IV

It is curious how many irrelevant details will crowd back into the mind

when one is trying to reconstruct only the main passage of an evening,

which was throughout, now one looks back on it, as though directed to

its inevitable end. I remember how, through one of the long silences

common to our odd, antagonistic intimacy, I sat staring into my

brandy-glass--those Gargantuan ones, Hilary had--and wondering at

Hilary’s, well, unsentimental sentimentality; and then I wondered what

sort of a fight the man of principle would put up against the friend of

childhood should Iris ever show the faintest inclination to take as her

third husband Mr. Townshend of Magralt. The man of principle would lose

... happily lose or unhappily, you could not tell, for no man can tell

what odd happinesses, more secretly kept than crimes, another man will

snatch from intimacy with a woman whom he would detest if he did not

desire.

But through the silences of that evening there walked mainly the figure

of the legend of Boy Fenwick, a boyish figure midst a babble of confused

rumours and knowing silences. Yet I was so concerned not to appear, to

that watchful and dangerous friend of childhood, too interested in Mrs.

Storm, that the name of Boy Fenwick hung on my lips before I was out

with it. Oh, that name of Boy Fenwick! One knew it so well and so dimly,

it would so often be just dropped into a conversation by some friend of

his or some friend of a friend, just the name with a passing regret, to

the perpetuation of his charm and his time....

Many will, no doubt, remember the details of what must have been one

among the minor sensations of that time better than I can pretend to. It

happened during the summer of 1913, when I, having just left school, was

enjoying a first taste of freedom up and down Switzerland, and was far

from the long arm of even the Continental _Daily Mail_. Boy Fenwick was

found, on that dawn of his wedding-night, lying in the courtyard of the

Hôtel Vendôme in Deauville, dead of a broken collar-bone. He had fallen,

it appeared, from his bedroom window on the third floor. His beautiful

young wife (I collect the bits of rumour that came to me later) had been

asleep, had suddenly awoken to a sharp feeling of solitude, had happened

to look out at the dawn....

Tests were made, and it was found that a man could, given certain

conditions, have fallen out of that window. The hotel management

suggested that a man could, given certain conditions, fall out of almost

any window. Among the certain conditions suggested, tactfully, was

champagne. That was, I believe, adopted, tactfully. Much, of course,

must have been said and printed about the beautiful girl, Mrs. Fenwick;

and there was provided a little comic relief to the affair in the

scarcely suppressed indignation of the illustrated papers, for the

beautiful Mrs. Fenwick had in some way prevailed on Sebastian Roeskin,

the photographer in Dover, not to issue any of her photographs, and had

shown a remarkable ingenuity in evading the street-camera. And, the

tragedy happening at Deauville during the _Grande Semaine_--Deauville

at that time was still in the first flush of its victory over

Trouville--it was hushed up as quickly as possible.

Boy Fenwick had only that year come down from Oxford, and his memory was

treasured by his many friends both there and in London. Indeed, to one

who heard of him only when he had become legend, and when the first

edition of a slim book of poetry by him, published posthumously with a

charming introduction by P. L., had attained to a price only surpassed

later by Rupert Brooke’s memory, he appears to have been the most

beloved of the beloved young men of that time. To youth of this decade,

grown now a little impatient of the careless wise-seeming pastime of

indulging “sound” scepticisms or catholic idealisms, those youths of the

days before the war must seem to have been the most gifted of God’s

creatures who ever walked this earth, always excluding the glory that

was Greece. Several, to be sure, survive until this day, but nothing

could be more unjust than to approach a man’s youth in the light of the

shadow that he casts in his early thirties. Yet they would verily seem,

those few dead young men, to have a certain god-like quality of

immortality denied to the multitude that died with them and for whom

cenotaphs and obelisks and memorials must do duty for memory: that they

should retain the regret of their many friends is not remarkable, but it

is odd, and pleasant, how they will ever and again loiter, gay and

handsome and “sound,” in the imagination of those who never knew them.

Boy Fenwick’s name, now, would ever and again pass like a phantom of

beauty and laughter across some conversation: so real, so dim. He had

been notable, it seemed--and this is the only clear thing I had ever

heard about him--for a certain catholic idealism that was almost an

obsession with him. So, I was to think this night, thrusting from me the

legend of Boy Fenwick, so it would seem. An idealist! Yes, Boy Fenwick

was an idealist. But would I had the debonair truculence of that

puissant nobleman, the Earl of Birkenhead, who has dared to say, in an

age given over to the new-rich snobbery of exalting plain, normal men:

“I do not like meek men.” I, had I that presence, would say: “I do not

like idealists.”

Yet it was not to be over this dinner with Hilary that I was to be given

the full sum of the idealism of that handsome young god who, beloved of

many, was the hero of one March and the fate of another. That was to

come much later, on a night that was the sister of this night.

