“Go quietly,” Tarlyon restrained me. “We’ll teach Red Antony to walk up
Park Lane without a hat.”
Gently we approached, one on each side of the colossal back.
“Oi!” we cried.
A wrench, and he faced us. We are tall, but we were as children beneath
him.
“Oi to you!” snarled Antony. “Who the blazes are you, anyway?” And the
great red expanse which was given to Antony for a face surveyed us
intolerantly. Never what you might call an easy-tempered man, Red
Antony.
“We be friends,” said Tarlyon sombrely.
“That’s uncommonly original of you,” drawled Antony. “I didn’t know I
had any.” And he pretended not to recognise us--for Antony must always
act, always play cussed.
“You haven’t,” Tarlyon grinned. “But mine was just a manner of
speaking.” He knew his man; and there passed over Red Antony’s face that
earthquake and tornado which was given him for a smile and a laugh.
“Hell! Always the same Tarlyon! How are you, George?”
“Monstrous,” says George.
“But there is no sensation in matter,” boomed Red Antony, crushing his
hand.
“And this,” said Tarlyon, waving his other towards me, “and this, Sir
Antony, is your old friend Ralph Wyndham Trevor, whom you may quite have
forgotten, since you owe him a hundred pounds.”
Another earthquake across that vast red expanse, so that I feared for
the sleep of those mythical Jews....
“Dear old Trevor--fancy having kept you waiting all this time! Here you
are, man, here you are.” And from somewhere inside his cloak he jerked a
pocket-book into my hand and crushed it against my palm. “You can keep
the change, old boy, as you’re younger than I am and look as though you
need it. Always take vegetables with your meat, Trevor.”
“I hate to take money from an impoverished baronet,” I got in, just to
goad him.
“Impoverished nothing!” he boomed, and swung on Tarlyon, who backed a
step. “D’you remember, George, that Roger always said I had a _flair_
for making money----”
“But he added,” Tarlyon said, “that you hadn’t got the brain of a louse
to back that _flair_ up with.”
Boomed Antony: “I have studied the ways of lice for five years on end
and must inform you, George, that my brain, though moth-eaten, is
certainly superior. I have made mints of money. I am fat with money. I
roll in money....” He was working himself up into that state of chronic
excitement in which he might twist the lamp-post. Breakable or twistable
things had always a fascination for Red Antony.
“There, there!” I soothed him. “And we thought the little man was dead!”
“There, there!” said George. “Did he make money, now! And we thought he
was lying in some forgotten foreign field with a German bullet in his
heart.”
Bother the man! He simply had to make a noise each time he opened his
mouth. The policeman who had talked Vine Street to us approached.
“Dead! Me dead!” And the sweep of his arm flung wide his cloak, and
indeed he looked a mighty man of wrath. “As though a Prooshian bullet
could kill me!”
“You are no doubt reserved for a more terrible end,” said Tarlyon.
Blessed if the man didn’t wilt! That roaring red giant--he wilted.
“Don’t say that, George,” he begged hoarsely. “It’s a fool remark to
make, that. You didn’t mean it, did you?” And he put the question
seriously! We gaped at him.
“He was only being funny,” I explained. “He tries his best....”
“I wish you well, Antony,” said Tarlyon, out of his surprise.
“God, I need it!” Antony growled surprisingly.
And then I laughed--remembering Red Antony’s old way of acting cussed,
just to surprise and annoy. He’d do anything to make a fool of some one,
that man, even if he had to make a fool of himself in doing it. But as I
laughed, Antony looked at me with furious, haggard eyes, and I stopped
laughing.
I saw Tarlyon looking at him queerly. He knew Antony much better than I
did, for many and many a year ago he was a junior subaltern in the mess
when Antony threw a bottle at the head of an extremely superior officer.
The bottle was full, the aim was true, and Antony was cashiered with all
due pomp and dishonour. But, through all his subsequent follies, Tarlyon
had liked him. One couldn’t, of course, defend Antony; but the very few
who had once liked Red Antony always, somehow, went on liking him.
There was something about the man, a sort of tremendous gallantry, an
air of shameless bravado, a thunder of individuality, which might have
made him a simple and lovable giant--but for a grain of rotten subtlety
somewhere in him. Fine timber worm-eaten, Tarlyon said. Not, of course,
said Tarlyon, that himself was anything to write home about.
