“No,” she said. She shook her head. “Certainly not. My ring, please.”
Imperiously her finger pointed to the floor, but her eyes were as plaintive as a nun’s who has strayed into one of the corridors of hell. That I might walk with her there I again made myself a Judas to her hand, and she shivered with her whole body as in a torment, and she seemed to bite her lip from within.
“It means nothing,” she said coldly.
“I know,” I said.
She breathed deeply, with a hand pressed to one breast, as though it hurt her. I think it must have hurt her very much. I was sorry. She shook her head, as though she was in a cage, and then she was as still as a cut flower. The whole brim of the green hat was between me and her face, we were both terribly alone. Her right hand drooped naked over the arm of the chair, and I was bending down to pick up the emerald to replace it onthe third finger when a cautious knocking came from below.
That was the second or third time of knocking, and each time it was less cautious, and I knew it to come from the policeman on the beat, who would be wishing to have the primrose car put in its proper place, which was not on the King’s highroad. I wondered if she had heard, but I could not see her face. I wondered if she heard me move. As I came to the door I switched out the light and the dawn pounced on her green hat, but she who wore it fought her battles carved in stone. She said something, I did not catch what, and I went downstairs and spoke with the policeman, who was an amiable middle-aged man of my acquaintance.
“My brother is with me,” I said, “but he will be gone soon.” Shepherd’s Market was creeping out into the dawn, draped and mysterious with the shadows of night. A window here and there was alight against the dark pile of Camelot House. The great car stood like a bruise against the passage of eternity, dawn fought for it, night draped it, and the silver stork flew unseen. The small noises of dawn stirred sharply in the night, and the lamps wore pale, tired faces. “Summer’s well on,” said the policeman.
I re-entered the sitting-room, saying impersonally: “I’m afraid you must go, as....” The room was empty. The figure that had been carved in stone was wrapped in air. The disorder of the room lay jeering at me on the dim carpet of the dawn. It was all like a purposeless limbo stretched between the night and the day, the room, my life, hers, everything, the strong, thesilly and the brave. The hundreds of books lay in soiled confusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that has gone to the making of the soiled nothings that we are.
I was seized by a catholic anger against the woman. Through all the disenchantments of youth, despite the contagious impurities of life, in defiance of the crimes against love that we call love, I had kept romance for my ghostly companion. Romance was more than a silly lithe goddess coming down from a marble column. Romance was more than the licence to be shameless with clouded eyes. Romance did not steal through the fleshy portals of the heart, did not shiver at a Judas kiss, did not coil white trembling limbs into the puerile lusts of the mind. Romance was all that and was as much greater than that as a religion is greater than a church. To romance, which was the ultimate vision of commonsense, sex, as sex, was the most colossal bore that had ever distracted man from his heritage. And she would palm a facet of this colossal bore off on me! She would have me barter my ghostly companion for the fall of an emerald, she would invade my thoughts, perhaps my life, in exchange for a puny pleasure that needs love to exalt it above the matchless silliness of what, with an excessive zeal for scientific classification, is known to our civilisation as the sexual act.
I picked up the emerald from the floor, and it smiled in the palm of my hand.
In the dusk of the bedroom, she lay coiled on the bed. The hush of her breathing was no more than the trembling servant of the silence. Then she coughed a small cigarette cough. It was theusual cough, and gave me back my confidence. “Iris Storm!” I said, but I wondered if I had spoken, the frail silence was so undisturbed. She was asleep.
Perhaps it was then that I realised that she was beautiful. She was asleep. Could any but the shape of beauty dare to wear that impertinence! She lay on her side, she lay anyhow. The green hat was gone.
“Iris!” I said. Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair. It was like a boy’s hair, swept back from the forehead, which was a wide, clear forehead, clean and brave and sensible as a boy’s. Sensible, oh dear! The tawny cornstalks danced their formal dance on the one cheek that I could see, and the tip of a pierced ear played beneath them, like a mouse in the cornfield. Above her neck her hair died a very manly death, a more manly death than “bobbed” hair was ever known to die, and so it comes about that Iris Storm was the first Englishwoman I ever saw with “shingled” hair. This was in 1922.
I decided that I did not know what to do. I decided that that was just as well. “I will play,” I thought, “a waiting game,” and lit a cigarette. But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like a promise, and it smelled as grass might smell in a faëry land, and always about her there was that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a little shiny bit in the valley between her cheek and her nose. To this I applied a littleQuelques Fleurstalc powder on a handkerchief, that when she awoke she should not think so illof herself as I did. Hers was a small, straight nose with an imperceptible curve, just as any straight line might have, and its tip quivered a little as she breathed. Her leather jacketpour le sport, that had a high collar trimmed with some minks, was flung open, and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination. Towards her feet her hat lay with my hat.
Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and when the red elephants marching towards an unknown destination stirred breasts full of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “But enough of this hell!”
Of all that had once decorated the walls of my sitting-room there was left by the removers only a looking-glass in an ancient gold frame, above the fireplace. My mother had once given me an oil-painting, saying, “This will do nicely for your flat,” but I in my pride had thought a looking-glass would offend the frame more judiciously.
She stood before that.
“What is the time?” she asked her reflection, and I told her that it was ten minutes to six.
“Have you a comb?” she asked of her reflection, and luckily I had a comb which was notmy comb. She looked at it and saw that it was so.
“Thank you,” she said to her reflection.
The light of the tawny hair mocked the clouded daylight, and when, with the palm of her hand on her forehead, she swept the comb from front to back, it flamed tiger-tawny and ate into my spirit.Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night....
In the Upper Fifth at school there was a tall, cold-eyed blood called Dwight-Rankin—I think he died on Gallipoli—who used to sit at the desk just in front of mine. He was a man of the mode, wearing his fair hair plastered from front to back, and his neck was clean and unspotted as a girl’s, and I would spend minutes wondering whether, if one touched the gold down in which his hair ended high above his neck one would feel hair or only skin. The back of her head affected me like that; it was just like Dwight-Rankin’s, only dry, and tiger-tawny.
She tore the small comb through the dancing curls on each cheek, so that they trembled like voiceless bells. It is a commonplace about women, as assiduously remarked by brilliant feminine psychologists as women’s “caprice” and “intuition,” that every woman must now and then make a “grimace of distaste” into a looking-glass. But she did not do that, nor need to. She was untouched, unsoiled, impregnable to the grubby, truthful hand oflex femina. She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world. The outlaw was above the law of afterwards, impervious and imperious. She was beautiful, grave, proud. How beautiful she was now! It wasa sort of blasphemy in her to be so beautiful now, to stand in such ordered loveliness, to be neither shameful like a maiden nor shameless like a mondaine, nor show any fussy after-trill of womanhood, any dingy ember of desire. It was a sort of blasphemy in her, as it would be in a peacock to sing gracefully.
