II
Venice was in high looks that day, Venice was all of a glitter, and that was because, she said at first, of this and that. But we had no sooner passed through the glass doors into the restaurant than she said, she almost cried, that something marvellous had happened just a moment before. “What do you think?” she dared me to guess, and when I said that I thought I would have some oysters she said she was too excited to eat anything, but might she have some ham and a glass of lager beer?
Venice hadn’t met my sister but once or twice, but they had met again that morning in some shop or other, “and I was complaining bitterly,” said Venice, “about Napier, how he made a perfect jumble of everything by never knowing his own mind for two minutes running, and how we couldn’t now find any sleepers in tonight’s train—when she offered to lend us her car to take us to Monte Carlo! She couldn’t bear the sight of it, she said, for another week at least, and that gives us plenty of time to get there and send it back, doesn’t it? Now fancy your having a sister like that!”
“And how is Napier?” I asked. “I only saw him for a moment. …”
“I can tell you,” said Venice in a sudden sombre moment, “that I’m not a bit sorry to be leaving Paris as quick as quick. Naps has been working awfully hard lately, and here we come away for a holiday and the first thing he does is to go off the deep end about this old friend of his being ill.”
“Well, she is rather ill,” I said.
“Yes, I’m awfully sorry, really I am. I’ve never met her, but I saw her once, one night at the Loyalty just before my—”
“Yes, I remember, Venice.”
“And I thought she was the most lovely woman I’d ever seen, and rather sad-looking, which made her lovelier than ever. She’d be sad, I suppose, because of her two husbands and the things people say about her; for they do say some things, don’t they?”
“They! They, Venice, will say anything. …”
“Yes, of course, but you know what I mean. And Naps, you see, can’t bear anyone to be ill and miserable, and I’m sure he’s got an idea that Mrs. Storm is lonely up there, but really, I think, he might consider himself a little, don’t you? And so I ordered the car at three o’clock this afternoon, and off we’ll go. He’ll be surprised when he gets here. …”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose he will.”
“Well,” said Venice, sticking out that Pollen jaw, “there’s no use in hanging about Paris, is there? And so I sent him a message to the Embassy, where he’s been all morning, to come as soon as he could and not worry about getting ‘sleepers.’ And as I’ve already had his things packed we can start off as soon as he’s here, which will be while we’re at coffee, I shouldn’t wonder.” That Pollen jaw! What, I wondered, was Venice thinking of when she stuck out that Pollen jaw like that? Maybe she had been disturbed by Napier’s white-thunder looks when they got back to the hotel last night and was wanting to get him to herself and normal as quickly as she could—and Provence, Oh, Provence! It is not every day that a girl can motor through Provence with her lover. Venice’s love was like a solid marble monument, and I said to myself that one should respect illness but also one should respect love, and so I held my peace.
Napier had not come by the time we had finished luncheon, and as we took two deep chairs in the corner of the lounge, where we would have coffee, Venice asked me if I knew anything about the psychology of men as regards children. When I had picked myself up I said that I would reserve my defence, laughing heartily the while, but now there was a cloud of thought over Venice’s mad-blue eyes, and she was ever so serious, a flat cigarette tortured between her full, pale, dry lips. Venice, you know, said she hated the taste of lip-salve; but, with no idea at all of ever doubting Venice’s word, one had noticed that it was only since her marriage that she had grown to hate it so consistently, and so it might be that Napier had made a face after kissing her one day, for it is the affectation of Englishmen to be tiresome about cosmetics, and if they are not tiresome about cosmetics they cannot be the right sort.
“Sugar?” I asked, and she nodded intently, her mad-blue eyes absorbed on a point of the thick carpet.
“How,” I said, “you will love Provence!”
“Listen,” she said sharply. Wise those eyes were now, and steady as stars in a cavern, looking into me as though judging me, balancing life.
“Well?” I said, to get it over. But what could she know?
She made herself look unimportant. “Oh, it’s only,” she said, “that I can’t have a baby.” And she looked at me with a frantic smile, and because every second of her twenty-one years seemed to me to be in that frantic smile I did not know what on earth to say, saying: “You have probably been to some silly doctor—”
“I haven’t!” she whispered, so fiercely that an old gentleman nearby almost spilled his coffee.
