I candidly vented my grievance on Iris, who seemed somehow implicated, the next time I saw her, but she said that I was always apt to be psychic about the wrong things.
"And even if you were in the least bit right you might be a little understanding about it," she complained. "For after all, it's not very unnatural that they should be a bit put out by you—because you, see, you've known all about their little bitternesses for so many years. You are somehow the sleuth that has never been shaken off! not, of course, that you ever wanted to be a sleuth, that was just circumstance, nor that either of them has ever wanted to shake you off—very much the reverse with Antony, in fact, poor Ronnie! But if there's any strain at all it must come from that, don't you think?..."
I didn't. In fact I thought it a very poor explanation—and, anyway, I had latelybeen growing so impatient about the damnable vagaries of those brothers, especially Antony's, that I clutched at this as a last straw; and vowed that several moons must pass before I would again dine with Roger and Antony. And several moons did pass....
Since Antony's return I had discovered in myself a lack of sympathy with him that I had never before felt to such a degree, even on his most unsympathetic days. And now, as the weeks passed and he never so much as came near me, I thought of him as really beyond the limit. After all, I had done a good deal for the man, one way and another. And now, simply because he had no use for me.... There was a shamelessness about the thing that gave me a positive distaste for him, and I really desired to see him as little as possible. But it would have surprised me very much if I had known that, as a fact, I was to see him only once more, on that night a few months later.
I might have known more than I did of what was happening at this time if I hadn't been so full of that stubborn impatience about the brothers; so unreciprocative about them, that, Iris accused me later, even if she had been minded to tell me anything of her feelings and of what was happening (which would only have furiously muddled me withouthelping her in the least) my attitude of, as it were, "disowning" them would have prevented any such confidence.
I saw very little of Roger throughout that time, and then only casually at the Club; for I never once went to Regent's Park—as much because I didn't want to as because he didn't ask me. But, Iris told me, neither did he ask any one else, except to cards—there were no more parties of the old kind. And the reason for that, as she told it to me one day, came almost as a shock; for when she had asked him why there were no more parties he had simply answered, because he couldn't afford them. It was difficult to think of Roger as not being able to afford things. For years one had thought of him as so rich a man without enquiring how rich, as so magnificent a spender without thinking of how much he spent—he seemed capable of spending so much! There are men in relation to whom one doesn't think of money, it seems natural to them to have so much. But now, it had happened that he couldn't afford things!...
"And what's more," Iris said, as we were childishly wondering about this (for we were both rather stupid about large sums of money, I suppose because she was so used to them and because I had never had any),"he's been having a real streak of bad luck at cards lately. Of course, he's lost before, but he has always managed to get it back in the end and much besides—but lately, you know, as I've watched them playing, it seems to me that he was losing very heavily. But it's difficult to believe that he has ever lost much, he always seems so very unaffected by it—so unbelievably a good loser that one simply can't believe he's lost very much." And thus Roger's philosophy of surface values had at last won its share of Iris's grudging admiration, or so it seemed to me from her wistful silence. And, I remember, I wondered what kind of a man he could be who could, despite so much, so firmly retain a woman's imagination about his personality.
It was difficult, Iris began (when all these things had settled into the limbo of our past lives), to tell me in a matter-of-fact way exactly when and exactly why she had come to be distressed by the nearness of her husband and his brother to each other. It had just grown, by very devious ways and windings, though not so stealthily but that she hadn't noticed the discomfort of it; but,as with such things, it had seemed altogether so unreasonable and fanciful a feeling that she had never ceased trying to discourage it within herself; and it was only at the end that, with quite a burst, her fear had finally overcome her sense of absurdity, and had scattered it back to the shades that had sent it to delude her for so long—only at the very end!
At first and for a little time after she was, as I had seen that afternoon, happy about their friendship. She was pleased with the success of her plot, it seemed so much like a bad thing put right, one more "bogey" exorcised from this world. And, mainly, she was pleased for Roger's sake.... Ah yes, that would surprise me, to whom she had made such a fuss about wanting to help Antony! But Antony had only been an incident of her plot—she had seized this idea and given him the leading part, while Roger and she would get as much or more benefit from it than he. How the idea of using Antony's suggestion of the masquerade had come to her she didn't know, but it had come forcefully enough for her to take great pains about his disguise; the idea that it would somehow be of great good to Roger to make it up with his brother, that this new affection (she had an instinct that the brothers were really very fond ofeach other, but pettily arrogant) might make him more, well, tangible—to her!
"My dear, of course I wanted to make him tangible to me, possible to me. I always wanted that. Don't you realise that ever since I first met him every thought I had, however little I realised it, was really concerned with him and about him? My feeling for him had crept into my veins, it was as much a part of me as my voice is, and no amount of hardening my heart against him could drive it out. And, as you know, my heart grew hard enough; I had begun to close myself against him soon after our honeymoon, quite, quite tightly, as one can if one tries very hard. It was my only defence, you see, I couldn't hit back nor really leave him, for there's simply no pride in love.... And I had succeeded, hadn't I? By the time Antony came back my defences were so strong, so strong that I began to think I must have exaggerated my love as much as one has always suspected one's friends of exaggerating theirs: almost to treat my love with a bedside manner, it seemed so dim and ailing.... But it was there all the time, I suppose, love only playing at indifference, the only game that grown-ups continue to play after childhood, but never so well as children could play it ifthey weren't too wise to try. And as soon as Antony said he'd like to make friends with Roger and suggested how it could best be done, some part of my mind fixed on it and made a dream, of how Roger might change, wonderfully. It was just a chance, and anyway it would help Antony.
"I was happy about it at first, it seemed that I might have been right about Roger, perhaps he might become more tangible—until there came the little shocks, earthquakes in the air and under my feet! The first one was their sudden distaste for you, Ronnie, even though I did seem so snappy with your grievance. In Roger it only surprised me, though very unpleasantly, for he was apt to make these sudden dislikes. But in Antony, though I didn't tell you, it shocked me, I couldn't understand it, it seemed the sort of thing a man might do in a book, a renegade kind of thing—not that he said anything in particular against you, he hadn't the face to do that beforeme; but his attitude of a kind of contempt was quite enough in a man whom I knew you had been so very nice to, even though you had always seen through him. But I thought I would wait a little while before thoroughly disliking 'poor' Antony, as it might be just one more of those freak perversities which you and Ihave often been so impatient about in both of them. So I didn't mind when he came to live at the house about then, and anyway I couldn't see more of him than before, for he was at dinner every night.
"Then came the disappointment of Roger's slacking away from the House and from everything to do with it. And though that seemed to have nothing to do with Antony (how could it?) I couldn't resist a vague idea.... Even before Antony came back he had begun to be more and more interested in the City and less in politics, but now he seemed to have become altogether a business man. There was something particularly dreary about that disappointment, for Roger's public life had never lost its glamour for me. I had always been interested in his career, and interested in him as a bright part of dull affairs. All that political stuff had seemed to become his personality so well, and besides it seemed the only proper outlook for his passion to dominate people—and now I would have to lose even that much of him! that part of him that I read about in the papers, and that had seemed to be really mine. A funny contradiction, that his wife should treasure only that part of him which the whole world knew as well or better than she....