“What’s the matter, old Antony?” Tarlyon asked kindly. “You’ve changed
enormously....”
Now I had noticed no particular change, except, perhaps, that handsome
Antony looked his forty years and more; but Tarlyon knew him better.
“How have I changed?” snapped Antony. He hated kindness; he thought he
was being pitied.
“You look a bit worn, old boy, that’s all,” said George lightly.
“If it comes to that, you aren’t the man you were, what with war, wine,
and women!”
“Talking of wine,” I thought to say, “one always understood that you’d
die of drink, Antony. That’s probably what George meant when he said you
looked worn.”
I wished I had kept my mouth shut. His eyes blazed over me ... but he
restrained himself; and Antony’s “restraint” was a portentous
business--it made a noise like a fast car with the brakes jammed on.
“Drink!” he said sharply. “I drink nothing to speak of nowadays. There’s
an end to all things....” Now the lion’s bedside manner is a significant
thing, and even more significant is it when the lion in the fulness of
his strength sways a little, just a little; and what would make Red
Antony sway just a little would be enough to put another man under the
table, and no dishonour to the strength of his head, either.
“I do not wish,” said Antony reasonably, “that you should think me
irresponsible through excess of stimulant. The things that are happening
to me are not happening through drink, and you must bear that in mind. I
am saner than a sane man, though I can hear and see and smell things
that a sane man would die of....”
Tarlyon looked at me meaningly. Antony seemed to have forgotten us.
Tarlyon took his arm.
“We can’t stay here all night,” he said. “Let us now leave Park Lane in
a body and go to my house....”
Antony woke up; he threw back his head and howled: “Taxi!”
“All right, sir, all right,” said the policeman gently. “You don’t need
to shout like that.” That was a brave policeman.
“I insist on shouting,” boomed Antony. “Taxi!”
And, thankfully, a taxi appeared from Mount Street, for Red Antony and
the police never did mix well. He once arrested two policemen for
loitering and took them to Vine Street....
Antony flung open the door. A clock began the lengthy job of striking
eleven o’clock.
“We will go to _my_ house,” said Antony. “I have a charming house, and
an appointment to keep in it. Jump in.” We jumped in, and we heard him
give the driver the address of a house in Regent’s Park. How often had
we not directed taxis to that house! Tarlyon whistled.
“So you’ve got Roger’s old house!” he murmured.
Antony did not answer. The taxi staggered northwards as best it could.
“I don’t see,” snapped Antony at last, “why you should gape about it.
Getting back to England four months ago, I found the house empty, and
took it. It seems natural enough.”
“I never said it wasn’t,” Tarlyon murmured. But he thought it wasn’t,
and so did I. A brother, on coming back to civilisation after many
years’ absence, does not immediately leap into the house in which his
elder brother blew his brains out--anyway, I wouldn’t.
The taxi twisted through the gates, round the little drive, and to the
great door. An odd feeling it was, to stand again in front of that door
after nine years--but now we faced a house black and still where once
had been a house of shining windows, gay with music and the laughter of
the most brilliant company in London. Oh, the Georgians, the magnificent
young Georgians--mostly dead!
We told the driver to wait, and followed Antony in. We stood still in
the pitch-black hall until he should switch on the light, and in the
blaze of light in which the cloaked figure faced us I instantly
understood what Tarlyon had meant when he said that Antony had
“changed.” I can only describe the change by saying that the structure
of his face seemed to have fallen into disrepair; its brick-red
complexion of old had dwindled to a faint pink, so that one had an idea
that any ordinary face would have been a ghastly white; and he looked
worn with more than the usual wear of passing years. But the wild eyes
were still wild, and uncommonly fine he looked as he faced us in the
sombre hall, the huge dandy in the black cloak with the head of flaming
hair brushed immaculately back.
He smiled at us with that sudden charm for which women had forgiven him
much--too much; he flung out an arm in the grand manner.
“Welcome to the old house,” he said. “And for heaven’s sake try to look
as though you didn’t miss Roger.”
But the magic of Roger Poole was not, I thought, in the place; the house
was now but a shell for a noisy man.