FROM my flat in Monday Road to Piccadilly Circus was a long way, and the first part of it wearisome enough through the Fulham Road, with its cancer and consumption hospitals, its out-of-the-centre dinginess, its thrifty, eager-looking, dowdy women, and its decrepit intellectuals slouching along with their heads twisted over their shoulders looking back for a bus, on the top of which they will sit with an air of grieved and bitter dislike of the people near them. But at Hyde Park Corner I would get off the bus, for I have a conventional fondness for Piccadilly, and like to walk the length of it to the Circus.
I like to walk on the Green Park side; in summer because of the fresh, green, rustling trees, an unhurried pleasaunce in London's chaotic noises, and in winter because I like nothing better than to look at leaf-stripped trees standing nakedly against a grey sky, finger-posts of Nature pointing to the real No-Man's Land, and illustrating the miraculous wonder of being just beautiful, as no man-made thing can be; for all things made by man, a picture, or, if you like, a woman's shoes with heels of stained majolica, have an aim and a purpose. They lack the futility, of which Nature alone has the secret, of being just carelessly beautiful. When I say Nature, I do not see the Dame Nature of Oscar Wilde's crooked vision, a crude, slatternly charwoman, but a spendthrift prodigal, spending for the sheer love of spending; he takes every man by the sleeve, and with delicious good manners he makes it seem that he values your opinion above all others, that he has created the beauty of the world to please in particular your eye, that you will sadly disappoint him if you hint that you hadn't much liked the tinge of vermilion in yestreen's sunset, for he had touched in that vermilion just to give you a pleasant surprise.
Thus it is with Nature and myself; I see him as an old beau, given to leering in cities, but frank and natural in open places. And he knows me well, too; knows I am no minor poet, no poet at all, in fact, and, therefore, not to be gulled by insincere sunsets and valleys without shade or colour; that the idea of a fawn skipping about where I don't expect him, far from causing in me a metrical paroxysm after Mr. Robert Nichols, frankly bores me; he has shown me an odd nymph here and there, but I haven't encouraged him.... They are so intangible, I thought, and they faded away. So at last, in desperation, he stuck up a naked tree against a grey sky, and I thought it beautiful. It is a matter entirely between the old beau and myself. For all I care, you may think my stripped tree a stupid old tree, but to me it is beautiful. I see life that way.
But the day I am thinking of, when I got off the bus at Hyde Park Corner, was towards the end of October, when oysters have already become a commonplace; and as I walked up the Green Park side, the path around me was strewn with brown and red and faded green leaves, the last sacrifice of autumn to winter. I wondered why all things did not die as beautifully and as naturally as autumn dies. If all things died like that, there would be no fear in the world, and a world without fear would be just a splendid adventure, and life would be like chasing a sunset to the Antipodes—it would disappear only to appear again, more wonderfully.
But the fear of the shapeless bogey behind existence has been the peculiar gift of God; for so long He has chosen to be secretive about death, and the secret of it is in the eating of the last remaining apple on the Tree of Knowledge. But, O God, it is all a vain secrecy, this about death. Man was not made to be so easily satisfied. Education may have made him ignorant, but he was born inquisitive. Some day, some day, a more subtle and less solid Conan Doyle will arise, and valiantly catch a too indiscreet ancestral ghost, and holloa to a professor to X-ray his astral vitals, to find out by what means and processes came a living man to be a dead man and then an ancestral ghost. Their discoveries will then be written down in the form of a memoir and made into a fat book, complete with a spiritual preface and an astral index, and will cause a great stir in the world. But it will be a great shame on the Tree of Knowledge to have its last apple knocked down from it by a paltry book.
This last week or so of autumn is the time of all times when the fanatic hermit, sitting alone in his desert place, should be tolerant of the world's frailty. If such an one would let me, a worldly enough young man, approach him, I would tell him of the great joys there is in walking with a loved woman on crisp wind-blown leaves, under country trees, with tea soon to be ready before a big fire in the house half-a-mile away. At that my hermit would look at me angrily, for a fleshly young man indeed, but I would go on to tell him of how there is no splendour anywhere like to the splendour of a youth's dreams at that quiet time; dreams that may be of a palace made of dead leaves, with terraced pleasure gardens fashioned out of autumn air, in which he would walk with his mistress, and be a king and she a queen of more than one world....
