I
On a bitter afternoon in the last week of January of the year 1923 the
writer found himself in the Place Vendôme in Paris.
Now here, in the Place Vendôme, is material ready to the hand of the as
yet undiscovered chronicler of lofty frivolities: such, unfortunately,
as am not. But I can, at least, count up to fifty. There were
forty-eight motor-cars in the Place Vendôme, and one coach-and-six.
The Place Vendôme is a paradox in grey stone. Spacious, noble,
monumental, it is cast, even at the stranger’s first glance, in an
everlasting mould. The Place Vendôme is, without a doubt, one among the
few things about which we may say with certainty: “That will last.” And
yet, monumental and everlasting though it is, what do we find in the
Place Vendôme? Do we find therein the practice of the seven arts, the
learning of the nine humanities, the study of any one among the august
array of sciences, nay, the application of any one among the Ten
Commandments? We do not. We find forty-eight motor-cars and one
coach-and-six. We find that it is given over only to the frivolities of
the trivial of two worlds and to every sort of “high-minded depravity”
that may occur to the enfeebled wits of the exquisite. We find, in
other words, that the Place Vendôme is the centre of that floating
population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre
of which, under the lofty title of _l’aristocratie internationale_, the
Chevalier Gilulio di Risotto is the ultimate servitor. The Place Vendôme
is, therefore, no place for a plain man, nor by any means a safe station
for the man in the street: there are motor-cars kept in readiness to run
them over.
Across the Place, from the rue de la Paix to the rue de Castiglione,
dash for ever the nimble green Citroën taxicabs; whilst from the rue de
Castiglione to the rue de la Paix will march the Renaults _de luxe_ with
scarlet wheels, passing in a fancy of cool brown eyes and the _poudre à
la maréchale_ of Bourbon days. Here and there among them, maybe, will
flash the racing Bugattis of the dark young men a _giggolo_, a
_rastaqouère_, a “racingman.” They will come to no good.
And always the great column on which Napoleon stands rises to the
clouds, but no one cares about that. All they care about are the
forty-eight automobiles and one coach-and-six which stretch, in ordered
array of two lines, from the foot of his column to the entrance of the
Ritz. The shops are loaded with diamonds as large as carnations and with
carnations as expensive as diamonds. The shop-keepers are very polite,
and courteously do not mind how many you buy. Americans buy. Englishmen
watch the Americans buying. Grand Dukes wait for the Englishmen to dare
them to have a cocktail. A few Frenchmen are stationed at those
strategic points where they can best be rude to the English and
Americans. Then the English and Americans tip them. The women do not
wear stays, and insist on their men shaving twice a day.
“Well, at last!” sighed my sister, as her car, colourless with dust, was
added to the forty-eight. I had been in Europe for four months, had
lately joined some friends at Cannes, had chanced on my sister there,
and had motored back with her to Paris. We were foul with dust, numbed
with cold, aching with tiredness, and this was because we had “done” the
six hundred odd miles from Cannes in two days and a few hours. The devil
was in it if there was any reason why we should not have taken three
days, or four, or five. But, then, why do people say “’phone” for
“telephone”? Thus, they get an illusion of speed.
We went into the hotel. The long, narrow, crimson lounge was crowded
with tea-drinkers. “But what a crowd of women!” said my sister. But
there were quite a few people in men’s clothes. _Au Réception._
“I-want-a-room-and-bathroom-please,” my sister said.
“_Madame?_” The dark-suited gentlemen of the _Réception_ looked up from
their desks at my sister, saw that her clothes were not bad and that she
was in a hurry, and looked away again.
My sister repeated herself, in that dead and faintly aggressive tone in
which women ask for what is very probably going to be denied them. “I
wired,” she added. Liar.
I went towards the concierge’s box. He was a nice man, and had a white
imperial.
“Is Mrs. Storm staying in the hotel?”
“Sir?”
“Could you tell me if Mrs. Storm is----”
“No, sir, no, sir. Not at present, sir.”
“I thought that, as her car was outside.... A yellow Hispano.”
“That is so, sir. _Parfaitement. L’Hispano jaune._”
“But Mrs. Storm, you say, is not in the hotel?”
“No, sir. Not at present, sir.”
“Then, perhaps you may know, she has sold or lent her car to some one?”
“That is so, sir. Madame _a prêté l’Hispano. Merci, monsieur._”
“You couldn’t possibly give me any idea of Mrs. Storm’s present
address?”
“_Pardon, monsieur.... Timbre, monseigneur? De quinze centimes, un.
