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The Romantic Lady

by Michael Arlen · English · Gutenberg #46217 · 360,027 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Romantic Lady

Author: Michael Arlen


        
Release date: July 7, 2014 [eBook #46217]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANTIC LADY ***

Transcriber's Note.

A list of the changes made can be found at the end of the book.
Formatting and special characters are indicated as follows:

_italic_




                          _The Romantic Lady_

                             MICHAEL ARLEN




_By_ MICHAEL ARLEN

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




                                  _The
                             Romantic Lady_

                                  _by
                             Michael Arlen_

                             [Illustration]

                               _NEW YORK_
                        GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




                           _Copyright, 1921,
                      By George H. Doran Company_

                             [Illustration]


                           THE ROMANTIC LADY
                                -- B --
                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                                  _To_

                           WALTER PAYNE, Esq.

                           "A VERY ABLE MAN"




CONTENTS

                                     PAGE

    I: THE ROMANTIC LADY               11

   II: FAY RICHMOND                    51

  III: CONSUELO                       111

   IV: THE ROMANCE OF IRIS POOLE      141




I: THE ROMANTIC LADY




THE ROMANTIC LADY

I: THE ROMANTIC LADY


NOËL ANSON and I had been great friends in our first youthful days, but
our lives and ambitions had led us so contrarily that we had not seen
each other for more than six years when, on the night two weeks ago, we
happened to meet at the Club. We had both, of course, so much to say
that, as often happens, we babbled on quite inartistically, spoiling
many a good story in the gay, breathless exchange of reminiscence and
experience; from all of which, however, clearly loomed out these great
cardinal facts of our lives, that we had both married; my wife, who was
a perfect woman, I explained, I had had to leave behind in New Zealand
to take care of her old father; while his wife, who was also a perfect
woman, he chivalrously insisted, had thought fit to divorce poor Noël
some six months before.

But there was one story, anyway, which Noël Anson did not hurriedly
spoil. He kept it long inside him--until that hour after ten when our
corner of the smoking-room was entirely our own, and until he safely
knew that I had talked enough to be able now to remain comfortably
silent and attentive. Dear Noël, he dearly loved to tell a story!

"You are the very first person to hear this," he began untruthfully;
and the calm grey eyes of my friend Noël Anson merged into the
luxurious stare with which the raconteur hypnotically fixes his prey
all the world over. Even thus must the gentle Marlow have transfixed
his hearers as he led them inexorably through the labyrinth of Lord
Jim's career, and through many another such intricacy of Conradian
imagination.

"It's old, older than the stuff that hills and Armenians are made of,"
he said. "The ageless tale of the inevitable lady sitting alone in the
inevitable box of the inevitable theatre to which our inevitable young
man has gone to wile away a tiresome evening. History supplies the
formula, it is only the details for which I'm personally responsible.

"There I sat, one night years ago, alone in a stall at the old
Imperial; grimly smoking, and watching the footlight favourites
'getting-off' with a stage-boxful of rowdy young men who hadn't the
grace even to try to imitate the few gentlemen who might at one time
have been good enough to know 'em--until, on a moment, my eyes circled
round the upper boxes and fixed on a marvellous lady in white, amazing
and alone and unashamed....

"One has grown into the habit of using phrases trivially, but when I
say that I caught my breath at the sight of that figure through the
smoke, I mean that I actually did. There she suddenly was, a wonderful
fact in a dreary place! A candle lighting even the dimmest recesses of
that mausoleum! She, in contrast to all around, was real, exquisite
life....

"And, of course, there was to her beauty the added attraction of
the curious, as you can well understand. For there simply was not
the slightest trace of the _demi-monde_ about her, nothing at all
to suggest that she might at any moment be the mistress of a great
shopkeeper--as, the deuce take it, there well might be about any woman
who had the effrontery to sit so shamelessly alone and--and _soignée_
in front of a box at the Imperial! I mean, it was not the sort of
thing one's sister could do and look dignified about--in fact, it is
some very special and subtle quality which will prevent a well-dressed
woman looking like a courtesan under certain circumstances. French
women say English women haven't got it, and English women say French
women have got nothing else. But this dark-haired, immobile, alien
woman had just that quality--well, of utter 'rightness'; she was
impeccable, you understand. It was more than an impertinence not to
take for granted that she herself had walked into Cartier's and bought
that rope of pearls around her throat.... For although she was in one
of the upper boxes, I could see her quite clearly.

"But 'desirable'--that's the word for the particular creak in the hinge
of one's mind as it enfolds the beauty of such a person--desirable! You
wanted to stretch out a long graceful arm above the heads of all the
stuffy people around you and catch her up, not by force, for she must
yield; and then, as you brought her close to you, what happened would
depend entirely on the sort of woman she was and the sort of man you
were....

"Of course one couldn't let this sort of thing go on without, anyway,
trying to see about it. In the first _entr'acte_ I made a dash for
that ginger-haired old boy by the box-office and got him to send a
page-boy with a note. It naturally wasn't all done in a breath, for the
note had obviously to be a note of the finer sort, it had to convey
a very particular impertinence which wasn't an impertinence simply
because it was so particular. You must know what I mean.... Oh, it had
to be just right! You must be neither too casual nor too ingratiating.
You must not write it either in clogs or in carpet slippers, but in a
happy mean, in the most exquisite pumps that were ever contrived by
Lobb. You may think I'm exaggerating, but really I sweated blood over
those few lines--how, how did one know that one might not miss the best
thing of a lifetime by a _gauche_ word!

"I sent it off at last--the central idea of it being that I greatly
desired the honour of her presence at supper, while apologising for
my monstrous cheek in asking for her presence at same, and that I
was sitting in the third seat from the end of the third row of the
stalls.... Which, by the way, reminds me! It always pays to take a
stall, for imagine writing to a marvellous woman who may have spent her
maid's quarterly wages on a box and saying that you are sitting in the
dress-circle--the dress-circle, mind you! It sounds so odd--anyway, I
breathe again when I think that I might have missed a perfect thing by
sitting in the dress-circle. One isn't being a snob, but an opportunist.

"I received my answer in the second interval ... amazed, excited. Yes,
she was a foreigner by her writing; just a couple of cold lines saying
that I could call at her box at the end of the revue.

"Preliminaries are of course always tiresome, but these were perhaps
less so than most, simply because one was so in the air about her,
and so much readier than usual to be appreciative.... And, mind you,
rightly, as it proved. She spoke English charmingly well, but just
incorrectly enough to be recognisable as a 'distinguished foreigner.'

"Almost on my entrance she began to apologise for her 'rudeness' at
neither accepting nor declining my invitation to supper in her note.

"'But let's be amazingly candid,' I suggested, on her note. 'You
wished, of course, to have a look at your host, before--'

"'But no, I wished to have a look at my guest,' she said, quickly. And
by the slightest flutter in her voice I guessed for the first time that
she was frightfully shy. Personally, I never felt so unattractive in
my life, all prickly hot and affected--as one gets, you know.

"'You must understand that I have a charming house,' she explained.
'And if you will not think me too insincere, I will say that I should
be very flattered if you will take supper with me....'

"I was still standing. She had turned towards me in her chair, and
was looking up at me. She smiled up at me, with a pretty pretence at
pathos, and very lightly her fingers just touched my arm....

"'Please, will you not mind my depriving you of the pleasure of
showing me how charming a host you can be? And anyway, it is so much
more important for me to show you my qualities as a hostess. I have
something of a reputation for that, I must warn you.'

"That quickly found note of intimacy, how fascinating it is! This woman
could turn a drawing-room into an adventure, and an adventure into a
drawing-room, all by a particular quality of--what is it? eye, voice,
manner, ancestry? God knows! But all, all a snare and a delusion....

"Her electric brougham took us away from the deserted theatre. I was of
course too interested in my companion to notice where we were going.
I had a vague idea of Piccadilly, that's all.... She was very amusing.
We had stepped off the ice too quickly, if indeed we had ever been on
it, to get back to it in any way, and the twenty minutes or so of that
gliding motion passed in one pleasant moment.

"'But perhaps you would prefer me to be haughty,' she said suddenly,
'or how do you say it--county? It would perhaps be more becoming in a
woman who does not yet know the name of her guest?'

"'You drive me into a fatuous corner,' I said. 'For what on earth can
I answer but that you can well afford not to be county or any stuff of
that kind?'

"She turned her eyes quickly on mine; suddenly, she was very serious.
She brooded on me for a swift, palpable second.

"'You really, really mean that you do not think me--ah, it is very
delicate!--well, you don't think me "cheap" for letting this happen,
like this? But,' she laughed as suddenly, 'but forgive me,' she said.
'I was not trusting my own judgment.... And besides you have just said
that your father is a Bishop!'

"It was as she was about to step out of the brougham that she said: 'It
has a charm, our adventure. You are so delightful a partner, you "play
up." It is most unusual in men.... And perhaps, too, you are good at
forgetting?'

"'Am I being threatened?' I had to ask.

"'But no, you are being trusted!' she said, very gently....

"I followed her into the house a little shamefacedly; taken, as it
were, out of my stride. There seemed, don't you see, to be no tattered
edges about this woman, there was a finesse about her every emotion
and movement, it was as though every mood and motive had been polished
to perfection before it became articulate in word or gesture. She was
deplorably civilized.

"The house was of the sort that one would have expected of her, though
I can't specify what that was; and exactly where it was, as I've said,
I didn't realize, though it couldn't have been a hundred miles away
from Hyde Park Corner.

"I am not much of a hand at describing rooms, so I can't tell you much
more of the room into which I followed her than that it was large and
seemed just right. What I mean is that I wasn't taking much interest
in antique furniture at that moment, but if anything had been wrong or
jarring in the room I would have been on it at once,--so it must have
been a perfect room. Simplicity stunt on Howard de Walden lines, you
know, with Whistler and Meryon etchings scattered here and there about
the pale walls, and a certain suggestion of black and gold lacquer
somewhere, which I can't now exactly place, unless it was a tall boy or
something of the kind.

"As we entered the room, and she was putting her cloak, white stuff and
ermine, and other things on a chair, I saw particularly the glitter on
the table which meant supper--and as she turned I suppose that I must
too obviously have shown a hint of _gauche_ surprise; and indeed I was
surprised, for the table was laid for two! She had caught me out, and
rather unfairly, and for a second the divine person watched me quite
severely--a severity that amazingly broke into the most absolute and
whole-hearted laugh that I've ever had the misfortune and fortune to
see on any face. Its abandon and gaiety were quite delightful, but I
don't ever wish repeated the prickly discomfort of being so utterly
laughed _at_, as she laughed at me so helplessly standing there.

"But she mended it, a quick simple gesture towards me changed her from
a possible enemy into a--well--comrade.

"'Fool man!' she said. 'Did you really think that it was you who had,
how d'you say it? "picked me up"? Don't you know that it was decided
this morning that you should come to supper with me, decided quite,
quite, early? Or some one like you, perhaps not so charming--but then I
have been so lucky.... Are you very angry with me?'

"She was very close to me, smiling, intimate. Pure coquetry, of
course,--but what perfect _technique_! You knew that she was playing,
but that did not prevent the blood rushing to your head; and she was
so clean, so much 'one of us'! Perhaps she expected me to kiss her at
that moment, in fact, I could scarcely resist, for I always try to be a
little gentleman and do what is expected of me; but I didn't kiss her
then, for I felt it was the wrong moment, it would have to come about
differently. Besides, I don't like your scrappy kisses.... But she was
waiting.

"'Anger isn't exactly one of my emotions at the moment,' I said,
stupidly enough. 'But will you please be very gentle with me, because
never, never have I met any one like you?'

"'I will make a note of that and refer to it when you make a fool of
yourself. Ah, but I know you very well, you are a cautious person who
will make a fool of himself only when it would be folly to be wise.'

"She was close to me, it was dangerous, and I can only bear a certain
amount of that kind of thing, for my sort of restraint is due entirely
to a desire for, well, greater efficiency.... But why will women do
that, why will they step in where men fear to tread? I only speak from
my own paltry experience, of course, but the only two real affairs
I've had would have gone sadly awry if the women had had their way, if
it hadn't been for my mania for organisation.... But I couldn't stand
there another second, holding my breath over that face, that scent.
She was wearing an orchid, too, and an orchid takes its scent from a
woman's body, you can't really smell it except when it is entangled
in a woman's breath. It was an exquisite, damnable addition. I had to
break loose.

"'Encouraged as I am being to enter for the correspondent stakes,' I
said impertinently, 'I am being most awfully neglected as a guest.'

"The darling, how she laughed! She had the kind of large soft mouth
that's made for laughter--until one day you find it's made for tragedy.

"Not then, nor later, did I see any servant about. But the table was
admirably arranged. I am a commonplace enough person, I think of food
in terms of _cantaloup_ and _caviare_ and damn the labour question;
one would be a charming person if one had ten thousand a year. And so,
though I would have been surprised if the supper had not been good, I
was surprised that it was so good; for women, as you know, are rather
bewildering in their choice of food, generally I don't trust 'em, but
she--how well she had plumbed the particular male beastliness which I,
anyway, affect! Oh, her age? About that of Mary Stuart when Bothwell
and Swinburne fell in love with her....

"It was as we sat down to supper that I really looked round the room
for the first time, and noticed a full length portrait in oils on a
wall by the door; of a very distinguished-looking person indeed, in
the toy uniform of some foreign cavalry--Italian, I imagined. But,
gorgeously decorated and hilted as he was, his chest emblazoned with
the ribbons of orders (merited as much by his birth as by any action,
one thought), there was a great air of distinction about the man which
discounted as well as harmonised with his ridiculous trappings. The
slim, perhaps too waisted, figure bore a thin hawk-like face, which
with its perfectly poised mixture of ferocity and courtesy would have
carried its fortunate owner as easily into the heart of any schoolboy
as into the _boudoir_ of the most unattainable lady; and sweeping
_moustachios_ somehow added prominence to the long, delicate, very
arched nose--surely the nose of a Roman person, I ventured to myself at
the end of my long glance. And as I turned to my hostess, she explained
quickly that the decoration was her husband.

"'A very charming and considerate person,' she said, 'who apologises
for being neglected by me.'

"Over supper I began at last to lose my shyness, for I had been very
nervous, you know. As one only too rarely is.... She had the quality of
making one talk, of making one feel that one was on the top of one's
form. Oh, that insinuating art of unuttered flattery which makes one
weak and sincere and terribly reckless.

"'You are very terrible, you make me almost articulate,' I simply had
to say, as we rose from the table. 'You see the only really nice things
about me are my admirations, and I admire you so unreservedly....'

"Perhaps it was just at that moment that I first kissed her. Yes, it
must have been then, for she had a way of accepting those shameless
remarks with such an air of pretty surprise that I couldn't have
resisted the impulse--and anyway, I didn't want to, the thing could go
its own divine way without any more officious restraint on my part.

"I found then that she had that rarest of generous gifts, the power of
graceful admission.... You, old man, who have loved beautiful things,
must know how rare that is, how often one is jarred by that meanest
sort of pride which denies, refuses to admit, the influence of another.
Oh, the insaneness of generous people, the indecencies of decent
people! Am I phrasing a sensation too absurdly if I say that I was
_comfortable_ with this woman whom I had known for less than two hours?
And when I had kissed her, and kissed her again, for hers was not the
riddle to be solved by one touch of the lips, the thing did not take on
the air of a _liaison_, it was not a surprising and stolen pleasure, it
was just natural.

"Slowly she unpinned her orchid and threw it among the elegant debris
of the table.

"'You crush orchids,' she said. She didn't smile. She looked up at me
very thoughtfully.

"'But you must know that this is all wrong,' she said. 'It should not
have been like this at all. When I decided this morning that you
must come to supper with me it was on the distinct understanding that
you should not touch more than the tips of my fingers--and they were
manicured so well this afternoon, too! Look.... Oh, no no! It is too
late, now that you have crushed my orchid it is too late to be so
deferential. And anyway, I did not intend that you should kiss even
my hand until you were going away--and I imagined you going away very
disappointed and full of quite pleasant regrets that I was a cold
woman in spite, oh, in spite of everything! Come, Noël Anson, defend
yourself. Give me reasons why you should not be disappointed. I am very
serious.' And I realised that she was indeed serious.

"'But why d'you say that?' I asked quickly. 'Must the thing be exactly
as you planned, can't anything be altered--oh, I know that sounds
fatuous, but when you look like that one feels helpless! I was right.
You are very terrible.'

"'I _know_, that's all.' she said. And she slowly raised her arms and
put her hands on my shoulders. 'Do not be a fool, Noël Anson,' she said
gently. 'Life is not so easy. There is no romance without reality. I am
warning you, because I am afraid.'

"'And will you tell me when a warning has prevented a fool from being
foolish? And besides, I like being a fool. And _I_ am not afraid. I'm
not even afraid of your answer if I ask whether you love me.'

"She laughed, but so lightly that she didn't break the tension--you
know that infernal laugh?

"'But that is a leading question!' she protested.

"'And that is a dangerous way of answering it,' I had to say, though
anything else would have done equally well, for I hadn't mind for
words. She had lost her laugh and her eyes held mine. We stood there
looking at each other.... As men and women will, when they know
everything and nothing of each other. She was close to me, amazingly
kissable! But I didn't, instead I picked her up in my arms and carried
her to the door, and out into the strange hall, and up the strange wide
staircase of this unknown house, up....

"But if my impulse was to carry her, hers was certainly to let me. Do
you understand that, or am I cheapening her to you? Oh, but one was so
uncertain yet certain about her, it was so good to be with a woman with
whom one could lose one's head and be sure that she wouldn't lose her
dignity--until that moment when she, like every one else, must become
self-conscious. And that moment came, on the landing upstairs, when
her fingers suddenly tightened around my arm. I let her stand, gently,
and she whispered something, just two words, into my ear, but I didn't
catch them, they are lost words.... She opened a door.

"In there she suddenly turned on me, and shook my arm. And a sudden,
queer darkness about her face made me wonder if she was angry.

"'Oh, you are so inevitable, aren't you!' she cried, but the
exclamation ended so surprisingly in the air, somehow so high up in
the air, that I've never yet been able to bring it definitely down to
earth and discover its meaning; unless it was that--I don't know....
She was so strange, so different from the other women who had filled
and emptied one's life, and it was difficult to tell her moods from her
emotions. But there was nothing spurious nor counterfeit about her, she
was not unreal, she wasn't even the closely-knit but far away dream
that beautiful women sometimes become in those terrifying, intimate
moments. She was the most essentially feminine woman that I've ever
met, she was so real.... That white oval face with the large, so large
and so articulate eyes, set in a mass of soft black Southern hair which
I myself had unpinned and let fall over her shoulders despite a shy
murmur from her--why, desire is a cheap word to express the passion to
possess that, the living symbol of the loveliest woman of all time!
Yes, yes, I was supremely ridiculous. I still am....

"A second or a century later, at the end of a long, long silence, for
me an infinity of happiness, she moved her head away from me and asked
me to light her a cigarette. I gave it to her, and waited. I knew so
well, you see, what was coming. I had been watching her, I had made a
feast of all the movements of that amazing face. It was a sad face,
wonderfully alive, but sad; and its sadness became fixed, her eyes were
large and held no curiosity at all. I noticed the lack of curiosity
in them, because one is so used to meeting it in women--they want to
find out! But she, perhaps, in her splendid conceit, had found out, she
_knew_, and she was sad--had she not said downstairs that she knew?
I didn't care then whether she knew or not, for then life was before
me, the present and the future were in exquisite certainty; but now,
as I waited and watched her draw her cigarette, I looked back on that
future, and was really terrified of the present. There are moments of
ice-clear sanity in all of us--you must know those moments?--when you
realise with helpless vividness what you can and what you cannot do,
what you simply cannot alter. And so with this moment and this woman;
she was inexorable, I could not alter her, I could do nothing but
wait--for the epilogue to that prelude played long ago downstairs, when
she had put her hands on my shoulders and told me that she was warning
me....

"'But perhaps you will think me very vain?' she asked at last, very
quietly.

"'Because you are thinking you will make me wretched by what you are
going to say?'

"'Oh, you are too quick!' she murmured. And she raised her head on her
elbow and looked at me.