As though for the first time, I noticed that afternoon a sheen of livid copper over the scattered leaves, and I said to myself that it was an undefinable addition to their beauty, like the sheen of blue in the dark hair of Shelmerdene, as she sat in the corner of a sofa under a Liberty-shaded lamp.
The passing thought of Shelmerdene fixed my attention through the Park railings on the prostrate figures here and there of men sleeping, for it was a very mild afternoon for late October. Sleep was her foible, the hobby-horse on which she would capriciously ride to heights of unreason whither no man could follow her and remain sane. She admitted that she herself had, occasionally, to sleep; but she apologised for it, resented the necessity. And, as I walked, I saw a sleeping, dejected figure too near the Park railings as though with her eyes, and was as disgusted. But I smiled at the memory of her wild flights of mythical reasoning.
"The mistake Jehovah made," I heard her saying, "was to teach Adam and Eve that it was pleasanter and more comfortable to lie and sleep on the same well-worn spot in Eden every night than to move about the Garden and venture new resting-places. It was a great mistake, for it gave sleep a definite and important value, it became something to be sought for in a special and comfortable place. Sleep ceased to be a careless lapse, as it had been at first when Adam madly chased the shadow of Lilith through the twilight. In the company of Eve sleep was no more a state for the tired body, and only for the body, but it became a thing of the senses; so many hours definitely and defiantly flung as a sop to Time. Sleep became part of the business of life, whereas, in those first careless days of Adam's unending pursuit of Lilith, it had been only part of the hazard of life.
"If Lilith had been allowed to have the handling of Adam," she said, "instead of Eve, who was the comfortable sort of woman 'born to be a mother,' sleep, as we know it, would never have happened; unnecessary, gluttonous sleep, the mind-sleep!
"Lilith was a real woman, and very beautiful. She was the first and greatest and most mysterious of all courtesans—as, indeed, the devil's mistress would have to be, or lose her job. She must have had the eyes of a Phoenix, veiled and secret, but their secret was only the secret of love and danger—Danger! Jehovah never had a chance against Lucifer, who was, after all, a man of the world, in his fight for the soul of Lilith. She never had a soul, and it was of Lilith Swinburne must have been thinking when he wrote 'Faustine,' which silly fools of men have addressed to me.... Of course, she chose Lucifer. Who wouldn't choose a dashing young rebel, a splendid failure if ever there was one, with a name like Lucifer, as compared to a darling, respectable, anxious old man called Jehovah? It's like asking a young woman to choose between Byron and Tolstoi ..."
But Shelmerdene had long since gone, to play at life and make fools of men; to make men, to break men, they said of her, and leave them in the dust, grovelling arabesques on the carpet of their humiliated love. "Let them be, let them be in peace," I had said to her impatiently, but she had turned large, inquiring, serious eyes on me, and answered, "I want to find out." She had, indeed, gone "to find out"—to Persia, they said, on a splendid, despairing chase. And I saw a vision of her there, but not as the proud, beautiful creature who filled and emptied a man's life as though for a caprice; I saw her on her knees in a ruined pagan temple on a deserted river bank, purified, and satisfied, and tired, entreating the spectre of the monstrous goddess, Ishtar, to let her cease from the quest of love ... I am so tired, she is saying to the nebulous goddess who has fashioned the years of her life into a love-tale. But who is Shelmerdene to beg a favour from Ishtar, who, in the guise of Astarte in Syria and Astaroth in Canaan, upset the gods and households of great peoples and debauched their minds, so that in later ages they were fit for nothing but to be conquered and to serve Rome and Byzantium as concubines and eunuchs?
Poor, weak Shelmerdene! Slave of Ishtar! Didn't you know, when, as a young girl, you set yourself, mischievously but seriously, "to find out" about men and life, that you would never be able to stop, that you would go on and on, even from Mayfair to Chorasan? You should have known. You have been so wantonly blind, Shelmerdene. You have idealised to-morrow and forgotten to-day—and now, perhaps, you are on your knees in a ruined temple in the East, begging favours of Ishtar. Not she to grant you a favour! Trouble has always come to the world from such as she, a malignant goddess. It has been said that Semiramis conquered the world, and Ishtar set it on fire....
