The London Venture

by Michael Arlen

"'My child,' he said very gently, 'I am intruding on you only because I have something to say to you of the utmost importance and delicacy. I am too old and too much of the world to do things by impulse, and so if I seem to offend against your unworldliness now it is not because I have not thought very carefully about what I am going to say.... And I beg you not to count it as any more than the suggestion of an old man who thinks only of your good, and to tell me quite frankly at the end what you think of it.

"'My old friend, your father,' he said, 'honoured me by placing you entirely in my charge as guardian and executor; but on looking into matters I find that he has left very little for me to do in the latter capacity—very little, in fact, besides that small estate in Shropshire which is entailed on you and your children, as with all its associations of that beautiful girl—scarcely older than you are now, your mother—your father could not bear the thought of it ever passing to strangers. And so, my child, without any reflection on my friend, when you leave my care you enter the world with an old enough name to ensure your position, but without the income to maintain it, and, if you will forgive me, a quite insignificant dot; though in your case, as in your beautiful mother's,' he added, with his little gallant smile, the first and last of the morning, 'a dot would be the requirement of a blind man.

"'All this preamble must seem very aimless and tiresome to you, but I wish to put all the facts before you, my dear, before asking you to take the responsibility, as indeed it is, of weighing the suggestion I am going to make.... You must have seen that I am out of sympathy with this modern world of yours, that I belong to some other period, better or worse, what does it matter? And this world, my child, has little use for those hard-headed persons who cannot change the bent of their minds according to its passing whims, and so it has little use for me who cannot and will not change.... Do you understand? I mean that I am an old man who is every day losing touch with life, and that I know here, quite certainly, that I have only a very few more years to live. Do not look sad, child,' he said, almost impatiently, 'it is not that I am complaining, but that I wish you to understand my thoughts.... Into an old life you have come like a ray of sunshine which is even now making light of your little puzzled frown; and I have a debt of gratitude to pay to you, my child, which I wish to pay at the expense even of your young peace of mind this morning. Although this new world has passed out of my grasp, and will soon pass out of my understanding, I know that it is the proper setting for you, the only subtle and beautiful thing that I have found in it, and my greatest wish is to leave you in a position worthy of your beauty and intelligence. It is not that I am afraid for you, for you are no trivial chit of a girl, but merely that I wish to leave you both happy and independent.... And, as it is, I can do nothing, nothing at all! For it has been a fixed rule of our family that we may not leave our fortune and property to any one who does not bear our name, and thus, though my nephew and I have had no occasion to meet for some fifteen years, I must leave him such money as I have and all this not unappreciated furniture.... And that is why, my child, because of my wish to leave you all I have, I have been forced to suggest the only alternative, for I would not have even considered it otherwise, that you should consent to bear my name with me for the few years I have to live, and then, as a young and beautiful widow of means, and bearing an old French name which may still be worth a little consideration, you can take your fit position in the world in which you, and not I, were born to be happy....'

"There it is, Dikran, or as much of it as I can remember. And do you need a setting for it? Oh, yes, you do, for you are a little lost. Imagine then, sitting by a window of a large house in the Rue Colbert, a young girl with a battered copy of Madame Bovary skilfully hidden beside her, and a little erect old man, very stiff but soigné, and cruelly aged by the sunlight which poured blessedly into the room, standing by the arm of her chair, asking her to marry him. Oh! but you can't imagine it, you will think of him as pleading, and of me as surprised. He didn't plead, he couldn't and I, my dear, by the time he had finished, wasn't surprised.... I knew, you see. Why, I knew everything! Lexicons and encyclopædias had toppled off their dusty shelves, and the Sibylline books had come running to my feet, and the whole world had come trotting out with its wisdom, wisdom as clear and cold as any Dân-nan-Rón that your friend Gloom ever played on his feadan, and all in the few minutes that an old man was speaking to me! Of course, it should all have happened differently; I should have been just a 'trivial chit of a girl,' and then I would have accepted all the old darling said, and gaped, and cried, and said 'thank you.' But as it was I did none of those things; I'm not quite sure what I did, unless it was nothing at all.... It all seems rather mixed now, but on that May morning it was as clear as the sunlight in my cruel young mind—how young and how cruel, Dikran!

"You see, as he spoke, he opened out the world which he so despised to me; page by page he showed me life, how beastly and how beautiful; he showed me both sides, because he himself was both beastly and beautiful.... And I gloried in it all! At my knowledge and the power it gave me over life. After a while the old man didn't seem to matter—there he was, talking away! I knew about him, and just how beastly and beautiful he was. For he was beautiful in his sincerity; I knew that he wished for my good, that to leave me well provided was the only condition he made with death; but I knew too that there was a beastly little imp somewhere in him, as in other men, which turned his finest thoughts into so much bluff, which told him through the locked and bolted doors of his honour that he wanted me for my own sake, and just for that, because I was young and because he loved me, and, stripped of all his honour and guardianship, because he loved me just as Solomon loved his wives, and Lucifer loved Lilith, and as you love me now....

