I
As I think of that wretched night of the children’s party there will be
two pictures that cross my mind. The first, of a group of brightly
coloured people, for we were in white flannels and the women in those
mad, barbaric colours which fashion, goaded on by Chanel and gallantly
led by Captain Molyneux, has lately flung as a challenge to our dark
civilisation, around a table lit by the cameo flames rising from eight
tall cast candlesticks by Paul Lamarie; and I remember that in the still
air of Guy’s great, bare diningroom those cameo flames never flickered
even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the
stifling heat.
The second picture is of a darkness. A darkness torn here and there by
the sudden flame of a match which drove the stars trembling back into
the invisible and joined to groping eyes the silky soft blackness of the
water. The black night pinned round the world with stars, shouts,
laughter, splashings, an empty boat, silence, shrieks, a whisper from
the black face of the water, and so home. Total losses: one stocking and
one emerald. “I’m so glad, so glad,” she whispered, just before going to
sleep against my shoulder, for it was Hugo Cypress who was riding the
stork homeward.
But I have said that whilst we were on our way riverwards, and I sitting
beside Iris as she hurled us headlong through the still night, we stood
at enmity, she and I--for Venice! And yet, so far as I could make out,
there was not a soul but myself out of that party, Guy, Napier, Venice,
Hugo, Shirley, Iris, who seemed in the least degree uncomfortable. Those
people had been, throughout dinner and afterwards, completely and
supremely normal. For all you knew, I mean, they might have been having
fun. There weren’t any undercurrents. Not even what you would call any
undercurrents. Those people were quite calmly themselves, they just
_behaved_ as themselves in that confoundedly unassailable way which is
peculiar to the people of this small island: as though, to be sure, they
weren’t giving away anything of a personal nature even to themselves.
You can’t help seeing why Napoleon found these people so detestable.
And it was all, you couldn’t help feeling, so mean, such a humbug of a
thing. I suppose, of course, that I was the only one besides Iris and
Napier who knew of their departure together in three days’ time. “I have
always wanted,” she had said to me, “to go to Rio, and then across the
continent. One can’t _talk_ in Europe, it’s got so stuffy now. But I
always thought I would keep the Americas until my fate should be
fulfilled.” Yet, I was quite certain, every one at the table must have
known that something was wrong, else why was that fell, beautiful lady
there at all? For Guy, in the ordinary way, wouldn’t, it simply wasn’t
in Guy’s nature to be able to, ask Iris Storm to the same dinner with
the young wives of his two young friends, his _protégés_ almost, Napier
and Hugo. And if he had asked Iris to-night, knowing that she wouldn’t
funk coming--though the real reason why she had come was that Iris
simply did not attach any importance to such things, “and besides,” she
had said, “I want to see dear Hugo again, and as a married man”--it was
just because he wanted Iris to realise the scene on which she was
intruding so wickedly. It is such catholic cruelty as Guy’s that, by
always lopping off the rotten limb, has kept the heritage of so many
English houses almost, despite the common talk of the day, unimpaired.
To-night he was wanting Iris to see that her old friends, her old
playmates, Hugo and Napier, had grown up differently from her--better or
worse, that wasn’t Guy’s point, but _differently_--that while she had
lived according to her nature they had lived according to their country,
they and their young wives, Shirley and Venice. Not the most prejudiced
eye, Guy knew, could but see that they made a fine, harmonious, clean
four. Youth was there, and simplicity, and friendship, and love, too.
And Guy had dared Iris to come to the children’s party merely to say to
her, with her eyes: “See, Iris, here are four people, two by two,
happily paired, friends and lovers, husbands and wives. See, Iris, and
let them be. One of these men you may be able to introduce to the magic
mysteries of love more completely than his young wife ever can. But see,
Iris, how much you deprive him of, how utterly you deprive her! You
have put yourself outside this long ago, you never can be of this again.
See, Iris, how happy they are, and young, and clean, and earnest to do
right: most earnest to do right, Iris, despite the most damnable
enchantments. And as they are so you might have been with Boy Fenwick,
but you chose differently. Iris March, the death of Boy Fenwick puts you
out of court. See, Iris, and for God’s sake let these children be!”
