I
One chapter can’t reasonably be expected to bear the weight of that
night. We have so far built but the groundwork of that night, and on
that we have now to shape a peculiar edifice, according to the flimsy
but saturnine manner of the third decade of the twentieth century; to
which majority the twentieth century has attained, as more austere
histories will tell you, only after the most unparalleled pains,
retchings, belchings and bellowings; but we, taking a more private
course, will be more circumspect in our derangements.
We have, so far that night, seen Gerald Haveleur March, by the way. We
have seen his evening paper; but we have not read it. (Nor had Hilary
read his _Evening Standard_. He always “glanced at it,” he excused
himself later on, as he was going to bed. As I did, if ever.) We have,
also by the way, noted the presence in London of the car of the flying
stork. We have dined, and had some brandy. We have talked of purity, and
discovered an amiable dissonance in our views thereon. We would then, at
about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed, for after
dining with Hilary one somehow always went straightway to bed. That was
why, Guy said cruelly, one dined with Hilary. The “hm’s” seemed to
soothe the way thither. But that evening, however it came about, I did
not feel that I would like to go straightway to bed. One has, I suppose,
moods.
But I can’t account plausibly for the fact that Hilary came with me to
the Loyalty. Hilary did not go to night-clubs. His moods took a more
exclusive course. He ignored night-clubs, and thought he was ignoring
the whole of folly. Not so superior, I! Wherefore it passed that I
discovered my mood to Hilary as we stood in the hall of his house, for
Hilary was accompanying me to the door. Ross, red and silent and
amiable, stood somewhere about with my hat. Where we stood, just without
the door, the unusually warm June night smiled kindly on us. There is
not much sky in London, but that little smiled on us with a faint load
of stars, and somewhere behind the roofs there might be hanging a moon.
There might? But there was such a pretty tilted silver boat among the
chimneys of Curzon House! From the small table in the hall Hilary had
absently taken up the evening-paper, which was folded in that way which
tells you in the Stop-Press News that Surrey has scored 263 for eight
wickets. He held it in his hand with that air of one who has nothing
left to do but read an evening-paper. Grey and thoughtful and kind, he
stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the
faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that
contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during
their holidays. “Hm,” he said. “Nice night....”
“Hilary, why don’t you come with me? It won’t probably be amusing, but
we can always come away....”
“Dancing,” he frowned. Hilary likes dancing, really. Only, not being
exactly supreme among dancers, he never can understand how good dancers
may like dancing so much that they will dance whenever they can. If
Hilary had been a writer he would have put very witty and biting bits
about dancing into his books. All writers have clumsy feet.
I made to assure him that he would find himself in the most polite
company, for the Loyalty Club was notable as a relaxation for
Government, diplomacy, and princes of the blood. He “hm’d” viciously at
that, but set out with me down Curzon Street and through the noisome
shadows of Shepherd’s Market. Gerald’s light was on. But now that I was
not there to turn it out, when would Gerald’s light not be on?
Through the deep cavernous artery of Whitehorse Street we emerged on to
Piccadilly, quiet as before the storm that would at any moment break on
it from the theatres. Buses, their lights within revealing the seats,
fled madly as though from a doomed city. Loitering taxicabs, attracted
like moths to a flame by walking silkhats, came near the curb, hung in
doubt, loitered on.
I wondered whether she would be at the Loyalty. She might. I wondered
whether she could have accepted the sacrifice of herself “for purity”
without question, without bitterness. She would--that “Chislehurst
mind!” Oh, yes, she would have agreed with that idealist’s harshest
judgment--indeed, she had agreed with it so completely that she had
plucked two words from her heart and given them to the world to whip her
with. Boy Fenwick, you could see, had impressed himself like an
anchorite’s scourge on the souls of the twins. What was it she had said?
