Hilary says that I was very quiet over dinner that night. He remarked
it, he says, because it was so unusual. Hilary has an illusion common to
Englishmen, that if a man can utter three consecutive sentences without
breaking them up with “eh,” “ah,” “hm,” “mm,” and any other noises that
may occur to him as fit and proper, he must be held to be talking too
much.
How on earth, I was wondering, could I cast the name of Mrs. Storm
before my host with even a tolerable hope of his more than grunting at
it? For, of course, one never discussed women with Hilary. I believe he
had been a member of several clubs once upon a time, but in these
degenerate days he had finally withdrawn into the impenetrable fortress
of the Marlborough; Guy and he agreeing that, since it was once said of
a King of Spain that he had died of etiquette, they envied rather than
cared to overlook their young friends in the exercise of the long lives
assured to them.
“He will, if you provoke him,” Iris had said, absently enough. And,
indeed, never but once had I ever heard Hilary expand at the mention of
a woman’s name, and that was when I had provoked him by defending her,
the lady in question being one for whom he had a great regard but who
had, as they say very aptly in the popular phrase, “gone completely off
the rails.” As regards Iris, in that case, it should be child’s work.
Hilary says now that he was able, so soon as I mentioned her name, to
account for my subdued air. Such, Hilary says, was the aftermath of
Iris’s effect on men. But all he said at the time was, snappy like, that
he hadn’t even known she was in London and would I have port or brandy
or both, because I was detaining them at my side of the table? I said I
was sorry and how amiable Mrs. Storm had been about him. “And fancy,” I
said, “her being Gerald’s twin sister!”
“Why ‘fancy’?”
Hilary was annoyed. Now why was Hilary annoyed? Why do men get annoyed?
“She is beautiful,” I said, “she is good, she is----”
“It seems to me,” snapped Hilary, “that they make a perfectly harmonious
pair of twins. Hm.” And he lit a cigar and reflected profoundly on the
flame of the match. Perhaps I had better leave out his “hm’s.”
“There’s only one March,” he said, pushing a cup of coffee towards me as
though he hated the sight of it, “who has ever been any good, and that’s
the aunt, Eve Chalice, a dear old lady. Heavens above, the March blood!
But they will be near their last gasp now, with young Gerald as the
heir....”
It just showed, you know, how much one ever knew about that young man. I
had no idea he was heir to anything, let alone the bankrupt earldom.
“Ever since last July,” said Hilary, “when his uncle, Barty’s elder
brother by a year, and his cousin thought they would do some fifth-rate
mountaineering in Switzerland without a guide, and tried by mistake to
climb the Jungfrau.” Hilary, I remember thinking, seemed very bitter
about that mountaineering. You know, that bitterness of a calm, normal,
reasonable air, with a slight flavour of old-world banter? He seemed to
want to give the impression that he rather gloated than otherwise over
the decline and fall of the house of Portairley. Gerald, as the
nineteenth earl, Hilary seemed to want to say, served the house of
Portairley right. If Hilary could only have seen his own kind grey eyes!
But that something, apart from the mere existence of the Marches, had
annoyed him, was obvious; and presently I realised that the something
was the fact that Iris had not let him know she was in London, but that
he had heard of it from me, from any one, in fact, but herself. I ought
instantly to have guessed that was the matter, Hilary being one of
those detached men who have no use for the flibberty-gibberties of life.
Gerald, one thought, would make about as pretty an Earl of Portairley
and Axe as even the Marches could boast. “But at least,” I suggested,
“he will have a little more money than he has now?”
“About,” said Hilary, “minus five hundred a year. They can’t even bribe
any one to take Portairley, and so the old gentleman has to live in a
couple of rooms and pay the taxes on the property from what his
creditors allow him. That old curse working, one would think....”
There isn’t really a great variety among these family curses. There
appear to be no more than two schools of thought among the cursers, one
which consigns the cursed to instant death, and the other to prolonged
disgrace ending in damnation. The Portairley’s curse was of the second
variety, and poor Gerald appeared to be in at the death for the
damnation.
“Vaguely,” I said, “I gather that Gerald and his sister had some quarrel
in the distant past. But I happened to see Gerald as I came on here, and
he seemed ready for a reconciliation. In that case, as Mrs. Storm seems
to be wealthy....”
Certainly Hilary could surprise one. He exploded, in that quiet
parliamentary way which is one of the loftiest dignities of a
constitutional country: “And thank the Lord she is! Imagine the shoddy
life of an Iris--with neither money nor morals!”
Evidently, then, Hilary had a great regard for the lady of the green
hat. You must remember that until this evening not so much as her name
had passed between us.... “He will, if you provoke him,” Iris had said.
Well, hadn’t I!
Hector Storm V.C. had, it seemed, left her every penny. Storm, steel,
Sheffield. “Fine boy, Storm,” said Hilary, pulling at a stiff grey thing
which I forgot to mention he wore on his upper lip without, however,
succeeding in looking anything but clean-shaven. “Boy Fenwick left her
all he had too, but she wouldn’t, naturally, touch a penny of it. You
would think the world was upside down when you came to inquire into the
moral sense of an Iris! Strict as steel here, unbending as iron
there--and then! She gave all Boy Fenwick’s fortune over to old Aunt
Fenwick, since when the old hag has called Iris every name out of the
Apocrypha for her pains.”
“But, Hilary!” I said. Hilary says now that I was white in the face.
“But did you say Boy Fenwick? Boy ... Fenwick?”
“Her first husband,” said Hilary; and he pushed his port-glass an inch
or two up the polished surface of the table and stared at it. “You
couldn’t,” he said, “do better than young Fenwick.... But before your
time, I suppose....”