But that catholic Guy had not seen that beautiful white mask between the
tawny formal curls and the two amethysts for eyes. I have told him since
that had he seen that mask he would have foreseen the little profit he
might expect to derive for his friends from Iris’s presence at that
dinner. I have told him how it was in my mind that night that nothing
could move Iris, because it was as though in winning Napier she was
winning the thirty years’ war of her life. The shameless lady had at
last lopped off the limb that was called the shameful lady; and so she
had come again out of the darkness to Napier, she had come again as the
enchanted voice whispering of better dreams, and not all Guy’s Englishry
could hold Napier now from following that enchanted whisper across the
seas, that Iris March might at last come to fulfil her fate.
And yet, by the perfection of their normality over dinner, it might have
been this person, me, who was being treacherous to his friends by
fancying disloyalties among them! Shirley, for instance. Shirley, little
sister to George Tarlyon, was of the same age as Venice, they had been
at Heathfield together, they had always been together, and where Venice
led there Shirley followed, and what Venice saw that Shirley saw, and
where Venice raged there Shirley raged. And Venice was raging now. Oh,
she must be raging frantically! Yet Shirley never once, as they say,
“let on” about her state of mind. She was just Shirley all the time,
sweet in a small way, sarcastic in a large way, Shirley of the brown
eyes and unbreakable spirit, pretty Shirley. Maybe she was behaving a
little better than was her general wont, for Shirley was so well-bred
that she never practised what you would call deportment, but that was
the only way the strain of that evening seemed to affect _her_....
Exactly at what point, one wondered that evening, did behaviour become
hypocrisy? For instance, Guy. There he sat, that knight of old beliefs,
at our head, very gay in white flannels and a brilliant Fair Isle
sweater, for all the world as though it was not already stifling enough,
for all the world as though two people at his table hadn’t offended him
on the one essential point of conduct by which Guy de Travest knew
friends from strangers: never to give way to what you want to do, if
honour tells you that you may not do it.
And Napier, that love-lost man! Love-lost, that man? Let me tell of a
moment after dinner when Venice suddenly, tremendously, helplessly,
cried to Iris: “Oh, dear Jesu, aren’t you lovely!” And Napier, at that
moment gaiety itself, came suddenly between them, an arm round each of
their shoulders. “Why, of course she is, Venice! I tell you, I was
particular about my friends when I was young....” It wasn’t, of course,
voluntary, he was not thinking, Napier couldn’t think and then be a
hypocrite: it was just the natural, normal sort of nonsense that
happens. He had, at that moment, forgotten what he would have to tell
Venice, to-morrow or the day after, of the love-philtre. And the child
Venice! Venice, that very queen of hypocrites! Charming she was to Iris,
just the tiniest bit deferential, as a girl of one-and-twenty might well
be, but seldom is, to a woman of thirty. And yet Venice, ever since that
afternoon in Paris, had been, I knew, eating her heart fretting about
Napier, fearful and jealous and racked by what she could not see of his
heart, tremulous with terror and suspicion of that legendary playmate,
that Iris March of long ago. And how she hated the idea of Iris, I knew
well, how she hated the thing she thought Iris was--and wasn’t Iris just
that!--with all the uncompromising savagery of her heart! Venice, O
Venice! And once, over dinner, she whispered to me: “I like Mrs. Storm.”
I don’t know, of course, but I suppose that in saying nothing one said
quite enough to that.
“I do really,” Venice insisted, but not with enough vehemence for one to
be able to fix on that as evidence of her insincerity. “She gives you a
sense of ... well, completeness, if you see what I mean?”
“Oh, quite,” I said. “Completeness, certainly....”
“Not like Shirley and me, you see,” she said thoughtfully.
“Yes, I can just see that, Venice.”
“Mrs. Storm,” said Venice gravely, “gives one a sense of being a lady
from herself, in her own right, if you see what I mean. Whereas Shirley
and me----”
“Shirley and I.”
“Shirley and I, dear, and nearly every one we know are ladies just
because our mothers were, and that kind of thing. I’d trust Mrs.
Storm....”
