The Green Hat
MICHAEL ARLEN

The Green Hat

by
Michael Arlen

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1924,
By George H. Doran Company

THE GREEN HAT
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
F. M. ATKINSON, Esquire

CONTENTS

THE GREEN HAT

Chapter One: THE GREEN HAT

I

IT has occurred to the writer to call this unimportant history The Green Hat because a green hat was the first thing about her that he saw: as also it was, in a way, the last thing about her that he saw. It was bright green, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn: being, no doubt, one of those that women who have many hats affect pour le sport.

I saw it for the first time (writes the Author) on the eve of my removal from one residence in London to another; although when I say residence I mean that I was, by the grace of God and at the impulse of my own temerity, removing to somewhat more habitable premises nearby from two rooms and a bathroom above a mean lane in a place called Shepherd’s Market. Not that our lane hadn’t attractions of its own to offer. Our lane was one in which many improbable things were wont to happen, but it somehow seemed inevitable that such things should happen there. But maybe I had better select a few of these things, that you may know the sort of lane ours was. I have seen men arrested there, and I have seen a heavy constable worsted in a fight with a little Jew pickpocket, who was for some time responsible for a rag-shop in our lane. I have seen two butlers fighting in our lane. I have seen a very old nobleman woo a flower-girl in our lane, but whether or not she ever favoured his suit our lane had no means of telling. One night I fell over the body of a woman lying in the blood of a broken head, and in our lane by night policemen solace themselves by smoking cigarettes into the crowns of their helmets, while cats, I must tell you, will never cease to sport together all about it.

But it was by day that our lane attained to any real interest for a student of such things, for then it was sacred to the activities of a hearty-looking man in a brown bowler-hat, who with one hand would write interminably in a small book, while with the other he dealt with passing men in slips of paper known to the law as “betting-slips.” As partner to the hearty-looking man—we are, I venture to say, already embarked on our tale, for these gentlemen will make a faint devil’s chorus for more spacious happenings—was a tall, wizened man who wore a check cap and had hair growing out of his ears. This man would stand at one end of the lane and now and then say, “Oi!” When he had said “Oi!” he would light a cigarette, while the hearty-looking man would run heavily round our end of the lane, for “Oi!” meant that the law was after him. When the law had gone he would come back wiping his mouth, and jokes were exchanged with the butcher and the fishmonger; but when the law really wanted him, say twice a year, a posse of policemen would simultaneously rush both ends of our lane, and the hearty-looking man was mulcted in a fine not exceeding so much and was back again the next morning within a yard of my door. Among his most persistent admirers was a little bent old man with blood-shot eyes and a twitching mouth, who was a window-cleaner without a Union, which meant that he would clean a window for threepence and want no tip. He liked me, and used to give me racing information, but I never won anything.

Now the first thing to do is to clear the ground as quickly as possible for the coming of the green hat, for Mr. H. G. Wells says that there is no money to be made out of any book that cannot bring a woman in within the first few thousand words. But in setting the scene in Shepherd’s Market we have evaded the necessity for any “writing-up” of atmosphere, for that place has an atmosphere quite impossible to convey in a book, unless, of course, you were to take the book to Shepherd’s Market and leave it in our lane for a few days in nice warm weather. Shepherd’s Market is, in fine, a collection of lively odours bounded on the north side by Curzon Street, on the south by Piccadilly, on the west by Hertford Street, and on the east by Half-Moon Street; and rejoices, therefore, in the polite direction of Mayfair, as you will see printed on the notepaper of any of its residents. A flower-shop which was opened in our lane lived for only six months, and that in spite of the gardenia gallantly affected by the old nobleman from Curzon Street every day. I, after having lived there for six years, was (by the grace of God) leaving on the morrow.

It is late, after midnight, when the tale begins.

I had been that evening to a party; for that is now the name that folks give to a dance,—I am not sure why. In America, I believe, one doesn’t even give a party, one just throws a party, but as to this party I am telling of, it had, with that infallible sense of direction peculiar to parties, whether given or thrown, taken a man by the nerves at the back of his head and had hurled him into a deep pit. And it was as one encompassed by that pit, deep as the playground of the seven devils, dark as the very dungeons of gaiety, that I found myself back in my flat above the mean lane. It would be the last night I would ever spend in that flat, and I was so glad. The bookshelves had already been taken away, and books littered the floor, books and pictures and what-nots crowded the gate-leg table, while the ottoman with its soiled Chinese yellow cover was a shambles of whatever you will find in a bachelor’s flat if you begin to clean out the drawers. The bedroom, however, was still ordered for human habitation.

Now I had no sooner cast my hat on the bed than the bell rang. It was one of those infernal things you pull at, so that they may go on clanging for ever, and as it clanged I wondered, I am afraid ungraciously, who it could be. Could it, I wondered, be any one for Gerald March, who lived in the flat above mine? But no one, I told myself, has called on Gerald March within the memory of man, for that man discourages callers, that man knows how to discourage callers.

I had no hope in pretending not to be at home, for my lights were plain to see from our lane. And in my mind’s eye I saw the hearty face of the acquaintance at the door, and with my mind’s ear I heard the hearty greeting that dropped from his parasitical and thirsty lips. He had seen my light, that man, as he went his way home from some party even more pestilential than the one which had sent me home stricken; and he would fain drink a glass with me, after the fashion of pests of the night, that are hearty with the weary and thirsty with the unwary.

I could, however, always order my privacy without seeming too unfriendly by looking down from my bedroom window, for whereas the windows of my sitting-room faced the public-bar of The Leather Butler and an angle of the offices of the Duke of Marlborough’s fine house, from my bedroom window I had a clear prospect of our lane. Of pests, however, there was neither sight nor sign; nor of cats, nor of men, nor of any low and usual thing; only, under the lamp at the Sheep Street end of our lane, a long, low, yellow car which shone like a battle-chariot. It was empty.

Now I am of those who are affected by motor-cars: their lines thrill me, the harmony of their colour touches me, a gallant device wins my earnest admiration so that, walking along Piccadilly, I will distress my mind by being a partisan of this one, a despiser of that one. Nor am I to be won by any cheap thing, no matter how brave-seeming it may be to the eye, how admirable in endurance; but I am to be won only by the simple lines, the severe and menacing aspect, of the aces among motor-cars; for economy hath charms, but not to the eye. This car charmed the eye. Like a huge yellow insect that had dropped to earth from a butterfly civilisation, this car, gallant and suave, rested in the lowly silence of the Shepherd’s Market night. Open as a yacht, it wore a great shining bonnet, and flying over the crest of this great bonnet, as though in proud flight over the heads of scores of phantom horses, was that silver stork by which the gentle may be pleased to know that they have just escaped death beneath the wheels of a Hispano-Suiza car, as supplied to His Most Catholic Majesty.

Downwards to my door I looked, and there was a green hat before my door. The light from the one lamp in Sheep Street fell about it, and that was how I saw that it was a green hat, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn: being, no doubt, one of those that women who have many hats affect pour le sport.

II

“Do you know if Mr. March is in?” asked the voice of the green hat. But I could not see her face for the shadow of the brim, for it was a piratical brim, such as might very possibly defy the burning suns of El Dorado.

I said I was not sure. I was very surprised—a caller for Gerald March! “If we look up,” I said, “we can see by his lights if he is in.” And I stepped out into the lane, and the green hat and I stared up at the topmost windows of the grubby little house.

“There’s no light there,” she said. “I suppose the light below is yours....”

“There is,” I said, “but it’s very faint. He’s in all right.”

Still she looked up, thoughtfully. She was tall, not very tall, but as tall as becomes a woman. Her hair, in the shadow of her hat, may have been any colour, but I dared swear that there was a tawny whisper to it. And it seemed to dance, from beneath her hat, a very formal dance on her cheeks. One had, with her, a sense of the conventions; and that she had just been playing six sets of tennis.

“If I look surprised,” I said, “that is because you are the first caller Gerald March has ever had.”

She seemed to smile, faintly, as one might in the way of politeness. Otherwise she did not seem to be given to smiling.

“He’s my brother,” she said, as though explaining herself, the hour, everything. “It’s very nice of you to have opened the door....”

I was listening, oh, intently! One had to, to make out what she was saying. Then the voice suddenly expired and one was left standing there, listening to nothing, unprepared to say anything. It was, you can see, rather silly; but one got used to it.

“Oh,” I said, “Gerald wouldn’t open a door! He never opens doors....”

She looked vaguely about our lane. I was proud of our lane at that moment, for it set off the colour of her hat so well. There was no doubt but that she was tired. Seven sets, possibly. Her eyes seemed at last to find the car of the flying silver stork.

