I
As I think of that wretched night of the children’s party there will be two pictures that cross my mind. The first, of a group of brightly coloured people, for we were in white flannels and the women in those mad, barbaric colours which fashion, goaded on by Chanel and gallantly led by Captain Molyneux, has lately flung as a challenge to our dark civilisation, around a table lit by the cameo flames rising from eight tall cast candlesticks by Paul Lamarie; and I remember that in the still air of Guy’s great, bare diningroom those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat.
The second picture is of a darkness. A darkness torn here and there by the sudden flame of a match which drove the stars trembling back into the invisible and joined to groping eyes the silky soft blackness of the water. The black night pinned round the world with stars, shouts, laughter, splashings, an empty boat, silence, shrieks, a whisper from the black face of the water, and so home. Total losses: one stocking and one emerald. “I’m so glad, so glad,” she whispered, just before going to sleep against my shoulder, for it was Hugo Cypress who was riding the stork homeward.
But I have said that whilst we were on our way riverwards, and I sitting beside Iris as she hurled us headlong through the still night, we stood at enmity, she and I—for Venice! And yet, so far as I could make out, there was not a soul but myself out of that party, Guy, Napier, Venice, Hugo, Shirley, Iris, who seemed in the least degree uncomfortable. Those people had been, throughout dinner and afterwards, completely and supremely normal. For all you knew, I mean, they might have been having fun. There weren’t any undercurrents. Not even what you would call any undercurrents. Those people were quite calmly themselves, they just behaved as themselves in that confoundedly unassailable way which is peculiar to the people of this small island: as though, to be sure, they weren’t giving away anything of a personal nature even to themselves. You can’t help seeing why Napoleon found these people so detestable.
And it was all, you couldn’t help feeling, so mean, such a humbug of a thing. I suppose, of course, that I was the only one besides Iris and Napier who knew of their departure together in three days’ time. “I have always wanted,” she had said to me, “to go to Rio, and then across the continent. One can’t talk in Europe, it’s got so stuffy now. But I always thought I would keep the Americas until my fate should be fulfilled.” Yet, I was quite certain, everyone at the table must have known that something was wrong, else why was that fell, beautiful lady there at all? For Guy, in the ordinary way, wouldn’t, it simply wasn’t in Guy’s nature to be able to, ask Iris Storm to the same dinner with the young wives of his two young friends, his protégés almost, Napier and Hugo. And if he had asked Iris tonight, knowing that she wouldn’t funk coming—though the real reason why she had come was that Iris simply did not attach any importance to such things, “and besides,” she had said, “I want to see dear Hugo again, and as a married man”—it was just because he wanted Iris to realise the scene on which she was intruding so wickedly. It is such catholic cruelty as Guy’s that, by always lopping off the rotten limb, has kept the heritage of so many English houses almost, despite the common talk of the day, unimpaired. Tonight he was wanting Iris to see that her old friends, her old playmates, Hugo and Napier, had grown up differently from her—better or worse, that wasn’t Guy’s point, but differently—that while she had lived according to her nature they had lived according to their country, they and their young wives, Shirley and Venice. Not the most prejudiced eye, Guy knew, could but see that they made a fine, harmonious, clean four. Youth was there, and simplicity, and friendship, and love, too. And Guy had dared Iris to come to the children’s party merely to say to her, with her eyes: “See, Iris, here are four people, two by two, happily paired, friends and lovers, husbands and wives. See, Iris, and let them be. One of these men you may be able to introduce to the magic mysteries of love more completely than his young wife ever can. But see, Iris, how much you deprive him of, how utterly you deprive her! You have put yourself outside this long ago, you never can be of this again. See, Iris, how happy they are, and young, and clean, and earnest to do right: most earnest to do right, Iris, despite the most damnable enchantments. And as they are so you might have been with Boy Fenwick, but you chose differently. Iris March, the death of Boy Fenwick puts you out of court. See, Iris, and for God’s sake let these children be!”