Merci, monseigneur. L’automobile à huit heures moins quart?
Parfaitement, monseigneur...._ I have no instructions, sir. That was the
gentleman to whom madame has lent her motor. _Le due de Valaucourt._”
“Thank you. But Mrs. Storm, you say, is in Paris?”
“Sir? _Je suis sans instructions, monsieur. Madame?_”
“What is it, what is it?” asked my sister.
“Nothing,” I said. “Got a room? Good. I am going to the Westminster, and
I’ll come at half-past eight, shall I, and take you out to dinner?”
“Yes, but not here. It’s crowded with minor royalties that you can’t
stand with your back to any one except the orchestra. Larue?”
She had no sooner turned towards the lift than my name was cried in an
agony of exultation. My sister says that my face as I started round was
a face of fear.
“Only the other day,” cried Mr. Cherry-Marvel, exercising, with
incredible perfection of gesture, his eyes, shoulders, hands, wrist,
beautiful teeth, tie-pin and handkerchief, “we were talking about
you....” But it was ever one of Mr. Cherry-Marvel’s many social charms
that, the instant he saw you after an absence, he would make it his
business to give you the impression that people had been interested in
nothing else but you during your absence. Not, of course, that he
stopped there; he had other things to say, too. “Of course what I
_really_ must tell you first of all, is that Henri Daverelle, whom, of
course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day,
_à propos_ of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of
mind, will appreciate at its full value....”
Cherry-Marvel was an artist enslaved by his art: he could not see you
but he and you must instantly fall under its dominion; for it was an art
too perfectly modulated to admit of hurry, it was an art too sensitive
to admit of interruption. Indeed, a wicked little gleam would flash
across his wicked old eyes if you so much as made to interrupt him.
Pitiless to himself, he was only the less pitiless to you in so far as
you were not himself; and, should you be a boor and leave him suddenly,
you might hear the dry, clear voice dying in the distance, but dying
hard, rising and falling to the fullest and most pregnant sense of each
period; for his, you understand, was an art not of selection but of
detail, and must always and be continually expending itself....
“Ava Mainwaring, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying
to me only the other day, _à propos_ of something which I am positive
that you, with your sort of mind....”
Essentially an aristocrat, in person dainty, neat, fastidious,
Cherry-Marvel’s art was essentially democratic, for it abhorred all
limitations and exacted from him its complete display on every occasion,
whether lofty, literary, or plebeian, which came before his relentlessly
alert eyes; and you can hear, through the last sixty years of English
social history, the rise and fall of Cherry-Marvel’s voice, each word
dropping on a stunned silence like a long-polished jewel. Eager,
exquisite, always prepared, always with a handkerchief fluttering
between his breast-pocket and the corner of his eye, you must imagine
him against the tapestry of wasted time, a figure of ancient, æsthetic
_dandysme_, on immaculate lawns, in drawing-rooms, up and down terraces
of palazzos, in clubs and cabarets. You might enter a spacious
drawing-room in Rome, a museum in Naples, a friend’s villa in Capri, you
might stray from your boat in a South Sea lagoon into the smoking-room
of the hotel, you might steal a moment from your companions to see the
moonlight on the Pyramid.... Oh, you might be anywhere, and suddenly you
would hear that voice, rising and falling, relentless, ageless,
enchanting even lions to silence, with here and there a sudden, profound
drawl on one word, any word, “de-ar,” and you would, fascinated, be
compelled to face him--there, with full pale lips drawn wide apart,
wicked blue eyes absorbed with cunning ecstasy in your stunned
attention, the while, infinite as fate, he joined together the perfected
pieces of his art with the word “whereupon,” which lounged from his
tongue in a crescendo to a cry of sadic exaltation. And while you
laughed at some elaborately phrased conceit, wondering how he had
remembered the order of the words so well, he would watch the effect of
his art with kind, cunning eyes, one wrist suspended in the air, his
handkerchief fluttering towards the corner of his eye, in consummate
politeness to show how he, too, by your laughter, was appreciating the
full flavour of his art ... “whereupon Elsa, who, by the way, had really
a very amusing experience in Venice last Autumn, and one which I am
positive that you, with your sort of mind....”