"I showed my bitter disappointment when one day he told me he was thinking of resigning his seat; and, do you know, he actually seemed apologetic about it! It was strange, that air of apology about him, and the way he looked at me from the door as he went out, as though to say he was sorry for having let me down! Let me down!
"That was the first time I realised a new gentleness about him, something I hadn't seen in him even when he had made love to me before we were married. I was very young then, and thought he made love so well then because of his gentleness, whereas it was only practice, like being good at billiards. But now there was this queer air of gentleness about the way he sometimes looked at me, almost of weakness. And maybe my surprise at it made it seem even more intangible than it was, for it seemed to be nearer the ceiling than to me, I couldn't somehow reach it; and I didn't dare try to, I wanted to touch him but I was afraid—he had done the awful thing, had made my heart suspicious, which is degrading to oneself and to the person one loves. And so, at first, I mistrusted my own weakness for being hurt by him, and I mistrusted him.... But if Antony had been a different sort of man I would have blessed him for somehowor other having brought that gentleness on Roger, for of course he had something to do with it in a contrary way, I thought.
"I suppose my disappointment at his leaving the House had something to do with my boredom at the eternal talks about business. Money, money, money. Something about Mexico and oil, as far as I could gather, that Antony had brought back to England; and I could only hope that there was a lot of oil to make up for the amount of talk about it, and interest in it.... They left together in the morning and came back together in the evening, sometimes quite late, as dull a pair of business men as ever got be-knighted; and the only people that Roger asked to the house were odd Napoleonic kind of men, very good at being 'merchant princes' I've no doubt, and the usual gamblers—who, as far as I could see, were very good at gambling, by the amount that Roger seemed nowadays to lose to them, mainly at poker.
"Roger had never talked to me about money affairs, I being old-fashioned with my affectations of stupidity. But I had realised that things were not going so well with him as they used to, that his immersion in the City and retirement from politics had a great deal to do with being temporarily hard up. He's having a run of bad-luck, I thought,and must be a little worried about it; though it struck me as strange that Roger should worry about money, for he had always such an air of complete detachment from it. But it must be that that is on his mind, I thought as I looked at him, and thus found a plausible reason for his rather feverish and seedy looks.
"His face, as you know, was always colourless, and his eyes very bright, but he had never looked unhealthy; a kind of vitality and vividness had always made him seem very alive and well. But just lately I had thought he looked rather too pale and haggard—and then, one night at dinner, I realised suddenly that my Roger was terribly thin, a long, thin, white-faced man with brilliant eyes—but so thin! Of course, he had always been like that, but one had thought of him as supple, not thin—and now, suddenly, it seemed to me that his thinness was the most apparent thing about him! And there, at the other side of the table, was Antony, redder than ever, burlier than ever, healthier than ever, and growing, I thought, a good deal stouter. And, resenting him, I suddenly resented his healthy good looks in contrast to his brother's nervous paleness, and—why, my dear, I couldn't take my eyes from Roger that night, he seemed so whiteand delicate, so quite unlike himself, unlike the man I knew! Of course, it was silly of me to be surprised at it, since he had always looked rather white and delicately made—but so self-confidently delicate that one had never thought of him as particularly so. But now a touch of worry and weakness seemed to have pruned that self-confidence away from his body, and I seemed to see what had always been there under a cover; a kind of shadow where I had grown used to a kind of tyrant....
"I accused him of being not well, but he said that it was only that he was a little tired and overworked: 'But if everything goes well I will buy a villa near Cannes, Iris, and we will go there, and leave Antony to do all the work. Antony is a great financier, you must know....' And he left the sentence in the air, looking at him with a smile; while Antony said with a laugh to me: 'If only I had Roger's brain with which to carry out my ideas you wouldn't be able to see me for money, Iris, nor yourself for Teclas.' But you know Antony, how he could never make the most comical boast without giving one an unpleasant idea that he really believed in it—and how unpleasantly absurd it suddenly was, the idea of Antony acquiring Roger's brain just to set me up in pearls!
"That was just about a month before that night you and I will always remember. But how, my dear, was I to know or even dream of what was to come? What did I know about the fall in cotton prices and the upside downs of that oil thing, of which I heard of vaguely as Cascan Oil?...
"All I actually did know was that Roger's health was weak, and that began to worry me to the exclusion of nearly all else; but, from his 'faded' looks, I thought he was probably right in saying that it was overwork, and I didn't dare to pester him about it, for I could trust no amount of gentleness in him to rid him of his contrary perversities—but I would take him away at the first possible moment, which, I vowed, would be very soon indeed! Oh yes, Ronnie, how many chances one gives God for saying that He knows better....
"And it was about that time of my worrying about Roger's health that I noticed that the relations between him and Antony had changed since I had had the feeling that they were so interested in each other as scarcely to notice me. But I can't express it except by saying that they seemed gradually to have changed from a great amiability to an electric kind of chaff—which, as that about Antony and finance, Roger generally led andAntony followed as best he could. I remembered then what you had told me about them at school, but there was nothing like that between them now, no jeers from Antony, and only a very kindly sort of contempt from Roger. It was contempt surely enough, that look Roger gave him now and then, but a contempt wrapped in a good-natured smile: his 'Antony' smile, I rather jealousy called it to myself, for he had never turned tomewith that particular kind of good-nature with which he smiled at Antony. And there was certainly no such quarrelsomeness as we had all come to expect from Antony, even when Roger might sting just a little bit sharply; in fact, the remarkable thing about him, I thought, was his great deference, not so much to Roger, but to Roger's intelligence. He seemed to have convinced himself that his brother was the cleverest man in the world, and he had a way of sometimes repeating what Roger had just said tacked on to one of his great laughs, and an air about him as though to say: 'Just look what a clever brother I've got!'
"What could I think about Antony, my dear! To me he was always charming, but charming, and quite naturally. Antony, as you know, always wore courtesy when he needed it like a rather flamboyant cloakflapping in a north wind, but to me he was always quite natural with it—just as in those days at your flat when I liked him so genuinely. But I had somehow come to mistrust him—and more deeply than one can mistrust one's friends' weaknesses while continuing to like them. And when I saw, or felt I saw, that contempt in Roger's eyes, I was more than ever uncomfortable about Antony. It seemed that Roger mistrusted him too—but that he didn't mind mistrusting him, it made no difference to his liking for him! Imagine the smoke from that dim fire, the theories that would chase through my head as we sat at dinner, often rather silently! And then the next moment I would wonder impatiently what the deuce all the fuss was about. They were such friends, after all!... But no sense of absurdity could so easily rid me of the feeling that Roger knew very well what Antony was about, but that he was just waiting, ever so good-naturedly, just letting things be. Roger to let things be!..."
