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.