I
And that, I think, is all that there really is about me, as a person, in
the tale. Of course, this first person singular will continue, and
there’ll no doubt be any amount of “I this” and “I that,” but that is
because of the nature of the work, and there’s never, the way I see it,
much more than a pen behind it. Hilary, however, and Guy de Travest are
not of my mind about this. We have recently been talking about these
affairs, and a sad enough talk they made, and my two friends, my two
seniors, were reluctantly compelled, they said, to disagree with me
about my lack of responsibility in the events to be related hereinafter.
To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain things were decreed
to happen and that, therefore, they did happen: they had it in their
blood, these people, that certain things should happen to them, and I
could no more contrive these things than they could evade them. But
Hilary and Guy, murmuring together in that astonishing unison which can
only be found in two Englishmen who disagree upon everything in the
world but on the fact that conduct is three parts of life, are of
opinion that my substitution of the word “ptomaine” for “septic” really
affected the course of events. Had I, they say in effect, spoken the
truth like a brave little man, there would have been a divorce and every
one would by now have been happy, as happiness goes. And then, too, they
have something to say about those two red lights, those two rear-lamps
of two cars sweeping into South Audley Street--had I told Iris, they
say, about Gerald, those two red lights never would have been so close
together. Oh, Guy, what a man is that! That latter-day thunder-god of
dandies, that warrior of conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could
give “gratuitous information” about any one! Oh, Hilary, that friend of
childhood!
Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and
Iris since their earliest childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up
than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had turned away from his
friends, his people: he had dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it’s
not difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that young man. But I
was to find, after the coming of the lady of the green hat, that it
wasn’t only at the impulse of his furious nature that Gerald had, well,
withered fiercely into solitude. In very truth that Gerald had been a
hero-worshipper; and in very truth he had become, as his sister had
said, a nothing without his hero. Very few things had ever mattered to
Gerald Haveleur March; but those few things, one was to learn, had
mattered far too much.
His sister was, as it’s not impossible to have gathered, what is called
_declassée_--even for a March or a Portairley. And that was why I had
heard nothing about her from Guy or Hilary, for while Guy never gave
gratuitous information about any one, Hilary was held in thrall by that
upside-down but virulent form of snobbery which will make of a man of
property an extreme Liberal and a thorough-going die-hard disapprover of
any one who let his, Hilary’s, caste down. Hilary, a sincerely good man,
was an enemy of caste, he was an enemy of his own caste in particular,
he did not believe in it; and yet, in the depths of that being where
lurks a dragon that can ultimately defeat even the sincerity of a man of
principle, Hilary believed in nothing else but caste.
And Iris, of course, had betrayed her caste to perfection. No one, you
might say, could have done that more thoroughly than Iris. She had been
malinspired to excess, she had reached Excelsior in the abyss. But she
was ever completely not on her guard about what people might say or did
say, she had an amazing, an enviable, snapped Hilary, talent for just
not noticing things.
She had been quite surprised, Hilary told me recently, when once he had
taxed her with being a renegade from her class. Genuinely surprised she
was, Hilary says. It simply hadn’t, she had told him, occurred to her in
that light.
“Rushing about Europe like that,” Hilary had said, “you let England
down. You’ve no idea, Iris, how these young foreign blighters hold
Englishwomen cheap.” Iris had maintained she had a very good idea about
that. (But you simply had to disagree with Hilary. He was like that. And
he said “hm” all the time.) And you only had to travel on a liner to
the East, she had said, to notice how British matrons reacted to foreign
parts. As for Egypt! But she always did her best, she had said, to
influence foreigners to a more lofty view of the gallantries of British
matrons.
“People cut you,” Hilary had said, for that seemed to him an abominable
thing, that she should have put herself into the position of being
“cut”; and she had admitted having noticed glaciers, but she had
maintained that it was a far, far better thing to be cut by a county eye
than to be killed by the boredom of a county tongue. “I arose from the
dead when I was twenty,” she had said. (Hilary, you understand, would
provoke any one.) “Your class,” Hilary had snapped, and she had said she
had never actually thought of herself as belonging to any class. Her
class would be, she supposed, the landed gentry, same as Hilary’s. She
was proud, she had said, to belong to the same class as Hilary, and was
very sorry indeed if she had hit him in the eye with her heel. But she
hoped, she had said, that with him she had always been a lady.
That had annoyed Hilary very much indeed. But everything about any woman
he liked would annoy Hilary very much indeed. Mr. Townshend was one of
those Englishmen with an unlimited capacity for disapproving of any
woman, whom he liked, who enjoyed being with other men as much as with
himself; and an unlimited capacity for finding other reasons than that
for his disapproval.
As for Gerald, Hilary had last known him as a “dark diabolical
schoolboy” with a disturbing capacity for threatening silences and an
immense--“a corroding, almost,” Hilary said--admiration for Iris. But
not long after Barty March’s death--every one had loved _that_
drunkard!--he had quite lost sight of Gerald. Guy de Travest had been
Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war, but he
never spoke but once of Gerald as a soldier--“young hell-fire
idiot”--and never went near him while he lived above me in Shepherd’s
Market. “Reminds me,” Guy said, “too much of Barty left standing too
long with the cork out.” And that was more or less what Hilary said,
too. One must say this for the warriors of caste and conduct: they
seldom try to improve any man.
This chapter has been called The Cavalier of Low Creatures because it is
about Gerald, and therefore it is a short chapter, for what on earth is
there to say about Gerald? It isn’t at all a good description of him,
but it is intended, if you please, more as a flourish, a naïve gesture.
For you simply can’t let Gerald stand without a flourish, without a
something, anything. Besides, I liked him, and would like to do him a
bit of good. He was, _sans_ gesture, a zero with a scowl and a hat--and
a hat. Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a
novel? I liked Gerald, but I would not give him a line if he wasn’t
essential; and that is just what he is, essential, for these things
simply couldn’t have happened without Gerald. He hated his sister, he
had not seen her for ten years, yet it turned out that he was the most
important factor in her life. And, decidedly, her love for him was one
of the most important factors in _her_ life. I wonder if he knows. But
he too, even he, grew up in the end. I can hear him now, through the
twilight of East Chapel Street, his shoulder against the saloon-door of
the inn. “Give her my love,” he said. But you will hear him.