Mrs. Storm could have been no more than nineteen or twenty at the time

of that tragedy at Deauville. And I suppose I must have remarked,

probably apropos of nothing but Hilary’s passing me the matches, how

very terrible it must have been for a young girl, for Hilary passed,

through one of those pregnant pauses which seem always to preface the

cruelties of kind people, his Gargantuan brandy-glass round about his

nose. “And,” he said thoughtfully, “rather more terrible for him, don’t

you think?”

“I suppose,” I said in all innocence, “that he was tipsy or something,

to fall out like that....”

Hilary looked at me through his glass, for the rim reached his eyebrows

as he sipped, in that way which is supposed, I believe, to make noisy

Labour interruptors feel such fools as even a clown must despise.

“But, Hilary,” I couldn’t help crying out, “you’re not implying that he

threw himself out!”

Hilary, because I had given way to a moment’s emphasis, gained instantly

in leisured calm. “Hm,” he said. Gently he put down his huge glass.

“Hm,” he said. He considered the stump of his cigar and decided that it

was not worth while relighting it. “Hm,” he said, and took another from

the box, pinching it. I passed him the matches. “Hm,” he said. But not I

to be provoked! I did to him what Mr. Beerbohm once so notably did to

the late Mr. James Pethick in the Casino at Dieppe: I plied the spur of

silence.

“Boy Fenwick,” said Hilary, lighting his cigar, “was a young man of

quality. I don’t mean the word in the flashy sense in which you use it

in your stories. But of _quality_--in mind and spirit. And yet,” in a

volume of white smoke he smothered the failing light of the match, “he

chucked himself out of that window.”

And, you know, just at that moment I saw him doing that, and Iris lying

in bed....

Hilary was angry. The very thought of that buried tragedy seemed to

wrench that inside tap a little looser, but still the savage, hurt

bewilderment would not quite reach his skin.

“Of course,” I said, “they just said it was an accident, then....”

“Naturally,” murmured Hilary.

Naturally, Mrs. Boy Fenwick had not hurt her husband’s name by saying

publicly that he had died of his own will. “And then,” said Hilary,

“you come to the upside-down morality of an Iris March, the part of her

that’s steel and iron and gold. She ruined herself, telling the truth.”

“But,” I said humbly, “if you had preferred not to think of her as

ruined, need you have believed that it was the truth?”

“Iris,” said Hilary, “never lies. It bores her. One quite naturally gets

into the habit of taking everything she says literally; for it always

will be literally true, particularly if it’s against herself. She

hasn’t, you see, a trace of the self-preservative instinct. Hm. Pity.”

Iris Fenwick couldn’t, it seemed, endure for one moment the idea that

his friends should think that Boy had fallen out in a moment of tipsy

dizziness--Boy being well known to be a very light drinker, and Iris

abominating drink, “the very idea of drink,” Hilary said, “as only the

daughter of a drunkard and the sister of a drunkard can. If you ever get

to know her at all well,” he suddenly smiled, “you may be a little put

out, in the natural satisfaction of your thirst, by seeing Iris look

just a little, well, sulky. Unreasonable, yes. But they get unreasonable

about drink, daughters or sisters or wives of drunkards.”

Mrs. Boy Fenwick had seemed to feel most deeply her responsibility to

Boy’s memory and to his friends’ love for him. She simply had, it

seemed, to safeguard the love they had for him, by making it clear that

he had died as he had lived. In disenchantment of an ideal--that, if Boy

was to commit suicide at all, could be his only possible justification.

His suicide, as apart from his death, naturally scarred his friends, but

not so deeply when they knew that it was done in the despair of the

disenchantment of an ideal. Boy’s friends would understand that

completely, Iris must have felt, for were they not Boy’s friends? He was

sensitive even to madness--they could, indeed they’d have to, think

that. But that he was given something to rouse his sensitiveness and to

overturn his balance--she had, Iris seemed to have felt, to tell his

friends that, so that, in giving Iris all the blame that was her due,

they should retain their memory of a Boy strong to the end in idealism.

And they seemed, I gathered from Hilary, to have done that without

stint. Hilary, too--for wasn’t he a realist, that man? One could see

them all at it, Boy’s friends to Boy’s widow--the dead adored youth in

their minds, the still, pale, beautiful girl between them. She had to

tell Gerald. You can imagine that....

She had, Hilary said, a quite unearthly beauty just at that time, and

was so still, so terribly _un_young somewhere inside her. “It was my

fault,” she had said. She had been looking when he had thrown himself

out of the window. He had just lit a cigarette, she said.

“That a girl of that age,” said Hilary, “that a girl whose moral

character, you can’t help seeing, was ... well, what it was, should be

so impelled to tell the truth at her own expense, at the expense of her

own ruin, at the expense of a queer brother’s hatred, for that must have

hurt her most of all, by a sense of honour that would make even the

rigidity of a Guy look small, well----”

“But isn’t that where, Hilary, there comes in that ‘caste’ which you

complain of her having always ignored?”

But Hilary wasn’t going back on any of his words. A “hm,” and he was

off, saying that it made him think there was something in the stale

paradox that you never know the best about a woman until you know the

worst. “But, God in Heaven, what a worst!”

