_The Green Hat_

                             MICHAEL ARLEN

                          _By_ MICHAEL ARLEN

                         _These Charming People_
                         _The Green Hat_
                         _“Piracy”_
                         _The Romantic Lady_
                         _The London Venture_

                            _The Green Hat_

                                 _by_

                            _Michael Arlen_

                              _NEW YORK_
                        GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

                           _Copyright, 1924,
                      By George H. Doran Company_

                             THE GREEN HAT

                                 --B--

                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

                                 _To_

                        F. M. ATKINSON, Esquire

CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                                             PAGE
  _One_: THE GREEN HAT                                                11
  _Two_: THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES                                60
_Three_: FOR PURITY!                                                  81
 _Four_: APHRODITE                                                   114
 _Five_: THE DARK LETTER                                             151
  _Six_: THE RED LIGHTS                                              173
_Seven_: FOR VENICE!                                                 210
_Eight_: PIQURE DU CŒUR                                              237
 _Nine_: TALKING OF HATS                                             253
  _Ten_: THE FALL OF THE EMERALD                                     270
_The Last Chapter_: ST. GEORGE FOR ENGLAND! 300

THE GREEN HAT

CHAPTER ONE: THE GREEN HAT

It has occurred to the writer to call this unimportant history The Green
Hat because a green hat was the first thing about her that he saw: as
also it was, in a way, the last thing about her that he saw. It was
bright green, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn: being, no doubt, one
of those that women who have many hats affect _pour le sport_.

I saw it for the first time (writes the Author) on the eve of my removal
from one residence in London to another; although when I say residence I
mean that I was, by the grace of God and at the impulse of my own
temerity, removing to somewhat more habitable premises nearby from two
rooms and a bathroom above a mean lane in a place called Shepherd’s
Market. Not that our lane hadn’t attractions of its own to offer. Our
lane was one in which many improbable things were wont to happen, but it
somehow seemed inevitable that such things should happen there. But
maybe I had better select a few of these things, that you may know the
sort of lane ours was. I have seen men arrested there, and I have seen
a heavy constable worsted in a fight with a little Jew pickpocket, who
was for some time responsible for a rag-shop in our lane. I have seen
two butlers fighting in our lane. I have seen a very old nobleman woo a
flower-girl in our lane, but whether or not she ever favoured his suit
our lane had no means of telling. One night I fell over the body of a
woman lying in the blood of a broken head, and in our lane by night
policemen solace themselves by smoking cigarettes into the crowns of
their helmets, while cats, I must tell you, will never cease to sport
together all about it.

But it was by day that our lane attained to any real interest for a
student of such things, for then it was sacred to the activities of a
hearty-looking man in a brown bowler-hat, who with one hand would write
interminably in a small book, while with the other he dealt with passing
men in slips of paper known to the law as “betting-slips.” As partner to
the hearty-looking man--we are, I venture to say, already embarked on
our tale, for these gentlemen will make a faint devil’s chorus for more
spacious happenings--was a tall, wizened man who wore a check cap and
had hair growing out of his ears. This man would stand at one end of the
lane and now and then say, “Oi!” When he had said “Oi!” he would light a
cigarette, while the hearty-looking man would run heavily round our end
of the lane, for “Oi!” meant that the law was after him. When the law
had gone he would come back wiping his mouth, and jokes were exchanged
with the butcher and the fishmonger; but when the law really wanted
him, say twice a year, a posse of policemen would simultaneously rush
both ends of our lane, and the hearty-looking man was mulcted in a fine
not exceeding so much and was back again the next morning within a yard
of my door. Among his most persistent admirers was a little bent old man
with blood-shot eyes and a twitching mouth, who was a window-cleaner
without a Union, which meant that he would clean a window for threepence
and want no tip. He liked me, and used to give me racing information,
but I never won anything.

Now the first thing to do is to clear the ground as quickly as possible
for the coming of the green hat, for Mr. H. G. Wells says that there is
no money to be made out of any book that cannot bring a woman in within
the first few thousand words. But in setting the scene in Shepherd’s
Market we have evaded the necessity for any “writing-up” of atmosphere,
for that place has an atmosphere quite impossible to convey in a book,
unless, of course, you were to take the book to Shepherd’s Market and
leave it in our lane for a few days in nice warm weather. Shepherd’s
Market is, in fine, a collection of lively odours bounded on the north
side by Curzon Street, on the south by Piccadilly, on the west by
Hertford Street, and on the east by Half-Moon Street; and rejoices,
therefore, in the polite direction of Mayfair, as you will see printed
on the notepaper of any of its residents. A flower-shop which was opened
in our lane lived for only six months, and that in spite of the gardenia
gallantly affected by the old nobleman from Curzon Street every day. I,
after having lived there for six years, was (by the grace of God)
leaving on the morrow.

It is late, after midnight, when the tale begins.

I had been that evening to a party; for that is now the name that folks
give to a dance,--I am not sure why. In America, I believe, one doesn’t
even give a party, one just throws a party, but as to this party I am
telling of, it had, with that infallible sense of direction peculiar to
parties, whether given or thrown, taken a man by the nerves at the back
of his head and had hurled him into a deep pit. And it was as one
encompassed by that pit, deep as the playground of the seven devils,
dark as the very dungeons of gaiety, that I found myself back in my flat
above the mean lane. It would be the last night I would ever spend in
that flat, and I was so glad. The bookshelves had already been taken
away, and books littered the floor, books and pictures and what-nots
crowded the gate-leg table, while the ottoman with its soiled Chinese
yellow cover was a shambles of whatever you will find in a bachelor’s
flat if you begin to clean out the drawers. The bedroom, however, was
still ordered for human habitation.

Now I had no sooner cast my hat on the bed than the bell rang. It was
one of those infernal things you pull at, so that they may go on
clanging for ever, and as it clanged I wondered, I am afraid
ungraciously, who it could be. Could it, I wondered, be any one for
Gerald March, who lived in the flat above mine? But no one, I told
myself, has called on Gerald March within the memory of man, for that
man discourages callers, that man knows how to discourage callers.

I had no hope in pretending not to be at home, for my lights were plain
to see from our lane. And in my mind’s eye I saw the hearty face of the
acquaintance at the door, and with my mind’s ear I heard the hearty
greeting that dropped from his parasitical and thirsty lips. He had seen
my light, that man, as he went his way home from some party even more
pestilential than the one which had sent me home stricken; and he would
fain drink a glass with me, after the fashion of pests of the night,
that are hearty with the weary and thirsty with the unwary.

I could, however, always order my privacy without seeming too unfriendly
by looking down from my bedroom window, for whereas the windows of my
sitting-room faced the public-bar of The Leather Butler and an angle of
the offices of the Duke of Marlborough’s fine house, from my bedroom
window I had a clear prospect of our lane. Of pests, however, there was
neither sight nor sign; nor of cats, nor of men, nor of any low and
usual thing; only, under the lamp at the Sheep Street end of our lane, a
long, low, yellow car which shone like a battle-chariot. It was empty.

Now I am of those who are affected by motor-cars: their lines thrill me,
the harmony of their colour touches me, a gallant device wins my earnest
admiration so that, walking along Piccadilly, I will distress my mind by
being a partisan of this one, a despiser of that one. Nor am I to be won
by any cheap thing, no matter how brave-seeming it may be to the eye,
how admirable in endurance; but I am to be won only by the simple
lines, the severe and menacing aspect, of the aces among motor-cars; for
economy hath charms, but not to the eye. This car charmed the eye. Like
a huge yellow insect that had dropped to earth from a butterfly
civilisation, this car, gallant and suave, rested in the lowly silence
of the Shepherd’s Market night. Open as a yacht, it wore a great shining
bonnet, and flying over the crest of this great bonnet, as though in
proud flight over the heads of scores of phantom horses, was that silver
stork by which the gentle may be pleased to know that they have just
escaped death beneath the wheels of a Hispano-Suiza car, as supplied to
His Most Catholic Majesty.

Downwards to my door I looked, and there was a green hat before my door.
The light from the one lamp in Sheep Street fell about it, and that was
how I saw that it was a green hat, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn:
being, no doubt, one of those that women who have many hats affect _pour
le sport_.

II

“Do you know if Mr. March is in?” asked the voice of the green hat. But
I could not see her face for the shadow of the brim, for it was a
piratical brim, such as might very possibly defy the burning suns of El
Dorado.

I said I was not sure. I was very surprised--a caller for Gerald March!
“If we look up,” I said, “we can see by his lights if he is in.” And I
stepped out into the lane, and the green hat and I stared up at the
topmost windows of the grubby little house.

“There’s no light _there_,” she said. “I suppose the light below is
yours....”

“There is,” I said, “but it’s very faint. He’s in all right.”

Still she looked up, thoughtfully. She was tall, not very tall, but as
tall as becomes a woman. Her hair, in the shadow of her hat, may have
been any colour, but I dared swear that there was a tawny whisper to it.
And it seemed to dance, from beneath her hat, a very formal dance on her
cheeks. One had, with her, a sense of the conventions; and that she had
just been playing six sets of tennis.

“If I look surprised,” I said, “that is because you are the first caller
Gerald March has ever had.”

She seemed to smile, faintly, as one might in the way of politeness.
Otherwise she did not seem to be given to smiling.

“He’s my brother,” she said, as though explaining herself, the hour,
everything. “It’s very nice of you to have opened the door....”

I was listening, oh, intently! One had to, to make out what she was
saying. Then the voice suddenly expired and one was left standing there,
listening to nothing, unprepared to say anything. It was, you can see,
rather silly; but one got used to it.

“Oh,” I said, “Gerald wouldn’t open a door! He never opens doors....”

She looked vaguely about our lane. I was proud of our lane at that
moment, for it set off the colour of her hat so well. There was no
doubt but that she was tired. Seven sets, possibly. Her eyes seemed at
last to find the car of the flying silver stork.

“That car ... I suppose it will be all right there?”

She seemed to me to lack a proper pride in her car. I said I thought it
would be quite all right there, as though a Hispano-Suiza was a usual
sight near my door; and I suggested that maybe I had better see her
upstairs to her brother’s flat, as it was the top flat and there were no
lights on the stairs. But she appeared to be in no hurry. Thoughtful she
was. She said dimly: “You are very kind....”

One somehow gathered from her voice that her face was very small.

“I’ve often wanted,” she murmured, looking about, “to live in this
place. You know, vaguely....”

“Of course, vaguely,” I said.

She looked at me, seemed to see me for the first time, seemed faintly
surprised to find herself talking to me. I was surprised, too. Maybe it
was the way her hair danced formally on her cheeks that made it look
such a small face, but it seemed to me no larger than a small size in
ladies’ handkerchiefs. That was why I was surprised. She stood
carelessly, like the women in Georges Barbier’s almanacks, _Falbalas et
Fanfreluches_, who know how to stand carelessly. Her hands were thrust
into the pockets of a light brown leather jacket--_pour le sport_--which
shone quite definitely in the lamplight: it was wide open at the
throat, and had a high collar of the fur of a few minks. I once had a
friend who was a taxidermist, and that was how I knew that. One small
red elephant marched across what I could see of her dress, which was
dark and not _pour le sport_.

“Perhaps you are right,” she admitted doubtfully. Not that I had the
faintest idea what she was talking about.

I went before her up the dark narrow stairs, sideways, lighting and
dropping matches, after the custom of six years. There were three floors
in the little house, but the first was untenanted except by mice. I
wondered whether it would interest her if I told her I was leaving
to-morrow, but I did not see why it should. She, after all, had probably
just come back from foreign parts. About her, it was perfectly obvious,
was the aura of many adventures. But I was looking on her in brotherly
sort, interested in her because she was Gerald March’s sister. For that
was a most deficient man in every other respect. Fancy, I thought. She
said: “Oo, isn’t it dark!”

“Of course,” I said, striking yet another match against the wall, “I
knew Gerald _had_ a sister, but I had a vague idea, I don’t know why,
that she was still at school....”

“I don’t suppose,” she said helpfully--stumbled slightly, I helped
her--“that any one knows _everything_. Is that mice downstairs? Rats?
Oo, really.... Gerald and I showed, once upon a time, a strong tendency
to be twins, though there was a good hour between us, so I was told. I
was at the tail end of the hour.” Slowly struggling up those dim,
narrow, musty stairs, her green hat now and then flaming in the
matchlight, she gave one worthless information in a slightly husky,
impersonal voice. As we came up to my landing I asked her if she had
seen Gerald lately.

“Not,” she said, whispered, “for years and years. Nearly ten, I think.
Do you think that comes, perhaps, of having been almost twins once upon
a time?”

I did not say anything for I was thinking hard. Now I was Gerald’s
friend. This lady of the green hat was Gerald’s sister, nay, his twin
sister. Fancy, I thought. Where, I asked myself, did one stand? It was a
matter for thought, for deep thought, and so I treated it, as she did
not appear to be in any great hurry.

