IT shames me a little to confess that I have always fitted in my friends to suit my moods; for it may seem superior of me, as though I attached as much importance to my moods as to my friends, and therefore too much to the former; but it is really quite natural and human, for there is no man, be he ever so strong, who does not somehow sway to his moment's mood; as a great liner imperceptibly sways to the lulling roll of the seas—as compared to myself, a rickety, rakish-looking little craft which goes up to the skies and down into the trough to the great swing of those mocking waves—moods!

But I, as I say, unlike that strong man who will pretend to crush his mood as some trifling temptation to relax his hold on life, I am so sociable a person that I must give my friends every side of myself and to each friend his particular side. And, though I do not wish to seem superior I have so far mastered the art of friendship, of which Whistler made such a grievous mess, that that side of me which such and such a friend may like is the side which I happen to wish to show to him. I keep it for him, labelling it his; when I see him in the distance I say, "Dikran, up and away and be at him"; for I think it incumbent on people who, like myself, are not really significant, to be at least significant in their relations with others, to stand out as something, even as a buffoon, among their acquaintances, and not be just part of the ruck. My ideal is, of course, that splendid person of Henry James', in "The Private Life," who faded away, did not exist, when he was alone, but was wonderfully and variably present when even a chambermaid was watching him. That subtle, ironic creation of Henry James' is the very incarnation of a Divine Sociability, but in actual life there is no artist perfect enough to give himself so wholly to others that he literally does not exist to himself.

I am not selfish, then, with my moods; with a little revision and polishing I can make them presentable enough to give to my friends as, to say vulgarly, the real article, the real me. And of them all there is one special mood, a neutral-tinted, tired, sceptical thing, which I have come to reserve exclusively for my friend Nikolay, who lives in a studio in Fitzroy Street, and faintly despises people for living anywhere else.

When I had pressed his bell I had to step back and watch for his face at the third-floor window, which, having emerged and grunted at me below, would dwindle into a hand from which would drop the latchkey into my upturned hat. Then very wearily—I had to live up to my mood, you see, else why visit Nikolay?—I would climb the stone steps to his studio.

Once there, I resigned myself to a delicious and conscious indolence. My thoughts drifted up with my cigarette smoke, and faded with it. My special place was on the divan in the corner of the large room, under a long shelf of neatly arranged first editions, from which I would now and again pick one, finger it lazily, mutter just audibly that I had bought that same book half-a-crown cheaper, and relapse into silence. If uncongenial visitors dropped in, I would abuse Nikolay's hospitality by at once turning over on my left side and going to sleep until they had gone. But generally no one came, and we were alone and silent.

From the divan I would watch Nikolay at work at his long table in front of the window, through which could be seen all the chimneys in Fitzroy Street, Charlotte Street, and Tottenham Court Road. How he could do any work at all (and work of colour!) with the drab cosmopolitanism of this view ever before his eyes, I do not know; myself would have to be very drunk before I could ignore those uncongenial backs of houses and chimneys, stuck up in the air like the grimy paws of a gutter-brat humanity. For an hour on end, until he turned to me and said, "Tea, Dikran?" I would watch him through my smoke, as though fascinated by the bent, slight figure as it drew and painted, with so delicate a precision of movement, those unreal and intangible illustrations, which tried at first to impress one by their drawing or colouring, but seemed to me mainly expressions of the artist's grim and ironic detachment from other men; a macabre observer, as it were, of their passions, himself passionless, but widely, almost wickedly, tolerant. An erect satyr in topsy-turvydom.

If it were any other man than Nikolay, I would know him well, for I have seen much of him, but one knows men by their "points of view," and I am not sure that Nikolay ever had one. He was, or rather he seemed definitely to be, curiously wise; one never put his wisdom to the test; one never heard him say an overpoweringly wise thing, but there was no doubt that he was wise. People said he was wise. Women said it. A strange man, indeed; queer, and a little sinister. Perhaps six hundred years ago he might have been an alchemist living in a three-storied house in Prague, exiled from his native land of Russia for criticising too openly the size of the Czarina's ears; for Nikolay knows no fear, he can be ruder than any man I know. I have heard him answer a woman that her new hat didn't suit her at all. "I think it is a rotten hat," he said, and the vanity of an admitted thirty years faded from her, she was as a dejected houri before the repelling eyes of a Salhadine.

He had not always been so detached and passionless. Steps of folly must somehow have led up to that philosophic wisdom which so definitely obtruded on the consciousness; so definitely, indeed, that I have watched women, as we perhaps sat round the card-table in his studio, and seen them in their manner defer to him, as though he were a great man in the eyes of the world, which he isn't. But to be treated as a great man, even by women, when you are not a great man, is indeed the essence of greatness! Bravo, Nikolay! I see you, not as I have always seen you, but in Paris, where rumour tells of you; in Paris, where your art was your hobby and life your serious business, and a dress suit the essential of your visibility of an evening.

