And that was how, soon after midnight that night, I found myself for the
first time in the car of the flying stork. For the first time.... Iris
had dropped her boyish-looking chauffeur in the course of the evening,
because, she said, she only liked driving at night, when the air blew
clean and chill. She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as
though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel. The
great bonnet swept round by the squat Palace and up the slope of Saint
James’s Street, which only by night may remember a little of the
elegance it has long since forfeited by day.
“But that’s not the point,” I remember saying. “He won’t care a button
what any one else is thinking about it. He’ll just go mad at the
humiliation in himself, he’ll worry it, making a mountain of
sordidness....” I had told her that Gerald had sent her his love, and
her eyes had lit up at that, and she had laughed, shyly. “That’s
better,” she had said, and now she said: “Yes, that’s the point. He’s
proud, proud as Lucifer ... and such a baby! Oh, Gerald, you sensitive
beast! I’m going abroad to-morrow, and he must either come with me or he
must join me quickly, quickly. You’ll persuade him, too, won’t you?” I
did not say that, if I knew Gerald, he would probably be in a state far
beyond persuasion. But, I thought, there was no harm in trying to see
him.
At first, when Guy had told me downstairs at the Loyalty, I had just
laughed. It seemed so absurd, fantastic. Gerald had been arrested in
Hyde Park for “annoying women!” It was, you can see, unbelievable. How
could Gerald “annoy” a woman, Gerald who was so shy that he could never
even speak to one? “But there it is,” said Guy.
Perhaps it is because that was the last time I was ever at the Loyalty,
but I remember the most irrelevant details and the vivid way each one
of them seemed to impress some part of my mind. Guy and I stood in the
deserted Bar. Through the open door at the far end came the clean,
somehow biting tang of a marble swimming-bath: a faint splash now and
then, a rustle of water: a boyish American voice calling sharp and loud:
“Dive, you Julie, dive and get it over! You’ve got no hips, kid, and you
can’t drown without hips. I want to go eat some food.” Then, I remember,
Billy Swift walked intently past us, towards the Cloak-room. He comes to
mind vividly because that was the last time I saw Billy Swift alive. His
thin, lined, scarlet face glowed with the health-giving breezes that
penetrate into corners of clubs and restaurants where men sit drinking
brandy; his blue eyes always peered eagerly and kindly at you, as though
he had something of the first importance to say. He said, very hoarsely:
“There’s a boy up there dancing with two wooden legs. Good boy, I call
him. Good night.” And in a minute or two he repassed us, walking
intently, his crimson grey-haired head, immaculate in every detail,
sticking like an old fighting-bird’s out of the wide astrakhan collar of
the coat that he always wore against the midnight chill. Two months
later he was found on the cliffs near Dover with that head beaten in,
and some one was hanged. Billy Swift wouldn’t have had him hanged. “My
fault,” he would have said hoarsely. “My fault, chaps.”
“But there it is,” Guy said thoughtfully. “Sickening, isn’t it? Might
appeal, of course....”
“He’ll not appeal,” I said. Imagine Gerald “appealing” against a
five-pound fine for “indecently annoying” a woman in Hyde Park!
Guy always spoke low, he murmured in a chill voice, but you could always
hear every word he said. Not that you didn’t, after a while, know all
his words by heart, for Guy’s was one of those vocabularies that a
classical education is supposed to have expanded. As he spoke he would
always be looking at some point just above the crown of your head.
“Sorry about that boy,” he was saying thoughtfully. “He’s had no luck.
And this Hyde Park business might happen to any one nowadays....” He
looked down at me suddenly from that height of his, and I was, as
always, surprised by the profound childishness which would suddenly
sweep the ice out of the blue of those eyes.
“Beasts,” he went on, almost pathetically. “But aren’t they--those Park
police? Arresting nice old clergymen, Privy Councillors, any one, just
because a poor old boy who’s been brought up too well feels like having
a word or two with a sickening woman. I mean, you need torpedo-netting
around you to get round the Park in safety nowadays. Well, don’t you?
