IV: THE ROMANCE OF IRIS POOLE
I ONCE read, in an essay by a writer whose
considerable achievements in contemporary
literature seem to warrant a certain
knowledge of the craft of tale-telling, that it
is only the trained artificiality of writers—their
technique, so to say—that enables them
to begin their tales from a certain point and
go directly on to a certain ending. While
the truth of the matter is (he writes), as
you can easily verify from the narrative of
any peasant in any inn, that the tales that
are spun from life cannot be complacently
fitted along a straight line of narration, but
incline to zigzag unaccountably from one
point of memory to another; until the tale
fulfilled, or rather, fulfills itself by these
deft and disordered touches of the realism
of memory. For, to quote the simile that is
almost de rigueur as a cap to these grave abstractions,
"the figure in the carpet" can be
said to have no beginning nor middle, and
so on....
The plain fact of the matter is that, in
spite of the sternest intentions, I have the
greatest difficulty in nailing my mind down
to a clear and ordered conception of the sequence
that even the most facile publisher
will demand from this history: in ever and
again wrenching, as it were, my memory
from its erratic piracies, and in beguiling
it to sit soberly astride the course of events
as they occurred or were told to me. Even
though they didn't actually and consistently
occur, these events—not, I mean, in the usually
accepted sense of things "occurring."
They were all so deeply consequent on inside
things! and most of them happened inside....
Thus, as I try to shape my shadows as
truly as I may, my memory is ever and again
confronted by a few nights—mainly three,
and very bonfires of nights they seem to me,
with their high lights and sinister heat colouring
all that came before and all that happened
after; though, indeed, to two of us
there was very little left that could happen
after that third, and last, night.... That
last night! Of the many things that can
be lost in one night, Roger Poole lost as
much as any man can lose, Antony Poole
lost more than any man should lose, and
Iris—and I—but even a tale cannot play
spy for ever, it must surely end somewhere.
(And yes, it must begin, too).
Then that other night, which I could
rightly call the first, for it was the one which
very definitely sent the ball rolling down the
slope. And, though I should preface that
rolling by first describing that slope and that
ball, I see that I must let part of this particular
bonfire have its way, else they will
all get together to hinder and confuse me.
That man Antony never did know how to
wait, and so I must tell of the night of his
return before even the day of his going away.
An unfortunate night it was, even apart from
his connection with it, because of my heavy
and stupid depression about something that
time, in all decency, should have persuaded
me to face resignedly.
An hour or so after a midnight one late
June, I was walking slowly up Piccadilly;
in no hurry to reach my destination, whither
I would eventually take a taxi—for Regent's
Park is always far enough, but even further
on a moonless and rain-heavy night that
England must have grabbed from one of our
less desirable and more stifling colonies. I
was walking on the outer edge of the pavement,
with my head bent, as shoddily happened
when my mind was clouded—when in
crossing the end of that little passage that
leads into Albany-courtyard, I was arrested
by the stealthy and hurried sound of a scuffle.
From first to last the affair took but
a few seconds. At the far end of the dim
recess two figures were locked together,
swaying this way and that and then parting
to allow freedom for blows—the which, I
could judge, were exchanged with the heartiest
ill will; and all in silence, but for quick
pantings for breath and the shuffle of feet.
There really is an unholy kind of interest
in watching two men, presumably of one's
own kind if stiff white shirts meant anything
at all, fighting in relentless silence, and
maybe, in deadly earnest. The slightly
smaller one—they were both tall figures—seemed
to be getting much the worst of it,
but I certainly wouldn't have interfered if
I hadn't seen a posse of policemen coming
towards us from Vine Street on their usual
way to their beats.
"Time!" said I. But it was time enough
without my saying so, for one last and not
very heavy blow had doubled the smaller
against the window of Woodrow's hat-shop;
and the other, a giant of a man, picking up
his top-hat and ramming it on his head as
though it were a Crusader's helmet and without
a glance at his crumpled antagonist,
briskly walked towards me.
"England's come to a pretty pass when
the education of gentlemen has to fall to interested
amateurs like myself," he began
from a distance. "Eh, Ronnie?"
But I had recognised him without his use
of my name, and was staring at him with
such bewilderment that he broke out into
one of those guffaws I knew so well.
"Antony!" I cried.
"Myself as ever was, old man!" and he
clapped me on the shoulder heartily. "I
saw you out of the tail of my eye, while I
was teaching that young man Spartan history—and,
thought I, no luck could be better."
"But when did you get back, and where
from?"
"This very afternoon, and from Mexico—where
else? And damme," he turned on
me to add bitterly, "why the devil should
you be so surprised at my coming back to my
own country?"
But I could parry that kind of thing from
Antony well enough.
"For one reason," said I, "because you
yourself told me that you were probably
never coming back."
"Never! Well, my friend, isn't two years
as good as your 'never'? I'm learning that
there's only one bigger lie than 'never,' and
that's 'always'—for instance, I was never
coming back to England, and a few of my
friends were always going to be pleased to
see me."
There was a large and full-flavoured kind
of bitterness about Antony that seldom quite
failed in its appeal to my heart, albeit sourly,
and I was about to give the lie to his accusation
when he turned his eyes back to the dark
passage muttering, "And that was one of
'em." But the luckless wretch had disappeared
while we talked, to ponder maybe
upon the weight and quality of that word
"always," and with a muttered request from
me "not to be a fool about his real friends"
we walked on towards the Circus. I had
been made shy and nervous by Antony's boisterous
realisation of his position in England,
and now found it difficult to say anything
which somehow or other wouldn't remind
him of it. Just like the man to be so infernally
touchy and talkative about it, I
was thinking, when he said:—
"You actually are the very man I want
to see, Ronnie. I've got enough questions
to ask you to last a day or more, but I dare
say a lunch will see them through—though
that of course depends on where we
lunch ...?" That was ever the way with
Antony, he never tried to hide the fact that
he wanted something from one—though,
thank Heaven, it was now only a lunch!
"You had better come and lunch at my
flat to-morrow," I suggested—with my heart
in my mouth lest he should scent a possible
insult in that seclusion. But he accepted
easily enough.
At Piccadilly Circus, where I called a taxi,
he said he must leave me as he had to go
down to the Carlton: which thankfully relieved
me of any embarrassment as to how
to be rid of him at that moment. As he
went he called back to me, "Don't tell all
London that I'm back, there's a good fellow."
A quite unnecessary request, I found
it on my lips to answer; for the name of
Antony Poole, as himself knew very well,
would meet with but a grim welcome in any
house in London.
On the surface, and a good deal below the
surface, there was nothing at all to be said
for Antony. I had often wondered what
thoughts about himself must pass through
his mind in solitary moments when he viewed
his life (for he was not so insensitive but
that that necessity could never have come
upon him)—just thirty-six years of life,
which had four years before that night
finally ended its reckless social passage in
the utter loss of everything a man holds essential
to the self-respect with which he must
face the world! Not, however, that any loss
could ever intimidate Antony into facing the
world with any other manner but that with
which some imp had plagued his birth: a
blend of blustering indifference, dangerous
humours, and a ripe and racy geniality. But
even so there must be some moments of terrible
reckonings in his soul, I always thought,
when he realises his folly in so spoiling the
good life his could have been and had looked
to be; when, console himself with his "bad
luck" as he may, he reaches a point of self-knowledge
that tells him, with his own brutality,
how there is a degree of failure that
simply cannot be condoned by "bad luck."
I had known Antony for so long that my
view of him in his manhood was always
brightened to his advantage by my school-day
memories of him; those of a gay and
careless companion, with sufficient head but
little inclination for work: ever more rowdy
and reckless than his companions, a good
sportsman and a good man at most games,
and very popular among those whom his
fancy had not led him to treat as enemies.
It was maturity (or whatever queer development
took its place in him) that went to
Antony's head, so that he began to run amok
as soon as he left Sandhurst; something
seemed to grow up in him that spiced his
old faults with new outrage, and quite hid
what good there was in him. His, I then
found to my astonishment, was the most
makeshift mechanism that God ever put into
a man—for I had never dreamt of such complex
weaknesses in my Antony of old! Who
would have thought that this man, inches
more than six straight feet of him, with his
good looks, his loud and easy geniality, and
a certain aptitude of mind that expressed itself
in an understanding laugh where your
clever man would have been puzzled—who
would have thought that this man who
laughed with the laugh of the middle ages
was so shoddily made that his every organ
and moral attribute were as though held in
place by oddments of string? For never was
there a man so consistently and appallingly
weak to do battle with himself, to compel
himself to a sanity of living and a balance
of thought: a weak man, in that wretched
word's most wretched and active sense.
But the key to him lay just further than
that weakness: that he would have suffered,
and indeed did, any torture rather than reveal
it—the indetermination and moral cowardice
of those, without exaggeration, giant
fibres. This, I grew to realise, was the secret
of the contradiction that was Antony—this
pose of strength where he himself knew
he was weak: the most penalising pose that
ever bolstered a man's vanity the more completely
to wreck him. For the world might
have allowed Antony a certain length of forgiveness
if he could have been brought to
reveal himself as he actually was, if he could
only have bowed his head and revealed the
hesitancies of his nature, and his contrition;
if he could even for just once have foregone
the childish vanities of bluster and bravado
with which he thought to carry through
every escapade. He thought to outwit punishment,
but instead he did the most difficult
thing of all, he outwitted sympathy....
And since eventually such a pose as his
must make indecency a fact where it had
once only been vaguely suggested, so Antony
actually became, in the course of time,
the rogue and outsider that his crooked vanity
had once made him parade as a pose.
For, be you ever so arrogant, nature has
been proved to have its laws for men as well
as for beasts, laws not astral but severely
human, that never cease to confound alchemists
of every kind to their own hurt; and
it is obvious that a man may not play the
fool with his soul without covering it with
the verdigris of his own folly—that sourness
of heart and crookedness that stole gradually
on poor Antony, so that in his thirties
he was, to stretch a likeness, like a Hyde to
the Jekyll of his schooldays.
The advantages of a commission in the
Brigade, of a name sufficient to ensure a reasonable
amount of credit and consideration,
those details which can so warm the cockles
of even a philosophic heart on a dull afternoon,
and a little more than the usual pittance
that falls to the younger brothers of
pukka baronets, warranted, surely, a very
fair prospect. And yet, in a few years' time,
he had finally convinced people beyond a
shadow of doubt of what they had so far
only disliked to guess, of his complete failure
to be either an officer or a gentleman.
No man could be more noticeable in appearance
than Antony, nor more adequately
fulfil the name by which he was often known,
Red Antony; for he was very tall and
stoutly built, rather foppishly dressed, and
as consistently ginger as any man could well
be—moustaches, eyebrows that no brushing
could tame into regularity, hair which waved
back from his forehead in a most attractive
ginger but ordered profusion; and a complexion
appropriately coloured, and always
so clear and fresh as to seem to give the lie
to the certain dissipation of the night before.
A very fine looking man, Red Antony, if
you liked that kind of looks; but so noticeable
that his own appearance, no doubt, took
a hand against him, labelling his escapades
with its prominence so that once pointed out
he was never forgotten; and men and women
could cross the street in good time to avoid
the difficulty of acknowledging or of cutting
him.
It was an accumulation of escapades,
many of which had been overlooked but for
his manner of braving them, that had led to
his final extinction—which was long seen in
coming. A thousand little and unpleasant
things were known and more than whispered
about him. He was a man of red-hot tempers,
which there was no restraint in him to
keep within bounds; his weren't the rages
that burnt inwardly and grew in brooding,
but in their sudden heat must burn outwardly,
devouring everything with no care
nor heed for even primitive restraint.
(There have been times when I've been
rather afraid of Antony myself.) And so,
from his great height of stature and violence,
he had outrageously insulted men in return
for a fancied slight. He had committed follies,
when drunk, which his companions had
hurriedly disavowed. He had, as if by rote,
done the one thing a man may still not do
and remain this side of Styx, despite all that
we hear of the present laxity of etiquette—had
been unable to pay his gambling debts,
and then paid them with worthless cheques.
He had been the centre of innumerable
brawls in which, if ever a woman's name
was concerned, it was never to Antony's
credit; had been twice a corespondent and
not once a husband—an apparent failure to
act upon his obligations which does no man
any good; and from the second (the first
had too obviously been the result of carelessness)
he had emerged in so discreditable
a light that, on top of all his past follies,
Antony Poole was no longer a name to be
mentioned in any ordinary English company.
That was four years before that night I
met him on Piccadilly, when he was thirty-two.
He still continued for two years in
England, Heaven alone knew why! No one
sought him, he was seldom seen—except by
me, and later, another. His elder brother,
Roger, had not spoken to him for years.
It was about a year before he finally left
England that I began to see Antony in his
best light; and pretty closely since, in the
precarious condition of his affairs and reputation,
it was mostly in my flat that he could
enjoy that company which presented him in
this new and improved light. He was in
love, and he was making love: furtively and
hopelessly as to manner, for what girl would
dream of marrying him! And who ever
stood more firmly upon his honour than he
who has been proved to have none?...
But in his heart there was hope, I am sure
there was hope in his heart, else Antony
would not have been Antony.
A queer man. For all his appalling rudeness
and brutality on a thousand occasions,
he could be so very courteous and simple
when he was moved to it; could turn a tale,
rather candidly it's true, but very amusingly,
and had altogether a very diverting way with
him in company that didn't offend his absurd
feelings or ruffle his dangerous vanity—though
even then he couldn't help a, well,
cunning satire that might more profitably,
for him, have bit into paper.
It is in recalling this time that I feel most
uncomfortable, because of the ridiculous position
in which my own weakness placed me.
During the previous few months I had fallen
into the habit of wanting to see Iris Portairley
every day—or rather, she had graciously
allowed me fall into that habit. And
that, indeed, was the only encouragement I
had from her, the pleasure which she showed
that she had from my company; so that, if
we had not happened to meet for some days
over lunch or dinner at the same table, she
very often managed by some contrivance,
say of a tame chaperon, to come to see me
of an afternoon. Deliciously often though
she managed her contrivances, I was always
surprised to see her, who had so many more
amusing things to do! And with the carelessness
of a man ten years my junior I accepted
the pleasure of her company without
inquiring of myself whither I was being led.
The truth was that it depressed me to think
of what might come of it, for the back of
my mind could never be entirely rid of an
ugly high wall at the far end of my
meadow....
And yet I chartered ill luck to my suit,
or pretence of a suit, by aiding and abetting
Red Antony in his quite impossible and absurd
pretensions! Though, in justice to the
man, he must have realised clearly how very
impossible they were.
The excuse for the anomaly was in the
queer sympathy (and a very conscious one)
that Antony always had the power to raise
in me; and particularly at that time, when
he was so definitely an outcast, forced to
solitary meals in the grill-rooms of those
maîtres d'hôtel who still gallantly pretended
to believe in his signature at the foot of a
bill. I simply couldn't bring myself just
then, whether for my own or Iris's good, to
deprive him of the solace he found in her
occasional company at my flat, generally at
some odd hour between three to seven—more
often nearer seven, for Antony allowed
that I could shake a cocktail very prettily.
And though, from a tentative beginning (if
that word could ever be applicable to Antony)
it became a bare-faced intrusion on
my privacy, even so I hadn't the heart to
forbid, or definitely to discourage, the apparent
coincidence of his visits with hers;
"apparent," for Antony at this time never
said a word of his admiration, nor gave any
other hint of gratitude for my complaisance
than in an added pressure of my hand as he
left. Antony was a noisy man, but never by
any chance did he make a noise about anything
one really wanted to hear.
It was a very uncomfortable business—for
me, I mean. And, as I had let it go
on, quite impossible to cut short; since nothing
less drastic than an order for ejection, if
even that, would have penetrated the thick
skin that Antony could so conveniently wear
when he chose—and with no better result
than a "misunderstanding" with Iris who,
thanks largely to me, had come to have certain
views about Antony which materially
differed from the world's, and even stronger
views about deserting one's friends when
they were "down and out." There's no end
to difficulties when a woman takes her
standpoint on the highest pinnacles of the
code that men have arranged between themselves
for their own convenience and
woman's confusion.
I could only console myself with the ungenerous
thought that if my own position
with Iris, of "dear Ronnie" and the like,
was hopeless, how much more hopeless was
Red Antony's, the poor braggart who would
now be invisible, be he ever so tall and boisterous,
to even the most tarnished of her acquaintance.
So let the man have his run,
since he could never have his way!...
How he had ever met her at all, in fact, I
never clearly found out, and had never the
effrontery to ask; probably towards the end
of his swift downward passage to those underground
grill-rooms (oh, those grill-rooms
of broken hearts and broken reputations!)
just after Iris had come out. Be that as it
may, Iris had known him scarcely but by
reputation—about which, since it was glamoured
by the disapproval of every one who
had ever bored her, she had often asked me;
so that, when one day they had happened
at the same second at my door, she knew a
little more than hearsay about him; and
was quick to see the poor man's wretched
plight, was quick to encourage his longing to
talk to some one decent; giving intimacy
with that generous hand that makes gentle
women so much more dangerous than vampires,
searching for what sweetness there lay
in him so wisely and deftly as to leave him
unaware of the homage he paid her, so that
she could appreciate it at its fullest; and so
that, after a few weeks, she grew genuinely
fond of the wreck—and one day made me
openly swear at my folly by suddenly saying:
"I suppose there must be many people
who think they have met Napoleons, only
to find in the end that they are Antonys—and
how very much nicer!"
But there was another reason, quite apart
from any far-fetched call of sympathy, for
my putting a fairly good face on Antony's
falling in love on my premises. I might as
well, thought I, be entertained by what I
had to suffer—and so there was cast a play,
as though for my bewildered entertainment!
Though, of course, I never at that time indulged
in any such conceit, it's just the licence
of thought that is occasionally apt to
flow from one's pen.
For while I watched, perforce, Antony
pleading his furtive suit at some hour between
three to seven of an afternoon, I
could sometimes of an evening watch its parallel
contrast in that world which Antony
had been at such pains to offend unpardonably.
For, of the husbands that had been
suggested for Miss Portairley, not one had
received more favour than the possibility of
Roger Poole; and the idea had been much
encouraged of late by the very frequent circumstance
of their being of the same company....
Certainly, to that world which finds its
pleasure in the sensations of other people's
marriages, there was a great deal of apparent
fitness about this one; for they were both,
in their ways, well-known persons. Iris, of
course, trivially, in these days of illustrated
journals and the like, a much photographed
and commented on "beauty" whose features
and "recreations" were so widely known that
she looked gradually to become the rumoured
subject of any novel that contained the
requisite amount of social indecency implied
by the "modern society" of publishers' announcements;
and Roger Poole, already at
thirty-three a personage, "the only young
man," I have heard it said, "of this degeneration
with any political energy or brilliance":
who, in spite of the leisure that his
rumoured means might have claimed for
him, had actively sat as member for—since
he was twenty-six, was now recognised as
one of the leaders of the Opposition, and
certain, in spite of his youth, of office at the
fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after
all, so original of him to be so clever and
polished and dark and ambitious without
being a Jew.
The colouring between the Poole brothers
was distributed in some such way as this:
Antony, the younger by a year, as red and
wantonly extravagant as I have tried to
show; and Roger, no less tall than his
brother but inclined much more to suppleness
both in figure and features—he could
sometimes look remarkably like a knife: of
a much darker countenance, with dark eyes
that were somehow sombre yet witty, and
seemed always to be fevered with some secret
thought. In fact, there were a great
deal too many such "secret" thoughts about
Roger to ensure one's real comfort in his
company.