Now while these things were passing, the lady and I were standing on my
landing, which was four foot by three; she with one foot on the stair
below, one leather shoulder against the wall. And one had again, with
her, a sense of the conventions.

“You are thinking,” she accused me. “I wonder what about....”

The light that plunged through my half-open sitting-room door fought a
great fight with the shadow of her green hat and lit her face
mysteriously. She was fair. As they would say it in the England of long
ago--she was fair. And she was grave, so grave. That is a sad lady, I
thought. To be fair, to be sad ... why, was she intelligent, too? And
white she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim
light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool,
impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light
they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the
early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without
a doubt, when they sang of better dreams. But no siren, she! That was a
sad lady, most grave. And always her hair would be dancing a tawny,
formal dance about the small white cheeks.

She smiled, when it occurred to her that she was looking at me.

“I know what you are thinking,” she said.

“I wonder!”

“Yes. You like Gerald, don’t you?” She thought about that. “Well, what
you are thinking is, whether it is fair to him to take me up there in
case he is drunk....”

“If only it was ‘in case,’” I said. “You see?”

She closed her eyes.

“Poor Gerald!” she whispered. “Isn’t it a shame!”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “there’s nothing to be done....”

“Oh, I know!” Oh, she seemed to know that from her heart. And I wondered
why they had not seen each other for ten years. I couldn’t imagine her
disliking Gerald--childish, furious Gerald! Probably, I thought, he was
to blame, and I wondered if there was anything in Gerald’s life for
which he was not to blame. Poor Gerald.

“You see,” the slightly husky voice was saying, “I just came to-night on
an Impulse. I am scarcely ever in England....” The voice expired. We
waited, and she acknowledged my patience with a jewel of a smile. “And I
suddenly thought I would like to see Gerald to-night. Please,” she
suddenly begged, so seriously, “won’t you let me? I’d like just to _see_
him ... but if you think ...?”

“Oh,” I said, “come on.”

She laughed, a little nervously, abruptly. Gerald’s door was at the head
of the next flight of stairs, and it was, as usual, wide open. She moved
one step forward into the room, she stopped, her eyes on the ceiling, as
fixed as lamps. Yes, those were very sensible eyes. She didn’t look at
Gerald.

“What is it?” she asked dimly.

“Whisky,” I said. It was so obvious.

“But more than that! There’s certainly whisky, but....”

“Wet shoes....”

“But that’s too literary! Oh, of course! Old women in alms-houses....”

She was talking, it was so easy to see, against her eyes. Now she was
here she didn’t want to see Gerald. She was trying to put off the moment
when her eyes must rest on Gerald. Still just within the dingy room, she
looked everywhere but at Gerald.

“Lot of books,” she said.

I made to go, but the slightest hint of a start detained me. She
suggested her gestures. That was a very quiet lady. She didn’t, if you
please, intrude her womanhood on the occasion. Women do that
unconsciously. But she didn’t do it, unconsciously. She met a man on his
own ground. That was a gallant lady.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh!”

“Might just as well come away,” I muttered. I was used to Gerald, but at
the moment, at her sudden whisper, I would have liked to murder him.
Here for sixteen months not a soul had come to see him--and now, before
his sister, and his twin sister too, he was in this vile state. But she
had insisted on seeing him. What could I do? I promised Gerald a pretty
speech on the morrow. He would be more or less human to-morrow, for
Gerald had those phenomenal recuperative powers that are peculiar to
lean drunkards.

“The illness,” I told her, “goes in periods of three days. On the first
day he is thoughtful, on the second he is thoughtless, and on the third
speechless.”

I could not see her face, her back was to me. The leather jacket, the
brave green hat, the thoughtful poise. But I heard her whisper the name
of the inert thing sprawling half on a broken Windsor chair and half
across the littered table, and it was as though there was a smile in the
whisper, and I thought to myself that these twins must have been great
playmates once upon a time. “Gerald!” she whispered. “Gerald! Gerald!”

“Oh, go to hell!” muttered Gerald, and, without looking up, without
waking up, twitched his head feverishly to one side, upsetting a tea-cup
half-full of whisky.

“He thinks it’s me,” I explained from the door, and suddenly I found her
looking at me over her shoulder, so thoughtfully. I can see her now, the
way she suddenly looked at me, half over her leather shoulder, thinking
I knew not what, and her right hand spread out on her brother’s arm.
There was a striking emerald on the third finger of her right hand,
livid against the dark thing that was Gerald March.

“Only twenty-nine,” she told me gravely, “Gerald and me....”

“Oh,” I said. What could one say?

“Bad luck, I do think,” she murmured. I wondered, you know, whom she was
talking to. Certainly not to me.

“He’s a very good fellow,” I said.

“Heredity, you see,” she suddenly explained. “Father almost died of it.
Brandy, though. He liked brandy, Barty did. They said he would die if he
had more than half-a-bottle a day, but he had a bottle to make sure, and
then he died of pneumonia.”

Then, in her silence, she was so still that I grew very uncomfortable.
What was she thinking about? She was staring down at the sprawling thing
that was her twin brother, the emerald still livid against his arm.

“He wrote a very good book once,” I said, to say something.

“Yes. About Boy....”

“Boy?” Gerald, you see, was no talker. He just swore, but automatically;
it meant nothing.

“Didn’t you know?” She looked at me again, but her eyes seemed to me
masked. I was to know later why her eyes were masked just then. I said I
knew nothing at all about Gerald.

She passed a finger over one of her eyebrows, and looked at it. “Dirty,”
she said.

“Years ago,” she said, “before the war, Gerald had a very great friend.
Gerald, you see, is a hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and
everything, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper. And no hero, no
Gerald. And so, when his hero died, Gerald died too. Funny, life is,
isn’t it? Then the war, and that, of course, buried him. And now....”
Those absorbed, blazing blue eyes! The sea was in them, and the whisper
of all open places: the magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with
salt and winds.

“No friends?” she asked dimly. “No women? Nothing?”

And just at that moment I had, for the first time, that feeling of
incapacity with her. I was to have it again, profoundly, but I remember
vividly that it came for the first time just then, in poor, furious
Gerald’s room. Dingy--that is what I felt before this quiet, thoughtful
woman with the absorbed eyes. Dingy. I felt, I suppose, the immense
dinginess of being a human being, for there is an immense, unalterable
dinginess in being human, in the limitation of being human. But why I
should feel that particularly with her I did not know then. She, too,
was human, quiet, gentle, very unaware. But, later, I was to know why.

It was with an effort that I told her about Gerald. That feeling of
self-dinginess came somehow to a point in just feeling common. For I was
what Gerald was not, what she obviously was not. I could somehow “cope
with” my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to
failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio
Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while
they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white
death which is reserved for privilege in defeat.

Gerald, I told her, was a more solitary man than I had ever known or
thought to know. I supposed he had a small income, for he seemed to
manage to live. He was very shy, absurdly shy, tortured shy. She nodded
gravely, and I went on to say that shyness was a cruel disease with
Gerald: it was a shyness, to strangers, without charm, for he never
could show his shyness, he must show everything but his shyness. And so
it was that he couldn’t get on with people, and now he had ceased to
try, he just had drinks. Every Sunday afternoon he went to tea with his
aunt, Lady Eve Chalice, in Mount Street.

“It was Eve who really created my impulse,” she told me, then: “Oh,
here!” and I found I had an empty cigarette-case in my hand and that she
was offering me hers. It was an oblong white-jade case, and chained to
it by a double chain of gold was a hectagonal black onyx box which may
or may not have held powder. One corner of the hectagonal black onyx was
initialed in minute diamond letters: I.S.

“Iris,” she said. “Iris Storm.” And she smiled, childishly, formally,
saying: “You have been so nice, I had forgotten we didn’t know each
other.” I told her my name, in that embarrassed way one always does tell
any one one’s name, and we smoked a while in silence. She inhaled her
smoke with a faint hiss, and her teeth were a regiment of even bits of
rice-paper standing at attention, very smart and sharp. Teeth always
give one ideas. These were imperious, dangerous teeth. On a middle one
was wedged a small string of tobacco: it lay coiled there like a brown
maggot, and when I told her about that she removed it with the nail of
her small finger, and regarded it. She had a great talent for looking at
nothing in particular, and that was the only likeness I could see
between the twins: thoughtful they both were. Suddenly, from the tousled
dark head on the table came a jumble of inarticulate words. She listened
intently. Gerald shivered, but his face remained buried in his crossed
arms.

“He’s dreaming,” I said. She looked at me, and I thought there were
tears in her eyes. But as they never fell, I am not sure. Thoughtful she
was, smoking....

“Why does God do these things?” she asked in a suddenly strong, clear
voice, a most surprising voice; but I said nothing, knowing nothing of
God.

“Let us go,” she said.

“Shall I tell him you came?”

She thought about that, looking at me. “Yes,” she said, “will you?
Please. Just that I came. You see, Gerald doesn’t ... well,” she smiled
somewhere in those eyes, “let us say he is against me....”

We were in the doorway of the soiled room of the drunkard. I was going
to switch out the light. Often I would come upstairs and switch out
Gerald’s light.

“Gerald,” she said suddenly, in that strong voice, and I thought of a
prefect’s voice at school, down the corridor of a dormitory. “Good-bye
to Gerald.”

“You see,” she said to me, “Gerald and I are the last Marches, and we
ought to stand together. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, you ought,” I said gravely. One hand, the hand of the great
emerald, hung against her leather jacket. “Certainly you ought,” I said,
and raised the hand to my lips. Her hand smelt dimly of petrol and
cigarettes, and a scent whose name I shall now never know.

“These defiant courtesies,” she said thoughtfully. “They’re very nice, I
always say....”

Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow stairs to my landing. In the
sudden flare of my match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh
just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had occasion to rebuke
myself on the depravity that is man. She said over her shoulder: “Hilary
Townshend has told me about you....”

“But he has never told me about you!”

“Oh, he would if you provoked him!”

“And may I?”

But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary had, I thought, said something
about Gerald March having a sister, but I had not connected the vaguely
heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I don’t know why, but I had always
imagined Gerald’s sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere in the country
with a bankrupt old gentleman called Lord Portairley, Gerald’s uncle.

We were on my small landing now, in the light that plunged out of the
half-open door of my sitting-room: she with a foot on the stairs leading
downwards, away.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Really, I think you’ve been very kind....”

She seemed to me very nice and gentle; yes, nice; and then it seemed to
me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh,
impersonally, in the fires of herself. I was on another planet. Hilary
tells me now that he also had that feeling with her; but Hilary must
have struggled against it, whereas I am incapable of struggling against
any feeling.

“Good-bye,” I said.

I was looking not at her but through the half-open door into my room.
There lay the disorder of my life, the jumble, the lack of purpose, the
silence, and the defeat of my life. I wasn’t, it seems almost an
intrusion to say, very happy in those days; but that is by the way in
the history of Gerald March and Iris Storm.

Now here is the difficult part of this history. Of the many gaps it will
contain, this seems to me the most grave, the least excusable. One
should write, if not well, at least plausibly, about the things that
happen. And yet I cannot be plausible about this, because I do not know
how it happened. I mean, how she came into my room and sat down. I did
not ask her. Did she want to? Mrs. Storm was a lady who gave you a sense
of the conventions. Mrs. Storm was a ... and yet ... I do not know
anything about her.

I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together; and, of
course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then another,
and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might
have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that
each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces
of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I
have thought of her--foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about
a woman?--as some one who had by a mistake of the higher authorities
strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a
race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were
awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that
marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall
have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about
honour, morality, nationality.

We have all of us a crude desire to “place” our fellows in this or that
category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that,
maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with
the knowledge that she was Gerald’s sister, that she was twenty-nine
years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not,
anyhow I couldn’t, “place” Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather
despairing one, that she didn’t fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to
any nationality. She wasn’t that ghastly thing called “Bohemian,” she
wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society,” “county,” upper,
middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly
or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude
it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You
felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that
somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she
was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England,
spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as
devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the
conventions; but she gave you--unaware always, impersonal always, and
those cool, sensible eyes!--a much deeper sense that she was somehow
outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge
as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to
show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one
was non-existent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the
most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that
way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man
can’t get beyond--to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a
man like that--indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is
not?--but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the
galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects
the lives of the multitude of his fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so
I had with this woman that profound sense of incapability, of defeat,
which any limited man must feel with a woman whose limitations he cannot
know. She was--in that phrase of Mr. Conrad’s which can mean so little
or so much--she was of all time. She was, when the first woman crawled
out of the mud of the primeval world. She would be, when the last woman
walks towards the unmentionable end.

“Good-bye,” I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and
my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green hat
were brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned. “Why are you
laughing?” I asked, or perhaps I did not ask that, perhaps she had not
been laughing at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor her eyes
were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt. I pushed open the door of my
room.

