IV: THE ROMANCE OF IRIS POOLE

IV: THE ROMANCE OF IRIS POOLE

I

I ONCE read, in an essay by a writer whose considerable achievements in contemporary literature seem to warrant a certain knowledge of the craft of tale-telling, that it is only the trained artificiality of writers—their technique, so to say—that enables them to begin their tales from a certain point and go directly on to a certain ending. While the truth of the matter is (he writes), as you can easily verify from the narrative of any peasant in any inn, that the tales that are spun from life cannot be complacently fitted along a straight line of narration, but incline to zigzag unaccountably from one point of memory to another; until the tale fulfilled, or rather, fulfills itself by these deft and disordered touches of the realism of memory. For, to quote the simile that is almost de rigueur as a cap to these grave abstractions, "the figure in the carpet" can be said to have no beginning nor middle, and so on....

The plain fact of the matter is that, in spite of the sternest intentions, I have the greatest difficulty in nailing my mind down to a clear and ordered conception of the sequence that even the most facile publisher will demand from this history: in ever and again wrenching, as it were, my memory from its erratic piracies, and in beguiling it to sit soberly astride the course of events as they occurred or were told to me. Even though they didn't actually and consistently occur, these events—not, I mean, in the usually accepted sense of things "occurring." They were all so deeply consequent on inside things! and most of them happened inside....

Thus, as I try to shape my shadows as truly as I may, my memory is ever and again confronted by a few nights—mainly three, and very bonfires of nights they seem to me, with their high lights and sinister heat colouring all that came before and all that happened after; though, indeed, to two of us there was very little left that could happen after that third, and last, night.... That last night! Of the many things that can be lost in one night, Roger Poole lost as much as any man can lose, Antony Poole lost more than any man should lose, and Iris—and I—but even a tale cannot play spy for ever, it must surely end somewhere. (And yes, it must begin, too).

Then that other night, which I could rightly call the first, for it was the one which very definitely sent the ball rolling down the slope. And, though I should preface that rolling by first describing that slope and that ball, I see that I must let part of this particular bonfire have its way, else they will all get together to hinder and confuse me. That man Antony never did know how to wait, and so I must tell of the night of his return before even the day of his going away. An unfortunate night it was, even apart from his connection with it, because of my heavy and stupid depression about something that time, in all decency, should have persuaded me to face resignedly.

An hour or so after a midnight one late June, I was walking slowly up Piccadilly; in no hurry to reach my destination, whither I would eventually take a taxi—for Regent's Park is always far enough, but even further on a moonless and rain-heavy night that England must have grabbed from one of our less desirable and more stifling colonies. I was walking on the outer edge of the pavement, with my head bent, as shoddily happened when my mind was clouded—when in crossing the end of that little passage that leads into Albany-courtyard, I was arrested by the stealthy and hurried sound of a scuffle. From first to last the affair took but a few seconds. At the far end of the dim recess two figures were locked together, swaying this way and that and then parting to allow freedom for blows—the which, I could judge, were exchanged with the heartiest ill will; and all in silence, but for quick pantings for breath and the shuffle of feet. There really is an unholy kind of interest in watching two men, presumably of one's own kind if stiff white shirts meant anything at all, fighting in relentless silence, and maybe, in deadly earnest. The slightly smaller one—they were both tall figures—seemed to be getting much the worst of it, but I certainly wouldn't have interfered if I hadn't seen a posse of policemen coming towards us from Vine Street on their usual way to their beats.

"Time!" said I. But it was time enough without my saying so, for one last and not very heavy blow had doubled the smaller against the window of Woodrow's hat-shop; and the other, a giant of a man, picking up his top-hat and ramming it on his head as though it were a Crusader's helmet and without a glance at his crumpled antagonist, briskly walked towards me.

"England's come to a pretty pass when the education of gentlemen has to fall to interested amateurs like myself," he began from a distance. "Eh, Ronnie?"

But I had recognised him without his use of my name, and was staring at him with such bewilderment that he broke out into one of those guffaws I knew so well.

"Antony!" I cried.

"Myself as ever was, old man!" and he clapped me on the shoulder heartily. "I saw you out of the tail of my eye, while I was teaching that young man Spartan history—and, thought I, no luck could be better."

"But when did you get back, and where from?"

"This very afternoon, and from Mexico—where else? And damme," he turned on me to add bitterly, "why the devil should you be so surprised at my coming back to my own country?"

But I could parry that kind of thing from Antony well enough.

"For one reason," said I, "because you yourself told me that you were probably never coming back."

"Never! Well, my friend, isn't two years as good as your 'never'? I'm learning that there's only one bigger lie than 'never,' and that's 'always'—for instance, I was never coming back to England, and a few of my friends were always going to be pleased to see me."

There was a large and full-flavoured kind of bitterness about Antony that seldom quite failed in its appeal to my heart, albeit sourly, and I was about to give the lie to his accusation when he turned his eyes back to the dark passage muttering, "And that was one of 'em." But the luckless wretch had disappeared while we talked, to ponder maybe upon the weight and quality of that word "always," and with a muttered request from me "not to be a fool about his real friends" we walked on towards the Circus. I had been made shy and nervous by Antony's boisterous realisation of his position in England, and now found it difficult to say anything which somehow or other wouldn't remind him of it. Just like the man to be so infernally touchy and talkative about it, I was thinking, when he said:—

"You actually are the very man I want to see, Ronnie. I've got enough questions to ask you to last a day or more, but I dare say a lunch will see them through—though that of course depends on where we lunch ...?" That was ever the way with Antony, he never tried to hide the fact that he wanted something from one—though, thank Heaven, it was now only a lunch!

"You had better come and lunch at my flat to-morrow," I suggested—with my heart in my mouth lest he should scent a possible insult in that seclusion. But he accepted easily enough.

At Piccadilly Circus, where I called a taxi, he said he must leave me as he had to go down to the Carlton: which thankfully relieved me of any embarrassment as to how to be rid of him at that moment. As he went he called back to me, "Don't tell all London that I'm back, there's a good fellow." A quite unnecessary request, I found it on my lips to answer; for the name of Antony Poole, as himself knew very well, would meet with but a grim welcome in any house in London.

II

On the surface, and a good deal below the surface, there was nothing at all to be said for Antony. I had often wondered what thoughts about himself must pass through his mind in solitary moments when he viewed his life (for he was not so insensitive but that that necessity could never have come upon him)—just thirty-six years of life, which had four years before that night finally ended its reckless social passage in the utter loss of everything a man holds essential to the self-respect with which he must face the world! Not, however, that any loss could ever intimidate Antony into facing the world with any other manner but that with which some imp had plagued his birth: a blend of blustering indifference, dangerous humours, and a ripe and racy geniality. But even so there must be some moments of terrible reckonings in his soul, I always thought, when he realises his folly in so spoiling the good life his could have been and had looked to be; when, console himself with his "bad luck" as he may, he reaches a point of self-knowledge that tells him, with his own brutality, how there is a degree of failure that simply cannot be condoned by "bad luck."

I had known Antony for so long that my view of him in his manhood was always brightened to his advantage by my school-day memories of him; those of a gay and careless companion, with sufficient head but little inclination for work: ever more rowdy and reckless than his companions, a good sportsman and a good man at most games, and very popular among those whom his fancy had not led him to treat as enemies. It was maturity (or whatever queer development took its place in him) that went to Antony's head, so that he began to run amok as soon as he left Sandhurst; something seemed to grow up in him that spiced his old faults with new outrage, and quite hid what good there was in him. His, I then found to my astonishment, was the most makeshift mechanism that God ever put into a man—for I had never dreamt of such complex weaknesses in my Antony of old! Who would have thought that this man, inches more than six straight feet of him, with his good looks, his loud and easy geniality, and a certain aptitude of mind that expressed itself in an understanding laugh where your clever man would have been puzzled—who would have thought that this man who laughed with the laugh of the middle ages was so shoddily made that his every organ and moral attribute were as though held in place by oddments of string? For never was there a man so consistently and appallingly weak to do battle with himself, to compel himself to a sanity of living and a balance of thought: a weak man, in that wretched word's most wretched and active sense.

But the key to him lay just further than that weakness: that he would have suffered, and indeed did, any torture rather than reveal it—the indetermination and moral cowardice of those, without exaggeration, giant fibres. This, I grew to realise, was the secret of the contradiction that was Antony—this pose of strength where he himself knew he was weak: the most penalising pose that ever bolstered a man's vanity the more completely to wreck him. For the world might have allowed Antony a certain length of forgiveness if he could have been brought to reveal himself as he actually was, if he could only have bowed his head and revealed the hesitancies of his nature, and his contrition; if he could even for just once have foregone the childish vanities of bluster and bravado with which he thought to carry through every escapade. He thought to outwit punishment, but instead he did the most difficult thing of all, he outwitted sympathy....