The silence got on my nerves, and I said something, anything. She looked over her shoulder at me, vaguely. She was the male of the species that is more fearless than mankind. I wondered what she was going to say.
“My hat, please,” she said. I appeared to have been holding it in my hand. With her left hand she crushed it on her head and kept her hand on the crown, looking at herself intently in the looking-glass. I was startled at her eyes in the looking-glass. They were cold blue stones, expressionless, caddish as a beast’s.
Down, down, with two fingers of her left hand, she pulled the brim of the green hat over her left eyebrow. She said: “I think I must have left my powder in the other room. Do you mind?” I brought her the case of white jade and the box of black onyx. She powdered, without interest.
“Good-bye,” she said. Her hand was held out, her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself. It would be a kindness to let her go quickly, a kindness which she would not have allowed me had I been a woman and she a man.
“Good-bye,” I said. And suddenly the hand that lay in mine pressed mine, and she gave a vague, brittle laugh.
“It seems a pity,” she said; and then the eyes in the shadow of the brim seemed to open wide, wide.
“You see?” she whispered. “You see?”
But I could see nothing but her silhouette against the future days. I said: “We have begun at the wrong end; but can’t we work back?”
“Oh, no!” she whispered. “It is not like that a bit. You don’t understand....”
Suddenly I said many things.
She seemed, her hand still in mine, to be absorbed in something just behind my right shoulder. There was such fear in her eyes that I cried sharply: “What is it?”
“The beast,” said the lips of the eyes of fear. “Just the beast....”
The word I said was drowned in the din of a lorry that smashed through Whitehorse Street to Piccadilly. She took her hand gently from mine. “There is a dream,” she said, “and there is a beast.”
She smiled.
“That’s all,” she said.
“I can understand regret,” I said, “but——”
“Ah, we can understand, you and I! We are as old as sand ... at this moment.”
“But, Iris Storm, regret seems like a scar on you!”
“Not regret,” she said, so calmly. “Shame.” And she took my hand again, closely. “You must forgive me. I couldn’t have said that to any other man. My shame mustn’t shame you, please! But you have a cold mind, you are disenchanted, you understand. And oh, if one could be assoiled in human understanding!You see, I am not what you think. I am not of the women of your life. I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am the meanest of all, she who destroys her body because she must, she who hates the thing she is, she who loathes the thing she does....” The breathless, pregnant voice seemed to fall to the floor, like a small bird with broken wings, and as it struggled upwards I said: “You are like a boy after his first love.”
“Oh, if it was boyishness!” And she took from the pocket of her leather jacket a tube of gold, and she broke it into two pieces, and she stared moon-struck at the carmine tongue of the lip-salve.
“To be born a chaste woman,” she said to the carmine tongue, “is good. I am in favour of chastity. I would die for purity, in theory.” She painted her mouth, staring moon-struck into the daylight. “Yes, I would die for purity. I wouldn’t mind dying anyhow, but it would be nice to die for purity....”
I said thus and thus.
“Yes,” she said, not having heard a word of mine, “it is not good to have a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind, as I have. It is hell for the body and terror for the mind. There are dreams, and there are beasts. The dreams walk glittering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire, the beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret. Good-bye.”
“Then it must be ‘good-bye’?”
She looked at me with a strange, dark friendliness, and nodded.
“Because of shame,” she said. “But if I were different, I would like you for my friend——”
To my interruption, which she did not hear, she said: “I have only one lover. But I know that only because I always feel unfaithful to him. It would be good to be really bad, but I am not even that. I only misbehave. I will see you again, when I have found my only love. Or I will see you again when I am qualified to die for purity. I will let you know, so you can be there. God bless you, dear.”
And I said what I said, that He had, with Iris Storm.
She went very white. “That shall be written down,” she whispered, “as the prayer of the only man who ever shamed a woman of her shame.”
“My days of adventure, Iris Storm, are over. A few years ago it would have seemed nothing to me that you should disappear as you came, into the great hole of London. To experts in adventure that is, I think, the usual procedure. But now I would like a trace of you. You must not leave me, quite. If I may not see you again, mayn’t I perhaps talk to you? Or, what is the main thing, feel that I could if I dared?”
She said she was in London now only on business that would last a few weeks, and lived always abroad. “But this is the telephone-number,” she said, and I was looking round for paper and pencil when she said “Here!” and her leather arm darted to the floor and came up with a book, and on the fly-leaf of the book she scrawled the number with her lip-stick.
High above the sharp noises of the young day I heard the scream of an electric-horn.
AND that, I think, is all that there really is about me, as a person, in the tale. Of course, this first person singular will continue, and there’ll no doubt be any amount of “I this” and “I that,” but that is because of the nature of the work, and there’s never, the way I see it, much more than a pen behind it. Hilary, however, and Guy de Travest are not of my mind about this. We have recently been talking about these affairs, and a sad enough talk they made, and my two friends, my two seniors, were reluctantly compelled, they said, to disagree with me about my lack of responsibility in the events to be related hereinafter.
To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain things were decreed to happen and that, therefore, they did happen: they had it in their blood, these people, that certain things should happen to them, and I could no more contrive these things than they could evade them. But Hilary and Guy, murmuring together in that astonishing unison which can only be found in two Englishmen who disagree upon everything in the world but on the fact that conduct is three parts of life, are of opinion that my substitution of the word“ptomaine” for “septic” really affected the course of events. Had I, they say in effect, spoken the truth like a brave little man, there would have been a divorce and every one would by now have been happy, as happiness goes. And then, too, they have something to say about those two red lights, those two rear-lamps of two cars sweeping into South Audley Street—had I told Iris, they say, about Gerald, those two red lights never would have been so close together. Oh, Guy, what a man is that! That latter-day thunder-god of dandies, that warrior of conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could give “gratuitous information” about any one! Oh, Hilary, that friend of childhood!
Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had turned away from his friends, his people: he had dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it’s not difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that young man. But I was to find, after the coming of the lady of the green hat, that it wasn’t only at the impulse of his furious nature that Gerald had, well, withered fiercely into solitude. In very truth that Gerald had been a hero-worshipper; and in very truth he had become, as his sister had said, a nothing without his hero. Very few things had ever mattered to Gerald Haveleur March; but those few things, one was to learn, had mattered far too much.