But that catholic Guy had not seen that beautiful white mask between the tawny formal curls and the two amethysts for eyes. I have told him since that had he seen that mask he would have foreseen the little profit he might expect to derive for his friends from Iris’s presence at that dinner. I have told him how it was in my mind that night that nothing could move Iris, because it was as though in winning Napier she was winning the thirty years’ war of her life. The shameless lady had at last lopped off the limb that was called the shameful lady; and so she had come again out of the darkness to Napier, she had come again as the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams, and not all Guy’s Englishry could hold Napier now from following that enchanted whisper across the seas, that Iris March might at last come to fulfil her fate.
And yet, by the perfection of their normality over dinner, it might have been this person, me, who was being treacherous to his friends by fancying disloyalties among them! Shirley, for instance. Shirley, little sister to George Tarlyon, was of the same age as Venice, they had been at Heathfield together, they had always been together, and where Venice led there Shirley followed, and what Venice saw that Shirley saw, and where Venice raged there Shirley raged. And Venice was raging now. Oh, she must be raging frantically! Yet Shirley never once, as they say, “let on” about her state of mind. She was just Shirley all the time, sweet in a small way, sarcastic in a large way, Shirley of the brown eyes and unbreakable spirit, pretty Shirley. Maybe she was behaving a little better than was her general wont, for Shirley was so well-bred that she never practised what you would call deportment, but that was the only way the strain of that evening seemed to affect her. …
Exactly at what point, one wondered that evening, did behaviour become hypocrisy? For instance, Guy. There he sat, that knight of old beliefs, at our head, very gay in white flannels and a brilliant Fair Isle sweater, for all the world as though it was not already stifling enough, for all the world as though two people at his table hadn’t offended him on the one essential point of conduct by which Guy de Travest knew friends from strangers: never to give way to what you want to do, if honour tells you that you may not do it.
And Napier, that love-lost man! Love-lost, that man? Let me tell of a moment after dinner when Venice suddenly, tremendously, helplessly, cried to Iris: “Oh, dear Jesu, aren’t you lovely!” And Napier, at that moment gaiety itself, came suddenly between them, an arm round each of their shoulders. “Why, of course she is, Venice! I tell you, I was particular about my friends when I was young. …” It wasn’t, of course, voluntary, he was not thinking, Napier couldn’t think and then be a hypocrite: it was just the natural, normal sort of nonsense that happens. He had, at that moment, forgotten what he would have to tell Venice, tomorrow or the day after, of the love-philtre. And the child Venice! Venice, that very queen of hypocrites! Charming she was to Iris, just the tiniest bit deferential, as a girl of one-and-twenty might well be, but seldom is, to a woman of thirty. And yet Venice, ever since that afternoon in Paris, had been, I knew, eating her heart fretting about Napier, fearful and jealous and racked by what she could not see of his heart, tremulous with terror and suspicion of that legendary playmate, that Iris March of long ago. And how she hated the idea of Iris, I knew well, how she hated the thing she thought Iris was—and wasn’t Iris just that!—with all the uncompromising savagery of her heart! Venice, O Venice! And once, over dinner, she whispered to me: “I like Mrs. Storm.”
I don’t know, of course, but I suppose that in saying nothing one said quite enough to that.
“I do really,” Venice insisted, but not with enough vehemence for one to be able to fix on that as evidence of her insincerity. “She gives you a sense of … well, completeness, if you see what I mean?”
“Oh, quite,” I said. “Completeness, certainly. …”
“Not like Shirley and me, you see,” she said thoughtfully.
“Yes, I can just see that, Venice.”
“Mrs. Storm,” said Venice gravely, “gives one a sense of being a lady from herself, in her own right, if you see what I mean. Whereas Shirley and me—”
“Shirley and I.”
