Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow stairs to my landing. In the
sudden flare of my match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh
just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had occasion to rebuke
myself on the depravity that is man. She said over her shoulder: “Hilary
Townshend has told me about you....”
“But he has never told me about you!”
“Oh, he would if you provoked him!”
“And may I?”
But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary had, I thought, said something
about Gerald March having a sister, but I had not connected the vaguely
heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I don’t know why, but I had always
imagined Gerald’s sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere in the country
with a bankrupt old gentleman called Lord Portairley, Gerald’s uncle.
We were on my small landing now, in the light that plunged out of the
half-open door of my sitting-room: she with a foot on the stairs leading
downwards, away.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Really, I think you’ve been very kind....”
She seemed to me very nice and gentle; yes, nice; and then it seemed to
me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh,
impersonally, in the fires of herself. I was on another planet. Hilary
tells me now that he also had that feeling with her; but Hilary must
have struggled against it, whereas I am incapable of struggling against
any feeling.
“Good-bye,” I said.
I was looking not at her but through the half-open door into my room.
There lay the disorder of my life, the jumble, the lack of purpose, the
silence, and the defeat of my life. I wasn’t, it seems almost an
intrusion to say, very happy in those days; but that is by the way in
the history of Gerald March and Iris Storm.
Now here is the difficult part of this history. Of the many gaps it will
contain, this seems to me the most grave, the least excusable. One
should write, if not well, at least plausibly, about the things that
happen. And yet I cannot be plausible about this, because I do not know
how it happened. I mean, how she came into my room and sat down. I did
not ask her. Did she want to? Mrs. Storm was a lady who gave you a sense
of the conventions. Mrs. Storm was a ... and yet ... I do not know
anything about her.
I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together; and, of
course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then another,
and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might
have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that
each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces
of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I
have thought of her--foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about
a woman?--as some one who had by a mistake of the higher authorities
strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a
race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were
awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that
marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall
have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about
honour, morality, nationality.
We have all of us a crude desire to “place” our fellows in this or that
category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that,
maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with
the knowledge that she was Gerald’s sister, that she was twenty-nine
years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not,
anyhow I couldn’t, “place” Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather
despairing one, that she didn’t fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to
any nationality. She wasn’t that ghastly thing called “Bohemian,” she
wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society,” “county,” upper,
middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly
or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude
it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You
felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that
somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she
was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England,
spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as
devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the
conventions; but she gave you--unaware always, impersonal always, and
those cool, sensible eyes!--a much deeper sense that she was somehow
outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge
as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to
show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one
was non-existent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the
most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that
way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man
can’t get beyond--to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a
man like that--indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is
not?--but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the
galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects
the lives of the multitude of his fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so
I had with this woman that profound sense of incapability, of defeat,
which any limited man must feel with a woman whose limitations he cannot
know. She was--in that phrase of Mr. Conrad’s which can mean so little
or so much--she was of all time. She was, when the first woman crawled
out of the mud of the primeval world. She would be, when the last woman
walks towards the unmentionable end.
“Good-bye,” I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and
my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green hat
were brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned. “Why are you
laughing?” I asked, or perhaps I did not ask that, perhaps she had not
been laughing at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor her eyes
were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt. I pushed open the door of my
room.
“How I would like,” she said, that husky voice, “a glass of cold water!”
That was what she said, and so I let her go in alone into the
sitting-room, whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely and
long I let the water run, pleased with the way it was filling the little
house with its clean roar, pleased with the clean scent of the rushing
water, which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then she said:
“You have had a quick bath,” and so we became friends.
She stood among the littered books on the floor, looking round at the
disorder, like a tulip with a green head. She sipped the water, looking
round wisely over the rim of the tumbler. I explained that I was leaving
to-morrow, and therefore the disorder.
We talked.
In that disordered room, so littered with books that you might hardly
take a step without stumbling over one, it was not difficult to talk.