“Hush, Venice!”
“But I haven’t been to any doctor—”
“Well, then,” said I wisely, “in that case, of course, I don’t see—”
“Oh, you don’t!” she whispered with her fine, savage impatience. “I tell you, my child, that I can’t—I just feel that I can’t, in my bones I feel it, that I’ll never, never, never!” And she put a cloud of smoke between us to make her smile look plausible, but through the smoke her eyes looked as though they were holding back a pain.
“Venice, darling,” I pleaded, “I’m not old enough to deal with an emergency like this. What you need is a man of Hilary’s years to turn you over and smack you and tell you that as long as you’re such a child you don’t deserve to have one—”
“I’m so miserable,” she said.
“But it’s absurd, Venice! I mean, it’s just nerves, you can’t possibly know—”
“Do you actually think,” she grabbed a cigarette fiercely from my case, “that I’ve got to go to some dud doctor and have him poking about all over me before I know what’s me! Of course I can know, and I do know, and it’s a shame, and I daren’t tell Napier. …”
“You better hadn’t, on such insufficient evidence. I know what I’d do.”
“Darling, darling, darling! Tell me, do men love children? Really, really, I mean? Would Napier hate it if he knew that I was as barren as that old fig-tree—”
“Venice, how dare you let your nerves get the better of you like this! I’ve only got to be away from England for four months, and I find you in this silly state!”
“Oh, but answer my questions! Why is everyone so awful these days! You see, I never know what’s going on in Napier’s mind, never! Do you think I would if he loved me?”
“ ‘If?’ ” I said. “ ‘If,’ Venice?” Was I now to defend Napier’s love for Venice? And then I found that she was looking at me with wide-open, motherly, amused eyes.
“You don’t actually think,” she almost laughed, “that I ever thought that Napier loved me?”
“Well, I have thought so,” I bravely admitted. “Certainly I have. It is quite usual.”
“But isn’t my gentleman friend stupid!” she suddenly giggled. “Of course, I know he loves me—as much as he can ever love anyone. But that’s all, don’t you see. …”
She stared at the wounded end of her poor cigarette, and lit another from my case, as that was handy. The number of cigarettes that girl smoked, and how she tortured them!
“You see,” she said, knitting together her golden eyebrows so that I should see, “Napier can’t love like other people—me, for instance, and perhaps you, though I’d have my doubts about you. I suppose people are born like that, and you’ve got to take it or leave it. Napier loves just as much as he can—which means that he’s willing, oh anxious, to do anything in the world for you—but you’re never quite sure what he’s thinking about while he’s doing it. See what I mean?”
“I try hard, Venice.”
“Yes. And so, you see, you’ve always got a feeling that he’s keeping something back in himself, something rather important, if you see what I mean, something you can’t get a grip on but that’s there to be gripped, that Napier would like to be gripped, if you see what I mean—”
“I’ll tell you what I see, Venice. I’ve seen it before, and so I recognise it—”
“But I don’t want to hear about your fancy friends! I want to talk about myself.”
“The matter is, Venice, that any woman in love with a reserved man will pass her spare time in ascribing stormy villainies to his secret nature, whereas generally the poor devil is—”
“Stormy villainies,” said Venice quietly, “is good.”
“Women,” I said largely, cursing myself, “are always making themselves miserable about what they don’t see in a man, as though what they did see wasn’t quite enough.”
The full dry lips ravaged the cigarette for a while. Then they said thoughtfully: “The other night we were dining at Fay Avalon’s, just a very few of us, and when someone said that Mrs. Storm was a nymphomaniac Napier went as white as death—”
“And what did the other guests do, Venice? It’s the least Napier could have done, as she’s an old friend of his.”
“Of course,” said Venice very calmly, looking into her cup as though for more coffee. “I don’t know her, or anything about her, except just what people say. And I’d never have known that Naps even knew her if I hadn’t seen him speak to her that night at the Loyalty. That was the night her brother died, wasn’t it? Napier had never mentioned her name before—nor since, if it comes to that, until last night, when he seemed so upset about her that after a while I upped and said he could go and take a room at the nursing-home if he liked—”
“Wasn’t that rather harsh, Venice? After all, he’s known her a very long time, and it upsets anyone to see an old friend very ill.”