“Shirley and I, dear, and nearly everyone we know are ladies just because our mothers were, and that kind of thing. I’d trust Mrs. Storm. …”
And so I was to tell Iris that Venice trusted her! And then, according to the Scriptures as written by Venice, Iris would feel such a cad that she wouldn’t after all be able to bring herself to steal away her husband. She would repent, Iris would, on being told that Venice trusted her, and she would go back again into the nasty darkness of outlawry, leaving decent people to the safe enjoyment of their husbands. Dear Venice, I am afraid my telling Iris that wouldn’t have quite that effect, she just wouldn’t notice, Venice, that I had spoken; for such a plot might do exceeding well in a novel, whence you have no doubt derived it, but in life, Venice, your Iris March isn’t to be deterred from her chase of the Blue Bird by being trusted. If only life was a movie, Venice, you would only have to let Iris know that you trusted her, and away she would slink, weeping.
But imagine that Venice, an eagle in her eyrie, desperately beating her wings to hide the sun from the eyes of her mate! Oh, but Venice acted superbly! Not, of course, that there wasn’t provided a very handsome peg on which to hang the acting. The bathing idea came as a boon and a blessing to all the company. You could talk about an idea like that, and no harm done. Guy chivalrously gave me the credit for it, and I was acclaimed by Shirley and Venice as something they have in America called, so Venice swore on oath, a “he-man.” But Shirley thought it was very silly of Guy to go and spoil the whole picnic by insisting on bathing-costumes. Shirley thought that at length. So did Venice.
“I mean, on a hearty picnic like this!” said Shirley helplessly. And Venice said it was absurd to go digging about among bathing-costumes on a nice, warm, pitch-black night. One’s chemise, said Shirley, would do ever so well. One’s chemise, said Venice, had done very well before. And one wouldn’t, said Shirley, indignantly, really need the chemise afterwards, just to come home with. Not in this heat, said Venice, and they appealed to Iris, but Iris protested that she must be neutral, because she was not going to bathe; but she would have thought, she said, that a dry shift was always preferable, when possible.
“Not going to bathe!” cried Venice. “Not going to—Oh, you must bathe! Of course you’re going to bathe! Oi, you’ll spoil the whole party!”
It was after dinner, and Hugo was doing a few card-tricks with champagne-glasses, the idea being, Hugo said, to settle our digestions after one of the best dinners that had ever left him with an appetite.
“Of course she’ll bathe!” said Hugo. “I’ve known the girl all my life, and I’ll answer for her. She’ll bathe. Leave her to me. Silly, not bathing.”
“She’s rather common, your friend,” Shirley sighed to Guy.
“Sickening. Cannot bathe, really, on a night like this.”
“Seems to me,” Napier scowled, “that she will have to bathe. Tell me if I’m wrong. What?”
“Listen,” Iris pleaded.
“Coming here,” said Shirley indignantly, “and not bathing!”
“I am terrified,” said Iris desperately. “Terrified of masses of water. Once, in the Black Sea of all places, I got cramp, and ever since. …”
“If you only knew,” sighed Hugo, “how cold all that leaves us! You’ll swim, girl. Good for you. Make your coat shine. Give you back your lost youth.”
“Hugo, don’t be so tactless!” cried Shirley.
“The girl’s right,” Guy closed the discussion. “She’s only been out of bed about a month. …”
“But I haven’t been near mine for longer than that!” cried Shirley inevitably, and it was just at that moment, under cover of it, that I touched the ice-cold hand. That was the only sign until we reached the river that Venice’s married life had tumbled like a house of cards about her heart, that and her “trusting” Iris.
Venice was saying: “And didn’t we just have some trouble with you, Mrs. Storm, when you were ill in Paris! Naps white in the face thinking you were going to die, me green in the face thinking my holiday would be spoilt if you did, this he-man here purple in the face telling me to be reasonable. …”
“But you were in bed for ages, weren’t you?” said Shirley sympathetically. “What was it? Some foul plague?”
“Ptomaine poisoning,” said Napier, and as I was giving Venice a light with which to torture yet another cigarette my hand happened to touch hers. “In this heat!” said I.
“Shut up, you fool!” she whispered desperately, and then she tried not to smile frantically, whispering: “Darling, darling, darling! My one friend. …”
“Venice, they’re never any real good, friends. They can’t do anything. …”
“I know. Oh, I know. Oh God, I know! … Mrs. Storm, what a divine lipstick! May I see? May I use?”
Baby.