And so I was to tell Iris that Venice trusted her! And then, according
to the Scriptures as written by Venice, Iris would feel such a cad that
she wouldn’t after all be able to bring herself to steal away her
husband. She would repent, Iris would, on being told that Venice trusted
her, and she would go back again into the nasty darkness of outlawry,
leaving decent people to the safe enjoyment of their husbands. Dear
Venice, I am afraid my telling Iris that wouldn’t have quite that
effect, she just wouldn’t notice, Venice, that I had spoken; for such a
plot might do exceeding well in a novel, whence you have no doubt
derived it, but in life, Venice, your Iris March isn’t to be deterred
from her chase of the Blue Bird by being trusted. If only life was a
movie, Venice, you would only have to let Iris know that you trusted
her, and away she would slink, weeping.
But imagine that Venice, an eagle in her eyrie, desperately beating her
wings to hide the sun from the eyes of her mate! Oh, but Venice acted
superbly! Not, of course, that there wasn’t provided a very handsome peg
on which to hang the acting. The bathing idea came as a boon and a
blessing to all the company. You could talk about an idea like that, and
no harm done. Guy chivalrously gave me the credit for it, and I was
acclaimed by Shirley and Venice as something they have in America
called, so Venice swore on oath, a “he-man.” But Shirley thought it was
very silly of Guy to go and spoil the whole picnic by insisting on
bathing-costumes. Shirley thought that at length. So did Venice.
“I mean, on a hearty picnic like this!” said Shirley helplessly. And
Venice said it was absurd to go digging about among bathing-costumes on
a nice, warm, pitch-black night. One’s chemise, said Shirley, would do
ever so well. One’s chemise, said Venice, had done very well before. And
one wouldn’t, said Shirley, indignantly, really need the chemise
afterwards, just to come home with. Not in this heat, said Venice, and
they appealed to Iris, but Iris protested that she must be neutral,
because she was not going to bathe; but she would have thought, she
said, that a dry shift was always preferable, when possible.
“Not going to bathe!” cried Venice. “Not going to--Oh, you must bathe!
Of course you’re going to bathe! Oi, you’ll spoil the whole party!”
It was after dinner, and Hugo was doing a few card-tricks with
champagne-glasses, the idea being, Hugo said, to settle our digestions
after one of the best dinners that had ever left him with an appetite.
“Of course she’ll bathe!” said Hugo. “I’ve known the girl all my life,
and I’ll answer for her. She’ll bathe. Leave her to me. Silly, not
bathing.”
“She’s rather common, your friend,” Shirley sighed to Guy.
“Sickening. Cannot bathe, really, on a night like this.”
“Seems to me,” Napier scowled, “that she will have to bathe. Tell me if
I’m wrong. What?”
“Listen,” Iris pleaded.
“Coming here,” said Shirley indignantly, “and not bathing!”
“I am terrified,” said Iris desperately. “Terrified of masses of water.
Once, in the Black Sea of all places, I got cramp, and ever since....”
“If you only knew,” sighed Hugo, “how cold all that leaves us! You’ll
swim, girl. Good for you. Make your coat shine. Give you back your lost
youth.”
“Hugo, don’t be so tactless!” cried Shirley.
“The girl’s right,” Guy closed the discussion. “She’s only been out of
bed about a month....”
“But I haven’t been near mine for longer than that!” cried Shirley
inevitably, and it was just at that moment, under cover of it, that I
touched the ice-cold hand. That was the only sign until we reached the
river that Venice’s married life had tumbled like a house of cards about
her heart, that and her “trusting” Iris.
Venice was saying: “And didn’t we just have some trouble with you, Mrs.
Storm, when you were ill in Paris! Naps white in the face thinking you
were going to die, me green in the face thinking my holiday would be
spoilt if you did, this he-man here purple in the face telling me to be
reasonable....”
“But you were in bed for ages, weren’t you?” said Shirley
sympathetically. “What was it? Some foul plague?”
“Ptomaine poisoning,” said Napier, and as I was giving Venice a light
with which to torture yet another cigarette my hand happened to touch
hers. “In this heat!” said I.
“Shut up, you fool!” she whispered desperately, and then she tried not
to smile frantically, whispering: “Darling, darling, _darling_! My one
friend....”
“Venice, they’re never any real good, friends. They can’t _do_
anything....”
“I know. Oh, I know. Oh God, I know!... Mrs. Storm, what a divine
lip-stick! May I see? May I use?”
Baby.