III + 

For Purity! + 

I + 

The cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone, despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device “for purity,” whose ghost was to be raised by Mr. Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat. For, his wretched Liberal being at last retrieved from somewhere beneath the foot of the poll, that gentleman was again among us, saying “hm.” + 

We have so far seen but the shadow of Mr. Townshend; now, at last, this shadow must emerge into the tale of the weak Marches as the person of Mr. Townshend of Magralt. He emerges, as becomes a man of property who believes in progress as though it were a pain, in a dinner-jacket, le smoking, a Tuxedo; of which the bow-tie is gathered together with that dexterous carelessness which is the affectation of elderly Englishmen who cannot put up with any affectations whatever. Now there is no known explanation for this phenomenon of the sickly bow-tie among Englishmen of over forty years of age. That they are all blackguards, Mr. Shaw has assured us. But haven’t they, God bless one’s soul, eyes! It is not, of course, of the least importance whether a bow-tie falls straight or crooked, particularly on a grown-up man. It is not, after all, of the least importance whether one is clothed or naked. But one may, in passing, be permitted to wonder on the curious dispositions of the blind goddess Chance, whereby not once in a long lifetime, not even by one little bit of a fluke, will one of these elderly gentlemen ever tie a bow to fall even approximately right. They must, therefore, do it on purpose. But for what purpose? Let them, I say unto them, tie their bows carefully while the bow-tying is good, for voices from the Clyde are rising loud and everywhere those snobs are dominant who affect that the shirt of democracy should be a dishclout. + 

However, Mr. Townshend’s shadow does not even yet grow in substance without some difficulty. Between him and us, towards the dinner-hour, intrudes, knife-like, that deuce of cavaliers, he of the hat that Frederick the Great would have envied, for that wrecker of homes liked his hats soft and malleable, he liked to twist and torture them as though they were no more than men. In fine, Gerald made me late for dinner. + 

The clock of the Queen Street Post Office stood at three minutes before eight o’clock as I passed on my way to Hilary’s house in Chesterfield Street. The roar of the marching hosts of Piccadilly was as though muted by the still evening air. The small straight streets of Mayfair lay as though musing between the setting of the sun and the rising of the theatre-curtain. Neat errand-boys, released for the day, kicked their heels about on the curbs. The drivers of the sauntering taxicabs looked inquiringly, impersonally, into the faces of hurrying pedestrians. Limousines lounged softly by. Past me strode intently a tall raven-haired woman in a bright green wrap with a high sable collar, and moving frantically below were bright green shoes and bright green stockings that appalled the suave dignity of the evening light. These are not the only green properties we shall see in this tale, for women of the mode wore very much of green in the year 1922; although, of course, some women were not necessarily of the mode even when they wore green. Some women should not wear green. To such, their husbands should say: “My dear, I can’t help saying it again, but really I’ve never seen you look as well as when you’re in black.” + 

It was from the Curzon Street corner, just by Jolley’s the chemist, that I saw Gerald. He was across the road, against the entrance of the little tunnel that leads into Shepherd’s Market, buying an evening-paper off a friend of ours, Mr. Auk, who used to have his stand just there. + 

I crossed towards Gerald. I would be a few minutes late for dinner, that was certain, but if ever I was punctual at Hilary’s he never was dressed: a sense of conduct being the property of imperious men, who must disregard the servile virtue of punctuality. + 

I could not see Gerald’s face as he stood on the curb glancing at his paper, the brim of that hat was so low over his right eye. Mr. Auk winked at me as I came up. “Oiled, that’s wot!” whispered Mr. Auk. Then a friend of his came by and he and Mr. Auk retreated into the tunnel, where I vaguely thought that Mr. Auk seemed to be telling his friend something funny about Gerald. I never have passed the time of day with Mr. Auk since I found what it was that he thought so funny about Gerald that evening. + 

When I greeted Gerald he instantly looked up from the paper to me. I remember now that he seemed to watch my face for something, an expression, which he half-expected to see. But one notices those things only later on. + 

