“It makes one just sick, Guy. Sick....”
“Now look here,” Guy murmured, tapping my shoulder with one finger. “Don’t you waste any time being sick just now, but go round and see the young devil——”
“I’m going straight away.”
“Bright boy. And just ... Oh, tell him it’s all right and not to be an ass all his life. Tell him we’re all on his side, and if there’s going to be any being sick that we’re all going to be sick together and in one corporate body, or words to thateffect. Poor young devil. And I know he’ll be feeling this, because I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string——”
“And drink’s made him worse now. He’s almost certain to be nearly speechless to-night. But I’ll see.”
“Lord, O Lord, what a mess Barty left behind him! But you see what I mean? All you’ve got to tell young Gerald is not to make a mountain of this in his mind, as it’s the sort of thing that might happen to any one who is ass enough to go into the Park at night without an escort, and you never know but they mightn’t one night arrest the Bishop of London himself for saying ‘How do’ to his aunt....”
Now I have read in books about people “sailing” into places, and I suppose Iris came into the deserted Bar like that. Hilary must have been just behind her, for I heard his voice, but I only saw Iris, and I remember how she seemed to hold the white ermine round her with one clenched hand, and how the great emerald shone like a green fly on the soft, soft white. And the tawny curls danced their formal dance on her cheeks as she came towards us, swiftly, oh swiftly, saying, in that suddenly strong, clear voice: “Oh, Guy ... and friend of Gerald! Will you help me, dear friend? I want to go round to see Gerald, and Hilary says you still have the key of the house. I went hours ago, but I could get no answer at the door. I wonder, would you come with me?”
“Iris,” said Guy sternly, and I remember the way she threw back her head to look at him, andI thought again of the queer, unconscious way she had of always meeting men on their own ground. “Why don’t you ever look up your old friends when you’re in London, Iris? Or aren’t we your old friends? Or is that fine representative English gentleman, Colonel Duck, your old friend? Answer me yes or no.”
“Oh, Guy!” she said softly, sadly. “I wouldn’t have you be a humbug. I wouldn’t have you and Hilary be humbugs—you two, out of all the world.”
“But, honest, Iris, I’d like to see you. Ask Hilary. ‘Where’s that girl got to?’ I asks, and he says ‘hm,’ says he, if you see what I mean.”
“Whereas I, Guy, have learnt not to regret old friends. I’ve become an old woman on my travels, and one of the first things an old woman must learn is that the best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends ... which is, perhaps, a little different from being ‘old friends’....”
“Iris, don’t be so bitter!” snapped Hilary. That, I thought, came rather well from Hilary. Just at that moment a woman screamed from the swimming-bath, there was a resounding splash. Guy was saying: “You’d better take Gerald away for a while, Iris.”
“If he’ll only come,” she said, “that’s what I want to do....”
I remember thinking just then that I mustn’t forget to thank her for that beautiful notepaper, and also to ask her what was that last word in her note.
“I’ve got an idea,” Hilary was saying, in the specially detached voice he keeps for ideas, “that now wearein this foul night-club we might as well do a bit of good. There’s old Pollen upstairs, and we might ... hm, well, perhaps not.”
“Perhaps not what, Hilary?”
“Hm. I was thinking of Eve seeing the thing in to-morrow morning’s papers. She only reads one wretched picture-paper, and that’s Pollen’s, so I thought, hm, that if we asked him not to....”
“Eve, the poor darling!” Iris whispered. We seemed to be in a desert, three shadows of men, three shadows of voices, and Iris, very white and alight. That is how I always remember her, alight.
“No good, Hilary,” Guy was murmuring. “He won’t, because it’s what those fellows call News. And if you try you will only upset young Venice and make her perhaps feel she’s in the other camp, rather the wrong camp for her, she might think, and just as she’s marrying Naps. She’s a good girl, loyal as anything to her father—and he’s a good fellow enough, but he’s got a queer complaint called Consistency. It’s something you make money out of, I think. I know him very well, as I’ve blackballed him from three clubs. My God, ever seen the man’s jaw?”
“She’s lovely, I thought,” Iris said.
“Good girl, Venice....”
“Hell ...” said Iris suddenly, breathlessly.
“What?” Hilary jumped.
“Only ... hell is raving with millionaires with jaws like Mr. Pollen’s. I’ve dreamt, I know.People who snap ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ very brusquely and then stick to it, no matter what it is. This century likes them like that. Come along, my friend, come along!”
And in a trice Iris and I were walking up the long passage which connects the Loyalty Club to the pavement of Pall Mall. On one side it is hung (but this is two years ago) with glass cases laden with fine cut jades and ambers, while small blue and green figures of animal men, human animals, and bestial gods will delight the eyes of Egyptologists: on the other the faces of beautiful women and children will testify to the photographic art of Sebastian Roeskin of Dover Street. Iris walked swiftly, heroically, her eyes intent before her, impersonal, utterly unself-conscious. The glaring lights in the passage lit her swiftly-moving green-and-silver shoes, or were they sandals with high heels? and so intent were the flippant silver-flashing ankles, briskly striding on, as though chiming the never-to-be-known marching song of a lady who must always meet men on their own ground.
She said: “You’ll be wondering how I came to dine with a man like Victor Duck. Well, I’ve been wondering myself. Poor Victor Duck. He has taken to caddishness like a drug, and he goes on increasing the doses. It’s almost fascinating to watch, just to see what inevitable things he will say next. And he said and did them all, every one, even to ‘Dear little girl’ and to ordering a private room. But I said I never dined in private rooms on Fridays.”
There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for their women from theCloak-Room, maybe waiting for sirens to come to them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young men will. Admirably formal they looked, admirably toned to the dress-coats of Davies, the trousers of Anderson and Sheppard, the hats of Lock, the waistcoats of Hawes and Curtis, the ties of Budd. Handkerchiefs by Edouard and Butler. The glory to God. They looked furtively at Iris in the way that decent men will at a woman who is said to have had lovers, like cows at a bull. One of them said gloomily: “Might go to the Albert Hall Ball.”
Pall Mall seemed wrought of stately marble palaces, and Iris said that the reason why so many English people seemed to prefer Paris to London was that English people saw Paris mostly at night, while if they could see enough of London by night they would never leave it. “And the people!” she said. “All these years I’ve spent abroad, and never met any people so good, so decent, as the English. Couldn’t you sometimes kill people for thequalityof their admiration? Oh, I’ve committed so many murders in foreign streets....”
“But, if you like England ... why are you going away? You’re free....”
“Ah,” she mocked, and, as we walked, a hand darted out from her white cloak and touched my sleeve, and startled me very much. “Wait till you’re so free that you just daren’t do what you like. Wait till you’re so free that you can be here one minute and there another. Wait till you’re so free that you can see the four walls of your freedom and the iron-barred door that will let you outinto the open air of slavery, if only there was some one to open it. Ah, yes, freedom....”
