IV + 

Aphrodite + 

I + 

One chapter can’t reasonably be expected to bear the weight of that night. We have so far built but the groundwork of that night, and on that we have now to shape a peculiar edifice, according to the flimsy but saturnine manner of the third decade of the twentieth century; to which majority the twentieth century has attained, as more austere histories will tell you, only after the most unparalleled pains, retchings, belchings and bellowings; but we, taking a more private course, will be more circumspect in our derangements. + 

We have, so far that night, seen Gerald Haveleur March, by the way. We have seen his evening paper; but we have not read it. (Nor had Hilary read his Evening Standard. He always “glanced at it,” he excused himself later on, as he was going to bed. As I did, if ever.) We have, also by the way, noted the presence in London of the car of the flying stork. We have dined, and had some brandy. We have talked of purity, and discovered an amiable dissonance in our views thereon. We would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed, for after dining with Hilary one somehow always went straightway to bed. That was why, Guy said cruelly, one dined with Hilary. The “hm’s” seemed to soothe the way thither. But that evening, however it came about, I did not feel that I would like to go straightway to bed. One has, I suppose, moods. + 

But I can’t account plausibly for the fact that Hilary came with me to the Loyalty. Hilary did not go to nightclubs. His moods took a more exclusive course. He ignored nightclubs, and thought he was ignoring the whole of folly. Not so superior, I! Wherefore it passed that I discovered my mood to Hilary as we stood in the hall of his house, for Hilary was accompanying me to the door. Ross, red and silent and amiable, stood somewhere about with my hat. Where we stood, just without the door, the unusually warm June night smiled kindly on us. There is not much sky in London, but that little smiled on us with a faint load of stars, and somewhere behind the roofs there might be hanging a moon. There might? But there was such a pretty tilted silver boat among the chimneys of Curzon House! From the small table in the hall Hilary had absently taken up the evening-paper, which was folded in that way which tells you in the Stop-Press News that Surrey has scored 263 for eight wickets. He held it in his hand with that air of one who has nothing left to do but read an evening-paper. Grey and thoughtful and kind, he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during their holidays. “Hm,” he said. “Nice night.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Hilary, why don’t you come with me? It won’t probably be amusing, but we can always come away.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Dancing,” he frowned. Hilary likes dancing, really. Only, not being exactly supreme among dancers, he never can understand how good dancers may like dancing so much that they will dance whenever they can. If Hilary had been a writer he would have put very witty and biting bits about dancing into his books. All writers have clumsy feet. + 

I made to assure him that he would find himself in the most polite company, for the Loyalty Club was notable as a relaxation for Government, diplomacy, and princes of the blood. He “hm’d” viciously at that, but set out with me down Curzon Street and through the noisome shadows of Shepherd’s Market. Gerald’s light was on. But now that I was not there to turn it out, when would Gerald’s light not be on? + 

Through the deep cavernous artery of Whitehorse Street we emerged on to Piccadilly, quiet as before the storm that would at any moment break on it from the theatres. Buses, their lights within revealing the seats, fled madly as though from a doomed city. Loitering taxicabs, attracted like moths to a flame by walking silkhats, came near the curb, hung in doubt, loitered on. + 

I wondered whether she would be at the Loyalty. She might. I wondered whether she could have accepted the sacrifice of herself “for purity” without question, without bitterness. She would⁠—that “Chislehurst mind!” Oh, yes, she would have agreed with that idealist’s harshest judgment⁠—indeed, she had agreed with it so completely that she had plucked two words from her heart and given them to the world to whip her with. Boy Fenwick, you could see, had impressed himself like an anchorite’s scourge on the souls of the twins. What was it she had said? “It would be nice to die for purity.” Heavens, but wasn’t she sickened of purity! That pitiful, pitiless moment in the bedroom of the Hôtel Vendôme! The messy kindergarten that men make of love, and call it “romance,” “idealism”! Perhaps Judas was the first idealist⁠—that desperate, exalted betrayal of the body to the soul. They are so certain about their souls, your carnal idealists! Soul, soul, soul! May their punishment be to meet their souls face to face in the afterworld! One could see that boy, a slim pyjama’d figure by the window, a silhouette of cold fire with the ruin of all mankind in his clean eyes, staring through the meretricious dawn of Deauville towards the goal to which he was exalted beyond reason by his disenchantment. He had loved Iris madly.⁠ ⁠… But they do not love, those men! They torture, and are tortured. They take love as they might take a flower out of a garden, and they torture it because it does not thrive so well in the water of their tears as in the water of God’s good sense. They do not love, those men, they stand in wonder before the power to love that is in them. And theirs the pleasure of a spurious conceit; theirs the pain of a spurious disenchantment. If that boy had loved, he would have turned towards the bed on which she lay, beaten, silenced, a child groping for sense, for pity, for any reasonable thing, and he would have tried to understand, and maybe he would have found the grace to understand, that in her, despite and because of the hungers of the body, there was that frightful humility to an unknown purpose which makes the limitless beauty of some women. But the boy had lit a cigarette.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Don’t we cross?” muttered Hilary, and we crossed towards Jermyn Street, for the Loyalty Club lies in Pall Mall, to the end that, in immediate contact with the Royal Automobile Club, it may at least boast, as might occur to a student of Ruskin, a degree of eminence in the abyss. + 

One is, one can’t help being, impelled by a sense of decorum to disavow at once any connection which may be fancied by worldly readers between the Loyalty Club and the Embassy Club. Such connection could not, of course, be fancied if the Loyalty were so well known as the Embassy; but the Loyalty is, or was⁠—yes, was⁠—the daughter of the Embassy, and although it is not yet so well known to the people of the town, who shall say that a daughter is not more of the mode than her mother? Even, life being what it is, in spite of the mother. + 