His sister was, as it’s not impossible to have gathered, what is calleddeclassée—even for aMarch or a Portairley. And that was why I had heard nothing about her from Guy or Hilary, for while Guy never gave gratuitous information about any one, Hilary was held in thrall by that upside-down but virulent form of snobbery which will make of a man of property an extreme Liberal and a thorough-going die-hard disapprover of any one who let his, Hilary’s, caste down. Hilary, a sincerely good man, was an enemy of caste, he was an enemy of his own caste in particular, he did not believe in it; and yet, in the depths of that being where lurks a dragon that can ultimately defeat even the sincerity of a man of principle, Hilary believed in nothing else but caste.
And Iris, of course, had betrayed her caste to perfection. No one, you might say, could have done that more thoroughly than Iris. She had been malinspired to excess, she had reached Excelsior in the abyss. But she was ever completely not on her guard about what people might say or did say, she had an amazing, an enviable, snapped Hilary, talent for just not noticing things.
She had been quite surprised, Hilary told me recently, when once he had taxed her with being a renegade from her class. Genuinely surprised she was, Hilary says. It simply hadn’t, she had told him, occurred to her in that light.
“Rushing about Europe like that,” Hilary had said, “you let England down. You’ve no idea, Iris, how these young foreign blighters hold Englishwomen cheap.” Iris had maintained she had a very good idea about that. (But you simply had to disagree with Hilary. He was like that. And he said “hm” all the time.) And you onlyhad to travel on a liner to the East, she had said, to notice how British matrons reacted to foreign parts. As for Egypt! But she always did her best, she had said, to influence foreigners to a more lofty view of the gallantries of British matrons.
“People cut you,” Hilary had said, for that seemed to him an abominable thing, that she should have put herself into the position of being “cut”; and she had admitted having noticed glaciers, but she had maintained that it was a far, far better thing to be cut by a county eye than to be killed by the boredom of a county tongue. “I arose from the dead when I was twenty,” she had said. (Hilary, you understand, would provoke any one.) “Your class,” Hilary had snapped, and she had said she had never actually thought of herself as belonging to any class. Her class would be, she supposed, the landed gentry, same as Hilary’s. She was proud, she had said, to belong to the same class as Hilary, and was very sorry indeed if she had hit him in the eye with her heel. But she hoped, she had said, that with him she had always been a lady.
That had annoyed Hilary very much indeed. But everything about any woman he liked would annoy Hilary very much indeed. Mr. Townshend was one of those Englishmen with an unlimited capacity for disapproving of any woman, whom he liked, who enjoyed being with other men as much as with himself; and an unlimited capacity for finding other reasons than that for his disapproval.
As for Gerald, Hilary had last known him as a“dark diabolical schoolboy” with a disturbing capacity for threatening silences and an immense—“a corroding, almost,” Hilary said—admiration for Iris. But not long after Barty March’s death—every one had lovedthatdrunkard!—he had quite lost sight of Gerald. Guy de Travest had been Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war, but he never spoke but once of Gerald as a soldier—“young hell-fire idiot”—and never went near him while he lived above me in Shepherd’s Market. “Reminds me,” Guy said, “too much of Barty left standing too long with the cork out.” And that was more or less what Hilary said, too. One must say this for the warriors of caste and conduct: they seldom try to improve any man.
This chapter has been called The Cavalier of Low Creatures because it is about Gerald, and therefore it is a short chapter, for what on earth is there to say about Gerald? It isn’t at all a good description of him, but it is intended, if you please, more as a flourish, a naïve gesture. For you simply can’t let Gerald stand without a flourish, without a something, anything. Besides, I liked him, and would like to do him a bit of good. He was,sansgesture, a zero with a scowl and a hat—and a hat. Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a novel? I liked Gerald, but I would not give him a line if he wasn’t essential; and that is just what he is, essential, for these things simply couldn’t have happened without Gerald. He hated his sister, he had not seen her for ten years, yet it turned out that he was the most important factor in herlife. And, decidedly, her love for him was one of the most important factors inherlife. I wonder if he knows. But he too, even he, grew up in the end. I can hear him now, through the twilight of East Chapel Street, his shoulder against the saloon-door of the inn. “Give her my love,” he said. But you will hear him.
Sometimes I would see Gerald in the Café Royal. I would be dining, with Hilary maybe, and in the distance, cut as with a sharp knife in the tapestry of smoke and grubby faces, would be Gerald, darkly alone, a glass of whisky on the marble-top before him. One wouldn’t attempt to join him, for it made Gerald shy, desperate, if any one sat with him while drinking. He hated being “messed about,” did Gerald; and if you joined him he would presently mutter something about an appointment (Gerald with an appointment!), leave his drink unfinished and go and order one somewhere else; and as I understood he hadn’t much money I did not like to drive him to that. Maybe, though, he was less shy with me than with any one. “I like you,” he once said—oh, darkly!
One never knew, as he sat there or as he strode about the streets, careless as a fakir impelled always towards a terrible and nameless penance, what he could be thinking of. Maybe he was thinking of nothing. Once I saw him come out of a Cinema Theatre with a look on his face as though he had been tortured. He alwayslooked, you know, like something. You noticed him.
He had a grey suit. It was thin as paper, but still defiantly retained a little of that casual elegance which not even Gerald could wholly divorce from the combination of a good tailor and a lean Englishman. He never had but one other suit that I ever saw, a brown affair, but he bartered that with a boot-mender in Shepherd’s Market in exchange for mending his shoes. And he had a hat. That was a hat. And never was Gerald seen wearing an overcoat, no matter whether it blew, rained, snowed or froze. See him any winter evening striding down Half-Moon Street in the biting rain, his thin grey suit blackening with it, the jacket held by one button with deep creases into his waist, the shapes of his knuckles stuck through his trouser pockets, that hat—there, but for the grace of God, went the most lovable man I ever met.
“Gerald—I say, Gerald! Why don’t you wear a coat on a day like this? Gerald, aren’t you an ass!”
“Coat?” Thoughtful he was always, and his dark, sunk eyes would pierce the pavement or the sky with unutterable contempt. “Coat!” And he would repeat the word softly until, you understand, he had grasped the enormous idea, when he would say softly, savagely: “What the hell d’you mean, ‘coat’?” and away he would go, towards that terrible and nameless penance of his.
Well, the flourish goes, the gesture is gone, to the limbo that yawns for all such vanities in thevery second of their birth. The Cavalier of Low Creatures was never, to be sure, hailed as more than a zero. But, even as the ground is not the limit of a man’s fall, as you may see in the picture with the trail of flame, so zero is not the limit of a man’s nothingness; for what is that which is nothing but so completely nothing that it may not have even the mark of nothing? It is, to be sure, zero without the formative circle round it.