But, in spite of this more serious expression,
and in contradiction to what one might
have expected to appeal to a man of his
very real abilities and ambitions, Roger was
every bit as much of the material world as
his brother—but had what Antony never
had, the sanity and balance with which to
measure his recklessness and indulgences.
Roger Poole always knew what he was
about; and, to further his ambitions, had
never ceased to discipline himself, outwardly
anyway, into line with the world's conventions—of
which, funnily enough, if he continued
his success, he would one day be an
arbitrator!
But, rigorously though he disciplined himself
(a really splendid dissimulation, which
I who had known him so long had always
watched with envy), he could not help his
inclinations showing in some way—though
in a way that reflected to his advantage as a
figure, as it would have reflected to Antony's
if he hadn't been so foolish. For they were
shown in a manner, a certain air, which
couldn't be described but by the help of the
word "romantic"—a not unpleasing word to
be used about one who has name, appearance,
and ability. And he was, even to me, a romantic
kind of figure. There was nothing,
well, stationary about him, as there so often
is about one's acquaintance; in fact, more,
there was definitely a sense of movement;
one somehow thought of him as a man who
would always be going on to things, maybe
great things. His shadow will find in him
an exciting companion, one couldn't help
thinking. Among one's acquaintance, each
unit of whom one knew to be travelling on
a certain road to a more or less certain end,
Roger Poole stood out as a refreshing and
unexpected person, a kind of adventurer licensed
by the world; an appearance clothed
in possibilities, whom it was interesting to
know....
Besides, there was nothing silly nor banal
about his good looks; a thin, long face of
such firm lines as to give an impression of
hardness, and noticeable, in an Englishman,
because of its pallor; attractive, too, because
of a certain saturnine quality which seemed
to lurk about its expressions: an intangible
something that made one, in talking to him,
inquire within oneself a little fussily—a
vastly different state to that into which Red
Antony's boisterous ill humour had, in his
hey-days, so frequently put one!
And so the discomfort of my position with
regard to Antony allowed me to stand in the
wings, as it were, and watch the only game
in this world that is fairly played with
"packed" cards; the two brothers, in everything
but age and name as far apart as favour
can well be from its opposite, at their
love-making to a woman whom I loved as
much as they, perhaps more, but without
that visible and reckless ardour that will
make a man's love at least significant to the
most unloving woman. I suppose that theatricalism,
such as is not difficult to find in
any one's nature, may have tinged my view
of the queer spectacle; but there certainly
was something very sad and pitiable about
it all, and made the more pitiable, too, by
the inevitable course it must pursue—for
there is a certain logic to everything, be a
woman ever so lovely and remote. And Iris,
for all her pride and looks, for all her tawny
hair and sometimes too distant eyes, had
really as little to say in the matter as Antony
or I; for Roger Poole had a reputation
to keep up, not so much with the world as
with himself, the reputation of a man who
always played in luck! Besides, luck or no
luck, Iris had straightway fallen in love with
him.
She was twenty-two, and had up to that
age lived as full and as amusing a life as,
one supposes, it was possible for her to live.
But there must somehow have been born
with her a certain distance of mind, which
always kept her detached from any surroundings
she couldn't wholly and utterly
accept; a certain quality that, whether she
would or would not, kept her intact and untouched,
as though destining her never to
accept anything which she couldn't wholly
accept. Thus she had inevitably to be rejecting
much, and always; rejecting, indeed,
a great deal more than she was ever given
the credit for by even those who knew her
very well. At first I naturally took this distance
of mind from her surroundings to be
yet another of the usual and tedious affectations
of the "younger generation," but very
soon found that it was as sincere an affectation
as any that can trouble a mind and
make a heart deeply restless.
It wasn't that she was superior or blasé
(of being which she was, of course, commonly
accused by those who were disconcerted
by her reception of those trivial indecencies
that pass for humour among the
cultured inane); but simply that she was
never lulled into thinking that the life in
which she found herself was anything but a
phase of her youth, and a makeshift one at
that. There would, of course, be other
things! And of the men who came her way,
the interesting ones were mainly too old—now
why is courtesy always so much older
than oneself?—the younger ones mainly too
foolish, and as little worth loving as they
were able to love. Some day, some day, she
once laughed to me, there will be darkish
men with intelligent gestures....
Well, there came one, Roger Poole. He
at last was vital, giving her what she
had been starved for, a sense of achievement,
of movement. That expresses it so badly,
for it might imply that Iris was a sycophant
to success, which she never was—unlike her
ridiculous but amiable mother, who thought
she had a salon whereas she only kept a restaurant.
Iris had a longing to be allowed to
admire, a longing that was a fiercely integral
part of her nature. And she was a
woman with tangible desires, who would,
one thought, lay claim to her man's body
and mind with every part of her own, and
with no illusions about the spirituality or
intelligence of her love. Iris was of the
earth divinely, and perhaps that's why she
couldn't help obsessing a man's mind....
But for Roger's coming, she might have
continued for years being proposed to decently
and indecently by the young fops and
financiers whose piracies the world so completely
licences; not one of whom she would
ever like enough, not one of whom could
ever lead himself or her to anything but a
country-house or to Deauville. So, as I
imagine it, as she looked around her life, at
the supposed pageantry and possibilities of
it, she must have been in a state of watchful
coma, just waiting, with a growing inner
sadness, for that "something" to happen;
that "something," that fulfilment of a longing,
which would bring into actual being the
woman in her—that thing compact with
elemental passions and fierce desires which
had so far only been present in an involuntary
stiffening of her body, her spine, when
a kiss, and maybe one that had faintly attracted
her, had touched her. Her mind
might compromise, it often desperately did,
but it was as though an unhesitating iron
had entered her body, so that it could never
be lulled to even a pretence of acceptance.
And so, as she was one night surveying the
accustomed character of a crowded room,
with what relief she must have realised,
howsoever dimly at that first moment, that
the "something" was at last about to happen,
that Roger Poole was crossing the room
into her life.
She had met him only once before, four
years ago, just after she had come out—and
he had only just lately re-entered her world.
She had, of course, often heard about him
during that time, and not only in political
chatter; for Roger, with a certain superciliousness,
had withdrawn himself only from
what he found dull and boring in life—from
which Iris hadn't yet thought it worth while
to rebel; unless braving an hysterical scene
with her mother for a latchkey was rebellion.
But as to the flouting of conventions
and the like, it is easy enough to do as one
likes; but so very much easier, after all, to
know without doing so that the entertainment
gained won't be worth while.
Iris, many of whose friends had long since
indulged their sense of pleasure as it pleased
them, or as it displeased others, had never
but given an inquiring side-glance to that
life; and had been forced to admit to herself
that she must lack some essential verve,
for she had found as little entertainment in,
say, an absinthe at the Café Royal in the
company of, presumably, artists, as in the
noisy dinners that are sometimes given by
Argentines and other rich men to women
whose jewels, at least, led Iris to suppose
that it must be worth their while to attend
them. It was at the only one of these dinners
that she had ever gone to that an American
millionaire, a fussy little man of an
engaging candour, had straight away offered
to give her a Rolls-Royce, and she had only
succeeded in dissuading him from that intention
by revealing that her mother already
had a quite adequate car. Thus young was
it revealed to Iris that she would make an
inefficient kind of cocotte. She was always,
she had once told me rather brazenly, conscious
of a disturbing sense of laughter
which, she was sure, would tiresomely interfere
with her enjoyment of any of those indiscretions
and adventures in which some of
her acquaintance would now and then indulge;
and also, had never found any reason
to think otherwise of life round about
studios and the like than as really a rather
tedious affair, of a kind of anæmia and uncleanliness—the
kind, you know, that can
be cleaner without costing another half-penny—that
caused in her no more and no
less than a vivid feeling of self-consciousness;
about which she bitterly reproached
herself, for it was difficult to be rid of an
idea that she ought to be a little, well, humble
before these young men who were, after
all, trying to do something. Nor did protracted
meals and cigarettes and liqueurs in
grimy restaurants round about Soho and
Fitzroy Street with young men more or less
just down from Oxford "and pretty far
down at that," appeal to her as anything but
a wearisome duty to that side of her mind
which, so some of her friends always urged,
"must surely be sick of the boredom and
mental inertia of the life she led." ...
But she had honestly done her best, had vividly
plunged into both alternatives; and,
thank Heavens, had emerged unscathed,
with but an offer of an "automobile" and
several of marriage—not of course from the
millionaire, who very genuinely implied that
he respected her too really to ask that much,
but from the young invertebrates. There
seems, she had long since concluded, to be
much nonsense talked about the unfair advantages
that rich men take, for after all
they are prepared to pay very reasonably for
one's virginity, whereas those young men
have the cheek to ask for one's lifetime in
exchange for their devastating passions.
All this about what Iris might have done
has its place because, had she strayed out of
her accustomed path more determinedly, she
would have seen more of Roger Poole; who—and
ever with that peculiar and antagonising
air of a man with a fine sense of conduct
and deportment who knew himself to
an exact and rigorous shade—was in the
most inner background of these feverish activities,
though never too feverishly; who
was as much at home with our more presentable
celebrities as with those less efficient;
and who, in the rather different atmosphere
round about St. James's, was
known as a very cool and fortunate gambler;
and had once been heard to make the
profound paradox that "a good gambler
never takes any risks"—which, it was said,
had so impressed a certain very rich young
fool with its apparent impossibility that he
had at once married an elderly millionairess.
Roger intended, in brief, to revive in himself
and his station a certain tradition; and
with no affectation, for that tradition was
his very own and became him as none other
could; in fact, it became him as well or as
ill as it had once become the younger politicians
of a past century. It had needed little
perspicacity on his part to see that there
was a strange defect in the young men of
his generation; that they seemed quite unable
and unwilling to combine their abandon
with any such brilliance as might help
them to achieve something, or their brilliance
with enough abandon to make them
seem sympathetic fellows—that, in short,
they were either wasters or dons. They
seemed quite unable to accommodate their
pleasures and their business into one lurid
whole, as did those men in the days when
there were still clubs in St. James's Street
and not curiosities; when men of brains or
birth never so entirely forgot their self-respect
or breeding were they ever so debauched,
as to be wholly indifferent to the
politics or culture of their country; when it
was as nothing against a gentleman to have
it said against him that he had seduced a
friend's wife, so only he had wittily done
the same to the House of Commons on the
same night; when, in short, it was commonly
considered the part of a gentleman to be
interested in upholding or demolishing the
pillars of the constitution....
But now! there were only wasters, at best
inefficient dilettanti in art and gambling, and
drunkards who appalled you not by their
drunkenness but by their dulness. You
could walk London W. from midnight to
daylight and see neither hint nor hope of
your accomplished buck.... And that last
description, Roger must have known, would
so agreeably become the seeming contradictions
of his public ambitions and private life,
that from the presidency of the Union he
stepped plumb into it; in solitary elegance
re-created it, as it were, in the public and
social eye, both of which were never far
from his consideration; and having re-created
it, successfully lived up to and never budged
from it—until, when he was thirty-four, he
again re-entered that society which he had
always despised as dull but had never offended
except with the most sympathetic
disorders; and could now walk into it with
the comforting thought that no dowager
could say worse of him than a doubtful "He's
a remarkable young man...."
I knew by the little he told me that the
main reason for his emergence was marriage.
It was time to take a wife—but he
had never bargained to fall in love with
her as he did with Iris Portairley. And I've
tried to explain Iris, at the age of twenty-two
wanting a deal more vitality and reality
than her surroundings could give her,
half-consciously waiting for "something to
happen"—is it very wonderful that she fell
in love with him, not only with his person,
but with the idea of him? It is only a very
callous kind of critic who will discount reality
from a love because—it is touched with
glamour—for was there ever in all history
a lovely reality without a lovely glamour?
Since, be you ever so young, to kiss a courtesan
is to kiss a courtesan, but, be you ever
so calm, to kiss a lover is to make a fairy-tale....
I didn't wonder whether Iris had told
Roger that she was seeing his brother. I
knew very well that she hadn't—and, as
Roger never mentioned even Antony's name,
not even to me (and there was that rigidity
about Roger that allowed no trespassing
upon a distasteful subject), there was little
chance of the subject ever being mentioned
between them. But did Antony know of
his brother's suit, so ironically parallel to
his own? I suppose that he must vaguely
have heard of something, from a remark he
once let drop; but it could only have been
vaguely and distantly, for the spirit of the
thing, of his new gentleness, would have
been broken much sooner if he had definitely
heard what was commonly said, that Iris was
to marry Roger Poole.
I had often wondered how Antony would
take the news of the engagement when it
officially happened.... I left them alone
that afternoon; and only re-entered the room
when I had heard the front-door close to.
He was sitting at my writing-table, and
looked round at me without a smile, wearily.
"I thought you must have gone out somewhere,
and was leaving you a note," he explained—and
then, at my inquiring look,
with a flash of his brazen impudence; "just
to thank you for having been a good fellow,
Ronnie—and a very good hand at staging a
play, too!"
That was the only reference he made,
then or ever, to what had gone—and with a
sneer underlying it! which I had certainly
answered but for the evident hopelessness
that had let it out. I was angry at his morose
resignation, at the weariness on his face—an
ingrate if ever there was one, who
thought life was treating him badly!
Whereas, God knows, he had never ceased
to buffet it into being his enemy. He ought
to have been grateful for knowing Iris at
all....
Ten minutes later he left me, saying: "I'm
going abroad, Mexico way, and I don't suppose
you'll be seeing me for some time, Ronnie—in
fact, there's no earthly reason why
you should ever see me again." And to his
suddenly outstretched hand was tacked on
the glimmer of a really grateful smile; very
like him that, to tack on a little gratitude to
a long good-bye....
And so Red Antony went away, leaving
behind him nothing in England but a question
now and then in Iris and myself as to
where exactly he might be and what he might
be doing. And as I had often wondered why
he hadn't left England long before, I never
doubted but that now he had taken the step
he would keep his distance—a contemptuous
distance, mark you!—from it. For
what, after all, was there for him to come
back to?
About a month after he had gone Iris and
Roger were married. I was the best man.
That was two years before. And there I
am, on that night two years later, still in
that taxi and running up an unconscionably
high fare towards Roger Poole's house in
Regent's Park; and Antony back again in
England....
The intervening two years were full of
an exaggeration of my state; which in itself
would have no importance for this tale
but for the reasons that caused it. Most of
us, nowadays, seem, after all, to have developed
our emotions to a more, well, civilised
plane than that of mere constancy; an Armenian
I know once told me that his father
and mother had loved each other for fifty
years, but I shouldn't wonder if that wasn't
one more of those exaggerations for which
oppressed peoples are remarkable, so it must
be almost unbelievable that a normal kind
of man could still be in a feverish state
about a woman for so long a time—and with,
to be frank, so little for his trouble.
But there's no cynical twist about the
thing, it is very easily explained. One can't
be dogmatic about the state of love, except
just to say that it is full of profoundly logical
contradictions. For, however serious
you may be about your passions, you (you
and I, I mean; not odd people) cannot for
ever go on plaguing a woman who is not
only so insensible to your attractions that
she marries some one else, but is actually
happy with him when married. A belated
sense of humour must come to your rescue
eventually, to point in a tired sort of way
at the rather ludicrous figure you cut to yourself,
fussing about with a passion that is of
no earthly use to any one. Anyway, it
stands to reason that the appalling certainty
of her happiness must inevitably draw something
from the fire of your love, so that it
fades and fades—unless, of course, you are
a minor poet and worried with your own
sense of superiority and sonnets, in which
case you will write to her a cycle of the latter
explaining the former, and choosing, if
possible, a date in another world when your
bodies (both of which have caused you so
much trouble) shall be rotten.
No: an unhappy love such as I speak of
must be fed so that it can continue; and, if
by nothing positive, by what more acutely
fed than by her unhappiness? So, since it
came about that Iris was unhappy, that sufficiently
explains my persistent love for her.
But its exaggeration? How can I hope to
give any reason for that, but in my own
fatuity? How trivial it seems merely to
say that there were moments, in that second
year of her marriage, when Iris gave me an
acute sense of nearness, of almost physical
nearness; as though, in our destined journey,
we were every day nearing a point where
the road would be so narrow that perforce
we must touch, where she and I would at
last have to face each other in a complete
moment....
Not, however, that I knew anything of
Iris's unhappiness for some time—it had not
outlasted her honeymoon, and yet her best
friend knew nothing of it for many months!
Simply because, of course, it is always the
most tiresome of one's friends who confide
in one.... Had I suspected that she might
be unhappy I might have expected it sooner.
But, as it was, that first year of their marriage
seemed to confirm every hope one had
for its success. A vivid, crowded year it
was—for Roger did do things supremely
well! The original Poole money had not
been quite negligible, but from all one heard
"the present baronet" must have more than
trebled it by lucky speculation (of course
there must always be those who slur away
the "s" from that word) and gambling; and
his wife had brought him a considerable
dowry. So that he could and did let himself
go, and indulged his passion for entertaining
in every sense in which that wretched
word can possibly rob people of their sleep.
The house in Regent's Park, with its large
and decorous, too decorous, rooms, and gardens
down to the water (is it river or lake?
One only saw it at night, and then not very
clearly, when it was either beautiful or sombre)
became a more frequent scene of parties
than any other responsible dwelling in London:
a kind of holocaust of drink, cards, and
dancing from which one emerged an entirely
different person to the one who had entered
a few hours before. One never entered that
house without drinking more than one had
ever drunk before, the thing was somehow in
the atmosphere, and time over again one
heard some poor wretch tell another that he
had never been so drunk since Oxford.
But the frequent parties were not merely
rowdy affairs, though rowdiness was never
far absent for those who liked that sort of
thing. Roger, as I've said, knew what he
was about; and now there was forming
around him, around the card-tables and the
buffets, a small but dominating nucleus of
people whose serious purposes were decently
shielded, let's say, rather than submerged,
by the riot and extravagance of the passing
moment. He was becoming, in fact, the
leader of a new old-school: and one as inimical
to wasters as it was indifferent to dullards.
From the, after all, considerable eminence
of his means and position he was influencing
the most promising of his contemporaries
and juniors to what he considered a
useful, sympathetic, and amusing mode of
life: to think well and to live well, to live
hard and to work hard.... Not, if you
look full at it, a very elevating philosophy,
not very original, since Haroun-al-Raschid
lived and died so many years ago. But,
elevating or no, it was one with a deal of
practicable arrogance in it, and it is surprising
how people will be influenced by anything
that appeals practicably to their arrogance.
And, I suppose, it is not so difficult
as all that to influence people to one's own
conception of life if one has Roger Poole's
advantages; not only those of his means and
his abilities but, as definitely, of his looks
and air; and, to top it all, the possession of
such a wife—an advantage more vivid and
compelling than any he could find in himself.
Of course I took it for granted that she
was happy during that year! She seemed
supremely content—as why, one might ask,
shouldn't she be? Of all the men who had
and might have come her way, Roger Poole,
in spite of his indulgences in cards and
brandy-and-ginger-ale, was certainly the
most distinguished and eligible; and, what's
more, the most courteous and considerate of
husbands, who so far forgot the sardonic
reticence one had thought natural to him as
to seem, even in public, always to be making
love to his wife.
Personally, I found that year, full of
Poole extravagance, so entertaining that I
think my vision of Iris, who since her marriage,
and her busy household's calls upon
her time, came much less often to see me in
the afternoons, must have been as much confused
by the gaiety and bustle always round
her, as by her hypocrisy about the thing.
She was, I think, as perfect a hostess as ever
made a demand on one's time (for I, her old
friend, was allowed no excuse by which to
absent myself from any gathering whatsoever.
