The London Venture

by Michael Arlen

IV

BUT there was once a month of November, about which I could not so grandly say that I would not like to spend it in London; for something happened which threw me in a great hurly-burly of change into an uncomfortable little flat in Monday Road, which is in South Kensington, but for all the life and gaiety there is in it might just as well be in a scrubby corner of the Sahara on a dusty day. My father had died suddenly, and what little question there was of my ever going into business now dropped away, so I had to make at least a pretence of earning my living, or, rather, of making a career for myself. I was very definite about this, that I must do something, be something: for I had learnt this much of the world, that there is no room in it for casual comers, that a man must have a background (any background will do, but the more individual the better); that there is no room in any part soever of the social scale for a man who is just nothing at all; and as I have never seriously contemplated living exclusively in the company of landladies and their friends, I saw that I must put my back into it and cease being a very insignificant rentier. I couldn't bear the idea of going through life as just a complacent Armenian in a world where millions and millions of others were trying honestly and otherwise to climb up the greasy pole of respectable attainment.

But I cannot resist saying what I think of Monday Road, though I am sure I can do it no harm, because better men than I must have hated it, and more virulently. Monday Road, like all the other roads which sink their mutual differences into the so dreary Fulham Road, consists of large, equal-faced houses stuck together in two opposite rows which are separated by about fifteen yards or so of second-hand Tarmac; a road like another, you will mildly say, but you cannot possibly realise its dismal grimness if you have not lived there. The people who live in the angular-faced houses are artists who believe in art for art's sake—else they wouldn't be forced to live in the dismalest street in the world—amateur intellectuals like myself, and various sorts of women. The tribe of organ-grinders have a great weakness for Monday Road, probably because some tactless ass has stuck up a notice there that "Barrel-organs are prohibited," which is a silly thing to say if you can't enforce it. Altogether it is the sort of road in which a "spinster lady" might at any moment lock her door, close her windows, turn on the gas, and read a novel to death. A woman in the flat next to mine did that a week after I arrived, and I have never viewed death more sympathetically.

When men grow old they are apt to discover pleasant memories attached even to the worst periods, as they thought them at the time, of their lives. I am not very old as yet, but looking back calmly on the eighteen months I spent in South Kensington, I can find here and there, through an exaggerated cloud of depression and wretchedness, a pleasant memory smiling reprovingly at me; as though, perhaps, I should not be treacherous to the good hours God or my luck had given me.... And there was one moment of them all, when, in the first darkness of an early autumn night, a dim slight figure stood mysteriously on my doorstep, and I blinked childishly at it because I did not know who the figure was nor how it had come there—if indeed it had come at all, and I had not dreamed the ring of the bell which had startled me out of my book. Or, perhaps, she had made a mistake, hadn't come for me at all....

But when she spoke, asking for me, I began to remember her, but only her voice, for I could not see her face which was hidden in the high fur collar of an evening cloak. She looked so mysterious that I didn't want to remember where I had seen her.

"I simply can't bear it," she said nervously, "if you don't remember me. I'll go away." And she turned her head quickly to the gates where there stood the thick dark shape of a taxi which I had somehow not seen before, else I would have known for certain that she was not a fairy, a Lilith fairy, but just a woman; a nice woman who takes life at a venture, I decided, and said abruptly: "Don't go."

When we were upstairs in my sitting-room and I could see her by the light of eight candles, I remembered her perfectly well, though I had only seen her once before. We had met at some tiresome bridge party six months before, but just incidentally, and without enough interest on either side to carry the conversation beyond the tepid limits of our surroundings. And as I had never once thought of her since I had shaken myself free of them, I couldn't imagine how on earth she had known my address or even remembered my name, which she didn't dare try to pronounce, she had told me as we went up the stairs.

She said that she, too, had never thought about me at all since then, "until to-night when I was playing bridge in the same room with the same people, except that you were not there—and I remembered you only suddenly, as something missing from the room. I didn't remember you because of anything you said, but because you had been the worst bridge player in the room, and had the most unscrupulous brown eyes that ever advised a flapper to inhale her cigarette smoke, as it was no use her smoking if she didn't. And thinking about you among those people who seemed more dreary than ever to-night, I had a silly homesick feeling about you as though we were comrades in distress, whereas I didn't even know your name properly and never shall if you don't somehow make it a presentable one.

"So I turned the conversation to Armenians in general, which is an easy thing to do, because you have only to murmur the word 'massacre' and the connection is obvious, isn't it? Of course that sent that dear old snob, Mrs. ——, off like mad, saying what bad luck it was for you being an Armenian, because you could so nicely have been anything else, and even a Montenegrin would have been a better thing to be; how surprised she had been when she met you, she told us, for she had always had a vague idea that Armenians were funny little old men with long hooked noses and greasy black hair, who hawked carpets about on their backs, and invariably cheated people, even Jews and Greeks....

"But you are quite English and civilised really, aren't you? I mean you don't think that, just because I managed to wrangle out your address and came here on impulse, I want to stay with you or anything like that, do you?"