“I say, seen the evening-paper?” + 

“No. Why?” + 

The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the thin hawk’s nose, the fine, twisted, defiant mouth.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Why? How the hell do I know why!” + 

He crumpled his paper, thrust it under his arm and dug the released hand into his pocket. Thus was Gerald Haveleur March armed cap-a-pie against life. He had something on his mind, one could see that. But it would take hours to make Gerald confide anything. + 

“I say, have a drink?” + 

Now I wonder how many thousands of men are at this very moment putting that question to thousands of men; yet that, if nothing else, would have made that night significant in my life, for never before had the solitary asked me or, I think, anyone to have a drink with him. Nor would he, as a rule, have a drink if you suggested it. And once, at a party I gave, he had some gingerbeer. But, even so, I had to say I couldn’t, pleading that I would be too late for dinner. “With Hilary,” I said, and he scowled absently in a way he had, and lounged up the road with me. Thoughtful he was always. + 

That was a curious, capacious evening. The Marches were gathered together that evening, they who were never let off anything. As Gerald lounged beside me the great primrose car with the menacing shining bonnet passed us as silently as though Curzon Street was a carpet. It was empty but for a boyish chauffeur. Gerald, I suppose, did not know it, and I did not remark on it. I wondered if Iris had surprised Mrs. Oden by returning suddenly. Poor Mr. Oden.⁠ ⁠… + 

“What have you been doing with yourself lately, Gerald?” + 

“Doing?” His eyes pierced the pavement the other side of my shoulder, for tall was Gerald. + 

He grinned.⁠ ⁠… + 

“You’d never guess,” he grinned. + 

I did not like this grinning. It was unusual in Gerald. It was like a crooked mask on the fine dark face. There was by ordinary no grinning froth about Gerald⁠ ⁠… and, somehow, it crossed my mind that maybe Gerald was hard-up. I asked him, oh, tentatively, if anything was “up.” + 

“Up? The hell’s up. O Jesu!” And he grinned.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Yes, but besides that⁠—anything?” Not, you know, that I thought for one moment that anything really was “up.” It was merely that I misliked that grinning. + 

I can see him this moment so clearly, the way he suddenly threw back his head and stared from under the brim of that hat as though into the heart of the heavens: the dark, defiant, hungry silhouette searching the heart of the above. + 

We were at the corner of East Chapel Street, where the great American pile of Sunderland House debases itself before the puny roofs of Mayfair: it loitered clumsily against the soft evening light, reluctant to yield to the grey embrace of London.⁠ ⁠… + 

“God!” sighed Gerald. Like a child, like a child⁠ ⁠… and like a fiend he suddenly laughed up at the veiled heavens. “Imagine, you fool, just imagine the bloody degradation of being alive!” + 

But I will leave out Gerald’s “bloody’s.” One is tired of saying, hearing, reading that silly word. It is only chickenfood, after all, and does very well on the lips of the young ladies of the day, but there is no reason why grown-up people should use it. + 

“I like you,” he said, as only that devilish child could say it. “You sit on your imagination as though it was an egg, and a nice little chicken comes out. God, I wouldn’t be you! Look at all the pretty eggs you’ll hatch and not one have a chance to grow up into a splendid, lovely old hen that’ll peck at the dung you call life. Why don’t you write about fallen archangels? They’re the only things worth writing about, fallen archangels. Phut to you, that’s what I say.⁠ ⁠…” + 

I managed then, for the first time in our friendship, to suggest that if perhaps he was hard-up, well, phut to him.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Look here, that’s not fair,” stammered Gerald. Shy himself, he made one want to sink into the ground with shyness. “I mean, that’s putting friendship to music, isn’t it? What?” + 

“Oh, nonsense, Gerald! There’s nothing so silly and mean as this reticence about money.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“God, but you’ve given me an idea. I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, as you’re late for dinner. I’ll damn well lend you a fiver.” + 

“But, Gerald⁠—” + 

“You talk too much,” Gerald stammered. “I’d like to do you a bit of good. And I’ve still got to thank you for chloroforming me and lugging me off to that Home for Drunks, thanks very much. Now, am I going to lend you a fiver or am I going to make such a roughhouse just here that all the police in London will come and arrest you for soliciting? I’ll scream if you don’t touch me!” + 