Who else, said she, could give her the
necessary confidence in herself?) She
evoked gaiety. And how bald that sentence
seems when I mean it to imply the elation
caused in me, anyway, by the mere sight of
that figure here and there about the now
faintly and now brilliantly lit, whitepanelled
rooms of that familiar house. And her hair,
that wanton, tawny hair! It was so cunningly
contrived of rich amber colours that
it was always the most noticeable ornament
in the richest room; there was about it some
curious and wondrous quality of bedizening
itself to suit and startle the various pleasures
of every eye, even the most accustomed, that
traced its vivid course round a crowded room.
It was not until almost the middle of the
second year after her marriage that Iris again
began to come more or less frequently to see
me in the afternoons; but even then several
weeks had to pass before I came to realise,
and ever so dimly, what lay behind her quietness
and silences, to understand the splendid,
to me, faith which she put in my companionship....
What had from the first drawn
me to her, as to one different from her tiresome
and worldly friends, was that she was
never noisy in her personal relations. And
so, when she now again came to see me after
the lapse of that feverish year I had allowed
myself, I was slow to see the difference in
her usual quietness and silence, slow to find
sadness where I had ceased to suspect any.
She never told me anything. That was
ever the worst of Iris, she never did tell one
anything, anything actual, I mean. She said
not a word about her unhappiness until one
day I rather violently taxed her with it, and
then she seemed surprised that I should ask
so obvious a question: that I had not realised
for myself the reasons for her failure
to capture happiness. She actually seemed
to imply that I, her friend, had eyes to see!
whereas, God knows, I had little else but
a heart to feel....
What a plague to us our friend's reticence
can be! No one can well have suffered more
from it than I with Iris throughout that
time—she, so well versed in that unselfish
philosophy of trusting but never burdening a
friend; an unselfishness a little unfair to the
friend, I think, for he is crowned with
friendship's laurels without ever being allowed
to pay for them with service. But
such was Iris, with her philosophy of barricades....
"No one," said she, "can ever
really help one, except, of course, in fetching
one a taxi and the like. No one can ever
help one to do the odd jobs of the heart and
mind. It isn't to be expected. One must
work out everything for oneself. There's no
real help from outside, it must all come to
us from ourselves—though when and how,
for I've had mighty little of it."
But I suppose she was right in choosing
her own language of silence. For one
doesn't, as she said, talk about hell in the
Fourth Dimension.... I grew to know
quite well enough what it was all about.
She could have added nothing to my knowledge
but the details of disagreements and the
like, which are so often apt to be as mean in
repetition as in fact. And she spared me all
that at the risk of my impatience—and of
much more, she once confided to me later.
Dear Iris! How very much good a little
more conceit would have done you! you who
looked so like an autocrat but never ceased
to wonder at the admiration men paid
you....
It was Roger Poole who mainly perplexed
me. A particular conceit of mine, in fact,
received now a sharp rebuff; for, owing to
my long familiarity with them, it was always
with something of inner superiority
that I had listened to any mention of Poole
extravagances, thinking that I had measured
the brothers with some profundity—to discover
now that I had known nothing but the
outward complexion of anyway one of them!
How could one view him squarely?
But how can a man ever get a whole perspective
of another without, as it were, the
bedroom key to his passions? In vino veritas
may be a good enough test of drunkards
by topers, but in amore veritas is surely the
very secret of the sphinx, be he drunk or
sober. I once heard it said of a popular
French Society abbé that "there's no man in
France who is more confided in by people
who hate each other"; and at the time I
thought rather dismally that I had missed
my vocation—for, in my small way, the
same has happened to me throughout my life;
and had I had an orderly mind I might have
weaved the intricacies of other peoples' emotions
into a famous book, instead of letting
them settle into the deplorable chaos which
they have always been. But I do know this,
that I would know even less than I do of
women if I had ever listened to what men
said of them, and nothing at all of men if I
hadn't listened very attentively to what
women said of them. But Iris said almost
nothing at all to explain the perversities of
this particular man; except, once, that his
nerves were as tight and taut as violin
strings, and "sometimes so suddenly tuneless
that it is difficult to remember what a very
precious violin it really is."
In spite of the fact that her mother was
passing a very pleasant middle age in widely
bewailing that Iris was wasting her youth,
that Iris didn't like nor love any one, not
even her husband—"that child doesn't like
any one, you know! She is so contemptuous!"
she'd say brilliantly—Iris, under a becoming
air of inaccessibility which could
rather appall one, hid an ability to love utterly—such
as would quite have shocked
those who inveighed against her coldness!
And perhaps that hidden warmth of desire
in her, the human but divine possibility of
absolute surrender, must have been why her
very presence in a room so often disturbed
one. And now, to Roger! She had given
it all to him, the whole surrender—that
thing, so warmly full of potentiality, had
been all given to him. A marvellous box of
tricks to open, each passion to unwind its
mystic and craved-for gift! If only he could
have taken her love but a tithe so generously
as she had given it! And she never dreaming
that he wouldn't....
Whether it was from a colossal conceit or
from a meanness of vision, he seemed actually
not to believe in her love—or, if this
was a mad world, he seemed to want more!
And he disbelieved not humbly, but with
that sharpened scepticism which leaves so
lasting a stain—and if he wanted more, he
wanted silently, else maybe he had incited
her to the bitterest rebellion of all: of telling
him that she could love him no more
than she already did, were she Psyche and
he Cupid in Apuleius's book. He was that
difficult kind of man (difficult, anyway, in
a woman's first adventure) who never says
"I love you," will rather say anything else
than that; seeming, perversely, always to be
waiting for something else, some further
revelation. He was like a wall jagged here
and there with sharp flints, against which
Iris, in those first months, had hopefully
then blindly thrown herself and her love,
only to be hurt. He hurt her always, and
inexplicably.... Indeed there's no pride
in any love worthy of the name. Pride is
just an imp, the very last of last resources,
to be only used when all those gentler attributes
of love have failed—for if love is
humbled too far, then pride must become a
part of it.
She had felt, even before her marriage,
that there were queer depths in Roger which
might sometimes make him a little ... unexpected.
And, of course, difficult. She
might, with this man, have to waive the
slight advantage a woman has in loving a
gentleman rather than, say, a Dago, which
is that a gentleman more or less does what
is expected of him, a dull advantage, which
Iris's thoughts very easily waived aside, for
she was quick to allow as wide a licence for
other people's improbabilities as she expected
them to allow her. But she hadn't dreamt
that the queerest of these, in him, could take
so grotesque a shape as cruelty! For, however
refined as an art cruelty may become,
there is something vulgar and stupid in it as
a trait, it must always be the very opposite
of the immaculate—and that, as a man and
as a lover, Roger had seemed to be. That
idea of him, as essentially immaculate, had
helped to compel her to him. And so now,
hurt her as his cruelty did, it jarred and
shocked her even more—that an illusion
should have gone so distastefully awry!
There was the perversity of the man—to
love, as it were, upside-down. He could not
accept a thing as it was, he must dominate
and improve it, he in his own way! The
joy and gaiety of just loving and being loved
seemed to be meaningless to him—a wondrous
deficiency in a man who made so brave
a show of pleasure seeking! And so, jeering
at her spontaneity, sneering at her "effusion"—Iris
"effusive"!—dominating her
with his sardonic humours, he gradually subdued
her. "Subduing" people doesn't depend
on your strength but on the other's
weakness; and Iris had the terrible weakness
of being too easily saddened, too easily influenced
to credit that ever-present sense of
the inutility and worthlessness of herself as
compared to everything and every one; the
most weakening trait of all for oneself, the
most maddening for one's friends....
There was, then, this much excuse for him,
that this weakness in Iris's nature acted as
a kind of counterpart to his perversity. It
was as though from all the world of fair
women Iris had been chosen to bring out and
accentuate Roger's great faults, as though
from all the world of men who would have
cherished her Roger Poole had been chosen
as the only one who could belittle her and
her love. If only she had been of a more
stalwart confidence in herself, if only she
had less easily given way to the subjection
of herself before her high standards of worth!
But, as she was, the nerve of her weakness
once touched, she acted as a direct challenge
to Roger's peculiar cruelty; which was of
just the malevolent kind to confirm her in
the belief, not only of his worthlessness, but
of her own—this man who saw through her
and despised her! How very treacherously
your sadnesses treated you, Iris....
Once, in that second year, after one more
of those scenes which now her "coldness"
caused as once had her "effusiveness," she
made a rather feeble attempt to leave him,
but he called her back; which, somehow, he
easily could, for there was always that magnetism
about him for her, compelling her
to him almost bodily.... For three weeks
he had left her in peace and without a sign,
at the friend's house in the country to which
she had gone, saying blindly that she would
never return to him; and then, one day, he
had turned up after lunch, and with no resistance
but that of a set face she had gone
back to London with him. So, in his perverse
way, it seemed that he loved her, or
rather that she was necessary to him; (Iris
told me later that she never really doubted
her attraction for him. But these things are
too strange and too subtle for me).
He seemed to have need of her presence,
always. She must be always there. If she
were indisposed there would be no parties
in Regent's Park, since he seemed to enjoy
no gathering of people in his house without
her vivid presence.... I went as seldom
as I could to his parties during that second
year, but even so remarked how often his
eyes followed her round a room, though he
might not speak to her nor dance with her
for hours on end; and if he did not dance
with her he danced with no one else—he
never had since the first time they had danced
together; and, though she still lost as consistently
as ever at any games of hazard that
might be played, he seemed always to be
brighter and sharper for her presence about
the table.
He was a Pasha kind of man, Iris told
me later; which would not have been so difficult
to deal with if he had been consistent
about it. But she never knew where she
was, for he would let her be for weeks on
end, while she lunched here and dined there,
danced with this man and with that—and
then, suddenly, blaze out into a fury of, presumably,
jealousy; a cold kind of fury, in
which bitter abuse was couched in liveliest
terms and his opinion of her, and himself,
defined with that outrageous clearness peculiar
to scientists and sadists. Heaven only
knows how she stood it at all—but then
Heaven is our only really discreet friend, and
never tells.
The reason why I was so late in going to
the party at Roger's house that sultry night
in June was that I hadn't up to the last moment
intended to go. And, as I paid off the
cab before the house, was still uncertain
enough to hesitate—until I suddenly had an
acute feeling that I simply couldn't bear the
crowd inside, all those usual and vivacious
faces; that I couldn't bear the idea of the
large rooms and noisy groups here and there,
nor of Roger and his cultivated smile, nor of
Iris in that confounded gallère. I may go
in later, I told myself, thinking it would be
a more pleasant folly to smoke a cigarette in
the gardens behind the house. An ugly Victorian
house, large and flabby, and an illiterate
garden, I grumbled, but as I skirted the
front to it I had to admit that for all its
poverty and disorder it was a queerly attractive
garden, a very special garden. Its
hundred yards or so of length sloped in an
absent-minded way down to the water, but
where one would have expected an immaculate
lawn for the cultivation of afternoon
tea were only patches of grass traversed erratically
by paths that led to nowhere in
particular, and adorned by random trees and
bushes that always might just as well have
been anywhere else; a garden without any
conscience even at night-time, and with
scarcely any flowers, because, said Roger, a
garden in London needs no flowers to be
wonderful....
I blessed the little spots of rain that had
been falling for some time, for there would
be none of the usual wanderers about the
place. There would be nothing but the garden's
own silent and sombre contrast to the
rattling and bumpy music that gesticulated
at one through the wide open French windows
of the ballroom. And the noise of
that music was as the noise of a leering destiny,
from which there could be no escape
but only an occasional release....
A pleasant spectacle, this, from my dark
station under an elm, but for a mind clouded
with discontents and futile longings; the
three large windows of brilliant light, in
which were framed the passing figures of
young people, here and there a very fair face
reflecting the serious abandon of suiting
steps to a tireless measure: those sidelong
steps of the modern dance which I, anyway,
find so much more attractive than the steps
of the waltz, which is still regretted by
people with listless feet and superior minds
who take themselves but not dancing seriously.
But now I had no pleasure from the spectacle,
I only wished, and heartily, that the
room was empty of its music and people,
empty of all but Iris ... to whom, if miracles
could happen at all, I would enter suddenly
and brave her startled gaze with my
love-making, and take her. But the most
wonderful thing about miracles is that they
never happen, so I could do nothing but stare
at her as far as I could disjointly see her
among the moving crowd; a creature of green
and gold that night, for her dress was of
jade, and her hair, I thought, couldn't of
course be but gold to ornament it fittingly;
so that, I said, she will always be her own
carnival, even in a desolate place. And
once again, with that white face under hair
which seemed that night more than ever barbaric
in its splendour, she gave me that feeling
of her as a strange thing from some wild
legend, a woman of doubt and desire so consummately
human as to be almost inhuman:
tamed into life just for this moment, but
only for this moment, without a why nor
whence nor whither....
Thoughts, such vain thoughts as those, are
apt to engross one's mind and very senses so
utterly as to shut out for a few moments
the whole noise of the world. So now, as
I stood under the darkness of my tree, even
the rustling turmoil of the ballroom must
have become lulled by the vagaries of my
thoughts, for it was out of the deepest silence
that suddenly a voice behind my shoulder,
as though from the trunk of the tree,
asked softly:—
"And is the wise sentinel posted to keep
the fools in or to keep the fools out?"
With a start I found behind me—Antony!
a huge looming figure, his head bent to avoid
the branches, a gleam of white shirt front
and a red face, smiling impishly down at
me. My utter surprise involuntarily took
the shape of his simile, and I couldn't help
saying: "The sentinel is the biggest fool of
all, Antony, but he's going to stay outside." ...
But as I looked at him, his eyes fixed over
my shoulder at the ballroom, his suddenly
furtive appearance, the shameless espionage
of it, angered me, and I added: "One way
and another we seem to be seeing a good
deal of each other to-night, don't we?"
"Um," said Antony, but his eyes didn't
heed me.
"If that's your way of asking me why the
hell I'm here," he said, "—then, Ronnie, the
answer is that you do get in the way so to-night.
"And, anyway," he asked, "why are you
here?"
"Simply because I suddenly thought I
wouldn't go in—"
"Oh, stuff—you are in love with Iris, my
boy," he suddenly threw at me. "I've acquired
a taste for plain-speaking, you see,"
he added as I stared at him.
"What you needed was a touch of decency,"
I could only suggest.
"You only say that because you think
you have a reputation to keep up," he said
wearily. "Why on earth shouldn't you be
in love with Iris if you want to be? I am."
Verily, Red Antony had changed in two
years! It was never his way before to tell
the truth about himself. And now ... or
was it, my confusion asked, just a fancy on
his part, born that moment of a desire to
disturb me. His vanity had always inclined
him to disturb and startle, whether by a lie
or by a truth. And one is always confounded
by the sudden froth of a fool's mind.
"Anyway, it's the sort of thing one keeps
to oneself," I said,—lamely, I suppose. He
had so much of an advantage over one in any
unseemly discussion.
"Remarkable amount of good that seems
to have done you," he quizzed me, mildly.
But he seemed to be taking as little heed of
me as what he said to me, his attention was
all for the windows of the ballroom. There
was something pitiable about the way his
eyes followed the scene from our vantage,
as any poor alien might bitterly watch the
revelries of a strange country.
"I heard this afternoon," he said, "that
there was a party here to-night—and when I
saw you on Piccadilly I knew where you
must be going, so I suddenly thought I'd
come too. Just to have a look at my betters
enjoying themselves, you know.
"If you were a human being instead of a
gentleman," he said steadily, "you'd be telling
a man something. You'd tell him, for
instance, if the marriage is a success, and if
Iris is happy, and what her recreations are,
and so on. Wouldn't you now?"
"Oh, Antony, what a dolt you are!" I
told him. "If you'd only approach a man
properly, without any of that bluff and bluster
that so gets on one's nerves, one might
tell you quite a lot."
In spite of that, however—"that candour
peculiar to habitual liars who read novels"—I
was thinking very hard about what exactly
I would tell him about Iris, for Antony
evoked the truth as little as he indulged
in it.
"Of course the marriage is a success," I
said. "And as to Iris being happy I've never
seen any reason to doubt it."
"So long as she's got health, beauty,
riches, sort of thing, eh!" he added with a
laugh. "I just wondered, that's all. Mexico
is the devil of a country for wondering
in...."
I looked at my watch and saw that it was
nearly three. The ballroom was deserted,
and I could imagine the crowd in the supper-room....
I would make some excuse
to Iris to-morrow, I thought, and suggested
to Antony that we might have a last drink
at my flat, so that he could tell me some of
his news.
The decanter was empty and the night
done when at last Antony left me—having
told me many amusing tales of his experiences
in Mexico and the West, in which of
course he was always the first mover and
main motif; and that he had come back to
England with many good ideas of how to
make certain money, if he could only find
the capital. "We must talk seriously about
all that one of these days, Ronnie," said he.
As a matter of fact, Antony's frequent
ideas for making fortunes—out of the mugs,
of course—weren't quite the silly vapourings
of the usual waster, for he had a strain of
financial genius which, if he could but have
concentrated on anything, might long ago
have made him a rich man. And so now I
was less sceptical about his ability than
about his seriousness.
"And is brother Roger as rich as he was?"
he had asked me.
"Well, he seems to manage very well.
But one never really knows about Roger,"
I said. "There's always rumours, of course,
that he's stacked money on a horse, an oil
well, or a silver mine; but he never shows
any excitement about it."
"That," said Antony, "is because he's
lucky. Plucky too, but mainly lucky." ...
"But about you—how on earth are you
going to live? and at the Carlton?"
"For a wonder they dealt me some good
cards now and then," he vaguely explained,
with a laugh. "And when that's gone—well,
I must make some more, that's all,
Ronnie. And, bless your heart, there's always
you to lend a man a fiver, so I won't
starve."
I was not surprised when Antony, with
his wonted casual neglect of such things,
did not turn up to lunch the next day. But
I was surprised to hear why—from Iris, later
in the afternoon.
"And so that's why you didn't come to
the party last night," she accused me as she
came in.
She had been bewildered that morning by
an unfamiliar voice on the telephone, but
of course he had not needed to stress the
fact that he was a "relation by marriage"
before she had guessed who he was; and had
lunched with him at Kettner's. And she was
in one of those matter-of-fact moods which
made it difficult to discover if she was very
pleased or not by Antony's re-appearance.
"He was very nice," she said, "and full
of a thousand and odd things to say, and
some of them very odd indeed. Like a boy
back home for the holidays, he seems...."
"The sort of boy some one I know by
sight wouldn't like to meet again on a dark
night in a bad temper," I threw in, reminiscently.
"My dear, you are getting very difficult!"
she protested. "And you weren't very nice
to poor Antony last night, maybe, for he
said he had found you a trifle suspicious."
"I suspicious! Why, the man's full of it,
he throws the stuff about like ink—he's suspicious
even of me, the only friend he's
got!"
"You had better glower at him not at me,
Ronnie. And anyway, he's quite changed
now, you will soon not be able to see him
for tea-parties and the like! There's two
lots of people in the world, he said, those
who take tea and those who don't; you can
either have your headache from boredom or
from drink—and Antony is now going to
try the first kind."
And as I stared rather satirically at her,
Iris suddenly sat up in her chair and became
very serious. "It's quite true, Ronnie—and
if you're the man you've led me to believe
you are, you will take a hand and help. The
poor man realises he has made a horrible
mess of his life, and he realises that it hasn't
been worth it. He's tired of wandering, and
he's tired of being an outsider...."
"You don't mean to tell me he said that!"
"Not in those very words," she admitted,
"but he was very sweet and pathetic, and I
think he might be given a chance...."