And now they plant poor young Gerald. I’m sure, aren’t you, that these
police put the women there on purpose as--what d’you call them?”
“_Agents provocateurs?_”
“Well, have it your own way. But I’ve been watching the police round
about here lately, and of course they’re mostly very good fellows, the
best, but the police round the Park are quite a different lot. I’d like
to kick them for the way they look those poor devils of women up and
down as though they were dirt. I never thought much of the type of sneak
who went for the Military Police during the war, and these fellows seem
rather like that. Anything for an arrest and promotion.” He smiled
faintly. Guy’s eyes seemed always to get most frosty when he smiled. “I
once promoted some of them the wrong way for being inhuman. Inhuman,
that’s what these blighters get if you don’t keep an eye on them. And
these Park fellows seem somehow to have got spoilt since the war. I
mean, it just looks like that to an outsider. Good Lord, you’ve got to
have laws and to keep laws, but you needn’t set a lot of dirty sneaks at
the Bolshevik game of ruining gentlemen just for being silly old asses.”
I stared at the one black pearl that from time immemorial had stained
Guy’s shirt-front, which somehow seemed to fit him as no one else’s ever
could. Guy was easy to listen to, because you always knew what he would
say and how he would say it. (He had an enormous reverence for any man
of the smallest talent, any man “who did things with his brain.”)
“I saw him for a minute this evening,” I said. “He seemed rather queer,
but he said nothing about it....”
“But imagine the young devil! This business happened one night last
week, and he doesn’t then come to see you about it--or even Hilary or
me, because, of course, I’d have done all I could for him, for old
Barty’s sake as well as because he behaved himself in the war. I mean,
this will almost kill old Eve Chalice when she sees it in the morning
papers. It’s her I’m sorry for, for she’s always been fighting this
sticky patch in the March brood--first her eldest brother, old
Portairley, then her younger brother, Barty, then her niece Iris, and
now young Gerald comes along to make the poor old dear cry her eyes out
again. God, the vileness of it! Picking up odd women in parks. I haven’t
got a paper with me, but you ought to see the vile way they put down
every beastly detail, and you can see as clear as anything that it was
more bad luck and childishness on Gerald’s part than anything else. But,
good Lord, what’s the matter with the man! I mean, one simply doesn’t go
into the Park for women! The accuser, or whatever you call them, was a
woman called Spirit, and in evidence two plainclothes men and a
constable. I’m going to have an eye kept on Mrs. Spirit, just to see
all’s fair and square. I mean, it’s beginning to look as though the law
was the ass that St. George forgot to kill while he was showing off with
that sickening dragon. This Mrs. Spirit said--wish I had a paper--that
she was sitting on a bench waiting for her brother, when Gerald sat down
beside her and made ‘indecent’ proposals. Whereupon she was so
shocked--and she a grown-up married woman, too--that she jumped up like
a scalded cat and let out some sickening howls, and up come the police.
Now you can’t help thinking they were waiting behind a tree with old
Spirit as a bait, can you? and caught young Gerald instead of a Dean....
They’d get more promotion, I shouldn’t wonder, for a Dean....”
And as Guy spoke I saw Gerald glancing at the evening-paper on the curb
of Curzon Street, and I saw him suddenly throw back his head and laugh
at the heavens....
Gerald, Gerald! The despiser of the world caught by the meanest trap of
the world’s unrest. The worshipper of the hero who had died “for purity”
figuring in the filthy columns of the cheap Sunday Press as another
peer’s nephew gone wrong. Gerald, starved of life, Gerald who knew no
woman, Gerald who wrote the tale of a man who had lived “for purity” ...
and he had sat down beside a woman called Spirit on a bench in Hyde
Park. Those nightmare women who rave in the minds of lonely men, soft
women marvellously acquiescent, possible, the woman Aphrodite, goddess
of love and beauty, silent as marble, but acquiescent ... and Aphrodite
had dwindled into Mrs. Spirit, who was sitting waiting for her brother
in Hyde Park, and the law lurking nearby to give the Sunday papers
“copy.” And I saw Mr. Auk in an angle of the little tunnel, telling a
friend of his something funny about Gerald....