"There it was, then, the whole damnable world, and I, only eighteen, in the middle of it! And there he was, my dear old man, more rigid and more adorable than ever; for, cruel as I was in seeing through him, I loved him all the more for his sweet naïveté and for his old, so old illusions about his motives. While as for being shocked at the way he loved me, I've never been shocked by anything but the vulgarity and the indecencies of respectable people, who seem to think that sex is purely a sort of indoor sport to be indulged in darkness and behind barricaded doors, while it is really a setting for the most beautiful Bacchanal that was ever devised by the fairest and purest of God's children. In spite of bibles and the Bishop of London, Mary knew what she was about, Dikran. Love doesn't grow anywhere, to be picked up by the wayside. Pure beauty grows only where beauty already is....

"But, wise as I was, I didn't know what to say; what could I say? He was waiting; I had to say, do something. I did—flung my arms round his neck and told him he was a pet to be so nice to me, and that I must think about it. For the first time that he had wanted me to behave like a woman I behaved consciously like a child—it seemed the easiest way out. And I think he saw that I was acting; he had expected something else, for he smiled very sadly down at me, and patted my hair, saying I was a sweet child not to be angry with him for making life so suddenly serious, and then, very gently, he went away, leaving me in the sunshine, a playmate of the gods.... And yet I was so sorry for him that I almost cried when I thought of him sitting alone and lonely in his library.

"We never spoke of it again. At first it was as though he was waiting for me to say yes, or no, or something, but I didn't say anything, and, later, he seemed to forget. I didn't do it out of cruelty, my dear; I simply couldn't say anything, that's all. After sunshine, rain, you know; I was dismal, frightened of him a little. The romance of that May morning when he had come to me in my room had become a ridiculous fantasy, so that it seemed to me that any reference to it would rather tarnish the very splendid dignity which he had kept, and sort of increased, through it all. Besides, anyway, what was there to say? I had made up my mind as he spoke that morning, through all the clearness of my new-found knowledge. I had never a doubt as to what I was going to do. It wasn't in me to do as he asked, or rather, as he advised, the old dear! I wish it had been in me, for to be a rich French marquise without a marquis is no bad fate for any girl, and it might have helped me to steer clear of many complications. But I couldn't, because all my life, Dikran, I've been cursed by an utter inability to make any money out of love. And that is why I would never be a success in my mother's country of America, where men throw pearls and beauty roses about as a matter of course and are very offended if one suggests an economical flirtation on a gross of diamonds and a hundredweight of Russian sables.... It isn't that I am mean-minded, but I cannot take presents from men who love me, for, after all, the old Marquis' offer was a present. When I see other women with relays of fur coats, and pearl necklaces, and no visible means of support, I am thoroughly sorry for myself, for it isn't through any excess of morals that I haven't just as many furs and pearls; it is simply because I don't see life that way, as, ten years ago, I didn't see life as the wife of an old man, whom I adored but didn't love, and couldn't have thought of marrying him even if he had promised to arrange for his death an hour after the wedding.... Do you understand, Dikran? For all this while I've been trying to tell you that whatever else I am not, I am an honest woman; a very upright gentleman in my way, which is more than you can say for most really nice women.

"The reason why realistic tragedies are impossible, or at best only melodramatic, on the stage is that the Person who arranges life has no sense of drama at all. Imagine how Sardou, the wretched man who turned Sarah Bernhardt into an exhibition, would have worked it out: the young girl would have run away from the lustful old man to Nice; the old man would have followed her to her boarding-house and made faces at the landlady's fair-haired son, who was the girl's destiny; a duel, tears, another duel, more tears, and Sarah falling about the stage in exhausted attitudes, as well she might.... And then imagine how life worked out the tragedy of that girl and old man; it let them be, or it seemed to let them be! No, God can have no dramatic sense, as we know it, because all the tragedies He arranges for us are slow-moving, so slow and moving none of the actors know whither; perhaps this tragedy we are acting will fade away, they say hopefully to themselves, and leave us again happy and careless; a little later they are happily sure that their tragedy is fading, there is no possible climax in sight, and then suddenly, out of the inmost earth, from some really foul spot of their animal natures, come the sudden ingredients for the tragical climax; the climax lasts only a second, but after it no blessed curtain falls; God has interfered again, Life is more cruel than Art, He says, so away with your tricks, your curtains and your finales. And I suppose He is right, you know; it must be right that shameful memories live beside the beautiful ones, as twenty years from now the memory of that old man and myself will live beside this very moment of you and I under this willow; for my abundant confession of it all seems to make it as much yours as mine, Dikran.

"My guardian and I lived on smoothly enough, then; as before I broke out now and again when he stepped too sternly between myself and an amusing indiscretion, but rebellions always ended in my smiling at some cutting remark of his, and in his always sweet dismissal of the subject; there was nothing to show that we were different with each other. But we were, indeed we were. I did not know it then, but I knew it very clearly later; how we two people, really loving each other, though in our different ways, had found a deep, subtle antagonism in each other, a very real antagonism, which it would have shamed us to realise at the time, and with a very real and inevitable climax; but like God's creatures, mummers in yet another of His cruelly monstrous plays, we thought the tragedy was fading, had faded, and were forgetting it, for what climax could there possibly be?