"A chance at what?" I asked bluntly.
"Well, whatever it is men are given a
chance about. Don't, please, be thick-headed,
Ronnie. I suppose he wants to get
back."
"What, into the divorce court again!"
Iris jumped up from her chair, and there
was no smile on the face she turned to me.
"I think you are being horrible about him,
perfectly beastly. And you say you are a
friend of his!..."
"Iris, for the Lord's sake don't let us get
dramatic about Antony—and we can't do it
half so well as he can, anyway." And as she
turned away with that little grimace of contempt
that she reserved for peculiarly tiresome
people, I got up from my chair the
better to defend myself. And I was getting
very hot and bothered about the whole thing,
too. "Don't you see that it's exactly because
I'm a friend of his and know him pretty well
that I know all this 'getting back' talk is
simply stuff?" I put to her. "My dear,
I've been 'sympathetic' about Antony for
years, but it's never done him or myself any
good—simply because there's never one circumstance
in life when he will give up his
vanities and bravadoes, he's so full of silly
contempt that he will never even compromise.
It's not possible to help a man who
won't help himself...."
"The one after that in my copy-book was
'every cloud has a silver lining,'" Iris said
dangerously.
"You are being unfair about Antony," she
said. "You aren't allowing for the least
change in him since he went away. And you
are judging him entirely by his old weaknesses,
without giving him any credit for
new thoughts and—and longings...." I
couldn't help grimly thinking of the quickly
emptied decanter the night before, but I
didn't interrupt. Iris is following a theory,
I thought, and she won't find herself out
until she has made a pet-dog of it and it
makes a mess of her cushions.
"It's a perfectly human desire to want to
get back into the world," she said. "Not, of
course, the silly dull world, but that of affairs
and the like. The city, for instance...."
"Anyway, Iris, your intentions are very
honourable—but what are you going to do
about it? How will you begin?"
"Isn't it perfectly obvious that to begin
with he and Roger must make up their
wretched quarrel or whatever it is?" she
rather impatiently put to me. "I've always
thought it absurd and childish, this civil war
kind of thing, but now I think it's horrible
too—the rich brother not even allowing the
poor one into his house! Like silly schoolboys
playing a cruel game...." she added
desperately.
I laughed at that, but insincerely.
"Surely you know your husband and his
brother well enough to know that neither
of them will ever do what they don't want
to do! Really, my dear, it will be much better
for every one, but mainly you, not to interfere
between them....
"It's a silly idea, anyway," I added, "because
even if Roger consented, which isn't
probable, Antony would see him to blazes
before he'd enter his house. I've tried 'em
both, you know."
It was a little perturbing to have Iris pat
my shoulder on that mockingly, and say:
"There, there, everything will be all right—for
who but Antony himself suggested it to
me at lunch time?"
And she went on, my mind puzzled with
this hard fact—Antony had told Iris that he
wanted to make friends with Roger! Antony,
the most obstinate braggart in the
world!
"I chanced the subject, of course," Iris
was saying, "and Antony agreed that it was
the silliest thing in a silly life, and that he
would like to put it right.... Surely they
can't still be going on about that silly schoolboy
quarrel you once told me about!"
"Oh, the quarrel! the quarrel was nothing,
just a lid to the thing. The trivialest thing
for a blaze of temper that I ever saw. But
they must have hated each other for years."
She put her hands to her ears in mockery.
"Oh, dear! You're as bad and silly and
sinister as they are! I'm terribly disappointed
in you as a man of wise counsel,
Ronnie. Grown up men don't go on hating
each other for ever and ever, simply because
they are made different—"
"Or simply because they are made the
same," I broke in.
"Oh, chicken-food!" Iris rudely said.
"Anyway, I'm going to speak to Roger about
it...."
"Well," said I, "he won't speak to you
about it. He will just be silent, and let
you go on speaking—and when you've finished
you can begin again." I got that gibe
in just in time, as between the door-mat and
the door, so to speak....
And I judged that it must have been very
much as I said, for when I saw Iris again
she was not even decently communicative
about it, so that I had impatiently to accuse
her of being the kind of woman who would
liefer not mention her failures. But she said
she hadn't failed, "and anyway the word
'failure' seems rather portentous about so
childish a matter.
"He was like a blank wall," she explained.
"Or rather not a blank one, for he's never
quite that. And, of course, his sort of silence
made me lose my head as usual, so
that I might just as well have been prattling
about the cultivation of sweet potatoes as
about poor Antony, for all the good I did.
And in the end he merely said he would see
about it, or words to that effect."
"Or no effect," I amended, finally.
But she did not tell me till much later
that Roger had listened to her speech about
Antony, an extremely unusual subject between
them, with such a fine show of interest
as he didn't generally lend to what she
said; so that she had thought the thing was
going on splendidly until, when she had finished,
he had smiled, and murmured:—
"I wonder what other reason there could
possibly be for Antony's wanting to make it
up except that we are both acquainted with
my wife...."
So the matter dropped from my mind, except
that I now and then gave a thought to
Antony's queer idea, how and why on earth
he had come to humble himself so—for that
was the way the man would look at it. But
I could not discover a hint of his possible
motive until some days later; when, having
asked Iris what he was about, for he hadn't
come near me since that night of his arrival
(obviously because he had no present use
for me), she said he seemed to be dashing
about the City seeing people, and, she hoped,
profitably: "For I never see him but he has
a pound or more registered on his taxi. But
I daren't lecture him in case he loses his
dash, and economises by not going to the
City at all. For I think," she said with a
hard look at me, "there's some good to come
out of Antony yet."
So that was it, then—Antony actually was
taking something seriously for once! He
really had brought back money schemes, big
schemes of course, needing substantial backing,
for like every other spendthrift he could
only think in millions—and that was why he
had suddenly found a use for Roger, the
clever boy of the family!
But I dared not tell Iris my idea of Antony's
purpose in making up the quarrel, for
she was already surprised and displeased
enough by what she thought my "harsh"
attitude about him. "I never knew you to
be so wretchedly biased," she had been surprised
into saying; and so she wouldn't now
give much credence to my psychologising of
Antony—who was cunning enough to have
realised, maybe from something she had let
drop, that I was in no mood to be again used
by him, and therefore did not come near
me.
It was only a few days after Iris had told
me of his costly vagabondage about the City
that she informed me, ever so casually, that
Roger was going to give a "Nigel Poole"
dinner-party on the Friday night. She said
it so casually that I thought I hadn't heard
aright.
"A what party?"
"Oh, come, Ronnie! you know very well
that Roger has given a dinner-party on this
particular Friday of every year in honour
of Sir Nigel, the founder of the house of
Poole—"
"I know all about old Nigel, and that's
a deal too much," I broke in. "But would
you tell me where Roger has kept this annual
dinner hidden, for I've never heard of
it in all the years I've known him?"
"That's because of the life you lead," she
pointed out. "You are too recluse, too celibate,
too oblivious of the banal festivities of
more frivolous but more human people. And
I might add—"
"You might add, my dear, what this dinner
is about and what the deuce Sir Nigel
Poole, Bart., and bankrupt, has to do with
it?"
"Ronnie, you mustn't be rude about my
husband's family—you know very well that
they go to all the best Hunt Balls and that
all-their-people-are-Service-people. And as
for the dinner, why! it's about nothing in
particular—what are dinners ever about except
a table? Poor old Nigel Poole is just
a kind of plausible excuse to dress ourselves
up in his period and kick our heels up a bit.
The only thing that won't be eighteenth century
will be the champagne, unless its corked—and,
of course, you, if you are going to
pull a face like that about it.
"This very moment," she said, "we will
go to Clarkson's, where we will fit you up
with a very fine line in gents' eighteenth-century
suitings. And a wig, Ronnie, will
lend an intriguing appearance to what I
might call—well, you know, a rather discouraging
scarcity...."
As it turned out on the Friday night, it
was a very pretty spectacle. We were a
square party of men and women about the
long oak table, five down each side with our
host and hostess at each end; and not one
of us but was decked in the finery of circa
1780, and with a great deal more care and
less anachronism than is usually remarkable
in such masquerades. We men silked,
breeched, sheathed, ruffled, and bewigged;
and the women with their laces and powdered
hair looking to my mind vastly improved
upon their reality. Even Iris, her
tawny hair whitened to the convention and
extravagantly retreating from her ears and
forehead to a pinnacle (how in the world
she arranged it so I could never guess!), her
little, exquisite features thus quite prominently
lovely, looked less wild and more
worldly, as of this world and not another;
altogether of a more demure elegance—an
expression which, as Roger said in brazenly
asking us to admire his lady's looks, became
her very prettily.
We were all, it must be understood, talking
the speech of the period, as far as each
could remember its conceits and mannerisms.
Of course we all mixed things up a good deal—except
Roger, who had insisted on it from
our entrance, and was much more adept at
the foolery of the verbiage. He was in the
high good spirits that such make believe
generally put him in; and was always seen
in his best light as a host, as lavish of good
humour as of wine, both, of course, flowing
the more readily as the hour increased. And
now his consistent and amusing use of his
ancestor's way of speech added a great deal
to the fun—in which Iris was sharing no less
than I. Indeed, she has often told me since
that she could have lived smoothly enough
with Roger if all life were a masquerade—for
Roger, it seemed, was a man who would
take to fineness as a beau geste, where he
would see you to the deuce in reality.
Our host, in all his finery of black silks
and white laces, was sitting at the end of
the table facing the window; and on the oak
panelled wall on his right, as it were dominating
us all, was the only portrait in the
room, a full-length of the host of our fancy:
Sir Nigel, the first baronet, by Gainsborough—a
very gallant but misguided gentleman,
as Roger said of him. Misguided indeed,
if one can judge by what mention of him
can be found in the more obscure annals of
his time (for Sir Nigel's fame among his
contemporaries was not such as to ensure its
perpetuity by even the least responsible historian);
a rake who turned his coat this way
and that to suit his interests just a little too
outrageously even for that period, won and
as discreditably lost a fortune or two; who
was adjudged a sot and bankrupt, and then
half confounded opinion by certain strategies
of war which had nearly won us back
our American colonies but for highly-placed
incompetence; and in the end had surely won
a higher prize than a paltry baronetcy but
for his incurable passion for double-dealing,
in which, as the years and the bottle took
him, his wits seem to have lost much of their
dexterity. His figure stared down at us now,
stout, flushed, and rather blatant, and genial
enough but for something dour about the
cast of his eyes; and with very little such
damned nonsense as cultivation about him,
but a great deal of jaw.... He had come,
I thought, by a rare honour: such a one as is
not often lavished on many worthier shades—and,
as I looked round at the glasses and
the flushed faces of the company, an honour
done in no other way than that which Sir
Nigel himself would have chosen.
Much was said that amused us that night
which, if repeated now outside that setting,
would naturally make but a very pale and
artificial show.... It was past eleven and
we were still about the table, when I saw
Roger almost furtively raise a glass to the
portrait and carry it to his lips; but as he
did so he caught my eye on him, and at once
set the glass down untouched.
"I stand rebuked, Ronnie. It would become
us all to share this toast—to Sir
Nigel!" And with that he jumped up in
his place and held his glass up.
"Caballeros!" he gravely addressed us.
"There is but one thing to-night that would
surprise our host on the wall and in our
hearts, but would add vastly to his pleasure
at our entertainment—that the ladies will
toast him with us! But let it be as you sit,
and in silence—Silence, the only God Sir
Nigel never worshipped!" We drank.
"Nay, Sir Roger, you do me a great injustice!
I was perforce often silent—and
close on this very hour."
We all slewed round at the voice from
the window.
"My God! The very man!" cried young
Riverdale.
And it was—Sir Nigel as ever he lived,
or rather, was painted! Heady with wine
though we may have been—the very man
himself surely stood there! The likeness
was scrupulous, the resemblance of face
alone, as he stood surveying us from the open
window with his hat carried as in the portrait,
was startling, ludicrous. The colour
of the clothes, the very feather in the hat,
were as though taken from the oil of the portrait;
not one thing was amiss in the disguise,
not even that well-dined look of Sir Nigel's
time!
A full half-minute must have passed in
startled, amused silence, while we all stared
at the apparition, and he handsomely stared
back at us—we all except Iris who, I saw
from the corner of my eye, had not turned
in her chair at the voice, but was looking
straightly in front of her, a little crooked
smile about her mouth. The reason for the
"Nigel Poole" party, which she had suggested
to Roger, was now well out! And,
still in that half-minute, I twisted my head
to take stock of our host standing at his end
of the table—and, I don't quite know why,
was amazed to see that he was not looking
at Antony but at his wife, thoughtfully, ever
so thoughtfully, just for a second....
Antony's smile was mainly to Roger, and
after the first second he was wonderfully answered.
Roger let drop his empty glass so
that it shattered on the table, then strode
across the room towards his brother, both
hands outstretched to meet him.
"Welcome to my house, Sir Nigel," said
he, and the brothers very handsomely took
each the other's hands.
[I never thought to see two grown men
enjoy tomfoolery so seriously as did these
two brothers from this moment on.]
"You do me a great honour," continued
Roger as he led his brother towards us, "but
you also put me to a degree of shame—"
"Why, sir, I never yet shamed any man
by my presence in his house!" And the
blustering cry, one knew, might as well have
been Sir Nigel's as Red Antony's.
"I meant no such reflection," Roger protested
smoothly. "I am merely shamed that
you did not trust my hospitality some hours
before, so that you could have been of our
company over dinner."
"I protest, Sir Roger, that you make me
too welcome! But I assure you we keep a
very good table in the place I come from—"
(And it was obvious enough that Antony
had dined as extremely well as the heartiest
of us.)
"And that, had I known of this honour, I
would have asked one the less—for you, Sir
Nigel, will now make the thirteenth about
the table."
(I'll bet Iris never thought of that,
though!)
"Egad, I play in luck to-night, then! For
I'd have you know, Sir, that thirteen is a
number much favoured in the place I've just
left."
By now they had reached Roger's end of
the table and stood there, the objects of our
very amused attention. And a fine pair of
men they made, those brothers!
"I'll present the company to you—"
Roger was saying when Antony took him
quickly up.
"Nay, nay—let them be! I dare swear
that none will be so abashed as not to reveal
themselves aptly enough!" And at that
he sent a great laugh rocking down the table,
a magnificent laugh, an epic laugh, explaining
himself and us, waving and rocking
among the multitude of glasses—which, to
my heated fancy, seemed to clink as at the
hail of one they knew to be their master.
Only Roger among us did not laugh, nor
smile but abstractedly. He showed only
concern as to his last guest's entertainment;
and was now directing an amused servant to
place a chair beside his own at the table,
when Antony turned from us to him with
the amiable inquiry: "And the fairest of all,
that most brilliant ornament in a brilliant
room—I take to be your lady, Sir Roger?"
Roger waved a courtly hand towards Iris
to present her. But she made no sign as
Antony bowed; the little smile had stayed
rigid about her mouth since his entrance, it
was as though an ironic hand had lightly
caressed a shape upon it....
And Roger took a feather from Antony's
impudence as the other was bowing. "I am
glad you realise," said he, "that our house
has now no other claim to distinction than
in that lady."
And so my impossible had happened, the
breach between the brothers was at last filling
in! At this first, on Roger's part as
though, I thought, with hesitation, almost
perforce—but continued day by day to be
filled in so consistently that soon the breach
became, as it were, a mountain ridge: the
brothers on the one side and the world on the
other.
And, too, many another quarrel was tactfully
smoothed for Antony that night and
from that night; for there were some of our
table that night whose first surprise at his
entrance had held some repugnance in it,
men who thought him "really a bit too
much," women who weren't Wesleyans but
would not have remarked him in an empty
street. But Red Antony had certainly won—what
little of that kind of thing there is
to win—or to lose, for the matter of that.
And if ever a man who was worth his weight
in food and drink, that was Antony that
night, on the top of his form from floor to
ceiling, from midnight to daylight! And
Roger only less so—just a little colourless he
seemed beside this sudden brother of his. It
was strange to think that I was the only one
among them all who had ever seen the brothers
together before—and that more than
eighteen years before, in Roger's last term
at school! I tried to find from his face now
something of what he thought, but caught
no more than an occasional sidewise smile
at his brother.
I taxed Iris about her plot with only a
laughing, "Well, it was a very good idea,
anyway."
"Oh, if I could only claim the credit for
it!" she feigned to sigh. "It was Antony's,
you see."
The devil it was, I only thought! And as
at last I went home found some unrest from
the discovery, I was too drunk to know exactly
why; and for all the fun of the night I
went at last to bed quite bothered about the
whole thing—and awoke not less so. I ought
to have been pleased, of course: Antony had
splendidly got his way and might now make
good, and Iris might get the benefit of the
new friendship between the brothers. But
one never knew what those infernal brothers
were at, they both had such a damned sinister
way of taking their pleasures! And I
really had rather a grievance about the thing,
too, I felt entitled to be hurt—for, after all,
I'd been a pretty good friend to 'em both,
and in long-passed years had time over again
tried to bring them together and make them
see the error of their ways—and here they
suddenly come together without as much as
a "by your leave!"
I rang Iris up at about lunch time, and a
tired voice from her bed told me to go about
my business and "come to dinner to-night,
if you like. Roger's asked Antony...."
I didn't go simply because my constitution
is of this and not the eighteenth century.
But I would have liked to, if only to see
what those two might be at, or if they were
at anything at all. And as for Iris—well,
thought I (those late nights never really
agreed with me, you understand), a wiser
than I has said that it's in the nature of
women and cats to scratch the hand that
tries to free them from a trap.
Iris was in a flutter. At least no other
word can describe the quick gaiety of her
entrance, the hidden smile in her eyes, and
then, as she sat down, her sudden air of disinterested
thought—for all the world as
though I hadn't seen her for three days, as
though she hadn't really, anything at all to
tell me! As sometimes unavoidably happened
when some press of work kept me dallying
more busily than usual about editors,
publishers, or managers—which sounds so
much more important than ever the results
were—we had not been able to meet since
the night of the party; and I had had to restrain
my curiosity about both her "relations-by-marriage"
until this fourth afternoon:
when, as I've said, she as nearly fluttered
in as she could, and brought into my room
a sudden breath of memorable moments, how
long ago! when I had so often seen her with
the light of a new idea, a new theory, an old
book, or a new friend, in her eyes—a gay,
lovely Iris, whose sanity and illusions were
marvellously mixed in a wild and tender
profusion, like sedate tulips and wanton
poppies in a tawny sunlight. But the past
two years had a little pruned her carelessness,
and had made her mischief less sudden
and more shapely, for she had come by a
certain depth of mockery....
But at this very moment she was as she
had once been, pointing out that I was one
of the reasons why "girls go wrong in London.
For if I had taken any notice of your
pompous warnings to let Roger and Antony
be as they were, I would have gone through
life with a fixed idea of how horrible men
are to each other. Whereas, you know, they
aren't that at all—for instance, those two
are quite divine together, and very pleased
to have made up their absurd quarrel. And
as I look at them it's very difficult to believe
that all your talk about them wasn't
a nightmare, or a bad short story badly translated
from the Russian."
In fact it was quite remarkable, she told
me, how good they seemed to be for each
other; fancifully, as though each one had
taken on something of the other's quality—Antony
seeming to have become more intelligent
and balanced, and Roger more genial,
more—well—human. Which, of course,
made everything much more pleasant for
her....
But I had to protest when she said that
Antony seemed so interested in talking and
listening to his brother that he noticed her
very little; that, in fact, she had been rather
shocked to see that he wasn't now wasting
any time over any remnants of good looks
that might still be left to her since he had
left England.