“How I would like,” she said, that husky voice, “a glass of cold water!”
That was what she said, and so I let her go in alone into the
sitting-room, whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely and
long I let the water run, pleased with the way it was filling the little
house with its clean roar, pleased with the clean scent of the rushing
water, which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then she said:
“You have had a quick bath,” and so we became friends.

She stood among the littered books on the floor, looking round at the
disorder, like a tulip with a green head. She sipped the water, looking
round wisely over the rim of the tumbler. I explained that I was leaving
to-morrow, and therefore the disorder.

We talked.

In that disordered room, so littered with books that you might hardly
take a step without stumbling over one, it was not difficult to talk.
Indeed, it is never so easy to talk about books as when they are about
the floor, so that you may turn them over with your foot, see what they
are, pick them up and drop them anywhere with no precious nonsense as to
where they should exactly go.

She waved her glass of water about, sipping it. A drop of water clung
like a gem to the corner of her painted mouth. It was not fair.

Talking with her in that room was like talking with her as we walked on
a windy heath: she threw out things, you caught all you could of them,
you missed what you liked, and you threw something back. Now and then
something would turn up in a voice which was suddenly strong and clear,
and every time her voice was strong and clear you were so surprised that
you did not hear so well as when she spoke inaudibly. She had none of
the organised, agonised grimaces of the young lady of fashion. But one
knew she was not a young lady of fashion, for she hadn’t a sulky mouth.

Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely discriminating taste
which maddens you: you try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing
at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion of enjoyment. She used
some words as though she had never heard any one else using them.
“Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly immense sense. The word
seemed turned topsy-turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy. She
used the word “common,” I think, to denote a thing attempted and
achieved scratchily. Mr. Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “common.”
But Miss Clemence Dane in _Legend_ was. “Oh, come!” I said, for to me
_Legend_ is an achievement in literature.

“All those women talking and dissecting and yearning together,” she
said. “Their breath smells of ... oh, red hair!” She thought Miss Romer
Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time: _The Grand Tour_
particularly. She was loyal to girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr.
Temple Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was “nice.” “Nice?” I said.
“Well, wonderful,” she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem
slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “common,” a “stunt” writer.

“I detest the word ‘stunt,’” I said.

“That is why,” she said, “I used it about Monsieur Morand. He is an
abbreviation, like nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her.
She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for luncheon. “What,” she
asked, “is the hurry?” I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps
English was not the language for abbreviations and diminutives. She
deferred to my judgment about that, and I said what I said. One just
didn’t discuss Barrie: there he was. “You can’t laugh me out of him,”
she smiled, “by calling him whimsical.” She had once enjoyed a book by
Mr. Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called _Guy and Pauline_.
There was Hergesheimer. She put up a gallant, insincere defence for the
Imagistes, but it turned out that she had never read any, and wasn’t at
all sure what they were. “They’re short for poetry,” I said coldly,
“like nightie for nightingale.” But perhaps the book she most profoundly
liked was _The Passionate Friends_, with perhaps the last part of
_Tono-Bungay_. “And, of course,” she said, “_The Good Soldier_,” Mr.
Ford Maddox Hueffer’s amazing romance. From a table she picked up
Joyce’s _Ulysses_, looked at it vaguely, dropped it absently on the
floor amongst the others. I held a watching financial brief for it. One
was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property,
either her own or other people’s.

“It’s a funny thing,” she mused....

“What’s a funny thing?”

“Satirists.... They are all very plain men. Grubby, too. Why?”

“Why?” I said. “But, really----”

She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave,
intent. But one never knew what about....

“Genius,” I said, “has----”

“Of course, genius. But----”

“They are striving,” I said, “for----”

“Yes, I know. But why are they always so ugly? I mean, these people
called ‘satirists.’ One sees them abroad, at the Rotonde, or in Rome,
Florence....” I saw her among them, the small white face, the cool,
sensible, huge eyes, very attentive, deferring. “They marry plain, too.
Always. Invariably. Why? And man and wife hang on to each other like
grim death, despising everything hard. And they come out in spots. Why?
One just wonders.... It seems to need very ugly men with very
unattractive wives to despise things, to show us our ugliness. Has ever
any even fairly human-looking person ever been a ‘satirist’? But I
suppose if they weren’t so plain they wouldn’t have so much time to be
obscene on paper. Or am I talking nonsense?”

“It’s absurd,” I said, “to make it a question of looks----”

“But it makes me furious!” she said in that suddenly strong clear voice.
“These despisers. These grubby clever men with their grubby genius. The
heroes of the weekly reviews. Their impotent little obscenities. I’ve
tried to find, in knowing them and reading them, a great, real contempt,
something as fierce and clean as fire, a nightmare of contempt, so that
from the pillars of burning smoke we can build beings of better shape
than ourselves. I’ve read, watched, listened, wanting to know....”

I said things, too. But who am I? For instance, I said: “You don’t allow
to all men one common failing, which shows particularly when the men are
satirical writers: they must always write about women rather in the
spirit of uncleanminded undergraduates. You should be more tolerant,
Mrs. Storm....”

We talked of vulgarity. She had once read a book of mine, and I
complained bitterly of my vulgarity, saying, you know, that one didn’t
begin by being vulgar, “but one began,” I suggested, “by being just
bumptious. The meeker you are, the more bumptious you probably are
inside, but that does not harm. Not that I was ever really meek. And at
the beginning there’s a tremendous humility in you to yourself. You
can’t have any achievement without that humility, and yet you lose it
later on because you find out all the wrong things about yourself.
People are only too ready to show you the wrong things about yourself.
They like doing it. They seem to think there is something wrong with
conceit. It irritates fools, because they think it is unwarranted. How
do they know if it is unwarranted, and what does it matter if it is or
not? Or it irritates them because they too once had in themselves a
humility to themselves, and then allowed it to be, according to that
Bottomley-Kipling-John-Bull gospel, ‘knocked out of them.’ And so if a
young man is not very strong he lets the mischievous fools take his
conceit away from him, he turns his back on his real conceit, which is
himself--he has it ‘knocked out of him,’ just as any taste for music was
knocked out of him by his public-school--and goes out for one of the
spurious conceits which are called ‘being as others are.’ Then he has
put his feet on the endless and never-ending road of vulgarity, and
there are very few turnings....”

She sat in the deep wicker armchair, which had come with me from Chelsea
six years before but would travel nevermore. It creaked madly as she sat
down, and she glanced at it in surprise. “Of course,” she said, “it’s
contagious....”

“You are quite wrong,” I said. “The real sticky part seems to come from
inside one. And there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of
defeat--a writer, I mean, who must earn his living by writing, and so
must always write. For it is more difficult for a second-rate writer not
to be vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. It uncoils
from somewhere inside you, like a nasty, sticky snake. So slick it is,
too. So helpful, often. And when you see it for the first time you stare
at it transfixed, and you say, ‘But _I_ am not vulgar!’ But you get used
to it later on. Very few people notice it. Most people like it. And, of
course, it pays.”

“The golden snake,” she said. “It’s quite a good snake. It is silly to
despise money.”

“Writers,” I said, and, I think, said rightly, “love money, they adore
money! Successful writers, I mean. The ones who have become venerable,
the ones who have made great names by writing about the irony of life
and the incapabilities of wealth, the writers of the people for the
people. They worship money, they hoard money. One and all despise rich
people, and are perfectly beastly about the upper-classes. You should
ask any publisher about the business capacity of any great author who
writes about the Irony of Life. To really intelligent men of the
middle-classes, living in sin does not seem nearly so wicked as living
in luxurious sin. I only know one successful author who has the decency
to get drunk with his easily-earned money. One should keep a sense of
proportion about money, and you can only do that by throwing it away.
The Jews, for instance----”

“Jews,” she said, “are charming. The rich ones, I mean, and preferably
the fat shiny ones. They understand luxury and elegance, and elegance is
an enchantment that the skin loves. But nowadays only Jews have an idea
of enchantment, only Jews and Americans. Furs, jewels, spacious rooms,
trellised terraces, all lovely baubles, silks of China, myrrh,
frankincense, and motor-cars. The Jews are disenchanted, but at least
they’re brave enough to insist on having all the enchantments of
disenchantment. Luxury, ease, splendour, spaciousness. You’ll say
they’re florid. Well, they may be, they are, but they’re also the last
towers of chivalry. Mr. Chesterton goes running after them shouting
about beer and the Pope, but if you’re going to leave chivalry to
beer-drinkers and the Pope, God help enchantment. You’ll say that the
Americans’ indulgent admiration for their wives almost borders on the
_gaga_, but they fight for it very really, they don’t just talk and
indulge. They fight with money, they have the courage of their cheques,
they dare tremendous duels, they get up at unearthly hours in the
morning to dash towards the rendezvous, and they draw a cheque just as
gallantly as any rather caddish cavalier ever drew a sword....”

“Englishmen,” I said, “_respect_ their women....”

“Maybe,” she said absently.

We were impersonal. Now and then the wicker armchair creaked beneath
her, and she looked at it with faint surprise. Now and then a car
screamed on Piccadilly, an electric-landau sounded its bells through
Shepherd’s Market towards its garage by Camelot House. Now and then her
slightly husky voice expired. Then we waited a while. She stared deeply
into the eyes of a mask which a Russian artist had once given me in
exchange for a poker debt. It lay sideways against a corner of the
fender. I waited for her to say something about that, for it was the
mask of a Florentine gentleman that was a lecher. I had grown used to
it, as one can grow used to anything, but people would remark on it
adversely. The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I
knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing
to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where
you are.

We became personal. She said: “Let us talk about our friends now.”

“To-night,” I said, “I have been to a party at the Hallidays’.”

“Ah, the pitiless vulgarians! Surely, between us, we can do better than
that!”

“There’s Hilary....”

“The sweet! Can you _not_ love Hilary? But to-night,” she said very
seriously, “I have been dining with old Maurice Harpenden. How he would
hate me to say old! I went out all the way to Sutton Marle to do that,
because he expects it of me when I am in England. We are enemies, and we
watch each other. He was very courtly. They are difficult to deal with,
handsome old men who have known one since one was so high. You need to
be a woman to know what I mean, but you must try to pretend for a
minute. Thank you. Organically, of course, they are perfect. Good
features and long legs and iron-grey hair. Character and clothes by
Robert Hichens. They are very courtly, and then they touch one. Now, why
do they do that? They pretend to do it in a friendly way, as any
gentleman of the old school might to the daughter of another gentleman
of the old school: but they make _opportunities_....” The husky voice
committed suicide, was buried, and in the third second rose from the
dead. “I do not understand men. I do not understand the ‘old school’
type of man, nor what ‘old school’ means, unless it means that you never
did anything at school except win the Battle of Waterloo. Then as soon
as you left school you were qualified by good-looks, a charm of manner,
and a habit of becoming popular with elderly men which is peculiar to
right-minded young Englishmen, to become Major-General Sir Maurice
Harpenden, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., and to lead your troops in battle
with that gallant inefficiency patented by English infantry-commanders
who know a good horse when they see one. After which you can spend the
rest of your life in _bantering_. You can see that I do not like
Maurice. We dine, and we are enemies, and we watch each other.”

“The sire doesn’t seem very like the son. Napier is a saint....”

The chair creaked. She was looking at me from under her hat, gravely as
a Red Indian. “There were two roads leading from a certain tree, and
when we were eighteen life said to me, ‘You go this way,’ and life said
to Napier, ‘You go that way.’ And so we did that, and so it has
been....”

Now I was staring at her mouth, which was a silky red mouth engraved
with I don’t know how many deep downward lines, and my heart beat twice
so loudly that I wondered if she had heard it, for she whispered
sharply: “Listen!” But it was only a clock striking somewhere in London,
and its striking was quickly done.

“I must go,” she said, but not even the armchair creaked, and her green
hat was still crushed against the back of the chair, and her eyes were
still staring profoundly over my shoulder. There was only the window
there. The curtains were not drawn, and I thought I would draw them,
but it seemed a pity to move. Her eyes glowed like an animal’s. She was
staring, absorbed, over my right shoulder, but there was only the window
there. She was asleep. Then her eyes dilated into glowing points, and
her lips said: “_On a envie._”

Then she made a gesture of distaste.

She said: “There are desires....”

“Heavens, do you need to tell me that!”

“Oh, not those desires!” Expressionless, blazing eyes absorbed over my
shoulder, she waved away “those desires.” I was snubbed.

“They call it,” she said, “the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will
find it one day when we are dead and all things that live now are dead.
They will find it when everything is dead but the dreams we have no
words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine,
nor opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting,
loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in
that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is
unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there.
Life’s best gift, hasn’t some one said, is the ability to dream of a
better life....”

