Of all that had once decorated the walls of my sitting-room there was
left by the removers only a looking-glass in an ancient gold frame,
above the fireplace. My mother had once given me an oil-painting,
saying, “This will do nicely for your flat,” but I in my pride had
thought a looking-glass would offend the frame more judiciously.
She stood before that.
“What is the time?” she asked her reflection, and I told her that it was
ten minutes to six.
“Have you a comb?” she asked of her reflection, and luckily I had a comb
which was not my comb. She looked at it and saw that it was so.
“Thank you,” she said to her reflection.
The light of the tawny hair mocked the clouded daylight, and when, with
the palm of her hand on her forehead, she swept the comb from front to
back, it flamed tiger-tawny and ate into my spirit. _Tiger, tiger,
burning bright, in the forests of the night...._
In the Upper Fifth at school there was a tall, cold-eyed blood called
Dwight-Rankin--I think he died on Gallipoli--who used to sit at the desk
just in front of mine. He was a man of the mode, wearing his fair hair
plastered from front to back, and his neck was clean and unspotted as a
girl’s, and I would spend minutes wondering whether, if one touched the
gold down in which his hair ended high above his neck one would feel
hair or only skin. The back of her head affected me like that; it was
just like Dwight-Rankin’s, only dry, and tiger-tawny.
She tore the small comb through the dancing curls on each cheek, so that
they trembled like voiceless bells. It is a commonplace about women, as
assiduously remarked by brilliant feminine psychologists as women’s
“caprice” and “intuition,” that every woman must now and then make a
“grimace of distaste” into a looking-glass. But she did not do that, nor
need to. She was untouched, unsoiled, impregnable to the grubby,
truthful hand of _lex femina_. She was like a tower of beauty in the
morning of the world. The outlaw was above the law of afterwards,
impervious and imperious. She was beautiful, grave, proud. How beautiful
she was now! It was a sort of blasphemy in her to be so beautiful now,
to stand in such ordered loveliness, to be neither shameful like a
maiden nor shameless like a mondaine, nor show any fussy after-trill of
womanhood, any dingy ember of desire. It was a sort of blasphemy in her,
as it would be in a peacock to sing gracefully.
The silence got on my nerves, and I said something, anything. She looked
over her shoulder at me, vaguely. She was the male of the species that
is more fearless than mankind. I wondered what she was going to say.
“My hat, please,” she said. I appeared to have been holding it in my
hand. With her left hand she crushed it on her head and kept her hand on
the crown, looking at herself intently in the looking-glass. I was
startled at her eyes in the looking-glass. They were cold blue stones,
expressionless, caddish as a beast’s.
Down, down, with two fingers of her left hand, she pulled the brim of
the green hat over her left eyebrow. She said: “I think I must have left
my powder in the other room. Do you mind?” I brought her the case of
white jade and the box of black onyx. She powdered, without interest.
“Good-bye,” she said. Her hand was held out, her eyes were full on mine,
naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails
under which she had nailed herself. It would be a kindness to let her go
quickly, a kindness which she would not have allowed me had I been a
woman and she a man.
“Good-bye,” I said. And suddenly the hand that lay in mine pressed mine,
and she gave a vague, brittle laugh.
“It seems a pity,” she said; and then the eyes in the shadow of the brim
seemed to open wide, wide.
“You see?” she whispered. “You see?”
But I could see nothing but her silhouette against the future days. I
said: “We have begun at the wrong end; but can’t we work back?”
“Oh, no!” she whispered. “It is not like that a bit. You don’t
understand....”
Suddenly I said many things.
She seemed, her hand still in mine, to be absorbed in something just
behind my right shoulder. There was such fear in her eyes that I cried
sharply: “What is it?”
“The beast,” said the lips of the eyes of fear. “Just the beast....”
The word I said was drowned in the din of a lorry that smashed through
Whitehorse Street to Piccadilly. She took her hand gently from mine.
“There is a dream,” she said, “and there is a beast.”
She smiled.
“That’s all,” she said.
“I can understand regret,” I said, “but----”
“Ah, we can understand, you and I! We are as old as sand ... at this
moment.”
“But, Iris Storm, regret seems like a scar on you!”
“Not regret,” she said, so calmly. “Shame.” And she took my hand again,
closely. “You must forgive me. I couldn’t have said that to any other
man. My shame mustn’t shame you, please! But you have a cold mind, you
are disenchanted, you understand. And oh, if one could be assoiled in
human understanding! You see, I am not what you think. I am not of the
women of your life. I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for
pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am the meanest of
all, she who destroys her body because she must, she who hates the thing
she is, she who loathes the thing she does....” The breathless, pregnant
voice seemed to fall to the floor, like a small bird with broken wings,
and as it struggled upwards I said: “You are like a boy after his first
love.”
“Oh, if it was boyishness!” And she took from the pocket of her leather
jacket a tube of gold, and she broke it into two pieces, and she stared
moon-struck at the carmine tongue of the lip-salve.
“To be born a chaste woman,” she said to the carmine tongue, “is good. I
am in favour of chastity. I would die for purity, in theory.” She
painted her mouth, staring moon-struck into the daylight. “Yes, I would
die for purity. I wouldn’t mind dying anyhow, but it would be nice to
die for purity....”