That solitary drunkard, that soiled ascetic! Those nightmare women, soft as the grass of Parnassus, marvellously acquiescent, possible. Aphrodite, Ariadne, Anaïtis, white as marble, silent as marble, silent and acquiescent, possible, as only goddesses could be, the goddesses of soiled dreams, as no woman born of woman could ever be....
And yet one might have been wrong in imagining the malcontents of the solitary drunkard’s mind. God only knows, of course, with what nightmare fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them, and grow out of them; men, at least, do not admit even to themselves that they have not grown out of them, men do not admit even to themselves that while they indulge in continence they may suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire.
That women walked in all the delicious beauty of the unattainable through Gerald’s tortured mind, I know now. But I did not know it then, for never was a man so secret with another man as Gerald, never was a man so little given to discussing with another those inevitable mattersof desire and concupiscence which only by being discussed can be seen in a proper and proportionate light. They should be aired, those secret silly things, that they may be seen for what they are. In the old days there was a god in a garden, and people would do their best to make pretty fancies out of their lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns, nymphs, sirens, sylphs; they, at least, got rid of them somehow. But now that we see them plainly for what they are, the nasty little enemies of our assault on nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has smashed the god in the garden and hidden the pieces under the bed.
Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the cleanest-mouthed man I ever met with; while from his book one had gathered that there was one main idea in Gerald’s mind; this was purity. It was to do with that one brilliant-childish romance of his that, about seven years before the coming of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then, for more than five years, I had not seen nor heard of him, had forgotten him, when one day a lean, dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the Hammam Baths in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped me. I knew later that he must have been in an agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked intensely furious. I, not recognising him, thought he was going to hit me, and gaped at him.
Bitterly and darkly he told me that some one had told him there was a flat to be let above me in Shepherd’s Market. “I’m staying here at the moment,” he muttered, looking indignantly atthe Hammam Baths. Several minutes passed before I could place him, for he had been in uniform that first time, in that transfiguring long-waisted grey coat of the Brigade of Guards.
Gerald appeared suddenly, in the winter of 1915, at the office of Horton’sNew Voice. Now that Horton has left England on his adventure in un-individualism one does not hear much ofThe New Voice, but at that time and for long beforeThe New Voicewas, of course, a power, and Horton was a Power. Quite apart from Horton’s personal quality, you knew he was a Power because several of the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time kept on bitterly pointing out to their million readers what a futile man Horton was. Quite a number of the men whose names you can “conjure with” now—it would be fun to meet that man who is always in the street conjuring with names!—had begun by writing for Horton’s paper; but they had always gotten on his nerves by the time they had become the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time, and, since Horton was an honest man, he told them so, and he told them why, and he told them off, and they were furious. But the most inspired among the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time revenged themselves by republishing theirNew Voicestuff in book-form and omitting to mentionThe New Voiceas the first medium of publication. That was discourteous of them.
We were correcting proofs when Gerald appeared. It was a Monday afternoon, and on Monday afternoons any of Horton’s writers whowished could turn up and correct either his own or some one else’s proofs and then go and have tea at the A.B.C. And Talk.
“Hello!” said Horton. “Hello!”
“Defence of the Realm,” murmured Home.
We were not prepared for Gerald. We had, of course, seen soldiers before; indeed, there was one in the room at the moment, the philosopher Home, who was to be killed a year or so later. But Gerald was a Figure, he was martial. The herald of the dominion of hell upon earth, that was Gerald. Take one small, frowsty room, the staff (Miss Veale) addressing wrappers at a desk by the window, Horton blue-pencilling at the other desk by the door, four of us sitting cramped round correcting proofs on bound annuals ofThe New Voiceon our knees, smoking, muttering—enter six-foot-two of the Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night and the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who has seen Christ crucified in vain. The panoply of war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier in the real rather than in the technical sense of the word: he looked, you know, as though he had accepted death and was just living anyhow in the meanwhile. Ah, see him then! Not even Gerald’s malevolent slackness in attire could make that long-waisted grey coat with the red-silk lining sit on him but imperially. Not Gerald’s the common-or-garden chubby face of a Guard’s subaltern. Gerald was no chap. He glowered at us.
“Eh,” he stammered. “I say ... I’ve been told you people....”
“He’s heard about us,” said Home sympathetically. “Sit down, boy. On the floor, I’m afraid.”
Gerald began a fierce scowl at him—then grinned. Dear Gerald!
“Well?” smiled Horton. Always courteous was Horton, in manner.
“Heard,” muttered Gerald, “that you didn’t care what you published....”
“Oh!” said Horton. “Well, we don’t care how good it is, if that’s what you mean.”
You couldn’t guess that Gerald was so shy that he could scarcely speak. You thought he stammered just because he stammered, not because he was so shy that he could scarcely get a word out. A man had no right to look like Gerald, an ensign of the fallen Prince of Light, and be shy; but that was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy. Just then, for instance, he looked as though he had strayed intoThe New Voiceto send us all to blazes on general principles. And Horton looked as though he was quite prepared to go. Horton preferred bad-tempered men.
“There’s this,” Gerald muttered, and lugged out an enormous typescript from the deep pocket of his grey coat. “Novel,” he scowled at Horton. “Thought perhaps....” and he planted the thing with a thump on Horton’s desk. Horton grinned. Horton had had much too much to do with professional novelists to think that a novelby a subaltern of Grenadiers was necessarily unreadable. “Bit long, isn’t it?” he smiled.
“Long?” Gerald stammered. “Of course it’s long! Been writing it for four whole months.”
“Ought to be good,” said Home gravely.
“It’sawful,” grinned Gerald, “but, you see....”
“Quite,” said Horton busily. “Now, I’ll....”
“Hello!” said Horton, for Gerald was not. Horton threw the typescript to me to read. Of course, it was mad.The New Voicepublished most of it, and then Heinemann’s published it in the autumn of 1916 and ran it into three editions while people were still disentangling their eyes from the paper wrapper, which showed a woman with purple eyes crucifying a pleasant young man.
The Savage Deviceis open before me as I write, and its opening lines are: “The history of Felix Burton is the history of an ideal and a vision. They had nothing to do with one another except that the pursuit of the vision hardened him and blooded him for the attainment of the ideal. The ideal was aristocratic, in the sense that it was a striving after nobility in life: the vision was a contradiction, as scientific as it was mystic. The ideal was, of course, defeated: the vision, of course, defeated him. The ideal was purity: the vision had something to do with pain....”
