CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
In which Michael Arlen Disdains Pink Chestnuts
In 1870, had you chanced to be walking over one of the rough and alarming roads that stretched across the Balkans, from Roustchouk to Constantinople, you might have met a young man driving a bullock cart. He would have been tall and dark, with a certain weariness round his black eyes, and what might be described as ‘a grim determination’ round his lips. (Yes--we will get to Michael Arlen in a moment.)
The young man was setting out to make his fortune. And he made it. Not all at once, it is true, for the road from Roustchouk to Constantinople is long, and I should imagine, in 1870 it was even longer. And one cannot make a great fortune quickly when one has only £20 with which to buy Turkish delights, even when one sells them at double the money. Bandits, too, who emerged from the forlorn countryside and attacked one in the rear, were apt to make great inroads into one’s fortune. However, in time, the young man had saved £50, at the age of 19. (Yes, Michael Arlen is getting nearer and nearer.)
When the young man had made his £50 he bought a beautiful coat of blue velvet, with a scarf of coloured wool, and he was the beau of the village. All the Armenian girls cast their black eyes in his direction. His weariness, in consequence, was slightly alleviated. (I can hear Michael Arlen chafing in the next paragraph.)
One Sunday, this fine young man put on his velvet suit and went for a drive round the town in an open cab. Apart from the open cab, it was perhaps the greatest day in his life. For as he was passing under a certain high window, he looked up and saw a girl who was fairer than any girl he had ever seen. Their eyes met, and they were in love. She drew back from the window, and cried, as all true lovers should. He frowned, told the cab to drive him home, and went in his blue velvet coat to demand her hand from her father. And as soon as her father had said ‘yes,’ the first line, one might say, was written of _The Green Hat_. For the young man was Michael Arlen’s father.
I have introduced Michael Arlen in this manner because it seems in some way to heighten the romance of his career. They had a great deal in common, his father and he. They both treated life as an adventure, and doing so, gained a rich reward. The only difference being that Arlen senior went into business, whereas Arlen junior kept out of it. Arlen senior lost his money in the war. Arlen junior made his money in the peace.
A very dainty young man I thought him, when we first drank wine together at an hour when the last silk hat has drifted shamelessly home in the Mayfair dawn--(which is as no other dawn). I use the word ‘dainty,’ not to indicate effeminacy, but to convey a certain nicety of manner, a delicacy of tact. A very charming young man, it seemed, after the third glass of wine. A very brilliant young man, I was convinced, after the sixth. And I keep to the latter opinion, now that I am sober.
So few people know him. He has such a tiresome legend attached to him--a gilt-edged legend. He has been dehumanized in the popular imagination by his success. I hate writing biographies of anybody but myself and so, if I scrawl down a few disjointed lines, it is all the information that you will get. But it is more than most people will give you.
Eleven years ago--a pound a week--alone in London. ‘So lonely I was,’ he told me once, ‘I had nobody to speak to but my landlady. And even landladies, after a time, lose their charm. They are the last people who do, but still, it is inevitable.’
‘The New Age’--essays for two years--one friend. The friend, oddly enough, was young Frank Henderson, whose delightful old father ties a red tie better than any other Socialist in London, and runs ‘The Bomb Shop,’ where one may buy the sweetest seditious literature on this side of the English Channel. ‘I used to sit at the back of the shop, without a bob, talking to Frank,’ he said. ‘I still do. We roar with laughter as we see people coming in to buy _Mayfair_.’
_The London Venture_--£30 profit--a visit to Bruce Ingram, the Editor of _The Sketch_--a commission to do twelve short stories of 1,500 words each, at a remuneration of £8 apiece. ‘And now,’ he tells me, ‘I have a contract for the rest of my life, which brings me in £900 for every short story I write, whether it is published or not. Isn’t it silly?’
I liked that remark, ‘Isn’t it silly?’ It is the sort of remark that any young man, with his pockets full of unexpected dollars, might make. He sits down and writes. His stories are sent drifting round the world. They come drifting back. Then, one day, they do not drift back. They are published. They create a sensation. And he is ‘made.’
‘I have never met anybody who liked my books.’ Now that I have put it down, that seems to me the most extraordinary sentence I have ever written. ‘Never met anybody who liked my books.’ I can see him now, as he said it, propped up against a pile of cushions in his flat in Charles Street. The flat in question is at the extreme end of the street, rather crowded out by its richer relatives, like a raw recruit who has just shuffled hastily into line, and tries to look as though he had been there from the beginning.
