II
The Cavalier of Low Creatures
I
And that, I think, is all that there really is about me, as a person, in the tale. Of course, this first person singular will continue, and there’ll no doubt be any amount of “I this” and “I that,” but that is because of the nature of the work, and there’s never, the way I see it, much more than a pen behind it. Hilary, however, and Guy de Travest are not of my mind about this. We have recently been talking about these affairs, and a sad enough talk they made, and my two friends, my two seniors, were reluctantly compelled, they said, to disagree with me about my lack of responsibility in the events to be related hereinafter.
To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain things were decreed to happen and that, therefore, they did happen: they had it in their blood, these people, that certain things should happen to them, and I could no more contrive these things than they could evade them. But Hilary and Guy, murmuring together in that astonishing unison which can only be found in two Englishmen who disagree upon everything in the world but on the fact that conduct is three parts of life, are of opinion that my substitution of the word “ptomaine” for “septic” really affected the course of events. Had I, they say in effect, spoken the truth like a brave little man, there would have been a divorce and everyone would by now have been happy, as happiness goes. And then, too, they have something to say about those two red lights, those two rear-lamps of two cars sweeping into South Audley Street—had I told Iris, they say, about Gerald, those two red lights never would have been so close together. Oh, Guy, what a man is that! That latter-day thunder-god of dandies, that warrior of conduct, that man of cold eyes who never could give “gratuitous information” about anyone! Oh, Hilary, that friend of childhood!
Hilary and Guy, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. But Gerald had no sooner grown up than, at the impulse of his furious nature, he had turned away from his friends, his people: he had dropped out, had cut away; and no one, it’s not difficult to imagine, would want to intrude on that young man. But I was to find, after the coming of the lady of the green hat, that it wasn’t only at the impulse of his furious nature that Gerald had, well, withered fiercely into solitude. In very truth that Gerald had been a hero-worshipper; and in very truth he had become, as his sister had said, a nothing without his hero. Very few things had ever mattered to Gerald Haveleur March; but those few things, one was to learn, had mattered far too much.
His sister was, as it’s not impossible to have gathered, what is called déclassé—even for a March or a Portairley. And that was why I had heard nothing about her from Guy or Hilary, for while Guy never gave gratuitous information about anyone, Hilary was held in thrall by that upside-down but virulent form of snobbery which will make of a man of property an extreme Liberal and a thoroughgoing diehard disapprover of anyone who let his, Hilary’s, caste down. Hilary, a sincerely good man, was an enemy of caste, he was an enemy of his own caste in particular, he did not believe in it; and yet, in the depths of that being where lurks a dragon that can ultimately defeat even the sincerity of a man of principle, Hilary believed in nothing else but caste.
And Iris, of course, had betrayed her caste to perfection. No one, you might say, could have done that more thoroughly than Iris. She had been malinspired to excess, she had reached Excelsior in the abyss. But she was ever completely not on her guard about what people might say or did say, she had an amazing, an enviable, snapped Hilary, talent for just not noticing things.
She had been quite surprised, Hilary told me recently, when once he had taxed her with being a renegade from her class. Genuinely surprised she was, Hilary says. It simply hadn’t, she had told him, occurred to her in that light.
“Rushing about Europe like that,” Hilary had said, “you let England down. You’ve no idea, Iris, how these young foreign blighters hold Englishwomen cheap.” Iris had maintained she had a very good idea about that. (But you simply had to disagree with Hilary. He was like that. And he said “hm” all the time.) And you only had to travel on a liner to the East, she had said, to notice how British matrons reacted to foreign parts. As for Egypt! But she always did her best, she had said, to influence foreigners to a more lofty view of the gallantries of British matrons.
“People cut you,” Hilary had said, for that seemed to him an abominable thing, that she should have put herself into the position of being “cut”; and she had admitted having noticed glaciers, but she had maintained that it was a far, far better thing to be cut by a county eye than to be killed by the boredom of a county tongue. “I arose from the dead when I was twenty,” she had said. (Hilary, you understand, would provoke anyone.) “Your class,” Hilary had snapped, and she had said she had never actually thought of herself as belonging to any class. Her class would be, she supposed, the landed gentry, same as Hilary’s. She was proud, she had said, to belong to the same class as Hilary, and was very sorry indeed if she had hit him in the eye with her heel. But she hoped, she had said, that with him she had always been a lady.