“It makes one just sick, Guy. Sick....”
“Now look here,” Guy murmured, tapping my shoulder with one finger.
“Don’t you waste any time being sick just now, but go round and see the
young devil----”
“I’m going straight away.”
“Bright boy. And just ... Oh, tell him it’s all right and not to be an
ass all his life. Tell him we’re all on his side, and if there’s going
to be any being sick that we’re all going to be sick together and in one
corporate body, or words to that effect. Poor young devil. And I know
he’ll be feeling this, because I had a sort of eye on him in France, and
he seemed as sensitive as a violin string----”
“And drink’s made him worse now. He’s almost certain to be nearly
speechless to-night. But I’ll see.”
“Lord, O Lord, what a mess Barty left behind him! But you see what I
mean? All you’ve got to tell young Gerald is not to make a mountain of
this in his mind, as it’s the sort of thing that might happen to any one
who is ass enough to go into the Park at night without an escort, and
you never know but they mightn’t one night arrest the Bishop of London
himself for saying ‘How do’ to his aunt....”
Now I have read in books about people “sailing” into places, and I
suppose Iris came into the deserted Bar like that. Hilary must have been
just behind her, for I heard his voice, but I only saw Iris, and I
remember how she seemed to hold the white ermine round her with one
clenched hand, and how the great emerald shone like a green fly on the
soft, soft white. And the tawny curls danced their formal dance on her
cheeks as she came towards us, swiftly, oh swiftly, saying, in that
suddenly strong, clear voice: “Oh, Guy ... and friend of Gerald! Will
you help me, dear friend? I want to go round to see Gerald, and Hilary
says you still have the key of the house. I went hours ago, but I could
get no answer at the door. I wonder, would you come with me?”
“Iris,” said Guy sternly, and I remember the way she threw back her head
to look at him, and I thought again of the queer, unconscious way she
had of always meeting men on their own ground. “Why don’t you ever look
up your old friends when you’re in London, Iris? Or aren’t we your old
friends? Or is that fine representative English gentleman, Colonel Duck,
your old friend? Answer me yes or no.”
“Oh, Guy!” she said softly, sadly. “I wouldn’t have you be a humbug. I
wouldn’t have you and Hilary be humbugs--you two, out of all the world.”
“But, honest, Iris, I’d like to see you. Ask Hilary. ‘Where’s that girl
got to?’ I asks, and he says ‘hm,’ says he, if you see what I mean.”
“Whereas I, Guy, have learnt not to regret old friends. I’ve become an
old woman on my travels, and one of the first things an old woman must
learn is that the best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for
then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends ... which
is, perhaps, a little different from being ‘old friends’....”
“Iris, don’t be so bitter!” snapped Hilary. That, I thought, came rather
well from Hilary. Just at that moment a woman screamed from the
swimming-bath, there was a resounding splash. Guy was saying: “You’d
better take Gerald away for a while, Iris.”
“If he’ll only come,” she said, “that’s what I want to do....”
I remember thinking just then that I mustn’t forget to thank her for
that beautiful notepaper, and also to ask her what was that last word in
her note.
“I’ve got an idea,” Hilary was saying, in the specially detached voice
he keeps for ideas, “that now we _are_ in this foul night-club we might
as well do a bit of good. There’s old Pollen upstairs, and we might ...
hm, well, perhaps not.”
“Perhaps not what, Hilary?”
“Hm. I was thinking of Eve seeing the thing in to-morrow morning’s
papers. She only reads one wretched picture-paper, and that’s Pollen’s,
so I thought, hm, that if we asked him not to....”