“That car ... I suppose it will be all right there?”

She seemed to me to lack a proper pride in her car. I said I thought it would be quite all right there, as though a Hispano-Suiza was a usual sight near my door; and I suggested that maybe I had better see her upstairs to her brother’s flat, as it was the top flat and there were no lights on the stairs. But she appeared to be in no hurry. Thoughtful she was. She said dimly: “You are very kind....”

One somehow gathered from her voice that her face was very small.

“I’ve often wanted,” she murmured, looking about, “to live in this place. You know, vaguely....”

“Of course, vaguely,” I said.

She looked at me, seemed to see me for the first time, seemed faintly surprised to find herself talking to me. I was surprised, too. Maybe it was the way her hair danced formally on her cheeks that made it look such a small face, but it seemed to me no larger than a small size in ladies’ handkerchiefs. That was why I was surprised. She stood carelessly, like the women in Georges Barbier’s almanacks, Falbalas et Fanfreluches, who know how to stand carelessly. Her hands were thrust into the pockets of a light brown leather jacket—pour le sport—which shone quite definitely in the lamplight: it was wide open at the throat, and had a high collar of the fur of a few minks. I once had a friend who was a taxidermist, and that was how I knew that. One small red elephant marched across what I could see of her dress, which was dark and not pour le sport.

“Perhaps you are right,” she admitted doubtfully. Not that I had the faintest idea what she was talking about.

I went before her up the dark narrow stairs, sideways, lighting and dropping matches, after the custom of six years. There were three floors in the little house, but the first was untenanted except by mice. I wondered whether it would interest her if I told her I was leaving to-morrow, but I did not see why it should. She, after all, had probably just come back from foreign parts. About her, it was perfectly obvious, was the aura of many adventures. But I was looking on her in brotherly sort, interested in her because she was Gerald March’s sister. For that was a most deficient man in every other respect. Fancy, I thought. She said: “Oo, isn’t it dark!”

“Of course,” I said, striking yet another match against the wall, “I knew Gerald had a sister, but I had a vague idea, I don’t know why, that she was still at school....”

“I don’t suppose,” she said helpfully—stumbled slightly, I helped her—“that any one knows everything. Is that mice downstairs? Rats? Oo, really.... Gerald and I showed, once upon a time, a strong tendency to be twins, though there was a good hour between us, so I was told. I was at the tail end of the hour.” Slowly struggling up those dim, narrow, musty stairs, her green hat now and then flaming in the matchlight, she gave one worthless information in a slightly husky, impersonal voice. As we came up to my landing I asked her if she had seen Gerald lately.

“Not,” she said, whispered, “for years and years. Nearly ten, I think. Do you think that comes, perhaps, of having been almost twins once upon a time?”

I did not say anything for I was thinking hard. Now I was Gerald’s friend. This lady of the green hat was Gerald’s sister, nay, his twin sister. Fancy, I thought. Where, I asked myself, did one stand? It was a matter for thought, for deep thought, and so I treated it, as she did not appear to be in any great hurry.

Now while these things were passing, the lady and I were standing on my landing, which was four foot by three; she with one foot on the stair below, one leather shoulder against the wall. And one had again, with her, a sense of the conventions.

“You are thinking,” she accused me. “I wonder what about....”

The light that plunged through my half-open sitting-room door fought a great fight with the shadow of her green hat and lit her face mysteriously. She was fair. As they would say it in the England of long ago—she was fair. And she was grave, so grave. That is a sad lady, I thought. To be fair, to be sad ... why, was she intelligent, too? And white she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they sang of better dreams. But no siren, she! That was a sad lady, most grave. And always her hair would be dancing a tawny, formal dance about the small white cheeks.

She smiled, when it occurred to her that she was looking at me.

“I know what you are thinking,” she said.

“I wonder!”

“Yes. You like Gerald, don’t you?” She thought about that. “Well, what you are thinking is, whether it is fair to him to take me up there in case he is drunk....”

“If only it was ‘in case,’” I said. “You see?”

She closed her eyes.

“Poor Gerald!” she whispered. “Isn’t it a shame!”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “there’s nothing to be done....”

“Oh, I know!” Oh, she seemed to know that from her heart. And I wondered why they had not seen each other for ten years. I couldn’t imagine her disliking Gerald—childish, furious Gerald! Probably, I thought, he was to blame, and I wondered if there was anything in Gerald’s life for which he was not to blame. Poor Gerald.

“You see,” the slightly husky voice was saying, “I just came to-night on an Impulse. I am scarcely ever in England....” The voice expired. We waited, and she acknowledged my patience with a jewel of a smile. “And I suddenly thought I would like to see Gerald to-night. Please,” she suddenly begged, so seriously, “won’t you let me? I’d like just to see him ... but if you think ...?”

“Oh,” I said, “come on.”

She laughed, a little nervously, abruptly. Gerald’s door was at the head of the next flight of stairs, and it was, as usual, wide open. She moved one step forward into the room, she stopped, her eyes on the ceiling, as fixed as lamps. Yes, those were very sensible eyes. She didn’t look at Gerald.

“What is it?” she asked dimly.

“Whisky,” I said. It was so obvious.

“But more than that! There’s certainly whisky, but....”

“Wet shoes....”

“But that’s too literary! Oh, of course! Old women in alms-houses....”

She was talking, it was so easy to see, against her eyes. Now she was here she didn’t want to see Gerald. She was trying to put off the moment when her eyes must rest on Gerald. Still just within the dingy room, she looked everywhere but at Gerald.

“Lot of books,” she said.

I made to go, but the slightest hint of a start detained me. She suggested her gestures. That was a very quiet lady. She didn’t, if you please, intrude her womanhood on the occasion. Women do that unconsciously. But she didn’t do it, unconsciously. She met a man on his own ground. That was a gallant lady.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh!”

“Might just as well come away,” I muttered. I was used to Gerald, but at the moment, at her sudden whisper, I would have liked to murder him. Here for sixteen months not a soul had come to see him—and now, before his sister, and his twin sister too, he was in this vile state. But she had insisted on seeing him. What could I do? I promised Gerald a pretty speech on the morrow. He would be more or less human to-morrow, for Gerald had those phenomenal recuperative powers that are peculiar to lean drunkards.

“The illness,” I told her, “goes in periods of three days. On the first day he is thoughtful, on the second he is thoughtless, and on the third speechless.”

I could not see her face, her back was to me. The leather jacket, the brave green hat, the thoughtful poise. But I heard her whisper the name of the inert thing sprawling half on a broken Windsor chair and half across the littered table, and it was as though there was a smile in the whisper, and I thought to myself that these twins must have been great playmates once upon a time. “Gerald!” she whispered. “Gerald! Gerald!”

“Oh, go to hell!” muttered Gerald, and, without looking up, without waking up, twitched his head feverishly to one side, upsetting a tea-cup half-full of whisky.

“He thinks it’s me,” I explained from the door, and suddenly I found her looking at me over her shoulder, so thoughtfully. I can see her now, the way she suddenly looked at me, half over her leather shoulder, thinking I knew not what, and her right hand spread out on her brother’s arm. There was a striking emerald on the third finger of her right hand, livid against the dark thing that was Gerald March.

“Only twenty-nine,” she told me gravely, “Gerald and me....”

“Oh,” I said. What could one say?

“Bad luck, I do think,” she murmured. I wondered, you know, whom she was talking to. Certainly not to me.

“He’s a very good fellow,” I said.

“Heredity, you see,” she suddenly explained. “Father almost died of it. Brandy, though. He liked brandy, Barty did. They said he would die if he had more than half-a-bottle a day, but he had a bottle to make sure, and then he died of pneumonia.”

Then, in her silence, she was so still that I grew very uncomfortable. What was she thinking about? She was staring down at the sprawling thing that was her twin brother, the emerald still livid against his arm.

“He wrote a very good book once,” I said, to say something.

“Yes. About Boy....”

“Boy?” Gerald, you see, was no talker. He just swore, but automatically; it meant nothing.

“Didn’t you know?” She looked at me again, but her eyes seemed to me masked. I was to know later why her eyes were masked just then. I said I knew nothing at all about Gerald.

She passed a finger over one of her eyebrows, and looked at it. “Dirty,” she said.

“Years ago,” she said, “before the war, Gerald had a very great friend. Gerald, you see, is a hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and everything, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper. And no hero, no Gerald. And so, when his hero died, Gerald died too. Funny, life is, isn’t it? Then the war, and that, of course, buried him. And now....” Those absorbed, blazing blue eyes! The sea was in them, and the whisper of all open places: the magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.