Indeed, it is never so easy to talk about books as when they are about
the floor, so that you may turn them over with your foot, see what they
are, pick them up and drop them anywhere with no precious nonsense as to
where they should exactly go.
She waved her glass of water about, sipping it. A drop of water clung
like a gem to the corner of her painted mouth. It was not fair.
Talking with her in that room was like talking with her as we walked on
a windy heath: she threw out things, you caught all you could of them,
you missed what you liked, and you threw something back. Now and then
something would turn up in a voice which was suddenly strong and clear,
and every time her voice was strong and clear you were so surprised that
you did not hear so well as when she spoke inaudibly. She had none of
the organised, agonised grimaces of the young lady of fashion. But one
knew she was not a young lady of fashion, for she hadn’t a sulky mouth.
Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely discriminating taste
which maddens you: you try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing
at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion of enjoyment. She used
some words as though she had never heard any one else using them.
“Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly immense sense. The word
seemed turned topsy-turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy. She
used the word “common,” I think, to denote a thing attempted and
achieved scratchily. Mr. Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “common.”
But Miss Clemence Dane in _Legend_ was. “Oh, come!” I said, for to me
_Legend_ is an achievement in literature.
“All those women talking and dissecting and yearning together,” she
said. “Their breath smells of ... oh, red hair!” She thought Miss Romer
Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time: _The Grand Tour_
particularly. She was loyal to girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr.
Temple Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was “nice.” “Nice?” I said.
“Well, wonderful,” she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem
slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “common,” a “stunt” writer.
“I detest the word ‘stunt,’” I said.
“That is why,” she said, “I used it about Monsieur Morand. He is an
abbreviation, like nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her.
She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for luncheon. “What,” she
asked, “is the hurry?” I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps
English was not the language for abbreviations and diminutives. She
deferred to my judgment about that, and I said what I said. One just
didn’t discuss Barrie: there he was. “You can’t laugh me out of him,”
she smiled, “by calling him whimsical.” She had once enjoyed a book by
Mr. Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called _Guy and Pauline_.
There was Hergesheimer. She put up a gallant, insincere defence for the
Imagistes, but it turned out that she had never read any, and wasn’t at
all sure what they were. “They’re short for poetry,” I said coldly,
“like nightie for nightingale.” But perhaps the book she most profoundly
liked was _The Passionate Friends_, with perhaps the last part of
_Tono-Bungay_. “And, of course,” she said, “_The Good Soldier_,” Mr.
Ford Maddox Hueffer’s amazing romance. From a table she picked up
Joyce’s _Ulysses_, looked at it vaguely, dropped it absently on the
floor amongst the others. I held a watching financial brief for it. One
was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property,
either her own or other people’s.
“It’s a funny thing,” she mused....
“What’s a funny thing?”
“Satirists.... They are all very plain men. Grubby, too. Why?”
“Why?” I said. “But, really----”
She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave,
intent. But one never knew what about....
“Genius,” I said, “has----”
“Of course, genius. But----”
“They are striving,” I said, “for----”
“Yes, I know. But why are they always so ugly? I mean, these people
called ‘satirists.’ One sees them abroad, at the Rotonde, or in Rome,
Florence....” I saw her among them, the small white face, the cool,
sensible, huge eyes, very attentive, deferring. “They marry plain, too.
Always. Invariably. Why? And man and wife hang on to each other like
grim death, despising everything hard. And they come out in spots. Why?
One just wonders.... It seems to need very ugly men with very
unattractive wives to despise things, to show us our ugliness. Has ever
any even fairly human-looking person ever been a ‘satirist’? But I
suppose if they weren’t so plain they wouldn’t have so much time to be
obscene on paper. Or am I talking nonsense?”
“It’s absurd,” I said, “to make it a question of looks----”
“But it makes me furious!” she said in that suddenly strong clear voice.