And since eventually such a pose as his must make indecency a fact where it had once only been vaguely suggested, so Antony actually became, in the course of time, the rogue and outsider that his crooked vanity had once made him parade as a pose. For, be you ever so arrogant, nature has been proved to have its laws for men as well as for beasts, laws not astral but severely human, that never cease to confound alchemists of every kind to their own hurt; and it is obvious that a man may not play the fool with his soul without covering it with the verdigris of his own folly—that sourness of heart and crookedness that stole gradually on poor Antony, so that in his thirties he was, to stretch a likeness, like a Hyde to the Jekyll of his schooldays.

The advantages of a commission in the Brigade, of a name sufficient to ensure a reasonable amount of credit and consideration, those details which can so warm the cockles of even a philosophic heart on a dull afternoon, and a little more than the usual pittance that falls to the younger brothers of pukka baronets, warranted, surely, a very fair prospect. And yet, in a few years' time, he had finally convinced people beyond a shadow of doubt of what they had so far only disliked to guess, of his complete failure to be either an officer or a gentleman.

No man could be more noticeable in appearance than Antony, nor more adequately fulfil the name by which he was often known, Red Antony; for he was very tall and stoutly built, rather foppishly dressed, and as consistently ginger as any man could well be—moustaches, eyebrows that no brushing could tame into regularity, hair which waved back from his forehead in a most attractive ginger but ordered profusion; and a complexion appropriately coloured, and always so clear and fresh as to seem to give the lie to the certain dissipation of the night before. A very fine looking man, Red Antony, if you liked that kind of looks; but so noticeable that his own appearance, no doubt, took a hand against him, labelling his escapades with its prominence so that once pointed out he was never forgotten; and men and women could cross the street in good time to avoid the difficulty of acknowledging or of cutting him.

It was an accumulation of escapades, many of which had been overlooked but for his manner of braving them, that had led to his final extinction—which was long seen in coming. A thousand little and unpleasant things were known and more than whispered about him. He was a man of red-hot tempers, which there was no restraint in him to keep within bounds; his weren't the rages that burnt inwardly and grew in brooding, but in their sudden heat must burn outwardly, devouring everything with no care nor heed for even primitive restraint. (There have been times when I've been rather afraid of Antony myself.) And so, from his great height of stature and violence, he had outrageously insulted men in return for a fancied slight. He had committed follies, when drunk, which his companions had hurriedly disavowed. He had, as if by rote, done the one thing a man may still not do and remain this side of Styx, despite all that we hear of the present laxity of etiquette—had been unable to pay his gambling debts, and then paid them with worthless cheques. He had been the centre of innumerable brawls in which, if ever a woman's name was concerned, it was never to Antony's credit; had been twice a corespondent and not once a husband—an apparent failure to act upon his obligations which does no man any good; and from the second (the first had too obviously been the result of carelessness) he had emerged in so discreditable a light that, on top of all his past follies, Antony Poole was no longer a name to be mentioned in any ordinary English company.

That was four years before that night I met him on Piccadilly, when he was thirty-two. He still continued for two years in England, Heaven alone knew why! No one sought him, he was seldom seen—except by me, and later, another. His elder brother, Roger, had not spoken to him for years.

It was about a year before he finally left England that I began to see Antony in his best light; and pretty closely since, in the precarious condition of his affairs and reputation, it was mostly in my flat that he could enjoy that company which presented him in this new and improved light. He was in love, and he was making love: furtively and hopelessly as to manner, for what girl would dream of marrying him! And who ever stood more firmly upon his honour than he who has been proved to have none?... But in his heart there was hope, I am sure there was hope in his heart, else Antony would not have been Antony.

A queer man. For all his appalling rudeness and brutality on a thousand occasions, he could be so very courteous and simple when he was moved to it; could turn a tale, rather candidly it's true, but very amusingly, and had altogether a very diverting way with him in company that didn't offend his absurd feelings or ruffle his dangerous vanity—though even then he couldn't help a, well, cunning satire that might more profitably, for him, have bit into paper.

It is in recalling this time that I feel most uncomfortable, because of the ridiculous position in which my own weakness placed me. During the previous few months I had fallen into the habit of wanting to see Iris Portairley every day—or rather, she had graciously allowed me fall into that habit. And that, indeed, was the only encouragement I had from her, the pleasure which she showed that she had from my company; so that, if we had not happened to meet for some days over lunch or dinner at the same table, she very often managed by some contrivance, say of a tame chaperon, to come to see me of an afternoon. Deliciously often though she managed her contrivances, I was always surprised to see her, who had so many more amusing things to do! And with the carelessness of a man ten years my junior I accepted the pleasure of her company without inquiring of myself whither I was being led. The truth was that it depressed me to think of what might come of it, for the back of my mind could never be entirely rid of an ugly high wall at the far end of my meadow....

And yet I chartered ill luck to my suit, or pretence of a suit, by aiding and abetting Red Antony in his quite impossible and absurd pretensions! Though, in justice to the man, he must have realised clearly how very impossible they were.

The excuse for the anomaly was in the queer sympathy (and a very conscious one) that Antony always had the power to raise in me; and particularly at that time, when he was so definitely an outcast, forced to solitary meals in the grill-rooms of those maîtres d'hôtel who still gallantly pretended to believe in his signature at the foot of a bill. I simply couldn't bring myself just then, whether for my own or Iris's good, to deprive him of the solace he found in her occasional company at my flat, generally at some odd hour between three to seven—more often nearer seven, for Antony allowed that I could shake a cocktail very prettily. And though, from a tentative beginning (if that word could ever be applicable to Antony) it became a bare-faced intrusion on my privacy, even so I hadn't the heart to forbid, or definitely to discourage, the apparent coincidence of his visits with hers; "apparent," for Antony at this time never said a word of his admiration, nor gave any other hint of gratitude for my complaisance than in an added pressure of my hand as he left. Antony was a noisy man, but never by any chance did he make a noise about anything one really wanted to hear.

It was a very uncomfortable business—for me, I mean. And, as I had let it go on, quite impossible to cut short; since nothing less drastic than an order for ejection, if even that, would have penetrated the thick skin that Antony could so conveniently wear when he chose—and with no better result than a "misunderstanding" with Iris who, thanks largely to me, had come to have certain views about Antony which materially differed from the world's, and even stronger views about deserting one's friends when they were "down and out." There's no end to difficulties when a woman takes her standpoint on the highest pinnacles of the code that men have arranged between themselves for their own convenience and woman's confusion.

I could only console myself with the ungenerous thought that if my own position with Iris, of "dear Ronnie" and the like, was hopeless, how much more hopeless was Red Antony's, the poor braggart who would now be invisible, be he ever so tall and boisterous, to even the most tarnished of her acquaintance. So let the man have his run, since he could never have his way!...

How he had ever met her at all, in fact, I never clearly found out, and had never the effrontery to ask; probably towards the end of his swift downward passage to those underground grill-rooms (oh, those grill-rooms of broken hearts and broken reputations!) just after Iris had come out. Be that as it may, Iris had known him scarcely but by reputation—about which, since it was glamoured by the disapproval of every one who had ever bored her, she had often asked me; so that, when one day they had happened at the same second at my door, she knew a little more than hearsay about him; and was quick to see the poor man's wretched plight, was quick to encourage his longing to talk to some one decent; giving intimacy with that generous hand that makes gentle women so much more dangerous than vampires, searching for what sweetness there lay in him so wisely and deftly as to leave him unaware of the homage he paid her, so that she could appreciate it at its fullest; and so that, after a few weeks, she grew genuinely fond of the wreck—and one day made me openly swear at my folly by suddenly saying: "I suppose there must be many people who think they have met Napoleons, only to find in the end that they are Antonys—and how very much nicer!"

III

But there was another reason, quite apart from any far-fetched call of sympathy, for my putting a fairly good face on Antony's falling in love on my premises. I might as well, thought I, be entertained by what I had to suffer—and so there was cast a play, as though for my bewildered entertainment! Though, of course, I never at that time indulged in any such conceit, it's just the licence of thought that is occasionally apt to flow from one's pen.

For while I watched, perforce, Antony pleading his furtive suit at some hour between three to seven of an afternoon, I could sometimes of an evening watch its parallel contrast in that world which Antony had been at such pains to offend unpardonably. For, of the husbands that had been suggested for Miss Portairley, not one had received more favour than the possibility of Roger Poole; and the idea had been much encouraged of late by the very frequent circumstance of their being of the same company....