That had annoyed Hilary very much indeed. But everything about any woman he liked would annoy Hilary very much indeed. Mr. Townshend was one of those Englishmen with an unlimited capacity for disapproving of any woman, whom he liked, who enjoyed being with other men as much as with himself; and an unlimited capacity for finding other reasons than that for his disapproval.
As for Gerald, Hilary had last known him as a “dark diabolical schoolboy” with a disturbing capacity for threatening silences and an immense—“a corroding, almost,” Hilary said—admiration for Iris. But not long after Barty March’s death—everyone had loved that drunkard!—he had quite lost sight of Gerald. Guy de Travest had been Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war, but he never spoke but once of Gerald as a soldier—“young hellfire idiot”—and never went near him while he lived above me in Shepherd’s Market. “Reminds me,” Guy said, “too much of Barty left standing too long with the cork out.” And that was more or less what Hilary said, too. One must say this for the warriors of caste and conduct: they seldom try to improve any man.
This chapter has been called The Cavalier of Low Creatures because it is about Gerald, and therefore it is a short chapter, for what on earth is there to say about Gerald? It isn’t at all a good description of him, but it is intended, if you please, more as a flourish, a naive gesture. For you simply can’t let Gerald stand without a flourish, without a something, anything. Besides, I liked him, and would like to do him a bit of good. He was, sans gesture, a zero with a scowl and a hat—and a hat. Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a novel? I liked Gerald, but I would not give him a line if he wasn’t essential; and that is just what he is, essential, for these things simply couldn’t have happened without Gerald. He hated his sister, he had not seen her for ten years, yet it turned out that he was the most important factor in her life. And, decidedly, her love for him was one of the most important factors in her life. I wonder if he knows. But he too, even he, grew up in the end. I can hear him now, through the twilight of East Chapel Street, his shoulder against the saloon-door of the inn. “Give her my love,” he said. But you will hear him.
I
Sometimes I would see Gerald in the Café Royal. I would be dining, with Hilary maybe, and in the distance, cut as with a sharp knife in the tapestry of smoke and grubby faces, would be Gerald, darkly alone, a glass of whisky on the marble-top before him. One wouldn’t attempt to join him, for it made Gerald shy, desperate, if anyone sat with him while drinking. He hated being “messed about,” did Gerald; and if you joined him he would presently mutter something about an appointment (Gerald with an appointment!), leave his drink unfinished and go and order one somewhere else; and as I understood he hadn’t much money I did not like to drive him to that. Maybe, though, he was less shy with me than with anyone. “I like you,” he once said—oh, darkly!
One never knew, as he sat there or as he strode about the streets, careless as a fakir impelled always towards a terrible and nameless penance, what he could be thinking of. Maybe he was thinking of nothing. Once I saw him come out of a Cinema Theatre with a look on his face as though he had been tortured. He always looked, you know, like something. You noticed him.
He had a grey suit. It was thin as paper, but still defiantly retained a little of that casual elegance which not even Gerald could wholly divorce from the combination of a good tailor and a lean Englishman. He never had but one other suit that I ever saw, a brown affair, but he bartered that with a boot-mender in Shepherd’s Market in exchange for mending his shoes. And he had a hat. That was a hat. And never was Gerald seen wearing an overcoat, no matter whether it blew, rained, snowed or froze. See him any winter evening striding down Half-Moon Street in the biting rain, his thin grey suit blackening with it, the jacket held by one button with deep creases into his waist, the shapes of his knuckles stuck through his trouser pockets, that hat—there, but for the grace of God, went the most lovable man I ever met.
“Gerald—I say, Gerald! Why don’t you wear a coat on a day like this? Gerald, aren’t you an ass!”
“Coat?” Thoughtful he was always, and his dark, sunk eyes would pierce the pavement or the sky with unutterable contempt. “Coat!” And he would repeat the word softly until, you understand, he had grasped the enormous idea, when he would say softly, savagely: “What the hell d’you mean, ‘coat’?” and away he would go, towards that terrible and nameless penance of his.