“These despisers. These grubby clever men with their grubby genius. The
heroes of the weekly reviews. Their impotent little obscenities. I’ve
tried to find, in knowing them and reading them, a great, real contempt,
something as fierce and clean as fire, a nightmare of contempt, so that
from the pillars of burning smoke we can build beings of better shape
than ourselves. I’ve read, watched, listened, wanting to know....”
I said things, too. But who am I? For instance, I said: “You don’t allow
to all men one common failing, which shows particularly when the men are
satirical writers: they must always write about women rather in the
spirit of uncleanminded undergraduates. You should be more tolerant,
Mrs. Storm....”
We talked of vulgarity. She had once read a book of mine, and I
complained bitterly of my vulgarity, saying, you know, that one didn’t
begin by being vulgar, “but one began,” I suggested, “by being just
bumptious. The meeker you are, the more bumptious you probably are
inside, but that does not harm. Not that I was ever really meek. And at
the beginning there’s a tremendous humility in you to yourself. You
can’t have any achievement without that humility, and yet you lose it
later on because you find out all the wrong things about yourself.
People are only too ready to show you the wrong things about yourself.
They like doing it. They seem to think there is something wrong with
conceit. It irritates fools, because they think it is unwarranted. How
do they know if it is unwarranted, and what does it matter if it is or
not? Or it irritates them because they too once had in themselves a
humility to themselves, and then allowed it to be, according to that
Bottomley-Kipling-John-Bull gospel, ‘knocked out of them.’ And so if a
young man is not very strong he lets the mischievous fools take his
conceit away from him, he turns his back on his real conceit, which is
himself--he has it ‘knocked out of him,’ just as any taste for music was
knocked out of him by his public-school--and goes out for one of the
spurious conceits which are called ‘being as others are.’ Then he has
put his feet on the endless and never-ending road of vulgarity, and
there are very few turnings....”
She sat in the deep wicker armchair, which had come with me from Chelsea
six years before but would travel nevermore. It creaked madly as she sat
down, and she glanced at it in surprise. “Of course,” she said, “it’s
contagious....”
“You are quite wrong,” I said. “The real sticky part seems to come from
inside one. And there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of
defeat--a writer, I mean, who must earn his living by writing, and so
must always write. For it is more difficult for a second-rate writer not
to be vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. It uncoils
from somewhere inside you, like a nasty, sticky snake. So slick it is,
too. So helpful, often. And when you see it for the first time you stare
at it transfixed, and you say, ‘But _I_ am not vulgar!’ But you get used
to it later on. Very few people notice it. Most people like it. And, of
course, it pays.”
“The golden snake,” she said. “It’s quite a good snake. It is silly to
despise money.”
“Writers,” I said, and, I think, said rightly, “love money, they adore
money! Successful writers, I mean. The ones who have become venerable,
the ones who have made great names by writing about the irony of life
and the incapabilities of wealth, the writers of the people for the
people. They worship money, they hoard money. One and all despise rich
people, and are perfectly beastly about the upper-classes. You should
ask any publisher about the business capacity of any great author who
writes about the Irony of Life. To really intelligent men of the
middle-classes, living in sin does not seem nearly so wicked as living
in luxurious sin. I only know one successful author who has the decency
to get drunk with his easily-earned money. One should keep a sense of
proportion about money, and you can only do that by throwing it away.