And as Iris repeated those words about him I understood very well the reflected astonishment in her eyes. It must have been strange, Roger "letting things be!" about whom the most vivid fact had always been that he must try to colour and influence anythingthat he touched or that touched him, men or work or circumstance.... But, Iris said,shecouldn't let things be! As that month grew she realised that, absurd or not, there was something strangely the matter: and that if there was ever to be any levelness forced upon their present life she must be its direct agent. But she couldn't for the moment worry about Antony; nothing could be done until some kind of solidity had been coaxed back into Roger's health, for he seemed lately so gravely feeble.
By this time, although she had not realised its every stage, all her bitterness and resentment at his past scepticisms and perversities had passed from her mind; leaving her, despite her perplexities, happier and lighter, as after the expulsion of ugly grotesques from a sacred place. Her heart had opened to him, not artificially before his new weakness of health, but from a more profound realisation of the man himself. Now that she had lost that mistrust of him, he seemed so near to her; and it was as though the past wretched two years had not been except to deepen and widen her love, this love, it seemed, that had been found good but not good enough, and so had been sealed up for a time to allow builders to shape it into a more workable intensity; and now it hadgrown more complete and wiser than that first impulse to utter abandon which he had roused in her, and which had never been but an electric current of unhappiness between them. Now she understood him a little better—if it was understanding him to know clearly that she could have awakened this gentleness in him long before. He was one of those men who couldn't give but must be made to. She should have plundered where she had pleaded. She should have played the buccaneer to this man who had grown so used to being taken for one.... But now, she saw, it was too late to fly the Jolly Roger, for he had come by some knowledge of himself from a hidden turning on that well-paved road which he had trod with so well-poised an arrogance; and, in yielding to what had suddenly—and yes, secretly—come, he had yielded something from his health, some part of his vitality. Yes, it was too late to play at buccaneering now. First she must coax back his full health, and quietly wait for him to realise completely her new understanding of him. No half-way fulfilment this time, in this new love-affair that she knew was coming to them! She couldn't bear that—she must wait until he knew himself, so that he could love without any of those retractions thathad made such a wretched muddle of it all before.
So, letting love be as well as she could, she now disregarded any irritation she might cause, and began to "pester" him about his health: saying that whether it was overwork or not he must see a doctor. Until one evening, Antony having gone out after dinner, as she was complaining about the stupid insensibility of men to their own well-being, he said that it really was a very common complaint and not worth seeing a doctor about: just bad-luck, he said.
"But how bad-luck? Do be serious, please, Roger.... I am so tired of fantasies...."
"Just the thing itself, my dear—just bad-luck. Now why should that be a fantasy? Isn't it expressive enough, or do you think that the only serious illnesses are those that doctors get paid for discovering and the Lord be thanked for curing?"
"It's not that, but when one hears of some one being ill of his luck one thinks of a boneless, watery kind of man who thinks the world isagainsthim because a favourite has lost him a fiver."
"But I told you, Iris, that I meant just the fact of bad-luck, not any particular loss from it." And then he explained, but ever somildly, as though to a child who mightn't very readily understand an obvious fact.
"'It's very simply, and quite logical, I think. Have you ever realised, Iris, that since you met me I have always won? Well, all my life has been like that, I have always won—I don't mean only at cards and racing but at everything that is supposed to make life worth living, those various prizes that we put our names down for. Some men take their paths in life steadily and calculate their progress step by step by hard work, and some men just have a throw at what they most want from time to time—they may work hard to have deserved it after they have got it, but they get it by a chance, by backing themselves against the field. But that is such a poor description, for it's never such a conscious thing as that, the throw comes from a real part of one's nature. It's only a conscious trait in that awful type of "hotel-lounge" American who has many diamond tie-pins and wants every one to know that he lives by bluff and hazard, and in other fools who think that a strange glamour reflects on them from taking chances—whereas to take a chance is just the business of one's nature, it's the business of one's life, just like art or grocery. One gambles naturally or not at all, and the people who lose are mainly thosewho gamble for some other purpose than the mere fact of gambling, as anycroupierin any Casino will tell you....'
"He stopped and looked absently across at me with that half satiric smile that crept about his face when he spoke about himself—which was so seldom that I was now listening with all the nerves of my body. And then, each word very slowly and distinctly, as one might count the caskets of a fabulous treasure—
"'I have always won,'" he said.
(I'll leave you to imagine, Ronnie, that if it is possible for any man to make such a statement without seeming to boast his good fortune, Roger so made it).
"I can't tell you any more about it than you can find from just that sentence,' he explained, 'I don't know why I've won. I don't know. But I suppose that it somehow came naturally to me to win every time I ventured—whether it was for money or anything else. Always a good seat on the front bench, and sometimes the very first seat of all.... I know how difficult it is for you not to think I'm exaggerating, for every one does exaggerate one way or the other when talking roundabout the chances they've taken. But, Iris, dear, please believe that I'm exaggerating less than people usually dowhen I tell you that I grew to take the fact of winning as, well, my right—as part of me, don't you see? Without very particularly realising or fostering it, it grew to work out like that....
"'Yes, my good-luck or whatever it was, was certainly a part of me,' he repeated. 'And a very important part, if one's good health is important—why, Iris, my good-luck was the very key and centre of it! It must have been.... And does that, after all, seem so fantastic? that my whole zest and confidence and vitality, everything you first saw in me, were made up of my luck? I was nothing without them, the things of my luck—and you didn't know the man, Iris, you only knew the luck. The luck was the man, don't you see? and without it the man was—well, I'm damned if I know what he was! I can't remember ever not winning, so I've never had to examine myself until lately. For, of course, I didn't realise all I have told you until just lately—I suppose I am the kind of man to prospect rather than introspect when on top of a mountain. But I realise it all well enough now that there's such a poor view from the lowest ridge. I know now what my worst enemy would never have dreamt of saying of me, that I am a bad loser—a very bad loser in its reallyfundamental sense. Other people may lose or win with their faces, but it seems that I win or lose with my whole being.... The fact is that I can't lose, I simply don't know how. Don't you see that I can't lose, Iris? It saps all my vitality.... Poor Iris, to be married to a man who is only a man so long as he wins.'
"The little smile had clung to his face all the while, like a faint light about its shadows; and maybe it was the self-mockery of it that made his manner so much lighter than his words—which towards the end had seemed to fall wearily and listlessly, as though he had resigned himself to do a duty. And it must have been a deeper self-accusation than any words could express that had helped him to humiliate himself in a matter-of-fact way of explanation. For to him, Roger, what humiliation! To have realised within himself that he, of all the men in the world, was that strangely contemptible thing, I don't quite know why, a bad loser! To confess that realisation to me could add nothing to the humiliation, for Roger was never but first audience to his own acting, never but the main person in any gallery to which he might play! He stood or fell by himself, and if he fell, no other's judgment could count beside his own.