Certainly, to that world which finds its pleasure in the sensations of other people's marriages, there was a great deal of apparent fitness about this one; for they were both, in their ways, well-known persons. Iris, of course, trivially, in these days of illustrated journals and the like, a much photographed and commented on "beauty" whose features and "recreations" were so widely known that she looked gradually to become the rumoured subject of any novel that contained the requisite amount of social indecency implied by the "modern society" of publishers' announcements; and Roger Poole, already at thirty-three a personage, "the only young man," I have heard it said, "of this degeneration with any political energy or brilliance": who, in spite of the leisure that his rumoured means might have claimed for him, had actively sat as member for—since he was twenty-six, was now recognised as one of the leaders of the Opposition, and certain, in spite of his youth, of office at the fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after all, so original of him to be so clever and polished and dark and ambitious without being a Jew.

The colouring between the Poole brothers was distributed in some such way as this: Antony, the younger by a year, as red and wantonly extravagant as I have tried to show; and Roger, no less tall than his brother but inclined much more to suppleness both in figure and features—he could sometimes look remarkably like a knife: of a much darker countenance, with dark eyes that were somehow sombre yet witty, and seemed always to be fevered with some secret thought. In fact, there were a great deal too many such "secret" thoughts about Roger to ensure one's real comfort in his company.

But, in spite of this more serious expression, and in contradiction to what one might have expected to appeal to a man of his very real abilities and ambitions, Roger was every bit as much of the material world as his brother—but had what Antony never had, the sanity and balance with which to measure his recklessness and indulgences. Roger Poole always knew what he was about; and, to further his ambitions, had never ceased to discipline himself, outwardly anyway, into line with the world's conventions—of which, funnily enough, if he continued his success, he would one day be an arbitrator!

But, rigorously though he disciplined himself (a really splendid dissimulation, which I who had known him so long had always watched with envy), he could not help his inclinations showing in some way—though in a way that reflected to his advantage as a figure, as it would have reflected to Antony's if he hadn't been so foolish. For they were shown in a manner, a certain air, which couldn't be described but by the help of the word "romantic"—a not unpleasing word to be used about one who has name, appearance, and ability. And he was, even to me, a romantic kind of figure. There was nothing, well, stationary about him, as there so often is about one's acquaintance; in fact, more, there was definitely a sense of movement; one somehow thought of him as a man who would always be going on to things, maybe great things. His shadow will find in him an exciting companion, one couldn't help thinking. Among one's acquaintance, each unit of whom one knew to be travelling on a certain road to a more or less certain end, Roger Poole stood out as a refreshing and unexpected person, a kind of adventurer licensed by the world; an appearance clothed in possibilities, whom it was interesting to know....

Besides, there was nothing silly nor banal about his good looks; a thin, long face of such firm lines as to give an impression of hardness, and noticeable, in an Englishman, because of its pallor; attractive, too, because of a certain saturnine quality which seemed to lurk about its expressions: an intangible something that made one, in talking to him, inquire within oneself a little fussily—a vastly different state to that into which Red Antony's boisterous ill humour had, in his hey-days, so frequently put one!

And so the discomfort of my position with regard to Antony allowed me to stand in the wings, as it were, and watch the only game in this world that is fairly played with "packed" cards; the two brothers, in everything but age and name as far apart as favour can well be from its opposite, at their love-making to a woman whom I loved as much as they, perhaps more, but without that visible and reckless ardour that will make a man's love at least significant to the most unloving woman. I suppose that theatricalism, such as is not difficult to find in any one's nature, may have tinged my view of the queer spectacle; but there certainly was something very sad and pitiable about it all, and made the more pitiable, too, by the inevitable course it must pursue—for there is a certain logic to everything, be a woman ever so lovely and remote. And Iris, for all her pride and looks, for all her tawny hair and sometimes too distant eyes, had really as little to say in the matter as Antony or I; for Roger Poole had a reputation to keep up, not so much with the world as with himself, the reputation of a man who always played in luck! Besides, luck or no luck, Iris had straightway fallen in love with him.

She was twenty-two, and had up to that age lived as full and as amusing a life as, one supposes, it was possible for her to live. But there must somehow have been born with her a certain distance of mind, which always kept her detached from any surroundings she couldn't wholly and utterly accept; a certain quality that, whether she would or would not, kept her intact and untouched, as though destining her never to accept anything which she couldn't wholly accept. Thus she had inevitably to be rejecting much, and always; rejecting, indeed, a great deal more than she was ever given the credit for by even those who knew her very well. At first I naturally took this distance of mind from her surroundings to be yet another of the usual and tedious affectations of the "younger generation," but very soon found that it was as sincere an affectation as any that can trouble a mind and make a heart deeply restless.

It wasn't that she was superior or blasé (of being which she was, of course, commonly accused by those who were disconcerted by her reception of those trivial indecencies that pass for humour among the cultured inane); but simply that she was never lulled into thinking that the life in which she found herself was anything but a phase of her youth, and a makeshift one at that. There would, of course, be other things! And of the men who came her way, the interesting ones were mainly too old—now why is courtesy always so much older than oneself?—the younger ones mainly too foolish, and as little worth loving as they were able to love. Some day, some day, she once laughed to me, there will be darkish men with intelligent gestures....

Well, there came one, Roger Poole. He at last was vital, giving her what she had been starved for, a sense of achievement, of movement. That expresses it so badly, for it might imply that Iris was a sycophant to success, which she never was—unlike her ridiculous but amiable mother, who thought she had a salon whereas she only kept a restaurant. Iris had a longing to be allowed to admire, a longing that was a fiercely integral part of her nature. And she was a woman with tangible desires, who would, one thought, lay claim to her man's body and mind with every part of her own, and with no illusions about the spirituality or intelligence of her love. Iris was of the earth divinely, and perhaps that's why she couldn't help obsessing a man's mind....

But for Roger's coming, she might have continued for years being proposed to decently and indecently by the young fops and financiers whose piracies the world so completely licences; not one of whom she would ever like enough, not one of whom could ever lead himself or her to anything but a country-house or to Deauville. So, as I imagine it, as she looked around her life, at the supposed pageantry and possibilities of it, she must have been in a state of watchful coma, just waiting, with a growing inner sadness, for that "something" to happen; that "something," that fulfilment of a longing, which would bring into actual being the woman in her—that thing compact with elemental passions and fierce desires which had so far only been present in an involuntary stiffening of her body, her spine, when a kiss, and maybe one that had faintly attracted her, had touched her. Her mind might compromise, it often desperately did, but it was as though an unhesitating iron had entered her body, so that it could never be lulled to even a pretence of acceptance. And so, as she was one night surveying the accustomed character of a crowded room, with what relief she must have realised, howsoever dimly at that first moment, that the "something" was at last about to happen, that Roger Poole was crossing the room into her life.

She had met him only once before, four years ago, just after she had come out—and he had only just lately re-entered her world. She had, of course, often heard about him during that time, and not only in political chatter; for Roger, with a certain superciliousness, had withdrawn himself only from what he found dull and boring in life—from which Iris hadn't yet thought it worth while to rebel; unless braving an hysterical scene with her mother for a latchkey was rebellion. But as to the flouting of conventions and the like, it is easy enough to do as one likes; but so very much easier, after all, to know without doing so that the entertainment gained won't be worth while.

Iris, many of whose friends had long since indulged their sense of pleasure as it pleased them, or as it displeased others, had never but given an inquiring side-glance to that life; and had been forced to admit to herself that she must lack some essential verve, for she had found as little entertainment in, say, an absinthe at the Café Royal in the company of, presumably, artists, as in the noisy dinners that are sometimes given by Argentines and other rich men to women whose jewels, at least, led Iris to suppose that it must be worth their while to attend them. It was at the only one of these dinners that she had ever gone to that an American millionaire, a fussy little man of an engaging candour, had straight away offered to give her a Rolls-Royce, and she had only succeeded in dissuading him from that intention by revealing that her mother already had a quite adequate car. Thus young was it revealed to Iris that she would make an inefficient kind of cocotte. She was always, she had once told me rather brazenly, conscious of a disturbing sense of laughter which, she was sure, would tiresomely interfere with her enjoyment of any of those indiscretions and adventures in which some of her acquaintance would now and then indulge; and also, had never found any reason to think otherwise of life round about studios and the like than as really a rather tedious affair, of a kind of anæmia and uncleanliness—the kind, you know, that can be cleaner without costing another half-penny—that caused in her no more and no less than a vivid feeling of self-consciousness; about which she bitterly reproached herself, for it was difficult to be rid of an idea that she ought to be a little, well, humble before these young men who were, after all, trying to do something. Nor did protracted meals and cigarettes and liqueurs in grimy restaurants round about Soho and Fitzroy Street with young men more or less just down from Oxford "and pretty far down at that," appeal to her as anything but a wearisome duty to that side of her mind which, so some of her friends always urged, "must surely be sick of the boredom and mental inertia of the life she led." ... But she had honestly done her best, had vividly plunged into both alternatives; and, thank Heavens, had emerged unscathed, with but an offer of an "automobile" and several of marriage—not of course from the millionaire, who very genuinely implied that he respected her too really to ask that much, but from the young invertebrates. There seems, she had long since concluded, to be much nonsense talked about the unfair advantages that rich men take, for after all they are prepared to pay very reasonably for one's virginity, whereas those young men have the cheek to ask for one's lifetime in exchange for their devastating passions.

