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.
“Goodbye,” 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.
“Goodbye,” 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 moonstruck 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 moonstruck 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. Goodbye.”
“Then it must be ‘goodbye’?”
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 flyleaf of the book she scrawled the number with her lipstick.
High above the sharp noises of the young day I heard the scream of an electric-horn.