The “vision,” so far as one could see, had everything to do with pain; in fact it was pain, and the vision might or might not come afterwards. (And I detest that word “mystic.”) The book was exciting and interesting because of astrange mixture of high romance, desperate villainy and an abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally. Gerald’s hero had minority ideas about the war—letting the landed gentry down again! As for the pain ... Young Burton’s idea of it had not to do with pain as a fact, but as the most sublime among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald wrote, “it is the only drug that cannot debase a man. It can kill him, but there are worse ways of dying than being killed.” It was full of quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at you with a dash sadly lacking in the originals. Young Burton was, of course, going to die in the war.
Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the major and minor tortures of crime and martyrdom. There was a long description of tortures, if you liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s books on them, with illustrations ... very interesting. Then young Burton had come across the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain there is a definite state of bliss and definite and glorious visions of a real reality which men by ordinary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But poor old Gerald, try as he would, couldn’t makeThe Savage Devicea novel of ideas: it remained a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest. Young Burton went everywhere in the world, having adventures, getting magnificently hurt—South Sea stuff—studying the effect of pain on men’s minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a number of visions.
Then he plucked Ava Foe from a “dive” in San Francisco, she became Mrs. Burton, and thenhe had every opportunity for judging the visionary qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly well written, the hell that Ava Burton gave him. But young Burton’s ideal of purity was, naturally enough, schoolboy stuff: fine in parts, but stuff. The only part of it that was good was that it was, somehow, purity. On the sexual side young Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one thought, unnecessarily callous young wife. In Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking after the coming of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about Iris. I realised then how he must first have worshipped and then hated his twin sister. What on earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to make him hate her like that? Ava wasn’t in the least like her, of course, but Ava might quite well have been like any sister to any brother who hated her. But this fierce, devilish, mediæval passion—why? Yet I should have guessed something of the reason after Iris had told me that young Burton was “Boy,” Gerald’s hero of before the war. But it never occurred to me to connect Iris’s casually dropped “Boy” with the legendary Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-the-War fame. He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.
“Felix Burton’s” idea of what a man should be to live nobly—he was full of those large strivings of Young Men which were in vogue in the Careless-Days-Before-the-War—seemed to take the form of wanting to found a new race of something like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of course, without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn’t. Nor did young Burton want any ofyour waste of time in graceful love-making; he wanted a sort of ruthless companionship, with occasional patches of mating; he didnotwant to procreate gracefully, but with a sort of furious absent-mindedness. Imagine Ava—Iris! Imagine Gerald himself drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft possible woman of lonely dreams, detesting her for destroying him ... and for destroying Boy! One wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever known a woman. The dark knight of purity ... the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen!
I did not see Gerald whilst I was shaking the dust of Shepherd’s Market for ever off my feet, for he was still asleep. I left Shepherd’s Market. The hearty-looking man and the thin wizened man who said “Oi!” and the little bent old man with the blood-shot eyes gave me farewell.
That afternoon I snatched a few moments from the arranging of the new place, which was only round the corner, to go round and tell Gerald that his sister had been to see him on an Impulse. I had grown to feel responsible for Gerald: his solitude was somehow like a scar across one’s own life, a rebuke.
I came upon him in our lane. I have forgotten to say that Gerald, after a particularly hard spell of dipsomania, would go riding on a hack from the Mews nearby. He had a pair of fine polo breeches with which to do that, and with the fine polo breeches (Moss Bros.) went Barty March’s riding-whip and the jacket of the old grey suit and that hat. A highwayman on an off day, that is what he looked like in the mean lane, passing the time of day with the little bent old man with the blood-shot eyes.
“You’ve been drinking,” said Gerald severely to me.
“Billy Goat’s won the two-thirty,” wheezed the little bent old man. His hat was the captain of Gerald’s hat.
One didn’t, perhaps, look one’s best in the middle of a removal. But Gerald, confound the man, looked positively healthy, taut, tempered, weathered.Ach, le sale type anglais!I told him that his sister had called. “On an Impulse,” I said.
Gerald stared at me, his cigarette half-way to his mouth. “Oh!” he said. “Oh!...”
“Here’s her telephone number,” I said. He didn’t take the slip of paper I held out.
“’Ere,” said the little bent old man, “I’ll give it ’im when he’s better.” Gerald lowered his cigarette, scowling at me pathetically. No one else would have known it was “pathetically.”
“Iris called hell!” he accused me. “How you lie! What?”
“Honest to God, Gerald!”
He flipped away his cigarette and dug his free hand into his pocket as though it was a weapon. Those deep eyes scowled at me, but I wondered what they saw.
“That beast,” he whispered, “oh, that beast....”
I left him.
And I did not see him again until the twelfthevening later. I wish I had. I ought to have been to see him, for I was in the habit of seeing Gerald, and during those twelve days he might, I think he would, have told me about the silly, shoddy thing that had happened, and I could have helped to make him see it as only a silly, shoddy thing. What made me feel responsible for Gerald was that his livid, unreasonable, childish contempt for all accepted things was not contempt at all, but fear, just plain fear. He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it. Piercing that tortured vanity, I felt that life was a huge hungry beast ready to maul Gerald if he so much as tried to placate it—by using, say, a little pumice-stone on his fingers. And one could never, after having seen through his furiousblague, be rid of an acute sense of the shamefaced childishness in the man, a childishness beaten down, gone crooked, which could only do him a hurt if it was not watched. And one didn’t, quite definitely didn’t, want Gerald to be hurt more than he already hurt himself by just breathing.
But, whether it was because that involuntary whisper of his about his sister had sickened me even more than I had thought at the moment, or whether it was merely because I was too busy with arranging myself into the new place, I simply did not seem to have the time to look him up during those twelve days. I wish I had.
Nor, during those twelve days, would it have come very amiss to talk a little about Mrs. Storm. One would have liked to know just a little of the history of that shameless, shameful lady. After all, one didn’t every day meet a woman with apagan body and a Chislehurst mind. But naturally neither Guy nor Hilary was available during those twelve days, for that is a way friends have; Guy because he was down at Mace with the May-fly, and Hilary just because he was tiresome. Hilary, Guy wrote from Mace, was helping a Liberal to fight a musty bye-election in some Staffordshire place. “As if,” Guy wrote, “a Liberal ever won, as if a Liberal could ever win without a pretty long start! and a handicapper can never get a grip on anything in a Liberal to give him a start on—sticky little fellows they are, always sliding away somewhere. And as if it mattered whether a Liberal did or didn’t win. He’ll only get squashed with his own petard.” And, however it was, Hilary’s Liberal didn’t win, so maybe Guy was right. “In ten years’ time,” says Guy, “Hilary will be the only Liberal left in Parliament, looking happier and younger and more sickening than ever.”