All this about what Iris might have done has its place because, had she strayed out of her accustomed path more determinedly, she would have seen more of Roger Poole; who—and ever with that peculiar and antagonising air of a man with a fine sense of conduct and deportment who knew himself to an exact and rigorous shade—was in the most inner background of these feverish activities, though never too feverishly; who was as much at home with our more presentable celebrities as with those less efficient; and who, in the rather different atmosphere round about St. James's, was known as a very cool and fortunate gambler; and had once been heard to make the profound paradox that "a good gambler never takes any risks"—which, it was said, had so impressed a certain very rich young fool with its apparent impossibility that he had at once married an elderly millionairess.

Roger intended, in brief, to revive in himself and his station a certain tradition; and with no affectation, for that tradition was his very own and became him as none other could; in fact, it became him as well or as ill as it had once become the younger politicians of a past century. It had needed little perspicacity on his part to see that there was a strange defect in the young men of his generation; that they seemed quite unable and unwilling to combine their abandon with any such brilliance as might help them to achieve something, or their brilliance with enough abandon to make them seem sympathetic fellows—that, in short, they were either wasters or dons. They seemed quite unable to accommodate their pleasures and their business into one lurid whole, as did those men in the days when there were still clubs in St. James's Street and not curiosities; when men of brains or birth never so entirely forgot their self-respect or breeding were they ever so debauched, as to be wholly indifferent to the politics or culture of their country; when it was as nothing against a gentleman to have it said against him that he had seduced a friend's wife, so only he had wittily done the same to the House of Commons on the same night; when, in short, it was commonly considered the part of a gentleman to be interested in upholding or demolishing the pillars of the constitution....

But now! there were only wasters, at best inefficient dilettanti in art and gambling, and drunkards who appalled you not by their drunkenness but by their dulness. You could walk London W. from midnight to daylight and see neither hint nor hope of your accomplished buck.... And that last description, Roger must have known, would so agreeably become the seeming contradictions of his public ambitions and private life, that from the presidency of the Union he stepped plumb into it; in solitary elegance re-created it, as it were, in the public and social eye, both of which were never far from his consideration; and having re-created it, successfully lived up to and never budged from it—until, when he was thirty-four, he again re-entered that society which he had always despised as dull but had never offended except with the most sympathetic disorders; and could now walk into it with the comforting thought that no dowager could say worse of him than a doubtful "He's a remarkable young man...."

I knew by the little he told me that the main reason for his emergence was marriage. It was time to take a wife—but he had never bargained to fall in love with her as he did with Iris Portairley. And I've tried to explain Iris, at the age of twenty-two wanting a deal more vitality and reality than her surroundings could give her, half-consciously waiting for "something to happen"—is it very wonderful that she fell in love with him, not only with his person, but with the idea of him? It is only a very callous kind of critic who will discount reality from a love because—it is touched with glamour—for was there ever in all history a lovely reality without a lovely glamour? Since, be you ever so young, to kiss a courtesan is to kiss a courtesan, but, be you ever so calm, to kiss a lover is to make a fairy-tale....

I didn't wonder whether Iris had told Roger that she was seeing his brother. I knew very well that she hadn't—and, as Roger never mentioned even Antony's name, not even to me (and there was that rigidity about Roger that allowed no trespassing upon a distasteful subject), there was little chance of the subject ever being mentioned between them. But did Antony know of his brother's suit, so ironically parallel to his own? I suppose that he must vaguely have heard of something, from a remark he once let drop; but it could only have been vaguely and distantly, for the spirit of the thing, of his new gentleness, would have been broken much sooner if he had definitely heard what was commonly said, that Iris was to marry Roger Poole.

I had often wondered how Antony would take the news of the engagement when it officially happened.... I left them alone that afternoon; and only re-entered the room when I had heard the front-door close to. He was sitting at my writing-table, and looked round at me without a smile, wearily.

"I thought you must have gone out somewhere, and was leaving you a note," he explained—and then, at my inquiring look, with a flash of his brazen impudence; "just to thank you for having been a good fellow, Ronnie—and a very good hand at staging a play, too!"

That was the only reference he made, then or ever, to what had gone—and with a sneer underlying it! which I had certainly answered but for the evident hopelessness that had let it out. I was angry at his morose resignation, at the weariness on his face—an ingrate if ever there was one, who thought life was treating him badly! Whereas, God knows, he had never ceased to buffet it into being his enemy. He ought to have been grateful for knowing Iris at all....

Ten minutes later he left me, saying: "I'm going abroad, Mexico way, and I don't suppose you'll be seeing me for some time, Ronnie—in fact, there's no earthly reason why you should ever see me again." And to his suddenly outstretched hand was tacked on the glimmer of a really grateful smile; very like him that, to tack on a little gratitude to a long good-bye....

And so Red Antony went away, leaving behind him nothing in England but a question now and then in Iris and myself as to where exactly he might be and what he might be doing. And as I had often wondered why he hadn't left England long before, I never doubted but that now he had taken the step he would keep his distance—a contemptuous distance, mark you!—from it. For what, after all, was there for him to come back to?

About a month after he had gone Iris and Roger were married. I was the best man.

IV

That was two years before. And there I am, on that night two years later, still in that taxi and running up an unconscionably high fare towards Roger Poole's house in Regent's Park; and Antony back again in England....

The intervening two years were full of an exaggeration of my state; which in itself would have no importance for this tale but for the reasons that caused it. Most of us, nowadays, seem, after all, to have developed our emotions to a more, well, civilised plane than that of mere constancy; an Armenian I know once told me that his father and mother had loved each other for fifty years, but I shouldn't wonder if that wasn't one more of those exaggerations for which oppressed peoples are remarkable, so it must be almost unbelievable that a normal kind of man could still be in a feverish state about a woman for so long a time—and with, to be frank, so little for his trouble.

But there's no cynical twist about the thing, it is very easily explained. One can't be dogmatic about the state of love, except just to say that it is full of profoundly logical contradictions. For, however serious you may be about your passions, you (you and I, I mean; not odd people) cannot for ever go on plaguing a woman who is not only so insensible to your attractions that she marries some one else, but is actually happy with him when married. A belated sense of humour must come to your rescue eventually, to point in a tired sort of way at the rather ludicrous figure you cut to yourself, fussing about with a passion that is of no earthly use to any one. Anyway, it stands to reason that the appalling certainty of her happiness must inevitably draw something from the fire of your love, so that it fades and fades—unless, of course, you are a minor poet and worried with your own sense of superiority and sonnets, in which case you will write to her a cycle of the latter explaining the former, and choosing, if possible, a date in another world when your bodies (both of which have caused you so much trouble) shall be rotten.

No: an unhappy love such as I speak of must be fed so that it can continue; and, if by nothing positive, by what more acutely fed than by her unhappiness? So, since it came about that Iris was unhappy, that sufficiently explains my persistent love for her. But its exaggeration? How can I hope to give any reason for that, but in my own fatuity? How trivial it seems merely to say that there were moments, in that second year of her marriage, when Iris gave me an acute sense of nearness, of almost physical nearness; as though, in our destined journey, we were every day nearing a point where the road would be so narrow that perforce we must touch, where she and I would at last have to face each other in a complete moment....

Not, however, that I knew anything of Iris's unhappiness for some time—it had not outlasted her honeymoon, and yet her best friend knew nothing of it for many months! Simply because, of course, it is always the most tiresome of one's friends who confide in one.... Had I suspected that she might be unhappy I might have expected it sooner. But, as it was, that first year of their marriage seemed to confirm every hope one had for its success. A vivid, crowded year it was—for Roger did do things supremely well! The original Poole money had not been quite negligible, but from all one heard "the present baronet" must have more than trebled it by lucky speculation (of course there must always be those who slur away the "s" from that word) and gambling; and his wife had brought him a considerable dowry. So that he could and did let himself go, and indulged his passion for entertaining in every sense in which that wretched word can possibly rob people of their sleep.