"He doesn't ignore me, of course. He is
quite charming and courteous, and tries his
best to lower his voice when speaking to
one, in the old way, but—well, he's only
just aware when I am in or out of the room,"
she added helpfully.
That aroused in me a perverse candour
about something so far untouched between
us, and I said: "But you know as well as I
do, Iris, that you were one of the main reasons,
or the main reason, why Antony wanted
to make friends with Roger."
She stared at me thoughtfully, as though
examining a certain mental aspect of me;
but I seemed to have been wrong about the
infernal man so often as far as she was concerned
that I was now quite reckless about
making just one more faux pas. "And," I
added grimly, "wanted to see if you liked
Roger as much or more than you—"
"All right, all right," she impatiently
stopped me. "Ronnie, you've developed a
great talent for seeming to give knowledge
when you're only roasting chestnuts. Of
course, I had gathered all that—not too seriously,
of course. There is always an indecent
part of one that flatters oneself that
one just might be worth fighting about—and
so it wasn't difficult to work up a dim
but thrilling idea that Antony might still
be trying out his luck after two years; and,
after you had been so beastly about him,
that he might be wanting to spite Roger because
of me—being a man, you know, and
as common-minded as most men about such
things as rivalries and revenges about
women. But it's very obvious now that all
that was just the froth of our diseased minds,
and that poor Antony quite sincerely wanted
Roger to like him—and for his own, not for
my sake."
But as I still looked what she considered
"unintelligent" about it she rather brusquely
suggested that I had better "come to dinner
to-night and see for yourself."
"You may have known the pair of them
together well enough years ago," she said
later, "but that was years ago. And now
with so much experience, lives full of 'colour'
and all that, to bridge their memories
of each other, each one has discovered the
other one again. Don't you think that's it?
And that they've both quite naturally improved
in the discovering?... Silly men,
of course, not to have been decent about it
long before, and saved you from nightmares
and Antony from going against the world.
For I'm sure he wouldn't have made such a
fool of himself if Roger had been his friend.
And as for Roger—why, he has actually
confessed to me that he hasn't one real friend
whom he likes! while all the time there was
Antony under his very nose, perhaps the only
man who could touch anything in him. And
you'll admit that it's odd how the life Antony
has led never seems to have made him a
great friend, for one always thought that
men who lived his kind of life in bars and
places made many easy friends, even if they
were only down-at-heelers. But there seems
to have been something that always kept him
apart, I don't know what, but something that
has always given one the idea of him as a
quite special and solitary outsider: a good
drinking companion but a man who never
really liked any one—and so people never
really liked him, I suppose. And all the
while he never had the sense to go to Roger
and tell him not to be a fool so that he
needn't be one—for you have only to be
with them for a moment to realise the sympathy
between them, and the similarity,
too—"
"Oh, you've noticed that, have you?"
"Yes, you were right about that," she gallantly
admitted. "It's a kind of similarity
that comes to you as a shock, it's so improbable
on the face of it—but, funnily enough,
one seems somehow to have known of it always.
But I haven't got a psycho-analytical
eye, and shall have to see much more of them
together before I shall understand anything
more about it than that Roger is the thin
edge of the same wedge—though if a wedge
could have two thin ends and still be a wedge
then Antony would be the other one—oh,
dear, you know what I mean...."
Oh, yes, I knew what she meant. And
though, as Iris said, many things must have
been changed between them since I had
known them together, yet it seemed that this
indefinable sense of their likeness had not
changed. It had been unlooked for and quite
remarkable even to a not very observant
schoolboy as I was, this similarity between
such very different brothers as Poole I and
Poole II. Roger, quiet, feverish, the best
classical scholar in the school, a head-prefect
whose authority was severely respected by
every one (except Antony, who, however,
never seemed to come directly into contact
with it), and the first string of our racquets
pair at Queens for four years; and Antony,
as I've explained, the very opposite, a
slacker at work but our best fast bowler and
three-quarter—games, said Roger, which it
made him sweat to think about. And so, as
each went his so very different way, it had
puzzled my schoolboy mind to discover in
what lay this similarity between their natures,
one whose existence had grown upon
me as I had become more intimate with them:
some deep down, inarticulate sameness, that
was at first obscured by the great variance of
their personalities, but so strong a sameness
that it must show itself as one came to know
them—so, anyway, I had incoherently
thought at that time. And later, after we
had left school, had so seldom seen them
even in the same company, that I quite forgot
my curiosity about the subtlety—so that
when Iris now brought it again to my mind
I was where I had been at school; and not
likely, I thought, to get very much further.
But I had been really surprised to hear
of the obvious pleasure they took in each
other's company, of their mutual sympathy
and interest. In that, indeed, the years between
had made a change! For if their
likeness had been ever so dimly apparent to
me at school, not so any interest the one
might have in the other. They neither
showed any nor pretended to any, they went
their own ways with a quite unforced indifference;
and it would have been better if,
when they met, they had met as indifferently—but
Antony seemed unable to resist an unpleasantry,
to which Roger's generally silent
contempt seemed a more than sufficient
answer. In fact I rather sympathised with
the jeers that Antony now and then flung at
him as he passed, for Roger's kind of contempt
seemed to have behind it enough conviction
to provoke even a reasonable man to
a show of temper—and Antony reasonable!
But somehow or other Roger cleverly managed
not to provoke him beyond the limit
until a few days before the end of his last
term. I can swear that he purposely brought
on that burst, kept Antony's temper dangerously
dangling—until after supper that
night when he, somehow, finally goaded him
into making a perfect ass of himself before
the whole house. Poor Antony, so unfairly
matched against that grim quietness!
But now, as I saw when I went to Regent's
Park that night, it was as Iris had said,
the years had made a great difference in their
relation to each other. But in spite of the
pleasing air of easy friendship about them—with
a touch less reticent than usual about
Roger and one more "lowered" about Antony—I
managed to develop, as dinner went
on, another very real grievance; so real indeed
that, with some nursing, it lasted from
that time on. It came about by my suddenly
realizing that I had very little indeed
to say to these brothers—an uncomfortable
enough feeling about people whom one has
known long enough never to worry about
having much or little to say to them. But
my surprise at being made aware of that constraint
was heightened by another: that I
had nothing to say to Roger and Antony
simply because, for all their geniality, they
had nothing to say to me! that they were, in
fact, rather resenting my being there at
all....
I candidly vented my grievance on Iris,
who seemed somehow implicated, the next
time I saw her, but she said that I was always
apt to be psychic about the wrong
things.
"And even if you were in the least bit
right you might be a little understanding
about it," she complained. "For after all,
it's not very unnatural that they should be
a bit put out by you—because you, see,
you've known all about their little bitternesses
for so many years. You are somehow
the sleuth that has never been shaken off!
not, of course, that you ever wanted to be
a sleuth, that was just circumstance, nor that
either of them has ever wanted to shake you
off—very much the reverse with Antony, in
fact, poor Ronnie! But if there's any strain
at all it must come from that, don't you
think?..."
I didn't. In fact I thought it a very poor
explanation—and, anyway, I had lately
been growing so impatient about the damnable
vagaries of those brothers, especially Antony's,
that I clutched at this as a last straw;
and vowed that several moons must pass before
I would again dine with Roger and
Antony. And several moons did pass....
Since Antony's return I had discovered in
myself a lack of sympathy with him that I
had never before felt to such a degree, even
on his most unsympathetic days. And now,
as the weeks passed and he never so much
as came near me, I thought of him as really
beyond the limit. After all, I had done a
good deal for the man, one way and another.
And now, simply because he had no use for
me.... There was a shamelessness about
the thing that gave me a positive distaste for
him, and I really desired to see him as little
as possible. But it would have surprised me
very much if I had known that, as a fact,
I was to see him only once more, on that
night a few months later.
I might have known more than I did of
what was happening at this time if I hadn't
been so full of that stubborn impatience
about the brothers; so unreciprocative about
them, that, Iris accused me later, even if she
had been minded to tell me anything of her
feelings and of what was happening (which
would only have furiously muddled me without
helping her in the least) my attitude of,
as it were, "disowning" them would have
prevented any such confidence.
I saw very little of Roger throughout that
time, and then only casually at the Club;
for I never once went to Regent's Park—as
much because I didn't want to as because he
didn't ask me. But, Iris told me, neither did
he ask any one else, except to cards—there
were no more parties of the old kind. And
the reason for that, as she told it to me one
day, came almost as a shock; for when she
had asked him why there were no more parties
he had simply answered, because he couldn't
afford them. It was difficult to think of
Roger as not being able to afford things.
For years one had thought of him as so rich
a man without enquiring how rich, as so
magnificent a spender without thinking of
how much he spent—he seemed capable of
spending so much! There are men in relation
to whom one doesn't think of money, it
seems natural to them to have so much. But
now, it had happened that he couldn't afford
things!...
"And what's more," Iris said, as we were
childishly wondering about this (for we
were both rather stupid about large sums of
money, I suppose because she was so used
to them and because I had never had any),
"he's been having a real streak of bad luck
at cards lately. Of course, he's lost before,
but he has always managed to get it back in
the end and much besides—but lately, you
know, as I've watched them playing, it
seems to me that he was losing very heavily.
But it's difficult to believe that he has ever
lost much, he always seems so very unaffected
by it—so unbelievably a good loser
that one simply can't believe he's lost very
much." And thus Roger's philosophy of
surface values had at last won its share of
Iris's grudging admiration, or so it seemed
to me from her wistful silence. And, I remember,
I wondered what kind of a man he
could be who could, despite so much, so
firmly retain a woman's imagination about
his personality.
It was difficult, Iris began (when all these
things had settled into the limbo of our past
lives), to tell me in a matter-of-fact way exactly
when and exactly why she had come
to be distressed by the nearness of her husband
and his brother to each other. It had
just grown, by very devious ways and windings,
though not so stealthily but that she
hadn't noticed the discomfort of it; but,
as with such things, it had seemed altogether
so unreasonable and fanciful a feeling that
she had never ceased trying to discourage it
within herself; and it was only at the end
that, with quite a burst, her fear had finally
overcome her sense of absurdity, and had
scattered it back to the shades that had sent
it to delude her for so long—only at the very
end!
At first and for a little time after she was,
as I had seen that afternoon, happy about
their friendship. She was pleased with the
success of her plot, it seemed so much like a
bad thing put right, one more "bogey" exorcised
from this world. And, mainly, she was
pleased for Roger's sake.... Ah yes, that
would surprise me, to whom she had made
such a fuss about wanting to help Antony!
But Antony had only been an incident of her
plot—she had seized this idea and given him
the leading part, while Roger and she would
get as much or more benefit from it than he.
How the idea of using Antony's suggestion
of the masquerade had come to her she didn't
know, but it had come forcefully enough for
her to take great pains about his disguise;
the idea that it would somehow be of great
good to Roger to make it up with his brother,
that this new affection (she had an instinct
that the brothers were really very fond of
each other, but pettily arrogant) might make
him more, well, tangible—to her!
"My dear, of course I wanted to make him
tangible to me, possible to me. I always
wanted that. Don't you realise that ever
since I first met him every thought I had,
however little I realised it, was really concerned
with him and about him? My feeling
for him had crept into my veins, it was
as much a part of me as my voice is, and no
amount of hardening my heart against him
could drive it out. And, as you know, my
heart grew hard enough; I had begun to close
myself against him soon after our honeymoon,
quite, quite tightly, as one can if one
tries very hard. It was my only defence,
you see, I couldn't hit back nor really leave
him, for there's simply no pride in love....
And I had succeeded, hadn't I? By
the time Antony came back my defences
were so strong, so strong that I began to
think I must have exaggerated my love as
much as one has always suspected one's
friends of exaggerating theirs: almost to
treat my love with a bedside manner, it
seemed so dim and ailing.... But it was
there all the time, I suppose, love only playing
at indifference, the only game that grown-ups
continue to play after childhood, but
never so well as children could play it if
they weren't too wise to try. And as soon
as Antony said he'd like to make friends with
Roger and suggested how it could best be
done, some part of my mind fixed on it and
made a dream, of how Roger might change,
wonderfully. It was just a chance, and anyway
it would help Antony.
"I was happy about it at first, it seemed
that I might have been right about Roger,
perhaps he might become more tangible—until
there came the little shocks, earthquakes
in the air and under my feet! The first one
was their sudden distaste for you, Ronnie,
even though I did seem so snappy with your
grievance. In Roger it only surprised me,
though very unpleasantly, for he was apt
to make these sudden dislikes. But in
Antony, though I didn't tell you, it shocked
me, I couldn't understand it, it seemed the
sort of thing a man might do in a book, a
renegade kind of thing—not that he said
anything in particular against you, he hadn't
the face to do that before me; but his attitude
of a kind of contempt was quite enough
in a man whom I knew you had been so very
nice to, even though you had always seen
through him. But I thought I would wait a
little while before thoroughly disliking
'poor' Antony, as it might be just one more
of those freak perversities which you and I
have often been so impatient about in both
of them. So I didn't mind when he came
to live at the house about then, and anyway
I couldn't see more of him than before, for
he was at dinner every night.
"Then came the disappointment of
Roger's slacking away from the House and
from everything to do with it. And though
that seemed to have nothing to do with
Antony (how could it?) I couldn't resist a
vague idea.... Even before Antony came
back he had begun to be more and more interested
in the City and less in politics, but
now he seemed to have become altogether a
business man. There was something particularly
dreary about that disappointment,
for Roger's public life had never lost its
glamour for me. I had always been interested
in his career, and interested in him as
a bright part of dull affairs. All that political
stuff had seemed to become his personality
so well, and besides it seemed the only proper
outlook for his passion to dominate people—and
now I would have to lose even that much
of him! that part of him that I read about
in the papers, and that had seemed to be
really mine. A funny contradiction, that his
wife should treasure only that part of him
which the whole world knew as well or better
than she....
"I showed my bitter disappointment when
one day he told me he was thinking of resigning
his seat; and, do you know, he
actually seemed apologetic about it! It was
strange, that air of apology about him, and
the way he looked at me from the door as
he went out, as though to say he was sorry
for having let me down! Let me down!
"That was the first time I realised a new
gentleness about him, something I hadn't
seen in him even when he had made love to
me before we were married. I was very
young then, and thought he made love so well
then because of his gentleness, whereas it
was only practice, like being good at billiards.
But now there was this queer air of
gentleness about the way he sometimes looked
at me, almost of weakness. And maybe my
surprise at it made it seem even more intangible
than it was, for it seemed to be
nearer the ceiling than to me, I couldn't
somehow reach it; and I didn't dare try to,
I wanted to touch him but I was afraid—he
had done the awful thing, had made my
heart suspicious, which is degrading to oneself
and to the person one loves. And so, at
first, I mistrusted my own weakness for being
hurt by him, and I mistrusted him....
But if Antony had been a different sort of
man I would have blessed him for somehow
or other having brought that gentleness on
Roger, for of course he had something to do
with it in a contrary way, I thought.
"I suppose my disappointment at his leaving
the House had something to do with my
boredom at the eternal talks about business.
Money, money, money. Something about
Mexico and oil, as far as I could gather, that
Antony had brought back to England; and
I could only hope that there was a lot of oil
to make up for the amount of talk about it,
and interest in it.... They left together
in the morning and came back together in
the evening, sometimes quite late, as dull a
pair of business men as ever got be-knighted;
and the only people that Roger asked to
the house were odd Napoleonic kind of men,
very good at being 'merchant princes' I've
no doubt, and the usual gamblers—who, as
far as I could see, were very good at
gambling, by the amount that Roger seemed
nowadays to lose to them, mainly at poker.
"Roger had never talked to me about
money affairs, I being old-fashioned with my
affectations of stupidity. But I had realised
that things were not going so well with him
as they used to, that his immersion in the
City and retirement from politics had a great
deal to do with being temporarily hard up.
He's having a run of bad-luck, I thought,
and must be a little worried about it; though
it struck me as strange that Roger should
worry about money, for he had always such
an air of complete detachment from it. But
it must be that that is on his mind, I thought
as I looked at him, and thus found a plausible
reason for his rather feverish and seedy
looks.
"His face, as you know, was always colourless,
and his eyes very bright, but he had
never looked unhealthy; a kind of vitality
and vividness had always made him seem
very alive and well. But just lately I had
thought he looked rather too pale and haggard—and
then, one night at dinner, I
realised suddenly that my Roger was terribly
thin, a long, thin, white-faced man with
brilliant eyes—but so thin! Of course, he
had always been like that, but one had
thought of him as supple, not thin—and
now, suddenly, it seemed to me that his thinness
was the most apparent thing about him!
And there, at the other side of the table, was
Antony, redder than ever, burlier than ever,
healthier than ever, and growing, I thought,
a good deal stouter. And, resenting him,
I suddenly resented his healthy good looks
in contrast to his brother's nervous paleness,
and—why, my dear, I couldn't take my eyes
from Roger that night, he seemed so white
and delicate, so quite unlike himself, unlike
the man I knew! Of course, it was silly of
me to be surprised at it, since he had always
looked rather white and delicately made—but
so self-confidently delicate that one had
never thought of him as particularly so. But
now a touch of worry and weakness seemed
to have pruned that self-confidence away
from his body, and I seemed to see what had
always been there under a cover; a kind of
shadow where I had grown used to a kind of
tyrant....
"I accused him of being not well, but he
said that it was only that he was a little tired
and overworked: 'But if everything goes well
I will buy a villa near Cannes, Iris, and we
will go there, and leave Antony to do all the
work. Antony is a great financier, you must
know....' And he left the sentence in the
air, looking at him with a smile; while Antony
said with a laugh to me: 'If only I had
Roger's brain with which to carry out my
ideas you wouldn't be able to see me for
money, Iris, nor yourself for Teclas.' But
you know Antony, how he could never make
the most comical boast without giving one
an unpleasant idea that he really believed in
it—and how unpleasantly absurd it suddenly
was, the idea of Antony acquiring
Roger's brain just to set me up in pearls!
"That was just about a month before that
night you and I will always remember. But
how, my dear, was I to know or even dream
of what was to come? What did I know
about the fall in cotton prices and the upside
downs of that oil thing, of which I heard of
vaguely as Cascan Oil?...
"All I actually did know was that Roger's
health was weak, and that began to worry
me to the exclusion of nearly all else; but,
from his 'faded' looks, I thought he was
probably right in saying that it was overwork,
and I didn't dare to pester him about
it, for I could trust no amount of gentleness
in him to rid him of his contrary perversities—but
I would take him away at the first possible
moment, which, I vowed, would be very
soon indeed! Oh yes, Ronnie, how many
chances one gives God for saying that He
knows better....
"And it was about that time of my worrying
about Roger's health that I noticed that
the relations between him and Antony had
changed since I had had the feeling that they
were so interested in each other as scarcely
to notice me. But I can't express it except
by saying that they seemed gradually to have
changed from a great amiability to an electric
kind of chaff—which, as that about Antony
and finance, Roger generally led and
Antony followed as best he could. I remembered
then what you had told me about them
at school, but there was nothing like that
between them now, no jeers from Antony,
and only a very kindly sort of contempt from
Roger. It was contempt surely enough, that
look Roger gave him now and then, but a
contempt wrapped in a good-natured smile:
his 'Antony' smile, I rather jealousy called
it to myself, for he had never turned to me
with that particular kind of good-nature
with which he smiled at Antony. And there
was certainly no such quarrelsomeness as we
had all come to expect from Antony, even
when Roger might sting just a little bit
sharply; in fact, the remarkable thing about
him, I thought, was his great deference, not
so much to Roger, but to Roger's intelligence.