She had wanted, Hilary tried to explain--pathetically, you can see,

trying to make clear to himself the noble as well as the shady side of

Iris--to keep permanent, even to reinforce, the love for Boy of Boy’s

friends by the idea that he had died untamed of his ideal. You could see

her, Hilary said, meeting Gerald half-way on that. “Boy died,” she had

said, “for purity.”

“Hilary! She said that!”

And that, you know, was all that she had said! Boy Fenwick had died “for

purity.” That was all.

“It seems,” I couldn’t help thinking aloud, “very sweeping....”

It was, Hilary said grimly--and very pointed, in a girl not twenty!

“But!” I murmured.

Boy’s friends, Hilary said, could naturally put only one construction on

it. Naturally, Hilary said. “For purity!” And Iris’s friends could put

no other. What, after all, didn’t “for purity” mean? It could mean, to

all the decent people of the world, but one thing....

Hilary looked at me in inquiry. I had made a noise. But I was so

surprised. “You don’t mean,” I tried not to gasp, “that you condemn her

on that for Boy Fenwick’s death!”

“One doesn’t,” snapped Hilary, “‘condemn’ an Iris March, an Iris

Fenwick, an Iris Storm. They stand condemned in themselves. They are

outside the law by which we----”

“Hilary, as the Girondins were put by the Jacobins!”

“We’re not perfect,” said Hilary quietly, “but we’re not _that_. What

Iris was at nineteen or so--or before, evidently--she has been ever

since.”

“What, as brave!”

“As loose. She made a gesture after Boy’s death, a fine gesture--and

then she set about proving how she had that in her to disenchant a Boy

to his death. She had ... ‘affairs.’ Not, you know, one long affair ...

but ‘affairs.’ Oh, quite openly. You’ve no doubt heard about some of

them. And when four years later young Storm married her, against his

people’s wishes, she was no more than--well, what do you call those

people? _Demi-mondaines?_ And since Storm’s death....”

“But!” I said, and also I said what it was in my mind to say, for are we

sticks, are we stones, or are we human? It was Boy Fenwick I was

thinking of, not of Iris’s life later, although it seemed to me that Boy

Fenwick had had a good deal to do with that, too. I had begun by

provoking Hilary. He had, with that appalling talent of his for

appearing reasonable, provoked me. He could arouse all that was worst in

a man, could Hilary. He had aroused all that was worst in me against

that young purity hero. It seemed to me that it was, to say the least,

rather hasty of a young man to die “for purity” in connection with a

girl of twenty. “Hilary, in two thousand years we have discovered only

one caddish way of getting to Heaven, and Boy Fenwick, like many

‘idealists,’ has taken it.”

“You probably don’t realise,” said Hilary, oh nreasonably, “the depths of

sudden despair--in decent people.”

“But I thought we were discussing human beings!” And, as regards human

beings, one couldn’t help thinking that a girl who had confessed that

her lover had died “for purity” was purer than the lover who had not

been able to live for it. Boy Fenwick’s death had an air of getting away

with rather a good thing. He had destroyed the girl by exalting

himself--for purity! How did boys come to have the infernal conceit of

setting themselves up as connoisseurs of purity? And he had taken care

to leave his corpse in such a position as best to foul the fountains of

his young widow’s womanhood. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ought to speak to

him about it.

“Words!” said Hilary. “Words, words!”

“Well, we can’t all,” I pleaded, “talk by throwing ourselves out of

windows. And I was brought up to believe that it was caddish to sneak on

a woman, whether for purity or for humbug.”

“It was Iris,” said Hilary, “who sneaked on herself.”

“Only because, Hilary, she didn’t want the young man to waste such a

fine suicide. She didn’t want to do him out of the glory of dying for

true-blue manhood. At the age of twenty a girl is justified in having a

belief in true-blue manhood. But Mrs. Storm seems to have grown up since

then.”

Hilary indulged me. I was young. “Of course,” he said, “the boy wasn’t

quite sane. Hm. But he loved Iris--you know, extravagantly--as Hector

Storm did later. Iris isn’t, it seems, one of those women you love a

little. And Boy loved purity. And because, of course, the two simply

didn’t go together--the shock, man, of realising that, to a boy in

love!--he went on his own way. And I don’t think,” said Hilary, as

though he was trying hard to be fair to one, “that we should sneer at

the things men die for--even that young madmen die for.”

In England, I reflected sulkily, you may not apply the faintest touch of

reason to any of the accepted laws of life and death without being

accused of sneering. The accusation is invaluable in puissance. It has

made England what she is. It at once stops all argument, all nonsense,

all sense, all thinking. So powerful is the effect that the one accused,

thinking that perhaps he _was_ sneering, at once checks his mind from

further thought on that line. The word creates a vacuum. No one likes to

be thought he is sneering--when he was merely, for a change, thinking.

It is like being told you have no “sense of humour.” It damns you

completely, because it makes you damn yourself. And one of the reasons

why there can never be a Marxist revolution in England is that the

rebels will be told that they are sneering at the King. They will be

abashed.

“Seldom,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “have I known a man pull his weight

less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.”