The house in Regent's Park, with its large and decorous, too decorous, rooms, and gardens down to the water (is it river or lake? One only saw it at night, and then not very clearly, when it was either beautiful or sombre) became a more frequent scene of parties than any other responsible dwelling in London: a kind of holocaust of drink, cards, and dancing from which one emerged an entirely different person to the one who had entered a few hours before. One never entered that house without drinking more than one had ever drunk before, the thing was somehow in the atmosphere, and time over again one heard some poor wretch tell another that he had never been so drunk since Oxford.

But the frequent parties were not merely rowdy affairs, though rowdiness was never far absent for those who liked that sort of thing. Roger, as I've said, knew what he was about; and now there was forming around him, around the card-tables and the buffets, a small but dominating nucleus of people whose serious purposes were decently shielded, let's say, rather than submerged, by the riot and extravagance of the passing moment. He was becoming, in fact, the leader of a new old-school: and one as inimical to wasters as it was indifferent to dullards. From the, after all, considerable eminence of his means and position he was influencing the most promising of his contemporaries and juniors to what he considered a useful, sympathetic, and amusing mode of life: to think well and to live well, to live hard and to work hard.... Not, if you look full at it, a very elevating philosophy, not very original, since Haroun-al-Raschid lived and died so many years ago. But, elevating or no, it was one with a deal of practicable arrogance in it, and it is surprising how people will be influenced by anything that appeals practicably to their arrogance. And, I suppose, it is not so difficult as all that to influence people to one's own conception of life if one has Roger Poole's advantages; not only those of his means and his abilities but, as definitely, of his looks and air; and, to top it all, the possession of such a wife—an advantage more vivid and compelling than any he could find in himself.

Of course I took it for granted that she was happy during that year! She seemed supremely content—as why, one might ask, shouldn't she be? Of all the men who had and might have come her way, Roger Poole, in spite of his indulgences in cards and brandy-and-ginger-ale, was certainly the most distinguished and eligible; and, what's more, the most courteous and considerate of husbands, who so far forgot the sardonic reticence one had thought natural to him as to seem, even in public, always to be making love to his wife.

Personally, I found that year, full of Poole extravagance, so entertaining that I think my vision of Iris, who since her marriage, and her busy household's calls upon her time, came much less often to see me in the afternoons, must have been as much confused by the gaiety and bustle always round her, as by her hypocrisy about the thing. She was, I think, as perfect a hostess as ever made a demand on one's time (for I, her old friend, was allowed no excuse by which to absent myself from any gathering whatsoever. Who else, said she, could give her the necessary confidence in herself?) She evoked gaiety. And how bald that sentence seems when I mean it to imply the elation caused in me, anyway, by the mere sight of that figure here and there about the now faintly and now brilliantly lit, whitepanelled rooms of that familiar house. And her hair, that wanton, tawny hair! It was so cunningly contrived of rich amber colours that it was always the most noticeable ornament in the richest room; there was about it some curious and wondrous quality of bedizening itself to suit and startle the various pleasures of every eye, even the most accustomed, that traced its vivid course round a crowded room.

It was not until almost the middle of the second year after her marriage that Iris again began to come more or less frequently to see me in the afternoons; but even then several weeks had to pass before I came to realise, and ever so dimly, what lay behind her quietness and silences, to understand the splendid, to me, faith which she put in my companionship.... What had from the first drawn me to her, as to one different from her tiresome and worldly friends, was that she was never noisy in her personal relations. And so, when she now again came to see me after the lapse of that feverish year I had allowed myself, I was slow to see the difference in her usual quietness and silence, slow to find sadness where I had ceased to suspect any.

She never told me anything. That was ever the worst of Iris, she never did tell one anything, anything actual, I mean. She said not a word about her unhappiness until one day I rather violently taxed her with it, and then she seemed surprised that I should ask so obvious a question: that I had not realised for myself the reasons for her failure to capture happiness. She actually seemed to imply that I, her friend, had eyes to see! whereas, God knows, I had little else but a heart to feel....

What a plague to us our friend's reticence can be! No one can well have suffered more from it than I with Iris throughout that time—she, so well versed in that unselfish philosophy of trusting but never burdening a friend; an unselfishness a little unfair to the friend, I think, for he is crowned with friendship's laurels without ever being allowed to pay for them with service. But such was Iris, with her philosophy of barricades.... "No one," said she, "can ever really help one, except, of course, in fetching one a taxi and the like. No one can ever help one to do the odd jobs of the heart and mind. It isn't to be expected. One must work out everything for oneself. There's no real help from outside, it must all come to us from ourselves—though when and how, for I've had mighty little of it."

But I suppose she was right in choosing her own language of silence. For one doesn't, as she said, talk about hell in the Fourth Dimension.... I grew to know quite well enough what it was all about. She could have added nothing to my knowledge but the details of disagreements and the like, which are so often apt to be as mean in repetition as in fact. And she spared me all that at the risk of my impatience—and of much more, she once confided to me later. Dear Iris! How very much good a little more conceit would have done you! you who looked so like an autocrat but never ceased to wonder at the admiration men paid you....

It was Roger Poole who mainly perplexed me. A particular conceit of mine, in fact, received now a sharp rebuff; for, owing to my long familiarity with them, it was always with something of inner superiority that I had listened to any mention of Poole extravagances, thinking that I had measured the brothers with some profundity—to discover now that I had known nothing but the outward complexion of anyway one of them! How could one view him squarely?

But how can a man ever get a whole perspective of another without, as it were, the bedroom key to his passions? In vino veritas may be a good enough test of drunkards by topers, but in amore veritas is surely the very secret of the sphinx, be he drunk or sober. I once heard it said of a popular French Society abbé that "there's no man in France who is more confided in by people who hate each other"; and at the time I thought rather dismally that I had missed my vocation—for, in my small way, the same has happened to me throughout my life; and had I had an orderly mind I might have weaved the intricacies of other peoples' emotions into a famous book, instead of letting them settle into the deplorable chaos which they have always been. But I do know this, that I would know even less than I do of women if I had ever listened to what men said of them, and nothing at all of men if I hadn't listened very attentively to what women said of them. But Iris said almost nothing at all to explain the perversities of this particular man; except, once, that his nerves were as tight and taut as violin strings, and "sometimes so suddenly tuneless that it is difficult to remember what a very precious violin it really is."

In spite of the fact that her mother was passing a very pleasant middle age in widely bewailing that Iris was wasting her youth, that Iris didn't like nor love any one, not even her husband—"that child doesn't like any one, you know! She is so contemptuous!" she'd say brilliantly—Iris, under a becoming air of inaccessibility which could rather appall one, hid an ability to love utterly—such as would quite have shocked those who inveighed against her coldness! And perhaps that hidden warmth of desire in her, the human but divine possibility of absolute surrender, must have been why her very presence in a room so often disturbed one. And now, to Roger! She had given it all to him, the whole surrender—that thing, so warmly full of potentiality, had been all given to him. A marvellous box of tricks to open, each passion to unwind its mystic and craved-for gift! If only he could have taken her love but a tithe so generously as she had given it! And she never dreaming that he wouldn't....

Whether it was from a colossal conceit or from a meanness of vision, he seemed actually not to believe in her love—or, if this was a mad world, he seemed to want more! And he disbelieved not humbly, but with that sharpened scepticism which leaves so lasting a stain—and if he wanted more, he wanted silently, else maybe he had incited her to the bitterest rebellion of all: of telling him that she could love him no more than she already did, were she Psyche and he Cupid in Apuleius's book. He was that difficult kind of man (difficult, anyway, in a woman's first adventure) who never says "I love you," will rather say anything else than that; seeming, perversely, always to be waiting for something else, some further revelation. He was like a wall jagged here and there with sharp flints, against which Iris, in those first months, had hopefully then blindly thrown herself and her love, only to be hurt. He hurt her always, and inexplicably.... Indeed there's no pride in any love worthy of the name. Pride is just an imp, the very last of last resources, to be only used when all those gentler attributes of love have failed—for if love is humbled too far, then pride must become a part of it.