I was in a hurry. I had to take that fiver. I have that fiver still. + 

“I’ll keep it for you,” I said. “Damn you.” + 

“Yes, you keep it for me,” said Gerald thoughtfully. “Nice, fivers are⁠ ⁠…” and then, savagely muttering “Oh, hell!” he strode abruptly away down the slope of East Chapel Street, which leads into Shepherd’s Market. Drunk or sober, you simply couldn’t tell. You never knew that man was drunk until he was speechless. I was hurrying away when his voice held me⁠—and a very boyish voice Gerald had, like a prefect’s at school. + 

“I say, seen that sister of mine again?⁠ ⁠… You haven’t?” He seemed to reflect profoundly. “I say, if ever you do, give her my love. What? I say, don’t forget.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I won’t forget,” I called back. “Good night, Gerald.” But he had turned away, and the last I saw of him he was putting his shoulder against the saloon-door of The Leather Butler. I plunged across the road to Chesterfield Street, glad of the message I would certainly give to Gerald’s sister. Maybe tonight, somehow. A furious conference of livid pink and purple monsters hung over Seamore Place, where the sun was sinking into Kensington Gardens. + 

II + 

“There was a cocktail for you,” said Hilary gloomily, “but I drank it, in case it grew warm.” I thanked him politely for the idea. “It wasn’t an idea, really,” said Hilary gloomily. “It was an impulse.” + 

It is not, therefore, impossible to understand how it came about that there were not a few people, youngish people, who considered Mr. Townshend to be a tiresome man. They said: “He is very nice, but frankly, isn’t he rather tiresome?” I supposed he was rather tiresome. + 

Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him, he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I believe, his age. + 

Hilary was a man who had convinced himself and everyone else that he had neither use nor time for the flibberty-gibberties of life. He collected postage-stamps and had sat as Liberal Member for an Essex constituency for fifteen years. To be a Liberal was against every one of his prejudices, but to be a Conservative was against all his convictions. He thought of democracy as a drainpipe through which the world must crawl for its health. He did not think the health of the world would ever be good. When travelling he looked porters sternly in the face and over-tipped them. His eyes were grey and gentle, and they were suspicious of being amused. I think that Hilary treasured a belief that his eyes were cold and ironic, as also that his face was of a stern cast. His face was long, and the features somehow muddled. It was a kind face. + 

Hilary is the last in direct line of the Townshends, who have held Magralt, a Tudor manor on the Essex coast, since a Townshend deserted to Henry Tudor on Bosworth Field. The Townshends of Magralt have always been soldiers, “and that,” Guy, first and last, a soldier, will say, “is the only reason one can see why Hilary is a politician by profession and the foremost stamp-collector in Chesterfield Street by the sweat of his brow.” But one has to report that Hilary was once, before witnesses, perfectly beastly to an American gentleman who said that Blucher had arrived in time for the Battle of Waterloo. + 

But it was on the question of marriage that the two friends would indulge the sharpest difference of opinion; or rather, Hilary’s wasn’t an opinion, it was a lurking Silence. + 

“Suppose you die,” said Guy de Travest. “You might. You are ten years older than me in years alone. You may receive your call to higher things at any moment. Look how I beat you at squash the other day! Let us suppose, then, that you are as good as dead. Unmarried, childless. You have done nothing. You are nothing. You leave nothing. Except, of course, what was left to you⁠—” + 

“Less,” said Hilary. + 

“Your memory, then, goes down as that of a sickening philatelist. Whereas, had anyone of your ancestors had a chance of a bit of war like ours, he would have died a Major-General!” + 

“A Field-Marshal, Guy. You forget that the Townshends have the reputation of having lost more of their soldiers’ lives than any other service-family in England.” And so it would go on forever, Guy contending that as Hilary was nothing in himself it was disloyal of him not to wed and bring forth direct heirs, while Hilary’s attitude would be one of benevolently beckoning to the sombre heights of Cumberland, where sat the house of Curle-Townshend, heirs-apparent to Magralt and all its fiefs. + 