"How, then, could I tell him at that moment on what, as he was speaking, my mind had fixed—so that I could scarcely restrain the cry of my discovery, scarcely bear not jumping up from my chair to hold him to me. But to him, an egoist, realising that aspect himself, what possible consolation in telling him of my discovery? the reverse, maybe, another blow.... The vivid fact that I was intensely glad at the failure of his luck! All those arrogancies and dominations with which he had first charmed, then repelled, and always baffled one (they had seemed so out of one's reach to prick them, perched so confidently on a highest pinnacle of assurance): the whole of his easy mastery over life that had bred his 'confidence,' 'vitality'—I saw now that they were just the scum over his good-luck, a kind of verdigris that had made me grow to despise them, however unwillingly. 'You never knew the man, you only knew the luck. The man was nothing.' ... Poor dear, he was so sunk in that realisation that he couldn't possibly realise the vastness of the parallel one that it had roused in me: that the man was everything, the luck worse than nothing, just a slaughter-house for every quality with which my love had dowered him.
"And so, glad as I was at the result inhimself from his change of luck, its result in his health lost some of its seriousness—as a thing that is explained generally does, unless it is too bad. For I certainly didn't take his explanation of it as 'fantasy,' it was quite obvious that he had his finger on the real cause of his weakness. Given the other extreme, as he had so candidly explained it, why shouldn't a man fail in health with the failing of his luck? But I felt that he was more affected by the shock of it than by its contemplation—and, after all, I didn't love him weakly, I could deal with a shock, be it ever so mental. His air of resignation, so foreign in him, disturbed me a little; but, I thought, that is a natural part of the ailment and one will deal with them both at a time. Yes, the thing would mend of itself, for it carried its own cure with it, in a new and deepening knowledge of himself. He would be better even before the pendulum of this strange 'luck' of his had swung back again; and I had no fear from what its swinging back to 'good' might bring to us both, for he was now learning the lesson of himself beyond all un-learning.
"So I thought, anyway, after I had persuaded Roger, that same night, to explain just a bit of what had been happening to him in the great world—where, it seemed,luck of sorts made such a mess of men. And indeed it was only a very little bit that he explained, for he was tired, and said that it was a long and dull history, even though it hadn't taken very long to happen. 'Exactly how long?' I asked, but he evaded that—else maybe I had known so very much more!
"'As you know, when a writer wants to be done with one of his characters,' he explained, 'he sometimes throws a few bad investments and bucket-shops at the poor man and he's done for before you turn the page. Well, there are plenty of such things outside books, and I somehow seem to have happened on one or three of late. And thesedebaclesalways happen in the same way, if they are going to happen at all, to men whose money is mostly on paper. The paper actually becomes paper—and now even a Frenchgendarmewouldn't accept as a tip most of the stuff that was once my fortune. I thought I had tried every way there was of spending money, but I had never realised that losing it was the quickest. I know now. And that's all, Iris.'
"'But, my dear, it doesn't matter all that much! After all, bad-luck was never more than bad-luck seen in the Book of Job. It's inconvenient, of course—'
"'It's certainly that. But, of course, allyour money is quite safe and doing very well, and I'll see any creditor to hell before you dare pay him one penny of any debt of mine. I'd have you know that the best bankrupts are always very touchy about the thoroughness of their bankruptcies.... But, as you say, Iris, all that doesn't matter very much.'
"If he agreed about that, then why was he getting himself ill over it? I was going to heckle him, when he explained—and with what so far unknown deference, in him, to one's bewilderment!—that he had not been worrying about losing the money, nor so very much about the now almost certain bankruptcy: 'Although that is really so serious for me that I've got to joke about it or be as entirely silent as I have been—and will be after to-night,' he excused his levity to warn me. 'But it's actually the naked fact that these things can and have happened to oneself that has got on my nerves—which must, I suppose, be very tender nerves. Just the change of luck, you see, rather than its particular results, however serious.' ...
"But before we went upstairs he took me by the shoulder with some of his old air of authority, and warned me that he would be very disappointed if I worried over what he had told me. 'Because, after all, I didn't tell you about it because I wanted to—but simplyso that you shouldn't worry so much about my health now you know that it isn't due to a weak heart or a damaged lung—only damaged luck, after all! And I may, just possibly may, find a way out of everything in the next few weeks.'
"'With Cascan Oil?' I asked, as though it were a magic oil.
"But I didn't gather anything from his smile except that it was one of those smiles that never answer questions in the way you want them answered. 'It's certainly very good oil!' he only said.
"'And will you promise to tell me as soon as you have found your way out, as of course you will, you being you, luck or no luck?' I asked him firmly. 'And will you also promise to drop some of this air of resignation or whatever it is that has lately been growing on you? please, Roger, for although it makes you very kissable at home, I'm sure it's likely to make you quite "broke" in the great world—which doesn't care how much your wife loves you so long as it can get your money.'
"He promised to tell me—for I had fixed in my mind that as soon as he came to me with never so little brighter news I would at once snatch him away from London to some place like Tangiers, to mend his health and let the deuce take his luck, which was aplague, good or bad. And you know when he brought me news, at lunch-time two weeks later, the day before that....
"He rang up from the City to ask me if I would be in for lunch; and it was so unusual for him to come home for lunch that I quite ran wild in putting you off, so that you developed a wonderful theory about my having found a new young man from the back row of the Russian Ballet.
"Almost the first word he said when he came in was, 'Well, that's finished.' But as he said it with almost a smile and quite undramatically I didn't expect, as I 'registered' pleasure, to be pulled up by:
"'I mean there are no more uncertainties to worry about, Iris. The rats have got at everything.'
"'Then,' I said, 'we can go away for a lovely holiday with my money. To-morrow, for instance....' You see I never did believe much in standing on one's dignity about money and honour, for money's a messy thing anyway.
"But he was staring at me so differently, so pitiably almost, and with no smile anywhere to light his tired face, that I had to leave my holiday in the air, miserably wondering at him.
"'If it was only that kind of mess!' hesaid at last simply, as though I would understand by that!
"He wouldn't talk about anything to do with it through lunch, and I had to sit there with my heart screwed up for fear of what he was going to tell me now. Oh, I loved him so as he sat almost silently facing me, his thin face set so firmly that it looked drawn on that lovely paper you find in Kelmscott books; and his eyes, those so efficient eyes, now and then playing darkly with the sun through the large window behind me.
"It was as we were leaving the table that he suddenly threw his bomb, which hasn't really yet finished exploding in me. He threw it with a sudden, quiet smile and a look over my shoulder. He threw it as though it were a marvellous joke.
"'You very thoroughly let the rats in through that window that night, didn't you, Iris?'
"And I stared at him confounded, while my fingers groped about the table for something to hold, to hold tightly.... And I suddenly saw red, a kind of blind anger tore at me to tear him:
"'Then why didn't you kick him out? Why did you let him stay on and on? I thought he was foul and that he hated you,but you knew for certain all the time—and yet you've let him stay, like a weak fool!' And I felt like screaming out my detestation of the whole atmosphere about them, the silly childish darkness of it all....