The Loyalty sprang from the Embassy, and it sprang in a polite direction, from Bond Street down the hill of Saint James’s to Pall Mall, where it might lie over against Carlton House Terrace. It sprang because certain persons of ton had found that the Mother Society, while never ordered but with the most polite amenities, was growing perhaps just a little crowded with what-nots; had, by banding themselves in a body financial and social, founded the Loyalty; and were there assured of more freedom for the exercise of a reasonable exclusiveness since, the floor-space of the Loyalty being large enough to accommodate only one hundred and fifty dancers, the membership was strictly limited to one thousand and five hundred. Below were a swimming-bath and squash-courts, besides the more orthodox facilities; and while the whole place was appointed with the severest economy, if not with downright meanness, it is well known that those who spend more than a certain amount of money for supper, and see other people spending as much, will need no other assurance of being in surroundings of the first quality. That is a well-known French invention, of which England has only recently acquired the recipe. + 

The Loyalty Club can, however, claim no historical notice but in the person of the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, its directeur du restaurant. We need not interrupt ourselves here to envy the salary at which the Chevalier was with difficulty persuaded to leave his retreat at Rapallo; but that he was worth it nobody can gainsay, for wheresoever Risotto went he took with him his invention. His invention he called l’aristocracie internationale; his name, you understand, for his people; they loved it. + 

A study of the lives of philosophers and statesmen will inform and ennoble the mind; but a sideways glance at such a phenomenon as the twentieth-century Risotto cannot help but make it supple. One of the menials of all time, he is one of the successes of ours; and a portent of the doom of aristocracy in England. Born of Machiavelli by Demoiselle Demimonde, crafty, thin, pale, dry-shiny as shagreen, he had walked to fortune about every great restaurant in Europe, adding always, but with discrimination, to his order of l’aristocracie internationale; and to bankruptcy twice, of truly patrician magnificence, about the baccarat tables of his less inspired but more cautious colleague, M. Cornuché of Cannes and Deauville. The “creation” of the Loyalty Club must serve his biographers as the pinnacle of Risotto’s career. L’aristocracie internationale was ultimately served at last. Not an American was left on Fifth Avenue, nor an Argentine in the Americas; while Australian fruit-farms deplored the absence of their masters, and Canada adored the ton of her peerless millionaires. + 

We had no sooner entered among the company than Hilary was for going at once: but Risotto having rewarded us with a sofa-table⁠—for he and Hilary had, as the saying is, been boys together when Hilary had been attached to the Embassy in Paris and Risotto was ennobling patrons of the Ritz to l’aristocracie internationale⁠—he and I prevailed on Hilary to stay by ordering for him an angel-on-horseback, to which he was notably partial; while I, Risotto said, would have a haddock with a nice egg on it. + 

Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest nightclubs, at once left me to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. This was Mrs. Ammon. Whereas I, in not dancing, was following an example set by many present. We, we watched our elders dance with each other’s mothers, and for them the band on the balcony played with a sensibility approaching grief. There was no tune. But it is absurd, this querulous demand of young people for “tunes”! Our fathers and our mothers have done with “tunes.” Let there, our uncles say, be a rhythm. Let there, say our aunts, be syncopation. There was a rhythm. There was syncopation. Grave, profound, unforgettable, there was a rhythm. It had a beat like the throbbing of an agonised heart lost in an artery of the Underground. Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of past and passing things. It reminded you of the days when, people over forty had still enough restraint not to crowd out every ballroom and nightclub with their dancing in open formation, playfully aiming at each other’s tonsils with their feet. It reminded you of the scent tangled in the hair of she with whom you had last danced to that rhythm. You saw the soft line of her face by your shoulder, the tender pocket behind her ear, the absorbed excursion of her breath through her nostrils, the dark eyebrow over which you would lightly pass the third finger of your left hand but that it would soil the tip of it. You mourned the presence of the dead. You mourned the memory of the living. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of regret. It reminded you of a small white face suddenly thrown back against your arm with a smile that disturbed the dance. It reminded you of the desire that pleasantly turns to dust when you are desired. It reminded you of things you had never done with women you had never met. You danced again at the Ambassadeurs at Cannes, with the masts of yachts drawn ebony-black between the tall windows and the pale blue night over the sea. The Lido lay like a temptation before your mind, and the songs of the gondoliers raved into the measure of whispering feet. The Spanish King brushed by you at San Sebastian, eating salted almonds, again you hesitated in the dance at Biarritz to listen to the roar of the Atlantic, and across a perfumed street in Seville you again saw the shiver of a mantilla through the cracked window of a cabaret. You danced again beneath the vermilion moon of Algeria, between the American Bar and the pyramid-cypress tree. You danced again in the Bois in Paris, the trees like monstrous black pagodas against the night, the stars brilliant as sequins on an archangel’s floating cloak, the magically white faces of women, the lights in the night making love to the black shadows in their hair, their lips red as lobsters, their armpits clean as ivory, the men talking with facile gestures, the whole tapestry of the Château de Madrid like a painted fan against a summer night. They call this rhythm the Blues, which is short for a low state of vitality brought about by the action of life on the liver. O Baby, it’s divine! + 

That is what they say, our elders. + 

Astorias, chef d’orchestre, stood at rest by the edge of the balcony, his violin under his arm, his bow gently tapping the edge of a bowl of nameless ferns that hid his feet. His negligence is informed with depression, his poise leans on melancholy. The Blues, that man knows. He seems to wonder why he is there, why anyone is there, why everyone is there. No one can tell him, so he goes on doing nothing, lonely as a star in hell. He does not toil, nor spin, nor play his violin. From the crowded floor a woman, her face powdered brown, her mouth scarlet as the inside of a pomegranate in a tale by Oscar Wilde, beseeches him with an arm black-gloved to the shoulder to continue to play. He yields. + 

Nearby was a corner-table of eight young people. Maybe they would dance later on. Suddenly one of the girls would give a loud laugh, and then there would be silence. Of the four young men one looked as Richard of Gloucester might possibly have looked, a little bent, a little sinister, and pale, as though he had been reading a treatise on diseases far into the night before. They were four married couples, and they had all been boys and girls together, and they had a son and daughter apiece, and they all went to the same dentist. The women had white oval faces, small breasts, blue eyes, thin arms, no expression, no blood: literally, of course, not genealogically. One of them stared with wide blue eyes right into people’s faces, and blinked vaguely. She was lovely. These eight young people were very happy. They ignored everything but themselves, in whom they were not very interested. Presently a prince of the blood joined them, there was a little stir for a minute or two, a little laughter, and then he rose to dance with the girl of the blind blue eyes. As she danced she stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the ceiling. She looked bored with boredom. + 

