V
The Dark Letter
I
On a bitter afternoon in the last week of January of the year 1923 the writer found himself in the Place Vendôme in Paris.
Now here, in the Place Vendôme, is material ready to the hand of the as yet undiscovered chronicler of lofty frivolities: such, unfortunately, as am not. But I can, at least, count up to fifty. There were forty-eight motorcars in the Place Vendôme, and one coach-and-six.
The Place Vendôme is a paradox in grey stone. Spacious, noble, monumental, it is cast, even at the stranger’s first glance, in an everlasting mould. The Place Vendôme is, without a doubt, one among the few things about which we may say with certainty: “That will last.” And yet, monumental and everlasting though it is, what do we find in the Place Vendôme? Do we find therein the practice of the seven arts, the learning of the nine humanities, the study of any one among the august array of sciences, nay, the application of any one among the Ten Commandments? We do not. We find forty-eight motorcars and one coach-and-six. We find that it is given over only to the frivolities of the trivial of two worlds and to every sort of “high-minded depravity” that may occur to the enfeebled wits of the exquisite. We find, in other words, that the Place Vendôme is the centre of that floating population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre of which, under the lofty title of l’aristocratie internationale, the Chevalier Gilulio di Risotto is the ultimate servitor. The Place Vendôme is, therefore, no place for a plain man, nor by any means a safe station for the man in the street: there are motorcars kept in readiness to run them over.
Across the Place, from the rue de la Paix to the rue de Castiglione, dash forever the nimble green Citroën taxicabs; whilst from the rue de Castiglione to the rue de la Paix will march the Renaults de luxe with scarlet wheels, passing in a fancy of cool brown eyes and the poudre à la maréchale of Bourbon days. Here and there among them, maybe, will flash the racing Bugattis of the dark young men a gigolo, a rastacouère, a “racingman.” They will come to no good.
And always the great column on which Napoleon stands rises to the clouds, but no one cares about that. All they care about are the forty-eight automobiles and one coach-and-six which stretch, in ordered array of two lines, from the foot of his column to the entrance of the Ritz. The shops are loaded with diamonds as large as carnations and with carnations as expensive as diamonds. The shopkeepers are very polite, and courteously do not mind how many you buy. Americans buy. Englishmen watch the Americans buying. Grand Dukes wait for the Englishmen to dare them to have a cocktail. A few Frenchmen are stationed at those strategic points where they can best be rude to the English and Americans. Then the English and Americans tip them. The women do not wear stays, and insist on their men shaving twice a day.
“Well, at last!” sighed my sister, as her car, colourless with dust, was added to the forty-eight. I had been in Europe for four months, had lately joined some friends at Cannes, had chanced on my sister there, and had motored back with her to Paris. We were foul with dust, numbed with cold, aching with tiredness, and this was because we had “done” the six hundred odd miles from Cannes in two days and a few hours. The devil was in it if there was any reason why we should not have taken three days, or four, or five. But, then, why do people say “phone” for “telephone”? Thus, they get an illusion of speed.
We went into the hotel. The long, narrow, crimson lounge was crowded with tea-drinkers. “But what a crowd of women!” said my sister. But there were quite a few people in men’s clothes. Au Réception.
“I-want-a-room-and-bathroom-please,” my sister said.
“Madame?” The dark-suited gentlemen of the Réception looked up from their desks at my sister, saw that her clothes were not bad and that she was in a hurry, and looked away again.
My sister repeated herself, in that dead and faintly aggressive tone in which women ask for what is very probably going to be denied them. “I wired,” she added. Liar.
I went towards the concierge’s box. He was a nice man, and had a white imperial.
“Is Mrs. Storm staying in the hotel?”
“Sir?”
“Could you tell me if Mrs. Storm is—”
“No, sir, no, sir. Not at present, sir.”
“I thought that, as her car was outside. … A yellow Hispano.”
“That is so, sir. Parfaitement. L’Hispano jaune.”
“But Mrs. Storm, you say, is not in the hotel?”
“No, sir. Not at present, sir.”
“Then, perhaps you may know, she has sold or lent her car to someone?”
“That is so, sir. Madame a prêté l’Hispano. Merci, monsieur.”
“You couldn’t possibly give me any idea of Mrs. Storm’s present address?”
“Pardon, monsieur. … Timbre, monseigneur? De quinze centimes, un. Merci, monseigneur. L’automobile à huit heures moins quart? Parfaitement, monseigneur. … I have no instructions, sir. That was the gentleman to whom madame has lent her motor. Le duc de Valaucourt.”