“Oh, I know, I know!” she said eagerly. “You mustn’t think I was jealous, but I suppose it just got on my nerves a bit, seeing that he’d never spoken about her before. And that’s why, you see,” she showed all her very white teeth in an utterly insincere smile. “I’m rather wretched about this idea of not having any children. Do listen, please listen! Oh, why is everyone so tiresome! I’m not talking about Mrs. Storm now, but about the Mrs. Storms of life. You see, they’ve got a lot more to give a chap than anyone like me has—I mean to say, they know how to bring everything out of a man, how to make him a lover and all that—a real lover, I mean, a fire-and-ice, pits-and-mountains, sunlight-and-shadows, nice-and-nasty sort of lover, whereas people like Napier and me are just the same with each other as millions of other people, the men being pretty good duds at loving and the women even worse duds at being loved, if you see what I mean. Oh, I know! A man might be a just come-here-girl-oh-darling lover with one woman and then be a marvellous lover with another, just because, you see, she’d know how to make him be. Of course, with their experience. …”
I sat there in that deep armchair, subdued by the thought of the awful helplessness of men and women to understand one another, and of the terrible thing it would be for some of them if ever they did understand one another, and how many opportunities the devil is always being given of making plunder out of decent people. Here was Venice groping blindly in the corridors of her love, looking for the one golden key which she couldn’t find among the treasures there displayed. For there were treasures there. Venice was quite certain, marvellously certain she was, that Napier loved her as much as he could ever love anyone. Oh, but her love was quite big enough to cope with that nonsense of Napier’s! And, since the love of a good woman for a man is a compliment to all men, maybe I looked at her with understanding, for she gave me a sudden sharp smile, and said, quite calmly: “And so, you see, if I don’t have a baby soon I’ll bust.”
“Darling, darling, darling!” a low voice mocked behind us so that we started, and there above our deep chairs stood Napier, and I remember how he gave me one quick clear look, not in the least a conspiratorial look, but just a clear look, as though the last time he had seen me we had both faced a great danger; and between two men there can be no bond so faint and yet so binding as that which is forged of an understanding which is unmentionable between them; you may not like the bond, as I most sincerely did not like it, for it was Venice who was my friend, but there it is, a bond of invisible wire that cuts at the wrists of the mind.
Napier looked composed, but always the fever lurked in the dark eyes, always the dark eyes looked as though they were suffering from what neither you nor he could tell. That greyhound, sensitive and doubtful and poised … for flight! And he somehow looked queerly festive in that sombre, conventional hall, with his faded I Zingari tie and the brown Shetland waistcoat which was for the most part unbuttoned.
“Oh, Naps, such a wonder!” cried Venice on the instant, and I saw what one is so apt to see after an intimate talk with a woman, that one has only been talking to a mood. Venice was in an instant as I had always seen her with Napier, impetuous, imperious, gay. “What do you think, Naps! I have got a car, a lovely car, swift and shining, and a man called Hebblethwaite for chauffeur. Now what do you think of that?”
“I think,” said Napier gravely, smiling at me, “that it must be an English car. And what do you intend doing about it? Driving in the Bois? What?”
“Driving in the Bois! Am I mad! My child, it’s his sister’s car, and she has lent it to us, and we are going South in it, that is what we are going to do. And I ordered Mr. Hebblethwaite at three, and I’ve had all your things packed, and I’ve settled the bill, so we can go right away.”
Napier stared at her—he was sitting now—and it was as though he had put his hand to his mouth and placed a smile there. It was a very charming, helpless smile. I said something to the effect that I must go now, but no one was taking any notice of me. Venice was saying, in a voice tangled with confusion, impatience, a sort of gaiety: “But, Naps, you don’t mean to say you want to stay still another night in this foul Paris, when we might be in the sun!”