It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same instant act upon it.
“Hello!” I said.
“Hello!” they said. They were a she.
“Could I speak to Mrs. Storm, please?”
“Who is that speaking, please?”
I quibbled quite in vain.
“I will put the name down in her little book,” said the she kindly.
“Thank you,” I tried not to say bitterly. To ring some one up on impulse and then have your impulse perpetuated in a Little Book!
“Mrs. Storm is not in town,” said the she.
“Oh, I see,” I said. It is a detestable habit some people have of saying “in town” or “out of town.” What town? There can’t, honestly, be any real harm in saying London....
“Is there any message? I always take her messages.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Thank you very much. Good-b——”
“This is Mrs. Oden speaking.”
“Oh,” I said. “Mrs. Oden?”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Oden.
“Well, thank you very much,” I said. “Good-b——”
“She never is, you know,” complained Mrs. Oden. Now that was a loquacious lady. I do not wish to be belittling any one else, but I am sure that she talked more in the next few minutes than any other person of the same chest-expansion in England. She seemed to have been suffering from silence all that morning until my ring. I learnt later that Mrs. Oden had once been Iris’s governess, that there was always a floor reserved for Iris in her house in Montpellier Square, which house Mr. and Mrs. Oden owed entirely to Iris’s generosity.
“She went off to Paris the other day,” complained Mrs. Oden, “at amoment’snotice. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. It is too bad of her, when we never see anything of her. She is too vague, I always tell her. I suppose she had made some arrangement with you, Mr. er, has forgotten to put you off, and now you are disappointed?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, certainly.”
“Well, I expect her back any day, but how long she will stay this time I have not the faintest idea. Really it is too bad, she gets vaguer every year. And here has her aunt Lady Eve Chalice been wanting her address in Paris, and I have not the faintest idea of anything! What did you say the name was? Oh, yes, of course, I have it down. She will see it assoonas she returns, I promise you. Yes, yes. Good-bye, good-bye.”
It was five days later that there came to my hand a large box labelled fromEdouard Apel et Cie.,rue de la Paix,Parisand stamped “By Air.” Within the large box were several smaller flat boxes, and within these were reams upon reams of finest white notepaper, but good, manly stuff, stamped with my new address; and if that notepaper had its way I never would have another address, for there was enough in those small flat boxes to last a reasonably reticent man for all time. No note came with them. I searched. Then, across the top sheet of the third box that I opened, I found scrawled in pencil in an absurd, schoolgirl hand: “That one day you may write to me to say that you have forgiven me for the only dignity I have left: the dignity of the....”
I could not make out that last word for several days. It was scrawled right across the foot of the sheet, a long squiggle with one eye looking out from the middle of it which might have been an a. At last I thought it was “unaware.”
Much later Iris told me that it was “unaware.” She said: “I picked out the phrase from a book I was reading, and sent it to you like a flower.”
THE cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone, despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr. Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat. For, his wretched Liberal being at last retrieved from somewhere beneath the foot of the poll, that gentleman was again among us, saying “hm.”
We have so far seen but the shadow of Mr. Townshend; now, at last, this shadow must emerge into the tale of the weak Marches as the person of Mr. Townshend of Magralt. He emerges, as becomes a man of property who believes in progress as though it were a pain, in a dinner-jacket,le smoking, a Tuxedo; of which the bow-tie is gathered together with that dexterous carelessness which is the affectation of elderly Englishmen who cannot put up with any affectations whatever. Now there is no known explanation for this phenomenon of the sickly bow-tie among Englishmen of over forty years of age. That they are all blackguards, Mr. Shawhas assured us. But haven’t they, God bless one’s soul, eyes! It is not, of course, of the least importance whether a bow-tie falls straight or crooked, particularly on a grown-up man. It is not, after all, of the least importance whether one is clothed or naked. But one may, in passing, be permitted to wonder on the curious dispositions of the blind goddess Chance, whereby not once in a long lifetime, not even by one little bit of a fluke, will one of these elderly gentlemen ever tie a bow to fall even approximately right. They must, therefore, do it on purpose. But for what purpose? Let them, I say unto them, tie their bows carefully while the bow-tying is good, for voices from the Clyde are rising loud and everywhere those snobs are dominant who affect that the shirt of democracy should be a dishclout.
However, Mr. Townshend’s shadow does not even yet grow in substance without some difficulty. Between him and us, towards the dinner-hour, intrudes, knife-like, that deuce of cavaliers, he of the hat that Frederick the Great would have envied, for that wrecker of homes liked his hats soft and malleable, he liked to twist and torture them as though they were no more than men. In fine, Gerald made me late for dinner.
The clock of the Queen Street Post Office stood at three minutes before eight o’clock as I passed on my way to Hilary’s house in Chesterfield Street. The roar of the marching hosts of Piccadilly was as though muted by the still evening air. The small straight streets of Mayfair lay as though musing between the setting of the sunand the rising of the theatre-curtain. Neat errand-boys, released for the day, kicked their heels about on the curbs. The drivers of the sauntering taxi-cabs looked inquiringly, impersonally, into the faces of hurrying pedestrians. Limousines lounged softly by. Past me strode intently a tall raven-haired woman in a bright green wrap with a high sable collar, and moving frantically below were bright green shoes and bright green stockings that appalled the suave dignity of the evening light. These are not the only green properties we shall see in this tale, for women of the mode wore very much of green in the year 1922; although, of course, some women were not necessarily of the mode even when they wore green. Some women should not wear green. To such, their husbands should say: “My dear, I can’t help saying it again, but really I’ve never seen you look as well as when you’re in black.”
It was from the Curzon Street corner, just by Jolley’s the chemist, that I saw Gerald. He was across the road, against the entrance of the little tunnel that leads into Shepherd’s Market, buying an evening-paper off a friend of ours, Mr. Auk, who used to have his stand just there.
I crossed towards Gerald. I would be a few minutes late for dinner, that was certain, but if ever I was punctual at Hilary’s he never was dressed: a sense of conduct being the property of imperious men, who must disregard the servile virtue of punctuality.