“It would be nice to die for purity.” Heavens, but wasn’t she sickened
of purity! That pitiful, pitiless moment in the bedroom of the Hôtel
Vendôme! The messy kindergarten that men make of love, and call it
“romance,” “idealism”! Perhaps Judas was the first idealist--that
desperate, exalted betrayal of the body to the soul. They are so certain
about their souls, your carnal idealists! Soul, soul, soul! May their
punishment be to meet their souls face to face in the afterworld! One
could see that boy, a slim pyjama’d figure by the window, a silhouette
of cold fire with the ruin of all mankind in his clean eyes, staring
through the meretricious dawn of Deauville towards the goal to which he
was exalted beyond reason by his disenchantment. He had loved Iris
madly.... But they do not love, those men! They torture, and are
tortured. They take love as they might take a flower out of a garden,
and they torture it because it does not thrive so well in the water of
their tears as in the water of God’s good sense. They do not love, those
men, they stand in wonder before the power to love that is in them. And
theirs the pleasure of a spurious conceit; theirs the pain of a spurious
disenchantment. If that boy had loved, he would have turned towards the
bed on which she lay, beaten, silenced, a child groping for sense, for
pity, for any reasonable thing, and he would have tried to understand,
and maybe he would have found the grace to understand, that in her,
despite and because of the hungers of the body, there was that frightful
humility to an unknown purpose which makes the limitless beauty of some
women. But the boy had lit a cigarette....
“Don’t we cross?” muttered Hilary, and we crossed towards Jermyn Street,
for the Loyalty Club lies in Pall Mall, to the end that, in immediate
contact with the Royal Automobile Club, it may at least boast, as might
occur to a student of Ruskin, a degree of eminence in the abyss.
One is, one can’t help being, impelled by a sense of decorum to disavow
at once any connection which may be fancied by worldly readers between
the Loyalty Club and the Embassy Club. Such connection could not, of
course, be fancied if the Loyalty were so well known as the Embassy; but
the Loyalty is, or was--yes, was--the daughter of the Embassy, and
although it is not yet so well known to the people of the town, who
shall say that a daughter is not more of the mode than her mother? Even,
life being what it is, in spite of the mother.
The Loyalty sprang from the Embassy, and it sprang in a polite
direction, from Bond Street down the hill of Saint James’s to Pall Mall,
where it might lie over against Carlton House Terrace. It sprang because
certain persons of _ton_ had found that the Mother Society, while never
ordered but with the most polite amenities, was growing perhaps just a
little crowded with what-nots; had, by banding themselves in a body
financial and social, founded the Loyalty; and were there assured of
more freedom for the exercise of a reasonable exclusiveness since, the
floor-space of the Loyalty being large enough to accommodate only one
hundred and fifty dancers, the membership was strictly limited to one
thousand and five hundred. Below were a swimming-bath and squash-courts,
besides the more orthodox facilities; and while the whole place was
appointed with the severest economy, if not with downright meanness, it
is well known that those who spend more than a certain amount of money
for supper, and see other people spending as much, will need no other
assurance of being in surroundings of the first quality. That is a
well-known French invention, of which England has only recently acquired
the recipe.
The Loyalty Club can, however, claim no historical notice but in the
person of the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, its _directeur du
restaurant_. We need not interrupt ourselves here to envy the salary at
which the Chevalier was with difficulty persuaded to leave his retreat
at Rapallo; but that he was worth it nobody can gainsay, for wheresoever
Risotto went he took with him his invention. His invention he called
_l’aristocracie internationale_; his name, you understand, for his
people; they loved it.
A study of the lives of philosophers and statesmen will inform and
ennoble the mind; but a sideways glance at such a phenomenon as the
twentieth-century Risotto cannot help but make it supple. One of the
menials of all time, he is one of the successes of ours; and a portent
of the doom of aristocracy in England. Born of Machiavelli by
Demoiselle Demi-monde, crafty, thin, pale, dry-shiny as shagreen, he had
walked to fortune about every great restaurant in Europe, adding always,
but with discrimination, to his order of _l’aristocracie
internationale_; and to bankruptcy twice, of truly patrician
magnificence, about the _baccara_ tables of his less inspired but more
cautious colleague, M. Cornuché of Cannes and Deauville. The “creation”
of the Loyalty Club must serve his biographers as the pinnacle of
Risotto’s career. _L’aristocracie internationale_ was ultimately served
at last. Not an American was left on Fifth Avenue, nor an Argentine in
the Americas; while Australian fruit-farms deplored the absence of their
masters, and Canada adored the _ton_ of her peerless millionaires.
We had no sooner entered among the company than Hilary was for going at
once: but Risotto having rewarded us with a sofa-table--for he and
Hilary had, as the saying is, been boys together when Hilary had been
attached to the Embassy in Paris and Risotto was ennobling patrons of
the Ritz to _l’aristocracie internationale_--he and I prevailed on
Hilary to stay by ordering for him an angel-on-horseback, to which he
was notably partial; while I, Risotto said, would have a haddock with a
nice egg on it.
Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest night-clubs, at once left me
to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. This was Mrs. Ammon.
Whereas I, in not dancing, was following an example set by many present.
We, we watched our elders dance with each other’s mothers, and for them
the band on the balcony played with a sensibility approaching grief.
There was no tune. But it is absurd, this querulous demand of young
people for “tunes”! Our fathers and our mothers have done with “tunes.”
Let there, our uncles say, be a rhythm. Let there, say our aunts, be
syncopation. There was a rhythm. There was syncopation. Grave, profound,
unforgettable, there was a rhythm. It had a beat like the throbbing of
an agonised heart lost in an artery of the Underground. Dolorous it was,
yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it. They call this rhythm the
Blues. It reminded you of past and passing things. It reminded you of
the days when, people over forty had still enough restraint not to crowd
out every ballroom and night-club with their dancing in open formation,
playfully aiming at each other’s tonsils with their feet. It reminded
you of the scent tangled in the hair of she with whom you had last
danced to that rhythm. You saw the soft line of her face by your
shoulder, the tender pocket behind her ear, the absorbed excursion of
her breath through her nostrils, the dark eyebrow over which you would
lightly pass the third finger of your left hand but that it would soil
the tip of it. You mourned the presence of the dead. You mourned the
memory of the living. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you
of regret. It reminded you of a small white face suddenly thrown back
against your arm with a smile that disturbed the dance. It reminded you
of the desire that pleasantly turns to dust when you are desired. It
reminded you of things you had never done with women you had never met.
You danced again at the Ambassadeurs at Cannes, with the masts of
yachts drawn ebony-black between the tall windows and the pale blue
night over the sea. The Lido lay like a temptation before your mind, and
the songs of the gondoliers raved into the measure of whispering feet.
The Spanish King brushed by you at San Sebastian, eating salted almonds,
again you hesitated in the dance at Biarritz to listen to the roar of
the Atlantic, and across a perfumed street in Seville you again saw the
shiver of a mantilla through the cracked window of a cabaret. You danced
again beneath the vermilion moon of Algeria, between the American Bar
and the pyramid-cypress tree. You danced again in the Bois in Paris, the
trees like monstrous black pagodas against the night, the stars
brilliant as sequins on an archangel’s floating cloak, the magically
white faces of women, the lights in the night making love to the black
shadows in their hair, their lips red as lobsters, their arm-pits clean
as ivory, the men talking with facile gestures, the whole tapestry of
the Château de Madrid like a painted fan against a summer night. They
call this rhythm the Blues, which is short for a low state of vitality
brought about by the action of life on the liver. O Baby, it’s _divine_!
That is what they say, our elders.
Astorias, _chef d’orchestre_, stood at rest by the edge of the balcony,
his violin under his arm, his bow gently tapping the edge of a bowl of
nameless ferns that hid his feet. His negligence is informed with
depression, his poise leans on melancholy. The Blues, that man knows. He
seems to wonder why he is there, why any one is there, why every one is
there. No one can tell him, so he goes on doing nothing, lonely as a
star in hell. He does not toil, nor spin, nor play his violin. From the
crowded floor a woman, her face powdered brown, her mouth scarlet as the
inside of a pomegranate in a tale by Oscar Wilde, beseeches him with an
arm black-gloved to the shoulder to continue to play. He yields.
Nearby was a corner-table of eight young people. Maybe they would dance
later on. Suddenly one of the girls would give a loud laugh, and then
there would be silence. Of the four young men one looked as Richard of
Gloucester might possibly have looked, a little bent, a little sinister,
and pale, as though he had been reading a treatise on diseases far into
the night before. They were four married couples, and they had all been
boys and girls together, and they had a son and daughter apiece, and
they all went to the same dentist. The women had white oval faces, small
breasts, blue eyes, thin arms, no expression, no blood: literally, of
course, not genealogically. One of them stared with wide blue eyes right
into people’s faces, and blinked vaguely. She was lovely. These eight
young people were very happy. They ignored everything but themselves, in
whom they were not very interested. Presently a prince of the blood
joined them, there was a little stir for a minute or two, a little
laughter, and then he rose to dance with the girl of the blind blue
eyes. As she danced she stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the
ceiling. She looked bored with boredom.