The Jews, for instance----”
“Jews,” she said, “are charming. The rich ones, I mean, and preferably
the fat shiny ones. They understand luxury and elegance, and elegance is
an enchantment that the skin loves. But nowadays only Jews have an idea
of enchantment, only Jews and Americans. Furs, jewels, spacious rooms,
trellised terraces, all lovely baubles, silks of China, myrrh,
frankincense, and motor-cars. The Jews are disenchanted, but at least
they’re brave enough to insist on having all the enchantments of
disenchantment. Luxury, ease, splendour, spaciousness. You’ll say
they’re florid. Well, they may be, they are, but they’re also the last
towers of chivalry. Mr. Chesterton goes running after them shouting
about beer and the Pope, but if you’re going to leave chivalry to
beer-drinkers and the Pope, God help enchantment. You’ll say that the
Americans’ indulgent admiration for their wives almost borders on the
_gaga_, but they fight for it very really, they don’t just talk and
indulge. They fight with money, they have the courage of their cheques,
they dare tremendous duels, they get up at unearthly hours in the
morning to dash towards the rendezvous, and they draw a cheque just as
gallantly as any rather caddish cavalier ever drew a sword....”
“Englishmen,” I said, “_respect_ their women....”
“Maybe,” she said absently.
We were impersonal. Now and then the wicker armchair creaked beneath
her, and she looked at it with faint surprise. Now and then a car
screamed on Piccadilly, an electric-landau sounded its bells through
Shepherd’s Market towards its garage by Camelot House. Now and then her
slightly husky voice expired. Then we waited a while. She stared deeply
into the eyes of a mask which a Russian artist had once given me in
exchange for a poker debt. It lay sideways against a corner of the
fender. I waited for her to say something about that, for it was the
mask of a Florentine gentleman that was a lecher. I had grown used to
it, as one can grow used to anything, but people would remark on it
adversely. The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I
knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing
to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where
you are.
We became personal. She said: “Let us talk about our friends now.”
“To-night,” I said, “I have been to a party at the Hallidays’.”
“Ah, the pitiless vulgarians! Surely, between us, we can do better than
that!”
“There’s Hilary....”
“The sweet! Can you _not_ love Hilary? But to-night,” she said very
seriously, “I have been dining with old Maurice Harpenden. How he would
hate me to say old! I went out all the way to Sutton Marle to do that,
because he expects it of me when I am in England. We are enemies, and we
watch each other. He was very courtly. They are difficult to deal with,
handsome old men who have known one since one was so high. You need to
be a woman to know what I mean, but you must try to pretend for a
minute. Thank you. Organically, of course, they are perfect. Good
features and long legs and iron-grey hair. Character and clothes by
Robert Hichens. They are very courtly, and then they touch one. Now, why
do they do that? They pretend to do it in a friendly way, as any
gentleman of the old school might to the daughter of another gentleman
of the old school: but they make _opportunities_....” The husky voice
committed suicide, was buried, and in the third second rose from the
dead. “I do not understand men. I do not understand the ‘old school’
type of man, nor what ‘old school’ means, unless it means that you never
did anything at school except win the Battle of Waterloo. Then as soon
as you left school you were qualified by good-looks, a charm of manner,
and a habit of becoming popular with elderly men which is peculiar to
right-minded young Englishmen, to become Major-General Sir Maurice
Harpenden, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., and to lead your troops in battle
with that gallant inefficiency patented by English infantry-commanders
who know a good horse when they see one. After which you can spend the
rest of your life in _bantering_. You can see that I do not like
Maurice. We dine, and we are enemies, and we watch each other.”
“The sire doesn’t seem very like the son. Napier is a saint....”
The chair creaked. She was looking at me from under her hat, gravely as
a Red Indian. “There were two roads leading from a certain tree, and
when we were eighteen life said to me, ‘You go this way,’ and life said
to Napier, ‘You go that way.’ And so we did that, and so it has
been....”
Now I was staring at her mouth, which was a silky red mouth engraved
with I don’t know how many deep downward lines, and my heart beat twice
so loudly that I wondered if she had heard it, for she whispered
sharply: “Listen!” But it was only a clock striking somewhere in London,
and its striking was quickly done.
“I must go,” she said, but not even the armchair creaked, and her green
hat was still crushed against the back of the chair, and her eyes were
still staring profoundly over my shoulder. There was only the window
there. The curtains were not drawn, and I thought I would draw them,
but it seemed a pity to move. Her eyes glowed like an animal’s. She was
staring, absorbed, over my right shoulder, but there was only the window
there. She was asleep. Then her eyes dilated into glowing points, and
her lips said: “_On a envie._”
Then she made a gesture of distaste.