I could not see Gerald’s face as he stood on the curb glancing at his paper, the brim of that hat was so low over his right eye. Mr. Aukwinked at me as I came up. “Oiled, that’s wot!” whispered Mr. Auk. Then a friend of his came by and he and Mr. Auk retreated into the tunnel, where I vaguely thought that Mr. Auk seemed to be telling his friend something funny about Gerald. I never have passed the time of day with Mr. Auk since I found what it was that he thought so funny about Gerald that evening.
When I greeted Gerald he instantly looked up from the paper to me. I remember now that he seemed to watch my face for something, an expression, which he half-expected to see. But one notices those things only later on.
“I say, seen the evening-paper?”
“No. Why?”
The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the thin hawk’s nose, the fine, twisted, defiant mouth....
“Why? How the hell do I know why!”
He crumpled his paper, thrust it under his arm and dug the released hand into his pocket. Thus was Gerald Haveleur March armed cap-a-pie against life. He had something on his mind, one could see that. But it would take hours to make Gerald confide anything.
“I say, have a drink?”
Now I wonder how many thousands of men are at this very moment putting that question to thousands of men; yet that, if nothing else, would have made that night significant in my life, for never before had the solitary asked me or, I think, any one to have a drink with him. Nor would he, as a rule, have a drink if you suggested it. And once, at a party I gave, he had some gingerbeer. But, even so, I had to say I couldn’t, pleading that I would be too late for dinner. “With Hilary,” I said, and he scowled absently in a way he had, and lounged up the road with me. Thoughtful he was always.
That was a curious, capacious evening. The Marches were gathered together that evening, they who were never let off anything. As Gerald lounged beside me the great primrose car with the menacing shining bonnet passed us as silently as though Curzon Street was a carpet. It was empty but for a boyish chauffeur. Gerald, I suppose, did not know it, and I did not remark on it. I wondered if Iris had surprised Mrs. Oden by returning suddenly. Poor Mr. Oden....
“What have you been doing with yourself lately, Gerald?”
“Doing?” His eyes pierced the pavement the other side of my shoulder, for tall was Gerald.
He grinned....
“You’d never guess,” he grinned.
I did not like this grinning. It was unusual in Gerald. It was like a crooked mask on the fine dark face. There was by ordinary no grinning froth about Gerald ... and, somehow, it crossed my mind that maybe Gerald was hard-up. I asked him, oh, tentatively, if anything was “up.”
“Up? The hell’s up. O Jesu!” And he grinned....
“Yes, but besides that—anything?” Not, you know, that I thought for one moment that anything really was “up.” It was merely that I misliked that grinning.
I can see him this moment so clearly, the wayhe suddenly threw back his head and stared from under the brim of that hat as though into the heart of the heavens: the dark, defiant, hungry silhouette searching the heart of the above.
We were at the corner of East Chapel Street, where the great American pile of Sunderland House debases itself before the puny roofs of Mayfair: it loitered clumsily against the soft evening light, reluctant to yield to the grey embrace of London....
“God!” sighed Gerald. Like a child, like a child ... and like a fiend he suddenly laughed up at the veiled heavens. “Imagine, you fool, just imagine the bloody degradation of being alive!”
But I will leave out Gerald’s “bloody’s.” One is tired of saying, hearing, reading that silly word. It is only chickenfood, after all, and does very well on the lips of the young ladies of the day, but there is no reason why grown-up people should use it.
“I like you,” he said, as only that devilish child could say it. “You sit on your imagination as though it was an egg, and a nice little chicken comes out. God, I wouldn’t be you! Look at all the pretty eggs you’ll hatch and not one have a chance to grow up into a splendid, lovely old hen that’ll peck at the dung you call life. Why don’t you write about fallen archangels? They’re the only things worth writing about, fallen archangels. Phut to you, that’s what I say....”
I managed then, for the first time in our friendship, to suggest that if perhaps he was hard-up, well, phut to him....
“Look here, that’s not fair,” stammered Gerald. Shy himself, he made one want to sink into the ground with shyness. “I mean, that’s putting friendship to music, isn’t it? What?”
“Oh, nonsense, Gerald! There’s nothing so silly and mean as this reticence about money....”
“God, but you’ve given me an idea. I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, as you’re late for dinner. I’ll damn well lend you a fiver.”
“But, Gerald——”
“You talk too much,” Gerald stammered. “I’d like to do you a bit of good. And I’ve still got to thank you for chloroforming me and lugging me off to that Home for Drunks, thanks very much. Now, am I going to lend you a fiver or am I going to make such a rough-house just here that all the police in London will come and arrest you for soliciting? I’ll scream if you don’t touch me!”
I was in a hurry. I had to take that fiver. I have that fiver still.
“I’ll keep it for you,” I said. “Damn you.”
“Yes, you keep it for me,” said Gerald thoughtfully. “Nice, fivers are ...” and then, savagely muttering “Oh, hell!” he strode abruptly away down the slope of East Chapel Street, which leads into Shepherd’s Market. Drunk or sober, you simply couldn’t tell. You never knew that man was drunk until he was speechless. I was hurrying away when his voice held me—and a very boyish voice Gerald had, like a prefect’s at school.
“I say, seen that sister of mine again?... You haven’t?” He seemed to reflect profoundly.“I say, if ever you do, give her my love. What? I say, don’t forget....”
“I won’t forget,” I called back. “Good-night, Gerald.” But he had turned away, and the last I saw of him he was putting his shoulder against the saloon-door of The Leather Butler. I plunged across the road to Chesterfield Street, glad of the message I would certainly give to Gerald’s sister. Maybe to-night, somehow. A furious conference of livid pink and purple monsters hung over Seamore Place, where the sun was sinking into Kensington Gardens.
“There was a cocktail for you,” said Hilary gloomily, “but I drank it, in case it grew warm.” I thanked him politely for the idea. “It wasn’t an idea, really,” said Hilary gloomily. “It was an impulse.”
It is not, therefore, impossible to understand how it came about that there were not a few people, youngish people, who considered Mr. Townshend to be a tiresome man. They said: “He is very nice, butfrankly, isn’t he rather tiresome?” I supposed he was rather tiresome.
Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him, he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I believe, his age.
Hilary was a man who had convinced himselfand every one else that he had neither use nor time for the flibberty-gibberties of life. He collected postage-stamps and had sat as Liberal Member for an Essex constituency for fifteen years. To be a Liberal was against every one of his prejudices, but to be a Conservative was against all his convictions. He thought of democracy as a drain-pipe through which the world must crawl for its health. He did not think the health of the world would ever be good. When travelling he looked porters sternly in the face and over-tipped them. His eyes were grey and gentle, and they were suspicious of being amused. I think that Hilary treasured a belief that his eyes were cold and ironic, as also that his face was of a stern cast. His face was long, and the features somehow muddled. It was a kind face.