There were many green dresses: jade-green, October green, rusty green,
soft green, sea-green, dying green, any shade of green that would suit
the expiring voices of formal women in a garden by Watteau. There were
thirty-nine green dresses. There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the
wrong sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus whose head had been
dipped in dressing and then put in a warm place to dry. She dried in
patches. A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her bosom to her
throat, and she said to Mr. Trehawke Tush, the novelist: “The only
decent cocktails you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar, but the
people are so odd. My Archie wants to stand for Parliament. What do you
think?” Mr. Trehawke Tush, portraits of whose pre-war face must be
familiar to every one, was the most successful of the younger novelists,
and had earned from Miss Rebecca West the praise that he was “the leader
of the spats school of thought.” Mr. Trehawke Tush will go down to
history as the originator of Pique as a profitable literary idea. He had
hit on the discovery that English library subscribers will
whole-heartedly bear with any racy and illegal relation between the
sexes if the same is caused by Pique. He had observed that the whole
purpose of a “best-seller” is to justify a reasonable amount of adultery
in the eyes of suburban matrons. He had observed that in no current
English novel was there ever a mention of any woman having a lover
because she wanted a lover: she always took a lover because something
had upset her, as in real life she might take an aspirin. Mr. Trehawke
Tush had then created Pique, and was spoken of as a “brilliant feminine
psychologist.” Since the rise of Mr. Trehawke Tush no reviewer will take
any count of a writer as a “brilliant feminine psychologist” unless he
can explain the regrettable adultery of his leading female character by
the word Pique. This will also persuade _Punch_ reviewers to consider
the tale wholesome. Mr. Trehawke Tush was up to all those dodges. He
said: “I have just finished a serial for _The Daily Sale_. I want to
show up this kind of thing, the waste, the Indecency of it. All these
girls. I thought the editor might take objection to certain passages, as
there is some strong bedroom stuff in it, but he only asked me to change
one thing. I had put ‘he kissed her where he would,’ and so I changed it
to ‘as he would.’”
In a corner far across the crowded room sat Venice Pollen, most sedately
between her father and her mother. We waved, and decided that it was too
crowded to dance; but we did not know, Venice and I, that we were met
that night in darkness.
Observe Venice. We will always be found on Venice’s side, and why?
because she is a darling. Mark her now, and how the smoke about her
clears, how clean she is, and so excited! For Venice! You know she is
excited because she is so still, there between her hard father and her
monstrous fat mother. Mark her there, a green flower with a mad golden
head. And her eyes are blue, mad blue, and she is the queen of ten
thousand freckles, of which she is very contemptuous, saying: “Who wants
freckles?” And she had a noble forehead which would crinkle when she did
not catch what you said, and that was often enough, for she was always
talking herself. “Darling, darling, _darling_!” That is what she would
say. And on her lion’s-cub head was a tumult of short dusty-gold hair,
which was by nature rebellious, so that she must ever and again be
giving her head a fierce backward shake, as though that was going to do
any good. Mark her there, so sedate between her hard father and her
monstrous fat mother. Not sedate really, Venice! Yet she must be sedate
now, for Venice, who by ordinary knew not fear, was as though fascinated
by fear of her father, who was none other than Nathaniel Pollen, once of
Manchester, but now of Hampshire and Berkeley Square, for was he not as
rich as Crœsus would have been had Crœsus owned the half of the
newspapers of England?
So there sat Venice, most excited-still, undoubtedly waiting for Napier.
They were lovers, Napier and Venice, and in three days they would be
married. Dark, shy, handsome Napier! Favourite of the gods, you might
well call him, yet his was that rare, surprising quality which will keep
a man poised in continual sunshine, which will never let him droop and
laze in the certainty that his sins of omission and casualness will be
forgiven him. He was, to talk for a change of the things that matter, in
the Foreign Office, and worked conscientiously hard at a career which
would--“undoubtedly,” they said, “undoubtedly”--in the course of time
place Napier among the most honoured of the nation’s servants; although
he would--“undoubtedly,” one can’t help feeling, “undoubtedly”--reach in
the course of time the very same pinnacle if he did no work at all, for
England and America are the only two countries left in the world wherein
men’s charm and good looks are really appreciated by men in the
political, high financial, diplomatic, and educational spheres.
Our table faced the swing-doors across the room, and through the crowd
of dancers one could see who passed in and out. There was a press of
young men standing vaguely by the door, perhaps doubtful whether they
should stay or go to return another day. A very haughty and
flushed-looking lady, expensively dressed in a _dernier cri_, which she
wore like armour, tramped past them, looked suspiciously into their
bland faces, and out. She suspected they might be thinking she was going
to more than powder her nose. They were, she was, who cared?