Anyone, as Hilary was once goaded into muttering, would have thought that Guy’s own marriage was the happiest in the world; at worst, anyone might have thought that it was a happy marriage, as marriages go. Guy, it was said, adored his wife. Guy, it was said, never spoke to his wife except in public and as he passed through her room in the morning towards his bath, when he said “Good morning.” It was Lady de Travest who volunteered this information. “I do not see,” said Lady de Travest in her slow soft voice, “why one should forever conceal the fact that one’s husband is cruel to one. It is nothing for one to be ashamed of, is it?” Moira de Travest was a quiet woman, with slow graces of movement, statuesque, exceedingly handsome in what you might call a public way, with a dark, restrained smile in the blue eyes under the hair that shone like black silver. Suddenly she would give a very loud laugh, and then her eyes would shine boyishly for a second. She had many intimate friends among women, and at times she was rather brilliant in a manlike way. Foreign Ambassadors liked to be with her. Mr. de Laszlo, M.V.O., painted her. Women novelists had tea with her. Twice a year she would say that a day must come when she must take a lover, but she gave one a profound sense that there was nothing in the world she could endure less. But, whatever it was that had gone wrong between those two ten years before, they had a son, a boy of sixteen, at Eton, and Guy de Travest would remain by his marriage without question of separation or divorce. That was cruel of him, Moira’s friends said, but Guy was a very catholic gentleman, and he loved his son beyond all things. In the earlier pages of country house albums one might come on photographs of Guy and Moira arm-in-arm, yellow Viking and black silver. They did not seem to have aged at all since then, but maybe Lady de Travest was a little more statuesque and her eyes would shine more and more boyishly. + 

Hilary and Guy were friends. Inseparable, they were inimical. They agreed on nothing, nor had they one taste in common. But maybe it is in a similar tempering of a sense of conduct that Englishmen, regardless of all overt differences, will find their deepest friendships. Conduct was for Guy and Hilary one of three facts, the other two being birth and death. And it is they and their opposites who must finally make the storms of life. Warriors of conduct and enemies of conduct⁠—there is the issue that has still to find its final battlefield. Hilary’s Liberalism, in that issue, would come crashing about his heart; of his head he would take no account, for it is not by the head that one decides in ultimate moments. Guy, tall as a tree, Guy the latter-day “thunder-god of dandies,” would make a flaming figure, standing against the afterglow of the fires of an old religion called aristocracy. But Guy was far from being of those Tories, of whom Mr. Galsworthy has written with such cruel sympathy in Fraternity and The Patrician, who are obsessed by an illusion of their own exclusive right to national captaincy. Guy did not think that the hope for England or the world lay in himself or his caste. He was not a clever man; but his contempt for politics was born of a conviction that there was no hope of curing the diseases of life and society by anything that anybody of men could do. Men individually must clean themselves within, questing for and grasping what cleanness there was in them. There was a frozen storm in Guy’s eyes, and they were very clean. But, of course, he was not very clever. + 