“Eve, the poor darling!” Iris whispered. We seemed to be in a desert,
three shadows of men, three shadows of voices, and Iris, very white and
alight. That is how I always remember her, alight.
“No good, Hilary,” Guy was murmuring. “He won’t, because it’s what those
fellows call News. And if you try you will only upset young Venice and
make her perhaps feel she’s in the other camp, rather the wrong camp for
her, she might think, and just as she’s marrying Naps. She’s a good
girl, loyal as anything to her father--and he’s a good fellow enough,
but he’s got a queer complaint called Consistency. It’s something you
make money out of, I think. I know him very well, as I’ve blackballed
him from three clubs. My God, ever seen the man’s jaw?”
“She’s lovely, I thought,” Iris said.
“Good girl, Venice....”
“Hell ...” said Iris suddenly, breathlessly.
“What?” Hilary jumped.
“Only ... hell is raving with millionaires with jaws like Mr. Pollen’s.
I’ve dreamt, I know. People who snap ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ very brusquely and
then stick to it, no matter what it is. This century likes them like
that. Come along, my friend, come along!”
And in a trice Iris and I were walking up the long passage which
connects the Loyalty Club to the pavement of Pall Mall. On one side it
is hung (but this is two years ago) with glass cases laden with fine cut
jades and ambers, while small blue and green figures of animal men,
human animals, and bestial gods will delight the eyes of Egyptologists:
on the other the faces of beautiful women and children will testify to
the photographic art of Sebastian Roeskin of Dover Street. Iris walked
swiftly, heroically, her eyes intent before her, impersonal, utterly
unself-conscious. The glaring lights in the passage lit her
swiftly-moving green-and-silver shoes, or were they sandals with high
heels? and so intent were the flippant silver-flashing ankles, briskly
striding on, as though chiming the never-to-be-known marching song of a
lady who must always meet men on their own ground.
She said: “You’ll be wondering how I came to dine with a man like Victor
Duck. Well, I’ve been wondering myself. Poor Victor Duck. He has taken
to caddishness like a drug, and he goes on increasing the doses. It’s
almost fascinating to watch, just to see what inevitable things he will
say next. And he said and did them all, every one, even to ‘Dear little
girl’ and to ordering a private room. But I said I never dined in
private rooms on Fridays.”
There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for
their women from the Cloak-Room, maybe waiting for sirens to come to
them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for
the next minute, as young men will. Admirably formal they looked,
admirably toned to the dress-coats of Davies, the trousers of Anderson
and Sheppard, the hats of Lock, the waistcoats of Hawes and Curtis, the
ties of Budd. Handkerchiefs by Edouard and Butler. The glory to God.
They looked furtively at Iris in the way that decent men will at a woman
who is said to have had lovers, like cows at a bull. One of them said
gloomily: “Might go to the Albert Hall Ball.”
Pall Mall seemed wrought of stately marble palaces, and Iris said that
the reason why so many English people seemed to prefer Paris to London
was that English people saw Paris mostly at night, while if they could
see enough of London by night they would never leave it. “And the
people!” she said. “All these years I’ve spent abroad, and never met any
people so good, so decent, as the English. Couldn’t you sometimes kill
people for the _quality_ of their admiration? Oh, I’ve committed so many
murders in foreign streets....”
“But, if you like England ... why are you going away? You’re free....”
“Ah,” she mocked, and, as we walked, a hand darted out from her white
cloak and touched my sleeve, and startled me very much. “Wait till
you’re so free that you just daren’t do what you like. Wait till you’re
so free that you can be here one minute and there another. Wait till
you’re so free that you can see the four walls of your freedom and the
iron-barred door that will let you out into the open air of slavery, if
only there was some one to open it. Ah, yes, freedom....”