He seemed to have convinced himself
that his brother was the cleverest man
in the world, and he had a way of sometimes
repeating what Roger had just said
tacked on to one of his great laughs, and an
air about him as though to say: 'Just look
what a clever brother I've got!'
"What could I think about Antony, my
dear! To me he was always charming, but
charming, and quite naturally. Antony, as
you know, always wore courtesy when he
needed it like a rather flamboyant cloak
flapping in a north wind, but to me he was
always quite natural with it—just as in those
days at your flat when I liked him so genuinely.
But I had somehow come to mistrust
him—and more deeply than one can mistrust
one's friends' weaknesses while continuing to
like them. And when I saw, or felt I saw,
that contempt in Roger's eyes, I was more
than ever uncomfortable about Antony. It
seemed that Roger mistrusted him too—but
that he didn't mind mistrusting him, it
made no difference to his liking for him!
Imagine the smoke from that dim fire, the
theories that would chase through my head
as we sat at dinner, often rather silently!
And then the next moment I would wonder
impatiently what the deuce all the fuss was
about. They were such friends, after all!...
But no sense of absurdity could so
easily rid me of the feeling that Roger knew
very well what Antony was about, but that
he was just waiting, ever so good-naturedly,
just letting things be. Roger to let things
be!..."
And as Iris repeated those words about
him I understood very well the reflected
astonishment in her eyes. It must have been
strange, Roger "letting things be!" about
whom the most vivid fact had always been
that he must try to colour and influence anything
that he touched or that touched him,
men or work or circumstance.... But, Iris
said, she couldn't let things be! As that
month grew she realised that, absurd or not,
there was something strangely the matter:
and that if there was ever to be any levelness
forced upon their present life she must
be its direct agent. But she couldn't for the
moment worry about Antony; nothing could
be done until some kind of solidity had been
coaxed back into Roger's health, for he
seemed lately so gravely feeble.
By this time, although she had not realised
its every stage, all her bitterness and resentment
at his past scepticisms and perversities
had passed from her mind; leaving her,
despite her perplexities, happier and lighter,
as after the expulsion of ugly grotesques
from a sacred place. Her heart had opened
to him, not artificially before his new weakness
of health, but from a more profound
realisation of the man himself. Now that
she had lost that mistrust of him, he seemed
so near to her; and it was as though the past
wretched two years had not been except to
deepen and widen her love, this love, it
seemed, that had been found good but not
good enough, and so had been sealed up for
a time to allow builders to shape it into a
more workable intensity; and now it had
grown more complete and wiser than that
first impulse to utter abandon which he had
roused in her, and which had never been
but an electric current of unhappiness between
them. Now she understood him a
little better—if it was understanding him to
know clearly that she could have awakened
this gentleness in him long before. He was
one of those men who couldn't give but must
be made to. She should have plundered
where she had pleaded. She should have
played the buccaneer to this man who had
grown so used to being taken for one....
But now, she saw, it was too late to fly the
Jolly Roger, for he had come by some
knowledge of himself from a hidden turning
on that well-paved road which he had trod
with so well-poised an arrogance; and, in
yielding to what had suddenly—and yes,
secretly—come, he had yielded something
from his health, some part of his vitality.
Yes, it was too late to play at buccaneering
now. First she must coax back his full
health, and quietly wait for him to realise
completely her new understanding of him.
No half-way fulfilment this time, in this
new love-affair that she knew was coming to
them! She couldn't bear that—she must
wait until he knew himself, so that he could
love without any of those retractions that
had made such a wretched muddle of it all
before.
So, letting love be as well as she could, she
now disregarded any irritation she might
cause, and began to "pester" him about his
health: saying that whether it was overwork
or not he must see a doctor. Until one evening,
Antony having gone out after dinner,
as she was complaining about the stupid insensibility
of men to their own well-being,
he said that it really was a very common complaint
and not worth seeing a doctor about:
just bad-luck, he said.
"But how bad-luck? Do be serious,
please, Roger.... I am so tired of fantasies...."
"Just the thing itself, my dear—just bad-luck.
Now why should that be a fantasy?
Isn't it expressive enough, or do you think
that the only serious illnesses are those that
doctors get paid for discovering and the Lord
be thanked for curing?"
"It's not that, but when one hears of some
one being ill of his luck one thinks of a boneless,
watery kind of man who thinks the
world is against him because a favourite has
lost him a fiver."
"But I told you, Iris, that I meant just the
fact of bad-luck, not any particular loss from
it." And then he explained, but ever so
mildly, as though to a child who mightn't
very readily understand an obvious fact.
"'It's very simply, and quite logical, I
think. Have you ever realised, Iris, that
since you met me I have always won? Well,
all my life has been like that, I have always
won—I don't mean only at cards and racing
but at everything that is supposed to make
life worth living, those various prizes that
we put our names down for. Some men take
their paths in life steadily and calculate their
progress step by step by hard work, and some
men just have a throw at what they most
want from time to time—they may work
hard to have deserved it after they have got
it, but they get it by a chance, by backing
themselves against the field. But that is
such a poor description, for it's never such a
conscious thing as that, the throw comes from
a real part of one's nature. It's only a conscious
trait in that awful type of "hotel-lounge"
American who has many diamond
tie-pins and wants every one to know that he
lives by bluff and hazard, and in other fools
who think that a strange glamour reflects on
them from taking chances—whereas to take
a chance is just the business of one's nature,
it's the business of one's life, just like art or
grocery. One gambles naturally or not at
all, and the people who lose are mainly those
who gamble for some other purpose than the
mere fact of gambling, as any croupier in
any Casino will tell you....'
"He stopped and looked absently across
at me with that half satiric smile that crept
about his face when he spoke about himself—which
was so seldom that I was now listening
with all the nerves of my body. And
then, each word very slowly and distinctly,
as one might count the caskets of a fabulous
treasure—
"'I have always won,'" he said.
(I'll leave you to imagine, Ronnie, that if
it is possible for any man to make such a
statement without seeming to boast his good
fortune, Roger so made it).
"I can't tell you any more about it than
you can find from just that sentence,' he
explained, 'I don't know why I've won. I
don't know. But I suppose that it somehow
came naturally to me to win every time I
ventured—whether it was for money or anything
else. Always a good seat on the front
bench, and sometimes the very first seat of
all.... I know how difficult it is for you
not to think I'm exaggerating, for every one
does exaggerate one way or the other when
talking roundabout the chances they've
taken. But, Iris, dear, please believe that
I'm exaggerating less than people usually do
when I tell you that I grew to take the fact
of winning as, well, my right—as part of
me, don't you see? Without very particularly
realising or fostering it, it grew to
work out like that....
"'Yes, my good-luck or whatever it was,
was certainly a part of me,' he repeated.
'And a very important part, if one's good
health is important—why, Iris, my good-luck
was the very key and centre of it! It must
have been.... And does that, after all,
seem so fantastic? that my whole zest and
confidence and vitality, everything you first
saw in me, were made up of my luck? I
was nothing without them, the things of my
luck—and you didn't know the man, Iris,
you only knew the luck. The luck was the
man, don't you see? and without it the man
was—well, I'm damned if I know what he
was! I can't remember ever not winning, so
I've never had to examine myself until lately.
For, of course, I didn't realise all I have told
you until just lately—I suppose I am the
kind of man to prospect rather than introspect
when on top of a mountain. But I
realise it all well enough now that there's
such a poor view from the lowest ridge. I
know now what my worst enemy would
never have dreamt of saying of me, that I
am a bad loser—a very bad loser in its really
fundamental sense. Other people may lose
or win with their faces, but it seems that I
win or lose with my whole being.... The
fact is that I can't lose, I simply don't know
how. Don't you see that I can't lose, Iris?
It saps all my vitality.... Poor Iris, to
be married to a man who is only a man so
long as he wins.'
"The little smile had clung to his face all
the while, like a faint light about its
shadows; and maybe it was the self-mockery
of it that made his manner so much lighter
than his words—which towards the end had
seemed to fall wearily and listlessly, as
though he had resigned himself to do a duty.
And it must have been a deeper self-accusation
than any words could express that had
helped him to humiliate himself in a matter-of-fact
way of explanation. For to him,
Roger, what humiliation! To have realised
within himself that he, of all the men in the
world, was that strangely contemptible
thing, I don't quite know why, a bad loser!
To confess that realisation to me could add
nothing to the humiliation, for Roger was
never but first audience to his own acting,
never but the main person in any gallery to
which he might play! He stood or fell by
himself, and if he fell, no other's judgment
could count beside his own.
"How, then, could I tell him at that moment
on what, as he was speaking, my mind
had fixed—so that I could scarcely restrain
the cry of my discovery, scarcely bear not
jumping up from my chair to hold him to
me. But to him, an egoist, realising that
aspect himself, what possible consolation in
telling him of my discovery? the reverse,
maybe, another blow.... The vivid fact
that I was intensely glad at the failure of
his luck! All those arrogancies and dominations
with which he had first charmed, then
repelled, and always baffled one (they had
seemed so out of one's reach to prick them,
perched so confidently on a highest pinnacle
of assurance): the whole of his easy mastery
over life that had bred his 'confidence,'
'vitality'—I saw now that they were just the
scum over his good-luck, a kind of verdigris
that had made me grow to despise them,
however unwillingly. 'You never knew the
man, you only knew the luck. The man was
nothing.' ... Poor dear, he was so sunk in
that realisation that he couldn't possibly
realise the vastness of the parallel one that
it had roused in me: that the man was everything,
the luck worse than nothing, just a
slaughter-house for every quality with which
my love had dowered him.
"And so, glad as I was at the result in
himself from his change of luck, its result in
his health lost some of its seriousness—as a
thing that is explained generally does, unless
it is too bad. For I certainly didn't take his
explanation of it as 'fantasy,' it was quite
obvious that he had his finger on the real
cause of his weakness. Given the other extreme,
as he had so candidly explained it,
why shouldn't a man fail in health with the
failing of his luck? But I felt that he was
more affected by the shock of it than by its
contemplation—and, after all, I didn't love
him weakly, I could deal with a shock, be
it ever so mental. His air of resignation, so
foreign in him, disturbed me a little; but, I
thought, that is a natural part of the ailment
and one will deal with them both at a time.
Yes, the thing would mend of itself, for it
carried its own cure with it, in a new and
deepening knowledge of himself. He would
be better even before the pendulum of this
strange 'luck' of his had swung back again;
and I had no fear from what its swinging
back to 'good' might bring to us both, for he
was now learning the lesson of himself beyond
all un-learning.
"So I thought, anyway, after I had persuaded
Roger, that same night, to explain
just a bit of what had been happening to
him in the great world—where, it seemed,
luck of sorts made such a mess of men. And
indeed it was only a very little bit that he
explained, for he was tired, and said that it
was a long and dull history, even though it
hadn't taken very long to happen. 'Exactly
how long?' I asked, but he evaded that—else
maybe I had known so very much more!
"'As you know, when a writer wants to
be done with one of his characters,' he explained,
'he sometimes throws a few bad
investments and bucket-shops at the poor
man and he's done for before you turn the
page. Well, there are plenty of such things
outside books, and I somehow seem to have
happened on one or three of late. And these
debacles always happen in the same way, if
they are going to happen at all, to men
whose money is mostly on paper. The
paper actually becomes paper—and now
even a French gendarme wouldn't accept as
a tip most of the stuff that was once my
fortune. I thought I had tried every way
there was of spending money, but I had
never realised that losing it was the quickest.
I know now. And that's all, Iris.'
"'But, my dear, it doesn't matter all that
much! After all, bad-luck was never more
than bad-luck seen in the Book of Job. It's
inconvenient, of course—'
"'It's certainly that. But, of course, all
your money is quite safe and doing very well,
and I'll see any creditor to hell before you
dare pay him one penny of any debt of mine.
I'd have you know that the best bankrupts
are always very touchy about the thoroughness
of their bankruptcies.... But, as you
say, Iris, all that doesn't matter very much.'
"If he agreed about that, then why was he
getting himself ill over it? I was going to
heckle him, when he explained—and with
what so far unknown deference, in him, to
one's bewilderment!—that he had not been
worrying about losing the money, nor so very
much about the now almost certain bankruptcy:
'Although that is really so serious for
me that I've got to joke about it or be as
entirely silent as I have been—and will be
after to-night,' he excused his levity to warn
me. 'But it's actually the naked fact that
these things can and have happened to oneself
that has got on my nerves—which must,
I suppose, be very tender nerves. Just the
change of luck, you see, rather than its particular
results, however serious.' ...
"But before we went upstairs he took me
by the shoulder with some of his old air of
authority, and warned me that he would be
very disappointed if I worried over what he
had told me. 'Because, after all, I didn't tell
you about it because I wanted to—but simply
so that you shouldn't worry so much about
my health now you know that it isn't due
to a weak heart or a damaged lung—only
damaged luck, after all! And I may, just
possibly may, find a way out of everything in
the next few weeks.'
"'With Cascan Oil?' I asked, as though it
were a magic oil.
"But I didn't gather anything from his
smile except that it was one of those smiles
that never answer questions in the way you
want them answered. 'It's certainly very
good oil!' he only said.
"'And will you promise to tell me as soon
as you have found your way out, as of course
you will, you being you, luck or no luck?' I
asked him firmly. 'And will you also promise
to drop some of this air of resignation or
whatever it is that has lately been growing
on you? please, Roger, for although it makes
you very kissable at home, I'm sure it's likely
to make you quite "broke" in the great world—which
doesn't care how much your wife
loves you so long as it can get your money.'
"He promised to tell me—for I had fixed
in my mind that as soon as he came to me
with never so little brighter news I would at
once snatch him away from London to some
place like Tangiers, to mend his health and
let the deuce take his luck, which was a
plague, good or bad. And you know when
he brought me news, at lunch-time two weeks
later, the day before that....
"He rang up from the City to ask me if I
would be in for lunch; and it was so unusual
for him to come home for lunch that I quite
ran wild in putting you off, so that you developed
a wonderful theory about my having
found a new young man from the back row
of the Russian Ballet.
"Almost the first word he said when he
came in was, 'Well, that's finished.' But as
he said it with almost a smile and quite undramatically
I didn't expect, as I 'registered'
pleasure, to be pulled up by:
"'I mean there are no more uncertainties
to worry about, Iris. The rats have got at
everything.'
"'Then,' I said, 'we can go away for a
lovely holiday with my money. To-morrow,
for instance....' You see I never did believe
much in standing on one's dignity about
money and honour, for money's a messy
thing anyway.
"But he was staring at me so differently,
so pitiably almost, and with no smile anywhere
to light his tired face, that I had to
leave my holiday in the air, miserably wondering
at him.
"'If it was only that kind of mess!' he
said at last simply, as though I would understand
by that!
"He wouldn't talk about anything to do
with it through lunch, and I had to sit there
with my heart screwed up for fear of what
he was going to tell me now. Oh, I loved
him so as he sat almost silently facing me,
his thin face set so firmly that it looked
drawn on that lovely paper you find in
Kelmscott books; and his eyes, those so efficient
eyes, now and then playing darkly with
the sun through the large window behind
me.
"It was as we were leaving the table that
he suddenly threw his bomb, which hasn't
really yet finished exploding in me. He
threw it with a sudden, quiet smile and a
look over my shoulder. He threw it as
though it were a marvellous joke.
"'You very thoroughly let the rats in
through that window that night, didn't you,
Iris?'
"And I stared at him confounded, while
my fingers groped about the table for something
to hold, to hold tightly.... And I
suddenly saw red, a kind of blind anger tore
at me to tear him:
"'Then why didn't you kick him out?
Why did you let him stay on and on? I
thought he was foul and that he hated you,
but you knew for certain all the time—and
yet you've let him stay, like a weak fool!'
And I felt like screaming out my detestation
of the whole atmosphere about them, the silly
childish darkness of it all....
"How shrill I must have been at that
moment! But you see, all the half conscious
fears of the past months had suddenly burst
true and shaken me quite beyond myself.
And now I was so wildly sick to realise his
lassitude—and he looking silently down
from his height at me, unmoved by my anger
except to that faint, irritating smile.
"'You knew he hated you, you knew he
hated you,' I accused him trembling.
"'But I didn't hate him,' he said mildly.
'I've loved Antony, you see.'
"And then that long stifling afternoon,
when he and I sat under the sunblinds of
the library window and he told me from beginning
to end the tale of himself and Antony.
The sun in the garden to our feet, the
gay and livid sunblind over our heads, and
across the water the green and yellow openness
of the Park—why, it was one of those
afternoons that are sent to make all human
and animate things seems like nonsense!
And nothing in the world but Roger's clear,
definite voice could have drawn so thick a
line between us and its carelessness. For
what he said had no contact with a day of
sun, it was a tale for a winter's day with
doors and windows sealed, and a bright fire
to mock the shadows of the tale into dark
corners.
"He had said abruptly that he had loved
Antony, as though he meant until that very
moment; and now he began by explaining
that it had been so ever since he could remember,
and that it had grown with childhood
and far beyond, this love for Antony.
(And, Ronnie, you remember how, well,
saturnine and rather hard Roger's face always
was? Lately it had been growing
softer, I thought, but now it became quite a
different face altogether, almost different
lines and different depths, the real face of a
man you and I never knew, as we never knew
of his childhood. There was nothing soft
nor sentimental about the way he spoke, he
was speaking of naked facts nakedly, but it
was merely that the facts spoke for themselves
in his voice.)
"When they were both ever so little Antony
had been the favourite of the house, he
was so much the impish kind of child that
naturally is. And Roger had not been the
least jealous, but had loved to see Antony
made much of, and had spent a great part
of his childish ingenuity in still further sending
up his younger brother's 'stock' with
nurses and parents. It had come so naturally
to him to worship the pink, gay, careless
little man that then was Antony—growing
every year pinker and redder until he seemed
just like a sunball, the loveliest child that
ever a house and a dark brother were blessed
with; for Roger, even then dark-haired and
pale—anyway, beside that little meteor—used
to despise himself very heartily, and inarticulately
fumble with a theory that any
one who looked as he did could come to no
good in the world, whereas Antony—oh, but
the world was made for Antony! God had
made the world and then He had made Antony,
and just thrown Roger in as his elder
brother to help matters on a bit. Well, that
he did, and did increasingly as childhood
grew, loving to see Antony happy—who
cared for nothing but his own wild enjoyments,
and expected every one else to join
in them; which Roger, of course, did, and
nearly always bore the brunt of the results—expecting
never a bit of gratitude from the
young imp, and getting none, for it all
seemed very natural to young Antony. But
when, once in a while the chief culprit was
detected and punished, then Roger couldn't
bear the idea and set up such a hullabaloo
that they had to deal with him as well.
"Those were the happiest days of all, those
days of early childhood, he said. No suspicions
then—only games, and dark plots in
dark corners, and marvellous escapades that
no grown-up could ever discount by punishing.
But only in those very early days. For
the change came soon enough—when Roger
was not more than nine, and they had their
first tutor. But the change (or whatever it
was, for the possibility of it must always
have been in Antony else it couldn't so
readily have come out) was at first so slight,
and later so incomprehensible and baffling,
that Roger was almost on his way to school
before he could even dimly realise the cause
of it.
"Soon after the tutor came, Antony had
grown surly with Roger, inimical; and one
day, when Roger had badly hurt his leg in
climbing down a tree, had laughed with a
queer satisfaction that had made Roger look
at him in a shocked silence. He had been
hurt by Antony's sudden repudiation of him
as a comrade, had wondered how he had suddenly
come to prefer his stolen games with
the game-keeper's sons—but at this sudden
sigh of Antony's dislike, for it could only be
such that took satisfaction from his pain, he
had been quite shocked in his young mind.