I feel riot and revelry somewhere in you, Nikolay; the dim green lights of past experiences do very queerly mock the wisdom in your contemplative eye. I am to suppose, then, that you have seen other things than the rehearsals of a ballet, have marvelled at other things than the architecture of Spanish-Gothic cathedrals? Ah, I have the secret of you! You are a mediÆval, a knight of old exotic times, a Sir Lancelot without naÏvetÉ. Now, as the years take you, it is only in your drawings that your mind runs cynically riot among the indiscretions of literature—what a sinister inner gleam I espied in you when you told me that you were going to illustrate the poems of FranÇois Villon! But in Paris, long ago, I see you, Nikolay, standing in the curtained doorway of a cushion-spread studio, where the lights shine faintly through the red arabesques patterned on the black lamp shades. I see you standing there with a half-empty glass of Courvoisier in your hand, sipping, and watching, and smiling.... And women, perhaps—nay! a princess for very certain, it is said—running wild over the immobility of your face, immobile even through those first perfervid years.

But it did not always happen that I found him working at his table by the window. Sometimes he would be pacing restlessly up and down the room, and round the cardtable in the centre (which was also a lunch, tea, and dinner table).

"I have never before been four years in one place," he said. "I have never been six months in one place." He related it as a possibly interesting fact, not as a cavil against circumstances. It shows what little I knew of, or about, him, that I had never before heard of his travels.

"But how have you ever done any work if you never stayed in one place, never settled down?"

"Settled down!" He stopped in his walk and fixed on me with a disapproving eye. "That's a nasty bad word, Dikran. The being-at-home feeling is a sedative to all art and progress. In the end it kills imagination. It is a soporific, a—what you call it?—a dope. There's a feeling of contentment in being at home, and you can't squeeze any creation out of contentment.

"Permanent homes," he said, "were invented because men wanted safety. The safety of expectation! Imagination is a curse to most men; they are not comfortable with it; they think it is unsettling. Life is an experiment until you have a home, and feel that it is a home. Men like that. They like the idea of having a definite pillow on which to lay their heads every night, of having a definite woman, called a wife, beside them.... Bah! Charity begins at home, and inertia stays there. Safety doesn't breed art or progress—and when it does, it miscarries—the Royal Academy....

"Men want homes," he said, "because they want wives. And they generally want wives because they don't want to be worried by the sex-feeling any more. They don't want women left to their own imagination any more. They want the thing over and done with for ever and ever. Safety! Men are not adventurous...."

He turned to me sharply. "Look at you!" he said. "Have you done anything? Since I have known you, you have done nothing but write self-conscious essays which "The New Age" tolerates; you have played about with life as you have with literature, as though it were all a question of commas and semi-colons.... You have tried to idealise love-affairs into a pretty phrase, and in your spare time you lie on that divan and look up at the ceiling and dream of the luxurious vices of Heliogabalus.... You are horribly lazy, not adventurous at all. What's it matter if your cuffs get dirty as long as your hands get hold of something?"

"One can always change one's shirt, if that is what you suggest, Nikolay. But you are wrong about my not being adventurous—I shall adventure many things. But not sensationally, you know. I mean, I can't look at myself straight, I can only look at myself sideways; and that perhaps is just as well for I overlook many things in myself which it is good to overlook, and I can smile at things which James Joyce would write a book about. And when I write a novel—for of course I will write one, since England expects every young man to write a novel—the quality I shall desire in it will be, well, fastidiousness.... I come from the East; I shall go to the East; I shall try to strike the literary mean between the East and the West in me—between my Eastern mind and Western understanding. It will be a great adventure."

"The East is a shambles," he said shortly. And in that sentence lay my own condemnation of my real self; if any hope of fame ever lay in me, I suddenly realised, it was in that acquired self which had been to a public school and thought it not well bred to have too aggressive a point of view. Oh, but what nonsense it all was! I lazily thought—this striving after fame and notoriety in a despairing world.

I looked at Nikolay, who had done all the talking he would do that day, and was now sitting in an arm-chair and staring thoughtfully at the floor; thoughtfully, I say, but perhaps it was vacantly, for his face was a mask, as weird, in its way, as those fiendish masks which he delighted in making. And, as I watched him like this, I would say to myself that, if I watched long enough, I would be sure to surprise something; but I never surprised anything at all, for he would surprise me looking at him, and his sudden genial smile would bring him back into the world of men, leaving me nothing but the skeleton of a guilty and ludicrous fancy; and of my many ludicrous fancies about my friend this was indeed the most ludicrous, for I had caught myself thinking that he was not really a man at all, but just part of a drawing by FÉlicien Rops....

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