"'Dear Noël Anson,' she said, 'our lives go different ways. To-day we
had never met, and to-morrow it must be as though we had never met.
For life is not a romance, it is a reality, and it is much stronger
than our--inclinations? And even if I loved you it would be the same, I
should be saying what I am saying now, because in me there is something
much stronger than love, much more inevitable.... Please, you must
believe me, it will hurt me if you do not believe me. I am not playing
any more. I do not play with memories of crushed orchids, because it
is only fools who think there is no pleasure in being serious ... just
sometimes.'

"'It is no use for me to say any more,' she said, 'because if you like
me very much then, anyway, you will be bitter about me--and if you do
not like me very much then you will only think me (how is it?) an odd
sort of woman.... I command you, and I put you on your honour to obey,
that when you leave this house you will go into the brougham waiting
for you without looking to see the number of the house, nor the name of
the street, so that you will never see me again, you man.... But it is
now very, very late, you must go, Don Noël, you must go! And take with
you my blessings--Adieu!'

"But I can only repeat her words to you barely and crudely. I can't
hope to give you the tragic gesture of impotence in her voice, and the
way her voice grew lighter and lighter until it seemed to become part
of the air, as impalpable, as mysterious. And at the end her voice
had died down to almost less than a whisper, her 'adieu' had fainted
between her tongue and her lips, it was only a wisp of a dying word. It
was strangely as though she were rehearsing something she might have to
say sometime.... She was only rehearsing. I waited.

"'Oh, but isn't that enough!' she almost cried, suddenly. 'Have I not
done it quite, quite well, or do you want me to think of something
else--something more ... more dramatic?'

"'Please, please do make it easy for me, Don Noël--do go away, please!'
she begged. 'This is so difficult, so much more difficult than I.... It
is not a tragedy, this, remember! It is an incident, and the incident
is finished, that's all. Don't please let me make a tragedy of it--by
apologising! You see, my Noël, I am so weak, so weak. I feel such a bad
woman, such a brute.... And you can never understand why, never....
Forgive me, and go!'

"Her very last word was almost brutal in its defined meaning, it held
no uncertainty; but I didn't move at that moment. I remembered that I
did not know her name.

"'A few moments ago, before you spoke, I had a dream,' I said. 'And in
my dream I was told that you would tell me your name, the name that
will explain the initials under the coronet on your hairbrushes. The
adventure would not have been so complete without a coronet, so I
looked to see if one was there, and behold! it was there. I am such a
snob, I would like to know your name.... And then I would forget it.'

"'That was a false dream,' she said. 'You will not know my name, you
will not know where this house is, you will not know anything. Don
Noël, you will be an English gentleman of the kind we find in books,
you will not remember or know anything that I do not wish. You will not
look at the number of the house, nor at the name of the street. That is
my wish.'

"She was quite, quite cold. Just like a woman who has had a love affair
which has lasted an eternity but cannot outlast another second. How
wise she was to let me see that--oh, well, anti-climax! She knew that
men do not fall of their own accord from great heights down to Mother
Earth, they must be pushed over--ever so gently, gently.

"'It is getting light,' she murmured.

"But as I rose she confessed her affectation; she threw her arms round
my neck and brought my face close to hers.

"'You fool man!' she said. 'Why do you hurt yourself and me? Why
did you just say that this was an adventure? This has not been an
adventure, it has been a love-affair.... And always remember that I
asked you to forgive me. Always.'

"When I was at the door I had to turn round. I had feared this moment
of going, and I had made up my mind to go quickly and be done with it.
But I make a bad actor, and artistic effects can go to the devil for
all I care. With my hand on the knob I had to turn round.

"'I can't go like this,' I said. And I walked back across the room, and
looked down on her.

"'I can't. It seems wrong,' I said.

"'Perhaps, then, it was not worth it?' she asked, so tentatively!

"'It will always have been worth it.... But there _is_ something
missing, isn't there?'

"'But, of course, Don Noël! There is much missing, for it is
an unfinished romance which will never be finished. You do not
understand--this is life!

"'I know. You are a baby, like all really nice men, and you want a
piece of chocolate to eat as you go away,' she said. 'Bring your head
down--yes, down, down, Noël--and I will give it to you.... Listen, you!
It is decided that you will never see me again, is it not? And that
you will keep your promise not to look where this house is, so that
you will never, never find me again? But, my dear, will you please
believe that I am ver' ver' sorry, that I would like to see you many,
many times before this stupid "good-bye." For it is not every day that
people like you and I meet, we could laugh and cry so well together....
A long time ago, as we came into this house (and we came in because we
had to come in, my Noël) I asked you if you were good at forgetting.
But you have been such a dear that I now give you permission to
remember--me! And that is the end of my vanity and your love affair,
Don Noël, for now you must go away, out of the house into the night
from which you came--oh, so wonderfully! Go--adieu, adieu.'

"And this time I did not turn round at the door, but went out of the
room and out of the house, into the pale darkness of the early morning.
The squat shape of the electric brougham was there, waiting on ice for
me; but the bent figure of the man in the driving-seat seemed asleep,
he certainly did not hear me until I was opening the door of the cab,
when I gave him my direction. And I stepped in. The thing glided softly
away, and I lay back and closed my eyes....

"I don't know how what I've told you has impressed you, I may indeed
have made the thing seem farcical; it had begun as a--well--casual
adventure, it had ended--ended! with me sitting back in her brougham,
seriously, abjectly miserable! My feeling was one of deadly and
unutterable flatness--just that. From my own lips had come a promise
that I would let something go, something which I wanted more than
anything else in the world, something which would never come back! I
would never see her again! Everything but that one agonising certainty
was in utter blankness. I was very flat, everything was grey....

"The brougham soon drew up at my door in Mount Street. I got out and
stood by the footboard, rather absentmindedly fumbling in my pocket for
a pound note to give to this obviously very confidential chauffeur. He
was still huddled up in his seat, his peaked cap well over his eyes,
his coat-collar turned up over half his face. Only his nose was really
visible, and that dimly. I was vaguely staring at it as I picked out
a note, a little piqued by the fellow's utter lack of interest in me.
I had only stood there, say, four seconds or so; he hadn't looked at
me once, wasn't even going to wait for the tip, for I saw that he was
releasing the lever to move off--when suddenly, staring at that nose, I
realised with a shock that I had seen it before. The car was almost in
motion when I said, sharply, amazedly:

"'But you've shaved off your moustache!'

"The car stopped. The man deliberately got out, and stood on the
pavement beside me. I am pretty tall, but he was even taller. I could
see his face clearly now--yes, it was he! looking almost cadaverous
without his sweeping _moustachios_, but still very distinguished. He
was smiling at me, with a strange urbanity.

"'This is very awkward,' he said, or rather murmured; his accent and
voice were distinctly foreign.

"'Very,' I agreed hotly. I was angry, shocked. 'It's so awkward that I
wonder how you put up with it.'

"'I can do one of two things,' he went on, ignoring my bad temper, but
looking intently at me. 'I can either kill you, or I can explain.'

"He looked about forty, and there was a courteous and fatherly air
about him which I found intensely irritating. But any manner would have
been irritating in my absurd position.

"'You have a perfect right to do the first, of course,' I rapped out.
'But may I suggest that you do both, and the explaining first, if you
don't mind. I think I'm rather entitled to one, don't you?'

"He considered me for a moment.

"'As you will, then,' he conceded. 'If you will get back into the cab
I will explain in there. I have found the night air rather chilly.'

"His manner infected me. 'If you will accept my hospitality for a
moment, please come inside. And perhaps a little firewater....' I
suggested vaguely.

"He accepted my invitation with a bow, and followed me into my flat. In
the sitting-room he unbuttoned his heavy coat, and stood with his back
to the empty grate; a tall, slim, decorative, and dangerous gentleman.
He made me feel like a baby in arms, but I stifled my irritation. I
poured out two stiff whiskies.

"'Only a touch of soda, thanks,' he answered my inquiry.

"'It was clever of you to recognise me by my nose,' he said. 'But the
Casamonas have been proud of their noses for so long that I, the last
of them, find it a little hard to have to conceal mine even for a few
minutes. And as for my moustache, to the absence of which you referred
so pointedly, that has been gone for some time. That portrait of me
which you saw was painted a long time ago, and since then I have become
subject to colds in the head. And I found that my _moustachios_ became
frequently _mal-soignés_ after the continual application, however
delicate, of a handkerchief. I begin to concede that there may, after
all, be some defence for that "tooth-brush" parody of a moustache which
you, _par exemple_, can so charmingly affect.'

"No, he wasn't laughing at me. He was just talking courteously on about
whatever had come first. But I couldn't bear it.

"'Eh--about that little matter,' I said absurdly, feeling more and more
like a tradesman.

"'Yes, of course,' he instantly agreed. He drained his glass, put it
delicately down on the table, and then turned to me.

"'If you will forgive a pointed question--did you keep your promise not
to look where the house was?'

"I had given up being irritated, it was so clearly no use.

"'Of course I did.' I answered abruptly.

"'Good! How charming it is to meet in life what one is tired of meeting
in books--for you are exactly like the English gentlemen in Mr.
Oppenheim's novels who always lose secret documents and find beautiful
wives. I envy them, and you--but oh, my dear sir, I do wish you were a
little more wicked and human!'

"'Are you complaining of my being too good!' I burst out, amazed.

"He saw the point, and for the first time really laughed.

"'I see that I must get to my explanation quickly,' he apologised.
'May I sit down? Thank you.... That lady, as you have guessed, is
my wife. Or, more correctly, she was my wife until two years ago.
Since when she has been so only in name. I use the language of
convention so that you may the more quickly understand me.... She
loved me, but she ceased to love me. It happens thus. And though I
love her still, it is without fire or passion; it is not the love
of a possesser, but of a connoisseur. I love her as I love a vase,
a marble, any really beautiful thing. You understand?... We married
four years ago, in Paris. She is of the best Sicilian blood, but a
rebel, an _aristo_ in revolt. She believes in only one law, and that
is the law of lawlessness. We met without the formal courtesies of an
introduction--if I may draw a parallel, as you and she met a few hours
ago. And again, since I am as sensitive a person as yourself--it is
our charm, my dear sir--the same happened to me four years ago as to
you to-night. The night took wings, and carried us away to the very
pinnacles of wonderful adventure--she and I, king and queen of more
than one world! To the very pinnacles of that enchanting adventure
towards which the poets and philosophers of ages have been vainly
scrambling, that adventure for which cities have been sacked and
battles won. You, too, have been on those heights, and you know. In
most men's lives those heights are never attained, but you and I have
been supremely fortunate. _I_ regret nothing.... Night became morning,
romance became life. The adventure ended. And I found myself in the
street, with her last command ringing in my ears, not to look where
the house was, to forget--everything! The Seine seemed alluring to my
agony.... But I am Italian, I have at least the courage of my passions,
and so I broke my promise. I called the very next afternoon. And how
can I express to you, even now, my great surprise at the warmness of my
reception! For the fingers with which I had given the _concierge_ my
card had trembled with fear--had she not commanded me never to see her
again! But it needed only one second of her presence to soothe my fear,
she was so gay, so cordial, so quite delighted to see me! No word of
any promise, no word of last night, passed her lips--we had met before,
that is all! But we were not long together before another joined
us--a short _chic_ little man, of an agreeable air. He looked that
rarest of all human beings, a banker from whom it would be a pleasure
to borrow money. And as he came towards us I wondered if this was yet
one more slave of this marvellous lamp, but she introduced him to my
bewilderment as her husband. And then--imagine it--presented me to him
as her future husband! All in the most casual and un-ostentatious way,
as though she were performing a mere formality; and as such, indeed,
this amazing husband accepted it. For instead of knocking me down,
he bowed politely and took my hand. As for her, I didn't dare look
at her, I was so embarrassed. But when at last, as tea was served,
I did look, she smiled at me, and I knew that her smile was to say,
"This is your punishment for breaking your oath. I am so sorry...."
The husband did not stay for more than five minutes; obviously he did
not wish to intrude. But before he left us he turned to me, and with
the most charming deference, said: "You will find everything arranged.
Madame will explain. I beg you to accept my sincerest wishes for your
happiness." And then his lips touched her fingers, and he left us--to
let himself be divorced so that Madame could marry me, who had never
dared even to dream of such supreme happiness. And so it was that we
married.

"'I am sorry to be so tiresome and detailed, but the worst is over. For
the rest of my tale is a commonplace in the history of the world--you
realise? She tired of me. Gently, but remorselessly. As such wonderful
women will, you know. It is no use kicking--no man, neither Hector, nor
Adonis, nor Machiavelli, can supply the deficiencies of the sphinx. She
smiles and says "no," she says "no" even to the wisdom of Solomon, and
besotted man sprawls at her feet and murmurs frantically that, anyway,
it is better to be miserable about her than to be happy about any one
else.... Yes, my friend, men have been known to say that to women. I
myself have said it more than once, but I only believed it once. That
was two years ago. But it was no use, her love was as dead as though
it had never been--I was a man, I had become a God, and now I was a
man again. And so the revolt of man ended in submission, and I had to
acquiesce in her mere affection for me--that affection with which all
splendid women enshroud their dead loves. And how much in oneself dies
with their dead love! Why, there dies the ritual of love, the sacrament
of sex! for sex can be exalted to a sacrament only once in a lifetime,
for the rest it's just a game, an indoor sport....

"'You see, such women as she make their own laws. It is not her fault,
nor her arrogance, it is ours, who are so consistently susceptible.
Physically she belongs to the universe, not to one single man. She
never belonged to me, I was just an expression of the world to her.
She has never belonged to any one, she never will--for she is in quest
of the ideal which even she will never find. And so she will go on,
testing our--our quality and breaking our hearts. Men have killed
themselves because of her, poor dear, and I too would have considered
it seriously if I had not found that she ranked suicide high in the
list of supreme impoliteness from men to women.

"'I had suggested that she should divorce me, but she would not do
that, for she complained of a nervous fear of being left alone in a
house. We were in Rome then, and we could envisage no possible husband
for her from among our acquaintance--so she begged me to continue in
my capacity for a while. Of course, I was only too pleased.... In the
end we hit upon the only way out of the _impasse_--that she should do
what she had (so successfully, she sweetly said) done before, and risk
the adventure; and if the young man was acceptable, and broke his
solemn promise, and came to see her, then he would be made to suffer
the penalty of his weakness--happy, wretched youth! But I would not let
her take the risk without some guarantee as to her safety, for even
adventures can sometimes become unpleasant, and so I insisted that I
should be her chauffeur for the occasion--and from beginning to end of
the adventure, I insisted. To which she replied, smiling, that it would
not always be the same--"you will not be kept waiting long," she said.

"'And it happened as she said, for in the two adventures before this of
yours I was indeed not kept waiting long. Not for more than an hour, in
fact--in each case the wretched young man had a good supper and left
immediately after, wondering how this most unattainable of women had
ever come, so informally, to invite him. The first happened in Vienna,
the second in Paris--they bored her utterly to death, she told me. And
thus the occasion for the promise, the pivot of the adventure, as you
realise, never arose in those two cases. But in yours, the third....'

"'Yes?' I asked eagerly.

"'The night air was certainly chilly,' he demurred gently.

"He was silent for a few long minutes. I waited intently. And then he
leaned forward towards me, and put a hand lightly on my knee.

"'Young man, will you forgive an impertinence?' His eyes held in them
the kindliest light; my silence answered them, and he continued: 'I am
perhaps twelve or thirteen years older than you, so I may be allowed
the liberty of advising you--about something in which I am an expert.
Never, never try to find the house to which you went a few hours
ago--never, I say! And I say it because I like you, and because I know
that she is the most enchanting woman in the world; and if _she_ likes
you, so she is the more enchanting--and the more dangerous! As she was
dangerous to me.... You forgive the liberty I have taken?'

"He let his quite solemn speech balance in the air for a long pause,
then got up and, very lazily, stretched his arms over his head. And a
delightful, intimate smile passed over his lean face--the man had a
large share of the divine essence of childishness.

"'You know your 'Trilby'? he asked lightly; and murmured into the air:--

    'Hélas! Je sais un chant d'amour,
    Triste et gai, tour à tour!'

"As he went to the door I sat on in my chair; circumstances somehow
waived aside common politeness. I just stared after him--to meet his
eyes, for from the door he turned round just to say:--

"'I did not mean to jeer at your honesty in keeping your promise to
madame--please never think that. On the contrary, I sincerely admire
you--and congratulate you! For you have avoided a marvellous misery....
Good-night, Sir Lancelot. Adieu!'"

The Italian's exit seemed to bring Noël Anson's tale to an end, and yet
so abruptly that I could not but wait for a final ending. He waited,
but threw the end of his cigarette into the dying fire, and continued
silent.

"And so you never saw her again, and lived unhappily ever after?" I
suggested at last. But I wasn't prepared for his quick, pitying stare.
He heaved himself up from his chair.

"You damn fool!" he said. "Didn't I tell you all through dinner that I
was divorced six months ago!"

"But your promise--you told him--"

"The first thing I did when I left that house," he explained firmly,
"was to look round at the number on that door...."




II: FAY RICHMOND




II: FAY RICHMOND


THE influenza epidemic of the winter of 1918-19 will for me always
be memorable for a strange coincidence, which could in no way have
happened but for that plague's overwhelming rush; and together with
that I remember vividly the grieved face of a homely matron, as
she spoke to me that January afternoon on the hushed stairway of a
nursing-home in Beaumont Street. It was, I suppose, one of those unreal
incidents which are so essentially part of that life which realism
likes to depict, that a realist may often fail to translate them into
his tale (after that very old man, blind to the thing under his nose),
whereas a romanticist will, perhaps, with a debonair gesture, give them
their true part in the histories of his creatures.

Thus, this tale, sown however dismally, takes to itself the air of
a romance; not mine indeed, nor Howard Wentworth's, the well-known
playwright whom it intimately concerns, but Fay Richmond's. I call her
by that name even though it was lost, in the way that women must lose
the most apt and adequate names (as only names can be), on her Italian
marriage some twenty years before Howard told me about her. He was
curiously infatuated with it; I remember him repeating it, delicately,
and pronouncing it a beautiful name, not unworthy of the meditation of
Mr. George Moore by his fireside in Ebury Street.

"No, it was too fitting a name to last," he said. "A girl with such a
name couldn't but die or get married young.... Can you imagine an aged
spinster called Fay Richmond? It could only be the name of a lovely
girl, but it could never live much more than twenty years except in a
novel by, well, Disraeli or Meredith; unlikely enough shades, you'll
say, the bedizened and the tortuous, to be joined together even in
sentimental discourse about a girl's name, with whom I've already bored
you sufficiently...."

"But I haven't met her yet!" I protested actively from my side of the
fireplace, in his room in the Beaumont Street nursing home.

Influenza had already gripped and released me, so that I was now in an
irritatingly robust state of health in which to visit a less fortunate
friend who had succumbed to its second wave; for that second wave was
more virulent and more treacherous than the first, mocking its victim
into partial convalescence and then, with a jeer and a snarl at the
ambuscaded wretch, fixing again upon the damaged lungs, so inexorably
that there was only the one release. And thus Howard Wentworth, who
was thought, even by himself, to have cheated the thing, in the end
died; not ten days after that afternoon when I had sat listening to
him, as he lounged in the happy _déshabillé_ of convalescence, and was
reminiscent about a girl called Fay Richmond.

The difference in our years had not prevented an acquaintance ripening
into a steady friendship. What I liked about Howard Wentworth was
that--unlike so many Englishmen of middle years--he was _not_ young
for his age. He was completely, sincerely, and normally over 45, which
was so refreshing of him among the crowds of 38's to 42's passing all
the way from Coombe to Sunningdale of a Sunday morning.... And it was
after our occasional dinners in his house in Upper Brook Street that
I would be interested by a solitary photograph in a plain sandal-wood
frame; one could not help contrasting its prominence on the grand
piano with the total absence of any other photograph in that austere
house--austere, in spite of that slight Chinese element of tapestry,
strange green horsemen and the like, which even the best of celibates
are nowadays growing to affect.

I used to wonder, quite shamelessly, who the girl with the sad, sincere
face was, and whether my host and she had loved unhappily; for the
girl's eyes were large and sad, and the firm set of her young mouth had
not tried to obey the exhortation to smile; which must, indeed, have
been given very hesitatingly, for there was a frightening sincerity
about her face. You felt, looking even upon the poor mockery of a
likeness, that you would have to dance very well indeed before you
begged the favour of such as she to dance with you. You imagined to
yourself fine arrogances behind those young eyes, to attract and appall
you in a venturesome moment....