“No friends?” she asked dimly. “No women? Nothing?”

And just at that moment I had, for the first time, that feeling of incapacity with her. I was to have it again, profoundly, but I remember vividly that it came for the first time just then, in poor, furious Gerald’s room. Dingy—that is what I felt before this quiet, thoughtful woman with the absorbed eyes. Dingy. I felt, I suppose, the immense dinginess of being a human being, for there is an immense, unalterable dinginess in being human, in the limitation of being human. But why I should feel that particularly with her I did not know then. She, too, was human, quiet, gentle, very unaware. But, later, I was to know why.

It was with an effort that I told her about Gerald. That feeling of self-dinginess came somehow to a point in just feeling common. For I was what Gerald was not, what she obviously was not. I could somehow “cope with” my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for privilege in defeat.

Gerald, I told her, was a more solitary man than I had ever known or thought to know. I supposed he had a small income, for he seemed to manage to live. He was very shy, absurdly shy, tortured shy. She nodded gravely, and I went on to say that shyness was a cruel disease with Gerald: it was a shyness, to strangers, without charm, for he never could show his shyness, he must show everything but his shyness. And so it was that he couldn’t get on with people, and now he had ceased to try, he just had drinks. Every Sunday afternoon he went to tea with his aunt, Lady Eve Chalice, in Mount Street.

“It was Eve who really created my impulse,” she told me, then: “Oh, here!” and I found I had an empty cigarette-case in my hand and that she was offering me hers. It was an oblong white-jade case, and chained to it by a double chain of gold was a hectagonal black onyx box which may or may not have held powder. One corner of the hectagonal black onyx was initialed in minute diamond letters: I.S.

“Iris,” she said. “Iris Storm.” And she smiled, childishly, formally, saying: “You have been so nice, I had forgotten we didn’t know each other.” I told her my name, in that embarrassed way one always does tell any one one’s name, and we smoked a while in silence. She inhaled her smoke with a faint hiss, and her teeth were a regiment of even bits of rice-paper standing at attention, very smart and sharp. Teeth always give one ideas. These were imperious, dangerous teeth. On a middle one was wedged a small string of tobacco: it lay coiled there like a brown maggot, and when I told her about that she removed it with the nail of her small finger, and regarded it. She had a great talent for looking at nothing in particular, and that was the only likeness I could see between the twins: thoughtful they both were. Suddenly, from the tousled dark head on the table came a jumble of inarticulate words. She listened intently. Gerald shivered, but his face remained buried in his crossed arms.

“He’s dreaming,” I said. She looked at me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. But as they never fell, I am not sure. Thoughtful she was, smoking....

“Why does God do these things?” she asked in a suddenly strong, clear voice, a most surprising voice; but I said nothing, knowing nothing of God.

“Let us go,” she said.

“Shall I tell him you came?”

She thought about that, looking at me. “Yes,” she said, “will you? Please. Just that I came. You see, Gerald doesn’t ... well,” she smiled somewhere in those eyes, “let us say he is against me....”

We were in the doorway of the soiled room of the drunkard. I was going to switch out the light. Often I would come upstairs and switch out Gerald’s light.

“Gerald,” she said suddenly, in that strong voice, and I thought of a prefect’s voice at school, down the corridor of a dormitory. “Good-bye to Gerald.”

“You see,” she said to me, “Gerald and I are the last Marches, and we ought to stand together. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, you ought,” I said gravely. One hand, the hand of the great emerald, hung against her leather jacket. “Certainly you ought,” I said, and raised the hand to my lips. Her hand smelt dimly of petrol and cigarettes, and a scent whose name I shall now never know.

“These defiant courtesies,” she said thoughtfully. “They’re very nice, I always say....”

III

Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow stairs to my landing. In the sudden flare of my match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had occasion to rebuke myself on the depravity that is man. She said over her shoulder: “Hilary Townshend has told me about you....”

“But he has never told me about you!”

“Oh, he would if you provoked him!”

“And may I?”

But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary had, I thought, said something about Gerald March having a sister, but I had not connected the vaguely heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I don’t know why, but I had always imagined Gerald’s sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere in the country with a bankrupt old gentleman called Lord Portairley, Gerald’s uncle.

We were on my small landing now, in the light that plunged out of the half-open door of my sitting-room: she with a foot on the stairs leading downwards, away.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Really, I think you’ve been very kind....”

She seemed to me very nice and gentle; yes, nice; and then it seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself. I was on another planet. Hilary tells me now that he also had that feeling with her; but Hilary must have struggled against it, whereas I am incapable of struggling against any feeling.

“Good-bye,” I said.

I was looking not at her but through the half-open door into my room. There lay the disorder of my life, the jumble, the lack of purpose, the silence, and the defeat of my life. I wasn’t, it seems almost an intrusion to say, very happy in those days; but that is by the way in the history of Gerald March and Iris Storm.

Now here is the difficult part of this history. Of the many gaps it will contain, this seems to me the most grave, the least excusable. One should write, if not well, at least plausibly, about the things that happen. And yet I cannot be plausible about this, because I do not know how it happened. I mean, how she came into my room and sat down. I did not ask her. Did she want to? Mrs. Storm was a lady who gave you a sense of the conventions. Mrs. Storm was a ... and yet ... I do not know anything about her.

I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together; and, of course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her—foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?—as some one who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.

We have all of us a crude desire to “place” our fellows in this or that category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that, maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with the knowledge that she was Gerald’s sister, that she was twenty-nine years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not, anyhow I couldn’t, “place” Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather despairing one, that she didn’t fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to any nationality. She wasn’t that ghastly thing called “Bohemian,” she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society,” “county,” upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England, spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the conventions; but she gave you—unaware always, impersonal always, and those cool, sensible eyes!—a much deeper sense that she was somehow outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one was non-existent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man can’t get beyond—to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a man like that—indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is not?—but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects the lives of the multitude of his fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so I had with this woman that profound sense of incapability, of defeat, which any limited man must feel with a woman whose limitations he cannot know. She was—in that phrase of Mr. Conrad’s which can mean so little or so much—she was of all time. She was, when the first woman crawled out of the mud of the primeval world. She would be, when the last woman walks towards the unmentionable end.

“Good-bye,” I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green hat were brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned. “Why are you laughing?” I asked, or perhaps I did not ask that, perhaps she had not been laughing at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor her eyes were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt. I pushed open the door of my room.

“How I would like,” she said, that husky voice, “a glass of cold water!” That was what she said, and so I let her go in alone into the sitting-room, whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely and long I let the water run, pleased with the way it was filling the little house with its clean roar, pleased with the clean scent of the rushing water, which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then she said: “You have had a quick bath,” and so we became friends.

She stood among the littered books on the floor, looking round at the disorder, like a tulip with a green head. She sipped the water, looking round wisely over the rim of the tumbler. I explained that I was leaving to-morrow, and therefore the disorder.

We talked.

In that disordered room, so littered with books that you might hardly take a step without stumbling over one, it was not difficult to talk. Indeed, it is never so easy to talk about books as when they are about the floor, so that you may turn them over with your foot, see what they are, pick them up and drop them anywhere with no precious nonsense as to where they should exactly go.

She waved her glass of water about, sipping it. A drop of water clung like a gem to the corner of her painted mouth. It was not fair.

Talking with her in that room was like talking with her as we walked on a windy heath: she threw out things, you caught all you could of them, you missed what you liked, and you threw something back. Now and then something would turn up in a voice which was suddenly strong and clear, and every time her voice was strong and clear you were so surprised that you did not hear so well as when she spoke inaudibly. She had none of the organised, agonised grimaces of the young lady of fashion. But one knew she was not a young lady of fashion, for she hadn’t a sulky mouth.

Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely discriminating taste which maddens you: you try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion of enjoyment. She used some words as though she had never heard any one else using them. “Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly immense sense. The word seemed turned topsy-turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy. She used the word “common,” I think, to denote a thing attempted and achieved scratchily. Mr. Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “common.” But Miss Clemence Dane in Legend was. “Oh, come!” I said, for to me Legend is an achievement in literature.

“All those women talking and dissecting and yearning together,” she said. “Their breath smells of ... oh, red hair!” She thought Miss Romer Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time: The Grand Tour particularly. She was loyal to girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr. Temple Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was “nice.” “Nice?” I said. “Well, wonderful,” she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “common,” a “stunt” writer.

“I detest the word ‘stunt,’” I said.