She said: “There are desires....”
“Heavens, do you need to tell me that!”
“Oh, not those desires!” Expressionless, blazing eyes absorbed over my
shoulder, she waved away “those desires.” I was snubbed.
“They call it,” she said, “the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will
find it one day when we are dead and all things that live now are dead.
They will find it when everything is dead but the dreams we have no
words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine,
nor opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting,
loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in
that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is
unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there.
Life’s best gift, hasn’t some one said, is the ability to dream of a
better life....”
The green hat crushed recklessly against the back of the chair, she
stared, still and absorbed, at the names that friends of long-ago had
written on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her eyes glowed,
glowed like an animal’s. The light of the reading-lamp on the littered
table by my elbow kissed her lip, and the light kissed the faint, faint
down on her lip into a few minutes of existence as a garden of gold
dust. A sword lay in my mind, twisting and shining among the inner
grotesqueries where we keep ourselves, in the real sense, to ourselves.
I forced my mind to a more legal aspect of her. There were two rings on
her wedding finger. A narrow circle of platinum, a narrow circle of
gold. I wondered if she had been married twice. I tried to imagine her
husbands. They would be tall, handsome men, and she would be
passionately in love with them. She would, like all women in love with
tall, handsome men, be worshipful as a dog. Physically they would be
very courteous to her, but no more than courteous, and mentally they
would, if I may say so, treat her rough. They would go to sleep quickly,
and she would lie awake far into the night, pressing her breasts,
because they hurt her. She would think. She would not think. Then one
day, when she was between thinking and not thinking, she would be
unfaithful, and the tall, handsome man who was her husband would
apologise to her for not having understood her better. But she would
say, with cold eyes: “There is nothing to understand. _On a envie._”
Then he would say, “Oh!” and instruct her lawyers to divorce him.
“I was trying,” I said, “to imagine your husband....”
The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the hat one blue eye looked at
me like a blue stone worn by fire. “Two,” she said. “They are dead.”
I wondered what she saw, looking over my shoulder. She kept strange,
invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making
flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains. Then
suddenly the headlines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled before
my mind, stood livid against my memory, slashed with the name of Storm.
I had not a doubt but that he had been her second husband. “V.C.
murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C. Left on roadside with
five bullet wounds....”
She said suddenly: “I am a house of men.”
“What!” I said. “You surprise me.”
“A house of men. Of their desires and defeats and deaths. Of their
desires, yes, of their deaths, yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great
responsibility for me, and I have lodged complaints about it, but it is
no use. I am a house of men. Ah me, ah me! Oh, dear! My friend, there is
a curse, a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You will see it in
my eyes one day, and you will be sorry for me.”
“You mustn’t believe in curses,” I said. “Good God, curses!”
“The Marches,” she said, “are never let off anything. That is the
curse.”
Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and
always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far
below, like pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the
colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of
corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s
delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was
not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of
the sighs of Anaïtis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought
how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily
as they can in their minds. I said: “And so the house of March, fatal
and damned, can never avoid its destiny....”
“Yes,” she said reasonably, “it can avoid it. By not being weak enough
to desire so strongly.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.
“I’m glad you see,” she said gravely. They listen to voices whispering
dreams. While they listen, they do queer weak things. Of the soil
sordid--there is your March. But there is another March, who listens to
voices whispering dreams. My father, Barty March, was, I think, one of
the most loved men of his time. Like Napier is now, but of course Napier
behaves. A policeman found Barty early one morning on the doorstep of a
house we had then in Cambridge Square. He used to say he was never drunk
until he closed his eyes, but this time he had closed his eyes into
pneumonia. He only opened them once again, to look at Gerald and me,
sixteen years old apiece. He smiled, you know, because Barty couldn’t
help smiling. Besides, he was happy at last. “Avoid dreams,” he said.