But, of course, I could not ask my host about her, I had to wait;
until, on his reported convalescence, I went to see him in Beaumont
Street, and I suppose too obviously noticed the sandal-wood frame on
the dressing-table. He smiled:

"It always seemed to go with me," he said. "And I don't quite know why,
as I don't remember ever having made a point of it. But Briggs somehow
got into the habit of treating it like a toothbrush, so that it now
goes with me even for weekends. I don't think I've even really looked
at it for years and years.

"Though, I suppose, I've always got the feeling that it's there," he
said, "or that she's there...."

"No," he corrected himself quickly. "I can't aspire to that
consistency. Even in a sentimental mood with you sitting there trying
to look as though you had come to amuse a sick man, whereas you've come
to be amused, and well you know it...."

Then it was that he told me her name, dwelling on it.

"As a preface, I was a very sane young man," he went on, smiling. "I
know I must have been, because when I try to find in my youth even one
among those rare mornings in which a giant wakes up with the feeling
that he could break a lance for a fair lady that day, I can't find one.
There never was one, I never woke up so recklessly. And the fact that I
may have grown to have that feeling when it's too late and I'm too old
to joust carelessly is neither here nor there; it can't bluff me into
thinking that once upon a time I, too, could have followed His Grace of
Dorset into the river for a Zuleika Dobson--or, more splendidly, for
a Fay Richmond, no conjurer nor coquette! For I know dismally that
my wildest youth couldn't have shared in that fantasy of love--I was
too sane or too stupid, whichever you like. And that's why, instead of
being the chief actor, I am only a humble observer in the only play
that has ever really mattered in my life....

"One February afternoon, about six years ago, I drove past two people
on the Route Corniche between Nice and Monte-Carlo. I was driving
alone, a noisy Mercèdes. And I had just swung round a corner on to a
straight stretch, when ahead of me I saw a man and a woman come out of
the garden gate of a villa. The woman had on a white dress. I looked at
it until I was abreast.... And I don't know how I got round the next
corner. I don't know if she really recognised me as I whirled past, if
she really smiled--perhaps it was only a mocking game that the sun had
played on a woman's comely face! Indeed, I thought she had smiled, that
old, gentle smile.... For me the whole thing was just a sudden stare,
and then a long acute, acute pain. The sort of pain that fixes on the
heart and mind, with a doubtful smile to crown its ache.... Wondering
about that smile, as of a ghost in a white dress, all the rest of my
way on that fiendish, lovely mountain road, I suppose it wasn't my
fault that car and self didn't add one more wreck to the credit of Les
Alpes Maritimes.... I hadn't seen Fay Richmond for fourteen years, and
I have never seen her since then.

"I was about twenty-eight or so when I first met the Richmonds, _mère
et fille_, in London. Old General Richmond had died a few years
before--perhaps luckily, before the Boer War rats got at his reputation
as a strategist.

"I had already two fairly successful plays to my name; and so, among
the thousand and one people of my first drawing-rooms, I can't remember
exactly how I met Mrs. Richmond, unless it was at a bridge party, for
she was a fearsome player even at that early stage of the damnable
game. Fearsome she was, I said; but only in spades and clubs. She
is the only woman I've never really been terrified of in my life,
bless her dear kind heart! A huge, vast woman, with a vast expanse of
genial face, and fair hair, and a rumbling rasping voice that caught
you behind the shoulders and made you smile sheepishly. She had no
right to be a woman, she ought to have been a stockbroker, with a
terrified, adoring little wife and a large place in the country. I'm
not exaggerating, she wasn't fat, she was massive--simply exuding
luxury, terror, and kindliness. Yes, that rumbling, rasping voice said
the most encouraging things to a not-very-conceited young playwright;
who, I like to think, fascinated by the kindliness of that vast terror,
perhaps stood behind its chair all that afternoon and watched it take
the odd trick, or know the reason why not, my dear partner?...

"And not very many days later, on a lazy afternoon one October, he
was sending in his name from the doorway of a house in Rutland Gate,
vaguely hoping that she was not at home so that he could wander about
the Park for an hour or two. But within the next few minutes he was in
an unconventional little grey room upstairs, certainly not the usual
drawing-room of this large house, in half-hesitating talk with a girl
who had followed him in.

"He had swung round, as guiltily as one always does from the
examination of a strange room, when he heard the door open behind him;
and expecting, prepared for that large woman, he was suddenly struck
shy, absurdly stammering, when a slight thing, a girl, came towards
him with a smile and flushed cheeks and some quick nervous words. It
was surprising how slight she seemed! Her words and her flush showed
him that she was much more shy than he--why, she was only a girl!--and
this pulled him together into his experienced self, before he entirely
missed what she had begun to say.

"'My mother told me--' she was saying, but she had misjudged her
distance, and was now so close to me that she had to break in with a
'How d'you do?' and shake hands.... Then her eyelids fluttered, quite,
quite sincerely. But, beneath them, the brown eyes were apprising me
steadily all the time--she was one of those sweet things who valiantly
pretend that they can judge for themselves! Well, she would have to
like me, I decided.

"'You see,' she was going on quickly, 'when your card came up, mother
said at first that she wasn't at home--'

"'Thank you,' I said, and we both laughed like shy children.

"'You know I didn't mean--oh, dear, it's very difficult!' she broke in
helplessly. 'And I haven't even asked you to sit down yet!'

"'But I don't know if I'm to be allowed to stay!'

"'Why, of course, you are going to stay!' she said, surprised into a
decisive manner. 'I'm just trying to explain.... Do sit down, please!'
We both sat down. She took a deep breath:

"'Mother said she wasn't at home at first, because she is lying down
with a headache and a bad temper. But then she changed her mind--even
a headache can't ever prevent mother from changing her mind--and said
that she couldn't turn you away from the door the very first time you
called, as you might never come again, which--'

"'Yes, I would,' I interrupted.

"'But you wouldn't dare contradict mother like that if she were here,'
she retorted; and then covered her suddenly heightened flush with a
little tremor of a laugh. It wasn't quite a laugh--rather like a happy
gurgle, you know, if that doesn't sound too stupid. And it made one
want to smile all over.

"'Shall I go on where I left off when you interrupted?... Which, said
mother, would be a pity, because you were a nice young man and had
quite good manners for a man who couldn't help having gone to Oxford or
Cambridge--'

"'Heidelberg,' I corrected softly.

"'Well, I'm glad mother doesn't know that, because she generally
doesn't like eccentric people.... And then she told me to come down and
receive you, and give you tea, and make such a fuss of you that you'd
have to pretend to be amused, anyway.'

"I suppose she caught me with a whole-hearted smile all over my face,
because she added, 'And you are pretending splendidly,' in a shy,
mischievous way. Then again that tremor of a laugh, with just a little
mocking wave in it. And now, too, laughter was playing a fluttering
game with the inevitable shyness in the tortoiseshell eyes. Yes,
they were just brown eyes when she first came in, but now they were
tortoiseshell in the pale October light. These things happen.

"It was rash of me to begin to try and tell you about Fay Richmond,
because I find I am groping for the threads. And there is something
almost irritating in trying to modulate one's thoughts to the facts of
an intimacy which has been at the back of one's mind for so many years,
but which only lasted twelve months. That's all--just about twelve
months from that afternoon which I've been describing to you at such
terrible length; on purpose, indeed, because in groping to fit a memory
with a face and a voice I have got to go back to the very beginning, to
re-live that first impression of that first meeting; which ended only
with a suddenly returned nervousness, itself the herald of my returning
formality. As I took my leave I had the happy feeling that I had found
a friend--you know that feeling? as you walk away from a house which
you had entered never dreaming of the unusual smile with which you
would be leaving it? It happens so seldom....

"From that time I saw a great deal of them--or rather, as much of them
as of any one, for I did more writing at that period of my life than
at any other. I was still young enough to have the luxury of having
something to say, or thinking I had, which is as enjoyable. Mrs.
Richmond was really fond of me, God only knows why. And genuine in
her affections as in all else, the ordinary barriers of time between
acquaintance and friendship counted for nothing with her; and so I
found myself, very delightfully, to be almost an 'old friend' of the
family within less than a month!

"Perhaps it was just this unusual development that put me in the wrong
channel; for there were Fay and I, with the embracing presence of her
mother between us, or upstairs about to come down--how often she was,
carelessly, 'about to come down'!--calling each other by our Christian
names within, perhaps, the fifth time of my seeing her! While there was
another young man, much more often and with more right at Rutland Gate
than I, who, I know now, could not have called her by her Christian
name, nor she by his, until the moment came when he simply couldn't
help calling her by it. And that, after all, is what a Christian name
is for! Certainly not to be scattered about in casual familiarity....
What a feeling, not to have called her 'Fay' until, one day, I simply
had to! It's an emotion I missed, with other things....

"You will find it scarcely believable when I tell you that I went
there, for most of that time, just as much to see the mother as the
daughter! I simply can't remember hoping, when I rang the bell, that
Mrs. Richmond would be out or lying down, and that I must 'pretend to
be amused' with Fay--a joke, by the way, not easily released by any of
us in that pleasant house! Mrs. Richmond was quite right in trusting to
her affections, as good people often are right; and she herself said
once, 'One very seldom places confidence in the wrong people.'

"No, this unfinished romance would never have happened if, several
months before I met her, Fay Richmond had not been engaged to marry the
Marchese Vitiali. It would not have happened because Mrs. Richmond was
a sensible and practical woman, and because I was quite an ineligible
young man, having no money, and, as she once remarked, only the most
erratic prospects.

"'And for a woman to marry a man who lives by his pen is as dangerous
an adventure as to marry a man who lives by his sword,' she ponderously
added in the course of this same conversation; which of course held no
strictly personal quality in it, but had sprung, one afternoon early in
our friendship, from her coming down and finding Fay and me in a happy
mood together.

"'One of the pleasant things that have happened,' she said embracingly
as she came in, 'since this girl was clever enough to get herself
engaged, is that now we can have ineligible young men about the
house--can't we, Fay?'

"Even I could see that she wouldn't have answered but for the silence
of two people.

"'Yes, it's fun to have friends,' Fay said, almost shortly. And for the
first time in that house I felt a twinge of embarrassment. Something, a
faint idea, brushed me in the face, vaguely. It's exaggerating a vagary
into a phrase to say that I could almost feel it leave a faint red
mark, like a flush. But it's quite poignant, even now.

"Yes, I suppose I _have_ brought in her engagement as a sort of
casual incident instead of as the real fact of her life. But, don't
you see, that is exactly how it seemed to strike one, entering that
house at a mid-way hour, so to say? Why, as I see it now, I think it
was weeks before I actually realised the fact of her engagement! Her
_fiancé_ was nearly always there, of course; but not acutely so as her
_fiancé_! He wasn't momentously present, I mean.... And I don't think
that it was entirely an excessive good breeding or a lack of point of
view which so blurred the outlines of his position in the house. The
Richmonds seemed, rather, to have peculiarly enveloped him, his whole
foreignness, his demonstrativeness, and his dark good looks. So that
it wasn't, perhaps, unnatural that some time passed before I realised
anything other in the handsome young Italian than a charming and
cultured--one might almost be pardoned for adding, decorative--addition
to an already luxurious household. Accepting him as part of the
family he seemed to just grow, in his capacity of lover, into my
consciousness; as, I guessed, he must have grown with time into Fay's
life--that rich and eligible young Roman! He, born with all the good
things of life, having entered it with a letter of introduction, as it
were, from the god who awards the silver spoons, had managed to happen
on yet one more! And, with it all, he was still so very likeable....

"There seemed, through all those earlier months, to be a grim sort of
silence sustained by the mother and daughter about Vitiali. It grew
queerly on one, this silence, after I had accepted him as part of the
Richmond household; and I impudently put myself to inquiring into it.
Not, of course, that I often saw Mrs. Richmond and Fay, or either of
them, alone, for as I've said he was nearly always about the house,
had just left or was just arriving.... I chose to think it a little
strange that so ardent a _fiancé_, as undoubtedly he was, should be
treated so utterly as part of the family--strange, or if you like, more
than flattering for a foreigner in an English house! And, happening on
what I've already described as that grim sort of silence about him, I
found a more subtle reason to account for it than this whole-hearted
acceptance of him into the family as a lover and a gentleman. Its very
quality of grimness, which seems a little absurd in this context, gave
one the key to Mrs. Richmond's queerly and almost insensibly working
conscience, and--as I stretched the limits of my conceit--to Fay's
dim understanding of it and its cause. Surely you can see the pathos
of a situation in which a mother and a daughter, very really loving
one another, seldom referred to an approaching marriage because they
both vaguely saw in it a contradiction to their mutual understanding?
It couldn't have been more definite than that, else my tale would run
differently.

"I can see Mrs. Richmond, now, fumbling in her generous mind, through
that time for a real and deep content at her daughter's marriage
with the Marchese Vitiali, whom she liked so much. She, who would
indignantly have denied that she could ever force or more than mildly
persuade her daughter to a choice of a husband, must have felt a
plaintive discomfort in doubting if her genuine desire for Fay to
accept him had not influenced a daughter, who placed her mother's
happiness beside her own, over just that fraction which helps
indecision into assent.

"That Fay's concession of herself was not more abandoned than an assent
I came to see through the window which an intimate household, unused
to secreting its intimacies except by way of good breeding, almost
forces upon the privileged third person. It didn't vividly strike one,
as such a fact vividly should, that Fay was in love with her _fiancé_;
not, I mean, that admirable sort of "in love" of young people, however
undemonstrative, which makes the third person, on leaving its happy
presence, want to clutch at the heart of the first pretty woman he sees
so that he too can share of the beauty of a beautiful world.... But the
opposite, the flatness of a forced emotion, certainly didn't strike me;
love was there, I suppose, but of that pale kind which so often doesn't
outlast, even in the purest mind, its consequence of marriage. The
third person didn't have the acute feeling that he had blundered, ever
so little, on them in a room; or that, once there, he should quickly
leave them. There was a "grown-up" atmosphere about her in Vitiali's
presence which, I once realised, was quite lacking when he wasn't
there; which was terribly seldom.... Of course, when I did come on them
together, as happened sometimes when I called in the afternoon and Mrs.
Richmond was 'lying down,' I generally found a way to retire quite
early--but entirely because of that other party to the approaching
marriage, the charming Vitiali, whose eyes made no secret of a fact
which, after all, there's no reason to conceal from a celibate woman.

"I had nothing from Fay about the preliminaries, as I came to be
curious about them. She never spoke of yesterday, very seldom of
to-morrow; all her words and laughter were for the present moment, when
you were with her and were held captive by the deliciously sincere
brown eyes, which could mock so faintly--and, if she chose to play
with you, act so plaintively! Perhaps it is because I, even then,
had put her on a velvet cushion in a glass case, to admire and enjoy
her especially, but she certainly did seem a figure quite apart from
her own generation of just-emerged _débutantes_--usually a tiresome
barley-water stage for a girl, when she hasn't yet quite dropped
her girlish giggle for her woman's smile. I never thought of her in
relation to the other maidenly things one met in drawing-rooms round
about, even when she was herself there as one of them, and by a quaint
mixture of shyness and self-possession made one mentally describe
her by an unusual epithet for a girl--she looked gracious! But then
that was suitable, for parties and such-like were different to these
nowadays. It was much less difficult then than it is now to tell a lady
from a _demi-mondaine_; girls hadn't yet learnt, or pretended they
hadn't, to be sophisticated before getting married. One played more
ping-pong in those days.

"So it was entirely from Mrs. Richmond that I learnt of Vitiali's
approach, and of her own motherly share in it, and was able to piece
together my theory of the good lady's vague discomfort at it all. He
had appeared in London about two years before to take up the vaguest
post at the Embassy here, but with just a little more than the usual
social advantages of the ordinary attaché. Mothers' hearts could not
but beat a little frenziedly in the presence of his fortune and his
very agreeable person; and his title, however Italian, held a long and
honoured tradition. Mrs. Richmond was quite a dear in her self-directed
sarcasm, and there was a real tenderness in her reference to the
_parti_ which her daughter had won--because, after all, the prize had
melted before Fay into the most graceful of begging suitors; had so
wantonly fallen in love, her mother explained, that only the severest
exercise in breeding had restrained her from feeling superior to more
commonplace mothers. From the first he had lain, so to speak, on the
door-mat, quite pitifully. Fay, who had just 'come out' had quite
definitely refused his first proposal--any Englishman would have run to
join the salmon in the Hebrides after that girlish refusal! But not so
Carlo, who loved without false pride, like the Venetian suitor he was;
he ran no further than that door-mat, and there he stayed; looking not
in the least ridiculous in a position which tarnishes the dignity of
most spoiled young men, but rather grew in it, to one watching kindly
more than ever acceptable. Indeed both liking and approving him, Mrs.
Richmond had watched his suit kindly and carefully from the first and
had favoured it as well as she could; and more than ever after his
rebuff, for Vitiali was emerging so admirably from the dangerous test
that, so she affirmed, she had never in her life learnt so much as then
about the best way in which a young man can win a young woman.

"'And, after all, it's not every day that you will be loved so well
and so eligibly,' she had told Fay; and I gather that the rumbling
voice must have held a certain weight of impatience in it that day.
Because, beside the initial one, there were so many advantages which
the tiresome girl didn't seem to see; such, for instance, as the very
important one that the southern climate was good for her delicate
health,--a cause for great anxiety ever since a very severe attack of
bronchial pneumonia in her sixteenth year; in fact, just because of
that, they would anyway have to spend a considerable part of every year
in the south.... Not of course that any advantage of any kind could or
should sway a definite dislike into anything more amiable--but where,
incomparably instead of dislike, there was a genuine fondness which
the slightest touch of time's finger might throw into love, it was
irritating to see a girl's whim assert itself so contrarily!

"And who, in the end, but Fay herself had proved it to be a whim,
when, some eight months after he had first declared his suit, Carlo
had found himself accepted as whole-heartedly, Mrs. Richmond affirmed,
as once he had been refused? Although, of course, Fay was of a very
undemonstrative nature--which perhaps was just as well in a mate of
this Italian gallant, who was himself quite demonstrative enough for
one household!

"But there was to be no hurry about the affair, Mrs. Richmond had
decided from the first; and I could imagine her bustling that decision
about her mind, as a sort of anodyne for she didn't quite know what.
They had been engaged already six months, and she, watching her only
child's happiness very, very carefully, had gained from her care not
less than certainty about the felicity of Fay's choice. There was in
Carlo no note that jarred, as there often is even in the best of men;
besides, he could so perfectly accommodate one's every mood, and yet
lose not a fraction of his dignity in such complaisance; for, having so
absolutely thrown himself at Fay's feet, she hadn't really been able
to help allowing him to stay there--'as who wouldn't?' Mrs. Richmond
demanded comfortably.

"No, there was to be no hurrying. Carlo had been persuaded by her
determination--Mrs. Richmond rather stressed her influence here--and
the marriage would not take place for another six months from then;
for she preferred that Fay should have reached a decent one-and-twenty
before setting out on the conquest of Italy.

"'But she is an odd girl, with a terrible capacity for loyalty--I
suppose that's the word,' she added. 'With more loyalty than a
human being can comfortably hold, I sometimes imagine.' A note of
self-deprecatory anxiety in her voice conflicted oddly in one's ears
with the 'happy-ever-after' tone of her previous sentences; and to help
her out of her ensuing silence, I ventured that surely it was just
Fay's loyalty (if that was the word), which even a stranger could feel,
that made her so unusually, well, attractive for her years.

"'Of course, of course....' Mrs. Richmond assented heavily; then turned
in her chair directly round on me. 'But, my dear man, don't you
see that when it's carried to excess it can make a very treacherous
quality? When, let's say, it becomes a leading principle in life for
a girl who, after all, needs only a working amount of it, all sorts
of troublesome things might happen--I mean, of course, that it's just
conceivable as a theory in a foolish moment such as this.... Poor
Howard! to be burdened by a mother with her child's virtues for lack of
any real faults! It's a sweet thought, that way.