And his sky had filled with strange and unbelievable
clouds. He could only look at
Antony and wonder painfully, realising very
little but the monstrous fact that he was
hated by some one he loved. Yes, Roger had
been quite thrown off his balance by the
blow from behind, and the rest of his childhood
had passed like that, Antony growing
to open and jeering enmity and he continuing
silent, just silent....
"And as he told me how he had borne
Antony's cheek in silence, I looked at him
wonderingly, for such a patience in such a
boy as Roger must have been seemed, well,
almost unpleasant and unmanlike. He saw
what I was thinking, and explained that it
was simply because he had not known what
to do, he hadn't known. He couldn't retaliate
in the same spirit, because Antony's dislike
formed no such parallel in him. He
was at the disadvantage of loving him as
before, though now it was an affection mixed
with those dark clouds of wondering. His
liking for Antony had never had to do with
whether Antony was good or bad. In fact,
as a very small child he had realised that
his young brother could do strange things,
and strangely, but that had never affected
his admiration; those little traits went with
Antony, that's all. And had so continued to
'go with him,' disturbing Roger every now
and then—until, after the tutor came, he
realised that those 'traits' looked to make up
the whole! And that was terrible, doing
away with any admiration—but after all it's
a weak love that must admire what it loves;
and soon Roger came to accept even that as
inevitably Antony, still loving him—and
waiting, don't you see, until he could find
out where all this dislike came from, what
all this fuss was about and why?
"'If it had only been Jacob envying Esau
his birthright!' Roger exclaimed. 'But it
was nothing like that, and never has been,
but a much deeper and more instinctive jealousy—deep
enough to make it ridiculous,
but instinctive enough to make it as human
as all dangerous madnesses are. And you
can imagine how instinctive, from his age
when he first came by it! Then, of course, it
was inarticulate and unrealised by him, but
real enough to change his acceptance of me
as a comrade into a dislike that grew with
every month. At first he knew no more than
I what it was about, but he naturally found
out much sooner, and made hay with his
discovery....
"'I don't suppose you have ever seen it,
Iris, but there is a kind of similarity between
Antony and me. It's got nothing to do with
body and surface, nor, as far as any one can
see, with our points of view about anything.
But there it is and has always been—and I
can only express it by saying that the foundations
of our minds must be the same; that—and
can you believe it?—our real inclinations
of mind are the same, or rather Antony's
have always been the same as mine.
There's nothing very extravagant or uncommon
about that, two men may very easily be
made that way—if Antony weren't so obviously
the man he is, the child he was! But
you can see the curious absurdity of such a
likeness from even what you know of him—why,
his very voice and face, everything
about him, shout out that his inclinations
are as far from mine as one man's can be
from another's! And even as a child he
seemed every bit as different from me, a roystering
child to be a roystering man—and so
you can imagine how very impossible it was
for the one child to discover the secret of
the other's dislike. For that dislike came
from a strange jealousy, and the jealousy
from that similarity—and all so confused
and overlaid by every trait that can make
one man different from another that the devil
himself, though he had put the fantasy there,
would have been hard driven to find it. And
the fantasies that grip men's minds and destroy
them are like mists, it is in their nature
to be bodiless yet to obscure: they are
like mists that come upon a field in the morning,
no one knows whence, and fade no one
knows whither, to come again as mysteriously
in the evening. And so this jealousy had
come upon my Antony—but from where,
just where and why? To cloud a baby man's
mind with hatred and beastly things....
"'Being that, I suppose it was quite natural
for Antony's baby jealousy to date from
the tutor's coming. Now, as apart from
governess twaddle, we really had to work.
And, do you see, Antony, who all his life
has seemed a man who cared not a damn for
books and learning, who even as a boy
seemed more inclined to kick a book than
read it, wanted to be as good as I couldn't
help being at mastering things easily? He
couldn't, he knew he couldn't, and that's
why he kicked a book instead of reading it.
That was anger not contempt; and, to fan
the anger with impotence, a dim idea forming
at the back of his little mind that I had
been purposely brought into the world a
year before him to have good time to steal
all the good things of the brain that had been
equally allotted to both of us; leaving him
only the same foundations and nothing but
impotent husk to cover it—so that he must
always be the buffoon, and I—and I the one
who could do well everything he wanted
to! And the basis of the mind must have
seemed to him to be the same, for he so
wanted to do them, not out of rivalry because
I did, but because it came naturally
to him to want to. Silly and unreasonable,
yes—but then so is all madness that can
hurt one.
"'It wasn't only work, but everything,
that fanned the idea into Antony's mind, and
then kept on blowing into the flame that
seems to have burnt the poor fool ever since.
At least he might have been good at outdoor
things, games of strength or recklessness,
whereas I might have been expected to be
more an "indoor" man! Since he could do
nothing else that I could do, he might at
least have been allowed to play games of
every kind better! But even there, and at
first without trying to, I could do easier and
better what he could only do fairly well;
though later, at school, I went out of my
way to rub the thing in—it had come to that
by then, you see.
"'I had found my Antony out, and had
my answer to him. I had plumbed a little
of the confused issues of his jealousy, I knew
now what a large part of his hatred was
made of admiration: in fact very nearly the
whole of it. And, since hate exaggerates
even more than love, he exaggerated to himself
what little there was to admire, making
me out the devil of a fine fellow—because,
you see, in admiring me he was very really
admiring himself! never rid of that infernal
idea that I was as he should have been, as
he had a right to be—but for me! Oh, no,
he never belittled me! And you've seen the
deference to which he kindly treats me?
Well, the idea of that—not, of course, the
expression—has always been there. It makes
one's head reel to think of him as never but
admiring one's mentality and abilities much
above their reality, and hating me all the
more because of that admiration simply because
it kept on creating more things to
hate!
"'I remember, at school, Antony was always
the first in the gallery to watch me
playing a racquets match—racquets, of
course, being the one game the poor man
simply couldn't get at all, while I played it
better than anything else. And sometimes
I used to look up from the court at him, sitting
with his hands at each side of his face,
absorbed—in what? not the game, but only
in the way I was playing it—the way he
himself was playing it! But, ridiculous as
it all was, I had grown cruel about him, and
let him see that I despised him as much as
he despised himself; which, you know, was
very much indeed—though he would have
died rather than let the world see it.
"'I had been working at my contempt for
him very systematically ever since the age
of about fourteen. It was my only protection
against him, the only way I could prevent
him from getting the better of my love
for him—which was always there, mark you,
for there was no doing away with that, it
was as natural as the lava around a volcano.
The advantage had been all with Antony
until then, doing what he liked with me
in the way of unpleasantness; but now that
I had found this contempt (which I worked
at just as a goldsmith works at a golden leaf,
scratching and shaping and bending and filing
it until it's every bit as lifelike as the
original, but a good deal heavier), I was far
and away the first string in the wretched orchestra;
for Antony never did know what to
do with contempt but physically smash it,
and he and I have never raised a hand against
each other except once—I suppose because it
would have been such a trivial expression for
what we felt. And so, not being able to
answer it, it maddened him; but so obviously
that I couldn't resist doing it again
and again—until one night, at the end of my
last term, I went the nagging limit, and he
had to throw a bread knife at me and almost
killed another man. But I dare say Ronnie
has told you about that....
"'After school we saw each other once in a
dozen months, if then, and only as acquaintances
might in the street—and who,
living in London these last fifteen years,
could possibly avoid the figure of Red Antony?
But step by step the thing went its
same way—step by step feeding Antony's
first mad idea with conviction. The wheel
turned to my tune, never to his ... he who
would have liked to be doing things with
his brain and otherwise as I was doing them,
whereas he had to be a soldier! For what
else is there for a younger son with no brains
and a little money to do but be a soldier or
curate? And Antony believed in Heaven
and Hell much too vividly ever to want
to tell any one else about them....
"'He simply had to go his destined way,
as the noisy, red, attractive and dangerous
fool that the world expected him to be, and
then blamed him for thoroughly being. And
all the while he must have been playing a
bitter game, something like chess, with himself:
moving his pieces here and there in the
way he would love to do in life, and then
straining his eyes across the gulf at me to
see if I had done in life what he couldn't
even do in a game against himself—and, I
suppose, I invariably had!
"'He must have had the devil of a bad
time all those years, the best years of a man's
life, poor Antony. You see, he took no
pleasure from the kind of life he led, but
there was nothing else he could do. He
made no real friends—himself an unwilling
fool, despising complacent fools. I don't
blame him smashing up a dinner party now
and then, out of sheer, magnificent boredom....
And he had as bad luck as any
man can have. Nothing ever went well with
him, neither the motor he was driving nor
the horse he was backing. He couldn't,
somehow, touch anything but he lost by it.
He never did anything without being found
out—even those quite conventional indecencies
which the world generally conspires not
to find out. He couldn't make love to a
woman without being cited as a co-respondent,
and then in the worst light. And
even so he must have been a pretty inefficient
kind of lover, for the woman invariably refused
to marry him after the case—which
always looks bad for the man, the world
having a vague idea that a touch of "chivalry"
changes mud into foie gras.... He
couldn't even make a good and dashing rake,
don't you see? Dashing enough, but always
at the wrong moments—because he was
weak inside, he had no heart for the things
he did, but was somehow compelled to do
them by bravado and helpless desperation.
Vanity and bravado were the secrets of the
particular mess Antony made—always terrified
lest people should find out how weak
and hesitating he really was, and so covering
up his tracks with Heaven knows what
further stupidities! Ronnie is the only man
who has ever guessed that pathetic part
about him, and that's how, I suppose, he
has managed to keep some sympathy for
him for such an amazing long time.
"'Even there, about luck, the thing went
the way of his mad idea about our minds.
Maybe he worked himself up into thinking
that "luck," a kind of smoke hanging in the
air, fell on a man according to the turn of
his mind (which is no sillier nor more sensible
than the eminent theory about mixing
cocktails after death, don't you think?).
And the blessed smoke had fallen on me,
while he had been done out of it! His
mind turned to gambling as mine did, but he
couldn't gamble well, couldn't even lose
his money without his temper, and then
threw after it what name he had left. He
lost every penny he had between horses and
cards—while, as you know, Iris, I made
almost enough from both to further the land-owning
ambitions of every communist in the
fullest Albert Hall.
"'Yes, it certainly must have been a
wretched time for him, the most wretched of
a wretched life. Without even the consolation
of thinking he'd had a good time for his
loss of name and money, for no man ever
knew himself better than Antony—nor ever
concealed that knowledge more stupidly!
Nothing left for him, nothing to do, nothing
he could do! and still a very young man,
and better looking than most. If he had
only allowed the world to pity him he might
still have made something of himself, but
even if he had tried he couldn't have looked
an atom as sorry for himself as he really was....
He had flashes, streaks of genius
almost, about ways of making money, but
not one bit of ability or concentration to
make anything of them. His own incompetence
hitting him hard, always hard, and
always below the belt—poor Antony!...
I heard of him sometimes as penniless, but
still immaculate, and having even to bully
his Turkish bath on credit. What use, after
all, to look and sound like Antony and not
get credit from even a Scotch tobacconist!
In fact the only job he could have done at
all well would have been to be paid for persuading
other men's tailors into adding more
suits to long bills—but I've never heard of
any one daring to offer it to him.
"'I don't think he could have lived
through that conscious welter of helplessness
and despair but for something to hold him
together. What, simply what, was there
for him to live for? And even with that
"something to hold him together" there was
very little, but still it was a spirit of sorts,
and vital enough—that dear old hatred for
me! Just that, nothing else. Unbelievable
or not, I'm sure that Antony, big and hefty
though he is, would have wilted and faded
away but for that emotion that kept him
bound together. Two big men, and arrogant
enough, the one's health resting on his luck,
and the other's on his hatred of it!...
"'But he couldn't do anything about his
one real emotion. There was nothing to do
about it, it wasn't that sort. Just an inevitable
endless thing, leading nowhere but on
forever: a part of the man himself, and the
only consistent part—but, of its very nature,
with no possible outlet of any possible advantage
to himself. He hadn't the faintest
desire to kill me, to get my money and be a
baronet, or any stuff of that kind—in fact,
Antony heartily despised any one being a
baronet without the battlements, the men-at-arms,
and the serving wenches to be a
proper baronet with. None of your modern
Pink Peerages for Preposterous People
about Antony! In that sort of thing he was
a man after G. K. Chesterton's heart, all
noise and muscle and an appetite adequate
to deal with a keg of rum and a round of
cheese—and the whole lovely simplicity of
it all run wild and sour in him because of
this plaguy madness about me!
"'Perhaps you, and Ronnie too, have
thought sometimes that I was rather a beast
to and about him—as indeed I was, but
not so much a one as I seemed. As the contrast
deepened, it became more than ever
unpleasant, as it naturally is unpleasant for
the one to be rich and successful and the
other everything that isn't. But what could
I do—without Antony sending me to blazes
for trying to! Which he did once, as I'll
tell you.... And all the time I couldn't
help a grim sense of laughter when I thought
about him, I simply couldn't help a comic
view of us both. I still kept my contempt
for him intact, in case I might need it again—but,
as a fact, I simply did not want to see
him at that time. He would have been a
serious interruption, he would have got in
the way of my life—and without any benefit
to either of us. But not a trace of dislike
did I have for him—the reverse, I couldn't
think of Antony but with that consistent
fondness. That early childhood had somehow
written deep, ever so deep, and there
was no getting away from what it had
written. One plain word, "comrade" ...
two very little boys who had been "comrades."
And neither one nor the other had
found another comrade since, not the glint
or the glimmer of one. Life had passed and
left childhood, mine anyway, on a magic pinnacle!
never climbed since, maybe only
climbed then by marvellous illusion—but
climbed unforgettably it had been. And I
could only think of Antony like that, what
he felt for me could not make the slightest
difference to that. And sometimes, you
know, one longed for a comrade.... If I
had thought for one moment that he could
feel a tithe of that for me I would have held
out both my hands to him. But I was necessary
to him in a different way, I knew it
was no use trying to do anything. I only
tried once—just before I met you.
"'One morning I saw him in Jermyn
Street as he was turning into the Cavendish.
On an impulse, a very sudden one, I called
out his name, so that he swung round full
at me, not in the least surprised. "If you
go shouting my name about Jermyn Street
like that the police'll have you for making
indecent noises. Now, if it was yours—"
But I was in no mood for that stuff, and in
a hurry, too.
"'Look here, Antony, if a £1000 a year
is any good to you, you can have it and welcome,'
I said quickly. There wasn't time for
tact—and he stared at me, with all the bluff
dying out of his eyes, and a queer twisted
little smile.
"'That's very nice of you, old man, but—'
he was saying—just keeping time until he
could think what to say; and then, finding it,
he tapped me suddenly on the shoulder.
'But I'll tell you what, Roger. When I
want it I'll come for it—and between us
we'll make hay with the whole lot. Now
what could be fairer than that?' And, of
course out came that same old laugh he tacked
on to everything he said, rattling the passing
taxis' windows and making people stare
to see two top-hats pretty high from the
ground shaking with laughter at each other;
for I couldn't help but laugh after the long
time since I had seen him, he seemed so monstrously
comical....
"'And that was the last time I saw Antony
until that night you and a draught let him
into the house. But how were you to know,
Iris dear? How were you to know when you
married me that you were the last straw to
his wretched fire, that the very fact of you so
neatly fitted the last bit of coloured glass
into the kaleidoscope of Poole Bros.? and
that by letting him in that night, you and
Sir Nigel between you, you gave him the
kerosene with which to make a really efficient
bonfire?...
"'Yes, loving you was certainly the last
straw, Iris. And, you know, he did love
you! He has told me about it since, as it's
a dead thing—dead simply because Antony
isn't made to love any one who can't love
him. But when he met you, and hung about
the street until he saw you enter Ronnie's
flat—then he did love you, as he had never
loved in his life, nor as he had ever thought
to be able to love. If I was his first passion,
you were his second and last, this hate and
this love. And the passion he felt for you—maybe
you would have been frightened to
know of it, Iris, for Antony's were strong
words—carried him quite away for those few
months. There's nothing of the femme
fatale about you, but you've certainly got a
wonderful talent for obsessing men, making
them want to clutch at you with mind
and body—Roger, Antony, Ronnie, and I
wonder who else! And from the moment
Antony met you to the moment you told him
you were engaged to me he was absorbed in
his passion for you—for the first time he
looked to be forgetting about me, was forgetting
about me. If you had loved him,
Iris, he would have left me quite alone, from
that time on. But between his luck and
himself and you and me—he lost again.
And God knows what rotten furies were
added to him from that moment, always a
bad loser! He had passionately longed for
so many things, and passionately lost so
many—and, at last, you! To him, you were
his woman.... Maybe he thought he could
have won you but for me; and maybe he
was right, but I don't think so, for Antony
was made to capture only the surface of a
woman's fancy.
"'But you mustn't think that he bore the
least bit of resentment against you. Oh, no,
you didn't come into it after that. You
were just an added inch to the height of the
barricade between him and happiness. But
as for me.... And, do you know, so consistent
was the admiration part of his hatred
that he admired my being loved, or so he
thought, by you! And the only letter I've
ever received from Antony is one of congratulation
on being engaged to such a marvellous
woman. He wrote that from Mexico.
"'If you had seemed the "ultimate island"
of his bad luck, the finding of that wretched
oil-spring was the penultimate. And his
luck seemed to have turned, too, since he set
foot in America; a few months in Texas had
filled his pockets with dollars—actually won
at poker! And if a man is slippery enough
to win money from such a crew of toughs,
and at their own game, then his luck must
have turned indeed! And then, with another
man, a down-at-heel engineer who was
almost his servant—Antony could always
find a servant but never a master, and that
was his trouble—he had set out in the good
old way, prospecting for a fortune in Mexico,
rebellions or no rebellions. And actually
found it—the oil! And how he must have
thrown a mighty chest, thinking that now he
would show the world and Roger of what
stuff Red Antony was made.... But the
only stuff that was proven was that of his
luck and his oil. For as I told you, Iris, it
was very good oil, but there was not much
of it. And the rest, the oil that might have
been, the oil that would have made Antony's
millions and restored him his self-respect,
had to go the way of his other failures, to
add one more corpse to the shambles of who
knows how many failures.
"'And then came the idea of how, after
all, he could use that oil! It came from a
profound despair, from a realisation that, do
what he would, he could do nothing well in
this world. And realising that, he came to
want nothing, success and happiness or any
coveted thing was too far beyond his reach.
But there was one thing, anyway, that would
give him a little more rest after its accomplishment,
and which just might be within
his reach; for the first time, in Mexico, he
finally realised that if he was to live he must
do something about his obsession, the very
root of his discontent. He must somehow
prick and burst it, so that he could live more
smoothly. And how better flatten the thing
out than by bringing my house and goods
down on my head?...
"'If a man can come by such an intention
at all amiably, so Antony must have done.
There was none of your melodramatic stuff
about it. It merely seemed to him a clear
fact that my success was pitted against his
peace of mind, that we must row in the same
boat or he would drown too wretchedly. He
wanted now nothing from me, neither money
nor influence; but, in that last year in Mexico,
he very definitely made up his mind that
I should have as little of either as ever he
had had. So with that in his mind, and
armed with his plans and his tame engineer,
he came to England. And whether you had
let him in or not he would have got into the
house. Even Antony wasn't always to be
baulked, you know. And especially in his
last venture of all.' ...
"'But since you knew him so well, you
must have known what he was about from
the first moment,' I broke in; and, Ronnie,
it was a dangerous protest, for his last few
words about Antony's 'inevitability' had
brought my anger against him back again.