"How shrill I must have been at that moment! But you see, all the half conscious fears of the past months had suddenly burst true and shaken me quite beyond myself. And now I was so wildly sick to realise his lassitude—and he looking silently down from his height at me, unmoved by my anger except to that faint, irritating smile.
"'You knew he hated you, you knew he hated you,' I accused him trembling.
"'But I didn't hatehim,' he said mildly. 'I've loved Antony, you see.'
"And then that long stifling afternoon, when he and I sat under the sunblinds of the library window and he told me from beginning to end the tale of himself and Antony. The sun in the garden to our feet, the gay and livid sunblind over our heads, and across the water the green and yellow openness of the Park—why, it was one of those afternoons that are sent to make all human and animate things seems like nonsense!And nothing in the world but Roger's clear, definite voice could have drawn so thick a line between us and its carelessness. For what he said had no contact with a day of sun, it was a tale for a winter's day with doors and windows sealed, and a bright fire to mock the shadows of the tale into dark corners.
"He had said abruptly that he had loved Antony, as though he meant until that very moment; and now he began by explaining that it had been so ever since he could remember, and that it had grown with childhood and far beyond, this love for Antony. (And, Ronnie, you remember how, well, saturnine and rather hard Roger's face always was? Lately it had been growing softer, I thought, but now it became quite a different face altogether, almost different lines and different depths, the real face of a man you and I never knew, as we never knew of his childhood. There was nothing soft nor sentimental about the way he spoke, he was speaking of naked facts nakedly, but it was merely that the facts spoke for themselves in his voice.)
"When they were both ever so little Antony had been the favourite of the house, he was so much the impish kind of child that naturally is. And Roger had not been theleast jealous, but had loved to see Antony made much of, and had spent a great part of his childish ingenuity in still further sending up his younger brother's 'stock' with nurses and parents. It had come so naturally to him to worship the pink, gay, careless little man that then was Antony—growing every year pinker and redder until he seemed just like a sunball, the loveliest child that ever a house and a dark brother were blessed with; for Roger, even then dark-haired and pale—anyway, beside that little meteor—used to despise himself very heartily, and inarticulately fumble with a theory that any one who looked as he did could come to no good in the world, whereas Antony—oh, but the world was made for Antony! God had made the world and then He had made Antony, and just thrown Roger in as his elder brother to help matters on a bit. Well, that he did, and did increasingly as childhood grew, loving to see Antony happy—who cared for nothing but his own wild enjoyments, and expected every one else to join in them; which Roger, of course, did, and nearly always bore the brunt of the results—expecting never a bit of gratitude from the young imp, and getting none, for it all seemed very natural to young Antony. But when, once in a while the chief culprit wasdetected and punished, then Roger couldn't bear the idea and set up such a hullabaloo that they had to deal with him as well.
"Those were the happiest days of all, those days of early childhood, he said. No suspicions then—only games, and dark plots in dark corners, and marvellous escapades that no grown-up could ever discount by punishing. But only in those very early days. For the change came soon enough—when Roger was not more than nine, and they had their first tutor. But the change (or whatever it was, for the possibility of it must always have been in Antony else it couldn't so readily have come out) was at first so slight, and later so incomprehensible and baffling, that Roger was almost on his way to school before he could even dimly realise the cause of it.
"Soon after the tutor came, Antony had grown surly with Roger, inimical; and one day, when Roger had badly hurt his leg in climbing down a tree, had laughed with a queer satisfaction that had made Roger look at him in a shocked silence. He had been hurt by Antony's sudden repudiation of him as a comrade, had wondered how he had suddenly come to prefer his stolen games with the game-keeper's sons—but at this sudden sigh of Antony's dislike, for it could only besuch that took satisfaction from his pain, he had been quite shocked in his young mind. And his sky had filled with strange and unbelievable clouds. He could only look at Antony and wonder painfully, realising very little but the monstrous fact that he was hated by some one he loved. Yes, Roger had been quite thrown off his balance by the blow from behind, and the rest of his childhood had passed like that, Antony growing to open and jeering enmity and he continuing silent, just silent....
"And as he told me how he had borne Antony's cheek in silence, I looked at him wonderingly, for such a patience in such a boy as Roger must have been seemed, well, almost unpleasant and unmanlike. He saw what I was thinking, and explained that it was simply because he had not known what to do, he hadn't known. He couldn't retaliate in the same spirit, because Antony's dislike formed no such parallel in him. He was at the disadvantage of loving him as before, though now it was an affection mixed with those dark clouds of wondering. His liking for Antony had never had to do with whether Antony was good or bad. In fact, as a very small child he had realised that his young brother could do strange things, and strangely, but that had never affectedhis admiration; those little traits went with Antony, that's all. And had so continued to 'go with him,' disturbing Roger every now and then—until, after the tutor came, he realised that those 'traits' looked to make up the whole! And that was terrible, doing away with any admiration—but after all it's a weak love that must admire what it loves; and soon Roger came to accept even that as inevitably Antony, still loving him—and waiting, don't you see, until he could find out where all this dislike came from, what all this fuss was about and why?
"'If it had only been Jacob envying Esau his birthright!' Roger exclaimed. 'But it was nothing like that, and never has been, but a much deeper and more instinctive jealousy—deep enough to make it ridiculous, but instinctive enough to make it as human as all dangerous madnesses are. And you can imagine how instinctive, from his age when he first came by it! Then, of course, it was inarticulate and unrealised by him, but real enough to change his acceptance of me as a comrade into a dislike that grew with every month. At first he knew no more than I what it was about, but he naturally found out much sooner, and made hay with his discovery....
"'I don't suppose you have ever seen it,Iris, but there is a kind of similarity between Antony and me. It's got nothing to do with body and surface, nor, as far as any one can see, with our points of view about anything. But there it is and has always been—and I can only express it by saying that the foundations of our minds must be the same; that—and can you believe it?—our real inclinations of mind are the same, or rather Antony's have always been the same as mine. There's nothing very extravagant or uncommon about that, two menmayvery easily be made that way—if Antony weren't so obviously the man he is, the child he was! But you can see the curious absurdity of such a likeness from even what you know of him—why, his very voice and face, everything about him, shout out that his inclinations are as far from mine as one man's can be from another's! And even as a child he seemed every bit as different from me, a roystering child to be a roystering man—and so you can imagine how very impossible it was for the one child to discover the secret of the other's dislike. For that dislike came from a strange jealousy, and the jealousy from that similarity—and all so confused and overlaid by every trait that can make one man different from another that the devil himself, though he had put the fantasy there,would have been hard driven to find it. And the fantasies that grip men's minds and destroy them are like mists, it is in their nature to be bodiless yet to obscure: they are like mists that come upon a field in the morning, no one knows whence, and fade no one knows whither, to come again as mysteriously in the evening. And so this jealousy had come upon my Antony—but from where, just where and why? To cloud a baby man's mind with hatred and beastly things....