Well, the flourish goes, the gesture is gone, to the limbo that yawns for all such vanities in the very second of their birth. The Cavalier of Low Creatures was never, to be sure, hailed as more than a zero. But, even as the ground is not the limit of a man’s fall, as you may see in the picture with the trail of flame, so zero is not the limit of a man’s nothingness; for what is that which is nothing but so completely nothing that it may not have even the mark of nothing? It is, to be sure, zero without the formative circle round it.
That solitary drunkard, that soiled ascetic! Those nightmare women, soft as the grass of Parnassus, marvellously acquiescent, possible. Aphrodite, Ariadne, Anaïtis, white as marble, silent as marble, silent and acquiescent, possible, as only goddesses could be, the goddesses of soiled dreams, as no woman born of woman could ever be. …
And yet one might have been wrong in imagining the malcontents of the solitary drunkard’s mind. God only knows, of course, with what nightmare fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them, and grow out of them; men, at least, do not admit even to themselves that they have not grown out of them, men do not admit even to themselves that while they indulge in continence they may suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire.
That women walked in all the delicious beauty of the unattainable through Gerald’s tortured mind, I know now. But I did not know it then, for never was a man so secret with another man as Gerald, never was a man so little given to discussing with another those inevitable matters of desire and concupiscence which only by being discussed can be seen in a proper and proportionate light. They should be aired, those secret silly things, that they may be seen for what they are. In the old days there was a god in a garden, and people would do their best to make pretty fancies out of their lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns, nymphs, sirens, sylphs; they, at least, got rid of them somehow. But now that we see them plainly for what they are, the nasty little enemies of our assault on nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has smashed the god in the garden and hidden the pieces under the bed.
Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the cleanest-mouthed man I ever met with; while from his book one had gathered that there was one main idea in Gerald’s mind; this was purity. It was to do with that one brilliant-childish romance of his that, about seven years before the coming of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then, for more than five years, I had not seen nor heard of him, had forgotten him, when one day a lean, dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the Hammam Baths in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped me. I knew later that he must have been in an agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked intensely furious. I, not recognising him, thought he was going to hit me, and gaped at him.
Bitterly and darkly he told me that someone had told him there was a flat to be let above me in Shepherd’s Market. “I’m staying here at the moment,” he muttered, looking indignantly at the Hammam Baths. Several minutes passed before I could place him, for he had been in uniform that first time, in that transfiguring long-waisted grey coat of the Brigade of Guards.
Gerald appeared suddenly, in the winter of 1915, at the office of Horton’s New Voice. Now that Horton has left England on his adventure in un-individualism one does not hear much of The New Voice, but at that time and for long before The New Voice was, of course, a power, and Horton was a Power. Quite apart from Horton’s personal quality, you knew he was a Power because several of the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time kept on bitterly pointing out to their million readers what a futile man Horton was. Quite a number of the men whose names you can “conjure with” now—it would be fun to meet that man who is always in the street conjuring with names!—had begun by writing for Horton’s paper; but they had always gotten on his nerves by the time they had become the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time, and, since Horton was an honest man, he told them so, and he told them why, and he told them off, and they were furious. But the most inspired among the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time revenged themselves by republishing their New Voice stuff in book-form and omitting to mention The New Voice as the first medium of publication. That was discourteous of them.
We were correcting proofs when Gerald appeared. It was a Monday afternoon, and on Monday afternoons any of Horton’s writers who wished could turn up and correct either his own or someone else’s proofs and then go and have tea at the A.B.C. And Talk.
“Hello!” said Horton. “Hello!”
“Defence of the Realm,” murmured Home.
We were not prepared for Gerald. We had, of course, seen soldiers before; indeed, there was one in the room at the moment, the philosopher Home, who was to be killed a year or so later. But Gerald was a Figure, he was martial. The herald of the dominion of hell upon earth, that was Gerald. Take one small, frowsty room, the staff (Miss Veale) addressing wrappers at a desk by the window, Horton blue-pencilling at the other desk by the door, four of us sitting cramped round correcting proofs on bound annuals of The New Voice on our knees, smoking, muttering—enter six-foot-two of the Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night and the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who has seen Christ crucified in vain. The panoply of war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier in the real rather than in the technical sense of the word: he looked, you know, as though he had accepted death and was just living anyhow in the meanwhile. Ah, see him then! Not even Gerald’s malevolent slackness in attire could make that long-waisted grey coat with the red-silk lining sit on him but imperially. Not Gerald’s the common-or-garden chubby face of a Guard’s subaltern. Gerald was no chap. He glowered at us.