The green hat crushed recklessly against the back of the chair, she
stared, still and absorbed, at the names that friends of long-ago had
written on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her eyes glowed,
glowed like an animal’s. The light of the reading-lamp on the littered
table by my elbow kissed her lip, and the light kissed the faint, faint
down on her lip into a few minutes of existence as a garden of gold
dust. A sword lay in my mind, twisting and shining among the inner
grotesqueries where we keep ourselves, in the real sense, to ourselves.

I forced my mind to a more legal aspect of her. There were two rings on
her wedding finger. A narrow circle of platinum, a narrow circle of
gold. I wondered if she had been married twice. I tried to imagine her
husbands. They would be tall, handsome men, and she would be
passionately in love with them. She would, like all women in love with
tall, handsome men, be worshipful as a dog. Physically they would be
very courteous to her, but no more than courteous, and mentally they
would, if I may say so, treat her rough. They would go to sleep quickly,
and she would lie awake far into the night, pressing her breasts,
because they hurt her. She would think. She would not think. Then one
day, when she was between thinking and not thinking, she would be
unfaithful, and the tall, handsome man who was her husband would
apologise to her for not having understood her better. But she would
say, with cold eyes: “There is nothing to understand. _On a envie._”
Then he would say, “Oh!” and instruct her lawyers to divorce him.

“I was trying,” I said, “to imagine your husband....”

The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the hat one blue eye looked at
me like a blue stone worn by fire. “Two,” she said. “They are dead.”

I wondered what she saw, looking over my shoulder. She kept strange,
invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making
flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains. Then
suddenly the headlines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled before
my mind, stood livid against my memory, slashed with the name of Storm.
I had not a doubt but that he had been her second husband. “V.C.
murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C. Left on roadside with
five bullet wounds....”

She said suddenly: “I am a house of men.”

“What!” I said. “You surprise me.”

“A house of men. Of their desires and defeats and deaths. Of their
desires, yes, of their deaths, yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great
responsibility for me, and I have lodged complaints about it, but it is
no use. I am a house of men. Ah me, ah me! Oh, dear! My friend, there is
a curse, a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You will see it in
my eyes one day, and you will be sorry for me.”

“You mustn’t believe in curses,” I said. “Good God, curses!”

“The Marches,” she said, “are never let off anything. That is the
curse.”

Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and
always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far
below, like pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the
colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of
corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s
delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was
not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of
the sighs of Anaïtis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought
how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily
as they can in their minds. I said: “And so the house of March, fatal
and damned, can never avoid its destiny....”

“Yes,” she said reasonably, “it can avoid it. By not being weak enough
to desire so strongly.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“I’m glad you see,” she said gravely. They listen to voices whispering
dreams. While they listen, they do queer weak things. Of the soil
sordid--there is your March. But there is another March, who listens to
voices whispering dreams. My father, Barty March, was, I think, one of
the most loved men of his time. Like Napier is now, but of course Napier
behaves. A policeman found Barty early one morning on the doorstep of a
house we had then in Cambridge Square. He used to say he was never drunk
until he closed his eyes, but this time he had closed his eyes into
pneumonia. He only opened them once again, to look at Gerald and me,
sixteen years old apiece. He smiled, you know, because Barty couldn’t
help smiling. Besides, he was happy at last. “Avoid dreams,” he said.
“Never stop to listen to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run
over. Never sympathise with the moon when you can hear it, cold and
lonely and blind, crooning to itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You
will catch pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which men are men and
women are women. You will go mad....”

Her right hand hung limp over the arm of the chair. It was just faintly
dirty, and the nails shone like pink ivory. The emerald on the third
finger held my eyes enchanted for a long while. She smiled at my look,
and as she lay her eyes swept falcon-like down to the stone. It made me
rise out of myself, that falcon-like sweep of her clear eyes, and I
thought of the pitiless misbehaviour of life, that had not let her stay
within the sensible stability of marriage.

“It’s a bit loose,” she was saying.

“I was wondering. It’s such a beauty! Aren’t you afraid of it falling?”

She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her
childishness did not jar. She was always herself. “Oo, no! I have a
knuckle. I crook it. And lo, it doesn’t fall....”

“But this sounds like a plot!”

“It is a law,” she said. “There are four laws, variously entitled a, b,
c, d. The law (a) declares, against all formerly-held beliefs, that a
flower is less beautiful because it is sure to die. That is a religious
law, having to do with the unworth of perishable things, if you see what
I mean. The law (b) has something to do with the fact that all men with
long legs make poor lovers. That is a pagan law. You might write an
essay on the long arm of coincidence and the short legs of
co-respondents. It would be fun for you. The law (c) has something to do
with exhorting a woman never to trust a man of honour, for he serves two
mistresses. That is the law of good sense for amorous women, and will
save them disappointment. The law (d) has to do with this ring, which is
a bit loose, according to the directions of Jehovah.”

“You have mighty friends, Iris Storm!”

“Ah, I need them! Desire is a child with hungry eyes, and for him a
dragon lies waiting. This ring is a charm against dragons.” The slightly
husky voice dreamed. It was an hour for dreaming. She would mask unhappy
things with passing talk. “I called him Jehovah because the same was a
jealous God. And I would mock him with that, saying that it was I who
should be jealous of him, for doesn’t a man of honour serve two
mistresses, while it is well known of women of dishonour, I would mock
him, that they never serve but one god at a time. But he never was a
worldly man, and so eaten by doubt that you would have laughed if he
hadn’t been such a pet....”

“And so he gave you the emerald to be as a witness against you, and to
testify against your frailty?”

“Now take,” dreamed the husky voice, the great eyes fixed on the
ceiling; and there was a smile in them, like a distant wave of music;
“now take a night in Algeria. Take also a hill, and on the hill a
garden....”

“The Hotel St. George, Mustapha Supérieur, Algiers----”

“Ah, don’t forget the American Bar!”

“And the Benares bowls----”

“And _calorifères_ too hot or too cold----”

“And Arab carpets from Victoria Street----”

“And Americans with low heels----”

“And a passion for ‘mailing postals----’”

“Not to mention veal every day----”

“And a Soirée de Gala every Saturday----”

“And the best-dressed women----”

“Of Tunbridge Wells.”

“But take instead some red and purple flowers against a yellow wall,
some oranges, a tangerine or two, three gazelles on a tennis-court,
poppies tall as choir-boys, the cactus, the palm, and the pyramid
cypress-tree. And watch, my friend, two shadows that walk in the wicked
shadow of the pyramid cypress, that stands in the garden like a dark
torch keeping watch over disillusion. It is night, or have I already
told you that? Ah me, ah me, now will she who walks there ever forsake
her love, will she ever be disloyal to her vows, that were made with so
much pomp and circumstance in the Guards’ Chapel at Westminster before a
congregation notable for the absence of all her husband’s relations?
Why, her heart is confident, her heart is fragrant with the honey of
that moon’s passage, and she knows what she knows. And yet, and here is
a most pitiful thing, there must be something in her, some fatal
abandon, that sets men doubting, for he who walked with her in the
wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress wore the silence of the destroyer,
so that her heart cried that he was misnamed, for the mortal disease of
his heel was suspicion. Now I must tell you that it was Christmas Eve,
and after a little desultory conversation he said: ‘Here is a present
for you, sweet,’ and he gave me this emerald which you are kind enough
to admire. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘it is a little big for me! It may fall from
my finger, don’t you see?’

“‘Yes, it may fall,’ said he. ‘But if you are careful, my sweet, if you
curve your knuckle in time, it won’t dream of falling, not it!’ And then
I cried miserably, knowing there was a catch in this somewhere, for at
that time I was not yet broken in and was still fearful of suspicion.
And I cried: ‘Hector Storm, what do you mean?’

“‘I mean, Iris, that you are as that ring----’

“‘Beautiful but loose, Hector? Ah, _timeo Danaos_!”

“‘Iris, will you never be serious! Yes, you are as that ring, which you
must always wear on the third finger of your right hand. And as that
ring may fall, Iris, so you may fall, for that is the sort of woman you
are. But as that ring may be kept from falling, so may you keep yourself
from falling. Oh, God,’ he said, ‘my life is darkness without you, I
love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’ And he
said much more that is unmentionable, and I learnt something, for it is
only by listening to their husbands in moments of intimacy that
well-brought-up women can become acquainted with certain good old
English words. And though I pleaded bitterly that he was unfair to me,
saying I was chained to him as my wrist might be chained to a star,
which was no more than the truth, he insisted that I could be constant
only to inconstancy, and so I was tired and went to bed. But look! Oh,
look! Please look! Ah, the discourtesy of time! Really I must go now!”

I drew my eyes from her eyes to see that the dawn had slyly thrown a
grey handkerchief over the window. It was but the shape of the dawn
creeping out into the night, it was but a ghostly breath in the night,
but it was the dawn. And I did not know what to say, for can a man deny
the dawn, that speaks good sense in its vast elemental language?

The chair creaked and creaked. She was going now, there was no doubt
about it. The texture of her face was grave, she was busy with the angle
of her green hat. I examined the sword in my mind. The chair creaked and
creaked, and then it was as though snapped by silence, and our startled
eyes joined over the emerald that lay on the floor like the echo of the
kiss, which was an unfair kiss. She shivered faintly, and drew herself
taut, and was very proud. She was remote as the evening star, and very
proud. Her eyes were dark as in a crypt, and her eyes looked lost, as
though she had strayed into a maze. I lit a cigarette, and found my
throat dry and parched.

She found difficulty in speaking. I was amazed.

“No,” she said. She shook her head. “Certainly not. My ring, please.”

Imperiously her finger pointed to the floor, but her eyes were as
plaintive as a nun’s who has strayed into one of the corridors of hell.
That I might walk with her there I again made myself a Judas to her
hand, and she shivered with her whole body as in a torment, and she
seemed to bite her lip from within.

“It means nothing,” she said coldly.

“I know,” I said.

She breathed deeply, with a hand pressed to one breast, as though it
hurt her. I think it must have hurt her very much. I was sorry. She
shook her head, as though she was in a cage, and then she was as still
as a cut flower. The whole brim of the green hat was between me and her
face, we were both terribly alone. Her right hand drooped naked over the
arm of the chair, and I was bending down to pick up the emerald to
replace it on the third finger when a cautious knocking came from
below.

That was the second or third time of knocking, and each time it was less
cautious, and I knew it to come from the policeman on the beat, who
would be wishing to have the primrose car put in its proper place, which
was not on the King’s highroad. I wondered if she had heard, but I could
not see her face. I wondered if she heard me move. As I came to the door
I switched out the light and the dawn pounced on her green hat, but she
who wore it fought her battles carved in stone. She said something, I
did not catch what, and I went downstairs and spoke with the policeman,
who was an amiable middle-aged man of my acquaintance.

“My brother is with me,” I said, “but he will be gone soon.” Shepherd’s
Market was creeping out into the dawn, draped and mysterious with the
shadows of night. A window here and there was alight against the dark
pile of Camelot House. The great car stood like a bruise against the
passage of eternity, dawn fought for it, night draped it, and the silver
stork flew unseen. The small noises of dawn stirred sharply in the
night, and the lamps wore pale, tired faces. “Summer’s well on,” said
the policeman.

I re-entered the sitting-room, saying impersonally: “I’m afraid you must
go, as....” The room was empty. The figure that had been carved in stone
was wrapped in air. The disorder of the room lay jeering at me on the
dim carpet of the dawn. It was all like a purposeless limbo stretched
between the night and the day, the room, my life, hers, everything, the
strong, the silly and the brave. The hundreds of books lay in soiled
confusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that has gone to the
making of the soiled nothings that we are.

I was seized by a catholic anger against the woman. Through all the
disenchantments of youth, despite the contagious impurities of life, in
defiance of the crimes against love that we call love, I had kept
romance for my ghostly companion. Romance was more than a silly lithe
goddess coming down from a marble column. Romance was more than the
licence to be shameless with clouded eyes. Romance did not steal through
the fleshy portals of the heart, did not shiver at a Judas kiss, did not
coil white trembling limbs into the puerile lusts of the mind. Romance
was all that and was as much greater than that as a religion is greater
than a church. To romance, which was the ultimate vision of commonsense,
sex, as sex, was the most colossal bore that had ever distracted man
from his heritage. And she would palm a facet of this colossal bore off
on me! She would have me barter my ghostly companion for the fall of an
emerald, she would invade my thoughts, perhaps my life, in exchange for
a puny pleasure that needs love to exalt it above the matchless
silliness of what, with an excessive zeal for scientific classification,
is known to our civilisation as the sexual act.

I picked up the emerald from the floor, and it smiled in the palm of my
hand.

In the dusk of the bedroom, she lay coiled on the bed. The hush of her
breathing was no more than the trembling servant of the silence. Then
she coughed a small cigarette cough. It was the usual cough, and gave
me back my confidence. “Iris Storm!” I said, but I wondered if I had
spoken, the frail silence was so undisturbed. She was asleep.

Perhaps it was then that I realised that she was beautiful. She was
asleep. Could any but the shape of beauty dare to wear that
impertinence! She lay on her side, she lay anyhow. The green hat was
gone.