Those two men are for me symbols of an England that I love. I am not sure that I can explain what that England is. I am not sure that I would like to explain it even to myself, as, maybe for the same reason, I would not like to read Jane Austen with a mental measure. I am not sure that there ever was such an England. The soil, to be sure, is there, the clouds across the sun, the teasing humours of the island seasons: the halls, the parklands, the spacious rooms, they are there. But the figures that sweep across them⁠—are these that we see, all? Are there no others, lost somewhere, calmly ready to show themselves⁠—are these that we see, all? These healthy, high-busted women with muscles like those of minotaurs, these girls who are either stunned with health or pale with the common vapours of common dancing-halls, these stout, graceless ones here, those too slender, bloodless ones there, these things that have no voice between a shout and a whisper, these things that have yielded to democracy nothing but their dignity⁠—are these that we see, all? These rather caddish young men who have no vision between a pimply purity and vice, who are without the grace with which to adorn ignorance or the learning with which to make vulgarity tolerable, these peasant-minded noblewomen, these matrons who appear to have gained in youth what they have lost in dignity, these toiling dancers, these elderly gentlemen with their ungallant vices⁠—are these that we see, all? Or was there never such an England? Were the parklands and the spacious rooms never peopled but by nincompoops let loose by wealth among the graces of learning and fashion? Was there never such an England as I myself once saw in the magic of a spring morning in London? It was no more than the passing picture of Guy de Travest walking by the sulky side of Piccadilly, as he must always do to pass between his house in Belgrave Square to his club in Saint James’s Street, to which a few gentlemen will still absently resort. I saw Guy walking against the broken sunlight of the Green Park, and then I did not see Guy. It was as though from one step to another he had walked into a dimension wherein the desires of his heart melted his person into the England of his heart, and he was rendered invisible in the ambience of the Green Park and against the ancient landscape of Saint James’s. + 

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. + 

IV + 

It is curious how many irrelevant details will crowd back into the mind when one is trying to reconstruct only the main passage of an evening, which was throughout, now one looks back on it, as though directed to its inevitable end. I remember how, through one of the long silences common to our odd, antagonistic intimacy, I sat staring into my brandy-glass⁠—those Gargantuan ones, Hilary had⁠—and wondering at Hilary’s, well, unsentimental sentimentality; and then I wondered what sort of a fight the man of principle would put up against the friend of childhood should Iris ever show the faintest inclination to take as her third husband Mr. Townshend of Magralt. The man of principle would lose⁠ ⁠… happily lose or unhappily, you could not tell, for no man can tell what odd happinesses, more secretly kept than crimes, another man will snatch from intimacy with a woman whom he would detest if he did not desire. + 

But through the silences of that evening there walked mainly the figure of the legend of Boy Fenwick, a boyish figure midst a babble of confused rumours and knowing silences. Yet I was so concerned not to appear, to that watchful and dangerous friend of childhood, too interested in Mrs. Storm, that the name of Boy Fenwick hung on my lips before I was out with it. Oh, that name of Boy Fenwick! One knew it so well and so dimly, it would so often be just dropped into a conversation by some friend of his or some friend of a friend, just the name with a passing regret, to the perpetuation of his charm and his time.⁠ ⁠… + 

Many will, no doubt, remember the details of what must have been one among the minor sensations of that time better than I can pretend to. It happened during the summer of 1913, when I, having just left school, was enjoying a first taste of freedom up and down Switzerland, and was far from the long arm of even the Continental Daily Mail. Boy Fenwick was found, on that dawn of his wedding-night, lying in the courtyard of the Hôtel Vendôme in Deauville, dead of a broken collarbone. He had fallen, it appeared, from his bedroom window on the third floor. His beautiful young wife (I collect the bits of rumour that came to me later) had been asleep, had suddenly awoken to a sharp feeling of solitude, had happened to look out at the dawn.⁠ ⁠… + 

Tests were made, and it was found that a man could, given certain conditions, have fallen out of that window. The hotel management suggested that a man could, given certain conditions, fall out of almost any window. Among the certain conditions suggested, tactfully, was champagne. That was, I believe, adopted, tactfully. Much, of course, must have been said and printed about the beautiful girl, Mrs. Fenwick; and there was provided a little comic relief to the affair in the scarcely suppressed indignation of the illustrated papers, for the beautiful Mrs. Fenwick had in some way prevailed on Sebastian Roeskin, the photographer in Dover, not to issue any of her photographs, and had shown a remarkable ingenuity in evading the street-camera. And, the tragedy happening at Deauville during the Grande Semaine⁠—Deauville at that time was still in the first flush of its victory over Trouville⁠—it was hushed up as quickly as possible. + 