Then up the street of ghostly dandies we flew behind the silver stork, and the wind rushed down from Hampstead Heath and the wind ran out of Jermyn Street and jumped like a drunken man on the tawny cornstalks that were her hair, and waved them about and danced with them. But not she to notice, she who seemed to have a great talent for just not noticing things! She was silent, serious, intent. The light of an arc-lamp kissed the long slender legs into silver.
Once she turned to me, smiled, and looked away again. I wondered if she meant me to see that our friendship was in that smile. I hated her, I think, because she made me feel so incapable, unwise. As the stork, with scarcely a rustle of its wings, flew towards the Christian Science Chapel at the head of Half-Moon Street, she said: “I’m tired. All day seeing lawyers and trustees, and then taking sweet old Eve all round and round Selfridge’s because she had never been there before and some one had told her she could find everything she wanted there. And she was quite upset at being unfaithful to Harrod’s.... And Gerald! Oh, but why couldn’t they let Gerald alone! Just because, I suppose, the Marches are never let off anything....”
“Here we are,” I said, and she pulled up beneath the lamp by The Leather Butler in East Chapel Street. From the footboard a lane of low houses and shops stretched in a vague, squalid line towards the open Market Place at one end and the darkness of the mews at the other; somehow likean etching in a clouded light by an uncertain hand. Bits of newspapers and torn placards, the nameless odours of yesterday’s economies. The wind that came from Hampstead Heath could find no way into Shepherd’s Market, and it lay still as a tramp sleeping. Cats watched us intently from the middle distance, and a striped cat leapt with a scream from the shadow of the door of my old house. Gerald’s light was on. “What’s that mean?” Iris whispered. She seemed to be frightened, and she said sharply: “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I was just thinking,” I told her, “that if one could judge by appearances, which of course one must never do, in that white cloak in this mean lane you look as nearly an angel as this world could ever see.”
“Don’t let’s mock the angels. What does it mean, Gerald’s light being on?”
“Only what it has always meant, that I must turn it out.”
“Ah, you’ve been very good to Gerald....”
And I am glad that, just then, I said that I was very fond of Gerald.
Then we were on the narrow landing of my old flat, in the darkness. The musty stillness of that little old house brought six years of nights into my mind, and I wondered how people ever regretted their first youth, those intolerable uncertainties and enthusiasms that stare at you from the dead past like condemned gargoyles. The incapability of youth goes on long enough, Heaven knows, if not so long as the savagery of childishness. In the darkness I could feel the soft ermineof her cloak against me, and that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. She was very, very still, and I could not even hear her breathing.
“It is very kind of you to come with me,” she said suddenly, seriously. We were very still on that landing, and I drew back my arm where it touched her cloak. It was very soft, that cloak. “I have thought of you, and decided that if you ever thought of me you had a right to think with dislike....” She was talking smoothly, calmly, when suddenly her voice completely broke, into little bits. “Oh!” she whispered. I was silent. She said quickly: “To me there’s something terribly indecent about humanity, all humanity. It’s as though, in the whole lovely universe, humanity was cooped in this musty little house, talking vaguely of dislike, eternally talking of like and dislike, love and unlove, of doings and undoings, purposeless yet striving and savage. The other night I was motoring alone from Paris to Calais, and it seemed to me that no law was strong enough, no crime was big enough, not even disloyalty, to stop us, when we had the chance of rising above the beastly limitation of living as we were born to live. Because we humans are not born to live, we are born to die....”
“Something has happened to you to-night,” I said. She was a faint white shape in the darkness, and it seemed to me that that was as much of her as I should ever see; and I was right.
“No, nothing at all. Just a dream. But, oh, failing the dream, how I would like a child!”
“A dream-child!”
“Ah, I’ve had those, a many! No, a real one. To be playmates with....”
I said: “I will go up first to-night and see how Gerald is. Will you wait here?”
“I’m tired and frightened,” she said faintly. “Don’t be long.”
I don’t think I stayed up there more than a few seconds. I don’t know. I switched out the light, and as I went down the dark narrow stairs I did not strike a match.
“Well?” she whispered from the darkness.
I don’t know what I said. I suppose I must have said that he was in the same state as when she had seen him before. Then I pretended I had no matches left, and said I had better go down first while she held on to my shoulder. “Then if you fall, I’ll fall,” she complained, but I said I would not fall.
Stair by stair we slowly descended in the darkness. I wanted particularly to see Guy. There were certain things to be done, I supposed. My mind was vacant as a plate on which was drawn a confused picture that would, on looking closely, mean something horrible. There had been a stain on the wall, a great jagged dripping stain, and bits of hair sticking to it.
“Oh, God, this drink!” she said frantically; then almost sobbed: “What’s that!” But it was only the telephone-bell from the hall downstairs, queerly strident and unrestrained in that still, musty little house. Brrr! Brrr! Brrr!... “I never knew a telephone could be so shrill! Will it be some one for Gerald?”
“It will ring for ever if I don’t answer it,” I said, opening the door into the lane. “I’ll followyou to the car.” I hoped it was Guy ringing up on the chance of catching us.
“Well?” his cold murmur came through the night. He said he would meet me at my door in ten minutes’ time. “What are you doing about Iris?” he asked me and I think I said: “Nothing. What can I do?”
Iris was waiting by her car under the lamp. The car was like a great yellow beast with shining scales, and Iris, tall and gentle and white, the lovely princess of the tale who has enslaved the beast. Far above them towered the pile of Sunderland House, enchanted almost into dignity by the darkness. She looked at me gravely as I came, she seemed to crouch like a tired fairy into her white cloak.
“You look very white,” she said.
“Now, Lady Pynte!” I made to mock her, and I suppose we laughed. Then she was at the wheel, sunk into the low seat, staring up at the darkness of the faint London stars. “I’m tired,” she said again, and again I thought, what could I do? Then she did something to the dash-board with her left hand, and the engine hummed. I was on the curb, above her. Nearby a policeman was flashing his lamp on a door. I supposed one told the police....
“Will you see Gerald in the morning?” the slightly husky voice just reached me. “And tell him to follow me to Paris? I shall be at number — Avenue du Bois for a week or so, and then ... Good-bye,” she said sharply, as though impatient with herself. “Good-bye, dear. You’ve been very kind—to the twin Marches. Good-bye ... perhaps for a long time. You have your work inEngland, and I’m the slave of freedom. Good-bye, my friend.”
I could not tell her just then. She lay aslant in the driving seat, and her tawny curls flamed in the light, and she looked sad and tired. I could not tell her, and as she took her hand from mine the great car leapt down the fat little slope of East Chapel Street to the end, turned in a blaze of light and colour, rushed up the parallel little street to Curzon Street.
