III
I did not see Gerald whilst I was shaking the dust of Shepherd’s Market forever off my feet, for he was still asleep. I left Shepherd’s Market. The hearty-looking man and the thin wizened man who said “Oi!” and the little bent old man with the bloodshot eyes gave me farewell.
That afternoon I snatched a few moments from the arranging of the new place, which was only round the corner, to go round and tell Gerald that his sister had been to see him on an Impulse. I had grown to feel responsible for Gerald: his solitude was somehow like a scar across one’s own life, a rebuke.
I came upon him in our lane. I have forgotten to say that Gerald, after a particularly hard spell of dipsomania, would go riding on a hack from the Mews nearby. He had a pair of fine polo breeches with which to do that, and with the fine polo breeches (Moss Bros.) went Barty March’s riding-whip and the jacket of the old grey suit and that hat. A highwayman on an off day, that is what he looked like in the mean lane, passing the time of day with the little bent old man with the bloodshot eyes.
“You’ve been drinking,” said Gerald severely to me.
“Billy Goat’s won the two-thirty,” wheezed the little bent old man. His hat was the captain of Gerald’s hat.
One didn’t, perhaps, look one’s best in the middle of a removal. But Gerald, confound the man, looked positively healthy, taut, tempered, weathered. Ach, le sale type anglais! I told him that his sister had called. “On an Impulse,” I said.
Gerald stared at me, his cigarette halfway to his mouth. “Oh!” he said. “Oh! …”
“Here’s her telephone number,” I said. He didn’t take the slip of paper I held out.
“ ’Ere,” said the little bent old man, “I’ll give it ’im when he’s better.” Gerald lowered his cigarette, scowling at me pathetically. No one else would have known it was “pathetically.”
“Iris called hell!” he accused me. “How you lie! What?”
“Honest to God, Gerald!”
He flipped away his cigarette and dug his free hand into his pocket as though it was a weapon. Those deep eyes scowled at me, but I wondered what they saw.
“That beast,” he whispered, “oh, that beast. …”
I left him.
And I did not see him again until the twelfth evening later. I wish I had. I ought to have been to see him, for I was in the habit of seeing Gerald, and during those twelve days he might, I think he would, have told me about the silly, shoddy thing that had happened, and I could have helped to make him see it as only a silly, shoddy thing. What made me feel responsible for Gerald was that his livid, unreasonable, childish contempt for all accepted things was not contempt at all, but fear, just plain fear. He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it. Piercing that tortured vanity, I felt that life was a huge hungry beast ready to maul Gerald if he so much as tried to placate it—by using, say, a little pumice-stone on his fingers. And one could never, after having seen through his furious blague, be rid of an acute sense of the shamefaced childishness in the man, a childishness beaten down, gone crooked, which could only do him a hurt if it was not watched. And one didn’t, quite definitely didn’t, want Gerald to be hurt more than he already hurt himself by just breathing.
But, whether it was because that involuntary whisper of his about his sister had sickened me even more than I had thought at the moment, or whether it was merely because I was too busy with arranging myself into the new place, I simply did not seem to have the time to look him up during those twelve days. I wish I had.
Nor, during those twelve days, would it have come very amiss to talk a little about Mrs. Storm. One would have liked to know just a little of the history of that shameless, shameful lady. After all, one didn’t every day meet a woman with a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind. But naturally neither Guy nor Hilary was available during those twelve days, for that is a way friends have; Guy because he was down at Mace with the Mayfly, and Hilary just because he was tiresome. Hilary, Guy wrote from Mace, was helping a Liberal to fight a musty bye-election in some Staffordshire place. “As if,” Guy wrote, “a Liberal ever won, as if a Liberal could ever win without a pretty long start! and a handicapper can never get a grip on anything in a Liberal to give him a start on—sticky little fellows they are, always sliding away somewhere. And as if it mattered whether a Liberal did or didn’t win. He’ll only get squashed with his own petard.” And, however it was, Hilary’s Liberal didn’t win, so maybe Guy was right. “In ten years’ time,” says Guy, “Hilary will be the only Liberal left in Parliament, looking happier and younger and more sickening than ever.”
It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same instant act upon it.
“Hello!” I said.
“Hello!” they said. They were a she.
“Could I speak to Mrs. Storm, please?”
“Who is that speaking, please?”
I quibbled quite in vain.
“I will put the name down in her little book,” said the she kindly.
“Thank you,” I tried not to say bitterly. To ring someone up on impulse and then have your impulse perpetuated in a Little Book!
“Mrs. Storm is not in town,” said the she.
“Oh, I see,” I said. It is a detestable habit some people have of saying “in town” or “out of town.” What town? There can’t, honestly, be any real harm in saying London. …
“Is there any message? I always take her messages.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Thank you very much. Goodb—”
“This is Mrs. Oden speaking.”
“Oh,” I said. “Mrs. Oden?”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Oden.
“Well, thank you very much,” I said. “Goodb—”
“She never is, you know,” complained Mrs. Oden. Now that was a loquacious lady. I do not wish to be belittling anyone else, but I am sure that she talked more in the next few minutes than any other person of the same chest-expansion in England. She seemed to have been suffering from silence all that morning until my ring. I learnt later that Mrs. Oden had once been Iris’s governess, that there was always a floor reserved for Iris in her house in Montpellier Square, which house Mr. and Mrs. Oden owed entirely to Iris’s generosity.
“She went off to Paris the other day,” complained Mrs. Oden, “at a moment’s notice. Here today and gone tomorrow. It is too bad of her, when we never see anything of her. She is too vague, I always tell her. I suppose she had made some arrangement with you, Mr. er, has forgotten to put you off, and now you are disappointed?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, certainly.”
“Well, I expect her back any day, but how long she will stay this time I have not the faintest idea. Really it is too bad, she gets vaguer every year. And here has her aunt Lady Eve Chalice been wanting her address in Paris, and I have not the faintest idea of anything! What did you say the name was? Oh, yes, of course, I have it down. She will see it as soon as she returns, I promise you. Yes, yes. Goodbye, goodbye.”
It was five days later that there came to my hand a large box labelled from “Edouard Apel et Cie., rue de la Paix, Paris” and stamped “By Air.” Within the large box were several smaller flat boxes, and within these were reams upon reams of finest white notepaper, but good, manly stuff, stamped with my new address; and if that notepaper had its way I never would have another address, for there was enough in those small flat boxes to last a reasonably reticent man for all time. No note came with them. I searched. Then, across the top sheet of the third box that I opened, I found scrawled in pencil in an absurd, schoolgirl hand: “That one day you may write to me to say that you have forgiven me for the only dignity I have left: the dignity of the. …”
I could not make out that last word for several days. It was scrawled right across the foot of the sheet, a long squiggle with one eye looking out from the middle of it which might have been an a. At last I thought it was “unaware.”
Much later Iris told me that it was “unaware.” She said: “I picked out the phrase from a book I was reading, and sent it to you like a flower.”