III
Hilary says that I was very quiet over dinner that night. He remarked it, he says, because it was so unusual. Hilary has an illusion common to Englishmen, that if a man can utter three consecutive sentences without breaking them up with “eh,” “ah,” “hm,” “mm,” and any other noises that may occur to him as fit and proper, he must be held to be talking too much.
How on earth, I was wondering, could I cast the name of Mrs. Storm before my host with even a tolerable hope of his more than grunting at it? For, of course, one never discussed women with Hilary. I believe he had been a member of several clubs once upon a time, but in these degenerate days he had finally withdrawn into the impenetrable fortress of the Marlborough; Guy and he agreeing that, since it was once said of a King of Spain that he had died of etiquette, they envied rather than cared to overlook their young friends in the exercise of the long lives assured to them.
“He will, if you provoke him,” Iris had said, absently enough. And, indeed, never but once had I ever heard Hilary expand at the mention of a woman’s name, and that was when I had provoked him by defending her, the lady in question being one for whom he had a great regard but who had, as they say very aptly in the popular phrase, “gone completely off the rails.” As regards Iris, in that case, it should be child’s work.
Hilary says now that he was able, so soon as I mentioned her name, to account for my subdued air. Such, Hilary says, was the aftermath of Iris’s effect on men. But all he said at the time was, snappy like, that he hadn’t even known she was in London and would I have port or brandy or both, because I was detaining them at my side of the table? I said I was sorry and how amiable Mrs. Storm had been about him. “And fancy,” I said, “her being Gerald’s twin sister!”
“Why ‘fancy’?”
Hilary was annoyed. Now why was Hilary annoyed? Why do men get annoyed?
“She is beautiful,” I said, “she is good, she is—”
“It seems to me,” snapped Hilary, “that they make a perfectly harmonious pair of twins. Hm.” And he lit a cigar and reflected profoundly on the flame of the match. Perhaps I had better leave out his “hm’s.”
“There’s only one March,” he said, pushing a cup of coffee towards me as though he hated the sight of it, “who has ever been any good, and that’s the aunt, Eve Chalice, a dear old lady. Heavens above, the March blood! But they will be near their last gasp now, with young Gerald as the heir. …”
It just showed, you know, how much one ever knew about that young man. I had no idea he was heir to anything, let alone the bankrupt earldom. “Ever since last July,” said Hilary, “when his uncle, Barty’s elder brother by a year, and his cousin thought they would do some fifth-rate mountaineering in Switzerland without a guide, and tried by mistake to climb the Jungfrau.” Hilary, I remember thinking, seemed very bitter about that mountaineering. You know, that bitterness of a calm, normal, reasonable air, with a slight flavour of old-world banter? He seemed to want to give the impression that he rather gloated than otherwise over the decline and fall of the house of Portairley. Gerald, as the nineteenth earl, Hilary seemed to want to say, served the house of Portairley right. If Hilary could only have seen his own kind grey eyes!
But that something, apart from the mere existence of the Marches, had annoyed him, was obvious; and presently I realised that the something was the fact that Iris had not let him know she was in London, but that he had heard of it from me, from anyone, in fact, but herself. I ought instantly to have guessed that was the matter, Hilary being one of those detached men who have no use for the flibberty-gibberties of life.
Gerald, one thought, would make about as pretty an Earl of Portairley and Axe as even the Marches could boast. “But at least,” I suggested, “he will have a little more money than he has now?”
“About,” said Hilary, “minus five hundred a year. They can’t even bribe anyone to take Portairley, and so the old gentleman has to live in a couple of rooms and pay the taxes on the property from what his creditors allow him. That old curse working, one would think. …”
There isn’t really a great variety among these family curses. There appear to be no more than two schools of thought among the cursers, one which consigns the cursed to instant death, and the other to prolonged disgrace ending in damnation. The Portairley’s curse was of the second variety, and poor Gerald appeared to be in at the death for the damnation.
“Vaguely,” I said, “I gather that Gerald and his sister had some quarrel in the distant past. But I happened to see Gerald as I came on here, and he seemed ready for a reconciliation. In that case, as Mrs. Storm seems to be wealthy. …”
Certainly Hilary could surprise one. He exploded, in that quiet parliamentary way which is one of the loftiest dignities of a constitutional country: “And thank the Lord she is! Imagine the shoddy life of an Iris—with neither money nor morals!”
Evidently, then, Hilary had a great regard for the lady of the green hat. You must remember that until this evening not so much as her name had passed between us. … “He will, if you provoke him,” Iris had said. Well, hadn’t I!
Hector Storm V.C. had, it seemed, left her every penny. Storm, steel, Sheffield. “Fine boy, Storm,” said Hilary, pulling at a stiff grey thing which I forgot to mention he wore on his upper lip without, however, succeeding in looking anything but clean-shaven. “Boy Fenwick left her all he had too, but she wouldn’t, naturally, touch a penny of it. You would think the world was upside down when you came to inquire into the moral sense of an Iris! Strict as steel here, unbending as iron there—and then! She gave all Boy Fenwick’s fortune over to old Aunt Fenwick, since when the old hag has called Iris every name out of the Apocrypha for her pains.”
“But, Hilary!” I said. Hilary says now that I was white in the face. “But did you say Boy Fenwick? Boy … Fenwick?”