“Never stop to listen to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run
over. Never sympathise with the moon when you can hear it, cold and
lonely and blind, crooning to itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You
will catch pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which men are men and
women are women. You will go mad....”
Her right hand hung limp over the arm of the chair. It was just faintly
dirty, and the nails shone like pink ivory. The emerald on the third
finger held my eyes enchanted for a long while. She smiled at my look,
and as she lay her eyes swept falcon-like down to the stone. It made me
rise out of myself, that falcon-like sweep of her clear eyes, and I
thought of the pitiless misbehaviour of life, that had not let her stay
within the sensible stability of marriage.
“It’s a bit loose,” she was saying.
“I was wondering. It’s such a beauty! Aren’t you afraid of it falling?”
She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her
childishness did not jar. She was always herself. “Oo, no! I have a
knuckle. I crook it. And lo, it doesn’t fall....”
“But this sounds like a plot!”
“It is a law,” she said. “There are four laws, variously entitled a, b,
c, d. The law (a) declares, against all formerly-held beliefs, that a
flower is less beautiful because it is sure to die. That is a religious
law, having to do with the unworth of perishable things, if you see what
I mean. The law (b) has something to do with the fact that all men with
long legs make poor lovers. That is a pagan law. You might write an
essay on the long arm of coincidence and the short legs of
co-respondents. It would be fun for you. The law (c) has something to do
with exhorting a woman never to trust a man of honour, for he serves two
mistresses. That is the law of good sense for amorous women, and will
save them disappointment. The law (d) has to do with this ring, which is
a bit loose, according to the directions of Jehovah.”
“You have mighty friends, Iris Storm!”
“Ah, I need them! Desire is a child with hungry eyes, and for him a
dragon lies waiting. This ring is a charm against dragons.” The slightly
husky voice dreamed. It was an hour for dreaming. She would mask unhappy
things with passing talk. “I called him Jehovah because the same was a
jealous God. And I would mock him with that, saying that it was I who
should be jealous of him, for doesn’t a man of honour serve two
mistresses, while it is well known of women of dishonour, I would mock
him, that they never serve but one god at a time. But he never was a
worldly man, and so eaten by doubt that you would have laughed if he
hadn’t been such a pet....”
“And so he gave you the emerald to be as a witness against you, and to
testify against your frailty?”
“Now take,” dreamed the husky voice, the great eyes fixed on the
ceiling; and there was a smile in them, like a distant wave of music;
“now take a night in Algeria. Take also a hill, and on the hill a
garden....”
“The Hotel St. George, Mustapha Supérieur, Algiers----”
“Ah, don’t forget the American Bar!”
“And the Benares bowls----”
“And _calorifères_ too hot or too cold----”
“And Arab carpets from Victoria Street----”
“And Americans with low heels----”
“And a passion for ‘mailing postals----’”
“Not to mention veal every day----”
“And a Soirée de Gala every Saturday----”
“And the best-dressed women----”
“Of Tunbridge Wells.”
“But take instead some red and purple flowers against a yellow wall,
some oranges, a tangerine or two, three gazelles on a tennis-court,
poppies tall as choir-boys, the cactus, the palm, and the pyramid
cypress-tree. And watch, my friend, two shadows that walk in the wicked
shadow of the pyramid cypress, that stands in the garden like a dark
torch keeping watch over disillusion. It is night, or have I already
told you that? Ah me, ah me, now will she who walks there ever forsake
her love, will she ever be disloyal to her vows, that were made with so
much pomp and circumstance in the Guards’ Chapel at Westminster before a
congregation notable for the absence of all her husband’s relations?