I was at the corner where I had last seen Gerald putting his shoulder against the saloon-door of The Leather Butler; and as Iris’s car turned into Curzon Street a two-seater passed me swiftly, going the same way. I thought I heard a cry of “Iris!” above the rustle of the two engines, and I thought I heard Iris’s surprised voice, and the rear-lights of the two cars seemed to draw together, but I was not sure.
I crossed towards Queen Street, sure only that I wished to see Guy. From Jolley’s corner I saw, far up, two red rear-lights twisting into South Audley Street, and then, from afar, came the scream of a Klaxon, the growl of a horn. I wondered who was in the two-seater, but at that moment the tall figure of Guy came towards me from my door, where a taxi had just dropped him. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Poor young devil. Only hope the other side won’t disappoint him as much.”
“I couldn’t tell her,” I said.
Guy smoked thoughtfully, looking over my head. “I’ll tell her,” he said, “in the morning. Had an idea he might blow his brains out.”
ON a bitter afternoon in the last week of January of the year 1923 the writer found himself in the Place Vendôme in Paris.
Now here, in the Place Vendôme, is material ready to the hand of the as yet undiscovered chronicler of lofty frivolities: such, unfortunately, as am not. But I can, at least, count up to fifty. There were forty-eight motor-cars in the Place Vendôme, and one coach-and-six.
The Place Vendôme is a paradox in grey stone. Spacious, noble, monumental, it is cast, even at the stranger’s first glance, in an everlasting mould. The Place Vendôme is, without a doubt, one among the few things about which we may say with certainty: “That will last.” And yet, monumental and everlasting though it is, what do we find in the Place Vendôme? Do we find therein the practice of the seven arts, the learning of the nine humanities, the study of any one among the august array of sciences, nay, the application of any one among the Ten Commandments? We do not. We find forty-eight motor-cars and one coach-and-six. We find that it is given over only to the frivolities of the trivial of two worlds and to every sort of “high-minded depravity” that may occur to the enfeebled wits of the exquisite. Wefind, in other words, that the Place Vendôme is the centre of that floating population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre of which, under the lofty title ofl’aristocratie internationale, the Chevalier Gilulio di Risotto is the ultimate servitor. The Place Vendôme is, therefore, no place for a plain man, nor by any means a safe station for the man in the street: there are motor-cars kept in readiness to run them over.
Across the Place, from the rue de la Paix to the rue de Castiglione, dash for ever the nimble green Citroën taxicabs; whilst from the rue de Castiglione to the rue de la Paix will march the Renaultsde luxewith scarlet wheels, passing in a fancy of cool brown eyes and thepoudre à la maréchaleof Bourbon days. Here and there among them, maybe, will flash the racing Bugattis of the dark young men agiggolo, arastaqouère, a “racingman.” They will come to no good.
And always the great column on which Napoleon stands rises to the clouds, but no one cares about that. All they care about are the forty-eight automobiles and one coach-and-six which stretch, in ordered array of two lines, from the foot of his column to the entrance of the Ritz. The shops are loaded with diamonds as large as carnations and with carnations as expensive as diamonds. The shop-keepers are very polite, and courteously do not mind how many you buy. Americans buy. Englishmen watch the Americans buying. Grand Dukes wait for the Englishmen to dare them to have a cocktail. A few Frenchmen are stationed at those strategic points where they can best be rude to the English and Americans. Then the English and Americans tip them. The women do not wear stays, and insist on their men shaving twice a day.
“Well, at last!” sighed my sister, as her car, colourless with dust, was added to the forty-eight. I had been in Europe for four months, had lately joined some friends at Cannes, had chanced on my sister there, and had motored back with her to Paris. We were foul with dust, numbed with cold, aching with tiredness, and this was because we had “done” the six hundred odd miles from Cannes in two days and a few hours. The devil was in it if there was any reason why we should not have taken three days, or four, or five. But, then, why do people say “’phone” for “telephone”? Thus, they get an illusion of speed.
We went into the hotel. The long, narrow, crimson lounge was crowded with tea-drinkers. “But what a crowd of women!” said my sister. But there were quite a few people in men’s clothes.Au Réception.
“I-want-a-room-and-bathroom-please,” my sister said.
“Madame?” The dark-suited gentlemen of theRéceptionlooked up from their desks at my sister, saw that her clothes were not bad and that she was in a hurry, and looked away again.
My sister repeated herself, in that dead and faintly aggressive tone in which women ask for what is very probably going to be denied them. “I wired,” she added. Liar.
I went towards the concierge’s box. He was a nice man, and had a white imperial.
“Is Mrs. Storm staying in the hotel?”
“Sir?”
“Could you tell me if Mrs. Storm is——”
“No, sir, no, sir. Not at present, sir.”
“I thought that, as her car was outside.... A yellow Hispano.”
“That is so, sir.Parfaitement. L’Hispano jaune.”
“But Mrs. Storm, you say, is not in the hotel?”
“No, sir. Not at present, sir.”
“Then, perhaps you may know, she has sold or lent her car to some one?”
“That is so, sir. Madamea prêté l’Hispano. Merci, monsieur.”
“You couldn’t possibly give me any idea of Mrs. Storm’s present address?”
“Pardon, monsieur.... Timbre, monseigneur? De quinze centimes, un. Merci, monseigneur. L’automobile à huit heures moins quart? Parfaitement, monseigneur....I have no instructions, sir. That was the gentleman to whom madame has lent her motor.Le due de Valaucourt.”
“Thank you. But Mrs. Storm, you say, is in Paris?”
“Sir?Je suis sans instructions, monsieur. Madame?”
“What is it, what is it?” asked my sister.
“Nothing,” I said. “Got a room? Good. I am going to the Westminster, and I’ll come at half-past eight, shall I, and take you out to dinner?”
“Yes, but not here. It’s crowded with minor royalties that you can’t stand with your back to any one except the orchestra. Larue?”
She had no sooner turned towards the lift than my name was cried in an agony of exultation. My sister says that my face as I started round was a face of fear.
“Only the other day,” cried Mr. Cherry-Marvel, exercising, with incredible perfection of gesture, his eyes, shoulders, hands, wrist, beautiful teeth, tie-pin and handkerchief, “we were talking about you....” But it was ever one of Mr. Cherry-Marvel’s many social charms that, the instant he saw you after an absence, he would make it his business to give you the impression that people had been interested in nothing else but you during your absence. Not, of course, that he stopped there; he had other things to say, too. “Of course what Ireallymust tell you first of all, is that Henri Daverelle, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day,à proposof something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind, will appreciate at its full value....”
