"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.