Hilary is the last in direct line of the Townshends, who have held Magralt, a Tudor manor on the Essex coast, since a Townshend deserted to Henry Tudor on Bosworth Field. The Townshends of Magralt have always been soldiers, “and that,” Guy, first and last, a soldier, will say, “is the only reason one can see why Hilary is a politician by profession and the foremost stamp-collector in Chesterfield Street by the sweat of his brow.” But one has to report that Hilary was once, before witnesses, perfectly beastly to an American gentleman who said that Blucher had arrived in time for the Battle of Waterloo.
But it was on the question of marriage that the two friends would indulge the sharpest difference of opinion; or rather, Hilary’s wasn’t an opinion, it was a lurking Silence.
“Suppose you die,” said Guy de Travest. “You might. You are ten years older than me in years alone. You may receive your call to higher things at any moment. Look how I beat you at squash the other day! Let us suppose, then, that you are as good as dead. Unmarried, childless. You have done nothing. You are nothing. You leave nothing. Except, of course, what was left to you——”
“Less,” said Hilary.
“Your memory, then, goes down as that of a sickening philatelist. Whereas, had any one of your ancestors had a chance of a bit of war like ours, he would have died a Major-General!”
“A Field-Marshal, Guy. You forget that the Townshends have the reputation of having lost more of their soldiers’ lives than any other service-family in England.” And so it would go on for ever, Guy contending that as Hilary was nothing in himself it was disloyal of him not to wed and bring forth direct heirs, while Hilary’s attitude would be one of benevolently beckoning to the sombre heights of Cumberland, where sat the house of Curle-Townshend, heirs-apparent to Magralt and all its fiefs.
Any one, as Hilary was once goaded into muttering, would have thought that Guy’s own marriage was the happiest in the world; at worst, any one might have thought that it was a happy marriage, as marriages go. Guy, it was said, adored his wife. Guy, it was said, never spoke to his wife except in public and as he passed through her room in the morning towards his bath, when he said “Good-morning.” It was Lady de Travest who volunteered this information. “I do not see,” said Lady de Travest in her slow soft voice, “why one should for ever conceal the fact that one’s husband is cruel to one. It is nothing for one to be ashamed of, is it?” Moira de Travest was a quiet woman, with slow graces of movement, statuesque, exceedingly handsome in what you might call a public way, with a dark, restrained smile in the blue eyes under the hair that shone like black silver. Suddenly she would give a very loud laugh, and then her eyes would shine boyishly for a second. She had many intimate friends among women, and at times she was rather brilliant in a man-like way. Foreign Ambassadors liked to be with her. Mr. de Laszlo, M.V.O., painted her. Women novelists had tea with her. Twice a year she would say that a day must come when she must take a lover, but she gave one a profound sense that there was nothing in the world she could endure less. But, whatever it was that had gone wrong between those two ten years before, they had a son, a boy of sixteen, at Eton, and Guy de Travest would remain by his marriage without question of separation or divorce. That was cruel of him, Moira’s friends said, but Guy was a very catholic gentleman, and he loved his son beyond all things. In the earlier pages of country house albums one might come on photographs of Guy and Moira arm-in-arm, yellow Viking and black silver. They did not seem to have aged at all since then, but maybe Lady de Travest was a little more statuesque and her eyes would shine more and more boyishly.
Hilary and Guy were friends. Inseparable,they were inimical. They agreed on nothing, nor had they one taste in common. But maybe it is in a similar tempering of a sense of conduct that Englishmen, regardless of all overt differences, will find their deepest friendships. Conduct was for Guy and Hilary one of three facts, the other two being birth and death. And it is they and their opposites who must finally make the storms of life. Warriors of conduct and enemies of conduct—there is the issue that has still to find its final battlefield. Hilary’s Liberalism, in that issue, would come crashing about his heart; of his head he would take no account, for it is not by the head that one decides in ultimate moments. Guy, tall as a tree, Guy the latter-day “thunder-god of dandies,” would make a flaming figure, standing against the afterglow of the fires of an old religion called aristocracy. But Guy was far from being of those Tories, of whom Mr. Galsworthy has written with such cruel sympathy inFraternityandThe Patrician, who are obsessed by an illusion of their own exclusive right to national captaincy. Guy did not think that the hope for England or the world lay in himself or his caste. He was not a clever man; but his contempt for politics was born of a conviction that there was no hope of curing the diseases of life and society by anything that any body of men could do. Men individually must clean themselves within, questing for and grasping what cleanness there was in them. There was a frozen storm in Guy’s eyes, and they were very clean. But, of course, he was not very clever.
Those two men are for me symbols of anEngland that I love. I am not sure that I can explain what that England is. I am not sure that I would like to explain it even to myself, as, maybe for the same reason, I would not like to read Jane Austen with a mental measure. I am not sure that there ever was such an England. The soil, to be sure, is there, the clouds across the sun, the teasing humours of the island seasons: the halls, the parklands, the spacious rooms, they are there. But the figures that sweep across them—are these that we see, all? Are there no others, lost somewhere, calmly ready to show themselves—are these that we see, all? These healthy, high-busted women with muscles like those of minotaurs, these girls who are either stunned with health or pale with the common vapours of common dancing-halls, these stout, graceless ones here, those too slender, bloodless ones there, these things that have no voice between a shout and a whisper, these things that have yielded to democracy nothing but their dignity—are these that we see, all? These rather caddish young men who have no vision between a pimply purity and vice, who are without the grace with which to adorn ignorance or the learning with which to make vulgarity tolerable, these peasant-minded noblewomen, these matrons who appear to have gained in youth what they have lost in dignity, these toiling dancers, these elderly gentlemen with their ungallant vices—are these that we see, all? Or was there never such an England? Were the parklands and the spacious rooms never peopled but by nincompoops let loose by wealth among the graces of learning andfashion? Was there never such an England as I myself once saw in the magic of a spring morning in London? It was no more than the passing picture of Guy de Travest walking by the sulky side of Piccadilly, as he must always do to pass between his house in Belgrave Square to his club in Saint James’s Street, to which a few gentlemen will still absently resort. I saw Guy walking against the broken sunlight of the Green Park, and then I did not see Guy. It was as though from one step to another he had walked into a dimension wherein the desires of his heart melted his person into the England of his heart, and he was rendered invisible in the ambience of the Green Park and against the ancient landscape of Saint James’s.