Then up the street of ghostly dandies we flew behind the silver stork,
and the wind rushed down from Hampstead Heath and the wind ran out of
Jermyn Street and jumped like a drunken man on the tawny cornstalks that
were her hair, and waved them about and danced with them. But not she to
notice, she who seemed to have a great talent for just not noticing
things! She was silent, serious, intent. The light of an arc-lamp kissed
the long slender legs into silver.
Once she turned to me, smiled, and looked away again. I wondered if she
meant me to see that our friendship was in that smile. I hated her, I
think, because she made me feel so incapable, unwise. As the stork, with
scarcely a rustle of its wings, flew towards the Christian Science
Chapel at the head of Half-Moon Street, she said: “I’m tired. All day
seeing lawyers and trustees, and then taking sweet old Eve all round and
round Selfridge’s because she had never been there before and some one
had told her she could find everything she wanted there. And she was
quite upset at being unfaithful to Harrod’s.... And Gerald! Oh, but why
couldn’t they let Gerald alone! Just because, I suppose, the Marches are
never let off anything....”
“Here we are,” I said, and she pulled up beneath the lamp by The Leather
Butler in East Chapel Street. From the footboard a lane of low houses
and shops stretched in a vague, squalid line towards the open Market
Place at one end and the darkness of the mews at the other; somehow
like an etching in a clouded light by an uncertain hand. Bits of
newspapers and torn placards, the nameless odours of yesterday’s
economies. The wind that came from Hampstead Heath could find no way
into Shepherd’s Market, and it lay still as a tramp sleeping. Cats
watched us intently from the middle distance, and a striped cat leapt
with a scream from the shadow of the door of my old house. Gerald’s
light was on. “What’s that mean?” Iris whispered. She seemed to be
frightened, and she said sharply: “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I was just thinking,” I told her, “that if one could judge by
appearances, which of course one must never do, in that white cloak in
this mean lane you look as nearly an angel as this world could ever
see.”
“Don’t let’s mock the angels. What does it mean, Gerald’s light being
on?”
“Only what it has always meant, that I must turn it out.”
“Ah, you’ve been very good to Gerald....”
And I am glad that, just then, I said that I was very fond of Gerald.
Then we were on the narrow landing of my old flat, in the darkness. The
musty stillness of that little old house brought six years of nights
into my mind, and I wondered how people ever regretted their first
youth, those intolerable uncertainties and enthusiasms that stare at you
from the dead past like condemned gargoyles. The incapability of youth
goes on long enough, Heaven knows, if not so long as the savagery of
childishness. In the darkness I could feel the soft ermine of her cloak
against me, and that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know.
She was very, very still, and I could not even hear her breathing.
“It is very kind of you to come with me,” she said suddenly, seriously.
We were very still on that landing, and I drew back my arm where it
touched her cloak. It was very soft, that cloak. “I have thought of you,
and decided that if you ever thought of me you had a right to think with
dislike....” She was talking smoothly, calmly, when suddenly her voice
completely broke, into little bits. “Oh!” she whispered. I was silent.
She said quickly: “To me there’s something terribly indecent about
humanity, all humanity. It’s as though, in the whole lovely universe,
humanity was cooped in this musty little house, talking vaguely of
dislike, eternally talking of like and dislike, love and unlove, of
doings and undoings, purposeless yet striving and savage. The other
night I was motoring alone from Paris to Calais, and it seemed to me
that no law was strong enough, no crime was big enough, not even
disloyalty, to stop us, when we had the chance of rising above the
beastly limitation of living as we were born to live. Because we humans
are not born to live, we are born to die....”
“Something has happened to you to-night,” I said. She was a faint white
shape in the darkness, and it seemed to me that that was as much of her
as I should ever see; and I was right.
“No, nothing at all. Just a dream. But, oh, failing the dream, how I
would like a child!”
“A dream-child!”
“Ah, I’ve had those, a many! No, a real one. To be playmates with....”
I said: “I will go up first to-night and see how Gerald is. Will you
wait here?”
“I’m tired and frightened,” she said faintly. “Don’t be long.”