There were many green dresses: jade-green, October green, rusty green, soft green, sea-green, dying green, any shade of green that would suit the expiring voices of formal women in a garden by Watteau. There were thirty-nine green dresses. There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the wrong sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus whose head had been dipped in dressing and then put in a warm place to dry. She dried in patches. A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her bosom to her throat, and she said to Mr. Trehawke Tush, the novelist: “The only decent cocktails you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar, but the people are so odd. My Archie wants to stand for Parliament. What do you think?” Mr. Trehawke Tush, portraits of whose prewar face must be familiar to everyone, was the most successful of the younger novelists, and had earned from Miss Rebecca West the praise that he was “the leader of the spats school of thought.” Mr. Trehawke Tush will go down to history as the originator of Pique as a profitable literary idea. He had hit on the discovery that English library subscribers will wholeheartedly bear with any racy and illegal relation between the sexes if the same is caused by Pique. He had observed that the whole purpose of a “bestseller” is to justify a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of suburban matrons. He had observed that in no current English novel was there ever a mention of any woman having a lover because she wanted a lover: she always took a lover because something had upset her, as in real life she might take an aspirin. Mr. Trehawke Tush had then created Pique, and was spoken of as a “brilliant feminine psychologist.” Since the rise of Mr. Trehawke Tush no reviewer will take any count of a writer as a “brilliant feminine psychologist” unless he can explain the regrettable adultery of his leading female character by the word Pique. This will also persuade Punch reviewers to consider the tale wholesome. Mr. Trehawke Tush was up to all those dodges. He said: “I have just finished a serial for The Daily Sale. I want to show up this kind of thing, the waste, the Indecency of it. All these girls. I thought the editor might take objection to certain passages, as there is some strong bedroom stuff in it, but he only asked me to change one thing. I had put ‘he kissed her where he would,’ and so I changed it to ‘as he would.’ ” + 

In a corner far across the crowded room sat Venice Pollen, most sedately between her father and her mother. We waved, and decided that it was too crowded to dance; but we did not know, Venice and I, that we were met that night in darkness. + 

Observe Venice. We will always be found on Venice’s side, and why? because she is a darling. Mark her now, and how the smoke about her clears, how clean she is, and so excited! For Venice! You know she is excited because she is so still, there between her hard father and her monstrous fat mother. Mark her there, a green flower with a mad golden head. And her eyes are blue, mad blue, and she is the queen of ten thousand freckles, of which she is very contemptuous, saying: “Who wants freckles?” And she had a noble forehead which would crinkle when she did not catch what you said, and that was often enough, for she was always talking herself. “Darling, darling, darling!” That is what she would say. And on her lion’s-cub head was a tumult of short dusty-gold hair, which was by nature rebellious, so that she must ever and again be giving her head a fierce backward shake, as though that was going to do any good. Mark her there, so sedate between her hard father and her monstrous fat mother. Not sedate really, Venice! Yet she must be sedate now, for Venice, who by ordinary knew not fear, was as though fascinated by fear of her father, who was none other than Nathaniel Pollen, once of Manchester, but now of Hampshire and Berkeley Square, for was he not as rich as Croesus would have been had Croesus owned the half of the newspapers of England? + 

So there sat Venice, most excited-still, undoubtedly waiting for Napier. They were lovers, Napier and Venice, and in three days they would be married. Dark, shy, handsome Napier! Favourite of the gods, you might well call him, yet his was that rare, surprising quality which will keep a man poised in continual sunshine, which will never let him droop and laze in the certainty that his sins of omission and casualness will be forgiven him. He was, to talk for a change of the things that matter, in the Foreign Office, and worked conscientiously hard at a career which would⁠—“undoubtedly,” they said, “undoubtedly”⁠—in the course of time place Napier among the most honoured of the nation’s servants; although he would⁠—“undoubtedly,” one can’t help feeling, “undoubtedly”⁠—reach in the course of time the very same pinnacle if he did no work at all, for England and America are the only two countries left in the world wherein men’s charm and good looks are really appreciated by men in the political, high financial, diplomatic, and educational spheres. + 

Our table faced the swing-doors across the room, and through the crowd of dancers one could see who passed in and out. There was a press of young men standing vaguely by the door, perhaps doubtful whether they should stay or go to return another day. A very haughty and flushed-looking lady, expensively dressed in a dernier cri, which she wore like armour, tramped past them, looked suspiciously into their bland faces, and out. She suspected they might be thinking she was going to more than powder her nose. They were, she was, who cared? + 

A voice rose above the saxophone at the table to the left of mine. It came from a heavy, drooping man with the eyes of a schoolboy, the smile of a genius, the gestures of a conqueror, and the face of a bully. He said: “There are two things in England that not even God could afford to be truthful about: Himself and the Navy.” With the man of destiny was the most beautiful woman in Ireland (Ulster) and a dark woman with a high bust and flashing eye, who spoke Cockney with an American accent. Her father was a lord. She said: “I am growing to detest London. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get there.” The most beautiful woman in Ireland (Ulster) had hair as black as a raven’s wing and two aquamarines for eyes, while the symmetry of her features appalled the epithet. She said: “I took my little Juno out to tea with Fay Avalon today and she was so naughty on the handsome parquet floor, the mother’s darling!” + 