It was my love in arms against some treachery
he had licenced—and even the way he
looked at me, his eyes dark with pain, didn't
soften the silence with which I awaited the
explanation that he must make. And a helpless
gesture of his hand, the very manner of
his explaining, showed that he knew now,
now, that no explanation could be good
enough, however fully he had once accepted
it; that now, and just lately, there had happened
something between us that discounted
all previous acquiescences to 'inevitability.' ...
And he spoke now without a trace of
that rather grim fantasy with which he always
chose to obscure his most serious
moods.
"'Don't you realise Iris, that the man who
stopped Antony in Jermyn Street, the man
you married, was very different to the man
who played host to Antony's tomfoolery
on that Nigel Poole night? with you sitting
there at the table, and indifference the only
apparent fact about your face except its
loveliness. Didn't you realise at all that I
had changed, and very much? But then how
silly to ask that, for you and I never talked
of such things, if we talked at all.
"'In those two years my whole view of
life, my ambitions, and I once had so very
many! had gone awry. Or rather, they had
withered, got sour, don't you see? Of all
Antony's many follies his greatest was ever
to envy me my success—for the penalty of
that success went with the very nature of
the man who succeeded. Iris, I had to realise
I was a bad winner long before I realised
I was a bad loser.... I was just
about realising it when I fell in love with
you. And that pulled me up, indeed it
did. Love for you created something worth
while winning, worth succeeding about....
I'm trying to tell you that everything
had been too easy for me all my life. I
suppose one was always just a little rotten
with sophistication, and so, as one played
and won every throw, the winnings seemed
so little worth while—until you came! My
dear, I thought I'd have to fight for you—and
you so worth fighting for, you with those
mysterious cornstalks in place of hair! I
didn't tell myself that I wanted to fight for
you, but I must have had it at the back of
my mind—for I was so disappointed, angry,
when I found that I hadn't to fight, that you
were as easy to win as everything else. Iris,
that was terrible of you, why did you fall
so easily and quickly? Why didn't you pull
me up, why didn't you resist at all, at all?...
I loved you, never any one nor anything
more than you. And so much that I
simply couldn't believe that any one I
wanted so passionately could so easily give
herself! The gift seemed to grow less in
such giving, I couldn't believe but in the
surface of the thing. If I hadn't loved you
so much, my dear, I would have been very
well satisfied with your love, and we would
never have had those first wretched months,
leading to so many more. You'll say it was
my perversity that caused it all, and of
course it was. But how can I ever make
you believe that that perversity of scepticism
and other beastliness were born of nothing
but love for you, of wanting you always and
always? And that being built so ungenerously,
I couldn't believe but that your love
was a shallow thing, just another of those
gilt "prizes" that had so often been handed
to one for being a "clever boy." I didn't
want to be a "clever boy," I wanted to be
a real one, to be allowed to play a splendid
game with a splendid playmate and the devil
take the truffles. And you gave me admiration!
Why, damme, you almost glowered at
me with admiration—and, my sweet, how
terribly articulate you sometimes were with
it, weren't you?
"'There have been found grown-up men
to say that love can change a man's nature,
whereas, as you and I know, it can only intensify
his traits, sometimes the good and
sometimes the bad. And, Iris, somehow,
somehow, in spite of all the lovely things
about you, you intensified the bad.... Oh
yes, I know, I knew then, how stupid and
cruel I was, but I seemed to be goaded to it.
Bitter little knives, weren't they? I couldn't
believe in your love, and it irritated me when
I egged you on to plead it—and then it irritated
me when I found I couldn't egg you on
any more, when there was no making you say
that you loved me. And all the time I loving
you, wanting you always to be there but
always. Never leaving the thing alone, full
of fear that I might lose grip of it....
I'm not trying to find any excuse for my caddishness,
for there isn't any, since it's easier
for a murderer than for a cad to enter the
Kingdom of Heaven.... And then, at
last, my scepticism seemed to be justified, or
rather it had justified itself. For as you became
indifferent—and how indifferent you
can look, Iris!—I thought to myself that of
course you had never loved me, except as
the "clever boy" and weren't now loving
even that since you had found him out to be
a bad boy as well. The most grotesque perversities
can be justified if one looks crookedly
enough, and so I justified the indifference
I had forced on you as indecently as I
had wrecked your love. And so, too, when
the time came, I justified Antony.
"'You remember how nasty I was when
you first said something about him wanting
to make friends with me again? That was
the first I had heard of his return, but with
no surprise. And I was angry with you only
because it seemed, suddenly, very distasteful
that you should be mixed up with Antony
and myself—you seemed so cold and unsympathetic
that I was sure you would never
care to understand the thing. But as for
Antony, I really wanted to see him. And he
conceived the plot, you know, to save his
baby pride and vanity rather than as a
means of forcing himself on to me, about
which he knew there could be no real difficulty.
My mind had turned to him, often,
particularly since that new bitterness about
you. And how far from each other you and
I were, weren't we? And so I had gradually
come to let Antony into my thoughts again,
to want him with me. My life, it seemed to
me, had not been complete without him. I
didn't care whether he hated me or not, my
life had been incomplete without him, he
was my comrade. The world seemed to
have rushed by us both and left us stranded
together, as we had once been. And so I
was very ready for him when he so aptly
appeared that night....
"'You didn't notice, but I was looking
more at you than at him when he came in
through that window. I didn't doubt what
he had come for, you see—those "hay-making"
words so long ago.... And as I
looked at you, your face closed, a sphinx
whose only secret was indifference, I suddenly
thought, "Well, we will, indeed we
will!" With a vicious kind of gaiety....
Oh don't you see, in the state I was in you
seemed to have justified me! You were the
only person I could put beside Antony, and
ever so much higher with only a real smile
from you to unscrew me—but you didn't
care at all, at all! A queen who didn't care
enough about her kingdom even to try to
rule it....
"'There's no good, Iris, in indulging any
creepy feelings about Antony having come
to turn my luck, by force of evil or any other
such stuff. No black magic about Antony—his
magic was never but schoolboy red, at its
worst. And, anyway, my luck had begun to
turn before I saw him; I knew it was turning
because I seemed to have lost some of
my confidence, I wasn't so sure of my insight.
I felt worn thin, you know, like a coin kept
too long in circulation.... But what Antony
did do was to help matters along. His
very presence helped me to let things rip, and
how wildly! With luck going from bad to
worse, and not the devil of a win anywhere.
And good money rushing away after bad,
running hell-for-leather after it, money
thrown wildly to win back what had been
lost wildly, like any amateur.... And
Antony all the while chuckling at my elbow,
as I'd sign away some more on a jumpy
market. Not that I minded his chuckling!
I rather liked it, in fact. I was very interested
in his consistency, never before having
been really face to face with this blessed
obsession of his; and found myself enjoying
the simplicity of it, the simplicity of this
thing that had clouded his whole life, and
mine too! A marvellous and deferential
hatred I found it, with a large, full-blooded
malice about it that was as different from the
petty malice in ordinary circulation as a
sabre from a paper-knife; bitter enough, of
course, when in self-defence you dammed it
up, but once you let it have its run a very
genial and naïve part of him; and certainly
the most reliable.... It was as though we
were children again, and I paying for his
escapades while he grinned impishly and
admiringly from a corner.
"'But as we pegged away at our foolishness
in the City, every bit as seriously as
though we were actually making money, I
kept on thinking of you. In spite of Antony
and my interest in him, you came into my
mind more and more. I thought and
wondered about you. And I realised that I
knew no more of you than if you had been
a strange, beautiful woman whom I had met
and loved in a lane, and who had passed me
by and away with a quivering, careless
look. I knew you so little that I wondered
what you would think when the crash came,
as I saw that it must come, probably sooner
than later. I had often wondered before
why you had not asked me to give you your
freedom, but now I would offer it to you,
and you couldn't but take it. Maybe you
would marry Ronnie, I thought. And I
would take Antony away with me, perhaps
to the South Seas.... You see, dear, Antony
seemed inevitable in my life, fatally inevitable,
while I have never been able to
think of you as that, but as something outside
my life that I always longed to bring
into it. But I had thrown away that
hope.
"'I told you, didn't I, that I hadn't
reckoned what a bad loser I fundamentally
was until I had lost? Well, I hadn't
reckoned with the deuce it would play with
my health. But, my darling, if I'm grateful
to anything in this world it's for that
weakness, for it has given me a vision of you,
it has given me the "you" that I am talking
to now. As I lost all my confidence, everything
about me that I had treasured, all
those baubles of my luck, I seemed to feel a
cloud settling about my head—and I could
see you more clearly through that cloud than
ever I had through daylight. You grew
vivid, touchable, more than ever Iris. At
last, I saw you, and I knew—oh, I knew so
much that I hadn't known! And since then,
Iris, I've tried, I have tried so hard, but it
was too late. I hadn't dreamt of the depths
of Antony's consistency....'
"It was curious, Ronnie, how he seemed to
bring my temper round in a circle to that
same stiffening point against him. He
seemed always to end on that angering weakness,
resignedly implying some hurt to us
both. But I didn't understand what he
meant by his 'too late,' he had said it so inconsequently.
His eyes never left my face,
I knew he wanted to touch me, wanted me to
go to him, that very moment—but my back
was stiff against him, I could not move nor
speak until I had heard about this new terror
to our love, that had suffered so many.
"'That oil,' he explained hurriedly, and
with a sudden harshness. 'I told you that
Antony had worked out an idea how to use it,
didn't I? And a damned cunning swindle
Cascan Oil was, as efficient a bubble as ever
swindled money out of the public. Antony
and that engineer got their own back on
that oil right enough. And it took me in
at first—me, of all people! For, when I
said I didn't mind helping Antony let things
rip, I didn't mean to let him drag my name
through the mud. But he did. And when
I found the thing was a barefaced swindle,
with just a plausible crust over it, and that
it was only an amazing kind of chance that
had so far hidden it—my good-luck again,
you see, just the swan-song of it, for bubbles
aren't so easy to blow as they were—it was
too late for me to get out. I had to go on
and try to mend it. My name was tacked on
to most of the papers.... I think I must
have been mad during those first few months
after Antony's return not to have enquired
more closely—and mad not to have realised
the depths of his madness! But I had never
dreamed that he wanted to bring my part of
the name down even lower than his! I
found it out about six weeks ago. Just about
the same time that I found you out, Iris, that
I found out you did love me—you do, don't
you? I can't tell you any more than you can
guess about those two realisations, angel and
bogey to happen at the same time! But
what was the use of cursing Antony? I
ought to have known about him. My fault
for being a fool, rather than his for being so
insanely consistent. And if it hadn't been
for you, for what you suddenly meant, I
wouldn't have kicked so much, for there's
always one way out of these things. But I
did kick—Iris, I've worked in the last month
as I never thought to work, to try and raise
the money to pay off the holders, to stave off
the certain discovery or make it better when
discovered. That was "the way out" I told
you about, you remember?... And I
came home to lunch to-day to tell you that
I've done all I could—and that now there's
nothing but a miracle between me and the
police.'
"I haven't any memory left for what I
actually said or did then, Ronnie. And I've
read somewhere that despair keeps no diary.
He threw those last words at me, just threw
them, as though he was past caring how
brutally he got rid of them—and, at the end
of the fuse he had been lighting all the afternoon,
they simply burnt up my nerves. I
was hysterical, perhaps.... Anyway, the
very next moment we seemed to be standing
together, weirdly almost fighting; but it was
only that he had me by the shoulder, very
close to him, shaking me a little. And I
staring blindly at him, and he trembling
with a feverish impatience.
"'For God's sake don't go on about it,
Iris, else I won't be able to bear it at all. I
wish I hadn't told you now—but, my dear,
I had to tell you, I had to tell you the whole
thing. No one but you matters in my life—and
I had to tell you why I can't matter in
yours any more. Antony's got what he never
dreamed to get, he's got me to hate him at
last.... Oh, but that's just nonsense. He
doesn't matter any more, he might be dead
or alive for all I care. Nothing matters but
you....'
"I think I said something about our having
to run away, quickly. I must have repeated
that several times, for he was staring
down at me so thoughtfully that he seemed
already to have run away, a thousand miles
away.
"'Yes,' he said, but ever so vaguely, 'we
might do that. There'll be no cry for two
or three days. Longer perhaps, if I can
arrange things. Yes, we might run for it.
I'll see.... But there will be no happiness
for us now, Iris. I know.'
"But if a God had prophesied so I couldn't
have believed him. All the terrors and
bogeys he had called up, they faded to nothing
before the sudden, active hope that he
and I might be allowed to love, anywhere,
what matter where.... Oh, there was no
romance about it! There's seldom a moment,
an ice-clear moment, when a man or
woman can put one passion against the whole
world, and then forget even that the world
is there in contrast. That was my moment,
a splendid devouring one, and never to come
again. Crime, swindling?... dim silly
words, beside my lust for him. I wanted
him, he was my man. And I told him that
no police in this world would beat my devilish
cunning—and he suddenly let go of me,
and roared with laughter, as though he would
die unless he could laugh.
"'You're splendid, Iris' he said, still
laughing. 'You would change a respectable
swindler into such an awful criminal that
no police in this world would dare try to
arrest him.' And then he came very humbly
to me, and said that until a few weeks
ago he had not dreamt I had a heart, but
now he had found even more, that it was a
flag of loyalty. But he added suddenly:
"'I must tell Antony that, to make him
realise what he has made me lose.' He
seemed so queerly to bring his mind back to
Antony, for all his 'not mattering' any more.
And I showed my impatience, begging him
to forget the wretched man.
"'I do,' he said, 'but he comes back every
now and then. You see, the fool was so
obsessed about me that he quite forgot what
part you had in my life. And so he has hurt
me much more than he ever dreamed he
could hurt me. I must make him understand
that....'
"Curiously enough, or not, I hadn't now
any wild passion of resentment against Antony.
Roger's way of explaining him seemed
to have coloured my view of him; something
of that 'inevitability' I suppose, somehow
made me think of him more as an evil circumstance
than as an evil man. But I did
not want to see him that night, in fact my
head was aching so that I was fit only for
bed; and when I asked Roger if he intended
to let him stay on, he shrugged his shoulders
and said:
"'We will be leaving him behind us soon
enough.'
"I suppose it's true that no one is ever
made to suffer more than he or she can bear—but
self-pity is a goading kind of master,
isn't it? And those long evening hours in
my bedroom that night were terrible, fighting
with a splitting head and heart, and being
so beaten and bruised by both that I began
to feel mean and whipped, like an
offender punished for some offence. But,
my God, what and against whom!...
Until, after a long century, I heard Roger
enter his room. And I crept in after
him....
"I made a fuss on the telephone about
your having to come to see me the next
afternoon, you remember? I insisted that
you must, whether you had work to do or
not, for I couldn't bear to face that long
empty afternoon alone until Roger came
back from the City.
"But the day had begun almost happily,
for I had woken up with Roger's voice in my
mind, a voice pressed so closely to me:
promising me that he wouldn't give up and
let things go, saying that he had learnt an
old lesson about fatality, how there was no
fatality but that of a man's choosing. The
trouble had been that he hadn't known what
to choose until too late.... And he had
promised that if the worst came we would
go away as far as love and the sea could
take us, 'and that is ever so far westwards
past Cleopatra's Needle.' And he had
said: 'They will probably let me get clean
away. There's some one who will let me
know, anyway....' He said these things
to comfort me, but the worst fear of all was
the sudden one that the mind behind those
dark mocking eyes might persuade him to—poor
dear, I kept him long at his promising
that he would not do anything against himself.
Though it was not really difficult to
believe him, for Roger always made so very
few promises simply because he never broke
one.
"He and Antony, whom I didn't see, had
left earlier than usual for the City: to clear
up many last things, he said. And the day
grew heavier with every minute, until I
simply had to have you come and help me
wait, or go mad. How sweet you were to
me that afternoon, Ronnie, and how much
excuse you had to be impatient. But I
couldn't give you a glimpse of what it was
all about, how could I? For Roger had
made me promise not to tell even you a word....
It must have been wretched for you,
to sit about and be made nervous by my
nerves, and to feel the heaviness of the trouble
in the air without knowing anything of
what it was all about. And those endless
games of picquet we played, and your resigned
expression when I kept on forgetting
whose was the major hand!... Until at
last we heard them come in, and I insisted
on your staying for dinner, very cruelly, for
it was so obvious that you would much
rather not; but I wanted you to stay, you
were mine and Roger's friend, and you
might help. Just a vague idea that you
might help, I didn't know how or what
about....
"When they came in I saw that Roger was
glad you had been with me and were staying
to dinner. Maybe he thought you might
make things go easier, for it looked to be a
rather difficult dinner, just Antony, he and
I. And Antony looked so glum and silent,
like a tired red boy, so that I wondered if
Roger had cleared things up with him too.
But the dinner wasn't difficult, not difficult
enough, was it?" ...
To tell the plain truth I found myself
thoroughly enjoying it—a pleasant contrast
to my last dinner there, when I had so resented
the brothers' coldness. And, anyway,
I'm afraid I was too busy recovering from
my rather jumpy few hours with Iris, who
communicated a mood as you or I would a
piece of news, to notice much besides the
fact that though Antony was more silent
than usual, we three men had at a step got
back to our old easy friendship.
It was close on ten o'clock when Howard
came in to tell his master that he was wanted
on the telephone,—which was in the adjoining
room, the library, opened to the one we
were in through a folding door. Roger
looked a little surprised, I thought, but got
up quickly; and at a glance from him, a
sort of lifted-eyebrow glance, Antony followed,
leaving the door slightly ajar behind
them.
From where we sat at the table we could
only hear but not see Roger at the telephone,
which was on the writing table just within
the library door. But it seemed to be a very
short call, for we only heard him say the few
bare words: "Yes—right you are! Of
course, yes.... Thanks very much, Carter";
and then click down the receiver. Then
an unforgettable voice, strangled with laughter
and venom:
"I told you days ago to burn those concession
papers, and you swore you already had—and
now Carter tells me that the police
have just been to the office, as we knew they
must, and found every blessed one of 'em in
the top drawer of my desk—which was unlocked.
O Antony! O you poor husk of a
man, you graveyard of a broker—what a
lot of pleasure you've had from me, haven't
you? And all I can think of as a nice little
epitaph for you is Dolor ira—but what could
be fairer than that, Antony?" ...
A wild rush took me to the door, even as
the house shrieked with Roger's "grief and
anger." I stood dazed as I burst it wide—to
see through the smoke a huge figure facing
me from the corner by the window, swaying
idiotically to and fro with the eyes of a
thrashed child—and at the table beside me
Roger, his head fallen sideways against the
over-turned telephone and the smoke from
the thing in his hand hanging dreadfully
about him. I didn't look at the weight I
suddenly felt against my shoulder, I just put
out my arm to hold Iris, for I was staring
at Antony. He had not seemed to see us
until this moment—and now his eyes were
trying to tell Iris something, they were livid
with what he was trying to tell her—his eyes
were accusing her!
"He didn't, I tell you," he shouted at her.
"He didn't break his promise. He wanted
to kill me, you see, but—he...."
His tongue fumbled with his lips for
words—which never came, for with a wild
backward wave of his arm as though to wipe
three figures for ever from his mind, he swung
round and strode heavily out through the
open window. And whether or not Sir Antony,
under a less conspicuous name, died in
some obscure corner of the war that befell a
few months later I have never heard for
quite certain, and now never will. But Iris
and I have sometimes preferred to think that
he has met the only death that could at all
have satisfied the tortured vanity of the
helpless braggart.
THE END