Why, her heart is confident, her heart is fragrant with the honey of
that moon’s passage, and she knows what she knows. And yet, and here is
a most pitiful thing, there must be something in her, some fatal
abandon, that sets men doubting, for he who walked with her in the
wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress wore the silence of the destroyer,
so that her heart cried that he was misnamed, for the mortal disease of
his heel was suspicion. Now I must tell you that it was Christmas Eve,
and after a little desultory conversation he said: ‘Here is a present
for you, sweet,’ and he gave me this emerald which you are kind enough
to admire. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘it is a little big for me! It may fall from
my finger, don’t you see?’
“‘Yes, it may fall,’ said he. ‘But if you are careful, my sweet, if you
curve your knuckle in time, it won’t dream of falling, not it!’ And then
I cried miserably, knowing there was a catch in this somewhere, for at
that time I was not yet broken in and was still fearful of suspicion.
And I cried: ‘Hector Storm, what do you mean?’
“‘I mean, Iris, that you are as that ring----’
“‘Beautiful but loose, Hector? Ah, _timeo Danaos_!”
“‘Iris, will you never be serious! Yes, you are as that ring, which you
must always wear on the third finger of your right hand. And as that
ring may fall, Iris, so you may fall, for that is the sort of woman you
are. But as that ring may be kept from falling, so may you keep yourself
from falling. Oh, God,’ he said, ‘my life is darkness without you, I
love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’ And he
said much more that is unmentionable, and I learnt something, for it is
only by listening to their husbands in moments of intimacy that
well-brought-up women can become acquainted with certain good old
English words. And though I pleaded bitterly that he was unfair to me,
saying I was chained to him as my wrist might be chained to a star,
which was no more than the truth, he insisted that I could be constant
only to inconstancy, and so I was tired and went to bed. But look! Oh,
look! Please look! Ah, the discourtesy of time! Really I must go now!”
I drew my eyes from her eyes to see that the dawn had slyly thrown a
grey handkerchief over the window. It was but the shape of the dawn
creeping out into the night, it was but a ghostly breath in the night,
but it was the dawn. And I did not know what to say, for can a man deny
the dawn, that speaks good sense in its vast elemental language?
The chair creaked and creaked. She was going now, there was no doubt
about it. The texture of her face was grave, she was busy with the angle
of her green hat. I examined the sword in my mind. The chair creaked and
creaked, and then it was as though snapped by silence, and our startled
eyes joined over the emerald that lay on the floor like the echo of the
kiss, which was an unfair kiss. She shivered faintly, and drew herself
taut, and was very proud. She was remote as the evening star, and very
proud. Her eyes were dark as in a crypt, and her eyes looked lost, as
though she had strayed into a maze. I lit a cigarette, and found my
throat dry and parched.
She found difficulty in speaking. I was amazed.
“No,” she said. She shook her head. “Certainly not. My ring, please.”
Imperiously her finger pointed to the floor, but her eyes were as
plaintive as a nun’s who has strayed into one of the corridors of hell.
That I might walk with her there I again made myself a Judas to her
hand, and she shivered with her whole body as in a torment, and she
seemed to bite her lip from within.
“It means nothing,” she said coldly.
“I know,” I said.
She breathed deeply, with a hand pressed to one breast, as though it
hurt her. I think it must have hurt her very much. I was sorry. She
shook her head, as though she was in a cage, and then she was as still
as a cut flower. The whole brim of the green hat was between me and her
face, we were both terribly alone. Her right hand drooped naked over the
arm of the chair, and I was bending down to pick up the emerald to
replace it on the third finger when a cautious knocking came from
below.
That was the second or third time of knocking, and each time it was less
cautious, and I knew it to come from the policeman on the beat, who
would be wishing to have the primrose car put in its proper place, which
was not on the King’s highroad. I wondered if she had heard, but I could
not see her face. I wondered if she heard me move. As I came to the door
I switched out the light and the dawn pounced on her green hat, but she
who wore it fought her battles carved in stone. She said something, I
did not catch what, and I went downstairs and spoke with the policeman,
who was an amiable middle-aged man of my acquaintance.
