“Yes,” she said, not having heard a word of mine, “it is not good to
have a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind, as I have. It is hell for the
body and terror for the mind. There are dreams, and there are beasts.
The dreams walk glittering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire,
the beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret. Good-bye.”
“Then it must be ‘good-bye’?”
She looked at me with a strange, dark friendliness, and nodded.
“Because of shame,” she said. “But if I were different, I would like you
for my friend----”
To my interruption, which she did not hear, she said: “I have only one
lover. But I know that only because I always feel unfaithful to him. It
would be good to be really bad, but I am not even that. I only
misbehave. I will see you again, when I have found my only love. Or I
will see you again when I am qualified to die for purity. I will let you
know, so you can be there. God bless you, dear.”
And I said what I said, that He had, with Iris Storm.
She went very white. “That shall be written down,” she whispered, “as
the prayer of the only man who ever shamed a woman of her shame.”
“My days of adventure, Iris Storm, are over. A few years ago it would
have seemed nothing to me that you should disappear as you came, into
the great hole of London. To experts in adventure that is, I think, the
usual procedure. But now I would like a trace of you. You must not leave
me, quite. If I may not see you again, mayn’t I perhaps talk to you? Or,
what is the main thing, feel that I could if I dared?”
She said she was in London now only on business that would last a few
weeks, and lived always abroad. “But this is the telephone-number,” she
said, and I was looking round for paper and pencil when she said “Here!”
and her leather arm darted to the floor and came up with a book, and on
the fly-leaf of the book she scrawled the number with her lip-stick.
High above the sharp noises of the young day I heard the scream of an
electric-horn.