"'You see,' she said wistfully, 'people sometimes break after the
strain of too much loyalty--I've adopted that word now. They don't take
things easily enough, until, one day, they suddenly break and take
things too easily! I've seen it happen, a dear sweet woman.... I'm
talking so intimately to you because I expect you to understand, and
not be too brilliantly conclusive to yourself about it. Of course you
know that I am not talking directly of Fay, for it's absurd to suppose
that there ever could be a strain on her loyalty about anything, but
about my own theories. I've got lately into the habit, from so much
watching, of doing her introspection for her, just as I still like
doing her hair for her sometimes--for it's a shame that a mere maid
should have all the fun, isn't it?'

"But, after all, it was not to run so smoothly for dear Mrs.
Richmond; her half-articulate anxiety--I can't really call it
self-reproach--seemed to have held a parallel justification in its
subject. Fay, knowing nothing of her good mother's shouldering of
her burden, had done her own introspection as well as she could by
herself; and came, as girls will, upon its results inconveniently as
the marriage grew nearer--instead of having thought of it all _before_
as her mother had done for her!

"I had a very good view of the pattern they unknowingly worked
between them because, in my curious too-quickly developed position in
that house, I was again made the _confidant_. I was, 'Since mother
has quarrelled with all her "in-laws," the only sensible man about
the premises,' Fay herself said once; a bloodless and unenviable
prerogative so unsuitable to Vitiali's temper that he had never
troubled to stoop down to claim it from the heights where his good
fortune had enthroned him. For who, able to be something better, would
trouble himself to hold the mean place of 'the sensible man about the
premises?' I've never been lured into it since, anyway.

"It was about a month later that, after a week in which I had not seen
them, I called one afternoon and came face to face with Vitiali by the
drawing-room door, which he had just closed behind him.

"I'm so glad you have come, Howard,' he said, with his affectionate
smile, retaining my hand in his; we were great friends, you understand.
'I have just left Fay, looking exactly as though she were going to
write a book or a tragedy. Oh, so serious!

"'Come on, quickly,' he said, catching me by the arm and hurrying me to
the door. 'Let her see you before she takes a pen in her hand--let her
see a man who actually has written something, and take warning.

"'Of course, you don't look like an author, old man,' he soothed my
protest. 'You look just like any one else, but more sympathetic. That
is why I am asking you to make Fay look not so serious--Oh, it's
terrible, that quiet Fay seriousness!' He held me at arm's length with
a sudden gesture. 'Can you make a woman laugh?' he asked.

"'I can do nothing else,' I answered.

"'Then, Howard, I shall count you not a good friend if Fay is not
smiling all over her face when I come back to-night to take them out to
dinner.' He had a delightful way of mock solemnity, which seemed to
suit particularly his dark mobile features.

"'Quick, now, before she takes up that horrible pen!' and he opened
the door and thrust me into the room. 'God be with you,' he whispered
behind the closing door.

"What poor Carlo had helplessly called her 'seriousness' I had remarked
about Fay just lately; and the forced comedy of my entrance to combat
it was part of the woe-begone air with which he usually tried to
appease and lighten it.... It was, as I had noticed, as though a
fleeting shadow of thought, in brushing across her face, had been
seduced to stay beyond its first impulse; and there's nothing in the
world so satisfying to watch as a young serious loveliness, so it be
without guile. I, as sometimes the four of us sat at the play (when of
course I was Mrs. Richmond's companion in particular), in a side glance
at her would catch the shadow of that thought, and it was as a delicate
engravure on a lovely face; and I'd wonder what problem that dear
mind was trying to work out--of course, bravely! You see? She was the
sort of girl to induce a generous epithet about her every action, the
sort that even great writers seldom show as anything but lay figures,
simply because it needs a rare personal quality to create a perfect
description of beauty together with simplicity and genuineness. I can't
even attempt to do that, I'm content just to envy my youth her company,
and curse it for its commonplace vigour which, ambitious in a busy
world, thought of that girl as a playmate, instead of--oh, instead of
as a mate!

"'I'm here, to-day, as a clown,' I said, as I walked towards her at the
writing table by the window. They affected quills in that house, and
as she turned round in her chair she had the end of one thoughtfully
between her teeth.

"'You don't have to be a clown,' she denied, quite vigorously. 'Even
though Carlo did make a speech to you just outside--and isn't he a
sweet when he's fussed!'

"'And with reason. For the point of his speech was that you had been
pulling a long face at him, and no decent Italian likes to have his
women pulling long faces.'

"'It wasn't at _him_, Howard. Could any woman pull one of those faces
you refer to at Carlo? Obviously he's too dear to be treated as an
ordinary man....'

"'Well, I did say I was only a clown,' I murmured humbly.

"'No, to-day you are an uncle, Uncle Howard,' she said, puckering her
eyebrows as though in examination of me for that post. 'Yes, you've
got to be the sort of uncle that real uncles never are.'

"'This is one of my serious days,' she explained. 'I'm sorry, Howard,
but it is. I'm not old enough yet to have a plain day, so I've got to
put up with a serious one instead now and again. There's no sugar or
chocolate on any of the cakes I think about to-day.'

"'I remember a tale by a man called Henry Harland about a woman who
once had a plain day--' I was beginning vaguely.

"'You mustn't remember it because I'm not a bit interested in her,' she
stopped me. 'If you please, we will discuss myself Entirely. Do you
mind very much, Howard?'

"'Not very much,' I said.

"And suddenly she jumped up and caught me tightly by the arm, the
whole smile and impulse exquisitely childish. 'Oh, my dear, what
shall I do when I'm married to a foreigner and no strong, silly,
sensible Englishman about the house to play with!' Quick words they
were, tumbling over one another--and then she let go my arm, for that
inevitable flush was tingeing her cheeks.

"'You see, one thinks of that,' she went on, more sedately. 'It simply
creeps over me, the thought of who poor Fay is going to talk nonsense
with in the "near future." It's difficult to talk nonsense with most
people, isn't it? Yes, say it is.... You know you get that feeling
yourself, Howard--you know very well that it isn't with every chit of a
girl you can talk the sort of stuff you do with me. Just try, anyway,
and see what you get!'

"'Of course, I can with Carlo too,' she said. 'But it's different.
Rather like work. Why, it took me months and months to make him
understand that I didn't hate him when I laughed at him! And one only
really laughs at people one's very fond of, after all.... I suppose
it's different because he's in love with me,' she added, and waited for
me to find a query in her eyebrows; but I didn't answer it.

"'Italians are very odd,' she said. 'I know all about them now. They
simply mustn't be laughed at--it's a sort of threat they hold over
you, poor dears! I'm always making a sunny day into a rainy day for
Carlo.... When I said "foreigner" I didn't, of course, mean to imply
that he was an ordinary foreigner,' she added very decidedly.

"'Even if he had no money,' I agreed, 'he could never be anything
worse than an "alien." With a face like that he simply couldn't be
"undesirable."

"'What is it, Fay?' I asked suddenly. 'You've got the air of a woman
"leading up to something." There is an important look in your eye.'

"She smiled a little plaintively. 'It's not very important,' she said.
'I'm worrying about myself, that's all. To-day, and yesterday, and
other days before, I've been wondering whether I am or am not going to
marry Carlo.'

"'But, Fay, of course you are!' I was startled enough to cry.

"'Yes,' she nodded. 'That is exactly what mother would say, except that
she would say it in a bigger way; but she doesn't know.... I'm worrying
about it a lot, Howard. I simply don't know which to do.'

"She had startled me into the attitude of uncle she had desired of me.
I stood on the hearth, just by her chair, and really felt very serious.
Suddenly, and with both hands, she had given me a responsibility. She
had half turned a key and shown me a place of discomfort for three
people whom I was really fond of. And I wanted, intensely, to help--not
only Fay, but her mother. If this was only a passing indecision I
decided that her mother must never hear of it, for I already knew of
her infinite capacity to worry herself.... But it doesn't matter what
in particular I said. I probably bent over from my place on the hearth,
and spoke into her eyes, telling her that this wasn't a game. She
simply must make up her mind--now! To go on doubting was, after all, so
unfair to Carlo!

"'It can't all be so indefinite,' I urged rather impatiently. 'I mean,
my child, that you must know whether you do or don't like him enough.'

"'But I do, I like him frightfully,' she protested. 'You don't quite
understand, Uncle Howard. I'm not worrying so much about his part of
it as about mine. I'm sure about him, you see. He is the sweetest and
dearest young man in the world, and I know that I can be happy with
him--even though he does look sulky when I laugh at him. But Italian
sulks are so much more attractive than the home product.... Yes, I like
him very, very much, and I know very, very clearly that I'm not in love
with him--'

"She was too sensible a girl for me to take up that cue in the
conventional way; but there was no other way in which to answer it, so
I didn't.

"'But I'm not an idiot. I don't quarrel with that especially,' she
said, 'because I will probably never like any one I can marry half as
much. No, it's quite easy to just marry Carlo, he fits in so well.'

"'Well, if that's so, I wonder what on earth we are talking about!' I
had to say. And she shook her head at me helplessly.

"'You make an awfully good uncle, Howard, you are so terribly stupid!
Didn't I tell you ages ago that this discussion was to be limited
strictly to Fay? So Carlo, for the moment, is just a man who has bought
a ring. I, the Queen of Sheba, come to Solomon for wisdom, but with one
fat worry instead of jewels and things....'

"How surprised she would have been if I had said, 'My dear, even
Solomon was not more grateful.' But I wanted to.

"'I seem very meek and mild, but I'm really very full of myself,' she
explained shyly. 'I've been introspecting, you see, and of course I've
made an awful mess of it. Knowing oneself doesn't help, it simply
complicates.... I've found, for instance, that once I do a thing--well,
it's done! It's like a thing written in a book (or in a play by you!),
always there, by me. I mean that once I've stuck myself to a thing, I
am--do you mind?--a "sticker." I don't change or break away--I can't.
And it's very frightening and discouraging to realize that, because it
sort of cuts away from under the feet all the trap-doors which other
people can escape through. I feel very pathetic ... and even you don't
know what I'm talking about.'

"'But I do, Fay, I do!' I said quickly. And I knew even better than
she, with her mother's self-deprecatory confidence on 'loyalty' in my
ears!

"'The feeling,' she went on encouraged, 'is that, not quite like other
people, once I'm married--well, just suppose that I even in the least
bit wanted to get unmarried again! I couldn't. It's like a Roman
Catholic marriage, for ever and ever. Of course,' she added quickly,
sincerely, 'it's the very dimmest nightmare. I'm quite happy to marry
Carlo, and I can't really imagine that I could begin to be unhappy
with him--but just suppose! I'm much too fond of him even now to want
to hurt him, and as I grow fonder of him I shall never be able to hurt
him. Never. His eyes wouldn't let me....'

"And as I looked at her I couldn't help thinking that the world would
be a splendid place if women realised the responsibility of being loved
as did this girl. For that, mainly, was what it was, the burden of the
responsibility of being utterly loved for the first time.

"But I didn't give way to that sort of thing. I seem to remember
talking a great deal of sense that afternoon, but sense which I tried
to frame illogically enough not to appear too disagreeable. I simply
can't help feeling a little proud of my own share in that afternoon. I
remember that I said quite sternly that it was very strange for a girl
like her to have wandered so far ahead, strange and not very fitting.
'Because, don't you see, Fay, it's all very unfair to Carlo and to
your own affection for him? You say you are frightfully fond of him,
you let him feel that you are, and then, if you please, your mind goes
searching on ahead concocting plots as to what you will or will not do
when you are not so fond of him. If you are fond enough of him now, as
you say you are, it's simply dishonest of you, Fay, to go on playing
draughts with those vague doubts about a very vague future. It's the
sort of thing women do when they are thinking of marrying a fourth
husband.... If you go on like this, when you are an old woman you will
be very superstitious and quite unbearable. For it's not much more than
a superstition now, and you are treating yourself very cruelly to make
it the keystone of your "serious day." I've never felt less sympathetic
about a thing in all my life!'

"And so I went on, bartering my mess of pottage for the homely position
of 'Uncle' Howard. And as she looked up at me and listened, her eyes
grew not so serious, until they laughed outright.

"'Oh, dear, I'm sure you're right,' she said at last; 'but I don't in
the least agree with what you say.... But anyway I've gained something
by boring you with it all, Howard. The whole thing seems so very
unimportant and silly now I've told it to some one else.' And then she
added, with a manner: 'The serious day has nothing further on which to
proceed, so ... let's have tea! And muffins! It's simply impossible not
to have muffins to-day, Howard.'

"She was a dear, that girl! And a little later, as I walked up
Piccadilly towards my flat, I suddenly found myself staring hard at an
empty 'crawler,' with the tremendous thought in my head that it was a
great shame that England should lose such a girl to a foreigner and a
foreign country! It began to seem wrong, somehow....

"I saw very little of them between then and the marriage. August and
part of September took them up to Scotland, while I stayed in London
and worked. How I must have enjoyed working in those days! And when
they came back I was busy with the production of a new play, and they
too, I supposed, with the usual preparations. But Vitiali used often
to drop in at my rooms at odd hours, and I asked him once if Fay had
ever looked serious enough since that afternoon to write a tragedy; he
showed his teeth in a smile, and said that I must have done her a great
deal of good that day, 'Because, my dear Howard, she has never been
gayer and more light-hearted as lately. I am very happy....' He could
say those things, he had a way of charming you with his simplicity;
and, anyway, there is nothing more charming in the world than a
cultured foreigner--except, of course, a cultured Englishman.

"Two nights before the wedding day, after ten o'clock, Fay rang me up
on the telephone. 'I hope I am disturbing you,' she began sweetly.

"'I just want to know, Howard,' the voice said, 'if you really are
coming to see me married.'

"'Well, I've intimated to your mother my decision to be present, and
I've committed myself in writing, what's more.'

"'Don't be silly, my dear! Whoever takes any notice of what _you_
write? You write much too well.'

"'It's only that I had a vague idea,' she explained very gently, 'that
you wouldn't be there.' Then, somehow, there was a short silence. That
telephone silence, full of dim murmurings and the attention of two
people!

"'Why?' I asked abruptly.

"'Don't be snappy with me, please, Howard,' the voice begged. 'I just
wanted to know for certain, that's all.'

"Queer things happen sometimes on a clear telephone about half-past ten
at night. Voices seem to take their clothes off....

"'Well, as a matter of fact,' I began slowly.

"'Yes?' It was scarcely a word, but a light low tremor of a
question.... I put my lips very close to the mouthpiece and formed my
words very clearly:--

"'Why don't you want me to come, Fay?'

"I'm not sure about the little gasp, but only about the little voice,
after a long second, saying, 'I don't know why, Howard.'

"'Now that you've asked me I realise that I never intended to come,' I
confessed. 'And I'm damned if I know why, either!... If I come at all
I shall be among the crowd outside, admiring you and Carlo.'

"'But aren't you quite, quite sure that at the last moment you won't
regretfully find it impossible to come at all?' the voice seemed to
plead.

"'I'm beginning not to be sure of anything to-night,' I said fretfully.

"'Poor Howard!' Ah, I knew that voice, the firmer one with the little
caress of mischief over it! I made a quick grab at it.

"'I say, you're going to write to me quite a lot, aren't you?'

"'Not one line,' she answered firmly.

"'But, Fay, you can't disappear from my life like that!' I protested
heatedly. 'Of course you are going to write to me, aren't you?'

"'I don't intend to,' she said sweetly, 'but I suppose I will,
sometime.... Don't you know, Howard,' the voice asked, as though
getting farther and farther away, 'that you don't deserve a letter
from me, ever?' No words of mine could hold that voice near, it was
disappearing, a faint thing growing fainter, like phantom in a wind.

"'And you don't deserve ever to see me again.... Good-bye, Howard.'

"'Fay!' I cried. Her name seemed to be on the wall before me, a written
word. And I couldn't reach it, couldn't! Her receiver clicked--like a
far away door clicking behind some one who has left a room empty of all
that matters. And I was realising that only then! There was no more Fay
Richmond! That voice over the telephone, with an unrealised shade and
quiver in it, had wrenched aside in my consciousness what the eyes and
body of that voice had seemed to leave intact for so long! As though a
sudden ray of sunshine had awakened a man whom an alarm-clock had left
sleeping. There was no more Fay Richmond! I didn't go to the wedding.

"I haven't, even now, the least sympathy with myself. Nor would I have
with you, say, if you had grossly bungled your affairs in the same way.
It's a deficiency for which there is not the shadow of an excuse, that
mean, ungenerous, deficiency which blinds a man to the necessities of
his own happiness--until, since life is always farce or melodrama, it's
too late!

"She did not write to me. The 'sometime' of her concession faded with
the months into a dream, perhaps to come true, sometime!... I wrote
only once to her, a dishonest letter, which I did my best to fill with
the spirit of my past--and how long passed!--'avuncular' relations with
her. And yet nothing happened since the day when the Queen of Sheba
had come to Solomon with 'one fat worry,' nothing at all! Not even
the first syllable of a word of love--not, by a thousand miles, even
the shadow of an attempted or desired kiss! Only, to account for it
all, a voice on a telephone one night, a so familiar voice changed by
magic.... Changed in itself or in my mind? I simply didn't ask! But,
however it was, from that strange thing the god worked a stranger,
for I knew that when she read that letter she would know that it was
dishonest, unreal.

"She must have known! Or else, sixteen months later.... That 'sometime'
letter of hers had come at last! A treasure, stamped from Vienna where
(so Mrs. Richmond had written me from Tonbridge, her new home since the
disposal of the house of Rutland Gate) Carlo was now attached. It was a
very short letter something like this:

"'I am coming to England for a week,' she wrote, 'to see mother in
her new home in the country. But, if you don't mind, there are other
folk I would like to see, too!... Carlo is getting more and more of a
personage, and simply can't leave Vienna, so I won't be able to stay
away more than a week, from next Thursday as ever is, Howard! But as
I don't know what day I will be in London, you will please institute
no inquiries about me until you hear from me. I will ring you up at
about 10:30 on any of my seven nights, so that we can arrange to meet
somewhere. Of course, I could write to you, but I want to wonder,
as I take up the receiver, whether you will recognise my voice. But
you won't dare not to, will you, Howard?' That is only a reason in a
letter, I said to myself, for I can hear her adding, 'And so, my dear,
if there's anything gay enough to keep you out after ten-thirty on any
of those nights, then you will miss Fay--now won't you?'

"Thursday came. And then came those other days and nights, and passed!
Each one tingling with hope, until half-past ten, and then--oh, it's a
misery unlike any other, that waiting for a bell that doesn't ring! It
is a cruel game to play upon a man, that exaltation of hope to hear a
voice, and then that helpless misery, with no remedy but what he can
find in cigarettes. I paced many miles of carpet those six evenings.

"Thursday again. I dined alone, and then, telling Briggs that he could
take his evening out, opened a book, and read grimly. I can't remember
anything in my life like the bitter, dismal anger of that night. It's
a vivid sore even now, that last vigil by my fire with mind and heart
telling me that I had been cruelly played with, like a beast in a cage.
I didn't love the less, I couldn't; indeed it was my love that was
measured by my bitter grievance.... And even if I do hear her voice
to-night, I wasn't spared from realising, it will be too late to see
her--'to arrange to meet somewhere,' she had written!--for she will be
leaving to-morrow.

"One can act very well in one's own bitter company. Even as the clock
in my little hall struck the half-hour after ten I pretended to read
grimly on.... I've explained all this waiting to you because it seems
to reflect quite importantly on my behaviour that night. It can't but
account for it in a sort of way--and as for excusing it, well I don't
care a button for that!

"I suppose it was about a quarter of an hour later that the door-bell
rang. Briggs was out, as I've said, and I had not the faintest
intention of answering it, for it could only be a casual caller wanting
a drink. But the bell rang again, furiously--and this time, without a
second's hesitation, I threw aside my book, strode into the hall, and
flung open the door.

"'You beast!' I said with all my heart, quivering.

"There she was, in the half-darkness of the open doorway, a grey-hatted
woman, with a little face thrown up to laugh, laughing at me! And I
may have been laughable indeed, with face suited to that unrestrained
outburst. I didn't wait for her to speak, I stretched out a hand and
drew her by the arm into the hall, and kicked the door to. And she just
smiled! with her head a little to one side, she stared up at me, as I
still held her arm, and, I suppose, glowered down at her--like a child
examining the giant who has caught her. And then, at last, she spoke:

"'I wondered what my welcome would be,' she said softly, 'but I never
expected this particular one.'