A voice rose above the saxophone at the table to the left of mine. It
came from a heavy, drooping man with the eyes of a schoolboy, the smile
of a genius, the gestures of a conqueror, and the face of a bully. He
said: “There are two things in England that not even God could afford to
be truthful about: Himself and the Navy.” With the man of destiny was
the most beautiful woman in Ireland (Ulster) and a dark woman with a
high bust and flashing eye, who spoke Cockney with an American accent.
Her father was a lord. She said: “I am growing to detest London. There
is nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get there.” The most
beautiful woman in Ireland (Ulster) had hair as black as a raven’s wing
and two aquamarines for eyes, while the symmetry of her features
appalled the epithet. She said: “I took my little Juno out to tea with
Fay Avalon to-day and she was so naughty on the handsome parquet floor,
the mother’s darling!”
Then things happened. Gerald happened. Gerald and Aphrodite.... Venice,
Iris, Guy de Travest, Hugo Cypress, Napier, Colonel Duck, Gerald ... if
only one had a cinema for a moment! And there was also my Lady Pynte,
with whom I should have been dancing. Where Mrs. Ammon went there also
went Cornelia Pynte, and where Lady Pynte went there also went Angela
Ammon. They were fine hearty women. And since Hilary was dancing with
Mrs. Ammon I ought instantly to have begged the honour of taking the
floor with Lady Pynte. There she sat, across the room, alone, a fine
hearty woman. But, then, one goes to a night-club to think, to be alone,
to be comfortable, to eat a haddock. Lady Pynte thought dancing Good
Exercise, and she was taller than me, too. A fine woman. Once, as Hilary
toiled by with Mrs. Ammon, he whispered fiercely over her shoulder: “Why
don’t you dance with the old trout?” But I drowned discourtesy to Lady
Pynte in wine, for it was a “late night” at the Loyalty, which meant
that you could drink wine until they took it from you. Lady Pynte was
renowned as one of the five best women riders to hounds in the country.
It was said that the foxes in the Whaddon Chase country ceased laughing
when any one said “Pynte!” near them. But Lady Pynte also had her
politics, and she headed Movements; while Angela Ammon was more of a
literary turn. Lady Pynte liked young men to Do; Mrs. Ammon to Dare.
Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon
preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys; Mrs.
Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were Original. Lady
Pynte insisted on Working for the Welfare of the People at Large and Not
Just Our Own Little Class, she played bridge with a bantering tongue and
a Borgia heart, she maintained that the best place at which to buy shoes
was Fortnum & Mason’s, and if she saw you innocently taking the air of a
sunny morning she would say: “You look not at all well, my good young
man. Why don’t you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be
Riding.” That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s
haddock rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She
would say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from
Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did not
dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had already tried
to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that I came from the
lower classes, but she did not appear to think that any class could be
so Low as that. She would show one round her stables, and one felt an
awful fool standing there in the cold being expected to be intelligent
about the various horses, whereas one could only mutter, “Ah, good
horse!” or “Oh, there’s a fine horse!” until one day I remembered what
Peter Page, the critic, had once told me, that whenever he was shown a
horse by a horse-lover he would instantly say “What withers!” and thus
create a sound and manly impression as a horse-fancier. But when I came
out impressively with “What withers!” I thought that Lady Pynte looked
at me suspiciously, and Hilary, who was also fancying horses with us,
told me later that it wasn’t done to look a lady straight in the eye and
say “What withers!” Horses make life complicated, that is what it is.
Hugo Cypress, dancing by with his wife Shirley, called out: “Ho, there!
Seen the evening-paper? Friend of yours....”
“What?” I said. “Hugo....” But what on earth was this about the
evening-paper? I was agitated--suddenly, I was very agitated indeed.
There is something quite beastly about evening-papers, beastly and
naked....
Astorias stayed his men, and Hilary came back to the table. Gloomily he
looked at the angel that was frozen to its horse. And he looked worried.
“Hilary, what’s this I heard Hugo murmuring about the evening-paper?”
“Gerald,” said Hilary. “Hm....”
“But what, Hilary? Not serious, surely?”
“Oh, not serious,” Hilary grunted. “Not serious. Hm. Just a nasty silly
mess, I think. Didn’t catch what. Hm....”