Cherry-Marvel was an artist enslaved by his art: he could not see you but he and you must instantly fall under its dominion; for it was an art too perfectly modulated to admit of hurry, it was an art too sensitive to admit of interruption. Indeed, a wicked little gleam would flash across his wicked old eyes if you so much as made to interrupt him. Pitiless to himself, he was only the less pitiless to you in so far as you were not himself; and, should you be a boor and leave him suddenly, you might hear the dry, clear voice dying in the distance, but dying hard, rising and falling to the fullest and most pregnant sense ofeach period; for his, you understand, was an art not of selection but of detail, and must always and be continually expending itself....
“Ava Mainwaring, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day,à proposof something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind....”
Essentially an aristocrat, in person dainty, neat, fastidious, Cherry-Marvel’s art was essentially democratic, for it abhorred all limitations and exacted from him its complete display on every occasion, whether lofty, literary, or plebeian, which came before his relentlessly alert eyes; and you can hear, through the last sixty years of English social history, the rise and fall of Cherry-Marvel’s voice, each word dropping on a stunned silence like a long-polished jewel. Eager, exquisite, always prepared, always with a handkerchief fluttering between his breast-pocket and the corner of his eye, you must imagine him against the tapestry of wasted time, a figure of ancient, æstheticdandysme, on immaculate lawns, in drawing-rooms, up and down terraces of palazzos, in clubs and cabarets. You might enter a spacious drawing-room in Rome, a museum in Naples, a friend’s villa in Capri, you might stray from your boat in a South Sea lagoon into the smoking-room of the hotel, you might steal a moment from your companions to see the moonlight on the Pyramid.... Oh, you might be anywhere, and suddenly you would hear that voice, rising and falling, relentless, ageless, enchanting even lions to silence, with here and there a sudden, profound drawl on one word, any word, “de-ar,” and youwould, fascinated, be compelled to face him—there, with full pale lips drawn wide apart, wicked blue eyes absorbed with cunning ecstasy in your stunned attention, the while, infinite as fate, he joined together the perfected pieces of his art with the word “whereupon,” which lounged from his tongue in a crescendo to a cry of sadic exaltation. And while you laughed at some elaborately phrased conceit, wondering how he had remembered the order of the words so well, he would watch the effect of his art with kind, cunning eyes, one wrist suspended in the air, his handkerchief fluttering towards the corner of his eye, in consummate politeness to show how he, too, by your laughter, was appreciating the full flavour of his art ... “whereupon Elsa, who, by the way, had really a very amusing experience in Venice last Autumn, and one which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind....”
Now, if any one could tell me where Iris was to be found, Cherry-Marvel was that man. Cherry-Marvel knew, of course, everybody, and he knew everything about everybody ... “of course it’s absurd to suppose that Alice, with her intelligence, which I am positive makes its full appeal to you—it is absurd to suppose that Alice could for onemomenthave thought that her husband, whom of course you know as well as I do, would divorce her for going to Brighton with Cubby Tyrell, because, as I was pointing out to her sister only the other day, for one thing no decent man, and I am sure you will agree with me about this, would care to let it be known that his wife had ever gone to Brighton, and for another, and this,of course, is a Biblical detail which I am sure that you will grasp at once, Cubby Tyrell, who is a very intimate friend of mine, has been allowed, in spite of having been married twice, to remain a member of the Celibates Club....”
At this time I hadn’t the remotest idea as to where Iris was or how she did. I had not seen her since the night of her brother’s death; and had been permitted to gather from Hilary that he knew as little as I did of her whereabouts. Secret she had always been in her absences, Hilary said, or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively in hiding.
She had, a few weeks after that terrible night, written me one long letter: from some place near Rome, from a draughty house, so she wrote, on a hill of strangled olives. There was no address on the notepaper, and this, she wrote, was because she did not want me or any one to write to her. “Please,” she added to that.
Her letter was presumably in answer to two of mine addressed to the care of Mrs. Oden of Montpellier Square, but she was at the pains to excuse it on the ground that she and I were tied together—“no, tied apart!”—by a bond, the existence of which I would never, never know. Well! It was, you can see, a feverish, mysterious letter; and made how much more mysterious by that almost illegible, pencilled scrawl! There were whole sentences on the first few pages which I could not make out at all, which I made almost blind guesses at, while at some I could not even contrive so much.
“It is your fault, my friend. You paved theroad up which I raced in chase of the Blue Bird. Yours was the appointed dark finger in the darkness. May God forgive you, for I can’t. I will try, but I think I can’t. There is a waterfall of fire....”
Sheets upon sheets of it, that letter is before me now, and still I am unable to decipher whole sentences from that maze of pencil-marks on the thin Italian paper. There was one that stared at me, shocked me, in the middle of the second page—“I may hate you”—but I could not, do what I would, make out the words above or below.
“...I am lonely beyond bearing, and afraid. I am so afraid. I wonder, will you understand? But if I bore you take courage, for I will not bore you again. You are my friend, and this is my good-bye. Forgive me, dear, the arrogance of calling you my friend. But I am so afraid.Et, satyr bien-aimé, j’ai raison....”
I could, you can understand, make neither head nor tail of it. She might hate—me! She might, heaven knew, be indifferent to me, but why, how, hate? Andsatyr bien-aiméwas all very well, but it meant nothing.
On the later pages she seemed to have controlled her hand a little, but her mind, if one might judge, remained ... well, was that, perhaps, the effect on a mind of a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives? “I am lonely, but I have always been lonely since I was eighteen. Yes, I can trace my loneliness since then. It is a long time.”
This letter, you must remember, came only amonth after Gerald’s death. She wrote of that night, and here her haunted pencil was at its most firm, if that is saying anything. “There I stood in the old, old darkness—how old darkness is, have you ever felt?—while you were upstairs in Gerald’s room. And I listened, but I could not hear you moving, so I imagined you to be staring at Gerald from the door, as you and I did that night a million years ago, when, do you remember, you suddenly, strangely from your heart, made that defiant courtesy to my hand? And, do you know, I almost cried because of your kindness to that poor, helpless sweet. Oh, Hilary has told me about you, and you luring Gerald off to a Home, but all in vain, my poor Gerald. And then I heard you switch out the light, and down you came, slowly, slowly, more silent than the darkness, and when you spoke your voice was as old as the darkness. But you are very young really, else you couldn’t be so defiantly, so imperiously, kind. And I remember wondering why you said you had no matches left, for before you went upstairs I had seen a box half-full in your hand, but I said to myself: ‘He has forgotten, and he is wretched at his friend’s weakness.’ Ah, you should have told me about Gerald there and then, indeed you should! But you did not, for my unworthy comfort’s sake. Dear, you have a fine touch for the affections—but cruel, that is what you were, cruel. You laid your foot down on the soil of kindness, but where your foot fell there leapt up a dandelion ... and in the heart of the dandelion a tiny little rose; but what, my friend, isone little rose surrounded to suffocation by a huge dandelion?”
Well! Puzzle this way, puzzle that way, I couldn’t make a glimmer of sense out of that passage. I was pleased, of course, that she seemed to like me, but as to the rest....