She had felt, even before her marriage, that there were queer depths in Roger which might sometimes make him a little ... unexpected. And, of course, difficult. She might, with this man, have to waive the slight advantage a woman has in loving a gentleman rather than, say, a Dago, which is that a gentleman more or less does what is expected of him, a dull advantage, which Iris's thoughts very easily waived aside, for she was quick to allow as wide a licence for other people's improbabilities as she expected them to allow her. But she hadn't dreamt that the queerest of these, in him, could take so grotesque a shape as cruelty! For, however refined as an art cruelty may become, there is something vulgar and stupid in it as a trait, it must always be the very opposite of the immaculate—and that, as a man and as a lover, Roger had seemed to be. That idea of him, as essentially immaculate, had helped to compel her to him. And so now, hurt her as his cruelty did, it jarred and shocked her even more—that an illusion should have gone so distastefully awry!

There was the perversity of the man—to love, as it were, upside-down. He could not accept a thing as it was, he must dominate and improve it, he in his own way! The joy and gaiety of just loving and being loved seemed to be meaningless to him—a wondrous deficiency in a man who made so brave a show of pleasure seeking! And so, jeering at her spontaneity, sneering at her "effusion"—Iris "effusive"!—dominating her with his sardonic humours, he gradually subdued her. "Subduing" people doesn't depend on your strength but on the other's weakness; and Iris had the terrible weakness of being too easily saddened, too easily influenced to credit that ever-present sense of the inutility and worthlessness of herself as compared to everything and every one; the most weakening trait of all for oneself, the most maddening for one's friends....

There was, then, this much excuse for him, that this weakness in Iris's nature acted as a kind of counterpart to his perversity. It was as though from all the world of fair women Iris had been chosen to bring out and accentuate Roger's great faults, as though from all the world of men who would have cherished her Roger Poole had been chosen as the only one who could belittle her and her love. If only she had been of a more stalwart confidence in herself, if only she had less easily given way to the subjection of herself before her high standards of worth! But, as she was, the nerve of her weakness once touched, she acted as a direct challenge to Roger's peculiar cruelty; which was of just the malevolent kind to confirm her in the belief, not only of his worthlessness, but of her own—this man who saw through her and despised her! How very treacherously your sadnesses treated you, Iris....

Once, in that second year, after one more of those scenes which now her "coldness" caused as once had her "effusiveness," she made a rather feeble attempt to leave him, but he called her back; which, somehow, he easily could, for there was always that magnetism about him for her, compelling her to him almost bodily.... For three weeks he had left her in peace and without a sign, at the friend's house in the country to which she had gone, saying blindly that she would never return to him; and then, one day, he had turned up after lunch, and with no resistance but that of a set face she had gone back to London with him. So, in his perverse way, it seemed that he loved her, or rather that she was necessary to him; (Iris told me later that she never really doubted her attraction for him. But these things are too strange and too subtle for me).

He seemed to have need of her presence, always. She must be always there. If she were indisposed there would be no parties in Regent's Park, since he seemed to enjoy no gathering of people in his house without her vivid presence.... I went as seldom as I could to his parties during that second year, but even so remarked how often his eyes followed her round a room, though he might not speak to her nor dance with her for hours on end; and if he did not dance with her he danced with no one else—he never had since the first time they had danced together; and, though she still lost as consistently as ever at any games of hazard that might be played, he seemed always to be brighter and sharper for her presence about the table.

He was a Pasha kind of man, Iris told me later; which would not have been so difficult to deal with if he had been consistent about it. But she never knew where she was, for he would let her be for weeks on end, while she lunched here and dined there, danced with this man and with that—and then, suddenly, blaze out into a fury of, presumably, jealousy; a cold kind of fury, in which bitter abuse was couched in liveliest terms and his opinion of her, and himself, defined with that outrageous clearness peculiar to scientists and sadists. Heaven only knows how she stood it at all—but then Heaven is our only really discreet friend, and never tells.

V

The reason why I was so late in going to the party at Roger's house that sultry night in June was that I hadn't up to the last moment intended to go. And, as I paid off the cab before the house, was still uncertain enough to hesitate—until I suddenly had an acute feeling that I simply couldn't bear the crowd inside, all those usual and vivacious faces; that I couldn't bear the idea of the large rooms and noisy groups here and there, nor of Roger and his cultivated smile, nor of Iris in that confounded gallère. I may go in later, I told myself, thinking it would be a more pleasant folly to smoke a cigarette in the gardens behind the house. An ugly Victorian house, large and flabby, and an illiterate garden, I grumbled, but as I skirted the front to it I had to admit that for all its poverty and disorder it was a queerly attractive garden, a very special garden. Its hundred yards or so of length sloped in an absent-minded way down to the water, but where one would have expected an immaculate lawn for the cultivation of afternoon tea were only patches of grass traversed erratically by paths that led to nowhere in particular, and adorned by random trees and bushes that always might just as well have been anywhere else; a garden without any conscience even at night-time, and with scarcely any flowers, because, said Roger, a garden in London needs no flowers to be wonderful....

I blessed the little spots of rain that had been falling for some time, for there would be none of the usual wanderers about the place. There would be nothing but the garden's own silent and sombre contrast to the rattling and bumpy music that gesticulated at one through the wide open French windows of the ballroom. And the noise of that music was as the noise of a leering destiny, from which there could be no escape but only an occasional release....

A pleasant spectacle, this, from my dark station under an elm, but for a mind clouded with discontents and futile longings; the three large windows of brilliant light, in which were framed the passing figures of young people, here and there a very fair face reflecting the serious abandon of suiting steps to a tireless measure: those sidelong steps of the modern dance which I, anyway, find so much more attractive than the steps of the waltz, which is still regretted by people with listless feet and superior minds who take themselves but not dancing seriously.

But now I had no pleasure from the spectacle, I only wished, and heartily, that the room was empty of its music and people, empty of all but Iris ... to whom, if miracles could happen at all, I would enter suddenly and brave her startled gaze with my love-making, and take her. But the most wonderful thing about miracles is that they never happen, so I could do nothing but stare at her as far as I could disjointly see her among the moving crowd; a creature of green and gold that night, for her dress was of jade, and her hair, I thought, couldn't of course be but gold to ornament it fittingly; so that, I said, she will always be her own carnival, even in a desolate place. And once again, with that white face under hair which seemed that night more than ever barbaric in its splendour, she gave me that feeling of her as a strange thing from some wild legend, a woman of doubt and desire so consummately human as to be almost inhuman: tamed into life just for this moment, but only for this moment, without a why nor whence nor whither....

Thoughts, such vain thoughts as those, are apt to engross one's mind and very senses so utterly as to shut out for a few moments the whole noise of the world. So now, as I stood under the darkness of my tree, even the rustling turmoil of the ballroom must have become lulled by the vagaries of my thoughts, for it was out of the deepest silence that suddenly a voice behind my shoulder, as though from the trunk of the tree, asked softly:—

"And is the wise sentinel posted to keep the fools in or to keep the fools out?"

With a start I found behind me—Antony! a huge looming figure, his head bent to avoid the branches, a gleam of white shirt front and a red face, smiling impishly down at me. My utter surprise involuntarily took the shape of his simile, and I couldn't help saying: "The sentinel is the biggest fool of all, Antony, but he's going to stay outside." ...

But as I looked at him, his eyes fixed over my shoulder at the ballroom, his suddenly furtive appearance, the shameless espionage of it, angered me, and I added: "One way and another we seem to be seeing a good deal of each other to-night, don't we?"

"Um," said Antony, but his eyes didn't heed me.

"If that's your way of asking me why the hell I'm here," he said, "—then, Ronnie, the answer is that you do get in the way so to-night.

"And, anyway," he asked, "why are you here?"

"Simply because I suddenly thought I wouldn't go in—"

"Oh, stuff—you are in love with Iris, my boy," he suddenly threw at me. "I've acquired a taste for plain-speaking, you see," he added as I stared at him.

"What you needed was a touch of decency," I could only suggest.

"You only say that because you think you have a reputation to keep up," he said wearily. "Why on earth shouldn't you be in love with Iris if you want to be? I am."

Verily, Red Antony had changed in two years! It was never his way before to tell the truth about himself. And now ... or was it, my confusion asked, just a fancy on his part, born that moment of a desire to disturb me. His vanity had always inclined him to disturb and startle, whether by a lie or by a truth. And one is always confounded by the sudden froth of a fool's mind.

"Anyway, it's the sort of thing one keeps to oneself," I said,—lamely, I suppose. He had so much of an advantage over one in any unseemly discussion.

"Remarkable amount of good that seems to have done you," he quizzed me, mildly. But he seemed to be taking as little heed of me as what he said to me, his attention was all for the windows of the ballroom. There was something pitiable about the way his eyes followed the scene from our vantage, as any poor alien might bitterly watch the revelries of a strange country.