“That is why,” she said, “I used it about Monsieur Morand. He is an abbreviation, like nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her. She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for luncheon. “What,” she asked, “is the hurry?” I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps English was not the language for abbreviations and diminutives. She deferred to my judgment about that, and I said what I said. One just didn’t discuss Barrie: there he was. “You can’t laugh me out of him,” she smiled, “by calling him whimsical.” She had once enjoyed a book by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called Guy and Pauline. There was Hergesheimer. She put up a gallant, insincere defence for the Imagistes, but it turned out that she had never read any, and wasn’t at all sure what they were. “They’re short for poetry,” I said coldly, “like nightie for nightingale.” But perhaps the book she most profoundly liked was The Passionate Friends, with perhaps the last part of Tono-Bungay. “And, of course,” she said, “The Good Soldier,” Mr. Ford Maddox Hueffer’s amazing romance. From a table she picked up Joyce’s Ulysses, looked at it vaguely, dropped it absently on the floor amongst the others. I held a watching financial brief for it. One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.

“It’s a funny thing,” she mused....

“What’s a funny thing?”

“Satirists.... They are all very plain men. Grubby, too. Why?”

“Why?” I said. “But, really——”

She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about....

“Genius,” I said, “has——”

“Of course, genius. But——”

“They are striving,” I said, “for——”

“Yes, I know. But why are they always so ugly? I mean, these people called ‘satirists.’ One sees them abroad, at the Rotonde, or in Rome, Florence....” I saw her among them, the small white face, the cool, sensible, huge eyes, very attentive, deferring. “They marry plain, too. Always. Invariably. Why? And man and wife hang on to each other like grim death, despising everything hard. And they come out in spots. Why? One just wonders.... It seems to need very ugly men with very unattractive wives to despise things, to show us our ugliness. Has ever any even fairly human-looking person ever been a ‘satirist’? But I suppose if they weren’t so plain they wouldn’t have so much time to be obscene on paper. Or am I talking nonsense?”

“It’s absurd,” I said, “to make it a question of looks——”

“But it makes me furious!” she said in that suddenly strong clear voice. “These despisers. These grubby clever men with their grubby genius. The heroes of the weekly reviews. Their impotent little obscenities. I’ve tried to find, in knowing them and reading them, a great, real contempt, something as fierce and clean as fire, a nightmare of contempt, so that from the pillars of burning smoke we can build beings of better shape than ourselves. I’ve read, watched, listened, wanting to know....”

I said things, too. But who am I? For instance, I said: “You don’t allow to all men one common failing, which shows particularly when the men are satirical writers: they must always write about women rather in the spirit of uncleanminded undergraduates. You should be more tolerant, Mrs. Storm....”

We talked of vulgarity. She had once read a book of mine, and I complained bitterly of my vulgarity, saying, you know, that one didn’t begin by being vulgar, “but one began,” I suggested, “by being just bumptious. The meeker you are, the more bumptious you probably are inside, but that does not harm. Not that I was ever really meek. And at the beginning there’s a tremendous humility in you to yourself. You can’t have any achievement without that humility, and yet you lose it later on because you find out all the wrong things about yourself. People are only too ready to show you the wrong things about yourself. They like doing it. They seem to think there is something wrong with conceit. It irritates fools, because they think it is unwarranted. How do they know if it is unwarranted, and what does it matter if it is or not? Or it irritates them because they too once had in themselves a humility to themselves, and then allowed it to be, according to that Bottomley-Kipling-John-Bull gospel, ‘knocked out of them.’ And so if a young man is not very strong he lets the mischievous fools take his conceit away from him, he turns his back on his real conceit, which is himself—he has it ‘knocked out of him,’ just as any taste for music was knocked out of him by his public-school—and goes out for one of the spurious conceits which are called ‘being as others are.’ Then he has put his feet on the endless and never-ending road of vulgarity, and there are very few turnings....”

She sat in the deep wicker armchair, which had come with me from Chelsea six years before but would travel nevermore. It creaked madly as she sat down, and she glanced at it in surprise. “Of course,” she said, “it’s contagious....”

“You are quite wrong,” I said. “The real sticky part seems to come from inside one. And there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of defeat—a writer, I mean, who must earn his living by writing, and so must always write. For it is more difficult for a second-rate writer not to be vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. It uncoils from somewhere inside you, like a nasty, sticky snake. So slick it is, too. So helpful, often. And when you see it for the first time you stare at it transfixed, and you say, ‘But I am not vulgar!’ But you get used to it later on. Very few people notice it. Most people like it. And, of course, it pays.”

“The golden snake,” she said. “It’s quite a good snake. It is silly to despise money.”

“Writers,” I said, and, I think, said rightly, “love money, they adore money! Successful writers, I mean. The ones who have become venerable, the ones who have made great names by writing about the irony of life and the incapabilities of wealth, the writers of the people for the people. They worship money, they hoard money. One and all despise rich people, and are perfectly beastly about the upper-classes. You should ask any publisher about the business capacity of any great author who writes about the Irony of Life. To really intelligent men of the middle-classes, living in sin does not seem nearly so wicked as living in luxurious sin. I only know one successful author who has the decency to get drunk with his easily-earned money. One should keep a sense of proportion about money, and you can only do that by throwing it away. The Jews, for instance——”

“Jews,” she said, “are charming. The rich ones, I mean, and preferably the fat shiny ones. They understand luxury and elegance, and elegance is an enchantment that the skin loves. But nowadays only Jews have an idea of enchantment, only Jews and Americans. Furs, jewels, spacious rooms, trellised terraces, all lovely baubles, silks of China, myrrh, frankincense, and motor-cars. The Jews are disenchanted, but at least they’re brave enough to insist on having all the enchantments of disenchantment. Luxury, ease, splendour, spaciousness. You’ll say they’re florid. Well, they may be, they are, but they’re also the last towers of chivalry. Mr. Chesterton goes running after them shouting about beer and the Pope, but if you’re going to leave chivalry to beer-drinkers and the Pope, God help enchantment. You’ll say that the Americans’ indulgent admiration for their wives almost borders on the gaga, but they fight for it very really, they don’t just talk and indulge. They fight with money, they have the courage of their cheques, they dare tremendous duels, they get up at unearthly hours in the morning to dash towards the rendezvous, and they draw a cheque just as gallantly as any rather caddish cavalier ever drew a sword....”

“Englishmen,” I said, “respect their women....”

“Maybe,” she said absently.

We were impersonal. Now and then the wicker armchair creaked beneath her, and she looked at it with faint surprise. Now and then a car screamed on Piccadilly, an electric-landau sounded its bells through Shepherd’s Market towards its garage by Camelot House. Now and then her slightly husky voice expired. Then we waited a while. She stared deeply into the eyes of a mask which a Russian artist had once given me in exchange for a poker debt. It lay sideways against a corner of the fender. I waited for her to say something about that, for it was the mask of a Florentine gentleman that was a lecher. I had grown used to it, as one can grow used to anything, but people would remark on it adversely. The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where you are.

We became personal. She said: “Let us talk about our friends now.”

“To-night,” I said, “I have been to a party at the Hallidays’.”

“Ah, the pitiless vulgarians! Surely, between us, we can do better than that!”

“There’s Hilary....”

“The sweet! Can you not love Hilary? But to-night,” she said very seriously, “I have been dining with old Maurice Harpenden. How he would hate me to say old! I went out all the way to Sutton Marle to do that, because he expects it of me when I am in England. We are enemies, and we watch each other. He was very courtly. They are difficult to deal with, handsome old men who have known one since one was so high. You need to be a woman to know what I mean, but you must try to pretend for a minute. Thank you. Organically, of course, they are perfect. Good features and long legs and iron-grey hair. Character and clothes by Robert Hichens. They are very courtly, and then they touch one. Now, why do they do that? They pretend to do it in a friendly way, as any gentleman of the old school might to the daughter of another gentleman of the old school: but they make opportunities....” The husky voice committed suicide, was buried, and in the third second rose from the dead. “I do not understand men. I do not understand the ‘old school’ type of man, nor what ‘old school’ means, unless it means that you never did anything at school except win the Battle of Waterloo. Then as soon as you left school you were qualified by good-looks, a charm of manner, and a habit of becoming popular with elderly men which is peculiar to right-minded young Englishmen, to become Major-General Sir Maurice Harpenden, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., and to lead your troops in battle with that gallant inefficiency patented by English infantry-commanders who know a good horse when they see one. After which you can spend the rest of your life in bantering. You can see that I do not like Maurice. We dine, and we are enemies, and we watch each other.”

“The sire doesn’t seem very like the son. Napier is a saint....”