Guy, as he had told me he would, had been to see her early in the morning. He had—another friend of childhood—overruled Mrs. Oden, saying it would be better not to wake Iris and bring her downstairs at that hour, for could there be a better place than bed in which to receive bad news? Mrs. Oden knew him of old, he was Apollo Belvedere to Mrs. Oden. She had been desperately upset about his news, coming as it did on top of what she had read about Gerald in that morning’s paper. Poor Mrs. Oden.
Iris was asleep—“Oh, as no man can ever know sleep!”—when she awoke dimly to a tall shape at the foot of the bed. (“As no man can ever know sleep!” That, too, puzzled one, as well it might.) Dark it was, the curtains drawn, “and I remember them flapping peevishly because the door behind the tall shape was ajar. And I, scarcely awake, could think but of one thing, my awakening mind was hugging, in pain and joy, but one thing ... and I called the shape at the foot of the bed by a certain name, a name which was not his name. He made no sign that he had heard the name which was not his name, and I am sure he instantly made himself forget it. For, as you know, Guy would defend a secret not only against the angels of God, but also against himself. ‘Guy!’ I criedat last, and he seemed to smile faintly, like the handsome absent-minded god he is. ‘Yes, Guy,’ he said. ‘Sickening, isn’t it?’ Those high good looks of Guy’s, that small poised head—frozen, tireless Guy! But that morning he was very gentle with me....”
He had spoken for me, too, saying that I hadn’t told her of Gerald’s death at the time because she had looked so tired and sad. “Poor Iris,” Guy had said, “the men who don’t know you very well care very much for your comfort, but the three young men who have known you best of all have not cared enough.” Guy had said that, and she lying in bed, stunned, staring, while he sat holding her hand, as he might be an elder brother and she a hurt baby.
“He knew, you see, that I loved Gerald, that Gerald was a part of me, although Gerald had spent ten years in pretending that he hated me. Do you think, my friend, that I would have let myself be crucified on Boy’s death only for the sake of Boy’s cruel relations and friends? Two people Gerald worshipped in the world, but always he would have sacrificed Iris to Boy, that was always the way of Gerald’s heart. Above all things in this world I love the love that people have for each other, the real, immense, unquestioning, devouring, worshipful love that now and then I have seen in a girl for a boy, that now and then I have seen in a boy for a boy, that playmate love. It isn’t of this world, that playmate love, it’s of a larger world than ours, a better world, a world of dreams which aren’t illusions but the very pillars of a better life.But in our world all dreams are illusions, and that is why the angels have crows-feet round their eyes, because they are peering to see why all dreams in our world should be illusions.
“But you can’t, you see, get rid of the funny love between twins like Gerald and me just by the word ‘hate.’ Even Boy couldn’t really upset that. There was something peculiarlyusabout Gerald and me, something of blood and bone peculiarly us which nothing but death could destroy. And so Mrs. Spirit was sent into Hyde Park that the thing that was us might be for ever destroyed.”
She had suddenly asked Guy, half-sitting on the bed beside her, what it was in the world he loved most, and he had said he was sorry to admit that he loved his son more than all the world. “I could have killed him for jealousy, just then I could, he who had everything to have also that. You don’t know the body-ache for a child, the ache that destroys a body ... the lament for a child of love, a child of lovers....
“He would be two and a half years old now, my son. Hector, you see, didn’t know anything about his son, because he left me in a temper before even I was certain. And naturally when I was certain I wasn’t going to be outdone in silliness by my own husband, and besides, I thought it would be mean to force him to come back if he didn’t really want to come back, and so I didn’t let him know. For men, I would have you know, might make an awful row and stamp away in a tearing jealous fit, and when they are away they might be as pleased as anything to have got away. You can never tell about men, especially when they are convinced that they are being genuine. But, of course, I knew he would rush back quickly enough when the baby came. Oh, I would see to that! And, my dear, the fun I would have all by myself, for Hector and I had always longed for a son, the fun I had thinking of the look on his face when one day he would get my wire in Ireland: ‘Arrival of Hector-not-so-proud. You come too.’ Can you imagine what he’d look like then, and he stern and handsome and all covered with V.C.’s and oddments, wasting his time chasing disgusting Sinn Feiners who wouldn’t know a country of their own if they saw it. I had that wire all nicely written out months beforehand, and I went and hid my ugliness in my old nurse’s home near Peterboro’ and stuck the wire with a pin over my bed, being superstitious, you see, and wanting a winner for once in a way. Well, and then—Oh, and then they killed Hector just in time, and when Hector-not-so-proud came along he thought, the poor sweet, that the proper way for a gentleman to arrive in the world was toes first to slow music, and so away he had to go again....
“I have done with England, and England has done with me. But I don’t think I shall be able to go and have tea with the Empress of China yet awhile, for just now I love England as I never before have loved it. The captains and the kings of England—clean eyes, long shadows, low voices... why, I must hover, held in running as in a nightmare. And from the distance, from these lands of loud shrill voices, I will hear the low, low voices that I had long since thought I had given up regretting. Indeed, I was quite sure I had given up regretting them. But I am regretting them now, like a baby. Good-bye, dear, and God bless you. And when you think of me think instead of your words, ‘He has, with you,’ and you will have the sum of my pride in being liked by you.”
Often, during these past eight or nine months, that scrawled writing would pass my mind, but as I could hit on no clue to her fantasies, and as I might never see her again, I had put Iris carefully away into that part of our minds wherein we keep fancies, images, regrets, the things that we will do one day, the things that we would like to do one day, the things that we will never do again ... when, but a moment ago, the great yellow car had leapt from the Place Vendôme into the first place in my mind, and I would like, I thought, to learn from my friend, Cherry-Marvel, anything that might be learnt about Iris. But as I listened to him, the way he had said this and had done that and had heard the other, I wondered how I would ever get the chance to suggest so much as her name to him. “...à proposof something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind....”
We stood, for we had not yet had time to sit down, in the little reading-room of the Ritz that leads from the entrance-doors, while stern-faced Americans turned over the pages ofThe New York Heraldon the long marble-topped table in the centre, and a woman or two sat here andthere absorbed in waiting, and the dowager Lady Tekkleham’s voice nearby was grimly suggesting to the Baron de Belus that he could not do better than let her drive him in her coach-and-six to dinner at her villa at Saint Germain-en-Laye.
Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey and my heavy coat, and weighed down, too, by the gloom of the early winter evening that was falling about us, so that my eyes, borne down by Cherry-Marvels amenities, could scarcely make out the chairs and flowers and vases in the long courtyard through the windows; and suddenly I fell to wondering how it had come about that Iris, who loved her proud swift car, had lent it to a friend, but the instant I mentioned her name Cherry-Marvel’s little eyes gleamed with fury at the interruption. I was abashed, yet I would try again, but ... “whereupon Auguste de Maupin, whom, of course, you know as well as I do....”