"I heard this afternoon," he said, "that there was a party here to-night—and when I saw you on Piccadilly I knew where you must be going, so I suddenly thought I'd come too. Just to have a look at my betters enjoying themselves, you know.

"If you were a human being instead of a gentleman," he said steadily, "you'd be telling a man something. You'd tell him, for instance, if the marriage is a success, and if Iris is happy, and what her recreations are, and so on. Wouldn't you now?"

"Oh, Antony, what a dolt you are!" I told him. "If you'd only approach a man properly, without any of that bluff and bluster that so gets on one's nerves, one might tell you quite a lot."

In spite of that, however—"that candour peculiar to habitual liars who read novels"—I was thinking very hard about what exactly I would tell him about Iris, for Antony evoked the truth as little as he indulged in it.

"Of course the marriage is a success," I said. "And as to Iris being happy I've never seen any reason to doubt it."

"So long as she's got health, beauty, riches, sort of thing, eh!" he added with a laugh. "I just wondered, that's all. Mexico is the devil of a country for wondering in...."

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly three. The ballroom was deserted, and I could imagine the crowd in the supper-room.... I would make some excuse to Iris to-morrow, I thought, and suggested to Antony that we might have a last drink at my flat, so that he could tell me some of his news.

The decanter was empty and the night done when at last Antony left me—having told me many amusing tales of his experiences in Mexico and the West, in which of course he was always the first mover and main motif; and that he had come back to England with many good ideas of how to make certain money, if he could only find the capital. "We must talk seriously about all that one of these days, Ronnie," said he.

As a matter of fact, Antony's frequent ideas for making fortunes—out of the mugs, of course—weren't quite the silly vapourings of the usual waster, for he had a strain of financial genius which, if he could but have concentrated on anything, might long ago have made him a rich man. And so now I was less sceptical about his ability than about his seriousness.

"And is brother Roger as rich as he was?" he had asked me.

"Well, he seems to manage very well. But one never really knows about Roger," I said. "There's always rumours, of course, that he's stacked money on a horse, an oil well, or a silver mine; but he never shows any excitement about it."

"That," said Antony, "is because he's lucky. Plucky too, but mainly lucky." ...

"But about you—how on earth are you going to live? and at the Carlton?"

"For a wonder they dealt me some good cards now and then," he vaguely explained, with a laugh. "And when that's gone—well, I must make some more, that's all, Ronnie. And, bless your heart, there's always you to lend a man a fiver, so I won't starve."

I was not surprised when Antony, with his wonted casual neglect of such things, did not turn up to lunch the next day. But I was surprised to hear why—from Iris, later in the afternoon.

"And so that's why you didn't come to the party last night," she accused me as she came in.

She had been bewildered that morning by an unfamiliar voice on the telephone, but of course he had not needed to stress the fact that he was a "relation by marriage" before she had guessed who he was; and had lunched with him at Kettner's. And she was in one of those matter-of-fact moods which made it difficult to discover if she was very pleased or not by Antony's re-appearance.

"He was very nice," she said, "and full of a thousand and odd things to say, and some of them very odd indeed. Like a boy back home for the holidays, he seems...."

"The sort of boy some one I know by sight wouldn't like to meet again on a dark night in a bad temper," I threw in, reminiscently.

"My dear, you are getting very difficult!" she protested. "And you weren't very nice to poor Antony last night, maybe, for he said he had found you a trifle suspicious."

"I suspicious! Why, the man's full of it, he throws the stuff about like ink—he's suspicious even of me, the only friend he's got!"

"You had better glower at him not at me, Ronnie. And anyway, he's quite changed now, you will soon not be able to see him for tea-parties and the like! There's two lots of people in the world, he said, those who take tea and those who don't; you can either have your headache from boredom or from drink—and Antony is now going to try the first kind."

And as I stared rather satirically at her, Iris suddenly sat up in her chair and became very serious. "It's quite true, Ronnie—and if you're the man you've led me to believe you are, you will take a hand and help. The poor man realises he has made a horrible mess of his life, and he realises that it hasn't been worth it. He's tired of wandering, and he's tired of being an outsider...."

"You don't mean to tell me he said that!"

"Not in those very words," she admitted, "but he was very sweet and pathetic, and I think he might be given a chance...."

"A chance at what?" I asked bluntly.

"Well, whatever it is men are given a chance about. Don't, please, be thick-headed, Ronnie. I suppose he wants to get back."

"What, into the divorce court again!"

Iris jumped up from her chair, and there was no smile on the face she turned to me.

"I think you are being horrible about him, perfectly beastly. And you say you are a friend of his!..."

"Iris, for the Lord's sake don't let us get dramatic about Antony—and we can't do it half so well as he can, anyway." And as she turned away with that little grimace of contempt that she reserved for peculiarly tiresome people, I got up from my chair the better to defend myself. And I was getting very hot and bothered about the whole thing, too. "Don't you see that it's exactly because I'm a friend of his and know him pretty well that I know all this 'getting back' talk is simply stuff?" I put to her. "My dear, I've been 'sympathetic' about Antony for years, but it's never done him or myself any good—simply because there's never one circumstance in life when he will give up his vanities and bravadoes, he's so full of silly contempt that he will never even compromise. It's not possible to help a man who won't help himself...."

"The one after that in my copy-book was 'every cloud has a silver lining,'" Iris said dangerously.

"You are being unfair about Antony," she said. "You aren't allowing for the least change in him since he went away. And you are judging him entirely by his old weaknesses, without giving him any credit for new thoughts and—and longings...." I couldn't help grimly thinking of the quickly emptied decanter the night before, but I didn't interrupt. Iris is following a theory, I thought, and she won't find herself out until she has made a pet-dog of it and it makes a mess of her cushions.

"It's a perfectly human desire to want to get back into the world," she said. "Not, of course, the silly dull world, but that of affairs and the like. The city, for instance...."

"Anyway, Iris, your intentions are very honourable—but what are you going to do about it? How will you begin?"

"Isn't it perfectly obvious that to begin with he and Roger must make up their wretched quarrel or whatever it is?" she rather impatiently put to me. "I've always thought it absurd and childish, this civil war kind of thing, but now I think it's horrible too—the rich brother not even allowing the poor one into his house! Like silly schoolboys playing a cruel game...." she added desperately.

I laughed at that, but insincerely.

"Surely you know your husband and his brother well enough to know that neither of them will ever do what they don't want to do! Really, my dear, it will be much better for every one, but mainly you, not to interfere between them....

"It's a silly idea, anyway," I added, "because even if Roger consented, which isn't probable, Antony would see him to blazes before he'd enter his house. I've tried 'em both, you know."

It was a little perturbing to have Iris pat my shoulder on that mockingly, and say: "There, there, everything will be all right—for who but Antony himself suggested it to me at lunch time?"

And she went on, my mind puzzled with this hard fact—Antony had told Iris that he wanted to make friends with Roger! Antony, the most obstinate braggart in the world!

"I chanced the subject, of course," Iris was saying, "and Antony agreed that it was the silliest thing in a silly life, and that he would like to put it right.... Surely they can't still be going on about that silly schoolboy quarrel you once told me about!"

"Oh, the quarrel! the quarrel was nothing, just a lid to the thing. The trivialest thing for a blaze of temper that I ever saw. But they must have hated each other for years."

She put her hands to her ears in mockery.

"Oh, dear! You're as bad and silly and sinister as they are! I'm terribly disappointed in you as a man of wise counsel, Ronnie. Grown up men don't go on hating each other for ever and ever, simply because they are made different—"

"Or simply because they are made the same," I broke in.

"Oh, chicken-food!" Iris rudely said. "Anyway, I'm going to speak to Roger about it...."

"Well," said I, "he won't speak to you about it. He will just be silent, and let you go on speaking—and when you've finished you can begin again." I got that gibe in just in time, as between the door-mat and the door, so to speak....

And I judged that it must have been very much as I said, for when I saw Iris again she was not even decently communicative about it, so that I had impatiently to accuse her of being the kind of woman who would liefer not mention her failures. But she said she hadn't failed, "and anyway the word 'failure' seems rather portentous about so childish a matter.

"He was like a blank wall," she explained. "Or rather not a blank one, for he's never quite that. And, of course, his sort of silence made me lose my head as usual, so that I might just as well have been prattling about the cultivation of sweet potatoes as about poor Antony, for all the good I did. And in the end he merely said he would see about it, or words to that effect."

"Or no effect," I amended, finally.

