them as interlopers, and I don't think we made them particularly welcome.
It was thus that I first met Arnold Bennett and Clive Bell. One of these
casual visitors was Aleister Crowley. He was spending the winter in
Paris. I took an immediate dislike to him, but he interested and amused
me. He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth,
I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on
weight, and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way, whether
natural or acquired I do not know, of so focusing them that, when he
looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake, but not
entirely a fake. At Cambridge he had won his chess blue and was esteemed
the best whist player of his time. He was a liar and unbecomingly
boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the
things he boasted of. As a mountaineer, he had made an ascent of K2 in
the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain in India, and he made it
without the elaborate equipment, the cylinders of oxygen and so forth,
which render the endeavours of the mountaineers of the present day more
likely to succeed. He did not reach the top, but got nearer to it than
anyone had done before.

Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously
at his own expense. He had a gift for rhyming, and his verse is not
entirely without merit. He had been greatly influenced by Swinburne and
Robert Browning. He was grossly, but not unintelligently, imitative. As
you flip through the pages you may well read a stanza which, if you
came across it in a volume of Swinburne's, you would accept without
question as the work of the master. '_It's rather hard, isn't it, Sir,
to make sense of it?_' If you were shown this line and asked what poet
had written it, I think you would be inclined to say, Robert Browning.
You would be wrong. It was written by Aleister Crowley.