I don’t think I stayed up there more than a few seconds. I don’t know. I
switched out the light, and as I went down the dark narrow stairs I did
not strike a match.
“Well?” she whispered from the darkness.
I don’t know what I said. I suppose I must have said that he was in the
same state as when she had seen him before. Then I pretended I had no
matches left, and said I had better go down first while she held on to
my shoulder. “Then if you fall, I’ll fall,” she complained, but I said I
would not fall.
Stair by stair we slowly descended in the darkness. I wanted
particularly to see Guy. There were certain things to be done, I
supposed. My mind was vacant as a plate on which was drawn a confused
picture that would, on looking closely, mean something horrible. There
had been a stain on the wall, a great jagged dripping stain, and bits of
hair sticking to it.
“Oh, God, this drink!” she said frantically; then almost sobbed: “What’s
that!” But it was only the telephone-bell from the hall downstairs,
queerly strident and unrestrained in that still, musty little house.
Brrr! Brrr! Brrr!... “I never knew a telephone could be so shrill! Will
it be some one for Gerald?”
“It will ring for ever if I don’t answer it,” I said, opening the door
into the lane. “I’ll follow you to the car.” I hoped it was Guy ringing
up on the chance of catching us.
“Well?” his cold murmur came through the night. He said he would meet me
at my door in ten minutes’ time. “What are you doing about Iris?” he
asked me and I think I said: “Nothing. What can I do?”
Iris was waiting by her car under the lamp. The car was like a great
yellow beast with shining scales, and Iris, tall and gentle and white,
the lovely princess of the tale who has enslaved the beast. Far above
them towered the pile of Sunderland House, enchanted almost into dignity
by the darkness. She looked at me gravely as I came, she seemed to
crouch like a tired fairy into her white cloak.
“You look very white,” she said.
“Now, Lady Pynte!” I made to mock her, and I suppose we laughed. Then
she was at the wheel, sunk into the low seat, staring up at the darkness
of the faint London stars. “I’m tired,” she said again, and again I
thought, what could I do? Then she did something to the dash-board with
her left hand, and the engine hummed. I was on the curb, above her.
Nearby a policeman was flashing his lamp on a door. I supposed one told
the police....
“Will you see Gerald in the morning?” the slightly husky voice just
reached me. “And tell him to follow me to Paris? I shall be at
number -- Avenue du Bois for a week or so, and then ... Good-bye,” she
said sharply, as though impatient with herself. “Good-bye, dear. You’ve
been very kind--to the twin Marches. Good-bye ... perhaps for a long
time. You have your work in England, and I’m the slave of freedom.
Good-bye, my friend.”
I could not tell her just then. She lay aslant in the driving seat, and
her tawny curls flamed in the light, and she looked sad and tired. I
could not tell her, and as she took her hand from mine the great car
leapt down the fat little slope of East Chapel Street to the end, turned
in a blaze of light and colour, rushed up the parallel little street to
Curzon Street.
I was at the corner where I had last seen Gerald putting his shoulder
against the saloon-door of The Leather Butler; and as Iris’s car turned
into Curzon Street a two-seater passed me swiftly, going the same way. I
thought I heard a cry of “Iris!” above the rustle of the two engines,
and I thought I heard Iris’s surprised voice, and the rear-lights of the
two cars seemed to draw together, but I was not sure.
I crossed towards Queen Street, sure only that I wished to see Guy. From
Jolley’s corner I saw, far up, two red rear-lights twisting into South
Audley Street, and then, from afar, came the scream of a Klaxon, the
growl of a horn. I wondered who was in the two-seater, but at that
moment the tall figure of Guy came towards me from my door, where a taxi
had just dropped him. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Poor young devil. Only hope
the other side won’t disappoint him as much.”
“I couldn’t tell her,” I said.
Guy smoked thoughtfully, looking over my head. “I’ll tell her,” he said,
“in the morning. Had an idea he might blow his brains out.”