Then things happened. Gerald happened. Gerald and Aphrodite.⁠ ⁠… Venice, Iris, Guy de Travest, Hugo Cypress, Napier, Colonel Duck, Gerald⁠ ⁠… if only one had a cinema for a moment! And there was also my Lady Pynte, with whom I should have been dancing. Where Mrs. Ammon went there also went Cornelia Pynte, and where Lady Pynte went there also went Angela Ammon. They were fine hearty women. And since Hilary was dancing with Mrs. Ammon I ought instantly to have begged the honour of taking the floor with Lady Pynte. There she sat, across the room, alone, a fine hearty woman. But, then, one goes to a nightclub to think, to be alone, to be comfortable, to eat a haddock. Lady Pynte thought dancing Good Exercise, and she was taller than me, too. A fine woman. Once, as Hilary toiled by with Mrs. Ammon, he whispered fiercely over her shoulder: “Why don’t you dance with the old trout?” But I drowned discourtesy to Lady Pynte in wine, for it was a “late night” at the Loyalty, which meant that you could drink wine until they took it from you. Lady Pynte was renowned as one of the five best women riders to hounds in the country. It was said that the foxes in the Whaddon Chase country ceased laughing when anyone said “Pynte!” near them. But Lady Pynte also had her politics, and she headed Movements; while Angela Ammon was more of a literary turn. Lady Pynte liked young men to Do; Mrs. Ammon to Dare. Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys; Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working for the Welfare of the People at Large and Not Just Our Own Little Class, she played bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained that the best place at which to buy shoes was Fortnum & Mason’s, and if she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would say: “You look not at all well, my good young man. Why don’t you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.” That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had already tried to pave the way to that denouement by confessing that I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that any class could be so Low as that. She would show one round her stables, and one felt an awful fool standing there in the cold being expected to be intelligent about the various horses, whereas one could only mutter, “Ah, good horse!” or “Oh, there’s a fine horse!” until one day I remembered what Peter Page, the critic, had once told me, that whenever he was shown a horse by a horse-lover he would instantly say “What withers!” and thus create a sound and manly impression as a horse-fancier. But when I came out impressively with “What withers!” I thought that Lady Pynte looked at me suspiciously, and Hilary, who was also fancying horses with us, told me later that it wasn’t done to look a lady straight in the eye and say “What withers!” Horses make life complicated, that is what it is. + 

Hugo Cypress, dancing by with his wife Shirley, called out: “Ho, there! Seen the evening-paper? Friend of yours.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“What?” I said. “Hugo.⁠ ⁠…” But what on earth was this about the evening-paper? I was agitated⁠—suddenly, I was very agitated indeed. There is something quite beastly about evening-papers, beastly and naked.⁠ ⁠… + 

Astorias stayed his men, and Hilary came back to the table. Gloomily he looked at the angel that was frozen to its horse. And he looked worried. + 

“Hilary, what’s this I heard Hugo murmuring about the evening-paper?” + 

“Gerald,” said Hilary. “Hm.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But what, Hilary? Not serious, surely?” + 

“Oh, not serious,” Hilary grunted. “Not serious. Hm. Just a nasty silly mess, I think. Didn’t catch what. Hm.⁠ ⁠…” + 

I realised then that I had known all the time. That curious, hopeless grinning.⁠ ⁠… But, good Lord, what sort of a mess? Hilary didn’t know. “Something in the evening-paper,” he said. Hilary looked hurt, worried, and I had that jumpy feeling that I must do something at once. But what sort of a mess? A drunkard’s row? What? Hilary didn’t know, and I was just about to ask the waiter if he could find me an evening-paper when two figures by the door held my eye. And a third just behind them. + 

“Kids!” murmured Hilary, with a sort of grudging smile. And they looked just that, for all their beauty⁠—“kids.” One saw them playing together under a tree. A long while ago, they had played together under a tree. The favourite of the gods and the shameless, shameful lady.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Hm,” grumbled Hilary. “Imitation.⁠ ⁠…” + 

But I knew, for I once had a friend who was a taxidermist. There were 396 white ermines round Iris. White and tawny and white. She was like a light, and you hadn’t realised what an infernal dungeon the place was until the door had suddenly opened and she had come in, wrapped in cloth of soft snow. Boy’s head, curly head, white and tiger-tawny. She was like a light, a sad, white light. I can’t describe her but like that. Napier had been standing by the door, waiting for the dance to cease, so that he might join Venice. Then Iris had come in, grave, very unselfconscious. She didn’t see Napier. He didn’t see Iris. Her companion was Colonel Duck, M.F.H. + 

“God, that man!” sighed Hilary. Oh, Iris was hopeless! Why, of all men, Colonel Duck? + 

Napier made to walk away. Iris and Colonel Duck made to follow Risotto. Maybe one of the 396 white ermines just brushed Napier’s sleeve. Maybe this, maybe that. “Kids!” said Hilary. Napier had started round, looked blank: tall, slender, dark-haired, dark eyes always fevered with a fear of you could never tell what⁠—they almost blinked now, you thought, at the light that Iris was, and she with her pools of eyes simply blazing with surprise and an unsure smile parting the painted mouth. “Napier!” “Iris!” As though, you know, someone with a soft “There!” had turned a tap somewhere. They smiled completely. Well, they would, the old friends. Naturally. She wouldn’t, I was sure, be calling him “Naps,” and she detesting abbreviations and the like. + 

The wrong sort of Jewess gave a short, audible outline of Iris to Mr. Trehawke Tush. Hilary stared at her venomously. Then he stared across the room at Colonel Duck venomously. Colonel Duck stood behind Iris’s white shoulder, a red dragon of a man, smiling relentlessly with his well-known geniality. Napier did not appear to see Colonel Duck, M.F.H. Napier and Iris were talking very quickly, laughing, maybe rather shyly. Then Astorias, refreshed, hurled his men against the conversation; bravely it held on for a second or two, then lay shuddering and shattered, and gone was Napier, gone Iris towards a table with Colonel Duck, whose red, relentless geniality showed no hint of the certain fact that the next time he was at that talkative club of his he would say that Napier Harpenden had been another of Iris Storm’s “affairs” and might quite well be again, Iris Storm being what she was. Notably good at all games and sports was Colonel Duck, M.F.H., and therefore tolerated with respect by decent men. + 

“I wonder if she knows anything about Gerald,” I was saying, when from her table across the room she seemed to be beckoning. To Hilary, not to me. She looked very serious. The emerald shone on the third finger of her right hand. She did not appear to see me. I felt bitter. + 