“Iris!” I said. Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music,
and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair. It was like a boy’s
hair, swept back from the forehead, which was a wide, clear forehead,
clean and brave and sensible as a boy’s. Sensible, oh dear! The tawny
cornstalks danced their formal dance on the one cheek that I could see,
and the tip of a pierced ear played beneath them, like a mouse in the
cornfield. Above her neck her hair died a very manly death, a more manly
death than “bobbed” hair was ever known to die, and so it comes about
that Iris Storm was the first Englishwoman I ever saw with “shingled”
hair. This was in 1922.

I decided that I did not know what to do. I decided that that was just
as well. “I will play,” I thought, “a waiting game,” and lit a
cigarette. But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like a promise,
and it smelled as grass might smell in a faëry land, and always about
her there was that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know.
Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a little shiny bit in the
valley between her cheek and her nose. To this I applied a little
_Quelques Fleurs_ talc powder on a handkerchief, that when she awoke she
should not think so ill of herself as I did. Hers was a small, straight
nose with an imperceptible curve, just as any straight line might have,
and its tip quivered a little as she breathed. Her leather jacket _pour
le sport_, that had a high collar trimmed with some minks, was flung
open, and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants
were marching towards an unknown destination. Towards her feet her hat
lay with my hat.

Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being
better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of
her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed
against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from
my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and when the red
elephants marching towards an unknown destination stirred breasts full
of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “But
enough of this hell!”

IV

Of all that had once decorated the walls of my sitting-room there was
left by the removers only a looking-glass in an ancient gold frame,
above the fireplace. My mother had once given me an oil-painting,
saying, “This will do nicely for your flat,” but I in my pride had
thought a looking-glass would offend the frame more judiciously.

She stood before that.

“What is the time?” she asked her reflection, and I told her that it was
ten minutes to six.

“Have you a comb?” she asked of her reflection, and luckily I had a comb
which was not my comb. She looked at it and saw that it was so.

“Thank you,” she said to her reflection.

The light of the tawny hair mocked the clouded daylight, and when, with
the palm of her hand on her forehead, she swept the comb from front to
back, it flamed tiger-tawny and ate into my spirit. _Tiger, tiger,
burning bright, in the forests of the night...._

In the Upper Fifth at school there was a tall, cold-eyed blood called
Dwight-Rankin--I think he died on Gallipoli--who used to sit at the desk
just in front of mine. He was a man of the mode, wearing his fair hair
plastered from front to back, and his neck was clean and unspotted as a
girl’s, and I would spend minutes wondering whether, if one touched the
gold down in which his hair ended high above his neck one would feel
hair or only skin. The back of her head affected me like that; it was
just like Dwight-Rankin’s, only dry, and tiger-tawny.

She tore the small comb through the dancing curls on each cheek, so that
they trembled like voiceless bells. It is a commonplace about women, as
assiduously remarked by brilliant feminine psychologists as women’s
“caprice” and “intuition,” that every woman must now and then make a
“grimace of distaste” into a looking-glass. But she did not do that, nor
need to. She was untouched, unsoiled, impregnable to the grubby,
truthful hand of _lex femina_. She was like a tower of beauty in the
morning of the world. The outlaw was above the law of afterwards,
impervious and imperious. She was beautiful, grave, proud. How beautiful
she was now! It was a sort of blasphemy in her to be so beautiful now,
to stand in such ordered loveliness, to be neither shameful like a
maiden nor shameless like a mondaine, nor show any fussy after-trill of
womanhood, any dingy ember of desire. It was a sort of blasphemy in her,
as it would be in a peacock to sing gracefully.

The silence got on my nerves, and I said something, anything. She looked
over her shoulder at me, vaguely. She was the male of the species that
is more fearless than mankind. I wondered what she was going to say.

“My hat, please,” she said. I appeared to have been holding it in my
hand. With her left hand she crushed it on her head and kept her hand on
the crown, looking at herself intently in the looking-glass. I was
startled at her eyes in the looking-glass. They were cold blue stones,
expressionless, caddish as a beast’s.

Down, down, with two fingers of her left hand, she pulled the brim of
the green hat over her left eyebrow. She said: “I think I must have left
my powder in the other room. Do you mind?” I brought her the case of
white jade and the box of black onyx. She powdered, without interest.

“Good-bye,” she said. Her hand was held out, her eyes were full on mine,
naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails
under which she had nailed herself. It would be a kindness to let her go
quickly, a kindness which she would not have allowed me had I been a
woman and she a man.

“Good-bye,” I said. And suddenly the hand that lay in mine pressed mine,
and she gave a vague, brittle laugh.

“It seems a pity,” she said; and then the eyes in the shadow of the brim
seemed to open wide, wide.

“You see?” she whispered. “You see?”

But I could see nothing but her silhouette against the future days. I
said: “We have begun at the wrong end; but can’t we work back?”

“Oh, no!” she whispered. “It is not like that a bit. You don’t
understand....”

Suddenly I said many things.

She seemed, her hand still in mine, to be absorbed in something just
behind my right shoulder. There was such fear in her eyes that I cried
sharply: “What is it?”

“The beast,” said the lips of the eyes of fear. “Just the beast....”

The word I said was drowned in the din of a lorry that smashed through
Whitehorse Street to Piccadilly. She took her hand gently from mine.
“There is a dream,” she said, “and there is a beast.”

She smiled.

“That’s all,” she said.

“I can understand regret,” I said, “but----”

“Ah, we can understand, you and I! We are as old as sand ... at this
moment.”

“But, Iris Storm, regret seems like a scar on you!”

“Not regret,” she said, so calmly. “Shame.” And she took my hand again,
closely. “You must forgive me. I couldn’t have said that to any other
man. My shame mustn’t shame you, please! But you have a cold mind, you
are disenchanted, you understand. And oh, if one could be assoiled in
human understanding! You see, I am not what you think. I am not of the
women of your life. I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for
pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am the meanest of
all, she who destroys her body because she must, she who hates the thing
she is, she who loathes the thing she does....” The breathless, pregnant
voice seemed to fall to the floor, like a small bird with broken wings,
and as it struggled upwards I said: “You are like a boy after his first
love.”

“Oh, if it was boyishness!” And she took from the pocket of her leather
jacket a tube of gold, and she broke it into two pieces, and she stared
moon-struck at the carmine tongue of the lip-salve.

“To be born a chaste woman,” she said to the carmine tongue, “is good. I
am in favour of chastity. I would die for purity, in theory.” She
painted her mouth, staring moon-struck into the daylight. “Yes, I would
die for purity. I wouldn’t mind dying anyhow, but it would be nice to
die for purity....”

I said thus and thus.

“Yes,” she said, not having heard a word of mine, “it is not good to
have a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind, as I have. It is hell for the
body and terror for the mind. There are dreams, and there are beasts.
The dreams walk glittering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire,
the beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret. Good-bye.”

“Then it must be ‘good-bye’?”

She looked at me with a strange, dark friendliness, and nodded.

“Because of shame,” she said. “But if I were different, I would like you
for my friend----”

To my interruption, which she did not hear, she said: “I have only one
lover. But I know that only because I always feel unfaithful to him. It
would be good to be really bad, but I am not even that. I only
misbehave. I will see you again, when I have found my only love. Or I
will see you again when I am qualified to die for purity. I will let you
know, so you can be there. God bless you, dear.”

And I said what I said, that He had, with Iris Storm.

She went very white. “That shall be written down,” she whispered, “as
the prayer of the only man who ever shamed a woman of her shame.”

“My days of adventure, Iris Storm, are over. A few years ago it would
have seemed nothing to me that you should disappear as you came, into
the great hole of London. To experts in adventure that is, I think, the
usual procedure. But now I would like a trace of you. You must not leave
me, quite. If I may not see you again, mayn’t I perhaps talk to you? Or,
what is the main thing, feel that I could if I dared?”

She said she was in London now only on business that would last a few
weeks, and lived always abroad. “But this is the telephone-number,” she
said, and I was looking round for paper and pencil when she said “Here!”
and her leather arm darted to the floor and came up with a book, and on
the fly-leaf of the book she scrawled the number with her lip-stick.

High above the sharp noises of the young day I heard the scream of an
electric-horn.

CHAPTER TWO: THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES

And that, I think, is all that there really is about me, as a person, in
the tale. Of course, this first person singular will continue, and
there’ll no doubt be any amount of “I this” and “I that,” but that is
because of the nature of the work, and there’s never, the way I see it,
much more than a pen behind it. Hilary, however, and Guy de Travest are
not of my mind about this. We have recently been talking about these
affairs, and a sad enough talk they made, and my two friends, my two
seniors, were reluctantly compelled, they said, to disagree with me
about my lack of responsibility in the events to be related hereinafter.

To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain things were decreed
to happen and that, therefore, they did happen: they had it in their
blood, these people, that certain things should happen to them, and I
could no more contrive these things than they could evade them. But
Hilary and Guy, murmuring together in that astonishing unison which can
only be found in two Englishmen who disagree upon everything in the
world but on the fact that conduct is three parts of life, are of
opinion that my substitution of the word “ptomaine” for “septic” really
affected the course of events. Had I, they say in effect, spoken the
truth like a brave little man, there would have been a divorce and every
one would by now have been happy, as happiness goes. And then, too, they
have something to say about those two red lights, those two rear-lamps
of two cars sweeping into South Audley Street--had I told Iris, they
say, about Gerald, those two red lights never would have been so close
together. Oh, Guy, what a man is that! That latter-day thunder-god of
dandies, that warrior of conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could
give “gratuitous information” about any one! Oh, Hilary, that friend of
childhood!

Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and
Iris since their earliest childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up
than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had turned away from his
friends, his people: he had dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it’s
not difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that young man. But I
was to find, after the coming of the lady of the green hat, that it
wasn’t only at the impulse of his furious nature that Gerald had, well,
withered fiercely into solitude. In very truth that Gerald had been a
hero-worshipper; and in very truth he had become, as his sister had
said, a nothing without his hero. Very few things had ever mattered to
Gerald Haveleur March; but those few things, one was to learn, had
mattered far too much.

His sister was, as it’s not impossible to have gathered, what is called
_declassée_--even for a March or a Portairley. And that was why I had
heard nothing about her from Guy or Hilary, for while Guy never gave
gratuitous information about any one, Hilary was held in thrall by that
upside-down but virulent form of snobbery which will make of a man of
property an extreme Liberal and a thorough-going die-hard disapprover of
any one who let his, Hilary’s, caste down. Hilary, a sincerely good man,
was an enemy of caste, he was an enemy of his own caste in particular,
he did not believe in it; and yet, in the depths of that being where
lurks a dragon that can ultimately defeat even the sincerity of a man of
principle, Hilary believed in nothing else but caste.

And Iris, of course, had betrayed her caste to perfection. No one, you
might say, could have done that more thoroughly than Iris. She had been
malinspired to excess, she had reached Excelsior in the abyss. But she
was ever completely not on her guard about what people might say or did
say, she had an amazing, an enviable, snapped Hilary, talent for just
not noticing things.

She had been quite surprised, Hilary told me recently, when once he had
taxed her with being a renegade from her class. Genuinely surprised she
was, Hilary says. It simply hadn’t, she had told him, occurred to her in
that light.

“Rushing about Europe like that,” Hilary had said, “you let England
down. You’ve no idea, Iris, how these young foreign blighters hold
Englishwomen cheap.” Iris had maintained she had a very good idea about
that. (But you simply had to disagree with Hilary. He was like that. And
he said “hm” all the time.) And you only had to travel on a liner to
the East, she had said, to notice how British matrons reacted to foreign
parts. As for Egypt! But she always did her best, she had said, to
influence foreigners to a more lofty view of the gallantries of British
matrons.

“People cut you,” Hilary had said, for that seemed to him an abominable
thing, that she should have put herself into the position of being
“cut”; and she had admitted having noticed glaciers, but she had
maintained that it was a far, far better thing to be cut by a county eye
than to be killed by the boredom of a county tongue. “I arose from the
dead when I was twenty,” she had said. (Hilary, you understand, would
provoke any one.) “Your class,” Hilary had snapped, and she had said she
had never actually thought of herself as belonging to any class. Her
class would be, she supposed, the landed gentry, same as Hilary’s. She
was proud, she had said, to belong to the same class as Hilary, and was
very sorry indeed if she had hit him in the eye with her heel. But she
hoped, she had said, that with him she had always been a lady.

That had annoyed Hilary very much indeed. But everything about any woman
he liked would annoy Hilary very much indeed. Mr. Townshend was one of
those Englishmen with an unlimited capacity for disapproving of any
woman, whom he liked, who enjoyed being with other men as much as with
himself; and an unlimited capacity for finding other reasons than that
for his disapproval.