"Her voice broke my impulses into pieces, as a silver hammer might
break coarse grass. I let go of her arm.

"'And of all the welcomes I'd prepared for you, Fay,' I said humbly,
'this particular one never occurred to me. Please--'

"But she didn't seem to be listening, the large, serious eyes were
still examining me, my face.

"'Why, Howard, you're quite changed!' she exclaimed. 'You aren't the
same Howard at all, the one who used to come to Rutland Gate!'

"'Well, you see, that telephone call last century....' I explained
vaguely.

"She nodded her head comprehendingly.

"'Ah, yes, that one that should simply never have happened!' she
murmured.

"'I'm frightfully glad to see you again, Fay,' I said, as though
irrelevantly, and gravely held out my hand. We shook hands.

"'I just thought I'd call and see you before I left England,' she
said as gravely. 'And I might add that though I find your hall quite
charming, it's very unsatisfactory as a reception-room.'

"But she didn't go straight in, she stopped on the threshold of the
room to look round at me with a sudden, excited smile.

"'You silly Howard, don't you realise that this is a wonderful
adventure, because I've never, never been in your rooms before!' And
once in the room she looked slowly round, until her eyes fixed on her
own portrait on my writing table. She pointed a finger at the discovery.

"'Why, there's Fay Richmond!' she exclaimed.

"'A girl not unworthy to be put beside you, Madame la Marchesa,' I
bowed gallantly.

"'Don't!' she almost screamed. 'I've been hearing that sort of stuff
from Italians and Austrians for a year and a half--and I simply can't
bear it from you, Howard, even in fun.'

"'Anyway, it's a wretched sort of compliment,' she added, 'because that
girl wouldn't dare hold her head up beside me--would she now?' And she
looked me intimidatingly full in the face.

"'Well, I suppose you have grown just a little,' I conceded. 'Though
I can't possibly judge between your looks until you take off your
hat--like a dear?'

"It was easily done, a light grey felt thing with a rakish brim--a
travelling hat, I realised with a shock! My eyes followed it as she
threw it on to the table, and my mind lost all the ease which I had
managed to collect. She saw that, I suppose, for as she patted her hair
she was looking at me with a queer, understanding, hopeless smile.

"'Fay, you're not going--just now?' I blurted out.

"'I called here on my way to the station,' she told me very evenly.

"I couldn't help it, I said again, 'You beast, Fay!'

"'But you don't understand, my dear' she protested quickly; and with an
adorable gesture she stretched out a hand, three fingers of a gloved
hand, and ran them thoughtfully down my arm. 'Won't you understand
at all? Why I've come to see you on my last night in England instead
of--instead of on my first?'

"She seemed to plead, a suppliant before me staring cruelly down at
her. I didn't understand.

"'If I had seen you on my first night,' she tried to explain, 'why, I
might have been tempted to go on seeing you, again and again, for ever
and ever, Howard!... Oh, don't you understand?' And she asked that with
a sort of breathless, childish pleading in her voice--illuminating even
to my bitterness! But I couldn't, just then, let a pleading voice make
me forgive so easily.

"'And so, in case you might be tempted,' I said, like any cad, 'you
come to see me on your way to the train!'

"'But my train doesn't go until 7 o'clock in the morning,' she said....
A slave to that wonderful moment, I took her and kissed her lips.

"Those few hours explained Fay Richmond--the girl I had known so well,
the woman I loved.... And who loved me! There lay the unforgivable
wonder."

And for the first time, on that passionate regret, Howard Wentworth
broke in on his tale. With elbows on his knees and hands clasped, he
leant forward in his arm-chair (one of those creaking wicker things
which only poor men and rich nursing-homes have) and earnestly pointed
his haggard convalescent face at me.

"But it's simply impossible to carry on that explanation, the method
and the conviction of it, to you," he said. "In fact, if you will look
about you at methods of expression, you will find that it's just there
that life takes its leave of literature--just at that point where, in
this instance, one impulse kissed another! It is as though life and
literature had been travelling companions a good way, both helping
the other--until at a cross-road life, with a sudden realisation akin
to contempt, goes off on its own different road, a boundless and
secret road where men and women passionately tell God what, on that
other cruder road, they can't tell their fellows.... Sex, of course,
is generally the most convincing explanation of inconsistencies--but
it's not, by an exquisite subtraction, quite enough! It is only people
who cannot go one better who live and love and lie in terms of sex
alone; because, after all, there are additions to it, not so definite,
perhaps, but more satisfying--and more lasting! So, anyway, the memory
of one night tells me.

"That night was, as you realise, an amazing inconsistency in the
Fay Richmond I've told you about. But if you will look even at that
photograph you will see that such sincerity couldn't really be
consistently sincere without, just once, being inconsistent to itself.
I know that that sounds rather like a remark made by a young man after
a liqueur brandy, but somehow it's very true.

"Hours later, as though she had suddenly awoken to a memory, she
asked me very seriously if I remembered how there had been no sugar
or chocolate on any of the cakes she had thought about on a certain
afternoon? 'And all my long self-conscious speech, which you listened
to so brutally well that I almost hated you--even though I didn't
know for certain then that I loved you! And when you were going away,
d'you remember, I was smiling "all over my face" like Carlo wanted me
to, and being a frightfully jolly person? But afterwards I cried, Oh,
how I cried! I liked you so much, and I liked Carlo so much--but so
differently!...

"'It was all arranged that I should marry Carlo,' she said, 'and then
you came along and just ruffled the surface of things--but ever so
slightly! If you had kissed me you might have ruffled them too much,
things might have been different, and now I would still be an honest
woman instead of just a helpless creature in your arms, never, never
wanting to leave them to go back to the world, where there's no passion
for me....' Her voice was lower than a whisper, a murmur in my ears,
and I would have preferred it to fade entirely into the silence it
scarce left, for she was hurting us both with what she said.

"But the whisper went on, telling me how bitterly she had been hurt
because I had been to see them so little in the weeks before the
wedding--and how, missing me, she had found out her own secret.

"'If you had come to me then and said, "Fay, come away with me," I
suppose I would have thrown over Carlo. Yes, I suppose I would, but I'm
not sure, because it would have been so frightfully difficult to have
hurt him, the dearest man in the world! He would have died.... But it
doesn't matter what I would have done or not done in that wonderful
moment, because it never came--it was quite hopeless to hope that it
would! I felt that right in my bones, I felt that you were a hopeless
person to love, and very, very far away. Oh, so far away you seemed to
be, Howard! And getting farther and farther every day, a cold, friendly
figure coming to see us now and again, like a character in a play who
has nothing to do but watch and make a sensible sort of joke when the
real people get over-excited. And so I let everything go on, quite
terrified and miserable, wondering what to do. It wasn't the idea of
marrying Carlo that made me terrified or miserable, it was the thought
of losing all hope of you--the thought of putting a husband between me
and all hope of ever being loved by you.... But I let those last days
pass, one by one, full of prophecy about myself, like a tragic figure
in the Bible; and I didn't lift my voice, I did nothing at all, I let
each day pass. I suppose it was because I was so hopeless about you,
and laziness must have had something to do with it, too! That special
sort of laziness which tells you that one effort is easier to make than
the other--it was easier not to hurt Carlo and mother. But I couldn't
resist just telephoning to you at the last moment to let you know what
a pig you were, and, if you liked me at all, to make you see that
the whole thing served you jolly well right. But I suppose I didn't
control my voice very well and so gave myself away--though I didn't
mind, really, because I had it firmly fixed in my mind that it was too
late, I was going to marry Carlo whatever happened. And something did
happen on that telephone, vaguely--I found that you did like me quite
a lot after all, you poor man! And all this time that I've been away,
a respectable married woman, I've been building up the romance of my
life on a break in your voice--growing more and more certain that you
loved me, until I had to come back to England to find out. And when you
opened the door I found out....

"'On my way to St. George's to marry Carlo,' she said, 'it seemed as
though I had to wrap you up in a parcel, and go round by Westminster
Bridge and drop you into the river. Yes ... and that's what I did,
really, Howard dear. I have lost you, and you me, even though you are
beside me now, a figure in a dream from which I shall wake up--just
in time to catch my train! And that train is going to take me such a
long way away from you, Howard, that we will be dead and buried and
reincarnated before it can bring me back to see your beloved face
again. It seems to be that sort of train, my dear....'

"Of course, I said things, I protested, I implored. It simply couldn't
be that I was not to see her again!... There was misery enough, but
there was no heart in my entreaties, for I knew all the time that what
she said must be, and why it must be. It was the only right thing in
a wrong business, that last cruelty. Oh, I knew, I knew! And there
was a quality of fatalism about Fay's voice, which made its softness
as hard to pierce as adamant. I was quite dull and flat, listening to
her numbly, so that her words seemed to write themselves vividly in my
mind, unalterable words never to be forgotten, each one like a fate in
itself.

"It was more than martyrdom to an idea, it was a principle of living,
that determined her to that course, the inevitable course; something in
her much more human than can be found in such philandering with oneself
as martyrdom, and that's why it was so inevitable, why I couldn't fight
against it heartily and actively. It was simply that her whole being,
the very insides and outsides, was in revolt against the treachery of
any change in the road she had, however undecidedly once, set herself
to travel; it was not possible for her to burn a single boat even on
the certain chance of finding a palace in the romantic land--and so it
was like a Roman Catholic marriage, as she had told me that afternoon,
ages ago, when I had been so seriously concerned about her indecision
to marry Carlo!... My dear old man, hers was an aristocrat among souls!

"It was past six o'clock, and I was in an arm-chair watching her do her
hair at the dressing-table, when she suddenly let it fall again over
her shoulders, and came and knelt by the arm of my chair, and said:
'I'm not a very tiresome woman, really, because I know quite well that
often in your life you will be saying beautiful things to beautiful
women--but you will think it awfully bad luck if they believe you,
won't you, Howard?

"'I had to come to see if you loved me,' she said, 'and to make you my
lover, all mine, for once and always. Always ... just like that! It's a
long word to repeat, always, but I do make it sound convincing, don't
I, dear? Please, I want you to believe that I'll love you always....
Of course, I know that one day you will sit up and take notice of the
thrill in a woman's eyes, you won't be able to help it, and it's only
right that you shouldn't. But it won't be like this. She won't have all
of you, simply because you can't help always being mostly mine, the
girl whom you once took no notice of except to give her advice. It will
be no good your trying, Howard. I can hear you saying one day soon,
when you want to see me very much, "My God, I must end this damnable
wizardry"--damnable wizardry is exactly how you will put it, but even
swearing won't help you at all. You will try to worship strange gods,
but it will be a self-conscious business, perhaps good for your vanity
but not for your soul. You can't ever love again like this, my Howard,
you simply can't help loving Fay all your life. Those, roughly, are my
orders, anyway ...' she whispered into my ear, her fair hair tumbling
over my face, punishing me.

"I had ordered a cab earlier in the night. Her maid, to whom she had
made some excuse, was to meet her at the station. But Fay wouldn't
even let me accompany her part of the way, she insisted on saying
good-bye at the open door, the door which I had opened so fiercely
so long before. Two lives, after all, had been lived since then. She
stood there, in the open doorway, her eyes sad and remote, and touched
with something as old as this earth of ours is old, and a smile was
crucified on her face; and she whispered:

"'_Pour un plaisir mille douleurs. L'amour est mort, vive l'amour!_'

"And then she went away.... I know no more of Fay Richmond."

Howard's tale ended, I think, not too soon, for he had already talked
too much for his returning strength. He lay back with closed eyes,
perhaps he was asleep, as I stealthily left the room.

It so happened that I did not see him again. As I have said, although
he was convalescent at that time, he had a relapse, and died about
ten days later. I rang up frequently to inquire, but more than a
week passed before I had time to call at Beaumont Street. My young
brother, for whom I was entirely responsible, had fallen ill in the
meanwhile, and my time was anxiously spent, first in helping to nurse
him, for nurses were not easy to find, and then in helping to find a
nursing-home with a vacant bed, for nursing-homes were full; one had to
die and vacate his bed before another could fight the wretched plague
in it.

When at last I called at Howard's nursing-home and asked for him, the
maid said she would ask the matron. But I said I would go up to see
the matron myself, and was going upstairs to her room when I met her
descending. As she saw me she shook her head gently and told me that
Mr. Wentworth was not allowed to see any one, he was very ill. The
crisis had not passed yet.... She was a sweet, white-haired old woman,
on whose kind face grief had never been disciplined into that geniality
which makes matrons sometimes horrible.

"I'm afraid for him...." she added inconclusively, sadly. And then
she said: "I have spent most of my life among sick and ailing people,
Mr. Arlen, but this has been the saddest time of all. Terribly sad
it's been! Only this morning a dear sweet lady, who only came in two
days ago.... An English lady married to an Italian, and she was just
spending a day in London on her way to Tonbridge where her mother
lives, when...." I am almost certain that there were tears, repressed
rebellious tears in the kind eyes. "I think her dying has affected
me most of all," she added apologetically. "She was such a sweet,
beautiful lady!"

As I put up my umbrella against the rain outside I thought to myself
that it was like the end of a tale by a sentimentalist, for he had
compromised with the angels and brought together in the end, a Juliet
unaware of Romeo, the bodies of a man and woman who had loved so
unhappily and so incompletely. I heard a tired voice saying bitterly,
"I know no more of Fay Richmond."




III: CONSUELO




III: CONSUELO


AS far as I could see in the dim light of the Hallidays' hall, whose
house in Cheyne Walk I was just that moment leaving after one of
their too crowded and rather tiresome parties, the owner of the voice
which had asked me from the stairs if I was walking "Mayfair way" was
of about my age, too near fifty, and of a genial and polished air,
rare in these days of careless manners and--can one say it?--mannered
carelessness; the sort of man who had long since overcome his shyness
on meeting strangers, and, at a glance, seemed without that wretched
self-consciousness which so gets between a man and his power to
entertain; altogether, a cultivated and comfortable person, I thought.

But I am afraid that I was not in the best of tempers that night; for
as we walked away from the house I made very little attempt to justify
my companion's courteous invitation to share the walk. We had turned
into the King's Road on our way Eastward before his talk, which had
almost died down in the face of my wretched monosyllables, abruptly
began again with:--

"A tragic pity, that Carew business!"

At that I quite woke up.

"What! Did you know her?" I asked, and immediately felt ashamed of my
complete boorishness.

"Oh, ever so slightly," he gently waived my question; then turned to
me, as though confidingly: "but just well enough to be terribly shocked
at the sort of death she chose for herself.... As aimless, foolish, and
certainly as useless as you like, she had after all lived a wonderful,
perhaps a beautiful life--only to die as any damned bankrupt might die
in a 15th floor-flat in a Manhattan block!"

The sudden bitterness in his voice made me look sharply at him, but he
was too quick for me, and retrieved himself with a frank and altogether
engaging smile which deprecated his involuntary--as he naïvely showed
it to have been--seriousness. By this time I had quite recovered from
my bad-tempered stupor, and was acutely interested. I just waited.

"Curiously enough," he said, after a short silence, "when I read about
her suicide in the paper the other day it was not so much about her
that I thought, as about an incident which arose from my acquaintance
with her, years ago.... But are you sure I am not being very tedious?"

"Each word you say is shortening this walk," I answered quickly; how
seldom can one dress the truth in purple and fine linen!

"Well, then," he went on genially, "in connection with Consuelo's
name came to my mind an incident in which an acquaintance, almost a
stranger, stood me in better stead than a friend has ever done. I have
never seen him since, I have never thanked him--nor cursed him, as I
will explain--for his startling help in that really cruel emergency.
But I can't give you the incident without its background; for standing
alone it means almost nothing, it is just a trick, one of destiny's
sleights of hand. It takes its colour from a, well, imperfect passion,
its background. And its background is Consuelo Carew, as I knew her
twenty years ago.

"I met her just after she had married my friend Tristram Carew. She may
have been, at the outside, twenty years old, then, but though there
was nothing of the precocious young minx about her, she was more fully
developed, more complete, than any other young woman of that age that I
am now likely to meet. The only thing that was clear about her was her
complexion. She wasn't what we mean by a 'girl' except in freshness,
colouring, and zest--and what an amazing, embracing zest for life that
was! She never lost it, she can't ever have lost it, it was her very
being. I almost believe that, if we but knew the secret, this last
impulsive stupidity of hers might somehow take on the splendour of an
enthusiasm--but for what, for what?

"Tristram Carew was of my age, we had been friends at school and had
gone up together to Balliol. And we had come down only a very few
months before he ran amok and married the local parson's daughter, the
beautiful Consuelo Trent. I was living in London at that time, and was
too busy--I forget what about--to go down to Wiltshire to stay with
him, and so I never saw him or her in the 'engaged couple' state. But
I tried to imagine him in the role and drew a good deal of innocent
amusement from my imaginings--for Tristram, somehow, very definitely
didn't fit into the picture as either fiancé or husband. But though I
laughed, I was fond enough of him to be a little anxious--one didn't
see how it could turn out happily, come what would! For when I say
that Carew ran amok in marrying, I mean that in the ordinary way he
was intelligent enough about himself to know that his devil's temper
and insane jealousy would ruin the life and sour the love of any young
woman who had the misfortune to marry him.

"Though, mind you, no woman could be blamed for being carried away by
the man. That presence of his, that shock of auburn hair, those wild
eyes, and that infernally fluent tongue--why, the deuce take it, I, his
best friend of that time, spent my days in loving him and being jealous
of him! And though it sounds a fatuous thing to say about oneself, I
haven't an atom of jealousy in my nature--I'm quite proud to say that
I've never in my life envied any man his particular luck since that
Saturday, down at Tristram Carew's place, on which I first met his
young wife Consuelo, on their return from their honeymoon, and envied
him his possession of her. But then that probably because I've never
met another Consuelo.

"Consuelo wasn't made for a comfortable happiness, you understand. But
neither was she strange, nor exotic, nor bizarre, nor Belladonnaish,
nor any of those things that make a man think twice before introducing
a woman to a superior sister at the Bath Club--but even so no man,
unless he were a Tristram Carew, would too easily dare to marry her. I
don't know why, but it was so, for since she divorced Carew she has
had the pick of a thousand lovers, but not of many solid husbands. It
sounds a cruel thing to say, but I don't mean it cruelly; it is just
interesting as an instance of the curiously similar effect which one
woman may have on a thousand different, very different men. You just
loved her--and if you weren't turned down at the start you were certain
to be turned down after a while; and then you went your way, and you
knew why Menelaus had made such a nuisance of himself about Helen, for,
like him, you had known, and loved, and had been loved by a marvellous
woman; but, unlike that persistent Argive, you dimly realised that
if she turned you down in the quick end, then that was probably your
fault--and, anyway, it is only an indecent sort of man who quibbles
about the pain after the pleasure. And for many years after that,
long after you had married a steady young woman, you were Consuelo's
devoted friend--and, by God, she was your devoted friend too! I never
knew a woman break so many hearts and patch up so many quarrels as
Consuelo; but it is generally the sort of woman who looks on fidelity
and infidelity as moods rather than principles who makes the truest and
sincerest friend....

"But I envied my friend Carew overmuch, as even my English denseness
about these things found out soon enough. She loved him for six months,
and she detested him for years. And she grew to hate him so bitterly
that Tristram Carew, the most jealous and unrestrained man I ever knew,
was at last persuaded to let her divorce him. For, mind you, that woman
was strong. She had personality at the back of her power to charm--and
a rare, dangerous kindliness which makes it impossible for one's love
for her to be goaded into dislike. There wasn't a drop of affectation
in her, she was just an almost perfect type of that 'modern' woman who
has held her place in the life and poetry and prose of ages, from the
wife of Uriah to Mary Stuart, and onwards to Consuelo; women born with
just that mixture of essential breeding and adventurousness which will
turn the heads of most normal and decent men, and leave them gaping
and grovelling and smiling at their own damn-foolishness in thinking
that such a woman could ever have loved them! I said 'normal and decent
men' because it seems almost invariably to be the poor old _sahibs_ who
fall in love with this type of woman--while the outsiders step in and
take them, and leave them. Anyway, it seems always to be your 'manly'
man who odes the grovelling and the effeminate man to be the master of
women. Just a theory, of course....