Now, if any one could tell me where Iris was to be found, Cherry-Marvel
was that man. Cherry-Marvel knew, of course, everybody, and he knew
everything about everybody ... “of course it’s absurd to suppose that
Alice, with her intelligence, which I am positive makes its full appeal
to you--it is absurd to suppose that Alice could for one _moment_ have
thought that her husband, whom of course you know as well as I do, would
divorce her for going to Brighton with Cubby Tyrell, because, as I was
pointing out to her sister only the other day, for one thing no decent
man, and I am sure you will agree with me about this, would care to let
it be known that his wife had ever gone to Brighton, and for another,
and this, of course, is a Biblical detail which I am sure that you will
grasp at once, Cubby Tyrell, who is a very intimate friend of mine, has
been allowed, in spite of having been married twice, to remain a member
of the Celibates Club....”
At this time I hadn’t the remotest idea as to where Iris was or how she
did. I had not seen her since the night of her brother’s death; and had
been permitted to gather from Hilary that he knew as little as I did of
her whereabouts. Secret she had always been in her absences, Hilary
said, or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively in hiding.
She had, a few weeks after that terrible night, written me one long
letter: from some place near Rome, from a draughty house, so she wrote,
on a hill of strangled olives. There was no address on the notepaper,
and this, she wrote, was because she did not want me or any one to write
to her. “Please,” she added to that.
Her letter was presumably in answer to two of mine addressed to the care
of Mrs. Oden of Montpellier Square, but she was at the pains to excuse
it on the ground that she and I were tied together--“no, tied
apart!”--by a bond, the existence of which I would never, never know.
Well! It was, you can see, a feverish, mysterious letter; and made how
much more mysterious by that almost illegible, pencilled scrawl! There
were whole sentences on the first few pages which I could not make out
at all, which I made almost blind guesses at, while at some I could not
even contrive so much.
“It is your fault, my friend. You paved the road up which I raced in
chase of the Blue Bird. Yours was the appointed dark finger in the
darkness. May God forgive you, for I can’t. I will try, but I think I
can’t. There is a waterfall of fire....”
Sheets upon sheets of it, that letter is before me now, and still I am
unable to decipher whole sentences from that maze of pencil-marks on the
thin Italian paper. There was one that stared at me, shocked me, in the
middle of the second page--“I may hate you”--but I could not, do what I
would, make out the words above or below.
“...I am lonely beyond bearing, and afraid. I am so afraid. I wonder,
will you understand? But if I bore you take courage, for I will not bore
you again. You are my friend, and this is my good-bye. Forgive me, dear,
the arrogance of calling you my friend. But I am so afraid. _Et, satyr
bien-aimé, j’ai raison...._”
I could, you can understand, make neither head nor tail of it. She might
hate--me! She might, heaven knew, be indifferent to me, but why, how,
hate? And _satyr bien-aimé_ was all very well, but it meant nothing.
On the later pages she seemed to have controlled her hand a little, but
her mind, if one might judge, remained ... well, was that, perhaps, the
effect on a mind of a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives? “I
am lonely, but I have always been lonely since I was eighteen. Yes, I
can trace my loneliness since then. It is a long time.”
This letter, you must remember, came only a month after Gerald’s death.
She wrote of that night, and here her haunted pencil was at its most
firm, if that is saying anything. “There I stood in the old, old
darkness--how old darkness is, have you ever felt?--while you were
upstairs in Gerald’s room. And I listened, but I could not hear you
moving, so I imagined you to be staring at Gerald from the door, as you
and I did that night a million years ago, when, do you remember, you
suddenly, strangely from your heart, made that defiant courtesy to my
hand? And, do you know, I almost cried because of your kindness to that
poor, helpless sweet. Oh, Hilary has told me about you, and you luring
Gerald off to a Home, but all in vain, my poor Gerald. And then I heard
you switch out the light, and down you came, slowly, slowly, more silent
than the darkness, and when you spoke your voice was as old as the
darkness. But you are very young really, else you couldn’t be so
defiantly, so imperiously, kind. And I remember wondering why you said
you had no matches left, for before you went upstairs I had seen a box
half-full in your hand, but I said to myself: ‘He has forgotten, and he
is wretched at his friend’s weakness.’ Ah, you should have told me about
Gerald there and then, indeed you should! But you did not, for my
unworthy comfort’s sake. Dear, you have a fine touch for the
affections--but cruel, that is what you were, cruel. You laid your foot
down on the soil of kindness, but where your foot fell there leapt up a
dandelion ... and in the heart of the dandelion a tiny little rose; but
what, my friend, is one little rose surrounded to suffocation by a huge
dandelion?”
Well! Puzzle this way, puzzle that way, I couldn’t make a glimmer of
sense out of that passage. I was pleased, of course, that she seemed to
like me, but as to the rest....