As for Gerald, Hilary had last known him as a “dark diabolical
schoolboy” with a disturbing capacity for threatening silences and an
immense--“a corroding, almost,” Hilary said--admiration for Iris. But
not long after Barty March’s death--every one had loved _that_
drunkard!--he had quite lost sight of Gerald. Guy de Travest had been
Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war, but he
never spoke but once of Gerald as a soldier--“young hell-fire
idiot”--and never went near him while he lived above me in Shepherd’s
Market. “Reminds me,” Guy said, “too much of Barty left standing too
long with the cork out.” And that was more or less what Hilary said,
too. One must say this for the warriors of caste and conduct: they
seldom try to improve any man.

This chapter has been called The Cavalier of Low Creatures because it is
about Gerald, and therefore it is a short chapter, for what on earth is
there to say about Gerald? It isn’t at all a good description of him,
but it is intended, if you please, more as a flourish, a naïve gesture.
For you simply can’t let Gerald stand without a flourish, without a
something, anything. Besides, I liked him, and would like to do him a
bit of good. He was, _sans_ gesture, a zero with a scowl and a hat--and
a hat. Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a
novel? I liked Gerald, but I would not give him a line if he wasn’t
essential; and that is just what he is, essential, for these things
simply couldn’t have happened without Gerald. He hated his sister, he
had not seen her for ten years, yet it turned out that he was the most
important factor in her life. And, decidedly, her love for him was one
of the most important factors in _her_ life. I wonder if he knows. But
he too, even he, grew up in the end. I can hear him now, through the
twilight of East Chapel Street, his shoulder against the saloon-door of
the inn. “Give her my love,” he said. But you will hear him.

II

Sometimes I would see Gerald in the Café Royal. I would be dining, with
Hilary maybe, and in the distance, cut as with a sharp knife in the
tapestry of smoke and grubby faces, would be Gerald, darkly alone, a
glass of whisky on the marble-top before him. One wouldn’t attempt to
join him, for it made Gerald shy, desperate, if any one sat with him
while drinking. He hated being “messed about,” did Gerald; and if you
joined him he would presently mutter something about an appointment
(Gerald with an appointment!), leave his drink unfinished and go and
order one somewhere else; and as I understood he hadn’t much money I did
not like to drive him to that. Maybe, though, he was less shy with me
than with any one. “I like you,” he once said--oh, darkly!

One never knew, as he sat there or as he strode about the streets,
careless as a fakir impelled always towards a terrible and nameless
penance, what he could be thinking of. Maybe he was thinking of nothing.
Once I saw him come out of a Cinema Theatre with a look on his face as
though he had been tortured. He always looked, you know, like
something. You noticed him.

He had a grey suit. It was thin as paper, but still defiantly retained a
little of that casual elegance which not even Gerald could wholly
divorce from the combination of a good tailor and a lean Englishman. He
never had but one other suit that I ever saw, a brown affair, but he
bartered that with a boot-mender in Shepherd’s Market in exchange for
mending his shoes. And he had a hat. That was a hat. And never was
Gerald seen wearing an overcoat, no matter whether it blew, rained,
snowed or froze. See him any winter evening striding down Half-Moon
Street in the biting rain, his thin grey suit blackening with it, the
jacket held by one button with deep creases into his waist, the shapes
of his knuckles stuck through his trouser pockets, that hat--there, but
for the grace of God, went the most lovable man I ever met.

“Gerald--I say, Gerald! Why don’t you wear a coat on a day like this?
Gerald, aren’t you an ass!”

“Coat?” Thoughtful he was always, and his dark, sunk eyes would pierce
the pavement or the sky with unutterable contempt. “Coat!” And he would
repeat the word softly until, you understand, he had grasped the
enormous idea, when he would say softly, savagely: “What the hell d’you
mean, ‘coat’?” and away he would go, towards that terrible and nameless
penance of his.

Well, the flourish goes, the gesture is gone, to the limbo that yawns
for all such vanities in the very second of their birth. The Cavalier
of Low Creatures was never, to be sure, hailed as more than a zero. But,
even as the ground is not the limit of a man’s fall, as you may see in
the picture with the trail of flame, so zero is not the limit of a man’s
nothingness; for what is that which is nothing but so completely nothing
that it may not have even the mark of nothing? It is, to be sure, zero
without the formative circle round it.

That solitary drunkard, that soiled ascetic! Those nightmare women, soft
as the grass of Parnassus, marvellously acquiescent, possible.
Aphrodite, Ariadne, Anaïtis, white as marble, silent as marble, silent
and acquiescent, possible, as only goddesses could be, the goddesses of
soiled dreams, as no woman born of woman could ever be....

And yet one might have been wrong in imagining the malcontents of the
solitary drunkard’s mind. God only knows, of course, with what nightmare
fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them, and grow out of them;
men, at least, do not admit even to themselves that they have not grown
out of them, men do not admit even to themselves that while they indulge
in continence they may suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning
darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire.

That women walked in all the delicious beauty of the unattainable
through Gerald’s tortured mind, I know now. But I did not know it then,
for never was a man so secret with another man as Gerald, never was a
man so little given to discussing with another those inevitable matters
of desire and concupiscence which only by being discussed can be seen in
a proper and proportionate light. They should be aired, those secret
silly things, that they may be seen for what they are. In the old days
there was a god in a garden, and people would do their best to make
pretty fancies out of their lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns,
nymphs, sirens, sylphs; they, at least, got rid of them somehow. But now
that we see them plainly for what they are, the nasty little enemies of
our assault on nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has smashed
the god in the garden and hidden the pieces under the bed.

Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the cleanest-mouthed man I
ever met with; while from his book one had gathered that there was one
main idea in Gerald’s mind; this was purity. It was to do with that one
brilliant-childish romance of his that, about seven years before the
coming of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then, for more than
five years, I had not seen nor heard of him, had forgotten him, when one
day a lean, dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the Hammam Baths
in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped me. I knew later that he must have
been in an agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked intensely
furious. I, not recognising him, thought he was going to hit me, and
gaped at him.

Bitterly and darkly he told me that some one had told him there was a
flat to be let above me in Shepherd’s Market. “I’m staying here at the
moment,” he muttered, looking indignantly at the Hammam Baths. Several
minutes passed before I could place him, for he had been in uniform that
first time, in that transfiguring long-waisted grey coat of the Brigade
of Guards.

Gerald appeared suddenly, in the winter of 1915, at the office of
Horton’s _New Voice_. Now that Horton has left England on his adventure
in un-individualism one does not hear much of _The New Voice_, but at
that time and for long before _The New Voice_ was, of course, a power,
and Horton was a Power. Quite apart from Horton’s personal quality, you
knew he was a Power because several of the greatest of the intelligent
writers of our time kept on bitterly pointing out to their million
readers what a futile man Horton was. Quite a number of the men whose
names you can “conjure with” now--it would be fun to meet that man who
is always in the street conjuring with names!--had begun by writing for
Horton’s paper; but they had always gotten on his nerves by the time
they had become the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time,
and, since Horton was an honest man, he told them so, and he told them
why, and he told them off, and they were furious. But the most inspired
among the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time revenged
themselves by republishing their _New Voice_ stuff in book-form and
omitting to mention _The New Voice_ as the first medium of publication.
That was discourteous of them.

We were correcting proofs when Gerald appeared. It was a Monday
afternoon, and on Monday afternoons any of Horton’s writers who wished
could turn up and correct either his own or some one else’s proofs and
then go and have tea at the A.B.C. And Talk.

“Hello!” said Horton. “Hel_lo_!”

“Defence of the Realm,” murmured Home.

We were not prepared for Gerald. We had, of course, seen soldiers
before; indeed, there was one in the room at the moment, the philosopher
Home, who was to be killed a year or so later. But Gerald was a Figure,
he was martial. The herald of the dominion of hell upon earth, that was
Gerald. Take one small, frowsty room, the staff (Miss Veale) addressing
wrappers at a desk by the window, Horton blue-pencilling at the other
desk by the door, four of us sitting cramped round correcting proofs on
bound annuals of _The New Voice_ on our knees, smoking, muttering--enter
six-foot-two of the Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night and
the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who has seen Christ crucified in
vain. The panoply of war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier in
the real rather than in the technical sense of the word: he looked, you
know, as though he had accepted death and was just living anyhow in the
meanwhile. Ah, see him then! Not even Gerald’s malevolent slackness in
attire could make that long-waisted grey coat with the red-silk lining
sit on him but imperially. Not Gerald’s the common-or-garden chubby face
of a Guard’s subaltern. Gerald was no chap. He glowered at us.

“Eh,” he stammered. “I say ... I’ve been told you people....”

“He’s heard about us,” said Home sympathetically. “Sit down, boy. On the
floor, I’m afraid.”

Gerald began a fierce scowl at him--then grinned. Dear Gerald!

“Well?” smiled Horton. Always courteous was Horton, in manner.

“Heard,” muttered Gerald, “that you didn’t care what you published....”

“Oh!” said Horton. “Well, we don’t care how good it is, if that’s what
you mean.”

You couldn’t guess that Gerald was so shy that he could scarcely speak.
You thought he stammered just because he stammered, not because he was
so shy that he could scarcely get a word out. A man had no right to look
like Gerald, an ensign of the fallen Prince of Light, and be shy; but
that was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for
being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made
it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy. Just then, for
instance, he looked as though he had strayed into _The New Voice_ to
send us all to blazes on general principles. And Horton looked as though
he was quite prepared to go. Horton preferred bad-tempered men.

“There’s this,” Gerald muttered, and lugged out an enormous typescript
from the deep pocket of his grey coat. “Novel,” he scowled at Horton.
“Thought perhaps....” and he planted the thing with a thump on Horton’s
desk. Horton grinned. Horton had had much too much to do with
professional novelists to think that a novel by a subaltern of
Grenadiers was necessarily unreadable. “Bit long, isn’t it?” he smiled.

“Long?” Gerald stammered. “Of course it’s long! Been writing it for four
whole months.”

“Ought to be good,” said Home gravely.

“It’s _awful_,” grinned Gerald, “but, you see....”

“Quite,” said Horton busily. “Now, I’ll....”

“Hello!” said Horton, for Gerald was not. Horton threw the typescript to
me to read. Of course, it was mad. _The New Voice_ published most of it,
and then Heinemann’s published it in the autumn of 1916 and ran it into
three editions while people were still disentangling their eyes from the
paper wrapper, which showed a woman with purple eyes crucifying a
pleasant young man.

_The Savage Device_ is open before me as I write, and its opening lines
are: “The history of Felix Burton is the history of an ideal and a
vision. They had nothing to do with one another except that the pursuit
of the vision hardened him and blooded him for the attainment of the
ideal. The ideal was aristocratic, in the sense that it was a striving
after nobility in life: the vision was a contradiction, as scientific as
it was mystic. The ideal was, of course, defeated: the vision, of
course, defeated him. The ideal was purity: the vision had something to
do with pain....”

The “vision,” so far as one could see, had everything to do with pain;
in fact it was pain, and the vision might or might not come afterwards.
(And I detest that word “mystic.”) The book was exciting and interesting
because of a strange mixture of high romance, desperate villainy and an
abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally. Gerald’s hero had
minority ideas about the war--letting the landed gentry down again! As
for the pain ... Young Burton’s idea of it had not to do with pain as a
fact, but as the most sublime among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald
wrote, “it is the only drug that cannot debase a man. It can kill him,
but there are worse ways of dying than being killed.” It was full of
quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at you with a dash sadly
lacking in the originals. Young Burton was, of course, going to die in
the war.

Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the major and minor tortures of
crime and martyrdom. There was a long description of tortures, if you
liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s books on them, with
illustrations ... very interesting. Then young Burton had come across
the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain there is a definite
state of bliss and definite and glorious visions of a real reality which
men by ordinary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But poor old
Gerald, try as he would, couldn’t make _The Savage Device_ a novel of
ideas: it remained a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest. Young
Burton went everywhere in the world, having adventures, getting
magnificently hurt--South Sea stuff--studying the effect of pain on
men’s minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a number of visions.

Then he plucked Ava Foe from a “dive” in San Francisco, she became Mrs.
Burton, and then he had every opportunity for judging the visionary
qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly well written, the
hell that Ava Burton gave him. But young Burton’s ideal of purity was,
naturally enough, schoolboy stuff: fine in parts, but stuff. The only
part of it that was good was that it was, somehow, purity. On the sexual
side young Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one thought,
unnecessarily callous young wife. In Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking
after the coming of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about Iris.
I realised then how he must first have worshipped and then hated his
twin sister. What on earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to
make him hate her like that? Ava wasn’t in the least like her, of
course, but Ava might quite well have been like any sister to any
brother who hated her. But this fierce, devilish, mediæval passion--why?
Yet I should have guessed something of the reason after Iris had told me
that young Burton was “Boy,” Gerald’s hero of before the war. But it
never occurred to me to connect Iris’s casually dropped “Boy” with the
legendary Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-the-War fame. He will have
his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.