Boy Fenwick had only that year come down from Oxford, and his memory was treasured by his many friends both there and in London. Indeed, to one who heard of him only when he had become legend, and when the first edition of a slim book of poetry by him, published posthumously with a charming introduction by P. L., had attained to a price only surpassed later by Rupert Brooke’s memory, he appears to have been the most beloved of the beloved young men of that time. To youth of this decade, grown now a little impatient of the careless wise-seeming pastime of indulging “sound” scepticisms or catholic idealisms, those youths of the days before the war must seem to have been the most gifted of God’s creatures who ever walked this earth, always excluding the glory that was Greece. Several, to be sure, survive until this day, but nothing could be more unjust than to approach a man’s youth in the light of the shadow that he casts in his early thirties. Yet they would verily seem, those few dead young men, to have a certain godlike quality of immortality denied to the multitude that died with them and for whom cenotaphs and obelisks and memorials must do duty for memory: that they should retain the regret of their many friends is not remarkable, but it is odd, and pleasant, how they will ever and again loiter, gay and handsome and “sound,” in the imagination of those who never knew them. Boy Fenwick’s name, now, would ever and again pass like a phantom of beauty and laughter across some conversation: so real, so dim. He had been notable, it seemed⁠—and this is the only clear thing I had ever heard about him⁠—for a certain catholic idealism that was almost an obsession with him. So, I was to think this night, thrusting from me the legend of Boy Fenwick, so it would seem. An idealist! Yes, Boy Fenwick was an idealist. But would I had the debonair truculence of that puissant nobleman, the Earl of Birkenhead, who has dared to say, in an age given over to the new-rich snobbery of exalting plain, normal men: “I do not like meek men.” I, had I that presence, would say: “I do not like idealists.” + 

Yet it was not to be over this dinner with Hilary that I was to be given the full sum of the idealism of that handsome young god who, beloved of many, was the hero of one March and the fate of another. That was to come much later, on a night that was the sister of this night. + 

Mrs. Storm could have been no more than nineteen or twenty at the time of that tragedy at Deauville. And I suppose I must have remarked, probably apropos of nothing but Hilary’s passing me the matches, how very terrible it must have been for a young girl, for Hilary passed, through one of those pregnant pauses which seem always to preface the cruelties of kind people, his Gargantuan brandy-glass round about his nose. “And,” he said thoughtfully, “rather more terrible for him, don’t you think?” + 

“I suppose,” I said in all innocence, “that he was tipsy or something, to fall out like that.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Hilary looked at me through his glass, for the rim reached his eyebrows as he sipped, in that way which is supposed, I believe, to make noisy Labour interruptors feel such fools as even a clown must despise. + 

“But, Hilary,” I couldn’t help crying out, “you’re not implying that he threw himself out!” + 

Hilary, because I had given way to a moment’s emphasis, gained instantly in leisured calm. “Hm,” he said. Gently he put down his huge glass. “Hm,” he said. He considered the stump of his cigar and decided that it was not worth while relighting it. “Hm,” he said, and took another from the box, pinching it. I passed him the matches. “Hm,” he said. But not I to be provoked! I did to him what Mr. Beerbohm once so notably did to the late Mr. James Pethick in the Casino at Dieppe: I plied the spur of silence. + 

“Boy Fenwick,” said Hilary, lighting his cigar, “was a young man of quality. I don’t mean the word in the flashy sense in which you use it in your stories. But of quality⁠—in mind and spirit. And yet,” in a volume of white smoke he smothered the failing light of the match, “he chucked himself out of that window.” + 

And, you know, just at that moment I saw him doing that, and Iris lying in bed.⁠ ⁠… + 

Hilary was angry. The very thought of that buried tragedy seemed to wrench that inside tap a little looser, but still the savage, hurt bewilderment would not quite reach his skin. + 

“Of course,” I said, “they just said it was an accident, then.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Naturally,” murmured Hilary. + 

Naturally, Mrs. Boy Fenwick had not hurt her husband’s name by saying publicly that he had died of his own will. “And then,” said Hilary, “you come to the upside-down morality of an Iris March, the part of her that’s steel and iron and gold. She ruined herself, telling the truth.” + 

“But,” I said humbly, “if you had preferred not to think of her as ruined, need you have believed that it was the truth?” + 