Guy, as he had told me he would, had been to see her early in the
morning. He had--another friend of childhood--overruled Mrs. Oden,
saying it would be better not to wake Iris and bring her downstairs at
that hour, for could there be a better place than bed in which to
receive bad news? Mrs. Oden knew him of old, he was Apollo Belvedere to
Mrs. Oden. She had been desperately upset about his news, coming as it
did on top of what she had read about Gerald in that morning’s paper.
Poor Mrs. Oden.
Iris was asleep--“Oh, as no man can ever know sleep!”--when she awoke
dimly to a tall shape at the foot of the bed. (“As no man can ever know
sleep!” That, too, puzzled one, as well it might.) Dark it was, the
curtains drawn, “and I remember them flapping peevishly because the door
behind the tall shape was ajar. And I, scarcely awake, could think but
of one thing, my awakening mind was hugging, in pain and joy, but one
thing ... and I called the shape at the foot of the bed by a certain
name, a name which was not his name. He made no sign that he had heard
the name which was not his name, and I am sure he instantly made himself
forget it. For, as you know, Guy would defend a secret not only against
the angels of God, but also against himself. ‘Guy!’ I cried at last,
and he seemed to smile faintly, like the handsome absent-minded god he
is. ‘Yes, Guy,’ he said. ‘Sickening, isn’t it?’ Those high good looks of
Guy’s, that small poised head--frozen, tireless Guy! But that morning he
was very gentle with me....”
He had spoken for me, too, saying that I hadn’t told her of Gerald’s
death at the time because she had looked so tired and sad. “Poor Iris,”
Guy had said, “the men who don’t know you very well care very much for
your comfort, but the three young men who have known you best of all
have not cared enough.” Guy had said that, and she lying in bed,
stunned, staring, while he sat holding her hand, as he might be an elder
brother and she a hurt baby.
“He knew, you see, that I loved Gerald, that Gerald was a part of me,
although Gerald had spent ten years in pretending that he hated me. Do
you think, my friend, that I would have let myself be crucified on Boy’s
death only for the sake of Boy’s cruel relations and friends? Two people
Gerald worshipped in the world, but always he would have sacrificed Iris
to Boy, that was always the way of Gerald’s heart. Above all things in
this world I love the love that people have for each other, the real,
immense, unquestioning, devouring, worshipful love that now and then I
have seen in a girl for a boy, that now and then I have seen in a boy
for a boy, that playmate love. It isn’t of this world, that playmate
love, it’s of a larger world than ours, a better world, a world of
dreams which aren’t illusions but the very pillars of a better life.
But in our world all dreams are illusions, and that is why the angels
have crows-feet round their eyes, because they are peering to see why
all dreams in our world should be illusions.
“But you can’t, you see, get rid of the funny love between twins like
Gerald and me just by the word ‘hate.’ Even Boy couldn’t really upset
that. There was something peculiarly _us_ about Gerald and me, something
of blood and bone peculiarly us which nothing but death could destroy.
And so Mrs. Spirit was sent into Hyde Park that the thing that was us
might be for ever destroyed.”
She had suddenly asked Guy, half-sitting on the bed beside her, what it
was in the world he loved most, and he had said he was sorry to admit
that he loved his son more than all the world. “I could have killed him
for jealousy, just then I could, he who had everything to have also
that. You don’t know the body-ache for a child, the ache that destroys a
body ... the lament for a child of love, a child of lovers....
“He would be two and a half years old now, my son. Hector, you see,
didn’t know anything about his son, because he left me in a temper
before even I was certain. And naturally when I was certain I wasn’t
going to be outdone in silliness by my own husband, and besides, I
thought it would be mean to force him to come back if he didn’t really
want to come back, and so I didn’t let him know. For men, I would have
you know, might make an awful row and stamp away in a tearing jealous
fit, and when they are away they might be as pleased as anything to
have got away. You can never tell about men, especially when they are
convinced that they are being genuine. But, of course, I knew he would
rush back quickly enough when the baby came. Oh, I would see to that!
And, my dear, the fun I would have all by myself, for Hector and I had
always longed for a son, the fun I had thinking of the look on his face
when one day he would get my wire in Ireland: ‘Arrival of
Hector-not-so-proud. You come too.’ Can you imagine what he’d look like
then, and he stern and handsome and all covered with V.C.’s and
oddments, wasting his time chasing disgusting Sinn Feiners who wouldn’t
know a country of their own if they saw it. I had that wire all nicely
written out months beforehand, and I went and hid my ugliness in my old
nurse’s home near Peterboro’ and stuck the wire with a pin over my bed,
being superstitious, you see, and wanting a winner for once in a way.
