And I did not see him again until the twelfth evening later. I wish I
had. I ought to have been to see him, for I was in the habit of seeing
Gerald, and during those twelve days he might, I think he would, have
told me about the silly, shoddy thing that had happened, and I could
have helped to make him see it as only a silly, shoddy thing. What made
me feel responsible for Gerald was that his livid, unreasonable,
childish contempt for all accepted things was not contempt at all, but
fear, just plain fear. He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply
couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it. Piercing that tortured
vanity, I felt that life was a huge hungry beast ready to maul Gerald if
he so much as tried to placate it--by using, say, a little pumice-stone
on his fingers. And one could never, after having seen through his
furious _blague_, be rid of an acute sense of the shamefaced
childishness in the man, a childishness beaten down, gone crooked, which
could only do him a hurt if it was not watched. And one didn’t, quite
definitely didn’t, want Gerald to be hurt more than he already hurt
himself by just breathing.
But, whether it was because that involuntary whisper of his about his
sister had sickened me even more than I had thought at the moment, or
whether it was merely because I was too busy with arranging myself into
the new place, I simply did not seem to have the time to look him up
during those twelve days. I wish I had.
Nor, during those twelve days, would it have come very amiss to talk a
little about Mrs. Storm. One would have liked to know just a little of
the history of that shameless, shameful lady. After all, one didn’t
every day meet a woman with a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind. But
naturally neither Guy nor Hilary was available during those twelve days,
for that is a way friends have; Guy because he was down at Mace with the
May-fly, and Hilary just because he was tiresome. Hilary, Guy wrote from
Mace, was helping a Liberal to fight a musty bye-election in some
Staffordshire place. “As if,” Guy wrote, “a Liberal ever won, as if a
Liberal could ever win without a pretty long start! and a handicapper
can never get a grip on anything in a Liberal to give him a start
on--sticky little fellows they are, always sliding away somewhere. And
as if it mattered whether a Liberal did or didn’t win. He’ll only get
squashed with his own petard.” And, however it was, Hilary’s Liberal
didn’t win, so maybe Guy was right. “In ten years’ time,” says Guy,
“Hilary will be the only Liberal left in Parliament, looking happier and
younger and more sickening than ever.”
It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat
that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same
instant act upon it.
“Hello!” I said.
“Hello!” they said. They were a she.
“Could I speak to Mrs. Storm, please?”
“Who is that speaking, please?”