"But I've been wandering disgracefully all over the place, for I set
out to tell you that, at the end of a few years, Tristram at last
realised what a mess she and he had made of it together, and then, dear
fellow that he really was, he sat up and swallowed his gruel, and put
her in the way of divorcing him, as a gentleman should.

"But all that, of course, happened much later. My life touched theirs,
or hers in particular, if you like, only in the first year of their
marriage, when I used to see a great deal of them during the season
at their house in South Audley Street; and more week-ends than not I
spent with them at Carew's place in Wiltshire.... He was a very queer
sort of fellow, full of odd enthusiasms and intolerances, un-English
in his incessant contempt for the regularities and pretences of life,
though English enough in his hearty manner of showing that contempt.
He was strange, too arrogantly made to care much whether he was found
acceptable or unacceptable by others, and therefore a man without
friends, because, poor fool, 'he preferred his own and Consuelo's
company'; and even so he didn't love his young wife half as much as he
would have done if he weren't certain that she worshipped him--though
that childish contempt for happiness, as it can be called, was well
punished in those wretched years later on, when his six foot odd of
manhood must have made begging grotesques on the floor while she,
perhaps pitying him, was as cruel as only a surfeited woman can be
cruel--and, my God, how cruel!... The man's nature, being what it was,
then, you can well understand that, quite literally, he had no friends,
and that I was about the only man he could rub along with, the only man
that he liked, in fact; while, as for myself, although in the ordinary
way I couldn't have borne his particular sort of arrogance too long,
I would have suffered all the one-eyed giants in the nether-world for
the sake of being near that chit of a girl, as she was then; and as,
indeed, she always was, except to the men who bored her with too much
love.

"Besides, if one has set out to be a cad for once in a way, one may as
well do the thing properly--so I had to get on with Tristram, or else
no Consuelo! Of course there's nothing in the world to be said for my
behaviour, it was rotten-bad. Instead of running away, I hung on, and
did all I could to make my friend's wife love me one tenth as much as
I loved her. And you will notice that there was no limit to my utter
rottenness--I not only tried all I could to snatch the man's wife, but
accepted his hospitality as a means to that end. If I ever heard of any
son of mine doing the like of that by a friend, I'd send him to the
deuce without a penny--and, anyway, the young cub wouldn't have such an
excuse, such a marvellous excuse as Consuelo!

"There's a lot of stuff talked about 'unrequited love,' and how men
can go on loving a woman even though they get kicked downstairs by the
butler every time they mention it; you know what I mean. Most men I
suppose, are like you and I, we couldn't go on and on loving a woman
who made simply no return for it, who 'repulsed our advances,' as it
were. For one is human, after all, and, love or no love, I can't think
that any woman ever repulsed a man's advances for long without, in the
end, also repulsing him back to his club and his cocktails. All this,
of course, is my way of telling you that Consuelo liked me well enough
in her way, else I wouldn't have loved her so unwisely. Of course she
liked me! What young woman won't like a young man who, without being
too repulsive to look at, and with a certain reputation for polo and
scholarship (as I had then), pesters her insistently with besotted
but cynical attentions, in which there is no pretence of that platonic
limitation which is all that any good woman should expect from her
husband's best friend?

"'You more than like me,' I suggested to her once, (with that conceit
peculiar to gentlemen when they're alone with women who they know
won't tell on them to other gentlemen) and she answered that I amused
and flattered her, and that she liked my particular way of being in
love--though God knows there was nothing 'particular' in it except my
contemptible behaviour to Tristram. But that was said later on, for as
I told you she stayed in love with her husband for a whole six months,
and even then she didn't react violently, but gently--just enough to
keep him in his place, and to allow her to sit up and take notice again
of other young men. And as I happened to be the only other young man on
the spot, in whose eyes, only too obviously to her, lurked more than
the pure light of friendship, I--well, damn it, that's prologue enough,
isn't it?

"There wasn't the smallest jemmy missing from my burglar's outfit, you
see; I had been waiting and watching, and with more cunning than you
could believe possible in a common-or-garden Englishman; until one
afternoon, when I was having tea with her in South Audley Street, I
grabbed her up and kissed her....

"My cynicism, if it was cynicism, was born of my knowledge of Consuelo,
for being in love without idealising, I really knew Consuelo. I knew
her very well, what sort of a woman she was and what sort of a man she
liked, and under what conditions. I had all her moods and preferences
and tendencies tabulated in my mind, together with footnotes,
extensions and derivations--but not possible results! Poor, poor
Consuelo!

"I knew, you see, exactly what sort of a man Consuelo found dull
and dismal--that is, when she was bored at home and had begun to
cast her eyes abroad for her amusement; and if there is one man more
than another whom a certain sort of woman finds bitterly dull, that
is the friend of the husband who loves but dare not love the wife,
because he is a friend of the husband--a good and sufficient reason
for the likes of you and I, but not for our young woman, who finds
the 'beef-and-beer' type of man quite too devastating. Of course
only a very few, deplorable, charming women are like that; and we
friendship-respecting men wouldn't take much notice of 'em, if they
didn't, cussedly enough, happen to be the most attractive of their
sex. Most women, thank the Lord, have a very real respect for men's
friendships--but we are not talking of 'most women,' we are talking
of Consuelo, who was neither a witch nor a whore, but whose fault and
misfortune simply lay in her having no anchor in any sort of code of
respectability.

"To get back to the actual point (which is always the most boring
part of any story, don't you think?), one somehow didn't get much
'forrarder' with the affair. She just didn't seem to love me that way,
and was too much of an artist in life to deceive herself with a forced
passion when she had already tasted with Tristram, and might perhaps
again taste, the real, the consummate thing. We fenced with foils,
then, and she had the thrills without the wounds. But it was a very
special game, with very queer rules and restrictions, which I learnt
from her gradually as we went along; and so played the game as well as
I could, for all my deadly seriousness. But it was an unfair one, there
was nothing in its rules to provide for certain contingencies which
might leave one of the players helpless and beaten before the game even
began; it was unfair, because, like death, it was played with loaded
dice--she simply didn't love me enough!

"Then again, after those first simple six months of domesticity,
something developed in Consuelo and she began to change every day; she
began to grow into what she later became in the eyes of an interested
public, a 'leading beauty' of the day. Leading beauties are quite
common these days, one has only to sit any day in the Ritz _foyer_
at lunchtime to see a crowd of the slim, oval faced things; though
God knows whom they 'lead' nowadays, unless it's photographers and
publicans. But thirty or forty years ago, as you know, they were quite
rare and wondrous; just three or four of 'em, and by Royal Appointment
as it were, and people used to stand upon the chairs along Rotten Row
to have a better view of them as they rode or walked by. Well, Consuelo
began to grow up like that, and as she only too perfectly looked the
part there were only a few disgruntled 'old friends' like myself who
complained of the change in her, and how she was being taken from us by
a crowd of deplorable women and vapid young men who ought never to have
been allowed to leave school. And already, at her ridiculous age, she
had a mild reputation for breaking hearts in a casual sort of way....
Tristram, of course, wasn't at all of her way of thinking, and tried to
hold her back, but she just smiled at him and told him not to be silly;
she had not then begun to dislike him, she felt very tenderly about
him, as a woman sometimes does feel about a _ci-devant_ lover, even if
he also happens to be her husband.

"So, in that time of sudden development into 'the beautiful Mrs.
Carew,' it wasn't unnatural that our affair remained, well, indefinite,
and that from being 'the only other person' I became one of a crowd of
crawling young men--and not all so very young either! I may have been
a little more favoured than any one else, in fact now that I look back
on it I see that I was, but at the time I didn't notice it, and I was
bitter.

"Thus and thus, we drifted on for about three months--until I lost my
temper. At that time I had rather a good thing in the way of tempers;
it didn't explode suddenly and pass away into the lumber room of
past follies, but it simmered and waned and waxed and seethed for
a dangerous two weeks or more--and when it died, many other things
somehow died with it. My extravagant love for Consuelo Carew died with
my first and last fit of brooding temper at her indecision. Indecision
indeed! Poor fool that I was, I didn't see that she was undecided
because she didn't love enough, and that, being the absolute slave of
her emotions, her decision would be born the very same moment as her
love--poor, happy devil, whoever he might be, might have been!

"'You can't run a team,' I had said to her bitterly at the opening
performance, as it were, of my dangerous state. And, mind you, I
thought I had some right to my bad temper, because all this time she
had been saying that she loved me--but, but, but the memory of her
love for Tristram was so recent, and remembering how utterly she had
loved him made her cautious of trusting too blindly to this repetition
of that same emotion; 'for it seems quite the same, so I suppose that
I must love you,' she said so sweetly that I can't blame Jupiter for
withholding his thunderbolt. If I would only wait.... But I had, and
wouldn't any more.

"Those two sour weeks contained the last phase of the game. I was
fixing her down to that eternal 'something definite,' and I took a
real, cruel pleasure in frightening her--for she was fond enough of
me to be frightened at my strange lapse from the door-mat, ox-eyed
amiability to which I had so far treated her. That was the only time I
was ever near to being top-dog in the affair, those two weeks when I
had her in a corner and made her gradually realise that it must be 'one
thing or the other'; and that, best weapon of all for such a woman, I
was past the stage when I would mind very much if it was 'the other.'
She knew that I had the bit in my teeth and was going to run away, even
if I had to live as a celibate ever after--which, believe me, is what I
seriously told her I must become!

"I say that she was frightened at my sudden twist, but I am not at all
sure if it was fright; it may have been just a pretty pretence of it,
for she was too polished, too 'right,' to let an old friend go without
showing him that she would miss him--'so marvellously much, you dear!'

"But, fright or pretence, no regrets at losing me could influence her
in the least to yield to what, when the time came with some luckier
wretch, she would yield with such whole-hearted abandon that I can
quite understand how she sincerely thought, and sometimes said, that
each new lover was her last and ultimate fate....

"The strange incident to which I referred at the beginning of my long
and tiresome tale happened on the last night of those two weeks, which
was also the last night on which I ever mentioned the word 'love' to
Consuelo Carew; in fact, I did not see her again until ten or eleven
years later.... Tristram, Consuelo, myself, and a crowd of others
were staying down at the Portairleys' for a long week-end. During the
last ten days in which I had so far retained my loss of temper I had
thrown caution to the winds, I had got absolutely reckless in the way
I badgered Consuelo--and Tristram for the first time began to suspect
that there was more than friendliness in my feelings for his wife. She
begged me to take care, for Tristram let loose meant hell for some
one, and that some one would not be Tristram, for he was a good head
taller than any bad-tempered man has a right to be. He had no more than
a faint suspicion, but that faintness was fierce enough to be fanned
into manslaughter at the smallest provocation. I'm not a coward, but
it really is unwise to play the fool with unreasonable people like
Tristram, and so on the Friday and Saturday at the Portairleys' I
stepped warily and curbed my dash a good deal. And everything was all
right until Sunday night after dinner....

"I don't remember who the others of the party were, except, of course,
just the man of the incident; and I'm not even quite certain if the
man I have in my mind was that one in particular, because I had no
means of knowing exactly, as I will explain. Anyway, the one I mean was
just a vague young man like myself, whom I had never happened to meet
before, and would have scarcely noticed then if I hadn't felt that he
was in love with Consuelo; not so hopelessly or helplessly, either, as
becomes a discreet gentleman.

"I don't know if you know the Portairley's place? The summer house is
about two hundred yards west of the house, at the end of a narrow,
twisting gravel path which suddenly turns to its very door; and it
is almost entirely shut in by shrubbery of sorts, and, at that time
in full bloom, caressing its walls and roof were the sprays of lilac
trees--how well I remember the scent of 'em that wretched evening!

"On Sunday I woke up in a state of chronic irritation against the young
man; and as the day wore on became gradually more reckless again,
until, at about ten o'clock at night, I somehow managed to inveigle
Consuelo out on to the pretty, pretty lawn--and from there to the
summer house wasn't a long way for an immaturely bitter man to drag an
unwilling but careless young woman!

"We sat there, and between puffs of my cigar, and quite thoughtfully,
I told her exactly what I thought of her; all the pent-up emotions of
nine damnable months loosed themselves from my mind, and overriding my
every decent instinct, found a brutal expression on my lips. Are you
too 'sophisticated,' I wonder, to let me suggest that sinful thoughts
have their own special punishment? that they react too articulately,
they force themselves out in the end in a bitter wash of words--perhaps
cleansing? That was my punishment, anyway, to _have_ to say those
things that night, while she listened and looked horribly sorry. And,
you know, she _was_ sorry.... I had it all my own way, and, in my vile
state, I must have said all the bitter and beastly things that a man
can say to a woman; but she only listened, maddeningly! I can't now
imagine why she didn't rise and leave me; and then I may have crawled
after her, or I may not--I don't know.

"Then, in the sudden reaction quite common, I believe, in such scenes,
I began to take all I could of the worthless, surface things a woman,
if she sets her teeth, can give a man; but she didn't even trouble to
'set her teeth,' she seemed more unattainable, more mocking, the more
my lips touched her. She somehow made a doll of herself, and let me
maul her about as I liked--but so uselessly, for though I ruffled her
and myself I simply couldn't ruffle that smile! It was there right
through, symbolic of my helplessness, a very sweet and tender smile,
but sad, for she was pitying me. And at last she said very quietly: "If
ever I had loved you, dear, and perhaps I may have, I wouldn't now be
loving you any more. Because, don't you see, you have been doing all
you can, you've emptied out all your box of tricks into my unworthy
little lap, you've been working away ever so hard at making me love
you--and even though the moon is shining through that window, and the
scent of the lilac is sweetening this musty little place, I simply
can't, my dear, feel romantic enough with you to dream that your kisses
are the fairy-tales they should be. They are just kisses, and perhaps
very nice in their way, but they don't mean anything. They don't mean
rare things. Kisses which aren't fairy-tales never do.... I'm so, so
sorry, you know (that cheek is getting worn away, but do try the other
one, I'm told it's just as good) because I realise what I'm missing,
for you would make a perfect lover, bless you. But, as it is, when your
silly heart is mended again, some luckier woman will be grateful to me
for having taught you to love properly, and for having brought out in
you that particular mixture of brutality and delicacy which would be so
thrilling if only it thrilled me! And after all the nasty things you've
been saying to me it's pleasant to imagine some one sometime thinking
quite nice thoughts about me....'

"What can one do with that sort of woman! More than twenty years have
passed since then, and I suppose I've collected an odd bit of sense
here and there, as one does--but in such a circumstance I should be as
helpless now as I was then. It would have been easy enough to give up
the chase if she had shown a real distaste, physical, mental, any way,
for me, but she didn't--there she was, quiescent in my arms, and I, for
the first and last time in my life, was as unrestrained as a Dago....
And it was just at that moment, worst moment of all, that we heard
steps on the gravel path by which we had come. We heard the steady,
crunching sound, and pulled quickly apart, staring at each other. They
were coming nearer, there could only be one goal for them, the end of
the path--at the open door! Only a few seconds divided those steady
steps from us, there was nothing to be done. Consuelo was feverishly
trying to tidy her hair. It was impossible to do the one obvious thing,
to get up and close the door and hope that the intruder would turn
at the end of the path--impossible because the door was unhinged and
useless, and because, we knew, the intruder could only be Tristram
Carew, for whom a closed door would mean certain proof....

"We waited breathlessly. For the first time, I noticed my crumpled,
burnt out cigar, and I was going to throw it on the floor when I
remembered just in time that the sight of its ruffled, unsmoked state
would give the show away. Just beside me was a little window, its glass
long since smashed out. The steps were perhaps five yards away now, and
I blessed the winding path which hid us from him until he was actually
at the very door....

"Consuelo suddenly whispered fiercely, 'We must talk, you fool,' and
began talking about something as loudly and as casually as she could.
And then, and then, as I lifted my arm to throw my cigar out of the
window into the shrubbery, a hand came in from outside, from below,
just a hand, and very, very carefully, for between the fingers of that
hand was a cigar with a long ash. I didn't think, I hadn't time to be
surprised at the amazing fact of it; threw my cigar away and gently
took the cigar from the fingers. I knew what it meant--that long
undisturbed ash! My God, how gentle I was with it, my whole soul went
out into the care with which I brought it towards me! I didn't even see
the mysterious hand disappear, I hadn't time to think of it....

"Consuelo hadn't stopped talking during that second or so, for the
incident was only a matter of that. We were about two feet apart on the
bench. I held my cigar as prominently as I could, just above my knee,
and prayed that the ash wouldn't drop for just another fraction of a
second--and I passed a box of matches to Consuelo, whispering her to
strike one. Tristram was just at the last turn of the path to the door,
in one more step he would be facing us.

"'Hallo!' I interrupted Consuelo's flow of gibberish. 'I wonder who
that is!'

"And as I said it Consuelo struck a match--and the giant of a man
filled the doorway! Striking the match was an obvious thing to do, for
any one in the doorway had his back to the moonlight and was therefore
indistinguishable to us--and besides the light of the match would help
the moonlight to show him my excellent cigar-ash! But I was damned
frightened--Tristram's face, in that sudden dim light, wasn't angry,
his eyes weren't wild, but heavy, sullen. Oh, one can't express these
things in words. He wasn't melodramatic, he was cold, too cold. His
eyes were on me, not on her.

"'Hallo, Tristram!' I just managed to say. And then, with a flash of
absolute genius, Consuelo backed up with, 'But don't please ask him to
join our happy party, for he looks so bad-tempered that he might spoil
your cigar-ash just out of spite.'

"And that _was_ genius at that crucial moment. It cut the ground from
under Tristram's feet, he looked surprised--and he saw my cigar! The
moment was passing. A long cigar-ash and even the shortest love-affair
can't go together, even to the most suspicious mind--and Tristram,
thank Heavens, had his moments of extraordinary simplicity. I raised my
cigar.

"'Oh, damn!' I said. The ash had at last revolted.

"'There you are, I told you he'd spoil it!' Consuelo said quickly.

"'I haven't even touched the thing!' Tristram protested--and we both
really breathed for the first time since, two or three minutes before,
we had heard the steps on the path....

"Well, that's all there is of it, the incident, and you must forgive
me if I've taken a tiresome long time to get to it. Tristram, she, and
I sat on in the summer house for an half-hour or so, talking rather
constrainedly, but, anyway, peacefully. He showed that he had lost
his trust in me, that he at last realised our friendship was over;
his suspicions weren't more than allayed. But for the time being he
simply hadn't anything to work on, for it wasn't so very unnatural
that Consuelo, old friend as she was of mine, should sit by me in the
summerhouse while I smoked my after-dinner cigar; and I wasn't going
to give him another chance, because in that half-hour during which we
sat on there I realised that Consuelo really wasn't for me, and that I
was only making a fool of myself without advantage to anybody--and I
decided with the last bit of strength I had left in me to do what I did
the next morning, to run away. And, as I said, I didn't see her again
for about ten years, and then very casually....

"As we sat on there for half an hour or so I couldn't of course lay my
hands on the young man who had been eavesdropping outside the window
and had stood me in such amazingly good stead. But it really was a
strange and wonderful thing to do--to have even thought of doing that
particular thing! And still more wonderful for such a little cad to
have done it, for of course he was a cad to have been there at all.
I knew that it simply couldn't have been any one else but the young
man whom I've mentioned as being in love with Consuelo. He must have
seen Consuelo and I steal away into the garden, and followed us down
to the summer-house, and sat there in the shrubbery under the window,
listening to every word we said and calmly smoking his cigar--that
priceless cigar! And then, when he heard the steps on the gravel path
he had the wit to know that the climatic conditions in the summer-house
were about to become unsettled--and, on a noble impulse, did what he
did, and then faded away. I didn't see him in the morning, as I left
by the earliest train. What could one say, anyway? He was a cad, and a
gentleman, that's all."

We had turned into Clarges Street, and were almost at my door. As he
finished I took his arm.

"You are wrong about his being a cad," I said, "because he didn't
follow you two out to the summer-house at all. He was there a good five
minutes before you--not in the summer-house but just behind it, for,
poor fool, he was trying to choose the most perfect lilac bloom for the
most beautiful and imperfect lady in the world. And when she suddenly
turned up with the horrible young man who had been drifting round
her all day--well, he just sat down on the ground under the window,
cursed life and cursed women, and smoked his cigar. I didn't stay to
listen, I was too angry to move, that's all. You see, she had given
me an appointment to meet her in the summer-house at ten o'clock that
night...."