“Hm,” growled Hilary. He wanted to be persuaded to go. He wanted to go reluctantly. “Hate that Duck man so,” he said pathetically. + 

“Go on, Hilary. She might know something. I’ll get a paper.” + 

“Why, there’s Guy!” said Hilary. “Must have just come up from Mace. There, by the door.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The carpet of colours, on which the men were sprinkled like the black smuts on a town garden, swayed between us and the doorway, but no crowd might hide that man, for he was tall as a tree and his crisp yellow hair glared like a menace above the intervening heads and his frozen blue eyes petrified smoke, noise, and distance. Hilary was standing, about to go towards Iris. He looked rather sheepish at being found by Guy at the Loyalty. Most unsmiling was Guy that night. + 

“Ross must have told him we were here,” I said. “He’ll have come about Gerald.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“This foul place!” Hilary snapped. “You go downstairs with Guy, and I’ll get Iris to rid herself of her fancy friend and bring her down.⁠ ⁠…” + 

II + 

And that was how, soon after midnight that night, I found myself for the first time in the car of the flying stork. For the first time.⁠ ⁠… Iris had dropped her boyish-looking chauffeur in the course of the evening, because, she said, she only liked driving at night, when the air blew clean and chill. She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel. The great bonnet swept round by the squat Palace and up the slope of Saint James’s Street, which only by night may remember a little of the elegance it has long since forfeited by day. + 

“But that’s not the point,” I remember saying. “He won’t care a button what anyone else is thinking about it. He’ll just go mad at the humiliation in himself, he’ll worry it, making a mountain of sordidness.⁠ ⁠…” I had told her that Gerald had sent her his love, and her eyes had lit up at that, and she had laughed, shyly. “That’s better,” she had said, and now she said: “Yes, that’s the point. He’s proud, proud as Lucifer⁠ ⁠… and such a baby! Oh, Gerald, you sensitive beast! I’m going abroad tomorrow, and he must either come with me or he must join me quickly, quickly. You’ll persuade him, too, won’t you?” I did not say that, if I knew Gerald, he would probably be in a state far beyond persuasion. But, I thought, there was no harm in trying to see him. + 

At first, when Guy had told me downstairs at the Loyalty, I had just laughed. It seemed so absurd, fantastic. Gerald had been arrested in Hyde Park for “annoying women!” It was, you can see, unbelievable. How could Gerald “annoy” a woman, Gerald who was so shy that he could never even speak to one? “But there it is,” said Guy. + 

Perhaps it is because that was the last time I was ever at the Loyalty, but I remember the most irrelevant details and the vivid way each one of them seemed to impress some part of my mind. Guy and I stood in the deserted Bar. Through the open door at the far end came the clean, somehow biting tang of a marble swimming-bath: a faint splash now and then, a rustle of water: a boyish American voice calling sharp and loud: “Dive, you Julie, dive and get it over! You’ve got no hips, kid, and you can’t drown without hips. I want to go eat some food.” Then, I remember, Billy Swift walked intently past us, towards the Cloakroom. He comes to mind vividly because that was the last time I saw Billy Swift alive. His thin, lined, scarlet face glowed with the health-giving breezes that penetrate into corners of clubs and restaurants where men sit drinking brandy; his blue eyes always peered eagerly and kindly at you, as though he had something of the first importance to say. He said, very hoarsely: “There’s a boy up there dancing with two wooden legs. Good boy, I call him. Good night.” And in a minute or two he repassed us, walking intently, his crimson grey-haired head, immaculate in every detail, sticking like an old fighting-bird’s out of the wide astrakhan collar of the coat that he always wore against the midnight chill. Two months later he was found on the cliffs near Dover with that head beaten in, and someone was hanged. Billy Swift wouldn’t have had him hanged. “My fault,” he would have said hoarsely. “My fault, chaps.” + 

“But there it is,” Guy said thoughtfully. “Sickening, isn’t it? Might appeal, of course.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“He’ll not appeal,” I said. Imagine Gerald “appealing” against a five-pound fine for “indecently annoying” a woman in Hyde Park! + 

Guy always spoke low, he murmured in a chill voice, but you could always hear every word he said. Not that you didn’t, after a while, know all his words by heart, for Guy’s was one of those vocabularies that a classical education is supposed to have expanded. As he spoke he would always be looking at some point just above the crown of your head. + 

“Sorry about that boy,” he was saying thoughtfully. “He’s had no luck. And this Hyde Park business might happen to anyone nowadays.⁠ ⁠…” He looked down at me suddenly from that height of his, and I was, as always, surprised by the profound childishness which would suddenly sweep the ice out of the blue of those eyes. + 

“Beasts,” he went on, almost pathetically. “But aren’t they⁠—those Park police? Arresting nice old clergymen, Privy Councillors, anyone, just because a poor old boy who’s been brought up too well feels like having a word or two with a sickening woman. I mean, you need torpedo-netting around you to get round the Park in safety nowadays. Well, don’t you? And now they plant poor young Gerald. I’m sure, aren’t you, that these police put the women there on purpose as⁠—what d’you call them?” + 

“Agents provocateurs?” + 

“Well, have it your own way. But I’ve been watching the police round about here lately, and of course they’re mostly very good fellows, the best, but the police round the Park are quite a different lot. I’d like to kick them for the way they look those poor devils of women up and down as though they were dirt. I never thought much of the type of sneak who went for the Military Police during the war, and these fellows seem rather like that. Anything for an arrest and promotion.” He smiled faintly. Guy’s eyes seemed always to get most frosty when he smiled. “I once promoted some of them the wrong way for being inhuman. Inhuman, that’s what these blighters get if you don’t keep an eye on them. And these Park fellows seem somehow to have got spoilt since the war. I mean, it just looks like that to an outsider. Good Lord, you’ve got to have laws and to keep laws, but you needn’t set a lot of dirty sneaks at the Bolshevik game of ruining gentlemen just for being silly old asses.” + 