The chair creaked. She was looking at me from under her hat, gravely as a Red Indian. “There were two roads leading from a certain tree, and when we were eighteen life said to me, ‘You go this way,’ and life said to Napier, ‘You go that way.’ And so we did that, and so it has been....”

Now I was staring at her mouth, which was a silky red mouth engraved with I don’t know how many deep downward lines, and my heart beat twice so loudly that I wondered if she had heard it, for she whispered sharply: “Listen!” But it was only a clock striking somewhere in London, and its striking was quickly done.

“I must go,” she said, but not even the armchair creaked, and her green hat was still crushed against the back of the chair, and her eyes were still staring profoundly over my shoulder. There was only the window there. The curtains were not drawn, and I thought I would draw them, but it seemed a pity to move. Her eyes glowed like an animal’s. She was staring, absorbed, over my right shoulder, but there was only the window there. She was asleep. Then her eyes dilated into glowing points, and her lips said: “On a envie.”

Then she made a gesture of distaste.

She said: “There are desires....”

“Heavens, do you need to tell me that!”

“Oh, not those desires!” Expressionless, blazing eyes absorbed over my shoulder, she waved away “those desires.” I was snubbed.

“They call it,” she said, “the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will find it one day when we are dead and all things that live now are dead. They will find it when everything is dead but the dreams we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, nor opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there. Life’s best gift, hasn’t some one said, is the ability to dream of a better life....”

The green hat crushed recklessly against the back of the chair, she stared, still and absorbed, at the names that friends of long-ago had written on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her eyes glowed, glowed like an animal’s. The light of the reading-lamp on the littered table by my elbow kissed her lip, and the light kissed the faint, faint down on her lip into a few minutes of existence as a garden of gold dust. A sword lay in my mind, twisting and shining among the inner grotesqueries where we keep ourselves, in the real sense, to ourselves.

I forced my mind to a more legal aspect of her. There were two rings on her wedding finger. A narrow circle of platinum, a narrow circle of gold. I wondered if she had been married twice. I tried to imagine her husbands. They would be tall, handsome men, and she would be passionately in love with them. She would, like all women in love with tall, handsome men, be worshipful as a dog. Physically they would be very courteous to her, but no more than courteous, and mentally they would, if I may say so, treat her rough. They would go to sleep quickly, and she would lie awake far into the night, pressing her breasts, because they hurt her. She would think. She would not think. Then one day, when she was between thinking and not thinking, she would be unfaithful, and the tall, handsome man who was her husband would apologise to her for not having understood her better. But she would say, with cold eyes: “There is nothing to understand. On a envie.” Then he would say, “Oh!” and instruct her lawyers to divorce him.

“I was trying,” I said, “to imagine your husband....”

The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the hat one blue eye looked at me like a blue stone worn by fire. “Two,” she said. “They are dead.”

I wondered what she saw, looking over my shoulder. She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains. Then suddenly the headlines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled before my mind, stood livid against my memory, slashed with the name of Storm. I had not a doubt but that he had been her second husband. “V.C. murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C. Left on roadside with five bullet wounds....”

She said suddenly: “I am a house of men.”

“What!” I said. “You surprise me.”

“A house of men. Of their desires and defeats and deaths. Of their desires, yes, of their deaths, yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great responsibility for me, and I have lodged complaints about it, but it is no use. I am a house of men. Ah me, ah me! Oh, dear! My friend, there is a curse, a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You will see it in my eyes one day, and you will be sorry for me.”

“You mustn’t believe in curses,” I said. “Good God, curses!”

“The Marches,” she said, “are never let off anything. That is the curse.”

Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far below, like pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of the sighs of Anaïtis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as they can in their minds. I said: “And so the house of March, fatal and damned, can never avoid its destiny....”

“Yes,” she said reasonably, “it can avoid it. By not being weak enough to desire so strongly.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“I’m glad you see,” she said gravely. They listen to voices whispering dreams. While they listen, they do queer weak things. Of the soil sordid—there is your March. But there is another March, who listens to voices whispering dreams. My father, Barty March, was, I think, one of the most loved men of his time. Like Napier is now, but of course Napier behaves. A policeman found Barty early one morning on the doorstep of a house we had then in Cambridge Square. He used to say he was never drunk until he closed his eyes, but this time he had closed his eyes into pneumonia. He only opened them once again, to look at Gerald and me, sixteen years old apiece. He smiled, you know, because Barty couldn’t help smiling. Besides, he was happy at last. “Avoid dreams,” he said. “Never stop to listen to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run over. Never sympathise with the moon when you can hear it, cold and lonely and blind, crooning to itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You will catch pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which men are men and women are women. You will go mad....”

Her right hand hung limp over the arm of the chair. It was just faintly dirty, and the nails shone like pink ivory. The emerald on the third finger held my eyes enchanted for a long while. She smiled at my look, and as she lay her eyes swept falcon-like down to the stone. It made me rise out of myself, that falcon-like sweep of her clear eyes, and I thought of the pitiless misbehaviour of life, that had not let her stay within the sensible stability of marriage.

“It’s a bit loose,” she was saying.

“I was wondering. It’s such a beauty! Aren’t you afraid of it falling?”

She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself. “Oo, no! I have a knuckle. I crook it. And lo, it doesn’t fall....”

“But this sounds like a plot!”

“It is a law,” she said. “There are four laws, variously entitled a, b, c, d. The law (a) declares, against all formerly-held beliefs, that a flower is less beautiful because it is sure to die. That is a religious law, having to do with the unworth of perishable things, if you see what I mean. The law (b) has something to do with the fact that all men with long legs make poor lovers. That is a pagan law. You might write an essay on the long arm of coincidence and the short legs of co-respondents. It would be fun for you. The law (c) has something to do with exhorting a woman never to trust a man of honour, for he serves two mistresses. That is the law of good sense for amorous women, and will save them disappointment. The law (d) has to do with this ring, which is a bit loose, according to the directions of Jehovah.”

“You have mighty friends, Iris Storm!”

“Ah, I need them! Desire is a child with hungry eyes, and for him a dragon lies waiting. This ring is a charm against dragons.” The slightly husky voice dreamed. It was an hour for dreaming. She would mask unhappy things with passing talk. “I called him Jehovah because the same was a jealous God. And I would mock him with that, saying that it was I who should be jealous of him, for doesn’t a man of honour serve two mistresses, while it is well known of women of dishonour, I would mock him, that they never serve but one god at a time. But he never was a worldly man, and so eaten by doubt that you would have laughed if he hadn’t been such a pet....”

“And so he gave you the emerald to be as a witness against you, and to testify against your frailty?”

“Now take,” dreamed the husky voice, the great eyes fixed on the ceiling; and there was a smile in them, like a distant wave of music; “now take a night in Algeria. Take also a hill, and on the hill a garden....”

“The Hotel St. George, Mustapha Supérieur, Algiers——”

“Ah, don’t forget the American Bar!”

“And the Benares bowls——”

“And calorifères too hot or too cold——”

“And Arab carpets from Victoria Street——”

“And Americans with low heels——”

“And a passion for ‘mailing postals——’”

“Not to mention veal every day——”

“And a Soirée de Gala every Saturday——”

“And the best-dressed women——”

“Of Tunbridge Wells.”

“But take instead some red and purple flowers against a yellow wall, some oranges, a tangerine or two, three gazelles on a tennis-court, poppies tall as choir-boys, the cactus, the palm, and the pyramid cypress-tree. And watch, my friend, two shadows that walk in the wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress, that stands in the garden like a dark torch keeping watch over disillusion. It is night, or have I already told you that? Ah me, ah me, now will she who walks there ever forsake her love, will she ever be disloyal to her vows, that were made with so much pomp and circumstance in the Guards’ Chapel at Westminster before a congregation notable for the absence of all her husband’s relations? Why, her heart is confident, her heart is fragrant with the honey of that moon’s passage, and she knows what she knows. And yet, and here is a most pitiful thing, there must be something in her, some fatal abandon, that sets men doubting, for he who walked with her in the wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress wore the silence of the destroyer, so that her heart cried that he was misnamed, for the mortal disease of his heel was suspicion. Now I must tell you that it was Christmas Eve, and after a little desultory conversation he said: ‘Here is a present for you, sweet,’ and he gave me this emerald which you are kind enough to admire. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘it is a little big for me! It may fall from my finger, don’t you see?’

“‘Yes, it may fall,’ said he. ‘But if you are careful, my sweet, if you curve your knuckle in time, it won’t dream of falling, not it!’ And then I cried miserably, knowing there was a catch in this somewhere, for at that time I was not yet broken in and was still fearful of suspicion. And I cried: ‘Hector Storm, what do you mean?’