“Felix Burton’s” idea of what a man should be to live nobly--he was full
of those large strivings of Young Men which were in vogue in the
Careless-Days-Before-the-War--seemed to take the form of wanting to
found a new race of something like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of
course, without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn’t. Nor did young
Burton want any of your waste of time in graceful love-making; he
wanted a sort of ruthless companionship, with occasional patches of
mating; he did _not_ want to procreate gracefully, but with a sort of
furious absent-mindedness. Imagine Ava--Iris! Imagine Gerald himself
drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft possible woman of lonely
dreams, detesting her for destroying him ... and for destroying Boy! One
wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever known a woman. The dark knight
of purity ... the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen!

I did not see Gerald whilst I was shaking the dust of Shepherd’s Market
for ever off my feet, for he was still asleep. I left Shepherd’s Market.
The hearty-looking man and the thin wizened man who said “Oi!” and the
little bent old man with the blood-shot eyes gave me farewell.

That afternoon I snatched a few moments from the arranging of the new
place, which was only round the corner, to go round and tell Gerald that
his sister had been to see him on an Impulse. I had grown to feel
responsible for Gerald: his solitude was somehow like a scar across
one’s own life, a rebuke.

I came upon him in our lane. I have forgotten to say that Gerald, after
a particularly hard spell of dipsomania, would go riding on a hack from
the Mews nearby. He had a pair of fine polo breeches with which to do
that, and with the fine polo breeches (Moss Bros.) went Barty March’s
riding-whip and the jacket of the old grey suit and that hat. A
highwayman on an off day, that is what he looked like in the mean lane,
passing the time of day with the little bent old man with the blood-shot
eyes.

“You’ve been drinking,” said Gerald severely to me.

“Billy Goat’s won the two-thirty,” wheezed the little bent old man. His
hat was the captain of Gerald’s hat.

One didn’t, perhaps, look one’s best in the middle of a removal. But
Gerald, confound the man, looked positively healthy, taut, tempered,
weathered. _Ach, le sale type anglais!_ I told him that his sister had
called. “On an Impulse,” I said.

Gerald stared at me, his cigarette half-way to his mouth. “Oh!” he said.
“Oh!...”

“Here’s her telephone number,” I said. He didn’t take the slip of paper
I held out.

“’Ere,” said the little bent old man, “I’ll give it ’im when he’s
better.” Gerald lowered his cigarette, scowling at me pathetically. No
one else would have known it was “pathetically.”

“Iris called hell!” he accused me. “How you lie! What?”

“Honest to God, Gerald!”

He flipped away his cigarette and dug his free hand into his pocket as
though it was a weapon. Those deep eyes scowled at me, but I wondered
what they saw.

“That beast,” he whispered, “oh, that beast....”

I left him.

And I did not see him again until the twelfth evening later. I wish I
had. I ought to have been to see him, for I was in the habit of seeing
Gerald, and during those twelve days he might, I think he would, have
told me about the silly, shoddy thing that had happened, and I could
have helped to make him see it as only a silly, shoddy thing. What made
me feel responsible for Gerald was that his livid, unreasonable,
childish contempt for all accepted things was not contempt at all, but
fear, just plain fear. He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply
couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it. Piercing that tortured
vanity, I felt that life was a huge hungry beast ready to maul Gerald if
he so much as tried to placate it--by using, say, a little pumice-stone
on his fingers. And one could never, after having seen through his
furious _blague_, be rid of an acute sense of the shamefaced
childishness in the man, a childishness beaten down, gone crooked, which
could only do him a hurt if it was not watched. And one didn’t, quite
definitely didn’t, want Gerald to be hurt more than he already hurt
himself by just breathing.

But, whether it was because that involuntary whisper of his about his
sister had sickened me even more than I had thought at the moment, or
whether it was merely because I was too busy with arranging myself into
the new place, I simply did not seem to have the time to look him up
during those twelve days. I wish I had.

Nor, during those twelve days, would it have come very amiss to talk a
little about Mrs. Storm. One would have liked to know just a little of
the history of that shameless, shameful lady. After all, one didn’t
every day meet a woman with a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind. But
naturally neither Guy nor Hilary was available during those twelve days,
for that is a way friends have; Guy because he was down at Mace with the
May-fly, and Hilary just because he was tiresome. Hilary, Guy wrote from
Mace, was helping a Liberal to fight a musty bye-election in some
Staffordshire place. “As if,” Guy wrote, “a Liberal ever won, as if a
Liberal could ever win without a pretty long start! and a handicapper
can never get a grip on anything in a Liberal to give him a start
on--sticky little fellows they are, always sliding away somewhere. And
as if it mattered whether a Liberal did or didn’t win. He’ll only get
squashed with his own petard.” And, however it was, Hilary’s Liberal
didn’t win, so maybe Guy was right. “In ten years’ time,” says Guy,
“Hilary will be the only Liberal left in Parliament, looking happier and
younger and more sickening than ever.”

It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat
that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same
instant act upon it.

“Hello!” I said.

“Hello!” they said. They were a she.

“Could I speak to Mrs. Storm, please?”

“Who is that speaking, please?”

I quibbled quite in vain.

“I will put the name down in her little book,” said the she kindly.

“Thank you,” I tried not to say bitterly. To ring some one up on impulse
and then have your impulse perpetuated in a Little Book!

“Mrs. Storm is not in town,” said the she.

“Oh, I see,” I said. It is a detestable habit some people have of saying
“in town” or “out of town.” What town? There can’t, honestly, be any
real harm in saying London....

“Is there any message? I always take her messages.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Thank you very much. Good-b----”

“This is Mrs. Oden speaking.”

“Oh,” I said. “Mrs. Oden?”

“Yes?” said Mrs. Oden.

“Well, thank you very much,” I said. “Good-b----”

“She never is, you know,” complained Mrs. Oden. Now that was a
loquacious lady. I do not wish to be belittling any one else, but I am
sure that she talked more in the next few minutes than any other person
of the same chest-expansion in England. She seemed to have been
suffering from silence all that morning until my ring. I learnt later
that Mrs. Oden had once been Iris’s governess, that there was always a
floor reserved for Iris in her house in Montpellier Square, which house
Mr. and Mrs. Oden owed entirely to Iris’s generosity.

“She went off to Paris the other day,” complained Mrs. Oden, “at a
_moment’s_ notice. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. It is too bad of her,
when we never see anything of her. She is too vague, I always tell her.
I suppose she had made some arrangement with you, Mr. er, has forgotten
to put you off, and now you are disappointed?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, certainly.”

“Well, I expect her back any day, but how long she will stay this time I
have not the faintest idea. Really it is too bad, she gets vaguer every
year. And here has her aunt Lady Eve Chalice been wanting her address in
Paris, and I have not the faintest idea of anything! What did you say
the name was? Oh, yes, of course, I have it down. She will see it as
_soon_ as she returns, I promise you. Yes, yes. Good-bye, good-bye.”

It was five days later that there came to my hand a large box labelled
from _Edouard Apel et Cie._, _rue de la Paix_, _Paris_ and stamped “By
Air.” Within the large box were several smaller flat boxes, and within
these were reams upon reams of finest white notepaper, but good, manly
stuff, stamped with my new address; and if that notepaper had its way I
never would have another address, for there was enough in those small
flat boxes to last a reasonably reticent man for all time. No note came
with them. I searched. Then, across the top sheet of the third box that
I opened, I found scrawled in pencil in an absurd, schoolgirl hand:
“That one day you may write to me to say that you have forgiven me for
the only dignity I have left: the dignity of the....”

I could not make out that last word for several days. It was scrawled
right across the foot of the sheet, a long squiggle with one eye looking
out from the middle of it which might have been an a. At last I thought
it was “unaware.”

Much later Iris told me that it was “unaware.” She said: “I picked out
the phrase from a book I was reading, and sent it to you like a
flower.”

CHAPTER THREE: FOR PURITY!

The cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he
loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical
calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone,
despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic
device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr. Townshend over
dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat. For, his
wretched Liberal being at last retrieved from somewhere beneath the foot
of the poll, that gentleman was again among us, saying “hm.”

We have so far seen but the shadow of Mr. Townshend; now, at last, this
shadow must emerge into the tale of the weak Marches as the person of
Mr. Townshend of Magralt. He emerges, as becomes a man of property who
believes in progress as though it were a pain, in a dinner-jacket, _le
smoking_, a Tuxedo; of which the bow-tie is gathered together with that
dexterous carelessness which is the affectation of elderly Englishmen
who cannot put up with any affectations whatever. Now there is no known
explanation for this phenomenon of the sickly bow-tie among Englishmen
of over forty years of age. That they are all blackguards, Mr. Shaw has
assured us. But haven’t they, God bless one’s soul, eyes! It is not, of
course, of the least importance whether a bow-tie falls straight or
crooked, particularly on a grown-up man. It is not, after all, of the
least importance whether one is clothed or naked. But one may, in
passing, be permitted to wonder on the curious dispositions of the blind
goddess Chance, whereby not once in a long lifetime, not even by one
little bit of a fluke, will one of these elderly gentlemen ever tie a
bow to fall even approximately right. They must, therefore, do it on
purpose. But for what purpose? Let them, I say unto them, tie their bows
carefully while the bow-tying is good, for voices from the Clyde are
rising loud and everywhere those snobs are dominant who affect that the
shirt of democracy should be a dishclout.

However, Mr. Townshend’s shadow does not even yet grow in substance
without some difficulty. Between him and us, towards the dinner-hour,
intrudes, knife-like, that deuce of cavaliers, he of the hat that
Frederick the Great would have envied, for that wrecker of homes liked
his hats soft and malleable, he liked to twist and torture them as
though they were no more than men. In fine, Gerald made me late for
dinner.

The clock of the Queen Street Post Office stood at three minutes before
eight o’clock as I passed on my way to Hilary’s house in Chesterfield
Street. The roar of the marching hosts of Piccadilly was as though muted
by the still evening air. The small straight streets of Mayfair lay as
though musing between the setting of the sun and the rising of the
theatre-curtain. Neat errand-boys, released for the day, kicked their
heels about on the curbs. The drivers of the sauntering taxi-cabs looked
inquiringly, impersonally, into the faces of hurrying pedestrians.
Limousines lounged softly by. Past me strode intently a tall
raven-haired woman in a bright green wrap with a high sable collar, and
moving frantically below were bright green shoes and bright green
stockings that appalled the suave dignity of the evening light. These
are not the only green properties we shall see in this tale, for women
of the mode wore very much of green in the year 1922; although, of
course, some women were not necessarily of the mode even when they wore
green. Some women should not wear green. To such, their husbands should
say: “My dear, I can’t help saying it again, but really I’ve never seen
you look as well as when you’re in black.”

It was from the Curzon Street corner, just by Jolley’s the chemist, that
I saw Gerald. He was across the road, against the entrance of the little
tunnel that leads into Shepherd’s Market, buying an evening-paper off a
friend of ours, Mr. Auk, who used to have his stand just there.

I crossed towards Gerald. I would be a few minutes late for dinner, that
was certain, but if ever I was punctual at Hilary’s he never was
dressed: a sense of conduct being the property of imperious men, who
must disregard the servile virtue of punctuality.

I could not see Gerald’s face as he stood on the curb glancing at his
paper, the brim of that hat was so low over his right eye. Mr. Auk
winked at me as I came up. “Oiled, that’s wot!” whispered Mr. Auk. Then
a friend of his came by and he and Mr. Auk retreated into the tunnel,
where I vaguely thought that Mr. Auk seemed to be telling his friend
something funny about Gerald. I never have passed the time of day with
Mr. Auk since I found what it was that he thought so funny about Gerald
that evening.

When I greeted Gerald he instantly looked up from the paper to me. I
remember now that he seemed to watch my face for something, an
expression, which he half-expected to see. But one notices those things
only later on.

“I say, seen the evening-paper?”

“No. Why?”

The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the thin hawk’s nose, the fine,
twisted, defiant mouth....

“Why? How the hell do I know why!”

He crumpled his paper, thrust it under his arm and dug the released hand
into his pocket. Thus was Gerald Haveleur March armed cap-a-pie against
life. He had something on his mind, one could see that. But it would
take hours to make Gerald confide anything.

“I say, have a drink?”

Now I wonder how many thousands of men are at this very moment putting
that question to thousands of men; yet that, if nothing else, would have
made that night significant in my life, for never before had the
solitary asked me or, I think, any one to have a drink with him. Nor
would he, as a rule, have a drink if you suggested it. And once, at a
party I gave, he had some gingerbeer. But, even so, I had to say I
couldn’t, pleading that I would be too late for dinner. “With Hilary,” I
said, and he scowled absently in a way he had, and lounged up the road
with me. Thoughtful he was always.