“Thank you. But Mrs. Storm, you say, is in Paris?”
“Sir? Je suis sans instructions, monsieur. Madame?”
“What is it, what is it?” asked my sister.
“Nothing,” I said. “Got a room? Good. I am going to the Westminster, and I’ll come at half-past eight, shall I, and take you out to dinner?”
“Yes, but not here. It’s crowded with minor royalties that you can’t stand with your back to anyone except the orchestra. Larue?”
She had no sooner turned towards the lift than my name was cried in an agony of exultation. My sister says that my face as I started round was a face of fear.
“Only the other day,” cried Mr. Cherry-Marvel, exercising, with incredible perfection of gesture, his eyes, shoulders, hands, wrist, beautiful teeth, tiepin and handkerchief, “we were talking about you. …” But it was ever one of Mr. Cherry-Marvel’s many social charms that, the instant he saw you after an absence, he would make it his business to give you the impression that people had been interested in nothing else but you during your absence. Not, of course, that he stopped there; he had other things to say, too. “Of course what I really must tell you first of all, is that Henri Daverelle, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day, apropos of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind, will appreciate at its full value. …”
Cherry-Marvel was an artist enslaved by his art: he could not see you but he and you must instantly fall under its dominion; for it was an art too perfectly modulated to admit of hurry, it was an art too sensitive to admit of interruption. Indeed, a wicked little gleam would flash across his wicked old eyes if you so much as made to interrupt him. Pitiless to himself, he was only the less pitiless to you in so far as you were not himself; and, should you be a boor and leave him suddenly, you might hear the dry, clear voice dying in the distance, but dying hard, rising and falling to the fullest and most pregnant sense of each period; for his, you understand, was an art not of selection but of detail, and must always and be continually expending itself. …
“Ava Mainwaring, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day, apropos of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind. …”
Essentially an aristocrat, in person dainty, neat, fastidious, Cherry-Marvel’s art was essentially democratic, for it abhorred all limitations and exacted from him its complete display on every occasion, whether lofty, literary, or plebeian, which came before his relentlessly alert eyes; and you can hear, through the last sixty years of English social history, the rise and fall of Cherry-Marvel’s voice, each word dropping on a stunned silence like a long-polished jewel. Eager, exquisite, always prepared, always with a handkerchief fluttering between his breast-pocket and the corner of his eye, you must imagine him against the tapestry of wasted time, a figure of ancient, aesthetic dandysme, on immaculate lawns, in drawing-rooms, up and down terraces of palazzos, in clubs and cabarets. You might enter a spacious drawing-room in Rome, a museum in Naples, a friend’s villa in Capri, you might stray from your boat in a South Sea lagoon into the smoking-room of the hotel, you might steal a moment from your companions to see the moonlight on the Pyramid. … Oh, you might be anywhere, and suddenly you would hear that voice, rising and falling, relentless, ageless, enchanting even lions to silence, with here and there a sudden, profound drawl on one word, any word, “de‑ar,” and you would, fascinated, be compelled to face him—there, with full pale lips drawn wide apart, wicked blue eyes absorbed with cunning ecstasy in your stunned attention, the while, infinite as fate, he joined together the perfected pieces of his art with the word “whereupon,” which lounged from his tongue in a crescendo to a cry of sadic exaltation. And while you laughed at some elaborately phrased conceit, wondering how he had remembered the order of the words so well, he would watch the effect of his art with kind, cunning eyes, one wrist suspended in the air, his handkerchief fluttering towards the corner of his eye, in consummate politeness to show how he, too, by your laughter, was appreciating the full flavour of his art … “whereupon Elsa, who, by the way, had really a very amusing experience in Venice last Autumn, and one which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind. …”
Now, if anyone could tell me where Iris was to be found, Cherry-Marvel was that man. Cherry-Marvel knew, of course, everybody, and he knew everything about everybody … “of course it’s absurd to suppose that Alice, with her intelligence, which I am positive makes its full appeal to you—it is absurd to suppose that Alice could for one moment have thought that her husband, whom of course you know as well as I do, would divorce her for going to Brighton with Cubby Tyrell, because, as I was pointing out to her sister only the other day, for one thing no decent man, and I am sure you will agree with me about this, would care to let it be known that his wife had ever gone to Brighton, and for another, and this, of course, is a Biblical detail which I am sure that you will grasp at once, Cubby Tyrell, who is a very intimate friend of mine, has been allowed, in spite of having been married twice, to remain a member of the Celibates Club. …”
At this time I hadn’t the remotest idea as to where Iris was or how she did. I had not seen her since the night of her brother’s death; and had been permitted to gather from Hilary that he knew as little as I did of her whereabouts. Secret she had always been in her absences, Hilary said, or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively in hiding.