Well, and then--Oh, and then they killed Hector just in time, and when
Hector-not-so-proud came along he thought, the poor sweet, that the
proper way for a gentleman to arrive in the world was toes first to slow
music, and so away he had to go again....
“I have done with England, and England has done with me. But I don’t
think I shall be able to go and have tea with the Empress of China yet
awhile, for just now I love England as I never before have loved it. The
captains and the kings of England--clean eyes, long shadows, low voices
... why, I must hover, held in running as in a nightmare. And from the
distance, from these lands of loud shrill voices, I will hear the low,
low voices that I had long since thought I had given up regretting.
Indeed, I was quite sure I had given up regretting them. But I am
regretting them now, like a baby. Good-bye, dear, and God bless you. And
when you think of me think instead of your words, ‘He has, with you,’
and you will have the sum of my pride in being liked by you.”
Often, during these past eight or nine months, that scrawled writing
would pass my mind, but as I could hit on no clue to her fantasies, and
as I might never see her again, I had put Iris carefully away into that
part of our minds wherein we keep fancies, images, regrets, the things
that we will do one day, the things that we would like to do one day,
the things that we will never do again ... when, but a moment ago, the
great yellow car had leapt from the Place Vendôme into the first place
in my mind, and I would like, I thought, to learn from my friend,
Cherry-Marvel, anything that might be learnt about Iris. But as I
listened to him, the way he had said this and had done that and had
heard the other, I wondered how I would ever get the chance to suggest
so much as her name to him. “..._à propos_ of something which I am
positive that you, with your sort of mind....”
We stood, for we had not yet had time to sit down, in the little
reading-room of the Ritz that leads from the entrance-doors, while
stern-faced Americans turned over the pages of _The New York Herald_ on
the long marble-topped table in the centre, and a woman or two sat here
and there absorbed in waiting, and the dowager Lady Tekkleham’s voice
nearby was grimly suggesting to the Baron de Belus that he could not do
better than let her drive him in her coach-and-six to dinner at her
villa at Saint Germain-en-Laye.
Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey and my heavy coat, and
weighed down, too, by the gloom of the early winter evening that was
falling about us, so that my eyes, borne down by Cherry-Marvels
amenities, could scarcely make out the chairs and flowers and vases in
the long courtyard through the windows; and suddenly I fell to wondering
how it had come about that Iris, who loved her proud swift car, had lent
it to a friend, but the instant I mentioned her name Cherry-Marvel’s
little eyes gleamed with fury at the interruption. I was abashed, yet I
would try again, but ... “whereupon Auguste de Maupin, whom, of course,
you know as well as I do....”
But at last I achieved the impossible, in inserting a wedge into the
fabulous monologue, and then I murmured: “Ill? But are you sure, Cherry?
Mrs. Storm is ill?”
But illness appalled Cherry-Marvel, from illness he could not help but
turn away the neat, lined mask of his face, from illness his Florentine
_dandysme_ trembled away in the only unaristocratic emotion I have ever
observed in Cherry-Marvel, the emotion of fear. “Quiet we call Silence,
the merest word of all!” For, appalled by illness though he might be,
his art could always rise to a general view.... He had heard in a
roundabout way that Iris had had a “sort of minor operation----”
“But,” I said--
“Whereupon,” said Cherry-Marvel, his little eyes gleaming for a second
with fury, “what _I_ said was, ‘Operations, where are thy stings?’ for,
as of course you know as well as I do, women are scarcely women without
them, and I have not the faintest doubt that in Lesbos they suffered, if
I may put it like this, from the impolite insistence of their womanhood
even more than if there had been any men there, for as I was saying to
Marc only the other day, _à propos_ of the particular shade in which she
had dyed her hair, men may come and men may go, but the moon, my dear
boy, is always there. Now here, for instance, is Iris, quite one of the
loveliest women I have ever seen, and one who, I am convinced, must be
very fond of you with your sort of mind, here she has, I hear on the
very best authority, fallen a victim to one of those mental derangements
which seem, if I may put it like this, to be an irresistible incitement
to polite surgery in quite another and more individual part of the
person. But what I have always said about Iris is this, that I admire
her so, and I am so positive that you also must, with your sort of mind,
because she is one of the very few Englishwomen I have ever met who can,
as I am sure you will agree with me, live abroad without becoming more
and more English....”