“‘I mean, Iris, that you are as that ring——’

“‘Beautiful but loose, Hector? Ah, timeo Danaos!”

“‘Iris, will you never be serious! Yes, you are as that ring, which you must always wear on the third finger of your right hand. And as that ring may fall, Iris, so you may fall, for that is the sort of woman you are. But as that ring may be kept from falling, so may you keep yourself from falling. Oh, God,’ he said, ‘my life is darkness without you, I love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’ And he said much more that is unmentionable, and I learnt something, for it is only by listening to their husbands in moments of intimacy that well-brought-up women can become acquainted with certain good old English words. And though I pleaded bitterly that he was unfair to me, saying I was chained to him as my wrist might be chained to a star, which was no more than the truth, he insisted that I could be constant only to inconstancy, and so I was tired and went to bed. But look! Oh, look! Please look! Ah, the discourtesy of time! Really I must go now!”

I drew my eyes from her eyes to see that the dawn had slyly thrown a grey handkerchief over the window. It was but the shape of the dawn creeping out into the night, it was but a ghostly breath in the night, but it was the dawn. And I did not know what to say, for can a man deny the dawn, that speaks good sense in its vast elemental language?

The chair creaked and creaked. She was going now, there was no doubt about it. The texture of her face was grave, she was busy with the angle of her green hat. I examined the sword in my mind. The chair creaked and creaked, and then it was as though snapped by silence, and our startled eyes joined over the emerald that lay on the floor like the echo of the kiss, which was an unfair kiss. She shivered faintly, and drew herself taut, and was very proud. She was remote as the evening star, and very proud. Her eyes were dark as in a crypt, and her eyes looked lost, as though she had strayed into a maze. I lit a cigarette, and found my throat dry and parched.

She found difficulty in speaking. I was amazed.

“No,” she said. She shook her head. “Certainly not. My ring, please.”

Imperiously her finger pointed to the floor, but her eyes were as plaintive as a nun’s who has strayed into one of the corridors of hell. That I might walk with her there I again made myself a Judas to her hand, and she shivered with her whole body as in a torment, and she seemed to bite her lip from within.

“It means nothing,” she said coldly.

“I know,” I said.

She breathed deeply, with a hand pressed to one breast, as though it hurt her. I think it must have hurt her very much. I was sorry. She shook her head, as though she was in a cage, and then she was as still as a cut flower. The whole brim of the green hat was between me and her face, we were both terribly alone. Her right hand drooped naked over the arm of the chair, and I was bending down to pick up the emerald to replace it on the third finger when a cautious knocking came from below.

That was the second or third time of knocking, and each time it was less cautious, and I knew it to come from the policeman on the beat, who would be wishing to have the primrose car put in its proper place, which was not on the King’s highroad. I wondered if she had heard, but I could not see her face. I wondered if she heard me move. As I came to the door I switched out the light and the dawn pounced on her green hat, but she who wore it fought her battles carved in stone. She said something, I did not catch what, and I went downstairs and spoke with the policeman, who was an amiable middle-aged man of my acquaintance.

“My brother is with me,” I said, “but he will be gone soon.” Shepherd’s Market was creeping out into the dawn, draped and mysterious with the shadows of night. A window here and there was alight against the dark pile of Camelot House. The great car stood like a bruise against the passage of eternity, dawn fought for it, night draped it, and the silver stork flew unseen. The small noises of dawn stirred sharply in the night, and the lamps wore pale, tired faces. “Summer’s well on,” said the policeman.

I re-entered the sitting-room, saying impersonally: “I’m afraid you must go, as....” The room was empty. The figure that had been carved in stone was wrapped in air. The disorder of the room lay jeering at me on the dim carpet of the dawn. It was all like a purposeless limbo stretched between the night and the day, the room, my life, hers, everything, the strong, the silly and the brave. The hundreds of books lay in soiled confusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that has gone to the making of the soiled nothings that we are.

I was seized by a catholic anger against the woman. Through all the disenchantments of youth, despite the contagious impurities of life, in defiance of the crimes against love that we call love, I had kept romance for my ghostly companion. Romance was more than a silly lithe goddess coming down from a marble column. Romance was more than the licence to be shameless with clouded eyes. Romance did not steal through the fleshy portals of the heart, did not shiver at a Judas kiss, did not coil white trembling limbs into the puerile lusts of the mind. Romance was all that and was as much greater than that as a religion is greater than a church. To romance, which was the ultimate vision of commonsense, sex, as sex, was the most colossal bore that had ever distracted man from his heritage. And she would palm a facet of this colossal bore off on me! She would have me barter my ghostly companion for the fall of an emerald, she would invade my thoughts, perhaps my life, in exchange for a puny pleasure that needs love to exalt it above the matchless silliness of what, with an excessive zeal for scientific classification, is known to our civilisation as the sexual act.

I picked up the emerald from the floor, and it smiled in the palm of my hand.

In the dusk of the bedroom, she lay coiled on the bed. The hush of her breathing was no more than the trembling servant of the silence. Then she coughed a small cigarette cough. It was the usual cough, and gave me back my confidence. “Iris Storm!” I said, but I wondered if I had spoken, the frail silence was so undisturbed. She was asleep.

Perhaps it was then that I realised that she was beautiful. She was asleep. Could any but the shape of beauty dare to wear that impertinence! She lay on her side, she lay anyhow. The green hat was gone.

“Iris!” I said. Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair. It was like a boy’s hair, swept back from the forehead, which was a wide, clear forehead, clean and brave and sensible as a boy’s. Sensible, oh dear! The tawny cornstalks danced their formal dance on the one cheek that I could see, and the tip of a pierced ear played beneath them, like a mouse in the cornfield. Above her neck her hair died a very manly death, a more manly death than “bobbed” hair was ever known to die, and so it comes about that Iris Storm was the first Englishwoman I ever saw with “shingled” hair. This was in 1922.

I decided that I did not know what to do. I decided that that was just as well. “I will play,” I thought, “a waiting game,” and lit a cigarette. But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like a promise, and it smelled as grass might smell in a faëry land, and always about her there was that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a little shiny bit in the valley between her cheek and her nose. To this I applied a little Quelques Fleurs talc powder on a handkerchief, that when she awoke she should not think so ill of herself as I did. Hers was a small, straight nose with an imperceptible curve, just as any straight line might have, and its tip quivered a little as she breathed. Her leather jacket pour le sport, that had a high collar trimmed with some minks, was flung open, and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination. Towards her feet her hat lay with my hat.

Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and when the red elephants marching towards an unknown destination stirred breasts full of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “But enough of this hell!”

IV

Of all that had once decorated the walls of my sitting-room there was left by the removers only a looking-glass in an ancient gold frame, above the fireplace. My mother had once given me an oil-painting, saying, “This will do nicely for your flat,” but I in my pride had thought a looking-glass would offend the frame more judiciously.

She stood before that.

“What is the time?” she asked her reflection, and I told her that it was ten minutes to six.

“Have you a comb?” she asked of her reflection, and luckily I had a comb which was not my comb. She looked at it and saw that it was so.

“Thank you,” she said to her reflection.

The light of the tawny hair mocked the clouded daylight, and when, with the palm of her hand on her forehead, she swept the comb from front to back, it flamed tiger-tawny and ate into my spirit. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night....

In the Upper Fifth at school there was a tall, cold-eyed blood called Dwight-Rankin—I think he died on Gallipoli—who used to sit at the desk just in front of mine. He was a man of the mode, wearing his fair hair plastered from front to back, and his neck was clean and unspotted as a girl’s, and I would spend minutes wondering whether, if one touched the gold down in which his hair ended high above his neck one would feel hair or only skin. The back of her head affected me like that; it was just like Dwight-Rankin’s, only dry, and tiger-tawny.

She tore the small comb through the dancing curls on each cheek, so that they trembled like voiceless bells. It is a commonplace about women, as assiduously remarked by brilliant feminine psychologists as women’s “caprice” and “intuition,” that every woman must now and then make a “grimace of distaste” into a looking-glass. But she did not do that, nor need to. She was untouched, unsoiled, impregnable to the grubby, truthful hand of lex femina. She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world. The outlaw was above the law of afterwards, impervious and imperious. She was beautiful, grave, proud. How beautiful she was now! It was a sort of blasphemy in her to be so beautiful now, to stand in such ordered loveliness, to be neither shameful like a maiden nor shameless like a mondaine, nor show any fussy after-trill of womanhood, any dingy ember of desire. It was a sort of blasphemy in her, as it would be in a peacock to sing gracefully.