“Eh,” he stammered. “I say … I’ve been told you people. …”
“He’s heard about us,” said Home sympathetically. “Sit down, boy. On the floor, I’m afraid.”
Gerald began a fierce scowl at him—then grinned. Dear Gerald!
“Well?” smiled Horton. Always courteous was Horton, in manner.
“Heard,” muttered Gerald, “that you didn’t care what you published. …”
“Oh!” said Horton. “Well, we don’t care how good it is, if that’s what you mean.”
You couldn’t guess that Gerald was so shy that he could scarcely speak. You thought he stammered just because he stammered, not because he was so shy that he could scarcely get a word out. A man had no right to look like Gerald, an ensign of the fallen Prince of Light, and be shy; but that was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy. Just then, for instance, he looked as though he had strayed into The New Voice to send us all to blazes on general principles. And Horton looked as though he was quite prepared to go. Horton preferred bad-tempered men.
“There’s this,” Gerald muttered, and lugged out an enormous typescript from the deep pocket of his grey coat. “Novel,” he scowled at Horton. “Thought perhaps. …” and he planted the thing with a thump on Horton’s desk. Horton grinned. Horton had had much too much to do with professional novelists to think that a novel by a subaltern of Grenadiers was necessarily unreadable. “Bit long, isn’t it?” he smiled.
“Long?” Gerald stammered. “Of course it’s long! Been writing it for four whole months.”
“Ought to be good,” said Home gravely.
“It’s awful,” grinned Gerald, “but, you see. …”
“Quite,” said Horton busily. “Now, I’ll. …”
“Hello!” said Horton, for Gerald was not. Horton threw the typescript to me to read. Of course, it was mad. The New Voice published most of it, and then Heinemann’s published it in the autumn of 1916 and ran it into three editions while people were still disentangling their eyes from the paper wrapper, which showed a woman with purple eyes crucifying a pleasant young man.
The Savage Device is open before me as I write, and its opening lines are: “The history of Felix Burton is the history of an ideal and a vision. They had nothing to do with one another except that the pursuit of the vision hardened him and blooded him for the attainment of the ideal. The ideal was aristocratic, in the sense that it was a striving after nobility in life: the vision was a contradiction, as scientific as it was mystic. The ideal was, of course, defeated: the vision, of course, defeated him. The ideal was purity: the vision had something to do with pain. …”
The “vision,” so far as one could see, had everything to do with pain; in fact it was pain, and the vision might or might not come afterwards. (And I detest that word “mystic.”) The book was exciting and interesting because of a strange mixture of high romance, desperate villainy and an abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally. Gerald’s hero had minority ideas about the war—letting the landed gentry down again! As for the pain … Young Burton’s idea of it had not to do with pain as a fact, but as the most sublime among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald wrote, “it is the only drug that cannot debase a man. It can kill him, but there are worse ways of dying than being killed.” It was full of quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at you with a dash sadly lacking in the originals. Young Burton was, of course, going to die in the war.
Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the major and minor tortures of crime and martyrdom. There was a long description of tortures, if you liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s books on them, with illustrations … very interesting. Then young Burton had come across the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain there is a definite state of bliss and definite and glorious visions of a real reality which men by ordinary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But poor old Gerald, try as he would, couldn’t make The Savage Device a novel of ideas: it remained a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest. Young Burton went everywhere in the world, having adventures, getting magnificently hurt—South Sea stuff—studying the effect of pain on men’s minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a number of visions.