That was a curious, capacious evening. The Marches were gathered
together that evening, they who were never let off anything. As Gerald
lounged beside me the great primrose car with the menacing shining
bonnet passed us as silently as though Curzon Street was a carpet. It
was empty but for a boyish chauffeur. Gerald, I suppose, did not know
it, and I did not remark on it. I wondered if Iris had surprised Mrs.
Oden by returning suddenly. Poor Mr. Oden....

“What have you been doing with yourself lately, Gerald?”

“Doing?” His eyes pierced the pavement the other side of my shoulder,
for tall was Gerald.

He grinned....

“You’d never guess,” he grinned.

I did not like this grinning. It was unusual in Gerald. It was like a
crooked mask on the fine dark face. There was by ordinary no grinning
froth about Gerald ... and, somehow, it crossed my mind that maybe
Gerald was hard-up. I asked him, oh, tentatively, if anything was “up.”

“Up? The hell’s up. O Jesu!” And he grinned....

“Yes, but besides that--anything?” Not, you know, that I thought for one
moment that anything really was “up.” It was merely that I misliked that
grinning.

I can see him this moment so clearly, the way he suddenly threw back
his head and stared from under the brim of that hat as though into the
heart of the heavens: the dark, defiant, hungry silhouette searching the
heart of the above.

We were at the corner of East Chapel Street, where the great American
pile of Sunderland House debases itself before the puny roofs of
Mayfair: it loitered clumsily against the soft evening light, reluctant
to yield to the grey embrace of London....

“God!” sighed Gerald. Like a child, like a child ... and like a fiend he
suddenly laughed up at the veiled heavens. “Imagine, you fool, just
imagine the bloody degradation of being alive!”

But I will leave out Gerald’s “bloody’s.” One is tired of saying,
hearing, reading that silly word. It is only chickenfood, after all, and
does very well on the lips of the young ladies of the day, but there is
no reason why grown-up people should use it.

“I like you,” he said, as only that devilish child could say it. “You
sit on your imagination as though it was an egg, and a nice little
chicken comes out. God, I wouldn’t be you! Look at all the pretty eggs
you’ll hatch and not one have a chance to grow up into a splendid,
lovely old hen that’ll peck at the dung you call life. Why don’t you
write about fallen archangels? They’re the only things worth writing
about, fallen archangels. Phut to you, that’s what I say....”

I managed then, for the first time in our friendship, to suggest that if
perhaps he was hard-up, well, phut to him....

“Look here, that’s not fair,” stammered Gerald. Shy himself, he made one
want to sink into the ground with shyness. “I mean, that’s putting
friendship to music, isn’t it? What?”

“Oh, nonsense, Gerald! There’s nothing so silly and mean as this
reticence about money....”

“God, but you’ve given me an idea. I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,
as you’re late for dinner. I’ll damn well lend you a fiver.”

“But, Gerald----”

“You talk too much,” Gerald stammered. “I’d like to do you a bit of
good. And I’ve still got to thank you for chloroforming me and lugging
me off to that Home for Drunks, thanks very much. Now, am I going to
lend you a fiver or am I going to make such a rough-house just here that
all the police in London will come and arrest you for soliciting? I’ll
scream if you don’t touch me!”

I was in a hurry. I had to take that fiver. I have that fiver still.

“I’ll keep it for you,” I said. “Damn you.”

“Yes, you keep it for me,” said Gerald thoughtfully. “Nice, fivers are
...” and then, savagely muttering “Oh, hell!” he strode abruptly away
down the slope of East Chapel Street, which leads into Shepherd’s
Market. Drunk or sober, you simply couldn’t tell. You never knew that
man was drunk until he was speechless. I was hurrying away when his
voice held me--and a very boyish voice Gerald had, like a prefect’s at
school.

“I say, seen that sister of mine again?... You haven’t?” He seemed to
reflect profoundly. “I say, if ever you do, give her my love. What? I
say, don’t forget....”

“I won’t forget,” I called back. “Good-night, Gerald.” But he had turned
away, and the last I saw of him he was putting his shoulder against the
saloon-door of The Leather Butler. I plunged across the road to
Chesterfield Street, glad of the message I would certainly give to
Gerald’s sister. Maybe to-night, somehow. A furious conference of livid
pink and purple monsters hung over Seamore Place, where the sun was
sinking into Kensington Gardens.

II

“There was a cocktail for you,” said Hilary gloomily, “but I drank it,
in case it grew warm.” I thanked him politely for the idea. “It wasn’t
an idea, really,” said Hilary gloomily. “It was an impulse.”

It is not, therefore, impossible to understand how it came about that
there were not a few people, youngish people, who considered Mr.
Townshend to be a tiresome man. They said: “He is very nice, but
_frankly_, isn’t he rather tiresome?” I supposed he was rather tiresome.

Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him,
he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with
him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that
is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I
believe, his age.

Hilary was a man who had convinced himself and every one else that he
had neither use nor time for the flibberty-gibberties of life. He
collected postage-stamps and had sat as Liberal Member for an Essex
constituency for fifteen years. To be a Liberal was against every one of
his prejudices, but to be a Conservative was against all his
convictions. He thought of democracy as a drain-pipe through which the
world must crawl for its health. He did not think the health of the
world would ever be good. When travelling he looked porters sternly in
the face and over-tipped them. His eyes were grey and gentle, and they
were suspicious of being amused. I think that Hilary treasured a belief
that his eyes were cold and ironic, as also that his face was of a stern
cast. His face was long, and the features somehow muddled. It was a kind
face.

Hilary is the last in direct line of the Townshends, who have held
Magralt, a Tudor manor on the Essex coast, since a Townshend deserted to
Henry Tudor on Bosworth Field. The Townshends of Magralt have always
been soldiers, “and that,” Guy, first and last, a soldier, will say, “is
the only reason one can see why Hilary is a politician by profession and
the foremost stamp-collector in Chesterfield Street by the sweat of his
brow.” But one has to report that Hilary was once, before witnesses,
perfectly beastly to an American gentleman who said that Blucher had
arrived in time for the Battle of Waterloo.

But it was on the question of marriage that the two friends would
indulge the sharpest difference of opinion; or rather, Hilary’s wasn’t
an opinion, it was a lurking Silence.

“Suppose you die,” said Guy de Travest. “You might. You are ten years
older than me in years alone. You may receive your call to higher things
at any moment. Look how I beat you at squash the other day! Let us
suppose, then, that you are as good as dead. Unmarried, childless. You
have done nothing. You are nothing. You leave nothing. Except, of
course, what was left to you----”

“Less,” said Hilary.

“Your memory, then, goes down as that of a sickening philatelist.
Whereas, had any one of your ancestors had a chance of a bit of war like
ours, he would have died a Major-General!”

“A Field-Marshal, Guy. You forget that the Townshends have the
reputation of having lost more of their soldiers’ lives than any other
service-family in England.” And so it would go on for ever, Guy
contending that as Hilary was nothing in himself it was disloyal of him
not to wed and bring forth direct heirs, while Hilary’s attitude would
be one of benevolently beckoning to the sombre heights of Cumberland,
where sat the house of Curle-Townshend, heirs-apparent to Magralt and
all its fiefs.

Any one, as Hilary was once goaded into muttering, would have thought
that Guy’s own marriage was the happiest in the world; at worst, any one
might have thought that it was a happy marriage, as marriages go. Guy,
it was said, adored his wife. Guy, it was said, never spoke to his wife
except in public and as he passed through her room in the morning
towards his bath, when he said “Good-morning.” It was Lady de Travest
who volunteered this information. “I do not see,” said Lady de Travest
in her slow soft voice, “why one should for ever conceal the fact that
one’s husband is cruel to one. It is nothing for one to be ashamed of,
is it?” Moira de Travest was a quiet woman, with slow graces of
movement, statuesque, exceedingly handsome in what you might call a
public way, with a dark, restrained smile in the blue eyes under the
hair that shone like black silver. Suddenly she would give a very loud
laugh, and then her eyes would shine boyishly for a second. She had many
intimate friends among women, and at times she was rather brilliant in a
man-like way. Foreign Ambassadors liked to be with her. Mr. de Laszlo,
M.V.O., painted her. Women novelists had tea with her. Twice a year she
would say that a day must come when she must take a lover, but she gave
one a profound sense that there was nothing in the world she could
endure less. But, whatever it was that had gone wrong between those two
ten years before, they had a son, a boy of sixteen, at Eton, and Guy de
Travest would remain by his marriage without question of separation or
divorce. That was cruel of him, Moira’s friends said, but Guy was a very
catholic gentleman, and he loved his son beyond all things. In the
earlier pages of country house albums one might come on photographs of
Guy and Moira arm-in-arm, yellow Viking and black silver. They did not
seem to have aged at all since then, but maybe Lady de Travest was a
little more statuesque and her eyes would shine more and more boyishly.

Hilary and Guy were friends. Inseparable, they were inimical. They
agreed on nothing, nor had they one taste in common. But maybe it is in
a similar tempering of a sense of conduct that Englishmen, regardless of
all overt differences, will find their deepest friendships. Conduct was
for Guy and Hilary one of three facts, the other two being birth and
death. And it is they and their opposites who must finally make the
storms of life. Warriors of conduct and enemies of conduct--there is the
issue that has still to find its final battlefield. Hilary’s Liberalism,
in that issue, would come crashing about his heart; of his head he would
take no account, for it is not by the head that one decides in ultimate
moments. Guy, tall as a tree, Guy the latter-day “thunder-god of
dandies,” would make a flaming figure, standing against the afterglow of
the fires of an old religion called aristocracy. But Guy was far from
being of those Tories, of whom Mr. Galsworthy has written with such
cruel sympathy in _Fraternity_ and _The Patrician_, who are obsessed by
an illusion of their own exclusive right to national captaincy. Guy did
not think that the hope for England or the world lay in himself or his
caste. He was not a clever man; but his contempt for politics was born
of a conviction that there was no hope of curing the diseases of life
and society by anything that any body of men could do. Men individually
must clean themselves within, questing for and grasping what cleanness
there was in them. There was a frozen storm in Guy’s eyes, and they were
very clean. But, of course, he was not very clever.

Those two men are for me symbols of an England that I love. I am not
sure that I can explain what that England is. I am not sure that I would
like to explain it even to myself, as, maybe for the same reason, I
would not like to read Jane Austen with a mental measure. I am not sure
that there ever was such an England. The soil, to be sure, is there, the
clouds across the sun, the teasing humours of the island seasons: the
halls, the parklands, the spacious rooms, they are there. But the
figures that sweep across them--are these that we see, all? Are there no
others, lost somewhere, calmly ready to show themselves--are these that
we see, all? These healthy, high-busted women with muscles like those of
minotaurs, these girls who are either stunned with health or pale with
the common vapours of common dancing-halls, these stout, graceless ones
here, those too slender, bloodless ones there, these things that have no
voice between a shout and a whisper, these things that have yielded to
democracy nothing but their dignity--are these that we see, all? These
rather caddish young men who have no vision between a pimply purity and
vice, who are without the grace with which to adorn ignorance or the
learning with which to make vulgarity tolerable, these peasant-minded
noblewomen, these matrons who appear to have gained in youth what they
have lost in dignity, these toiling dancers, these elderly gentlemen
with their ungallant vices--are these that we see, all? Or was there
never such an England? Were the parklands and the spacious rooms never
peopled but by nincompoops let loose by wealth among the graces of
learning and fashion? Was there never such an England as I myself once
saw in the magic of a spring morning in London? It was no more than the
passing picture of Guy de Travest walking by the sulky side of
Piccadilly, as he must always do to pass between his house in Belgrave
Square to his club in Saint James’s Street, to which a few gentlemen
will still absently resort. I saw Guy walking against the broken
sunlight of the Green Park, and then I did not see Guy. It was as though
from one step to another he had walked into a dimension wherein the
desires of his heart melted his person into the England of his heart,
and he was rendered invisible in the ambience of the Green Park and
against the ancient landscape of Saint James’s.

Hilary says that I was very quiet over dinner that night. He remarked
it, he says, because it was so unusual. Hilary has an illusion common to
Englishmen, that if a man can utter three consecutive sentences without
breaking them up with “eh,” “ah,” “hm,” “mm,” and any other noises that
may occur to him as fit and proper, he must be held to be talking too
much.

How on earth, I was wondering, could I cast the name of Mrs. Storm
before my host with even a tolerable hope of his more than grunting at
it? For, of course, one never discussed women with Hilary. I believe he
had been a member of several clubs once upon a time, but in these
degenerate days he had finally withdrawn into the impenetrable fortress
of the Marlborough; Guy and he agreeing that, since it was once said of
a King of Spain that he had died of etiquette, they envied rather than
cared to overlook their young friends in the exercise of the long lives
assured to them.

“He will, if you provoke him,” Iris had said, absently enough. And,
indeed, never but once had I ever heard Hilary expand at the mention of
a woman’s name, and that was when I had provoked him by defending her,