She had, a few weeks after that terrible night, written me one long letter: from some place near Rome, from a draughty house, so she wrote, on a hill of strangled olives. There was no address on the notepaper, and this, she wrote, was because she did not want me or anyone to write to her. “Please,” she added to that.
Her letter was presumably in answer to two of mine addressed to the care of Mrs. Oden of Montpellier Square, but she was at the pains to excuse it on the ground that she and I were tied together—“no, tied apart!”—by a bond, the existence of which I would never, never know. Well! It was, you can see, a feverish, mysterious letter; and made how much more mysterious by that almost illegible, pencilled scrawl! There were whole sentences on the first few pages which I could not make out at all, which I made almost blind guesses at, while at some I could not even contrive so much.
“It is your fault, my friend. You paved the road up which I raced in chase of the Blue Bird. Yours was the appointed dark finger in the darkness. May God forgive you, for I can’t. I will try, but I think I can’t. There is a waterfall of fire. …”
Sheets upon sheets of it, that letter is before me now, and still I am unable to decipher whole sentences from that maze of pencil-marks on the thin Italian paper. There was one that stared at me, shocked me, in the middle of the second page—“I may hate you”—but I could not, do what I would, make out the words above or below.
“… I am lonely beyond bearing, and afraid. I am so afraid. I wonder, will you understand? But if I bore you take courage, for I will not bore you again. You are my friend, and this is my goodbye. Forgive me, dear, the arrogance of calling you my friend. But I am so afraid. Et, satyr bien-aimé, j’ai raison. …”
I could, you can understand, make neither head nor tail of it. She might hate—me! She might, heaven knew, be indifferent to me, but why, how, hate? And satyr bien-aimé was all very well, but it meant nothing.
On the later pages she seemed to have controlled her hand a little, but her mind, if one might judge, remained … well, was that, perhaps, the effect on a mind of a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives? “I am lonely, but I have always been lonely since I was eighteen. Yes, I can trace my loneliness since then. It is a long time.”
This letter, you must remember, came only a month after Gerald’s death. She wrote of that night, and here her haunted pencil was at its most firm, if that is saying anything. “There I stood in the old, old darkness—how old darkness is, have you ever felt?—while you were upstairs in Gerald’s room. And I listened, but I could not hear you moving, so I imagined you to be staring at Gerald from the door, as you and I did that night a million years ago, when, do you remember, you suddenly, strangely from your heart, made that defiant courtesy to my hand? And, do you know, I almost cried because of your kindness to that poor, helpless sweet. Oh, Hilary has told me about you, and you luring Gerald off to a Home, but all in vain, my poor Gerald. And then I heard you switch out the light, and down you came, slowly, slowly, more silent than the darkness, and when you spoke your voice was as old as the darkness. But you are very young really, else you couldn’t be so defiantly, so imperiously, kind. And I remember wondering why you said you had no matches left, for before you went upstairs I had seen a box half-full in your hand, but I said to myself: ‘He has forgotten, and he is wretched at his friend’s weakness.’ Ah, you should have told me about Gerald there and then, indeed you should! But you did not, for my unworthy comfort’s sake. Dear, you have a fine touch for the affections—but cruel, that is what you were, cruel. You laid your foot down on the soil of kindness, but where your foot fell there leapt up a dandelion … and in the heart of the dandelion a tiny little rose; but what, my friend, is one little rose surrounded to suffocation by a huge dandelion?”
Well! Puzzle this way, puzzle that way, I couldn’t make a glimmer of sense out of that passage. I was pleased, of course, that she seemed to like me, but as to the rest. …
Guy, as he had told me he would, had been to see her early in the morning. He had—another friend of childhood—overruled Mrs. Oden, saying it would be better not to wake Iris and bring her downstairs at that hour, for could there be a better place than bed in which to receive bad news? Mrs. Oden knew him of old, he was Apollo Belvedere to Mrs. Oden. She had been desperately upset about his news, coming as it did on top of what she had read about Gerald in that morning’s paper. Poor Mrs. Oden.