Then he plucked Ava Foe from a “dive” in San Francisco, she became Mrs. Burton, and then he had every opportunity for judging the visionary qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly well written, the hell that Ava Burton gave him. But young Burton’s ideal of purity was, naturally enough, schoolboy stuff: fine in parts, but stuff. The only part of it that was good was that it was, somehow, purity. On the sexual side young Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one thought, unnecessarily callous young wife. In Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking after the coming of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about Iris. I realised then how he must first have worshipped and then hated his twin sister. What on earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to make him hate her like that? Ava wasn’t in the least like her, of course, but Ava might quite well have been like any sister to any brother who hated her. But this fierce, devilish, medieval passion—why? Yet I should have guessed something of the reason after Iris had told me that young Burton was “Boy,” Gerald’s hero of before the war. But it never occurred to me to connect Iris’s casually dropped “Boy” with the legendary Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-the-War fame. He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.
“Felix Burton’s” idea of what a man should be to live nobly—he was full of those large strivings of Young Men which were in vogue in the Careless-Days-Before-the-War—seemed to take the form of wanting to found a new race of something like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of course, without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn’t. Nor did young Burton want any of your waste of time in graceful lovemaking; he wanted a sort of ruthless companionship, with occasional patches of mating; he did not want to procreate gracefully, but with a sort of furious absentmindedness. Imagine Ava—Iris! Imagine Gerald himself drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft possible woman of lonely dreams, detesting her for destroying him … and for destroying Boy! One wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever known a woman. The dark knight of purity … the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen!
III
I did not see Gerald whilst I was shaking the dust of Shepherd’s Market forever off my feet, for he was still asleep. I left Shepherd’s Market. The hearty-looking man and the thin wizened man who said “Oi!” and the little bent old man with the bloodshot eyes gave me farewell.
That afternoon I snatched a few moments from the arranging of the new place, which was only round the corner, to go round and tell Gerald that his sister had been to see him on an Impulse. I had grown to feel responsible for Gerald: his solitude was somehow like a scar across one’s own life, a rebuke.
I came upon him in our lane. I have forgotten to say that Gerald, after a particularly hard spell of dipsomania, would go riding on a hack from the Mews nearby. He had a pair of fine polo breeches with which to do that, and with the fine polo breeches (Moss Bros.) went Barty March’s riding-whip and the jacket of the old grey suit and that hat. A highwayman on an off day, that is what he looked like in the mean lane, passing the time of day with the little bent old man with the bloodshot eyes.
“You’ve been drinking,” said Gerald severely to me.
“Billy Goat’s won the two-thirty,” wheezed the little bent old man. His hat was the captain of Gerald’s hat.
One didn’t, perhaps, look one’s best in the middle of a removal. But Gerald, confound the man, looked positively healthy, taut, tempered, weathered. Ach, le sale type anglais! I told him that his sister had called. “On an Impulse,” I said.
Gerald stared at me, his cigarette halfway to his mouth. “Oh!” he said. “Oh! …”
“Here’s her telephone number,” I said. He didn’t take the slip of paper I held out.
“ ’Ere,” said the little bent old man, “I’ll give it ’im when he’s better.” Gerald lowered his cigarette, scowling at me pathetically. No one else would have known it was “pathetically.”
“Iris called hell!” he accused me. “How you lie! What?”
“Honest to God, Gerald!”
He flipped away his cigarette and dug his free hand into his pocket as though it was a weapon. Those deep eyes scowled at me, but I wondered what they saw.
“That beast,” he whispered, “oh, that beast. …”
I left him.
And I did not see him again until the twelfth evening later. I wish I had. I ought to have been to see him, for I was in the habit of seeing Gerald, and during those twelve days he might, I think he would, have told me about the silly, shoddy thing that had happened, and I could have helped to make him see it as only a silly, shoddy thing. What made me feel responsible for Gerald was that his livid, unreasonable, childish contempt for all accepted things was not contempt at all, but fear, just plain fear. He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it. Piercing that tortured vanity, I felt that life was a huge hungry beast ready to maul Gerald if he so much as tried to placate it—by using, say, a little pumice-stone on his fingers. And one could never, after having seen through his furious blague, be rid of an acute sense of the shamefaced childishness in the man, a childishness beaten down, gone crooked, which could only do him a hurt if it was not watched. And one didn’t, quite definitely didn’t, want Gerald to be hurt more than he already hurt himself by just breathing.