I realised then that I had known all the time. That curious, hopeless
grinning.... But, good Lord, what sort of a mess? Hilary didn’t know.
“Something in the evening-paper,” he said. Hilary looked hurt, worried,
and I had that jumpy feeling that I must do something at once. But what
sort of a mess? A drunkard’s row? What? Hilary didn’t know, and I was
just about to ask the waiter if he could find me an evening-paper when
two figures by the door held my eye. And a third just behind them.
“Kids!” murmured Hilary, with a sort of grudging smile. And they looked
just that, for all their beauty--“kids.” One saw them playing together
under a tree. A long while ago, they had played together under a tree.
The favourite of the gods and the shameless, shameful lady....
“Hm,” grumbled Hilary. “Imitation....”
But I knew, for I once had a friend who was a taxidermist. There were
396 white ermines round Iris. White and tawny and white. She was like a
light, and you hadn’t realised what an infernal dungeon the place was
until the door had suddenly opened and she had come in, wrapped in cloth
of soft snow. Boy’s head, curly head, white and tiger-tawny. She was
like a light, a sad, white light. I can’t describe her but like that.
Napier had been standing by the door, waiting for the dance to cease, so
that he might join Venice. Then Iris had come in, grave, very
unself-conscious. She didn’t see Napier. He didn’t see Iris. Her
companion was Colonel Duck, M.F.H.
“God, that man!” sighed Hilary. Oh, Iris was hopeless! Why, of all men,
Colonel Duck?
Napier made to walk away. Iris and Colonel Duck made to follow Risotto.
Maybe one of the 396 white ermines just brushed Napier’s sleeve. Maybe
this, maybe that. “Kids!” said Hilary. Napier had started round, looked
blank: tall, slender, dark-haired, dark eyes always fevered with a fear
of you could never tell what--they almost blinked now, you thought, at
the light that Iris was, and she with her pools of eyes simply blazing
with surprise and an unsure smile parting the painted mouth. “Napier!”
“Iris!” As though, you know, some one with a soft “There!” had turned a
tap somewhere. They smiled completely. Well, they would, the old
friends. Naturally. She wouldn’t, I was sure, be calling him “Naps,” and
she detesting abbreviations and the like.
The wrong sort of Jewess gave a short, audible outline of Iris to Mr.
Trehawke Tush. Hilary stared at her venomously. Then he stared across
the room at Colonel Duck venomously. Colonel Duck stood behind Iris’s
white shoulder, a red dragon of a man, smiling relentlessly with his
well-known geniality. Napier did not appear to see Colonel Duck, M.F.H.
Napier and Iris were talking very quickly, laughing, maybe rather shyly.
Then Astorias, refreshed, hurled his men against the conversation;
bravely it held on for a second or two, then lay shuddering and
shattered, and gone was Napier, gone Iris towards a table with Colonel
Duck, whose red, relentless geniality showed no hint of the certain fact
that the next time he was at that talkative club of his he would say
that Napier Harpenden had been another of Iris Storm’s “affairs” and
might quite well be again, Iris Storm being what she was. Notably good
at all games and sports was Colonel Duck, M.F.H., and therefore
tolerated with respect by decent men.
“I wonder if she knows anything about Gerald,” I was saying, when from
her table across the room she seemed to be beckoning. To Hilary, not to
me. She looked very serious. The emerald shone on the third finger of
her right hand. She did not appear to see me. I felt bitter.
“Hm,” growled Hilary. He wanted to be persuaded to go. He wanted to go
reluctantly. “Hate that Duck man so,” he said pathetically.
“Go on, Hilary. She might know something. I’ll get a paper.”
“Why, there’s Guy!” said Hilary. “Must have just come up from Mace.
There, by the door....”
The carpet of colours, on which the men were sprinkled like the black
smuts on a town garden, swayed between us and the doorway, but no crowd
might hide that man, for he was tall as a tree and his crisp yellow hair
glared like a menace above the intervening heads and his frozen blue
eyes petrified smoke, noise, and distance. Hilary was standing, about to
go towards Iris. He looked rather sheepish at being found by Guy at the
Loyalty. Most unsmiling was Guy that night.
“Ross must have told him we were here,” I said. “He’ll have come about
Gerald....”
“This foul place!” Hilary snapped. “You go downstairs with Guy, and I’ll
get Iris to rid herself of her fancy friend and bring her down....”