“Iris,” said Hilary, “never lies. It bores her. One quite naturally gets into the habit of taking everything she says literally; for it always will be literally true, particularly if it’s against herself. She hasn’t, you see, a trace of the self-preservative instinct. Hm. Pity.” + 

Iris Fenwick couldn’t, it seemed, endure for one moment the idea that his friends should think that Boy had fallen out in a moment of tipsy dizziness⁠—Boy being well known to be a very light drinker, and Iris abominating drink, “the very idea of drink,” Hilary said, “as only the daughter of a drunkard and the sister of a drunkard can. If you ever get to know her at all well,” he suddenly smiled, “you may be a little put out, in the natural satisfaction of your thirst, by seeing Iris look just a little, well, sulky. Unreasonable, yes. But they get unreasonable about drink, daughters or sisters or wives of drunkards.” + 

Mrs. Boy Fenwick had seemed to feel most deeply her responsibility to Boy’s memory and to his friends’ love for him. She simply had, it seemed, to safeguard the love they had for him, by making it clear that he had died as he had lived. In disenchantment of an ideal⁠—that, if Boy was to commit suicide at all, could be his only possible justification. His suicide, as apart from his death, naturally scarred his friends, but not so deeply when they knew that it was done in the despair of the disenchantment of an ideal. Boy’s friends would understand that completely, Iris must have felt, for were they not Boy’s friends? He was sensitive even to madness⁠—they could, indeed they’d have to, think that. But that he was given something to rouse his sensitiveness and to overturn his balance⁠—she had, Iris seemed to have felt, to tell his friends that, so that, in giving Iris all the blame that was her due, they should retain their memory of a Boy strong to the end in idealism. And they seemed, I gathered from Hilary, to have done that without stint. Hilary, too⁠—for wasn’t he a realist, that man? One could see them all at it, Boy’s friends to Boy’s widow⁠—the dead adored youth in their minds, the still, pale, beautiful girl between them. She had to tell Gerald. You can imagine that.⁠ ⁠… + 

She had, Hilary said, a quite unearthly beauty just at that time, and was so still, so terribly unyoung somewhere inside her. “It was my fault,” she had said. She had been looking when he had thrown himself out of the window. He had just lit a cigarette, she said. + 

“That a girl of that age,” said Hilary, “that a girl whose moral character, you can’t help seeing, was⁠ ⁠… well, what it was, should be so impelled to tell the truth at her own expense, at the expense of her own ruin, at the expense of a queer brother’s hatred, for that must have hurt her most of all, by a sense of honour that would make even the rigidity of a Guy look small, well⁠—” + 

“But isn’t that where, Hilary, there comes in that ‘caste’ which you complain of her having always ignored?” + 

But Hilary wasn’t going back on any of his words. A “hm,” and he was off, saying that it made him think there was something in the stale paradox that you never know the best about a woman until you know the worst. “But, God in Heaven, what a worst!” + 

She had wanted, Hilary tried to explain⁠—pathetically, you can see, trying to make clear to himself the noble as well as the shady side of Iris⁠—to keep permanent, even to reinforce, the love for Boy of Boy’s friends by the idea that he had died untamed of his ideal. You could see her, Hilary said, meeting Gerald halfway on that. “Boy died,” she had said, “for purity.” + 

“Hilary! She said that!” + 

And that, you know, was all that she had said! Boy Fenwick had died “for purity.” That was all. + 

“It seems,” I couldn’t help thinking aloud, “very sweeping.⁠ ⁠…” + 

It was, Hilary said grimly⁠—and very pointed, in a girl not twenty! + 

“But!” I murmured. + 

Boy’s friends, Hilary said, could naturally put only one construction on it. Naturally, Hilary said. “For purity!” And Iris’s friends could put no other. What, after all, didn’t “for purity” mean? It could mean, to all the decent people of the world, but one thing.⁠ ⁠… + 

Hilary looked at me in inquiry. I had made a noise. But I was so surprised. “You don’t mean,” I tried not to gasp, “that you condemn her on that for Boy Fenwick’s death!” + 