The silence got on my nerves, and I said something, anything. She looked over her shoulder at me, vaguely. She was the male of the species that is more fearless than mankind. I wondered what she was going to say.

“My hat, please,” she said. I appeared to have been holding it in my hand. With her left hand she crushed it on her head and kept her hand on the crown, looking at herself intently in the looking-glass. I was startled at her eyes in the looking-glass. They were cold blue stones, expressionless, caddish as a beast’s.

Down, down, with two fingers of her left hand, she pulled the brim of the green hat over her left eyebrow. She said: “I think I must have left my powder in the other room. Do you mind?” I brought her the case of white jade and the box of black onyx. She powdered, without interest.

“Good-bye,” she said. Her hand was held out, her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself. It would be a kindness to let her go quickly, a kindness which she would not have allowed me had I been a woman and she a man.

“Good-bye,” I said. And suddenly the hand that lay in mine pressed mine, and she gave a vague, brittle laugh.

“It seems a pity,” she said; and then the eyes in the shadow of the brim seemed to open wide, wide.

“You see?” she whispered. “You see?”

But I could see nothing but her silhouette against the future days. I said: “We have begun at the wrong end; but can’t we work back?”

“Oh, no!” she whispered. “It is not like that a bit. You don’t understand....”

Suddenly I said many things.

She seemed, her hand still in mine, to be absorbed in something just behind my right shoulder. There was such fear in her eyes that I cried sharply: “What is it?”

“The beast,” said the lips of the eyes of fear. “Just the beast....”

The word I said was drowned in the din of a lorry that smashed through Whitehorse Street to Piccadilly. She took her hand gently from mine. “There is a dream,” she said, “and there is a beast.”

She smiled.

“That’s all,” she said.

“I can understand regret,” I said, “but——”

“Ah, we can understand, you and I! We are as old as sand ... at this moment.”

“But, Iris Storm, regret seems like a scar on you!”

“Not regret,” she said, so calmly. “Shame.” And she took my hand again, closely. “You must forgive me. I couldn’t have said that to any other man. My shame mustn’t shame you, please! But you have a cold mind, you are disenchanted, you understand. And oh, if one could be assoiled in human understanding! You see, I am not what you think. I am not of the women of your life. I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am the meanest of all, she who destroys her body because she must, she who hates the thing she is, she who loathes the thing she does....” The breathless, pregnant voice seemed to fall to the floor, like a small bird with broken wings, and as it struggled upwards I said: “You are like a boy after his first love.”

“Oh, if it was boyishness!” And she took from the pocket of her leather jacket a tube of gold, and she broke it into two pieces, and she stared moon-struck at the carmine tongue of the lip-salve.

“To be born a chaste woman,” she said to the carmine tongue, “is good. I am in favour of chastity. I would die for purity, in theory.” She painted her mouth, staring moon-struck into the daylight. “Yes, I would die for purity. I wouldn’t mind dying anyhow, but it would be nice to die for purity....”

I said thus and thus.

“Yes,” she said, not having heard a word of mine, “it is not good to have a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind, as I have. It is hell for the body and terror for the mind. There are dreams, and there are beasts. The dreams walk glittering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire, the beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret. Good-bye.”

“Then it must be ‘good-bye’?”

She looked at me with a strange, dark friendliness, and nodded.

“Because of shame,” she said. “But if I were different, I would like you for my friend——”

To my interruption, which she did not hear, she said: “I have only one lover. But I know that only because I always feel unfaithful to him. It would be good to be really bad, but I am not even that. I only misbehave. I will see you again, when I have found my only love. Or I will see you again when I am qualified to die for purity. I will let you know, so you can be there. God bless you, dear.”

And I said what I said, that He had, with Iris Storm.

She went very white. “That shall be written down,” she whispered, “as the prayer of the only man who ever shamed a woman of her shame.”

“My days of adventure, Iris Storm, are over. A few years ago it would have seemed nothing to me that you should disappear as you came, into the great hole of London. To experts in adventure that is, I think, the usual procedure. But now I would like a trace of you. You must not leave me, quite. If I may not see you again, mayn’t I perhaps talk to you? Or, what is the main thing, feel that I could if I dared?”

She said she was in London now only on business that would last a few weeks, and lived always abroad. “But this is the telephone-number,” she said, and I was looking round for paper and pencil when she said “Here!” and her leather arm darted to the floor and came up with a book, and on the fly-leaf of the book she scrawled the number with her lip-stick.

High above the sharp noises of the young day I heard the scream of an electric-horn.

Chapter Two: THE CAVALIER OF LOW CREATURES

I

AND that, I think, is all that there really is about me, as a person, in the tale. Of course, this first person singular will continue, and there’ll no doubt be any amount of “I this” and “I that,” but that is because of the nature of the work, and there’s never, the way I see it, much more than a pen behind it. Hilary, however, and Guy de Travest are not of my mind about this. We have recently been talking about these affairs, and a sad enough talk they made, and my two friends, my two seniors, were reluctantly compelled, they said, to disagree with me about my lack of responsibility in the events to be related hereinafter.

To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain things were decreed to happen and that, therefore, they did happen: they had it in their blood, these people, that certain things should happen to them, and I could no more contrive these things than they could evade them. But Hilary and Guy, murmuring together in that astonishing unison which can only be found in two Englishmen who disagree upon everything in the world but on the fact that conduct is three parts of life, are of opinion that my substitution of the word “ptomaine” for “septic” really affected the course of events. Had I, they say in effect, spoken the truth like a brave little man, there would have been a divorce and every one would by now have been happy, as happiness goes. And then, too, they have something to say about those two red lights, those two rear-lamps of two cars sweeping into South Audley Street—had I told Iris, they say, about Gerald, those two red lights never would have been so close together. Oh, Guy, what a man is that! That latter-day thunder-god of dandies, that warrior of conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could give “gratuitous information” about any one! Oh, Hilary, that friend of childhood!

Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had turned away from his friends, his people: he had dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it’s not difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that young man. But I was to find, after the coming of the lady of the green hat, that it wasn’t only at the impulse of his furious nature that Gerald had, well, withered fiercely into solitude. In very truth that Gerald had been a hero-worshipper; and in very truth he had become, as his sister had said, a nothing without his hero. Very few things had ever mattered to Gerald Haveleur March; but those few things, one was to learn, had mattered far too much.

His sister was, as it’s not impossible to have gathered, what is called declassée—even for a March or a Portairley. And that was why I had heard nothing about her from Guy or Hilary, for while Guy never gave gratuitous information about any one, Hilary was held in thrall by that upside-down but virulent form of snobbery which will make of a man of property an extreme Liberal and a thorough-going die-hard disapprover of any one who let his, Hilary’s, caste down. Hilary, a sincerely good man, was an enemy of caste, he was an enemy of his own caste in particular, he did not believe in it; and yet, in the depths of that being where lurks a dragon that can ultimately defeat even the sincerity of a man of principle, Hilary believed in nothing else but caste.

And Iris, of course, had betrayed her caste to perfection. No one, you might say, could have done that more thoroughly than Iris. She had been malinspired to excess, she had reached Excelsior in the abyss. But she was ever completely not on her guard about what people might say or did say, she had an amazing, an enviable, snapped Hilary, talent for just not noticing things.

She had been quite surprised, Hilary told me recently, when once he had taxed her with being a renegade from her class. Genuinely surprised she was, Hilary says. It simply hadn’t, she had told him, occurred to her in that light.

“Rushing about Europe like that,” Hilary had said, “you let England down. You’ve no idea, Iris, how these young foreign blighters hold Englishwomen cheap.” Iris had maintained she had a very good idea about that. (But you simply had to disagree with Hilary. He was like that. And he said “hm” all the time.) And you only had to travel on a liner to the East, she had said, to notice how British matrons reacted to foreign parts. As for Egypt! But she always did her best, she had said, to influence foreigners to a more lofty view of the gallantries of British matrons.

“People cut you,” Hilary had said, for that seemed to him an abominable thing, that she should have put herself into the position of being “cut”; and she had admitted having noticed glaciers, but she had maintained that it was a far, far better thing to be cut by a county eye than to be killed by the boredom of a county tongue. “I arose from the dead when I was twenty,” she had said. (Hilary, you understand, would provoke any one.) “Your class,” Hilary had snapped, and she had said she had never actually thought of herself as belonging to any class. Her class would be, she supposed, the landed gentry, same as Hilary’s. She was proud, she had said, to belong to the same class as Hilary, and was very sorry indeed if she had hit him in the eye with her heel. But she hoped, she had said, that with him she had always been a lady.