Iris was asleep—“Oh, as no man can ever know sleep!”—when she awoke dimly to a tall shape at the foot of the bed. (“As no man can ever know sleep!” That, too, puzzled one, as well it might.) Dark it was, the curtains drawn, “and I remember them flapping peevishly because the door behind the tall shape was ajar. And I, scarcely awake, could think but of one thing, my awakening mind was hugging, in pain and joy, but one thing … and I called the shape at the foot of the bed by a certain name, a name which was not his name. He made no sign that he had heard the name which was not his name, and I am sure he instantly made himself forget it. For, as you know, Guy would defend a secret not only against the angels of God, but also against himself. ‘Guy!’ I cried at last, and he seemed to smile faintly, like the handsome absentminded god he is. ‘Yes, Guy,’ he said. ‘Sickening, isn’t it?’ Those high good looks of Guy’s, that small poised head—frozen, tireless Guy! But that morning he was very gentle with me. …”
He had spoken for me, too, saying that I hadn’t told her of Gerald’s death at the time because she had looked so tired and sad. “Poor Iris,” Guy had said, “the men who don’t know you very well care very much for your comfort, but the three young men who have known you best of all have not cared enough.” Guy had said that, and she lying in bed, stunned, staring, while he sat holding her hand, as he might be an elder brother and she a hurt baby.
“He knew, you see, that I loved Gerald, that Gerald was a part of me, although Gerald had spent ten years in pretending that he hated me. Do you think, my friend, that I would have let myself be crucified on Boy’s death only for the sake of Boy’s cruel relations and friends? Two people Gerald worshipped in the world, but always he would have sacrificed Iris to Boy, that was always the way of Gerald’s heart. Above all things in this world I love the love that people have for each other, the real, immense, unquestioning, devouring, worshipful love that now and then I have seen in a girl for a boy, that now and then I have seen in a boy for a boy, that playmate love. It isn’t of this world, that playmate love, it’s of a larger world than ours, a better world, a world of dreams which aren’t illusions but the very pillars of a better life. But in our world all dreams are illusions, and that is why the angels have crows-feet round their eyes, because they are peering to see why all dreams in our world should be illusions.
“But you can’t, you see, get rid of the funny love between twins like Gerald and me just by the word ‘hate.’ Even Boy couldn’t really upset that. There was something peculiarly us about Gerald and me, something of blood and bone peculiarly us which nothing but death could destroy. And so Mrs. Spirit was sent into Hyde Park that the thing that was us might be forever destroyed.”
She had suddenly asked Guy, half-sitting on the bed beside her, what it was in the world he loved most, and he had said he was sorry to admit that he loved his son more than all the world. “I could have killed him for jealousy, just then I could, he who had everything to have also that. You don’t know the body-ache for a child, the ache that destroys a body … the lament for a child of love, a child of lovers. …
“He would be two and a half years old now, my son. Hector, you see, didn’t know anything about his son, because he left me in a temper before even I was certain. And naturally when I was certain I wasn’t going to be outdone in silliness by my own husband, and besides, I thought it would be mean to force him to come back if he didn’t really want to come back, and so I didn’t let him know. For men, I would have you know, might make an awful row and stamp away in a tearing jealous fit, and when they are away they might be as pleased as anything to have got away. You can never tell about men, especially when they are convinced that they are being genuine. But, of course, I knew he would rush back quickly enough when the baby came. Oh, I would see to that! And, my dear, the fun I would have all by myself, for Hector and I had always longed for a son, the fun I had thinking of the look on his face when one day he would get my wire in Ireland: ‘Arrival of Hector-not-so-proud. You come too.’ Can you imagine what he’d look like then, and he stern and handsome and all covered with V.C.’s and oddments, wasting his time chasing disgusting Sinn Feiners who wouldn’t know a country of their own if they saw it. I had that wire all nicely written out months beforehand, and I went and hid my ugliness in my old nurse’s home near Peterboro’ and stuck the wire with a pin over my bed, being superstitious, you see, and wanting a winner for once in a way. Well, and then—Oh, and then they killed Hector just in time, and when Hector-not-so-proud came along he thought, the poor sweet, that the proper way for a gentleman to arrive in the world was toes first to slow music, and so away he had to go again. …
“I have done with England, and England has done with me. But I don’t think I shall be able to go and have tea with the Empress of China yet awhile, for just now I love England as I never before have loved it. The captains and the kings of England—clean eyes, long shadows, low voices … why, I must hover, held in running as in a nightmare. And from the distance, from these lands of loud shrill voices, I will hear the low, low voices that I had long since thought I had given up regretting. Indeed, I was quite sure I had given up regretting them. But I am regretting them now, like a baby. Goodbye, dear, and God bless you. And when you think of me think instead of your words, ‘He has, with you,’ and you will have the sum of my pride in being liked by you.”