“I never dreamt,” I think I said, “that Mrs. Storm had been the Mrs.
Fenwick....”
“Mrs. Storm,” smiled Hilary queerly to his port-glass, “has been
everything.”
But Boy Fenwick! And the shameless, shameful lady of the green hat as
the tragic Mrs. Fenwick! So there was “Felix Burton” and his ideal of
purity! And there, plain as hate could make her, there was “Ava Foe,”
and somewhere there was the reason for Gerald’s mediæval hatred for his
sister! Somewhere there, but exactly where? For no one knew less of Boy
Fenwick’s death than I did, that being a legend of “a little before my
time....”
“I knew Iris,” Hilary was saying thoughtfully, playing with the stem of
his glass, “when she was so high. They had a house in Cambridge Square
then, and she used to go to that school in South Audley Street where
they all go to. I’d see her walking along with her governess, a long
little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. Hm. She was adorable.”
There was a pause ... and suddenly he turned his face to me, that long,
thin, grey-looking face with the kind, muddled features. And it was as
though it had, suddenly, profoundly lost all its inner calm. Hilary’s
outward calm, in spite of his detached air--“Mr. Townshend, the
imperturbable champion of procedure”--was always rather like a Gruyère
cheese, a sort of smooth surface with gaps. But this was different, this
was as though a tap had been wrenched loose inside him, letting run a
savage, hurt bewilderment which didn’t quite reach his skin. “And now,”
he said softly, yet looking at me as though accusing _me_ of something.
“And now! The last I heard of Iris was that she was seen night after
night in a Russian cabaret in Vienna with an Italian Jew who is said to
have made a fortune by exporting medicated champagne to America. There’s
the long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes....”
“But,” I began, and decided that it was better not. But it was absurd,
that “night after night.” That wasn’t, I knew, Iris Storm. Not “night
after night.” She might very possibly have sat one night in a Russian
cabaret in Vienna with an Italian Jew who exported medicated champagne
to America, but certainly not “night after night.” Unless, that is, she
had changed a great deal since then. After all, one couldn’t be more
unattractive than an Italian Jew who exported medicated champagne to
America. No, really, that was too much.
“Your generation,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “is a mess. Have some
brandy?”
“It’s absurd,” I said, “to talk ‘generations.’ Slack novelists do it to
get easy effects. All generations are a mess. Thank you.”
“Your generation,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “has more opportunities for
being a mess than ours had. That’s what I meant. And your children will
have more opportunities than you have. There is a certain amount of
horse-sense in the reluctance of many young fellows nowadays to having
wives of their own. They’re afraid of getting it in the neck from the
results. For whereas you have motors and telephones and wireless with
which to lose your sense of the stabilities, as you are losing them,
they will have cheap aeroplanes as well. When you people nowadays begin
to break loose there’s no limit to your looseness. There was in my
father’s time. They couldn’t get about so quickly. They couldn’t grub
about in so many cesspools at one time, rushing in a night between
London and any vile paradise of the vulgarities like Deauville or the
present Riviera. Even if they broke loose a little--the women, I
mean--they generally had to make some compromise with the decencies
simply because they had to live in the place, they couldn’t make an
appointment with a trunk-call to Paris and go and have a few days’ ‘fun’
there. But now if a woman has kicked through every restraint of caste
and chastity there’s the whole world open for her to play the mischief
in, there’s every invention in the world to help her indulge her
intolerable little lusts....”
I mastered an irrational impulse to try to defend Iris against the
friend of her childhood. I would have liked to say that the little lusts
were intolerable most of all to Iris. Hilary would almost have
sympathised with that in Iris, for it would seem that the only vice a
man of principle can understand is the vice of not enjoying what he has
forfeited his principles to do. Hilary couldn’t, obviously, forgive Iris
for not having grown common and meretricious and, in the slim beastly
sense, coarse, as the other “rotten ladies” did. He couldn’t, obviously,
forgive her for the continued graciousness of her outward seeming, and
of her inner seeming too, if one didn’t know those things about her. He
couldn’t, obviously, forgive her for being so indifferent to every
distinction of class that she was equally indifferent, with the whole
calm of her mind, to being “declassed.” And he couldn’t, obviously,
forgive himself for still, God knew how, seeing in her the same
qualities that he had seen in the long little thing, all brown stockings
and blue eyes. If only Hilary had been a sentimentalist, and could have
closed his eyes against what he did not wish to see and could have
opened his eyes to see all that he did wish to see! But Hilary was a
realist with a backward-seeing eye. The Iris of long ago should have
been dead, choked to death by this grown-up Iris--but, and there lay the
perversity of this grown-up Iris who had kicked through every restraint
of caste and chastity, it wasn’t dead at all, she was still essentially
the same Iris who had walked with her governess up South Audley Street.
But, the devil, all these men! Yet there she was ... profoundly
_un_different, profoundly as though untouched by any more soiling breath
than that of the lightest passage of the years. It was, you might hear
Hilary thinking, confoundedly unfair to all decent womanhood, Iris’s
immunity in the abyss. He should not like her--no, there should not be
left anything about her for a decent man to like. The friend of Iris’s
childhood couldn’t help a savage anger with her for retaining the
interest of a clean, and otherwise balanced, mind. The friend of
childhood liked the woman so deeply that, being a man of principle, he
could see only her worst side. And then the man of principle would fall
into the toils of the friend of childhood, and whilst the two
antagonists were wrestling together they could see only the side of the
woman that it made them the most wretched to see. The very fact that
Hilary was deeply attached to Iris made him see only her worst side.
Many good men call that “liking” a woman. Many good women call that
“idealism” in men.