“One doesn’t,” snapped Hilary, “ ‘condemn’ an Iris March, an Iris Fenwick, an Iris Storm. They stand condemned in themselves. They are outside the law by which we⁠—” + 

“Hilary, as the Girondins were put by the Jacobins!” + 

“We’re not perfect,” said Hilary quietly, “but we’re not that. What Iris was at nineteen or so⁠—or before, evidently⁠—she has been ever since.” + 

“What, as brave!” + 

“As loose. She made a gesture after Boy’s death, a fine gesture⁠—and then she set about proving how she had that in her to disenchant a Boy to his death. She had⁠ ⁠… ‘affairs.’ Not, you know, one long affair⁠ ⁠… but ‘affairs.’ Oh, quite openly. You’ve no doubt heard about some of them. And when four years later young Storm married her, against his people’s wishes, she was no more than⁠—well, what do you call those people? Demimondaines? And since Storm’s death.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But!” I said, and also I said what it was in my mind to say, for are we sticks, are we stones, or are we human? It was Boy Fenwick I was thinking of, not of Iris’s life later, although it seemed to me that Boy Fenwick had had a good deal to do with that, too. I had begun by provoking Hilary. He had, with that appalling talent of his for appearing reasonable, provoked me. He could arouse all that was worst in a man, could Hilary. He had aroused all that was worst in me against that young purity hero. It seemed to me that it was, to say the least, rather hasty of a young man to die “for purity” in connection with a girl of twenty. “Hilary, in two thousand years we have discovered only one caddish way of getting to Heaven, and Boy Fenwick, like many ‘idealists,’ has taken it.” + 

“You probably don’t realise,” said Hilary, oh nreasonably, “the depths of sudden despair⁠—in decent people.” + 

“But I thought we were discussing human beings!” And, as regards human beings, one couldn’t help thinking that a girl who had confessed that her lover had died “for purity” was purer than the lover who had not been able to live for it. Boy Fenwick’s death had an air of getting away with rather a good thing. He had destroyed the girl by exalting himself⁠—for purity! How did boys come to have the infernal conceit of setting themselves up as connoisseurs of purity? And he had taken care to leave his corpse in such a position as best to foul the fountains of his young widow’s womanhood. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ought to speak to him about it. + 

“Words!” said Hilary. “Words, words!” + 

“Well, we can’t all,” I pleaded, “talk by throwing ourselves out of windows. And I was brought up to believe that it was caddish to sneak on a woman, whether for purity or for humbug.” + 

“It was Iris,” said Hilary, “who sneaked on herself.” + 

“Only because, Hilary, she didn’t want the young man to waste such a fine suicide. She didn’t want to do him out of the glory of dying for true-blue manhood. At the age of twenty a girl is justified in having a belief in true-blue manhood. But Mrs. Storm seems to have grown up since then.” + 

Hilary indulged me. I was young. “Of course,” he said, “the boy wasn’t quite sane. Hm. But he loved Iris⁠—you know, extravagantly⁠—as Hector Storm did later. Iris isn’t, it seems, one of those women you love a little. And Boy loved purity. And because, of course, the two simply didn’t go together⁠—the shock, man, of realising that, to a boy in love!⁠—he went on his own way. And I don’t think,” said Hilary, as though he was trying hard to be fair to one, “that we should sneer at the things men die for⁠—even that young madmen die for.” + 

In England, I reflected sulkily, you may not apply the faintest touch of reason to any of the accepted laws of life and death without being accused of sneering. The accusation is invaluable in puissance. It has made England what she is. It at once stops all argument, all nonsense, all sense, all thinking. So powerful is the effect that the one accused, thinking that perhaps he was sneering, at once checks his mind from further thought on that line. The word creates a vacuum. No one likes to be thought he is sneering⁠—when he was merely, for a change, thinking. It is like being told you have no “sense of humour.” It damns you completely, because it makes you damn yourself. And one of the reasons why there can never be a Marxist revolution in England is that the rebels will be told that they are sneering at the King. They will be abashed. + 

“Seldom,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “have I known a man pull his weight less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.” + 