I stared at the one black pearl that from time immemorial had stained Guy’s shirtfront, which somehow seemed to fit him as no one else’s ever could. Guy was easy to listen to, because you always knew what he would say and how he would say it. (He had an enormous reverence for any man of the smallest talent, any man “who did things with his brain.”) + 

“I saw him for a minute this evening,” I said. “He seemed rather queer, but he said nothing about it.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But imagine the young devil! This business happened one night last week, and he doesn’t then come to see you about it⁠—or even Hilary or me, because, of course, I’d have done all I could for him, for old Barty’s sake as well as because he behaved himself in the war. I mean, this will almost kill old Eve Chalice when she sees it in the morning papers. It’s her I’m sorry for, for she’s always been fighting this sticky patch in the March brood⁠—first her eldest brother, old Portairley, then her younger brother, Barty, then her niece Iris, and now young Gerald comes along to make the poor old dear cry her eyes out again. God, the vileness of it! Picking up odd women in parks. I haven’t got a paper with me, but you ought to see the vile way they put down every beastly detail, and you can see as clear as anything that it was more bad luck and childishness on Gerald’s part than anything else. But, good Lord, what’s the matter with the man! I mean, one simply doesn’t go into the Park for women! The accuser, or whatever you call them, was a woman called Spirit, and in evidence two plainclothes men and a constable. I’m going to have an eye kept on Mrs. Spirit, just to see all’s fair and square. I mean, it’s beginning to look as though the law was the ass that St. George forgot to kill while he was showing off with that sickening dragon. This Mrs. Spirit said⁠—wish I had a paper⁠—that she was sitting on a bench waiting for her brother, when Gerald sat down beside her and made ‘indecent’ proposals. Whereupon she was so shocked⁠—and she a grown-up married woman, too⁠—that she jumped up like a scalded cat and let out some sickening howls, and up come the police. Now you can’t help thinking they were waiting behind a tree with old Spirit as a bait, can you? and caught young Gerald instead of a Dean.⁠ ⁠… They’d get more promotion, I shouldn’t wonder, for a Dean.⁠ ⁠…” + 

And as Guy spoke I saw Gerald glancing at the evening-paper on the curb of Curzon Street, and I saw him suddenly throw back his head and laugh at the heavens.⁠ ⁠… + 

Gerald, Gerald! The despiser of the world caught by the meanest trap of the world’s unrest. The worshipper of the hero who had died “for purity” figuring in the filthy columns of the cheap Sunday Press as another peer’s nephew gone wrong. Gerald, starved of life, Gerald who knew no woman, Gerald who wrote the tale of a man who had lived “for purity”⁠ ⁠… and he had sat down beside a woman called Spirit on a bench in Hyde Park. Those nightmare women who rave in the minds of lonely men, soft women marvellously acquiescent, possible, the woman Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, silent as marble, but acquiescent⁠ ⁠… and Aphrodite had dwindled into Mrs. Spirit, who was sitting waiting for her brother in Hyde Park, and the law lurking nearby to give the Sunday papers “copy.” And I saw Mr. Auk in an angle of the little tunnel, telling a friend of his something funny about Gerald.⁠ ⁠… + 

“It makes one just sick, Guy. Sick.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Now look here,” Guy murmured, tapping my shoulder with one finger. “Don’t you waste any time being sick just now, but go round and see the young devil⁠—” + 

“I’m going straight away.” + 

“Bright boy. And just⁠ ⁠… Oh, tell him it’s all right and not to be an ass all his life. Tell him we’re all on his side, and if there’s going to be any being sick that we’re all going to be sick together and in one corporate body, or words to that effect. Poor young devil. And I know he’ll be feeling this, because I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string⁠—” + 

“And drink’s made him worse now. He’s almost certain to be nearly speechless tonight. But I’ll see.” + 

“Lord, O Lord, what a mess Barty left behind him! But you see what I mean? All you’ve got to tell young Gerald is not to make a mountain of this in his mind, as it’s the sort of thing that might happen to anyone who is ass enough to go into the Park at night without an escort, and you never know but they mightn’t one night arrest the Bishop of London himself for saying ‘How do’ to his aunt.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Now I have read in books about people “sailing” into places, and I suppose Iris came into the deserted Bar like that. Hilary must have been just behind her, for I heard his voice, but I only saw Iris, and I remember how she seemed to hold the white ermine round her with one clenched hand, and how the great emerald shone like a green fly on the soft, soft white. And the tawny curls danced their formal dance on her cheeks as she came towards us, swiftly, oh swiftly, saying, in that suddenly strong, clear voice: “Oh, Guy⁠ ⁠… and friend of Gerald! Will you help me, dear friend? I want to go round to see Gerald, and Hilary says you still have the key of the house. I went hours ago, but I could get no answer at the door. I wonder, would you come with me?” + 

“Iris,” said Guy sternly, and I remember the way she threw back her head to look at him, and I thought again of the queer, unconscious way she had of always meeting men on their own ground. “Why don’t you ever look up your old friends when you’re in London, Iris? Or aren’t we your old friends? Or is that fine representative English gentleman, Colonel Duck, your old friend? Answer me yes or no.” + 

“Oh, Guy!” she said softly, sadly. “I wouldn’t have you be a humbug. I wouldn’t have you and Hilary be humbugs⁠—you two, out of all the world.” + 

“But, honest, Iris, I’d like to see you. Ask Hilary. ‘Where’s that girl got to?’ I asks, and he says ‘hm,’ says he, if you see what I mean.” + 

“Whereas I, Guy, have learnt not to regret old friends. I’ve become an old woman on my travels, and one of the first things an old woman must learn is that the best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends⁠ ⁠… which is, perhaps, a little different from being ‘old friends.’⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Iris, don’t be so bitter!” snapped Hilary. That, I thought, came rather well from Hilary. Just at that moment a woman screamed from the swimming-bath, there was a resounding splash. Guy was saying: “You’d better take Gerald away for a while, Iris.” + 

“If he’ll only come,” she said, “that’s what I want to do.⁠ ⁠…” + 

I remember thinking just then that I mustn’t forget to thank her for that beautiful notepaper, and also to ask her what was that last word in her note. + 