But she did not tell me till much later that Roger had listened to her speech about Antony, an extremely unusual subject between them, with such a fine show of interest as he didn't generally lend to what she said; so that she had thought the thing was going on splendidly until, when she had finished, he had smiled, and murmured:—

"I wonder what other reason there could possibly be for Antony's wanting to make it up except that we are both acquainted with my wife...."

VI

So the matter dropped from my mind, except that I now and then gave a thought to Antony's queer idea, how and why on earth he had come to humble himself so—for that was the way the man would look at it. But I could not discover a hint of his possible motive until some days later; when, having asked Iris what he was about, for he hadn't come near me since that night of his arrival (obviously because he had no present use for me), she said he seemed to be dashing about the City seeing people, and, she hoped, profitably: "For I never see him but he has a pound or more registered on his taxi. But I daren't lecture him in case he loses his dash, and economises by not going to the City at all. For I think," she said with a hard look at me, "there's some good to come out of Antony yet."

So that was it, then—Antony actually was taking something seriously for once! He really had brought back money schemes, big schemes of course, needing substantial backing, for like every other spendthrift he could only think in millions—and that was why he had suddenly found a use for Roger, the clever boy of the family!

But I dared not tell Iris my idea of Antony's purpose in making up the quarrel, for she was already surprised and displeased enough by what she thought my "harsh" attitude about him. "I never knew you to be so wretchedly biased," she had been surprised into saying; and so she wouldn't now give much credence to my psychologising of Antony—who was cunning enough to have realised, maybe from something she had let drop, that I was in no mood to be again used by him, and therefore did not come near me.

It was only a few days after Iris had told me of his costly vagabondage about the City that she informed me, ever so casually, that Roger was going to give a "Nigel Poole" dinner-party on the Friday night. She said it so casually that I thought I hadn't heard aright.

"A what party?"

"Oh, come, Ronnie! you know very well that Roger has given a dinner-party on this particular Friday of every year in honour of Sir Nigel, the founder of the house of Poole—"

"I know all about old Nigel, and that's a deal too much," I broke in. "But would you tell me where Roger has kept this annual dinner hidden, for I've never heard of it in all the years I've known him?"

"That's because of the life you lead," she pointed out. "You are too recluse, too celibate, too oblivious of the banal festivities of more frivolous but more human people. And I might add—"

"You might add, my dear, what this dinner is about and what the deuce Sir Nigel Poole, Bart., and bankrupt, has to do with it?"

"Ronnie, you mustn't be rude about my husband's family—you know very well that they go to all the best Hunt Balls and that all-their-people-are-Service-people. And as for the dinner, why! it's about nothing in particular—what are dinners ever about except a table? Poor old Nigel Poole is just a kind of plausible excuse to dress ourselves up in his period and kick our heels up a bit. The only thing that won't be eighteenth century will be the champagne, unless its corked—and, of course, you, if you are going to pull a face like that about it.

"This very moment," she said, "we will go to Clarkson's, where we will fit you up with a very fine line in gents' eighteenth-century suitings. And a wig, Ronnie, will lend an intriguing appearance to what I might call—well, you know, a rather discouraging scarcity...."

As it turned out on the Friday night, it was a very pretty spectacle. We were a square party of men and women about the long oak table, five down each side with our host and hostess at each end; and not one of us but was decked in the finery of circa 1780, and with a great deal more care and less anachronism than is usually remarkable in such masquerades. We men silked, breeched, sheathed, ruffled, and bewigged; and the women with their laces and powdered hair looking to my mind vastly improved upon their reality. Even Iris, her tawny hair whitened to the convention and extravagantly retreating from her ears and forehead to a pinnacle (how in the world she arranged it so I could never guess!), her little, exquisite features thus quite prominently lovely, looked less wild and more worldly, as of this world and not another; altogether of a more demure elegance—an expression which, as Roger said in brazenly asking us to admire his lady's looks, became her very prettily.

We were all, it must be understood, talking the speech of the period, as far as each could remember its conceits and mannerisms. Of course we all mixed things up a good deal—except Roger, who had insisted on it from our entrance, and was much more adept at the foolery of the verbiage. He was in the high good spirits that such make believe generally put him in; and was always seen in his best light as a host, as lavish of good humour as of wine, both, of course, flowing the more readily as the hour increased. And now his consistent and amusing use of his ancestor's way of speech added a great deal to the fun—in which Iris was sharing no less than I. Indeed, she has often told me since that she could have lived smoothly enough with Roger if all life were a masquerade—for Roger, it seemed, was a man who would take to fineness as a beau geste, where he would see you to the deuce in reality.

Our host, in all his finery of black silks and white laces, was sitting at the end of the table facing the window; and on the oak panelled wall on his right, as it were dominating us all, was the only portrait in the room, a full-length of the host of our fancy: Sir Nigel, the first baronet, by Gainsborough—a very gallant but misguided gentleman, as Roger said of him. Misguided indeed, if one can judge by what mention of him can be found in the more obscure annals of his time (for Sir Nigel's fame among his contemporaries was not such as to ensure its perpetuity by even the least responsible historian); a rake who turned his coat this way and that to suit his interests just a little too outrageously even for that period, won and as discreditably lost a fortune or two; who was adjudged a sot and bankrupt, and then half confounded opinion by certain strategies of war which had nearly won us back our American colonies but for highly-placed incompetence; and in the end had surely won a higher prize than a paltry baronetcy but for his incurable passion for double-dealing, in which, as the years and the bottle took him, his wits seem to have lost much of their dexterity. His figure stared down at us now, stout, flushed, and rather blatant, and genial enough but for something dour about the cast of his eyes; and with very little such damned nonsense as cultivation about him, but a great deal of jaw.... He had come, I thought, by a rare honour: such a one as is not often lavished on many worthier shades—and, as I looked round at the glasses and the flushed faces of the company, an honour done in no other way than that which Sir Nigel himself would have chosen.

Much was said that amused us that night which, if repeated now outside that setting, would naturally make but a very pale and artificial show.... It was past eleven and we were still about the table, when I saw Roger almost furtively raise a glass to the portrait and carry it to his lips; but as he did so he caught my eye on him, and at once set the glass down untouched.

"I stand rebuked, Ronnie. It would become us all to share this toast—to Sir Nigel!" And with that he jumped up in his place and held his glass up.

"Caballeros!" he gravely addressed us. "There is but one thing to-night that would surprise our host on the wall and in our hearts, but would add vastly to his pleasure at our entertainment—that the ladies will toast him with us! But let it be as you sit, and in silence—Silence, the only God Sir Nigel never worshipped!" We drank.

"Nay, Sir Roger, you do me a great injustice! I was perforce often silent—and close on this very hour."

We all slewed round at the voice from the window.

"My God! The very man!" cried young Riverdale.

And it was—Sir Nigel as ever he lived, or rather, was painted! Heady with wine though we may have been—the very man himself surely stood there! The likeness was scrupulous, the resemblance of face alone, as he stood surveying us from the open window with his hat carried as in the portrait, was startling, ludicrous. The colour of the clothes, the very feather in the hat, were as though taken from the oil of the portrait; not one thing was amiss in the disguise, not even that well-dined look of Sir Nigel's time!

A full half-minute must have passed in startled, amused silence, while we all stared at the apparition, and he handsomely stared back at us—we all except Iris who, I saw from the corner of my eye, had not turned in her chair at the voice, but was looking straightly in front of her, a little crooked smile about her mouth. The reason for the "Nigel Poole" party, which she had suggested to Roger, was now well out! And, still in that half-minute, I twisted my head to take stock of our host standing at his end of the table—and, I don't quite know why, was amazed to see that he was not looking at Antony but at his wife, thoughtfully, ever so thoughtfully, just for a second....

Antony's smile was mainly to Roger, and after the first second he was wonderfully answered. Roger let drop his empty glass so that it shattered on the table, then strode across the room towards his brother, both hands outstretched to meet him.

"Welcome to my house, Sir Nigel," said he, and the brothers very handsomely took each the other's hands.

[I never thought to see two grown men enjoy tomfoolery so seriously as did these two brothers from this moment on.]

"You do me a great honour," continued Roger as he led his brother towards us, "but you also put me to a degree of shame—"

"Why, sir, I never yet shamed any man by my presence in his house!" And the blustering cry, one knew, might as well have been Sir Nigel's as Red Antony's.

"I meant no such reflection," Roger protested smoothly. "I am merely shamed that you did not trust my hospitality some hours before, so that you could have been of our company over dinner."

"I protest, Sir Roger, that you make me too welcome! But I assure you we keep a very good table in the place I come from—" (And it was obvious enough that Antony had dined as extremely well as the heartiest of us.)