‘You see,’ he went on, ‘I’m not really a fashion. I’m a disease. An international disease. Nobody likes me. Most of the people who read me say, “How horrid, or how silly, or how tiresome.” And yet they read me. They’ve _got_ to, don’t you see? That’s really the cleverest thing I did. I saw the rather feverish state of the body politic and social. And I disseminated my poisonous prose right and left. They did not catch it at first. A few people who have been thoroughly inoculated by a habit of taking Wordsworth neat have not caught it even yet. But the great majority have fallen by the wayside. And how they hate it!’
* * * * *
I don’t like people who do not adore their mothers. It seems a strange thing to say, just like that, in the middle of this little caper with Michael Arlen, but it is not quite so irrelevant as you think. Michael Arlen is a nice young man, and he adores his mother. The first proceeds of _The Green Hat_ may now be seen round Mrs. Arlen’s neck, in the shape of a chain of glistening pearls.
‘She reads _The Green Hat_ serially in an Armenian paper published in Constantinople, which is sent to her in Cheshire,’ he told me. ‘You see, she hardly speaks a word of English. But,’--and here he looked almost earnest for a moment--‘I defy anybody to tell me that I write English like a foreigner.’
He doesn’t. He analysed his style to me as ‘influenced by an early study of de Quincey, with a side glance at the eighteenth century.’ I think it a very beautiful style. A liqueur style, of course, to be sipped with discretion. But one does not sneer at yellow chartreuse because one cannot turn it on from a tap. There is a lingering cadence about it, a lazy passion, as though he were lying on a sofa by a bowl of roses and picking them to pieces one by one. I shudder at that awful simile. But it shall stand. It vaguely expresses what I mean.
I mentioned yellow chartreuse. Immediately it brought into my mind’s eye the huge yellow Rolls-Royce which he suddenly bought, and equally suddenly gave away--(to his mother). Somehow that car seemed to help me to understand him. It was luxurious, and he adores luxury. It was six inches longer than any other car in London, and who would not, in their heart of hearts, delight in that distinction? And it had, on the number plate, M.A. He had taken the car all the way to Manchester to be registered, in order to have that mark put on it. ‘It is exactly the sort of car that my sort of success demands,’ he said, a little wistfully. It was.
I remember driving round and round Hyde Park in this car, on one of those early summer evenings when one feels one’s whole life has been devoted to the consumption of strawberries. We drove round until I felt slightly dizzy. But in spite of the dizziness I remember a great many things we said, for we were in good form just then, and Michael had been lying in bed all day, ‘from fatigue.’
‘One day,’ he said, and his eyes were half closed, ‘there will be a house in a square--fountains and silky animals--women....’
I wondered. Silky animals? Women? Which was which? Or was each, neither? If you understand me....
‘And,’ he said, ‘I shall go away, sell everything, go right away.’ The car whirled round a corner. ‘With two innovation trunks.’
We were on a straight piece of road, and my head was clearer.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about _The Green Hat_.’
‘There is nothing to tell.’
‘There is everything to tell about something which makes one a millionaire.’
‘Ah!’ The Albert Memorial hove in sight, and we were both silent, and a little awed. Then, ‘It was written in two months. At a place called Southport, in Lancashire. I wrote solidly every day for ten hours. Lots of drink and no friends. I would write all the morning. Then, in the afternoon, I would read what I had written. Then in the evening I would re-write it again.’
The Albert Memorial had vanished into the distance, as even Albert Memorials do (which is the consolation of life), and he told me more.
‘And on each new morning,’ he said, ‘I would begin by writing the last two pages over again, to get me into the mood of the thing. There are a hundred thousand words in _The Green Hat_.’
‘It makes me feel exceedingly hearty,’ I said, ‘to think that “we authors”’ (you see, the Albert Memorial was still with us in spirit), ‘are capable of such a physical strain.’
The car whizzed once more round a bend. ‘Look quickly,’ I said. ‘Over there. A pink chestnut has forgotten the time of year. It ought to have been over long ago. And look at it now. _Please_....’ I was becoming agonized.
‘I never look at views,’ he said, examining his small hands with intense interest.
‘A pink chestnut is not a view. It is an emotion.’
He flicked his fingers, and sighed. ‘Only people,’ he said. ‘And streets, of course. But I hate views. Going across America I never looked out of the window. I was too excited by the people inside. Trees and hills and valleys say nothing to me. Weather says very little to me. Environment leaves me cold.’
We had whizzed far enough. I called a halt, and I got out. And Michael Arlen waved his hand with an eighteenth-century grace, the pink chestnut outlining his head like a halo that has missed its way.
_Au revoir_--you charming person! I seem to see you wandering away from me, rather inconsequently, down one of the grey, misty streets of the Mayfair which you love. You make, in some vague way, romance even of Berkeley Square. I had always regarded it as dull. But to you, it has a beauty. It tells you so many secrets. And though, in the morning, I feel that I know the answer to those secrets, at night you touch them with magic, you colour them with something of your own subtle spirit.