But at last I achieved the impossible, in inserting a wedge into the fabulous monologue, and then I murmured: “Ill? But are you sure, Cherry? Mrs. Storm is ill?”
But illness appalled Cherry-Marvel, from illness he could not help but turn away the neat, lined mask of his face, from illness his Florentinedandysmetrembled away in the only unaristocratic emotion I have ever observed in Cherry-Marvel, the emotion of fear. “Quiet we call Silence, the merest word of all!” For, appalled by illness though he might be, his art could always rise to a general view.... He had heard in a roundabout way that Iris had had a “sort of minor operation——”
“But,” I said—
“Whereupon,” said Cherry-Marvel, his little eyes gleaming for a second with fury, “whatIsaid was, ‘Operations, where are thy stings?’ for, as of course you know as well as I do, women are scarcely women without them, and I have not the faintest doubt that in Lesbos they suffered, if I may put it like this, from the impolite insistence of their womanhood even more than if there had been any men there, for as I was saying to Marc only the other day,à proposof the particular shade in which she had dyed her hair, men may come and men may go, but the moon, my dear boy, is always there. Now here, for instance, is Iris, quite one of the loveliest women I have ever seen, and one who, I am convinced, must be very fond of you with your sort of mind, here she has, I hear on the very best authority, fallen a victim to one of those mental derangements which seem, if I may put it like this, to be an irresistible incitement to polite surgery in quite another and more individual part of the person. But what I have always said about Iris is this, that I admire her so, and I am so positive that you also must, with your sort of mind, because she is one of the very few Englishwomen I have ever met who can, as I am sure you will agree with me, live abroad without becoming more and more English....”
Paris rises in a cloud of chill darkness, the rain falls like whips of ice, the street-lampsloiter on vague, bitter errands, confused strings of light, a stealthy, idiot wind glories in being corrupted by corners. The platforms of the omnibuses are packed tight with small men whose overcoats are too short for them, the brims of their felt-hats too narrow, their trousers turned up too high, their eyes too dark, their faces too pale. The jargon of the traffic on the rue de Rivoli, as it squabbles for every step between the deserted pavement beneath the railings of the Tuileries and the reeking pavement under the long archway lit by impudent shop-lights falling on imitation jewellery, is multiplied an hundred-fold by the shrewish air into a noise that hurts like warm water on a chill hand.
The taxi, a clever little Citroën taxi, darted hither and thither among the squabbling hosts, and nimbly we capered across the dark face of the Louvre, nimbly over the Pont Royal and the river paved with broken darkness, and so down the slope into the rout of the Boulevard Raspail.
Maybe it is true that there are times when we can detest Paris more deeply than any other city. Other cities stare back calmly at our sudden hatreds, other cities grow more impersonal as we execrate them, while as for Paris, she is always personal, but when we are nervous and detest her for being Paris she becomes even more herself, she insists on being herself with a nerveracking insistence, like a silly woman who, seeing she is getting on her man’s nerves, gives a loud, nervous laugh and simpers: “I can’t help it, it’s my nature to be like this....”
Now why were the people yelling here, whatwas the matter? Millions of them there were, joined in some strife between the Bon Marché, the Hôtel Lutetia and the entrance of the Nord-Sud railway, while omnibuses and trams made strategic movements against each other, whilefacteursin dirty blue, fabulously moustachioed, pushed carts about in all directions, irritating any one they could, and a motionlessgendarmeor two played with his bâton, heedless, unheeded. The eager face of a young artist I knew, shadowed by a great black hat, artistic, anarchistic, strode out of the white mass of the Hôtel Lutetia and turned greedily towards Montparnasse. At last my clever little Citroën and I plunged into quieter wastes, lit here and there by the bastard glitter of a Cinema Theatre falling on posters livid with three colours, red, blue, and yellow.
That strange unstormy exquisite, Cherry-Marvel! That most æsthetic creator of a monster more terrible than Frankenstein’s, for it devoured the spirit of all who passed beside it! Why I should be worried about Iris I could not tell, indeed I was too tired to inquire, but worried I was despite Cherry-Marvel’s so well-informed badinage about the white woman’s burden, and the more worried too, as the taxi plunged into nameless darknesses beyond the Bal Bullier, towards the address of the nursing-home which Cherry-Marvel, that confidant at third-hand, had of course known.
Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold asthe devil it was now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi Marianne danced aminuet du cœurwith a crimson garter and the moon fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours....
And now we tore up a dark, endless boulevard, even as a shifty maggot in a pit of darkness. But surely this was the murderer’s Paris, here lived the fathers and grandfathers of Apaches, here were born the daughters of the drinkers of blood and the sons of the mothers of crime. It stretched never-ending between lamps fixed atastronomical distances, and on each side tall naked trees thrashed the shadows of very high black walls. They hid from the world, the people of this boulevard of the high walls, and who shall say that they had no reason to hide? And then, do you know, a lion leapt out of the night, a huge lion that was black as sin and crouched for prey in the centre way between five lanes of darkness made even darker by confused strings of light. And as we breathed a prayer in thanks for our deliverance from the lion of darkness trams crawled near us and stayed a while, and tram, at the impulse of a vice peculiarly continental, was joined to tram and crawled away; while we, having regained our breath, came beneath the shadow of a terrible wall. It was the wall of a castle, a fortress, a something satanically majestic. This, I thought, is another of Carlyle’s mistakes, this is no less than the Bastille skulking in these parts until such time as the Camelots du Roy shall have left the kindergarten and can crown the duc d’Orleans King of France. Far above our laboured passage glowed a long, long row of small windows faintly lit, and it seemed to me that they were striped with bars of iron. And there was a great gate of iron, and a black soldier with a beastly bayonet to his rifle, and an old woman with a great brown parcel under her arm, waiting. The clever little Citroën stopped. It is tired, I thought, and will go on later....
“Eh, numéro quarante-neuf, Boulevard Pierre Abel?” the taxi-driver threw at me reproachfully, and I got out, and I stared up at the great fortress which towered above me like a beast with a row of unclean eyes about his forehead, and the rain whipped my face.
“C’est un prison?”
“Mais oui, monsieur. Le Paradis.”
The pavement was broad, of mud and asphalt. The prison towered on our right, filling the sky with darkness—but for those distant, terrible windows. The rain whipped down, stinging like little animals. Nearby one forlorn lamp lit the putrefying colours of the advertisements circling alavabo. What, I wondered and wondered, could Iris be doing here? Facing me across the broad pavement of mud and asphalt was a great gate which had once been brown, lit by a lamp on which had once been inscribed the number of the Nursing Home. Iris was here. Were we, then, always to meet in darkness, Iris and I? She was here, and perhaps, I thought, on the other side of her is a Morgue or an Asylum.