"'Being that, I suppose it was quite natural for Antony's baby jealousy to date from the tutor's coming. Now, as apart from governess twaddle, we really had to work. And, do you see, Antony, who all his life has seemed a man who cared not a damn for books and learning, who even as a boy seemed more inclined to kick a book than read it, wanted to be as good as I couldn't help being at mastering things easily? He couldn't, he knew he couldn't, and that's why he kicked a book instead of reading it. That was anger not contempt; and, to fan the anger with impotence, a dim idea forming at the back of his little mind that I had been purposely brought into the world a year before him to have good time to steal all the good things of the brain that had been equally allotted to both of us; leaving himonly the same foundations and nothing but impotent husk to cover it—so that he must always be the buffoon, and I—and I the one who could do well everything he wanted to! And the basis of the mind must have seemed to him to be the same, for he sowantedto do them, not out of rivalry because I did, but because it came naturally to him to want to. Silly and unreasonable, yes—but then so is all madness that can hurt one.
"'It wasn't only work, but everything, that fanned the idea into Antony's mind, and then kept on blowing into the flame that seems to have burnt the poor fool ever since. At leasthemight have been good at outdoor things, games of strength or recklessness, whereas I might have been expected to be more an "indoor" man! Since he could do nothing else that I could do, he might at least have been allowed to play games of every kind better! But even there, and at first without trying to, I could do easier and better what he could only do fairly well; though later, at school, I went out of my way to rub the thing in—it had come to that by then, you see.
"'I had found my Antony out, and had my answer to him. I had plumbed a little of the confused issues of his jealousy, I knewnow what a large part of his hatred was made of admiration: in fact very nearly the whole of it. And, since hate exaggerates even more than love, he exaggerated to himself what little there was to admire, making me out the devil of a fine fellow—because, you see, in admiring me he was very really admiring himself! never rid of that infernal idea that I was as he should have been, as he had a right to be—but for me! Oh, no, he never belittled me! And you've seen the deference to which he kindly treats me? Well, the idea of that—not, of course, the expression—has always been there. It makes one's head reel to think of him as never but admiring one's mentality and abilities much above their reality, and hating me all the more because of that admiration simply because it kept on creating more things to hate!
"'I remember, at school, Antony was always the first in the gallery to watch me playing a racquets match—racquets, of course, being the one game the poor man simply couldn't get at all, while I played it better than anything else. And sometimes I used to look up from the court at him, sitting with his hands at each side of his face, absorbed—in what? not the game, but only in the way I was playing it—the wayhehimself was playing it! But, ridiculous as it all was, I had grown cruel about him, and let him see that I despised him as much as he despised himself; which, you know, was very much indeed—though he would have died rather than let the world see it.
"'I had been working at my contempt for him very systematically ever since the age of about fourteen. It was my only protection against him, the only way I could prevent him from getting the better of my love for him—which was always there, mark you, for there was no doing away with that, it was as natural as the lava around a volcano. The advantage had been all with Antony until then, doing what he liked with me in the way of unpleasantness; but now that I had found this contempt (which I worked at just as a goldsmith works at a golden leaf, scratching and shaping and bending and filing it until it's every bit as lifelike as the original, but a good deal heavier), I was far and away the first string in the wretched orchestra; for Antony never did know what to do with contempt but physically smash it, and he and I have never raised a hand against each other except once—I suppose because it would have been such a trivial expression for what we felt. And so, not being able to answer it, it maddened him; but so obviouslythat I couldn't resist doing it again and again—until one night, at the end of my last term, I went the nagging limit, and he had to throw a bread knife at me and almost killed another man. But I dare say Ronnie has told you about that....
"'After school we saw each other once in a dozen months, if then, and only as acquaintances might in the street—and who, living in London these last fifteen years, could possibly avoid the figure of Red Antony? But step by step the thing went its same way—step by step feeding Antony's first mad idea with conviction. The wheel turned to my tune, never to his ... he who would have liked to be doing things with his brain and otherwise as I was doing them, whereas he had to be a soldier! For what else is there for a younger son with no brains and a little money to do but be a soldier or curate? And Antony believed in Heaven and Hell much too vividly ever to want to tell any one else about them....
"'He simply had to go his destined way, as the noisy, red, attractive and dangerous fool that the world expected him to be, and then blamed him for thoroughly being. And all the while he must have been playing a bitter game, something like chess, with himself: moving his pieces here and there in theway he would love to do in life, and then straining his eyes across the gulf at me to see if I had done in life what he couldn't even do in a game against himself—and, I suppose, I invariably had!
"'He must have had the devil of a bad time all those years, the best years of a man's life, poor Antony. You see, he took no pleasure from the kind of life he led, but there was nothing else he could do. He made no real friends—himself an unwilling fool, despising complacent fools. I don't blame him smashing up a dinner party now and then, out of sheer, magnificent boredom.... And he had as bad luck as any man can have. Nothing ever went well with him, neither the motor he was driving nor the horse he was backing. He couldn't, somehow, touch anything but he lost by it. He never did anything without being found out—even those quite conventional indecencies which the world generally conspiresnotto find out. He couldn't make love to a woman without being cited as a co-respondent, and then in the worst light. And even so he must have been a pretty inefficient kind of lover, for the woman invariably refused to marry him after the case—which always looks bad for the man, the world having a vague idea that a touch of "chivalry"changes mud intofoie gras.... He couldn't even make a good and dashing rake, don't you see? Dashing enough, but always at the wrong moments—because he was weak inside, he had no heart for the things he did, but was somehow compelled to do them by bravado and helpless desperation. Vanity and bravado were the secrets of the particular mess Antony made—always terrified lest people should find out how weak and hesitating he really was, and so covering up his tracks with Heaven knows what further stupidities! Ronnie is the only man who has ever guessed that pathetic part about him, and that's how, I suppose, he has managed to keep some sympathy for him for such an amazing long time.
"'Even there, about luck, the thing went the way of his mad idea about our minds. Maybe he worked himself up into thinking that "luck," a kind of smoke hanging in the air, fell on a man according to the turn of his mind (which is no sillier nor more sensible than the eminent theory about mixing cocktails after death, don't you think?). And the blessed smoke had fallen on me, while he had been done out of it! His mind turned to gambling as mine did, but he couldn't gamble well, couldn't even lose his money without his temper, and thenthrew after it what name he had left. He lost every penny he had between horses and cards—while, as you know, Iris, I made almost enough from both to further the land-owning ambitions of every communist in the fullest Albert Hall.
"'Yes, it certainly must have been a wretched time for him, the most wretched of a wretched life. Without even the consolation of thinking he'd had a good time for his loss of name and money, for no man ever knew himself better than Antony—nor ever concealed that knowledge more stupidly! Nothing left for him, nothing to do, nothing he could do! and still a very young man, and better looking than most. If he had only allowed the world to pity him he might still have made something of himself, but even if he had tried he couldn't have looked an atom as sorry for himself as he really was.... He had flashes, streaks of genius almost, about ways of making money, but not one bit of ability or concentration to make anything of them. His own incompetence hitting him hard, always hard, and always below the belt—poor Antony!... I heard of him sometimes as penniless, but still immaculate, and having even to bully his Turkish bath on credit. What use, after all, to look and sound like Antony and notget credit from even a Scotch tobacconist! In fact the only job he could have done at all well would have been to be paid for persuading other men's tailors into adding more suits to long bills—but I've never heard of any one daring to offer it to him.