Often, during these past eight or nine months, that scrawled writing would pass my mind, but as I could hit on no clue to her fantasies, and as I might never see her again, I had put Iris carefully away into that part of our minds wherein we keep fancies, images, regrets, the things that we will do one day, the things that we would like to do one day, the things that we will never do again … when, but a moment ago, the great yellow car had leapt from the Place Vendôme into the first place in my mind, and I would like, I thought, to learn from my friend, Cherry-Marvel, anything that might be learnt about Iris. But as I listened to him, the way he had said this and had done that and had heard the other, I wondered how I would ever get the chance to suggest so much as her name to him. “… apropos of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind. …”
We stood, for we had not yet had time to sit down, in the little reading-room of the Ritz that leads from the entrance-doors, while stern-faced Americans turned over the pages of The New York Herald on the long marble-topped table in the centre, and a woman or two sat here and there absorbed in waiting, and the dowager Lady Tekkleham’s voice nearby was grimly suggesting to the Baron de Belus that he could not do better than let her drive him in her coach-and-six to dinner at her villa at Saint Germain-en-Laye.
Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey and my heavy coat, and weighed down, too, by the gloom of the early winter evening that was falling about us, so that my eyes, borne down by Cherry-Marvels amenities, could scarcely make out the chairs and flowers and vases in the long courtyard through the windows; and suddenly I fell to wondering how it had come about that Iris, who loved her proud swift car, had lent it to a friend, but the instant I mentioned her name Cherry-Marvel’s little eyes gleamed with fury at the interruption. I was abashed, yet I would try again, but … “whereupon Auguste de Maupin, whom, of course, you know as well as I do. …”
But at last I achieved the impossible, in inserting a wedge into the fabulous monologue, and then I murmured: “Ill? But are you sure, Cherry? Mrs. Storm is ill?”
But illness appalled Cherry-Marvel, from illness he could not help but turn away the neat, lined mask of his face, from illness his Florentine dandysme trembled away in the only unaristocratic emotion I have ever observed in Cherry-Marvel, the emotion of fear. “Quiet we call Silence, the merest word of all!” For, appalled by illness though he might be, his art could always rise to a general view. … He had heard in a roundabout way that Iris had had a “sort of minor operation—”
“But,” I said—
“Whereupon,” said Cherry-Marvel, his little eyes gleaming for a second with fury, “what I said was, ‘Operations, where are thy stings?’ for, as of course you know as well as I do, women are scarcely women without them, and I have not the faintest doubt that in Lesbos they suffered, if I may put it like this, from the impolite insistence of their womanhood even more than if there had been any men there, for as I was saying to Marc only the other day, apropos of the particular shade in which she had dyed her hair, men may come and men may go, but the moon, my dear boy, is always there. Now here, for instance, is Iris, quite one of the loveliest women I have ever seen, and one who, I am convinced, must be very fond of you with your sort of mind, here she has, I hear on the very best authority, fallen a victim to one of those mental derangements which seem, if I may put it like this, to be an irresistible incitement to polite surgery in quite another and more individual part of the person. But what I have always said about Iris is this, that I admire her so, and I am so positive that you also must, with your sort of mind, because she is one of the very few Englishwomen I have ever met who can, as I am sure you will agree with me, live abroad without becoming more and more English. …”
II
Paris rises in a cloud of chill darkness, the rain falls like whips of ice, the streetlamps loiter on vague, bitter errands, confused strings of light, a stealthy, idiot wind glories in being corrupted by corners. The platforms of the omnibuses are packed tight with small men whose overcoats are too short for them, the brims of their felt-hats too narrow, their trousers turned up too high, their eyes too dark, their faces too pale. The jargon of the traffic on the rue de Rivoli, as it squabbles for every step between the deserted pavement beneath the railings of the Tuileries and the reeking pavement under the long archway lit by impudent shop-lights falling on imitation jewellery, is multiplied an hundredfold by the shrewish air into a noise that hurts like warm water on a chill hand.
The taxi, a clever little Citroën taxi, darted hither and thither among the squabbling hosts, and nimbly we capered across the dark face of the Louvre, nimbly over the Pont Royal and the river paved with broken darkness, and so down the slope into the rout of the Boulevard Raspail.