“I’ve got an idea,” Hilary was saying, in the specially detached voice he keeps for ideas, “that now we are in this foul nightclub we might as well do a bit of good. There’s old Pollen upstairs, and we might⁠ ⁠… hm, well, perhaps not.” + 

“Perhaps not what, Hilary?” + 

“Hm. I was thinking of Eve seeing the thing in tomorrow morning’s papers. She only reads one wretched picture-paper, and that’s Pollen’s, so I thought, hm, that if we asked him not to.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Eve, the poor darling!” Iris whispered. We seemed to be in a desert, three shadows of men, three shadows of voices, and Iris, very white and alight. That is how I always remember her, alight. + 

“No good, Hilary,” Guy was murmuring. “He won’t, because it’s what those fellows call News. And if you try you will only upset young Venice and make her perhaps feel she’s in the other camp, rather the wrong camp for her, she might think, and just as she’s marrying Naps. She’s a good girl, loyal as anything to her father⁠—and he’s a good fellow enough, but he’s got a queer complaint called Consistency. It’s something you make money out of, I think. I know him very well, as I’ve blackballed him from three clubs. My God, ever seen the man’s jaw?” + 

“She’s lovely, I thought,” Iris said. + 

“Good girl, Venice.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Hell⁠ ⁠…” said Iris suddenly, breathlessly. + 

“What?” Hilary jumped. + 

“Only⁠ ⁠… hell is raving with millionaires with jaws like Mr. Pollen’s. I’ve dreamt, I know. People who snap ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ very brusquely and then stick to it, no matter what it is. This century likes them like that. Come along, my friend, come along!” + 

And in a trice Iris and I were walking up the long passage which connects the Loyalty Club to the pavement of Pall Mall. On one side it is hung (but this is two years ago) with glass cases laden with fine cut jades and ambers, while small blue and green figures of animal men, human animals, and bestial gods will delight the eyes of Egyptologists: on the other the faces of beautiful women and children will testify to the photographic art of Sebastian Roeskin of Dover Street. Iris walked swiftly, heroically, her eyes intent before her, impersonal, utterly unselfconscious. The glaring lights in the passage lit her swiftly-moving green-and-silver shoes, or were they sandals with high heels? and so intent were the flippant silver-flashing ankles, briskly striding on, as though chiming the never-to-be-known marching song of a lady who must always meet men on their own ground. + 

She said: “You’ll be wondering how I came to dine with a man like Victor Duck. Well, I’ve been wondering myself. Poor Victor Duck. He has taken to caddishness like a drug, and he goes on increasing the doses. It’s almost fascinating to watch, just to see what inevitable things he will say next. And he said and did them all, every one, even to ‘Dear little girl’ and to ordering a private room. But I said I never dined in private rooms on Fridays.” + 

There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for their women from the Cloakroom, maybe waiting for sirens to come to them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young men will. Admirably formal they looked, admirably toned to the dress-coats of Davies, the trousers of Anderson and Sheppard, the hats of Lock, the waistcoats of Hawes and Curtis, the ties of Budd. Handkerchiefs by Edouard and Butler. The glory to God. They looked furtively at Iris in the way that decent men will at a woman who is said to have had lovers, like cows at a bull. One of them said gloomily: “Might go to the Albert Hall Ball.” + 

Pall Mall seemed wrought of stately marble palaces, and Iris said that the reason why so many English people seemed to prefer Paris to London was that English people saw Paris mostly at night, while if they could see enough of London by night they would never leave it. “And the people!” she said. “All these years I’ve spent abroad, and never met any people so good, so decent, as the English. Couldn’t you sometimes kill people for the quality of their admiration? Oh, I’ve committed so many murders in foreign streets.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But, if you like England⁠ ⁠… why are you going away? You’re free.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Ah,” she mocked, and, as we walked, a hand darted out from her white cloak and touched my sleeve, and startled me very much. “Wait till you’re so free that you just daren’t do what you like. Wait till you’re so free that you can be here one minute and there another. Wait till you’re so free that you can see the four walls of your freedom and the iron-barred door that will let you out into the open air of slavery, if only there was someone to open it. Ah, yes, freedom.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Then up the street of ghostly dandies we flew behind the silver stork, and the wind rushed down from Hampstead Heath and the wind ran out of Jermyn Street and jumped like a drunken man on the tawny cornstalks that were her hair, and waved them about and danced with them. But not she to notice, she who seemed to have a great talent for just not noticing things! She was silent, serious, intent. The light of an arc-lamp kissed the long slender legs into silver. + 

Once she turned to me, smiled, and looked away again. I wondered if she meant me to see that our friendship was in that smile. I hated her, I think, because she made me feel so incapable, unwise. As the stork, with scarcely a rustle of its wings, flew towards the Christian Science Chapel at the head of Half-Moon Street, she said: “I’m tired. All day seeing lawyers and trustees, and then taking sweet old Eve all round and round Selfridge’s because she had never been there before and someone had told her she could find everything she wanted there. And she was quite upset at being unfaithful to Harrod’s.⁠ ⁠… And Gerald! Oh, but why couldn’t they let Gerald alone! Just because, I suppose, the Marches are never let off anything.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Here we are,” I said, and she pulled up beneath the lamp by The Leather Butler in East Chapel Street. From the footboard a lane of low houses and shops stretched in a vague, squalid line towards the open Market Place at one end and the darkness of the mews at the other; somehow like an etching in a clouded light by an uncertain hand. Bits of newspapers and torn placards, the nameless odours of yesterday’s economies. The wind that came from Hampstead Heath could find no way into Shepherd’s Market, and it lay still as a tramp sleeping. Cats watched us intently from the middle distance, and a striped cat leapt with a scream from the shadow of the door of my old house. Gerald’s light was on. “What’s that mean?” Iris whispered. She seemed to be frightened, and she said sharply: “Why are you looking at me like that?” + 

“I was just thinking,” I told her, “that if one could judge by appearances, which of course one must never do, in that white cloak in this mean lane you look as nearly an angel as this world could ever see.” + 