We were at my door. He smiled, a little self-consciously, through the
short silence.

"You will please forgive me," he said, almost nervously. "And for more
than accusing you falsely, or for boring you with the yarn at all. For
I certainly wouldn't have told it to you so, well, intimately, if,
up in the Hallidays' drawing-room I hadn't half recognised you. Very
dimly, of course.... One's memory plays one queer tricks sometimes,
doesn't it? To retain, however dimly, and vaguely, a face seen twenty
years ago! And so I followed you out.... So Consuelo had told you to
meet her at the summer-house that night!

"I can almost understand now," he said slowly, "how she died as she
did. Life on those lines must have got too complicated.

"Good-night--my friend!" he said.




IV: THE ROMANCE OF IRIS POOLE




IV: THE ROMANCE OF IRIS POOLE


I

I ONCE read, in an essay by a writer whose considerable achievements
in contemporary literature seem to warrant a certain knowledge of the
craft of tale-telling, that it is only the trained artificiality of
writers--their technique, so to say--that enables them to begin their
tales from a certain point and go directly on to a certain ending.
While the truth of the matter is (he writes), as you can easily verify
from the narrative of any peasant in any inn, that the tales that are
spun from life cannot be complacently fitted along a straight line
of narration, but incline to zigzag unaccountably from one point of
memory to another; until the tale fulfilled, or rather, fulfills itself
by these deft and disordered touches of the realism of memory. For,
to quote the simile that is almost _de rigueur_ as a cap to these
grave abstractions, "the figure in the carpet" can be said to have no
beginning nor middle, and so on....

The plain fact of the matter is that, in spite of the sternest
intentions, I have the greatest difficulty in nailing my mind down to a
clear and ordered conception of the sequence that even the most facile
publisher will demand from this history: in ever and again wrenching,
as it were, my memory from its erratic piracies, and in beguiling it
to sit soberly astride the course of events as they occurred or were
told to me. Even though they didn't actually and consistently occur,
these events--not, I mean, in the usually accepted sense of things
"occurring." They were all so deeply consequent on inside things! and
most of them happened inside....

Thus, as I try to shape my shadows as truly as I may, my memory is ever
and again confronted by a few nights--mainly three, and very bonfires
of nights they seem to me, with their high lights and sinister heat
colouring all that came before and all that happened after; though,
indeed, to two of us there was very little left that could happen after
that third, and last, night.... That last night! Of the many things
that can be lost in one night, Roger Poole lost as much as any man can
lose, Antony Poole lost more than any man should lose, and Iris--and
I--but even a tale cannot play spy for ever, it must surely end
somewhere. (And yes, it must begin, too).

Then that other night, which I could rightly call the first, for it was
the one which very definitely sent the ball rolling down the slope.
And, though I should preface that rolling by first describing that
slope and that ball, I see that I must let part of this particular
bonfire have its way, else they will all get together to hinder and
confuse me. That man Antony never did know how to wait, and so I must
tell of the night of his return before even the day of his going away.
An unfortunate night it was, even apart from his connection with it,
because of my heavy and stupid depression about something that time, in
all decency, should have persuaded me to face resignedly.

An hour or so after a midnight one late June, I was walking slowly
up Piccadilly; in no hurry to reach my destination, whither I would
eventually take a taxi--for Regent's Park is always far enough, but
even further on a moonless and rain-heavy night that England must have
grabbed from one of our less desirable and more stifling colonies.
I was walking on the outer edge of the pavement, with my head bent,
as shoddily happened when my mind was clouded--when in crossing the
end of that little passage that leads into Albany-courtyard, I was
arrested by the stealthy and hurried sound of a scuffle. From first
to last the affair took but a few seconds. At the far end of the dim
recess two figures were locked together, swaying this way and that and
then parting to allow freedom for blows--the which, I could judge,
were exchanged with the heartiest ill will; and all in silence, but
for quick pantings for breath and the shuffle of feet. There really is
an unholy kind of interest in watching two men, presumably of one's
own kind if stiff white shirts meant anything at all, fighting in
relentless silence, and maybe, in deadly earnest. The slightly smaller
one--they were both tall figures--seemed to be getting much the worst
of it, but I certainly wouldn't have interfered if I hadn't seen a
posse of policemen coming towards us from Vine Street on their usual
way to their beats.

"Time!" said I. But it was time enough without my saying so, for one
last and not very heavy blow had doubled the smaller against the window
of Woodrow's hat-shop; and the other, a giant of a man, picking up
his top-hat and ramming it on his head as though it were a Crusader's
helmet and without a glance at his crumpled antagonist, briskly walked
towards me.

"England's come to a pretty pass when the education of gentlemen has
to fall to interested amateurs like myself," he began from a distance.
"Eh, Ronnie?"

But I had recognised him without his use of my name, and was staring at
him with such bewilderment that he broke out into one of those guffaws
I knew so well.

"Antony!" I cried.

"Myself as ever was, old man!" and he clapped me on the shoulder
heartily. "I saw you out of the tail of my eye, while I was teaching
that young man Spartan history--and, thought I, no luck could be
better."

"But when did you get back, and where from?"

"This very afternoon, and from Mexico--where else? And damme," he
turned on me to add bitterly, "why the devil should you be so surprised
at my coming back to my own country?"

But I could parry that kind of thing from Antony well enough.

"For one reason," said I, "because you yourself told me that you were
probably never coming back."

"Never! Well, my friend, isn't two years as good as your 'never'? I'm
learning that there's only one bigger lie than 'never,' and that's
'always'--for instance, I was _never_ coming back to England, and a few
of my friends were _always_ going to be pleased to see me."

There was a large and full-flavoured kind of bitterness about Antony
that seldom quite failed in its appeal to my heart, albeit sourly, and
I was about to give the lie to his accusation when he turned his eyes
back to the dark passage muttering, "And that was one of 'em." But
the luckless wretch had disappeared while we talked, to ponder maybe
upon the weight and quality of that word "always," and with a muttered
request from me "not to be a fool about his real friends" we walked
on towards the Circus. I had been made shy and nervous by Antony's
boisterous realisation of his position in England, and now found it
difficult to say anything which somehow or other wouldn't remind him of
it. Just like the man to be so infernally touchy and talkative about
it, I was thinking, when he said:--

"You actually are the very man I want to see, Ronnie. I've got enough
questions to ask you to last a day or more, but I dare say a lunch will
see them through--though that of course depends on where we lunch ...?"
That was ever the way with Antony, he never tried to hide the fact
that he wanted something from one--though, thank Heaven, it was now
only a lunch!

"You had better come and lunch at my flat to-morrow," I suggested--with
my heart in my mouth lest he should scent a possible insult in that
seclusion. But he accepted easily enough.

At Piccadilly Circus, where I called a taxi, he said he must leave me
as he had to go down to the Carlton: which thankfully relieved me of
any embarrassment as to how to be rid of him at that moment. As he went
he called back to me, "Don't tell all London that I'm back, there's a
good fellow." A quite unnecessary request, I found it on my lips to
answer; for the name of Antony Poole, as himself knew very well, would
meet with but a grim welcome in any house in London.


II

On the surface, and a good deal below the surface, there was nothing
at all to be said for Antony. I had often wondered what thoughts about
himself must pass through his mind in solitary moments when he viewed
his life (for he was not so insensitive but that that necessity could
never have come upon him)--just thirty-six years of life, which
had four years before that night finally ended its reckless social
passage in the utter loss of everything a man holds essential to the
self-respect with which he must face the world! Not, however, that
any loss could ever intimidate Antony into facing the world with any
other manner but that with which some imp had plagued his birth: a
blend of blustering indifference, dangerous humours, and a ripe and
racy geniality. But even so there must be some moments of terrible
reckonings in his soul, I always thought, when he realises his folly
in so spoiling the good life his could have been and had looked to be;
when, console himself with his "bad luck" as he may, he reaches a point
of self-knowledge that tells him, with his own brutality, how there is
a degree of failure that simply cannot be condoned by "bad luck."

I had known Antony for so long that my view of him in his manhood
was always brightened to his advantage by my school-day memories of
him; those of a gay and careless companion, with sufficient head but
little inclination for work: ever more rowdy and reckless than his
companions, a good sportsman and a good man at most games, and very
popular among those whom his fancy had not led him to treat as enemies.
It was maturity (or whatever queer development took its place in him)
that went to Antony's head, so that he began to run amok as soon as
he left Sandhurst; something seemed to grow up in him that spiced his
old faults with new outrage, and quite hid what good there was in him.
His, I then found to my astonishment, was the most makeshift mechanism
that God ever put into a man--for I had never dreamt of such complex
weaknesses in my Antony of old! Who would have thought that this man,
inches more than six straight feet of him, with his good looks, his
loud and easy geniality, and a certain aptitude of mind that expressed
itself in an understanding laugh where your clever man would have been
puzzled--who would have thought that this man who laughed with the
laugh of the middle ages was so shoddily made that his every organ and
moral attribute were as though held in place by oddments of string? For
never was there a man so consistently and appallingly weak to do battle
with himself, to compel himself to a sanity of living and a balance of
thought: a weak man, in that wretched word's most wretched and active
sense.

But the key to him lay just further than that weakness: that he
would have suffered, and indeed did, any torture rather than reveal
it--the indetermination and moral cowardice of those, without
exaggeration, giant fibres. This, I grew to realise, was the secret
of the contradiction that was Antony--this pose of strength where he
himself knew he was weak: the most penalising pose that ever bolstered
a man's vanity the more completely to wreck him. For the world might
have allowed Antony a certain length of forgiveness if he could have
been brought to reveal himself as he actually was, if he could only
have bowed his head and revealed the hesitancies of his nature, and his
contrition; if he could even for just once have foregone the childish
vanities of bluster and bravado with which he thought to carry through
every escapade. He thought to outwit punishment, but instead he did the
most difficult thing of all, he outwitted sympathy....

And since eventually such a pose as his must make indecency a fact
where it had once only been vaguely suggested, so Antony actually
became, in the course of time, the rogue and outsider that his
crooked vanity had once made him parade as a pose. For, be you ever
so arrogant, nature has been proved to have its laws for men as
well as for beasts, laws not astral but severely human, that never
cease to confound alchemists of every kind to their own hurt; and it
is obvious that a man may not play the fool with his soul without
covering it with the verdigris of his own folly--that sourness of heart
and crookedness that stole gradually on poor Antony, so that in his
thirties he was, to stretch a likeness, like a Hyde to the Jekyll of
his schooldays.

The advantages of a commission in the Brigade, of a name sufficient
to ensure a reasonable amount of credit and consideration, those
details which can so warm the cockles of even a philosophic heart
on a dull afternoon, and a little more than the usual pittance that
falls to the younger brothers of pukka baronets, warranted, surely,
a very fair prospect. And yet, in a few years' time, he had finally
convinced people beyond a shadow of doubt of what they had so far only
disliked to guess, of his complete failure to be either an officer or a
gentleman.

No man could be more noticeable in appearance than Antony, nor more
adequately fulfil the name by which he was often known, Red Antony;
for he was very tall and stoutly built, rather foppishly dressed, and
as consistently ginger as any man could well be--moustaches, eyebrows
that no brushing could tame into regularity, hair which waved back from
his forehead in a most attractive ginger but ordered profusion; and a
complexion appropriately coloured, and always so clear and fresh as to
seem to give the lie to the certain dissipation of the night before. A
very fine looking man, Red Antony, if you liked that kind of looks; but
so noticeable that his own appearance, no doubt, took a hand against
him, labelling his escapades with its prominence so that once pointed
out he was never forgotten; and men and women could cross the street in
good time to avoid the difficulty of acknowledging or of cutting him.

It was an accumulation of escapades, many of which had been overlooked
but for his manner of braving them, that had led to his final
extinction--which was long seen in coming. A thousand little and
unpleasant things were known and more than whispered about him. He
was a man of red-hot tempers, which there was no restraint in him to
keep within bounds; his weren't the rages that burnt inwardly and grew
in brooding, but in their sudden heat must burn outwardly, devouring
everything with no care nor heed for even primitive restraint. (There
have been times when I've been rather afraid of Antony myself.) And
so, from his great height of stature and violence, he had outrageously
insulted men in return for a fancied slight. He had committed follies,
when drunk, which his companions had hurriedly disavowed. He had,
as if by rote, done the one thing a man may still not do and remain
this side of Styx, despite all that we hear of the present laxity of
etiquette--had been unable to pay his gambling debts, and then paid
them with worthless cheques. He had been the centre of innumerable
brawls in which, if ever a woman's name was concerned, it was never
to Antony's credit; had been twice a corespondent and not once a
husband--an apparent failure to act upon his obligations which does no
man any good; and from the second (the first had too obviously been
the result of carelessness) he had emerged in so discreditable a light
that, on top of all his past follies, Antony Poole was no longer a name
to be mentioned in any ordinary English company.

That was four years before that night I met him on Piccadilly, when he
was thirty-two. He still continued for two years in England, Heaven
alone knew why! No one sought him, he was seldom seen--except by me,
and later, another. His elder brother, Roger, had not spoken to him for
years.

It was about a year before he finally left England that I began to see
Antony in his best light; and pretty closely since, in the precarious
condition of his affairs and reputation, it was mostly in my flat
that he could enjoy that company which presented him in this new and
improved light. He was in love, and he was making love: furtively and
hopelessly as to manner, for what girl would dream of marrying him! And
who ever stood more firmly upon his honour than he who has been proved
to have none?... But in his heart there was hope, I am sure there was
hope in his heart, else Antony would not have been Antony.

A queer man. For all his appalling rudeness and brutality on a
thousand occasions, he could be so very courteous and simple when he
was moved to it; could turn a tale, rather candidly it's true, but
very amusingly, and had altogether a very diverting way with him in
company that didn't offend his absurd feelings or ruffle his dangerous
vanity--though even then he couldn't help a, well, cunning satire that
might more profitably, for him, have bit into paper.

It is in recalling this time that I feel most uncomfortable, because of
the ridiculous position in which my own weakness placed me. During the
previous few months I had fallen into the habit of wanting to see Iris
Portairley every day--or rather, she had graciously allowed me fall
into that habit. And that, indeed, was the only encouragement I had
from her, the pleasure which she showed that she had from my company;
so that, if we had not happened to meet for some days over lunch or
dinner at the same table, she very often managed by some contrivance,
say of a tame chaperon, to come to see me of an afternoon. Deliciously
often though she managed her contrivances, I was always surprised
to see her, who had so many more amusing things to do! And with the
carelessness of a man ten years my junior I accepted the pleasure of
her company without inquiring of myself whither I was being led. The
truth was that it depressed me to think of what might come of it, for
the back of my mind could never be entirely rid of an ugly high wall at
the far end of my meadow....

And yet I chartered ill luck to my suit, or pretence of a suit, by
aiding and abetting Red Antony in his quite impossible and absurd
pretensions! Though, in justice to the man, he must have realised
clearly how very impossible they were.

The excuse for the anomaly was in the queer sympathy (and a very
conscious one) that Antony always had the power to raise in me; and
particularly at that time, when he was so definitely an outcast, forced
to solitary meals in the grill-rooms of those _maîtres d'hôtel_ who
still gallantly pretended to believe in his signature at the foot of a
bill. I simply couldn't bring myself just then, whether for my own or
Iris's good, to deprive him of the solace he found in her occasional
company at my flat, generally at some odd hour between three to
seven--more often nearer seven, for Antony allowed that I could shake
a cocktail very prettily. And though, from a tentative beginning (if
that word could ever be applicable to Antony) it became a bare-faced
intrusion on my privacy, even so I hadn't the heart to forbid, or
definitely to discourage, the apparent coincidence of his visits with
hers; "apparent," for Antony at this time never said a word of his
admiration, nor gave any other hint of gratitude for my complaisance
than in an added pressure of my hand as he left. Antony was a noisy
man, but never by any chance did he make a noise about anything one
really wanted to hear.

It was a very uncomfortable business--for me, I mean. And, as I had let
it go on, quite impossible to cut short; since nothing less drastic
than an order for ejection, if even that, would have penetrated the
thick skin that Antony could so conveniently wear when he chose--and
with no better result than a "misunderstanding" with Iris who, thanks
largely to me, had come to have certain views about Antony which
materially differed from the world's, and even stronger views about
deserting one's friends when they were "down and out." There's no
end to difficulties when a woman takes her standpoint on the highest
pinnacles of the code that men have arranged between themselves for
their own convenience and woman's confusion.

I could only console myself with the ungenerous thought that if my
own position with Iris, of "dear Ronnie" and the like, was hopeless,
how much more hopeless was Red Antony's, the poor braggart who would
now be invisible, be he ever so tall and boisterous, to even the most
tarnished of her acquaintance. So let the man have his run, since he
could never have his way!...

How he had ever met her at all, in fact, I never clearly found out,
and had never the effrontery to ask; probably towards the end of his
swift downward passage to those underground grill-rooms (oh, those
grill-rooms of broken hearts and broken reputations!) just after Iris
had come out. Be that as it may, Iris had known him scarcely but by
reputation--about which, since it was glamoured by the disapproval of
every one who had ever bored her, she had often asked me; so that,
when one day they had happened at the same second at my door, she knew
a little more than hearsay about him; and was quick to see the poor
man's wretched plight, was quick to encourage his longing to talk to
some one decent; giving intimacy with that generous hand that makes
gentle women so much more dangerous than vampires, searching for what
sweetness there lay in him so wisely and deftly as to leave him unaware
of the homage he paid her, so that she could appreciate it at its
fullest; and so that, after a few weeks, she grew genuinely fond of the
wreck--and one day made me openly swear at my folly by suddenly saying:
"I suppose there must be many people who think they have met Napoleons,
only to find in the end that they are Antonys--and how very much nicer!"


III

But there was another reason, quite apart from any far-fetched call
of sympathy, for my putting a fairly good face on Antony's falling
in love on my premises. I might as well, thought I, be entertained
by what I had to suffer--and so there was cast a play, as though for
my bewildered entertainment! Though, of course, I never at that time
indulged in any such conceit, it's just the licence of thought that is
occasionally apt to flow from one's pen.

For while I watched, perforce, Antony pleading his furtive suit at
some hour between three to seven of an afternoon, I could sometimes
of an evening watch its parallel contrast in that world which Antony
had been at such pains to offend unpardonably. For, of the husbands
that had been suggested for Miss Portairley, not one had received more
favour than the possibility of Roger Poole; and the idea had been much
encouraged of late by the very frequent circumstance of their being of
the same company....

Certainly, to that world which finds its pleasure in the sensations of
other people's marriages, there was a great deal of apparent fitness
about this one; for they were both, in their ways, well-known persons.
Iris, of course, trivially, in these days of illustrated journals and
the like, a much photographed and commented on "beauty" whose features
and "recreations" were so widely known that she looked gradually to
become the rumoured subject of any novel that contained the requisite
amount of social indecency implied by the "modern society" of
publishers' announcements; and Roger Poole, already at thirty-three
a personage, "the only young man," I have heard it said, "of this
degeneration with any political energy or brilliance": who, in spite
of the leisure that his rumoured means might have claimed for him, had
actively sat as member for--since he was twenty-six, was now recognised
as one of the leaders of the Opposition, and certain, in spite of his
youth, of office at the fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after all,
so original of him to be so clever and polished and dark and ambitious
without being a Jew.

The colouring between the Poole brothers was distributed in some
such way as this: Antony, the younger by a year, as red and wantonly
extravagant as I have tried to show; and Roger, no less tall than
his brother but inclined much more to suppleness both in figure and
features--he could sometimes look remarkably like a knife: of a much
darker countenance, with dark eyes that were somehow sombre yet witty,
and seemed always to be fevered with some secret thought. In fact,
there were a great deal too many such "secret" thoughts about Roger to
ensure one's real comfort in his company.

But, in spite of this more serious expression, and in contradiction
to what one might have expected to appeal to a man of his very real
abilities and ambitions, Roger was every bit as much of the material
world as his brother--but had what Antony never had, the sanity and
balance with which to measure his recklessness and indulgences. Roger
Poole always knew what he was about; and, to further his ambitions, had
never ceased to discipline himself, outwardly anyway, into line with
the world's conventions--of which, funnily enough, if he continued his
success, he would one day be an arbitrator!