But, whether it was because that involuntary whisper of his about his sister had sickened me even more than I had thought at the moment, or whether it was merely because I was too busy with arranging myself into the new place, I simply did not seem to have the time to look him up during those twelve days. I wish I had.
Nor, during those twelve days, would it have come very amiss to talk a little about Mrs. Storm. One would have liked to know just a little of the history of that shameless, shameful lady. After all, one didn’t every day meet a woman with a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind. But naturally neither Guy nor Hilary was available during those twelve days, for that is a way friends have; Guy because he was down at Mace with the Mayfly, and Hilary just because he was tiresome. Hilary, Guy wrote from Mace, was helping a Liberal to fight a musty bye-election in some Staffordshire place. “As if,” Guy wrote, “a Liberal ever won, as if a Liberal could ever win without a pretty long start! and a handicapper can never get a grip on anything in a Liberal to give him a start on—sticky little fellows they are, always sliding away somewhere. And as if it mattered whether a Liberal did or didn’t win. He’ll only get squashed with his own petard.” And, however it was, Hilary’s Liberal didn’t win, so maybe Guy was right. “In ten years’ time,” says Guy, “Hilary will be the only Liberal left in Parliament, looking happier and younger and more sickening than ever.”
It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same instant act upon it.
“Hello!” I said.
“Hello!” they said. They were a she.
“Could I speak to Mrs. Storm, please?”
“Who is that speaking, please?”
I quibbled quite in vain.
“I will put the name down in her little book,” said the she kindly.
“Thank you,” I tried not to say bitterly. To ring someone up on impulse and then have your impulse perpetuated in a Little Book!
“Mrs. Storm is not in town,” said the she.
“Oh, I see,” I said. It is a detestable habit some people have of saying “in town” or “out of town.” What town? There can’t, honestly, be any real harm in saying London. …
“Is there any message? I always take her messages.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Thank you very much. Goodb—”
“This is Mrs. Oden speaking.”
“Oh,” I said. “Mrs. Oden?”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Oden.
“Well, thank you very much,” I said. “Goodb—”
“She never is, you know,” complained Mrs. Oden. Now that was a loquacious lady. I do not wish to be belittling anyone else, but I am sure that she talked more in the next few minutes than any other person of the same chest-expansion in England. She seemed to have been suffering from silence all that morning until my ring. I learnt later that Mrs. Oden had once been Iris’s governess, that there was always a floor reserved for Iris in her house in Montpellier Square, which house Mr. and Mrs. Oden owed entirely to Iris’s generosity.
“She went off to Paris the other day,” complained Mrs. Oden, “at a moment’s notice. Here today and gone tomorrow. It is too bad of her, when we never see anything of her. She is too vague, I always tell her. I suppose she had made some arrangement with you, Mr. er, has forgotten to put you off, and now you are disappointed?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, certainly.”
“Well, I expect her back any day, but how long she will stay this time I have not the faintest idea. Really it is too bad, she gets vaguer every year. And here has her aunt Lady Eve Chalice been wanting her address in Paris, and I have not the faintest idea of anything! What did you say the name was? Oh, yes, of course, I have it down. She will see it as soon as she returns, I promise you. Yes, yes. Goodbye, goodbye.”
It was five days later that there came to my hand a large box labelled from “Edouard Apel et Cie., rue de la Paix, Paris” and stamped “By Air.” Within the large box were several smaller flat boxes, and within these were reams upon reams of finest white notepaper, but good, manly stuff, stamped with my new address; and if that notepaper had its way I never would have another address, for there was enough in those small flat boxes to last a reasonably reticent man for all time. No note came with them. I searched. Then, across the top sheet of the third box that I opened, I found scrawled in pencil in an absurd, schoolgirl hand: “That one day you may write to me to say that you have forgiven me for the only dignity I have left: the dignity of the. …”
I could not make out that last word for several days. It was scrawled right across the foot of the sheet, a long squiggle with one eye looking out from the middle of it which might have been an a. At last I thought it was “unaware.”
Much later Iris told me that it was “unaware.” She said: “I picked out the phrase from a book I was reading, and sent it to you like a flower.”