A yard or so from the great door there was let into the high wall a small door inscribedConcierge. I was startled at the clatter made by the bell. A nun stood in the dim doorway.
THE shape of her coif against the dim light was like some legendary thing’s head, and she was eating. I heard her. That she was old and very stout was all I could see. I could smell just a little, too. Poor Iris.
I asked if I might have news of Mrs. Storm.
“Ah, la dame anglaise!” She ate, but not finally. “Madame est assez bien, je crois. Mais pardon, monsieur. Je n’ai pas d’instructions à vous donner——”
“But!” I pleaded. “But——”
“Je regrette, monsieur. C’est pas ma faute, vous savez. Pardon.”
She was closing the door! Terse as you like. I was helpless. “Madame est assez bien, je crois!” Dear Heaven, but didn’t one know thoseassez biens! Isn’t there a company in Heaven wholly recruited from those who have beenassez bien, and daily augmented by those who areassez bien!
I lifted up my voice.
“Pardon, monsieur.”
I lifted up my voice in vain. So I was active. She stared at me, panting. I withdrew my first impression as to her being a nun. She was no nun. She had a crucifix and a coif, but she was no nun. She was a woman scorned. She saidmany things and used many words which I did not understand. But I didn’t care. I somehow thought, you know, of Iris dying.
“I am here,” I said in effect, “and here I stay until I can speak to a doctor or a matron. I am sorry, but you have made me anxious as to the lady’s health.”
“Mais je vous l’ai déjà dit, jeune homme! Madame est assez bien!”
The ordinary dingyconcierge’slodge: a black stove, a table covered with frayed red cloth, a chair, a stool, an indescribable odour, a plate of food on the table—bœuf bouilli, which is French for the salvaging of grey matter from liquid dungeons of onions, carrots and potatoes. I sat on the stool. It was unbelievable that her coif had ever been white. Somehow my eyes were transfixed by the small wooden crucifix which, like a dinghy on a choppy sea, rolled on her bosom as she ate. I wondered how long I would have to wait. I wondered if I could smoke. I wondered if this was one of those convent-nursing-homes. I wondered if one called a nunmadameormademoiselle. They were maidens presumably, so I supposedmademoiselle.
“On peut fumer, mademoiselle?”
I was wrong. She looked at me with contempt. “C’est défendu, monsieur.”
“Merci, madame.”
I wondered if she really could be a nun. I wondered if one could tip a nun. Out of sheer hatred one acquires a passion for tipping in France and Italy. Detestable it was on this detestable day to sit like this, being hated. Imade a muttering noise and gave her a ten-franc note, and it was in a more amiable spirit that she went on with her salvaging. At last there were only two bits of carrot and an awful looking onion left to engage her attention, and I felt that one might perhaps converse.
I was right about her being no nun. She was a lay-sister, she said. And this place, she told me, was a convent-nursing-home. “Nous avons ici,” she was pleased to add, “la clientèle européenne la plus chic.”
Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among aclientèle européenne la plus chic.... One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America. My poor ten-franc note must have seemed pathetic to this old lay-sister, who probably thought nothing of receiving amillefrom an anxious Dago.
I had until then been trying not to wonder about Iris in the vile shadow of a prison. Suddenly I was furiously hot. What on earth was I doing here! Intruding where I was not wanted! I was about to go, to run, when the lay-sister was as though distracted from the last piece of carrot by the opening of a door in the back room. Frantically she hurried towards it. It would look too silly of me to run now. I could but ask, anyhow.
The lay-sister’s voice, voluble, vindictive, explanatory. Much good my ten francs had done! Then steps came towards me, into the lodge. “Eh,” I said. How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards....
A man, bald, sharp-featured as a bird, in a rough brown great-coat, a tired-looking, an anxious-looking, middle-aged—Englishman!
“Masters! Conrad Masters!”
“Well,” muttered that anxious-looking man. He looked just the same when he was playing bridge. He was always playing bridge, that man. And he said he hated playing bridge. That kind of man. “Well? How are you?”
“Glad,” I said, “glad it’s no worse. Glad it’s only you. I was afraid of a purple beard.”
“And how did you get here?” A man given to muttering, that. One could hear what he said or not just as one pleased. One couldn’t, you understand, be afraid of Conrad Masters.
“Masters, the fight I’ve had with this Cerberus to see you!”
“Rules ... must have rules, you know....” A decidedly undecided man. Soft-speaking but not plausible, a combination peculiarly English. A man of nerves. Shifty without suavity ... and then, suddenly, apt to bite your head off like a very captain of men: “And how did you know Mrs. Storm was ill? Here?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well....” And I thought of many things. Of Conrad Masters, of “Should a doctor tell?” of Cherry-Marvel, that confidant at third-hand, of Mrs. Conrad Masters. A dashing lady, that.
“Who but Cherry-Marvel told me!” said I.
“God in Heaven, that man!”
But Iris swept out of my mind her doctor’s problematical indiscretions to his dashing wife....
“Ill,” he muttered. “Decidedly ill.... mm....”
“I heard,” I said desperately, “that she’d had a sort of operation—”
“There’s been no operation!” snapped that captain of men. “Simply maddens a man, the way these things get about....”
“Well, I’m only repeating what I heard, Masters. And you can’t hope for secrecy once our friend gets hold of anything—”
“Who said anything about secrecy?” A dangerous, feline muttering. “I don’t want secrecy....”
Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm with that lank man’s doubtful heat.
“I say, Masters, is she—is she very ill? But, of course, if I’m intruding....”
Those worried eyes were fixed on the feet stuck far out from the chair on which he lay as though exhausted. The lay-sister appeared to be pottering about in the next room. “Thinking of Donna Guelãra, are you? Haven’t much faith in me and Martel-Bonnard, have you?” Faintly amused those worried eyes looked to be. That was that man’s way. You would think he was being shifty with you when he might be just laughing at you.
Some would speak well, very well, of Dr. Masters; whilst others almost libellously, sayingthat, working as he did with Eugene Martel-Bonnard, the surgeon, he couldn’t be over-scrupulous in advising profitable but unnecessary operations. Martel-Bonnard’s wife wore a famous pearl rope, of which it was said that each pearl had been bought at the price of a woman’s life. But a brilliant surgeon’s life. Martel-Bonnard would say, is full of drawbacks. He charged accordingly. I think that he and Mrs. Masters must have bullied Masters every now and then—not that he wouldn’t have looked worried in the Elysian Fields. Between them, those three had once made poor Anna Estella Guelãra very sorry she had ever left Chile. She was quite well, Martel-Bonnard said she was very ill, he almost killed her, then he saved her, and how he hurt her! “Naturally,” smiled Martel-Bonnard. “Such things hurt. But, my friend, she was—pouf!—but for me.” How one would have liked to operate on that sleek little man, unsuccessfully! He despised you if you differed from him, operated on you if you were fool enough, and robbed you according to a special system he had of discounting the exchange. One hundred thousand francs, poor Anna Estella’s life had cost her that time. And pain, such as falls only to the lot of women!