"'I don't think he could have lived through that conscious welter of helplessness and despair but for something to hold him together. What, simply what, was there for him to live for? And even with that "something to hold him together" there was very little, but still it was a spirit of sorts, and vital enough—that dear old hatred for me! Just that, nothing else. Unbelievable or not, I'm sure that Antony, big and hefty though he is, would have wilted and faded away but for that emotion that kept him bound together. Two big men, and arrogant enough, the one's health resting on his luck, and the other's on his hatred of it!...
"'But he couldn't do anything about his one real emotion. There was nothing to do about it, it wasn't that sort. Just an inevitable endless thing, leading nowhere but on forever: a part of the man himself, and the only consistent part—but, of its very nature, with no possible outlet of any possible advantage to himself. He hadn't the faintest desire to kill me, to get my money and be abaronet, or any stuff of that kind—in fact, Antony heartily despised any one being a baronet without the battlements, the men-at-arms, and the serving wenches to be a proper baronet with. None of your modern Pink Peerages for Preposterous People about Antony! In that sort of thing he was a man after G. K. Chesterton's heart, all noise and muscle and an appetite adequate to deal with a keg of rum and a round of cheese—and the whole lovely simplicity of it all run wild and sour in him because of this plaguy madness about me!
"'Perhaps you, and Ronnie too, have thought sometimes that I was rather a beast to and about him—as indeed I was, but not so much a one as I seemed. As the contrast deepened, it became more than ever unpleasant, as it naturally is unpleasant for the one to be rich and successful and the other everything that isn't. But what could I do—without Antony sending me to blazes for trying to! Which he did once, as I'll tell you.... And all the time I couldn't help a grim sense of laughter when I thought about him, I simply couldn't help a comic view of us both. I still kept my contempt for him intact, in case I might need it again—but, as a fact, I simply did not want to see him at that time. He would have been aserious interruption, he would have got in the way of my life—and without any benefit to either of us. But not a trace of dislike did I have for him—the reverse, I couldn't think of Antony but with that consistent fondness. That early childhood had somehow written deep, ever so deep, and there was no getting away from what it had written. One plain word, "comrade" ... two very little boys who had been "comrades." And neither one nor the other had found another comrade since, not the glint or the glimmer of one. Life had passed and left childhood, mine anyway, on a magic pinnacle! never climbed since, maybe only climbed then by marvellous illusion—but climbed unforgettably it had been. And I could only think of Antony like that, what he felt for me could not make the slightest difference to that. And sometimes, you know, one longed for a comrade.... If I had thought for one moment that he could feel a tithe of that for me I would have held out both my hands to him. But I was necessary to him in a different way, I knew it was no use trying to do anything. I only tried once—just before I met you.
"'One morning I saw him in Jermyn Street as he was turning into the Cavendish. On an impulse, a very sudden one, I calledout his name, so that he swung round full at me, not in the least surprised. "If you go shoutingmyname about Jermyn Street like that the police'll have you for making indecent noises. Now, if it was yours—" But I was in no mood for that stuff, and in a hurry, too.
"'Look here, Antony, if a £1000 a year is any good to you, you can have it and welcome,' I said quickly. There wasn't time for tact—and he stared at me, with all the bluff dying out of his eyes, and a queer twisted little smile.
"'That's very nice of you, old man, but—' he was saying—just keeping time until he could think what to say; and then, finding it, he tapped me suddenly on the shoulder. 'But I'll tell you what, Roger. When I want it I'll come for it—and between us we'll make hay with the whole lot. Now what could be fairer than that?' And, of course out came that same old laugh he tacked on to everything he said, rattling the passing taxis' windows and making people stare to see two top-hats pretty high from the ground shaking with laughter at each other; for I couldn't help but laugh after the long time since I had seen him, he seemed so monstrously comical....
"'And that was the last time I saw Antonyuntil that night you and a draught let him into the house. But how were you to know, Iris dear? How were you to know when you married me that you were the last straw to his wretched fire, that the very fact of you so neatly fitted the last bit of coloured glass into the kaleidoscope of Poole Bros.? and that by letting him in that night, you and Sir Nigel between you, you gave him the kerosene with which to make a really efficient bonfire?...
"'Yes, loving you was certainly the last straw, Iris. And, you know, he did love you! He has told me about it since, as it's a dead thing—dead simply because Antony isn't made to love any one who can't love him. But when he met you, and hung about the street until he saw you enter Ronnie's flat—then he did love you, as he had never loved in his life, nor as he had ever thought to be able to love. If I was his first passion, you were his second and last, this hate and this love. And the passion he felt for you—maybe you would have been frightened to know of it, Iris, for Antony's were strong words—carried him quite away for those few months. There's nothing of thefemme fataleabout you, but you've certainly got a wonderful talent for obsessing men, making them want to clutch at you with mindand body—Roger, Antony, Ronnie, and I wonder who else! And from the moment Antony met you to the moment you told him you were engaged to me he was absorbed in his passion for you—for the first time he looked to be forgetting about me, was forgetting about me. If you had loved him, Iris, he would have left me quite alone, from that time on. But between his luck and himself and you and me—he lost again. And God knows what rotten furies were added to him from that moment, always a bad loser! He had passionately longed for so many things, and passionately lost so many—and, at last, you! To him, you were his woman.... Maybe he thought he could have won you but for me; and maybe he was right, but I don't think so, for Antony was made to capture only the surface of a woman's fancy.
"'But you mustn't think that he bore the least bit of resentment against you. Oh, no, you didn't come into it after that. You were just an added inch to the height of the barricade between him and happiness. But as for me.... And, do you know, so consistent was the admiration part of his hatred that he admired my being loved, or so he thought, by you! And the only letter I've ever received from Antony is one of congratulationon being engaged to such a marvellous woman. He wrote that from Mexico.
"'If you had seemed the "ultimate island" of his bad luck, the finding of that wretched oil-spring was the penultimate. And his luck seemed to have turned, too, since he set foot in America; a few months in Texas had filled his pockets with dollars—actually won at poker! And if a man is slippery enough to win money from such a crew of toughs, and at their own game, then his luck must have turned indeed! And then, with another man, a down-at-heel engineer who was almost his servant—Antony could always find a servant but never a master, and that was his trouble—he had set out in the good old way, prospecting for a fortune in Mexico, rebellions or no rebellions. And actually found it—the oil! And how he must have thrown a mighty chest, thinking that now he would show the world and Roger of what stuff Red Antony was made.... But the only stuff that was proven was that of his luck and his oil. For as I told you, Iris, it was very good oil, but there was not much of it. And the rest, the oil that might have been, the oil that would have made Antony's millions and restored him his self-respect, had to go the way of his other failures, toadd one more corpse to the shambles of who knows how many failures.