But, rigorously though he disciplined himself (a really splendid
dissimulation, which I who had known him so long had always watched
with envy), he could not help his inclinations showing in some
way--though in a way that reflected to his advantage as a figure, as
it would have reflected to Antony's if he hadn't been so foolish.
For they were shown in a manner, a certain air, which couldn't be
described but by the help of the word "romantic"--a not unpleasing word
to be used about one who has name, appearance, and ability. And he
was, even to me, a romantic kind of figure. There was nothing, well,
stationary about him, as there so often is about one's acquaintance;
in fact, more, there was definitely a sense of movement; one somehow
thought of him as a man who would always be going on to things, maybe
great things. His shadow will find in him an exciting companion, one
couldn't help thinking. Among one's acquaintance, each unit of whom
one knew to be travelling on a certain road to a more or less certain
end, Roger Poole stood out as a refreshing and unexpected person, a
kind of adventurer licensed by the world; an appearance clothed in
possibilities, whom it was interesting to know....

Besides, there was nothing silly nor banal about his good looks;
a thin, long face of such firm lines as to give an impression of
hardness, and noticeable, in an Englishman, because of its pallor;
attractive, too, because of a certain saturnine quality which seemed to
lurk about its expressions: an intangible _something_ that made one,
in talking to him, inquire within oneself a little fussily--a vastly
different state to that into which Red Antony's boisterous ill humour
had, in his hey-days, so frequently put one!

And so the discomfort of my position with regard to Antony allowed me
to stand in the wings, as it were, and watch the only game in this
world that is fairly played with "packed" cards; the two brothers, in
everything but age and name as far apart as favour can well be from
its opposite, at their love-making to a woman whom I loved as much as
they, perhaps more, but without that visible and reckless ardour that
will make a man's love at least significant to the most unloving woman.
I suppose that theatricalism, such as is not difficult to find in any
one's nature, may have tinged my view of the queer spectacle; but there
certainly was something very sad and pitiable about it all, and made
the more pitiable, too, by the inevitable course it must pursue--for
there is a certain logic to everything, be a woman ever so lovely and
remote. And Iris, for all her pride and looks, for all her tawny hair
and sometimes too distant eyes, had really as little to say in the
matter as Antony or I; for Roger Poole had a reputation to keep up, not
so much with the world as with himself, the reputation of a man who
always played in luck! Besides, luck or no luck, Iris had straightway
fallen in love with him.

She was twenty-two, and had up to that age lived as full and as amusing
a life as, one supposes, it was possible for her to live. But there
must somehow have been born with her a certain _distance_ of mind,
which always kept her detached from any surroundings she couldn't
wholly and utterly accept; a certain quality that, whether she would
or would not, kept her intact and untouched, as though destining her
never to accept anything which she couldn't wholly accept. Thus she had
inevitably to be rejecting much, and always; rejecting, indeed, a great
deal more than she was ever given the credit for by even those who knew
her very well. At first I naturally took this distance of mind from her
surroundings to be yet another of the usual and tedious affectations of
the "younger generation," but very soon found that it was as sincere
an affectation as any that can trouble a mind and make a heart deeply
restless.

It wasn't that she was superior or blasé (of being which she was,
of course, commonly accused by those who were disconcerted by her
reception of those trivial indecencies that pass for humour among the
cultured inane); but simply that she was never lulled into thinking
that the life in which she found herself was anything but a phase of
her youth, and a makeshift one at that. There would, of course, be
other things! And of the men who came her way, the interesting ones
were mainly too old--now why is courtesy always so much older than
oneself?--the younger ones mainly too foolish, and as little worth
loving as they were able to love. Some day, some day, she once laughed
to me, there will be darkish men with intelligent gestures....

Well, there came one, Roger Poole. He at last was vital, giving her
what she had been starved for, a sense of achievement, of movement.
That expresses it so badly, for it might imply that Iris was a
sycophant to success, which she never was--unlike her ridiculous but
amiable mother, who thought she had a _salon_ whereas she only kept
a restaurant. Iris had a longing to be allowed to admire, a longing
that was a fiercely integral part of her nature. And she was a woman
with tangible desires, who would, one thought, lay claim to her man's
body and mind with every part of her own, and with no illusions about
the spirituality or intelligence of her love. Iris was of the earth
divinely, and perhaps that's why she couldn't help obsessing a man's
mind....

But for Roger's coming, she might have continued for years being
proposed to decently and indecently by the young fops and financiers
whose piracies the world so completely licences; not one of whom she
would ever like enough, not one of whom could ever lead himself or
her to anything but a country-house or to Deauville. So, as I imagine
it, as she looked around her life, at the supposed pageantry and
possibilities of it, she must have been in a state of watchful coma,
just waiting, with a growing inner sadness, for that "something" to
happen; that "something," that fulfilment of a longing, which would
bring into actual being the woman in her--that thing compact with
elemental passions and fierce desires which had so far only been
present in an involuntary stiffening of her body, her spine, when a
kiss, and maybe one that had faintly attracted her, had touched her.
Her mind might compromise, it often desperately did, but it was as
though an unhesitating iron had entered her body, so that it could
never be lulled to even a pretence of acceptance. And so, as she was
one night surveying the accustomed character of a crowded room, with
what relief she must have realised, howsoever dimly at that first
moment, that the "something" was at last about to happen, that Roger
Poole was crossing the room into her life.

She had met him only once before, four years ago, just after she
had come out--and he had only just lately re-entered her world. She
had, of course, often heard about him during that time, and not only
in political chatter; for Roger, with a certain superciliousness,
had withdrawn himself only from what he found dull and boring in
life--from which Iris hadn't yet thought it worth while to rebel;
unless braving an hysterical scene with her mother for a latchkey was
rebellion. But as to the flouting of conventions and the like, it is
easy enough to do as one likes; but so very much easier, after all,
to know without doing so that the entertainment gained won't be worth
while.

Iris, many of whose friends had long since indulged their sense of
pleasure as it pleased them, or as it displeased others, had never but
given an inquiring side-glance to that life; and had been forced to
admit to herself that she must lack some essential _verve_, for she had
found as little entertainment in, say, an absinthe at the Café Royal
in the company of, presumably, artists, as in the noisy dinners that
are sometimes given by Argentines and other rich men to women whose
jewels, at least, led Iris to suppose that it must be worth their while
to attend them. It was at the only one of these dinners that she had
ever gone to that an American millionaire, a fussy little man of an
engaging candour, had straight away offered to give her a Rolls-Royce,
and she had only succeeded in dissuading him from that intention by
revealing that her mother already had a quite adequate car. Thus young
was it revealed to Iris that she would make an inefficient kind
of cocotte. She was always, she had once told me rather brazenly,
conscious of a disturbing sense of laughter which, she was sure, would
tiresomely interfere with her enjoyment of any of those indiscretions
and adventures in which some of her acquaintance would now and then
indulge; and also, had never found any reason to think otherwise of
life round about studios and the like than as really a rather tedious
affair, of a kind of anæmia and uncleanliness--the kind, you know,
that can be cleaner without costing another half-penny--that caused in
her no more and no less than a vivid feeling of self-consciousness;
about which she bitterly reproached herself, for it was difficult to
be rid of an idea that she ought to be a little, well, humble before
these young men who were, after all, trying to do _something_. Nor did
protracted meals and cigarettes and liqueurs in grimy restaurants round
about Soho and Fitzroy Street with young men more or less just down
from Oxford "and pretty far down at that," appeal to her as anything
but a wearisome duty to that side of her mind which, so some of her
friends always urged, "must surely be sick of the boredom and mental
inertia of the life she led." ... But she had honestly done her best,
had vividly plunged into both alternatives; and, thank Heavens, had
emerged unscathed, with but an offer of an "automobile" and several
of marriage--not of course from the millionaire, who very genuinely
implied that he respected her too really to ask that much, but from
the young invertebrates. There seems, she had long since concluded,
to be much nonsense talked about the unfair advantages that rich men
take, for after all they are prepared to pay very reasonably for one's
virginity, whereas those young men have the cheek to ask for one's
lifetime in exchange for their devastating passions.

All this about what Iris might have done has its place because, had
she strayed out of her accustomed path more determinedly, she would
have seen more of Roger Poole; who--and ever with that peculiar and
antagonising air of a man with a fine sense of conduct and deportment
who knew himself to an exact and rigorous shade--was in the most inner
background of these feverish activities, though never too feverishly;
who was as much at home with our more presentable celebrities as with
those less efficient; and who, in the rather different atmosphere round
about St. James's, was known as a very cool and fortunate gambler; and
had once been heard to make the profound paradox that "a good gambler
never takes any risks"--which, it was said, had so impressed a certain
very rich young fool with its apparent impossibility that he had at
once married an elderly millionairess.

Roger intended, in brief, to revive in himself and his station a
certain tradition; and with no affectation, for that tradition was his
very own and became him as none other could; in fact, it became him
as well or as ill as it had once become the younger politicians of a
past century. It had needed little perspicacity on his part to see
that there was a strange defect in the young men of his generation;
that they seemed quite unable and unwilling to combine their abandon
with any such brilliance as might help them to achieve something, or
their brilliance with enough abandon to make them seem sympathetic
fellows--that, in short, they were either wasters or dons. They seemed
quite unable to accommodate their pleasures and their business into one
lurid whole, as did those men in the days when there were still clubs
in St. James's Street and not curiosities; when men of brains or birth
never so entirely forgot their self-respect or breeding were they ever
so debauched, as to be wholly indifferent to the politics or culture
of their country; when it was as nothing against a gentleman to have
it said against him that he had seduced a friend's wife, so only he
had wittily done the same to the House of Commons on the same night;
when, in short, it was commonly considered the part of a gentleman
to be interested in upholding or demolishing the pillars of the
constitution....

But now! there were only wasters, at best inefficient dilettanti in art
and gambling, and drunkards who appalled you not by their drunkenness
but by their dulness. You could walk London W. from midnight to
daylight and see neither hint nor hope of your accomplished buck....
And that last description, Roger must have known, would so agreeably
become the seeming contradictions of his public ambitions and private
life, that from the presidency of the Union he stepped plumb into it;
in solitary elegance re-created it, as it were, in the public and
social eye, both of which were never far from his consideration; and
having re-created it, successfully lived up to and never budged from
it--until, when he was thirty-four, he again re-entered that society
which he had always despised as dull but had never offended except
with the most sympathetic disorders; and could now walk into it with
the comforting thought that no dowager could say worse of him than a
doubtful "He's a remarkable young man...."

I knew by the little he told me that the main reason for his emergence
was marriage. It was time to take a wife--but he had never bargained to
fall in love with her as he did with Iris Portairley. And I've tried
to explain Iris, at the age of twenty-two wanting a deal more vitality
and reality than her surroundings could give her, half-consciously
waiting for "something to happen"--is it very wonderful that she fell
in love with him, not only with his person, but with the idea of him?
It is only a very callous kind of critic who will discount reality from
a love because--it is touched with glamour--for was there ever in all
history a lovely reality without a lovely glamour? Since, be you ever
so young, to kiss a courtesan is to kiss a courtesan, but, be you ever
so calm, to kiss a lover is to make a fairy-tale....

I didn't wonder whether Iris had told Roger that she was seeing
his brother. I knew very well that she hadn't--and, as Roger never
mentioned even Antony's name, not even to me (and there was that
rigidity about Roger that allowed no trespassing upon a distasteful
subject), there was little chance of the subject ever being mentioned
between them. But did Antony know of his brother's suit, so ironically
parallel to his own? I suppose that he must vaguely have heard of
something, from a remark he once let drop; but it could only have
been vaguely and distantly, for the spirit of the thing, of his new
gentleness, would have been broken much sooner if he had definitely
heard what was commonly said, that Iris was to marry Roger Poole.

I had often wondered how Antony would take the news of the engagement
when it officially happened.... I left them alone that afternoon; and
only re-entered the room when I had heard the front-door close to.
He was sitting at my writing-table, and looked round at me without a
smile, wearily.

"I thought you must have gone out somewhere, and was leaving you a
note," he explained--and then, at my inquiring look, with a flash of
his brazen impudence; "just to thank you for having been a good fellow,
Ronnie--and a very good hand at staging a play, too!"

That was the only reference he made, then or ever, to what had
gone--and with a sneer underlying it! which I had certainly answered
but for the evident hopelessness that had let it out. I was angry at
his morose resignation, at the weariness on his face--an ingrate if
ever there was one, who thought life was treating him badly! Whereas,
God knows, he had never ceased to buffet it into being his enemy. He
ought to have been grateful for knowing Iris at all....

Ten minutes later he left me, saying: "I'm going abroad, Mexico way,
and I don't suppose you'll be seeing me for some time, Ronnie--in fact,
there's no earthly reason why you should ever see me again." And to
his suddenly outstretched hand was tacked on the glimmer of a really
grateful smile; very like him that, to tack on a little gratitude to a
long good-bye....

And so Red Antony went away, leaving behind him nothing in England
but a question now and then in Iris and myself as to where exactly he
might be and what he might be doing. And as I had often wondered why he
hadn't left England long before, I never doubted but that now he had
taken the step he would keep his distance--a contemptuous distance,
mark you!--from it. For what, after all, was there for him to come back
to?

About a month after he had gone Iris and Roger were married. I was the
best man.


IV

That was two years before. And there I am, on that night two years
later, still in that taxi and running up an unconscionably high fare
towards Roger Poole's house in Regent's Park; and Antony back again in
England....

The intervening two years were full of an exaggeration of my state;
which in itself would have no importance for this tale but for the
reasons that caused it. Most of us, nowadays, seem, after all, to have
developed our emotions to a more, well, civilised plane than that of
mere constancy; an Armenian I know once told me that his father and
mother had loved each other for fifty years, but I shouldn't wonder if
that wasn't one more of those exaggerations for which oppressed peoples
are remarkable, so it must be almost unbelievable that a normal kind
of man could still be in a feverish state about a woman for so long a
time--and with, to be frank, so little for his trouble.

But there's no cynical twist about the thing, it is very easily
explained. One can't be dogmatic about the state of love, except just
to say that it is full of profoundly logical contradictions. For,
however serious you may be about your passions, you (you and I, I
mean; not odd people) cannot for ever go on plaguing a woman who is
not only so insensible to your attractions that she marries some one
else, but is actually happy with him when married. A belated sense of
humour must come to your rescue eventually, to point in a tired sort
of way at the rather ludicrous figure you cut to yourself, fussing
about with a passion that is of no earthly use to any one. Anyway, it
stands to reason that the appalling certainty of her happiness must
inevitably draw something from the fire of your love, so that it fades
and fades--unless, of course, you are a minor poet and worried with
your own sense of superiority and sonnets, in which case you will write
to her a cycle of the latter explaining the former, and choosing, if
possible, a date in another world when your bodies (both of which have
caused _you_ so much trouble) shall be rotten.

No: an unhappy love such as I speak of must be fed so that it can
continue; and, if by nothing positive, by what more acutely fed than by
her unhappiness? So, since it came about that Iris was unhappy, that
sufficiently explains my persistent love for her. But its exaggeration?
How can I hope to give any reason for that, but in my own fatuity? How
trivial it seems merely to say that there were moments, in that second
year of her marriage, when Iris gave me an acute sense of nearness,
of almost physical nearness; as though, in our destined journey, we
were every day nearing a point where the road would be so narrow that
perforce we must touch, where she and I would at last have to face each
other in a complete moment....

Not, however, that I knew anything of Iris's unhappiness for some
time--it had not outlasted her honeymoon, and yet her best friend
knew nothing of it for many months! Simply because, of course, it
is always the most tiresome of one's friends who confide in one....
Had I suspected that she might be unhappy I might have expected it
sooner. But, as it was, that first year of their marriage seemed to
confirm every hope one had for its success. A vivid, crowded year it
was--for Roger did do things supremely well! The original Poole money
had not been quite negligible, but from all one heard "the present
baronet" must have more than trebled it by lucky speculation (of course
there must always be those who slur away the "s" from that word)
and gambling; and his wife had brought him a considerable dowry. So
that he could and did let himself go, and indulged his passion for
entertaining in every sense in which that wretched word can possibly
rob people of their sleep.

The house in Regent's Park, with its large and decorous, too decorous,
rooms, and gardens down to the water (is it river or lake? One only saw
it at night, and then not very clearly, when it was either beautiful
or sombre) became a more frequent scene of parties than any other
responsible dwelling in London: a kind of holocaust of drink, cards,
and dancing from which one emerged an entirely different person to the
one who had entered a few hours before. One never entered that house
without drinking more than one had ever drunk before, the thing was
somehow in the atmosphere, and time over again one heard some poor
wretch tell another that he had never been so drunk since Oxford.

But the frequent parties were not merely rowdy affairs, though
rowdiness was never far absent for those who liked that sort of
thing. Roger, as I've said, knew what he was about; and now there
was forming around him, around the card-tables and the buffets, a
small but dominating nucleus of people whose serious purposes were
decently shielded, let's say, rather than submerged, by the riot and
extravagance of the passing moment. He was becoming, in fact, the
leader of a new old-school: and one as inimical to wasters as it was
indifferent to dullards. From the, after all, considerable eminence of
his means and position he was influencing the most promising of his
contemporaries and juniors to what he considered a useful, sympathetic,
and amusing mode of life: to think well and to live well, to live hard
and to work hard.... Not, if you look full at it, a very elevating
philosophy, not very original, since Haroun-al-Raschid lived and died
so many years ago. But, elevating or no, it was one with a deal of
practicable arrogance in it, and it is surprising how people will be
influenced by anything that appeals practicably to their arrogance.
And, I suppose, it is not so difficult as all that to influence people
to one's own conception of life if one has Roger Poole's advantages;
not only those of his means and his abilities but, as definitely,
of his looks and air; and, to top it all, the possession of such a
wife--an advantage more vivid and compelling than any he could find in
himself.

Of course I took it for granted that she was happy during that year!
She seemed supremely content--as why, one might ask, shouldn't she
be? Of all the men who had and might have come her way, Roger Poole,
in spite of his indulgences in cards and brandy-and-ginger-ale, was
certainly the most distinguished and eligible; and, what's more, the
most courteous and considerate of husbands, who so far forgot the
sardonic reticence one had thought natural to him as to seem, even in
public, always to be making love to his wife.

Personally, I found that year, full of Poole extravagance, so
entertaining that I think my vision of Iris, who since her marriage,
and her busy household's calls upon her time, came much less often to
see me in the afternoons, must have been as much confused by the gaiety
and bustle always round her, as by her hypocrisy about the thing. She
was, I think, as perfect a hostess as ever made a demand on one's time
(for I, her old friend, was allowed no excuse by which to absent myself
from any gathering whatsoever. Who else, said she, could give her the
necessary confidence in herself?) She evoked gaiety. And how bald
that sentence seems when I mean it to imply the elation caused in me,
anyway, by the mere sight of that figure here and there about the now
faintly and now brilliantly lit, whitepanelled rooms of that familiar
house. And her hair, that wanton, tawny hair! It was so cunningly
contrived of rich amber colours that it was always the most noticeable
ornament in the richest room; there was about it some curious and
wondrous quality of bedizening itself to suit and startle the various
pleasures of every eye, even the most accustomed, that traced its vivid
course round a crowded room.

It was not until almost the middle of the second year after her
marriage that Iris again began to come more or less frequently to see
me in the afternoons; but even then several weeks had to pass before I
came to realise, and ever so dimly, what lay behind her quietness and
silences, to understand the splendid, to me, faith which she put in my
companionship.... What had from the first drawn me to her, as to one
different from her tiresome and worldly friends, was that she was never
noisy in her personal relations. And so, when she now again came to see
me after the lapse of that feverish year I had allowed myself, I was
slow to see the difference in her usual quietness and silence, slow to
find sadness where I had ceased to suspect any.

She never told me anything. That was ever the worst of Iris, she never
did tell one anything, anything _actual_, I mean. She said not a word
about her unhappiness until one day I rather violently taxed her
with it, and then she seemed surprised that I should ask so obvious
a question: that I had not realised for myself the reasons for her
failure to capture happiness. She actually seemed to imply that I, her
friend, had eyes to see! whereas, God knows, I had little else but a
heart to feel....

What a plague to us our friend's reticence can be! No one can well
have suffered more from it than I with Iris throughout that time--she,
so well versed in that unselfish philosophy of trusting but never
burdening

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