“Her first husband,” said Hilary; and he pushed his port-glass an inch or two up the polished surface of the table and stared at it. “You couldn’t,” he said, “do better than young Fenwick. … But before your time, I suppose. …”
“I never dreamt,” I think I said, “that Mrs. Storm had been the Mrs. Fenwick. …”
“Mrs. Storm,” smiled Hilary queerly to his port-glass, “has been everything.”
But Boy Fenwick! And the shameless, shameful lady of the green hat as the tragic Mrs. Fenwick! So there was “Felix Burton” and his ideal of purity! And there, plain as hate could make her, there was “Ava Foe,” and somewhere there was the reason for Gerald’s medieval hatred for his sister! Somewhere there, but exactly where? For no one knew less of Boy Fenwick’s death than I did, that being a legend of “a little before my time. …”
“I knew Iris,” Hilary was saying thoughtfully, playing with the stem of his glass, “when she was so high. They had a house in Cambridge Square then, and she used to go to that school in South Audley Street where they all go to. I’d see her walking along with her governess, a long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. Hm. She was adorable.”
There was a pause … and suddenly he turned his face to me, that long, thin, grey-looking face with the kind, muddled features. And it was as though it had, suddenly, profoundly lost all its inner calm. Hilary’s outward calm, in spite of his detached air—“Mr. Townshend, the imperturbable champion of procedure”—was always rather like a Gruyère cheese, a sort of smooth surface with gaps. But this was different, this was as though a tap had been wrenched loose inside him, letting run a savage, hurt bewilderment which didn’t quite reach his skin. “And now,” he said softly, yet looking at me as though accusing me of something. “And now! The last I heard of Iris was that she was seen night after night in a Russian cabaret in Vienna with an Italian Jew who is said to have made a fortune by exporting medicated champagne to America. There’s the long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. …”
“But,” I began, and decided that it was better not. But it was absurd, that “night after night.” That wasn’t, I knew, Iris Storm. Not “night after night.” She might very possibly have sat one night in a Russian cabaret in Vienna with an Italian Jew who exported medicated champagne to America, but certainly not “night after night.” Unless, that is, she had changed a great deal since then. After all, one couldn’t be more unattractive than an Italian Jew who exported medicated champagne to America. No, really, that was too much.
“Your generation,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “is a mess. Have some brandy?”
“It’s absurd,” I said, “to talk ‘generations.’ Slack novelists do it to get easy effects. All generations are a mess. Thank you.”
“Your generation,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “has more opportunities for being a mess than ours had. That’s what I meant. And your children will have more opportunities than you have. There is a certain amount of horse-sense in the reluctance of many young fellows nowadays to having wives of their own. They’re afraid of getting it in the neck from the results. For whereas you have motors and telephones and wireless with which to lose your sense of the stabilities, as you are losing them, they will have cheap aeroplanes as well. When you people nowadays begin to break loose there’s no limit to your looseness. There was in my father’s time. They couldn’t get about so quickly. They couldn’t grub about in so many cesspools at one time, rushing in a night between London and any vile paradise of the vulgarities like Deauville or the present Riviera. Even if they broke loose a little—the women, I mean—they generally had to make some compromise with the decencies simply because they had to live in the place, they couldn’t make an appointment with a trunk-call to Paris and go and have a few days’ ‘fun’ there. But now if a woman has kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity there’s the whole world open for her to play the mischief in, there’s every invention in the world to help her indulge her intolerable little lusts. …”
I mastered an irrational impulse to try to defend Iris against the friend of her childhood. I would have liked to say that the little lusts were intolerable most of all to Iris. Hilary would almost have sympathised with that in Iris, for it would seem that the only vice a man of principle can understand is the vice of not enjoying what he has forfeited his principles to do. Hilary couldn’t, obviously, forgive Iris for not having grown common and meretricious and, in the slim beastly sense, coarse, as the other “rotten ladies” did. He couldn’t, obviously, forgive her for the continued graciousness of her outward seeming, and of her inner seeming too, if one didn’t know those things about her. He couldn’t, obviously, forgive her for being so indifferent to every distinction of class that she was equally indifferent, with the whole calm of her mind, to being “declassed.” And he couldn’t, obviously, forgive himself for still, God knew how, seeing in her the same qualities that he had seen in the long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. If only Hilary had been a sentimentalist, and could have closed his eyes against what he did not wish to see and could have opened his eyes to see all that he did wish to see! But Hilary was a realist with a backward-seeing eye. The Iris of long ago should have been dead, choked to death by this grown-up Iris—but, and there lay the perversity of this grown-up Iris who had kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity, it wasn’t dead at all, she was still essentially the same Iris who had walked with her governess up South Audley Street. But, the devil, all these men! Yet there she was … profoundly undifferent, profoundly as though untouched by any more soiling breath than that of the lightest passage of the years. It was, you might hear Hilary thinking, confoundedly unfair to all decent womanhood, Iris’s immunity in the abyss. He should not like her—no, there should not be left anything about her for a decent man to like. The friend of Iris’s childhood couldn’t help a savage anger with her for retaining the interest of a clean, and otherwise balanced, mind. The friend of childhood liked the woman so deeply that, being a man of principle, he could see only her worst side. And then the man of principle would fall into the toils of the friend of childhood, and whilst the two antagonists were wrestling together they could see only the side of the woman that it made them the most wretched to see. The very fact that Hilary was deeply attached to Iris made him see only her worst side. Many good men call that “liking” a woman. Many good women call that “idealism” in men.