That had annoyed Hilary very much indeed. But everything about any woman he liked would annoy Hilary very much indeed. Mr. Townshend was one of those Englishmen with an unlimited capacity for disapproving of any woman, whom he liked, who enjoyed being with other men as much as with himself; and an unlimited capacity for finding other reasons than that for his disapproval.

As for Gerald, Hilary had last known him as a “dark diabolical schoolboy” with a disturbing capacity for threatening silences and an immense—“a corroding, almost,” Hilary said—admiration for Iris. But not long after Barty March’s death—every one had loved that drunkard!—he had quite lost sight of Gerald. Guy de Travest had been Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war, but he never spoke but once of Gerald as a soldier—“young hell-fire idiot”—and never went near him while he lived above me in Shepherd’s Market. “Reminds me,” Guy said, “too much of Barty left standing too long with the cork out.” And that was more or less what Hilary said, too. One must say this for the warriors of caste and conduct: they seldom try to improve any man.

This chapter has been called The Cavalier of Low Creatures because it is about Gerald, and therefore it is a short chapter, for what on earth is there to say about Gerald? It isn’t at all a good description of him, but it is intended, if you please, more as a flourish, a naïve gesture. For you simply can’t let Gerald stand without a flourish, without a something, anything. Besides, I liked him, and would like to do him a bit of good. He was, sans gesture, a zero with a scowl and a hat—and a hat. Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a novel? I liked Gerald, but I would not give him a line if he wasn’t essential; and that is just what he is, essential, for these things simply couldn’t have happened without Gerald. He hated his sister, he had not seen her for ten years, yet it turned out that he was the most important factor in her life. And, decidedly, her love for him was one of the most important factors in her life. I wonder if he knows. But he too, even he, grew up in the end. I can hear him now, through the twilight of East Chapel Street, his shoulder against the saloon-door of the inn. “Give her my love,” he said. But you will hear him.

II

Sometimes I would see Gerald in the Café Royal. I would be dining, with Hilary maybe, and in the distance, cut as with a sharp knife in the tapestry of smoke and grubby faces, would be Gerald, darkly alone, a glass of whisky on the marble-top before him. One wouldn’t attempt to join him, for it made Gerald shy, desperate, if any one sat with him while drinking. He hated being “messed about,” did Gerald; and if you joined him he would presently mutter something about an appointment (Gerald with an appointment!), leave his drink unfinished and go and order one somewhere else; and as I understood he hadn’t much money I did not like to drive him to that. Maybe, though, he was less shy with me than with any one. “I like you,” he once said—oh, darkly!

One never knew, as he sat there or as he strode about the streets, careless as a fakir impelled always towards a terrible and nameless penance, what he could be thinking of. Maybe he was thinking of nothing. Once I saw him come out of a Cinema Theatre with a look on his face as though he had been tortured. He always looked, you know, like something. You noticed him.

He had a grey suit. It was thin as paper, but still defiantly retained a little of that casual elegance which not even Gerald could wholly divorce from the combination of a good tailor and a lean Englishman. He never had but one other suit that I ever saw, a brown affair, but he bartered that with a boot-mender in Shepherd’s Market in exchange for mending his shoes. And he had a hat. That was a hat. And never was Gerald seen wearing an overcoat, no matter whether it blew, rained, snowed or froze. See him any winter evening striding down Half-Moon Street in the biting rain, his thin grey suit blackening with it, the jacket held by one button with deep creases into his waist, the shapes of his knuckles stuck through his trouser pockets, that hat—there, but for the grace of God, went the most lovable man I ever met.

“Gerald—I say, Gerald! Why don’t you wear a coat on a day like this? Gerald, aren’t you an ass!”

“Coat?” Thoughtful he was always, and his dark, sunk eyes would pierce the pavement or the sky with unutterable contempt. “Coat!” And he would repeat the word softly until, you understand, he had grasped the enormous idea, when he would say softly, savagely: “What the hell d’you mean, ‘coat’?” and away he would go, towards that terrible and nameless penance of his.

Well, the flourish goes, the gesture is gone, to the limbo that yawns for all such vanities in the very second of their birth. The Cavalier of Low Creatures was never, to be sure, hailed as more than a zero. But, even as the ground is not the limit of a man’s fall, as you may see in the picture with the trail of flame, so zero is not the limit of a man’s nothingness; for what is that which is nothing but so completely nothing that it may not have even the mark of nothing? It is, to be sure, zero without the formative circle round it.

That solitary drunkard, that soiled ascetic! Those nightmare women, soft as the grass of Parnassus, marvellously acquiescent, possible. Aphrodite, Ariadne, Anaïtis, white as marble, silent as marble, silent and acquiescent, possible, as only goddesses could be, the goddesses of soiled dreams, as no woman born of woman could ever be....

And yet one might have been wrong in imagining the malcontents of the solitary drunkard’s mind. God only knows, of course, with what nightmare fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them, and grow out of them; men, at least, do not admit even to themselves that they have not grown out of them, men do not admit even to themselves that while they indulge in continence they may suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire.

That women walked in all the delicious beauty of the unattainable through Gerald’s tortured mind, I know now. But I did not know it then, for never was a man so secret with another man as Gerald, never was a man so little given to discussing with another those inevitable matters of desire and concupiscence which only by being discussed can be seen in a proper and proportionate light. They should be aired, those secret silly things, that they may be seen for what they are. In the old days there was a god in a garden, and people would do their best to make pretty fancies out of their lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns, nymphs, sirens, sylphs; they, at least, got rid of them somehow. But now that we see them plainly for what they are, the nasty little enemies of our assault on nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has smashed the god in the garden and hidden the pieces under the bed.

Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the cleanest-mouthed man I ever met with; while from his book one had gathered that there was one main idea in Gerald’s mind; this was purity. It was to do with that one brilliant-childish romance of his that, about seven years before the coming of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then, for more than five years, I had not seen nor heard of him, had forgotten him, when one day a lean, dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the Hammam Baths in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped me. I knew later that he must have been in an agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked intensely furious. I, not recognising him, thought he was going to hit me, and gaped at him.

Bitterly and darkly he told me that some one had told him there was a flat to be let above me in Shepherd’s Market. “I’m staying here at the moment,” he muttered, looking indignantly at the Hammam Baths. Several minutes passed before I could place him, for he had been in uniform that first time, in that transfiguring long-waisted grey coat of the Brigade of Guards.

Gerald appeared suddenly, in the winter of 1915, at the office of Horton’s New Voice. Now that Horton has left England on his adventure in un-individualism one does not hear much of The New Voice, but at that time and for long before The New Voice was, of course, a power, and Horton was a Power. Quite apart from Horton’s personal quality, you knew he was a Power because several of the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time kept on bitterly pointing out to their million readers what a futile man Horton was. Quite a number of the men whose names you can “conjure with” now—it would be fun to meet that man who is always in the street conjuring with names!—had begun by writing for Horton’s paper; but they had always gotten on his nerves by the time they had become the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time, and, since Horton was an honest man, he told them so, and he told them why, and he told them off, and they were furious. But the most inspired among the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time revenged themselves by republishing their New Voice stuff in book-form and omitting to mention The New Voice as the first medium of publication. That was discourteous of them.

We were correcting proofs when Gerald appeared. It was a Monday afternoon, and on Monday afternoons any of Horton’s writers who wished could turn up and correct either his own or some one else’s proofs and then go and have tea at the A.B.C. And Talk.

“Hello!” said Horton. “Hello!”

“Defence of the Realm,” murmured Home.

We were not prepared for Gerald. We had, of course, seen soldiers before; indeed, there was one in the room at the moment, the philosopher Home, who was to be killed a year or so later. But Gerald was a Figure, he was martial. The herald of the dominion of hell upon earth, that was Gerald. Take one small, frowsty room, the staff (Miss Veale) addressing wrappers at a desk by the window, Horton blue-pencilling at the other desk by the door, four of us sitting cramped round correcting proofs on bound annuals of The New Voice on our knees, smoking, muttering—enter six-foot-two of the Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night and the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who has seen Christ crucified in vain. The panoply of war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier in the real rather than in the technical sense of the word: he looked, you know, as though he had accepted death and was just living anyhow in the meanwhile. Ah, see him then! Not even Gerald’s malevolent slackness in attire could make that long-waisted grey coat with the red-silk lining sit on him but imperially. Not Gerald’s the common-or-garden chubby face of a Guard’s subaltern. Gerald was no chap. He glowered at us.

“Eh,” he stammered. “I say ... I’ve been told you people....”

“He’s heard about us,” said Home sympathetically. “Sit down, boy. On the floor, I’m afraid.”