“Don’t let’s mock the angels. What does it mean, Gerald’s light being on?” + 

“Only what it has always meant, that I must turn it out.” + 

“Ah, you’ve been very good to Gerald.⁠ ⁠…” + 

And I am glad that, just then, I said that I was very fond of Gerald. + 

Then we were on the narrow landing of my old flat, in the darkness. The musty stillness of that little old house brought six years of nights into my mind, and I wondered how people ever regretted their first youth, those intolerable uncertainties and enthusiasms that stare at you from the dead past like condemned gargoyles. The incapability of youth goes on long enough, Heaven knows, if not so long as the savagery of childishness. In the darkness I could feel the soft ermine of her cloak against me, and that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. She was very, very still, and I could not even hear her breathing. + 

“It is very kind of you to come with me,” she said suddenly, seriously. We were very still on that landing, and I drew back my arm where it touched her cloak. It was very soft, that cloak. “I have thought of you, and decided that if you ever thought of me you had a right to think with dislike.⁠ ⁠…” She was talking smoothly, calmly, when suddenly her voice completely broke, into little bits. “Oh!” she whispered. I was silent. She said quickly: “To me there’s something terribly indecent about humanity, all humanity. It’s as though, in the whole lovely universe, humanity was cooped in this musty little house, talking vaguely of dislike, eternally talking of like and dislike, love and unlove, of doings and undoings, purposeless yet striving and savage. The other night I was motoring alone from Paris to Calais, and it seemed to me that no law was strong enough, no crime was big enough, not even disloyalty, to stop us, when we had the chance of rising above the beastly limitation of living as we were born to live. Because we humans are not born to live, we are born to die.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Something has happened to you tonight,” I said. She was a faint white shape in the darkness, and it seemed to me that that was as much of her as I should ever see; and I was right. + 

“No, nothing at all. Just a dream. But, oh, failing the dream, how I would like a child!” + 

“A dream-child!” + 

“Ah, I’ve had those, a many! No, a real one. To be playmates with.⁠ ⁠…” + 

I said: “I will go up first tonight and see how Gerald is. Will you wait here?” + 

“I’m tired and frightened,” she said faintly. “Don’t be long.” + 

I don’t think I stayed up there more than a few seconds. I don’t know. I switched out the light, and as I went down the dark narrow stairs I did not strike a match. + 

“Well?” she whispered from the darkness. + 

I don’t know what I said. I suppose I must have said that he was in the same state as when she had seen him before. Then I pretended I had no matches left, and said I had better go down first while she held on to my shoulder. “Then if you fall, I’ll fall,” she complained, but I said I would not fall. + 

Stair by stair we slowly descended in the darkness. I wanted particularly to see Guy. There were certain things to be done, I supposed. My mind was vacant as a plate on which was drawn a confused picture that would, on looking closely, mean something horrible. There had been a stain on the wall, a great jagged dripping stain, and bits of hair sticking to it. + 

“Oh, God, this drink!” she said frantically; then almost sobbed: “What’s that!” But it was only the telephone-bell from the hall downstairs, queerly strident and unrestrained in that still, musty little house. Brrr! Brrr! Brrr!⁠ ⁠… “I never knew a telephone could be so shrill! Will it be someone for Gerald?” + 

“It will ring forever if I don’t answer it,” I said, opening the door into the lane. “I’ll follow you to the car.” I hoped it was Guy ringing up on the chance of catching us. + 

“Well?” his cold murmur came through the night. He said he would meet me at my door in ten minutes’ time. “What are you doing about Iris?” he asked me and I think I said: “Nothing. What can I do?” + 

Iris was waiting by her car under the lamp. The car was like a great yellow beast with shining scales, and Iris, tall and gentle and white, the lovely princess of the tale who has enslaved the beast. Far above them towered the pile of Sunderland House, enchanted almost into dignity by the darkness. She looked at me gravely as I came, she seemed to crouch like a tired fairy into her white cloak. + 

“You look very white,” she said. + 

“Now, Lady Pynte!” I made to mock her, and I suppose we laughed. Then she was at the wheel, sunk into the low seat, staring up at the darkness of the faint London stars. “I’m tired,” she said again, and again I thought, what could I do? Then she did something to the dashboard with her left hand, and the engine hummed. I was on the curb, above her. Nearby a policeman was flashing his lamp on a door. I supposed one told the police.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Will you see Gerald in the morning?” the slightly husky voice just reached me. “And tell him to follow me to Paris? I shall be at number⁠—Avenue du Bois for a week or so, and then⁠ ⁠… Goodbye,” she said sharply, as though impatient with herself. “Goodbye, dear. You’ve been very kind⁠—to the twin Marches. Goodbye⁠ ⁠… perhaps for a long time. You have your work in England, and I’m the slave of freedom. Goodbye, my friend.” + 

I could not tell her just then. She lay aslant in the driving seat, and her tawny curls flamed in the light, and she looked sad and tired. I could not tell her, and as she took her hand from mine the great car leapt down the fat little slope of East Chapel Street to the end, turned in a blaze of light and colour, rushed up the parallel little street to Curzon Street. + 

I was at the corner where I had last seen Gerald putting his shoulder against the saloon-door of The Leather Butler; and as Iris’s car turned into Curzon Street a two-seater passed me swiftly, going the same way. I thought I heard a cry of “Iris!” above the rustle of the two engines, and I thought I heard Iris’s surprised voice, and the rear-lights of the two cars seemed to draw together, but I was not sure. + 

I crossed towards Queen Street, sure only that I wished to see Guy. From Jolley’s corner I saw, far up, two red rear-lights twisting into South Audley Street, and then, from afar, came the scream of a Klaxon, the growl of a horn. I wondered who was in the two-seater, but at that moment the tall figure of Guy came towards me from my door, where a taxi had just dropped him. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Poor young devil. Only hope the other side won’t disappoint him as much.” + 

“I couldn’t tell her,” I said. + 

Guy smoked thoughtfully, looking over my head. “I’ll tell her,” he said, “in the morning. Had an idea he might blow his brains out.” + 