"'And then came the idea of how, after all, he could use that oil! It came from a profound despair, from a realisation that, do what he would, he could do nothing well in this world. And realising that, he came to want nothing, success and happiness or any coveted thing was too far beyond his reach. But there was one thing, anyway, that would give him a little more rest after its accomplishment, and which just might be within his reach; for the first time, in Mexico, he finally realised that if he was to live he must do something about his obsession, the very root of his discontent. He must somehow prick and burst it, so that he could live more smoothly. And how better flatten the thing out than by bringing my house and goods down on my head?...
"'If a man can come by such an intention at all amiably, so Antony must have done. There was none of your melodramatic stuff about it. It merely seemed to him a clear fact that my success was pitted against his peace of mind, that we must row in the same boat or he would drown too wretchedly. He wanted now nothing from me, neither money nor influence; but, in that last year in Mexico, he very definitely made up his mind thatI should have as little of either as ever he had had. So with that in his mind, and armed with his plans and his tame engineer, he came to England. And whether you had let him in or not he would have got into the house. Even Antony wasn't always to be baulked, you know. And especially in his last venture of all.' ...
"'But since you knew him so well, you must have known what he was about from the first moment,' I broke in; and, Ronnie, it was a dangerous protest, for his last few words about Antony's 'inevitability' had brought my anger against him back again. It was my love in arms against some treachery he had licenced—and even the way he looked at me, his eyes dark with pain, didn't soften the silence with which I awaited the explanation that he must make. And a helpless gesture of his hand, the very manner of his explaining, showed that he knew now, now, that no explanation could be good enough, however fully he had once accepted it; that now, and just lately, there had happened something between us that discounted all previous acquiescences to 'inevitability.' ... And he spoke now without a trace of that rather grim fantasy with which he always chose to obscure his most serious moods.
"'Don't you realise Iris, that the man who stopped Antony in Jermyn Street, the man you married, was very different to the man who played host to Antony's tomfoolery on that Nigel Poole night? with you sitting there at the table, and indifference the only apparent fact about your face except its loveliness. Didn't you realise at all that I had changed, and very much? But then how silly to ask that, for you and I never talked of such things, if we talked at all.
"'In those two years my whole view of life, my ambitions, and I once had so very many! had gone awry. Or rather, they had withered, got sour, don't you see? Of all Antony's many follies his greatest was ever to envy me my success—for the penalty of that success went with the very nature of the man who succeeded. Iris, I had to realise I was a bad winner long before I realised I was a bad loser.... I was just about realising it when I fell in love with you. And that pulled me up, indeed it did. Love for you created something worth while winning, worth succeeding about.... I'm trying to tell you that everything had been too easy for me all my life. I suppose one was always just a little rotten with sophistication, and so, as one played and won every throw, the winnings seemedso little worth while—until you came! My dear, I thought I'd have to fight for you—and you so worth fighting for, you with those mysterious cornstalks in place of hair! I didn't tell myself that I wanted to fight for you, but I must have had it at the back of my mind—for I was so disappointed, angry, when I found that I hadn't to fight, that you were as easy to win as everything else. Iris, that was terrible of you, why did you fall so easily and quickly? Why didn't you pull me up, why didn't you resist at all, at all?... I loved you, never any one nor anything more than you. And so much that I simply couldn't believe that any one I wanted so passionately could so easily give herself! The gift seemed to grow less in such giving, I couldn't believe but in the surface of the thing. If I hadn't loved you so much, my dear, I would have been very well satisfied with your love, and we would never have had those first wretched months, leading to so many more. You'll say it was my perversity that caused it all, and of course it was. But how can I ever make you believe that that perversity of scepticism and other beastliness were born of nothing but love for you, of wanting you always and always? And that being built so ungenerously, I couldn't believe but that your lovewas a shallow thing, just another of those gilt "prizes" that had so often been handed to one for being a "clever boy." I didn't want to be a "clever boy," I wanted to be a real one, to be allowed to play a splendid game with a splendid playmate and the devil take the truffles. And you gave me admiration! Why, damme, you almost glowered at me with admiration—and, my sweet, how terribly articulate you sometimes were with it, weren't you?
"'There have been found grown-up men to say that love can change a man's nature, whereas, as you and I know, it can only intensify his traits, sometimes the good and sometimes the bad. And, Iris, somehow, somehow, in spite of all the lovely things about you, you intensified the bad.... Oh yes, I know, I knew then, how stupid and cruel I was, but I seemed to be goaded to it. Bitter little knives, weren't they? I couldn't believe in your love, and it irritated me when I egged you on to plead it—and then it irritated me when I found I couldn't egg you on any more, when there was no making you say that you loved me. And all the time I loving you, wanting you always to be there but always. Never leaving the thing alone, full of fear that I might lose grip of it.... I'm not trying to find any excuse for my caddishness,for there isn't any, since it's easier for a murderer than for a cad to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.... And then, at last, my scepticism seemed to be justified, or rather it had justified itself. For as you became indifferent—and how indifferent you can look, Iris!—I thought to myself that of course you had never loved me, except as the "clever boy" and weren't now loving even that since you had found him out to be a bad boy as well. The most grotesque perversities can be justified if one looks crookedly enough, and so I justified the indifference I had forced on you as indecently as I had wrecked your love. And so, too, when the time came, I justified Antony.
"'You remember how nasty I was when you first said something about him wanting to make friends with me again? That was the first I had heard of his return, but with no surprise. And I was angry with you only because it seemed, suddenly, very distasteful that you should be mixed up with Antony and myself—you seemed so cold and unsympathetic that I was sure you would never care to understand the thing. But as for Antony, I really wanted to see him. And he conceived the plot, you know, to save his baby pride and vanity rather than as a means of forcing himself on to me, aboutwhich he knew there could be no real difficulty. My mind had turned to him, often, particularly since that new bitterness about you. And how far from each other you and I were, weren't we? And so I had gradually come to let Antony into my thoughts again, to want him with me. My life, it seemed to me, had not been complete without him. I didn't care whether he hated me or not, my life had been incomplete without him, he was my comrade. The world seemed to have rushed by us both and left us stranded together, as we had once been. And so I was very ready for him when he so aptly appeared that night....
"'You didn't notice, but I was looking more at you than at him when he came in through that window. I didn't doubt what he had come for, you see—those "hay-making" words so long ago.... And as I looked at you, your face closed, a sphinx whose only secret was indifference, I suddenly thought, "Well, we will, indeed we will!" With a vicious kind of gaiety.... Oh don't you see, in the state I was in you seemed to have justified me! You were the only person I could put beside Antony, and ever so much higher with only a real smile from you to unscrew me—but you didn't care at all, at all! A queen who didn't careenough about her kingdom even to try to rule it....