Maybe it is true that there are times when we can detest Paris more deeply than any other city. Other cities stare back calmly at our sudden hatreds, other cities grow more impersonal as we execrate them, while as for Paris, she is always personal, but when we are nervous and detest her for being Paris she becomes even more herself, she insists on being herself with a nerveracking insistence, like a silly woman who, seeing she is getting on her man’s nerves, gives a loud, nervous laugh and simpers: “I can’t help it, it’s my nature to be like this. …”
Now why were the people yelling here, what was the matter? Millions of them there were, joined in some strife between the Bon Marché, the Hôtel Lutetia and the entrance of the Nord-Sud railway, while omnibuses and trams made strategic movements against each other, while facteurs in dirty blue, fabulously moustachioed, pushed carts about in all directions, irritating anyone they could, and a motionless gendarme or two played with his bâton, heedless, unheeded. The eager face of a young artist I knew, shadowed by a great black hat, artistic, anarchistic, strode out of the white mass of the Hôtel Lutetia and turned greedily towards Montparnasse. At last my clever little Citroën and I plunged into quieter wastes, lit here and there by the bastard glitter of a Cinema Theatre falling on posters livid with three colours, red, blue, and yellow.
That strange unstormy exquisite, Cherry-Marvel! That most aesthetic creator of a monster more terrible than Frankenstein’s, for it devoured the spirit of all who passed beside it! Why I should be worried about Iris I could not tell, indeed I was too tired to inquire, but worried I was despite Cherry-Marvel’s so well-informed badinage about the white woman’s burden, and the more worried too, as the taxi plunged into nameless darknesses beyond the Bal Bullier, towards the address of the nursing-home which Cherry-Marvel, that confidant at third-hand, had of course known.
Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the devil it was now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi Marianne danced a minuet du cœur with a crimson garter and the moon fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours. …
And now we tore up a dark, endless boulevard, even as a shifty maggot in a pit of darkness. But surely this was the murderer’s Paris, here lived the fathers and grandfathers of Apaches, here were born the daughters of the drinkers of blood and the sons of the mothers of crime. It stretched never-ending between lamps fixed at astronomical distances, and on each side tall naked trees thrashed the shadows of very high black walls. They hid from the world, the people of this boulevard of the high walls, and who shall say that they had no reason to hide? And then, do you know, a lion leapt out of the night, a huge lion that was black as sin and crouched for prey in the centre way between five lanes of darkness made even darker by confused strings of light. And as we breathed a prayer in thanks for our deliverance from the lion of darkness trams crawled near us and stayed a while, and tram, at the impulse of a vice peculiarly continental, was joined to tram and crawled away; while we, having regained our breath, came beneath the shadow of a terrible wall. It was the wall of a castle, a fortress, a something satanically majestic. This, I thought, is another of Carlyle’s mistakes, this is no less than the Bastille skulking in these parts until such time as the Camelots du Roy shall have left the kindergarten and can crown the duc d’Orleans King of France. Far above our laboured passage glowed a long, long row of small windows faintly lit, and it seemed to me that they were striped with bars of iron. And there was a great gate of iron, and a black soldier with a beastly bayonet to his rifle, and an old woman with a great brown parcel under her arm, waiting. The clever little Citroën stopped. It is tired, I thought, and will go on later. …
“Eh, numéro quarante-neuf, Boulevard Pierre Abel?” the taxi-driver threw at me reproachfully, and I got out, and I stared up at the great fortress which towered above me like a beast with a row of unclean eyes about his forehead, and the rain whipped my face.
“C’est un prison?”
“Mais oui, monsieur. Le Paradis.”
The pavement was broad, of mud and asphalt. The prison towered on our right, filling the sky with darkness—but for those distant, terrible windows. The rain whipped down, stinging like little animals. Nearby one forlorn lamp lit the putrefying colours of the advertisements circling a lavabo. What, I wondered and wondered, could Iris be doing here? Facing me across the broad pavement of mud and asphalt was a great gate which had once been brown, lit by a lamp on which had once been inscribed the number of the Nursing Home. Iris was here. Were we, then, always to meet in darkness, Iris and I? She was here, and perhaps, I thought, on the other side of her is a Morgue or an Asylum.
A yard or so from the great door there was let into the high wall a small door inscribed “Concierge.” I was startled at the clatter made by the bell. A nun stood in the dim doorway.