“My brother is with me,” I said, “but he will be gone soon.” Shepherd’s
Market was creeping out into the dawn, draped and mysterious with the
shadows of night. A window here and there was alight against the dark
pile of Camelot House. The great car stood like a bruise against the
passage of eternity, dawn fought for it, night draped it, and the silver
stork flew unseen. The small noises of dawn stirred sharply in the
night, and the lamps wore pale, tired faces. “Summer’s well on,” said
the policeman.
I re-entered the sitting-room, saying impersonally: “I’m afraid you must
go, as....” The room was empty. The figure that had been carved in stone
was wrapped in air. The disorder of the room lay jeering at me on the
dim carpet of the dawn. It was all like a purposeless limbo stretched
between the night and the day, the room, my life, hers, everything, the
strong, the silly and the brave. The hundreds of books lay in soiled
confusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that has gone to the
making of the soiled nothings that we are.
I was seized by a catholic anger against the woman. Through all the
disenchantments of youth, despite the contagious impurities of life, in
defiance of the crimes against love that we call love, I had kept
romance for my ghostly companion. Romance was more than a silly lithe
goddess coming down from a marble column. Romance was more than the
licence to be shameless with clouded eyes. Romance did not steal through
the fleshy portals of the heart, did not shiver at a Judas kiss, did not
coil white trembling limbs into the puerile lusts of the mind. Romance
was all that and was as much greater than that as a religion is greater
than a church. To romance, which was the ultimate vision of commonsense,
sex, as sex, was the most colossal bore that had ever distracted man
from his heritage. And she would palm a facet of this colossal bore off
on me! She would have me barter my ghostly companion for the fall of an
emerald, she would invade my thoughts, perhaps my life, in exchange for
a puny pleasure that needs love to exalt it above the matchless
silliness of what, with an excessive zeal for scientific classification,
is known to our civilisation as the sexual act.
I picked up the emerald from the floor, and it smiled in the palm of my
hand.
In the dusk of the bedroom, she lay coiled on the bed. The hush of her
breathing was no more than the trembling servant of the silence. Then
she coughed a small cigarette cough. It was the usual cough, and gave
me back my confidence. “Iris Storm!” I said, but I wondered if I had
spoken, the frail silence was so undisturbed. She was asleep.
Perhaps it was then that I realised that she was beautiful. She was
asleep. Could any but the shape of beauty dare to wear that
impertinence! She lay on her side, she lay anyhow. The green hat was
gone.
“Iris!” I said. Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music,
and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair. It was like a boy’s
hair, swept back from the forehead, which was a wide, clear forehead,
clean and brave and sensible as a boy’s. Sensible, oh dear! The tawny
cornstalks danced their formal dance on the one cheek that I could see,
and the tip of a pierced ear played beneath them, like a mouse in the
cornfield. Above her neck her hair died a very manly death, a more manly
death than “bobbed” hair was ever known to die, and so it comes about
that Iris Storm was the first Englishwoman I ever saw with “shingled”
hair. This was in 1922.
I decided that I did not know what to do. I decided that that was just
as well. “I will play,” I thought, “a waiting game,” and lit a
cigarette. But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like a promise,
and it smelled as grass might smell in a faëry land, and always about
her there was that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know.
Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a little shiny bit in the
valley between her cheek and her nose. To this I applied a little
_Quelques Fleurs_ talc powder on a handkerchief, that when she awoke she
should not think so ill of herself as I did. Hers was a small, straight
nose with an imperceptible curve, just as any straight line might have,
and its tip quivered a little as she breathed. Her leather jacket _pour
le sport_, that had a high collar trimmed with some minks, was flung
open, and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants
were marching towards an unknown destination. Towards her feet her hat
lay with my hat.
Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being
better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of
her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed
against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from
my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and when the red
elephants marching towards an unknown destination stirred breasts full
of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “But
enough of this hell!”