“But. Masters, it’s surely not as bad a case as that!”
“Mm ... not as bad? Well ... different shall we say?”
“But that was an internal operation! You just said—”
“Quite. That’s why it’s different....”
Talking with Conrad Masters was like playing a game in which he who made out the most of the other’s words scored the most points.... But Iris alone here, in this obscure place as full of crucifixes as a cemetery!
“I’m sorry,” I said, rising from the stool. “I’m intruding....”
“You’re all right,” he mumbled. “So you heard about it from thatfemme fatale, did you? Damn that man! Bla, bla, bla!”
Those worried but faintly amused eyes were on me. “Been hearing quite a lot about you lately. Nurses would have yourdossiercomplete by now if they could understand English. You seem to have put your foot in it somewhere. Rather sorry for you if....”
This bantering ... medical bantering! Only doctors dare do it. “Well, how are we to-day?” But by paying close attention to the game I had scored one point. She was delirious. So far, delirious. Then ... “if!”
“Masters,” I said, “are you telling me that she is dying?”
“Mm ...” he muttered impatiently, and as he jumped up from his chair the rough brown great-coat seemed to fill the dingy lodge. It smelt of England, that coat. And, protruding from it, that sharp, naked, weary face with the worried eyes....
“Look here, Masters—”
“Here you are,” he muttered. I could not understand why he muttered. “Here you are” until I found a cigarette in one hand and one of those wretched spirit-lighters in the other. Aman without conviction even in his ability to strike a match....
“Known her for years,” he muttered towards his feet. “At Deauville that year ... terrible for her. Poor child....”
“Masters, you said Donna Guelãra might die. You know you did. But she didn’t, did she?”
He looked at me sharply. “If only she’d help herself, lift a finger to help herself! That’s what beats a man. Doesn’t lift one finger, she doesn’t.”
“Oh!” I said, trying to look reasonable. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, accommodate myself to the idea of Iris dying. “I suppose this is the crisis, is it, Masters?”
The rough great-coat gave one vindictive flounce, filled the room. “Crisis! The way you people talk of crisis this and crisis that! Hear a word once and stick to it through life! ‘When does the crisis pass?’ There is no ‘crisis’ in most of these infernal things. Malaria, pneumonia, a few others—yes, crisis, know where you are. But in these things the patient just continues ill, two, three, four weeks, might live, might not. Lysis, not crisis. Crisis!”
“Sorry. Lysis....”
“Oh, here!” He suddenly began fumbling in an ancient pocket-book, from which he extracted a small folded piece of paper. “Might interest you,” he muttered.
Scrawled in pencil across the slip of paper were what looked like two names. That indecipherable scrawl! At last I made out the two names: Hilary’s and mine.
“She said, should either of these two happen somehow to hear I am ill and call, just be nice to them, please. Her very words....”
“Oh!” I said. And I went on staring at the slip of paper. It was a rather grubby slip of paper. And those two scrawled names were like a faint cry of loneliness.
“Known her for years,” Masters was muttering. “Nice! First tells me not to tell any one, then to be ‘nice’ to you two....”
I gave him back the slip of paper. I don’t know why, and now I wish I hadn’t. I would like to have it now, beside that fiver. “Nice, fivers are....” Thoughtful Iris! She knew her friends, she did. Lying lonely here ... and having an afterthought about Hilary—and me! “If they should somehow happen to hear and call.” Poor Guy hadn’t a mention. She wasn’t for putting any strain on Guy’s lawfulness. But why lawfulness? I looked at Conrad Masters.
“Septic poisoning,” said Masters. “That’s the trouble.”
That meant very little to me, for never was a man so ill-informed about such things. “But,” I said doubtfully to those gentle-worried eyes, and he murmured:
“Sure you’re not thinking of ptomaine poisoning? Not that that isn’t quite enough to be going on with....”
“Pain,” I said. “Good Lord, pain....” All I could think of was pain, pain, pain. One can almost feel the stabs of some one’s pain. Worst of all, one can mentally hear the faint screamsof a voice just recognisable. Conrad Masters, the sight of him, reminded me vividly of Anna Estella’s pain. Once, from a waiting-room, I had heard her screaming. “Pain?” I said.
“Oh, no ... no.” He weighed the matter. “Nothing to speak of. Just keep still, that’s the main thing. Very still, for weeks and weeks. Long business, you know. But what worries a man is that she doesn’t try to help herself at all. Letting herself go ... can’t tell whether consciously or not, but somewhere inside her just not caring. I’ve been sharp with her.... Nice business for me, isn’t it? Good Lord, nice! If only she’d take a pull, pull herself together ... some one just give her mind a jab somehow. No good talking, of course. If she won’t, she won’t. Lies there, you know, just not caring....” He was drawing on a fur-lined glove, and it was to that he spoke; almost, one thought, shyly. A curious, complex gentleman. “She’s said once or twice she’d like to see you and ... well, learn you a thing or two. Some stuff about roses and dandelions. You seem to have made agaffesomewhere, and it’s quite on her mind to tell you about it. Hope I’m not giving anything away ... but might do her good just to see you, feel you’re round about. You can’t tell. We’ll see how she is to-morrow. Extraordinary, I’ve found it, the way a woman will wake up for a second from days of delirium for no other purpose than to feel lonely.... Not awake now, though. Ill, this evening. Can’t really, you see, be iller if she tried. It will be good news, really good news, if she is alive in themorning. That’s as much as I can say. Sorry.... Well, I must snatch some dinner....”
We were outside. The rain had ceased, it was much warmer. The Masters’s Renault, sleek and shining black but for the scarlet wheels, dwarfed my taxi.
Septic poisoning. I began to remember a little about that. I remembered two words which seemed very like “septic poisoning” in reports of trials of wretched women who had “operated.” Surely, Masters couldn’t ... she had, after all, trusted me—“be nice to him”—and I must at once think the worst thing. Oh, God, how foul a thing a man’s mind is, how foul! But, Iris, dear Iris, why is one able to think of these awful things in connection with you!
“There’s always hope, you know,” Masters was muttering. “Pity you kept your taxi. I could have dropped you. And Donna Guelãra didn’t die, did she?”
But how Anna Estella had desired to live! “Die, me!” she had later screamed with laughter.
Iris had trusted me. “Be nice to him”—her very words. And I had thought that ...
“Masters, you won’t mind my coming round again? Perhaps to-night?”
“Sleep here, if you like,” he smiled. “I’ll be coming myself for a second, about midnight. Wife’s got a party. Like to come? Rather good bridge. Well, please yourself....”