Napier scowled, the smile still on his mouth. “Of course, I don’t want, but—”
“Oh, but, Naps, I’d like to go straight away, right away, as the Yankees say! And I thought we might have tea at Fontainebleau and I’d show you the place where I was at school. …”
“Now look here,” Napier scowled, touching her knee with one finger, “I can’t quite do that, Venice. You see, I made a sort of promise to that doctor fellow that I would go and sit with Iris just for a while this afternoon—”
“Oh, I see,” said Venice. “Well, in that case. …”
“Give her an idea—that’s what the doctor fellow said—that some of her friends care whether she lives or dies, for anyone would be rather lonely up there. What? I went round for a minute this morning just to inquire, but I didn’t see her, as they said that—”
“I thought you were at the Embassy this morning,” Venice said, in a very natural voice: and she crushed out her cigarette on the marble top of the table, and she picked up her vanity-case.
“Yes, so I was,” Napier scowled; “but I just went round there for a minute—”
“Oo, what a long way to go for a minute!” sighed Venice. “When one can always telephone. …” And she rose from her chair. Somehow an immense new dignity had suddenly come on Venice. Napier rose, facing her, smiling under his scowl, as though she had made a joke. I rose, saying that I must be going.
“As a matter of fact,” said Venice brightly, “as I knew you were so worried about her I rang up that place this morning, and they told me she was assez bien, if you see what I mean. …”
“Venice, that was kind!” Napier smiled with his whole thin, fine face, and I thought how glad I was that he didn’t know what had caused Iris’s illness, for would he then have smiled gratefully at Venice for inquiring after her? And he said, as though happy in her understanding: “I mean, we can start off first thing in the morning, can’t we? What? It’s rotten luck, cutting in on your holiday like this, but—well, friendship has duties. …”
“But of course I understand, Naps!” And Venice turned at me, smiling as though to show me what sort of a man that Napier was. As though she didn’t understand! As though she didn’t know the duties of friendship! She said to Napier, with a fine air of business settled: “Well, I’ll just go upstairs now and tell Mary to unpack some things again. And I do so hope, Naps,” she said with a fine large smile, “that your friend won’t die, for then how will I manage a man who has nothing left to live for?” And Venice turned to me, and her hand was in mine, and we were saying goodbye, when Napier said briskly:
“Come on, then. We’ll go now. Might as well, now the car’s there. …”
“But, Naps!” Venice turned on him, stared wide at him. …
“Oh, come on,” said Napier, as though eaten by impatience.
“But!” she pleaded desperately. “But, Naps, I don’t really want to go now a bit if you would rather stay until tomorrow. …”
“I don’t want to stay,” said Napier, quite reasonably, but he turned away as he spoke. One saw the set white profile. “Come along, Venice. There’s been enough talk about this already. …”
“But, Naps,” said Venice bitterly, “it’s wrong of you to go now, if she needs you. You know it’s wrong and naughty, what you’re doing. Naps dear, I’d very much rather not go now if you don’t mind—”
“Well, you’ll jolly well have to go now, if at all,” Napier tore at her so sharply that she stared at him dumbly for a full second, and then she made a white smile, half to him, half to me. “Silly baby,” she said. “Such a silly baby. …” And she was again about to say goodbye to the unwilling spectator when Napier broke in, to me, beginning with astonishing grimness and ending quite conversationally: “I say, if you should happen to see Iris in the course of the next few days, you might tell her I couldn’t stop, and”—here the grimness suddenly ended—“say goodbye from me. Will you? What?”
I said of course I would, and then he took Venice’s arm to lead her away. But Venice dragged, her eyes intent on the carpet, and when she suddenly looked round at me I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.
“Men!” she smiled. “Men!”
“Men!” mocked Napier, but he smiled, too. “What?”
“But don’t you think it’s a shame!” she bitterly appealed to me. “There’s Mrs. Storm very ill and expecting to see Napier, all lonely up there, and here Naps puts me in the beastly position of a wife who—”
But I was thinking that the shame of it lay in the disadvantage at which a woman always is with a man whom she loves more than she feels he loves her, the disadvantage of never knowing how far she may use an artificial pride, for there is no real pride in a heart in love, without upsetting the applecart.
“Nonsense, Venice,” Napier was saying, and it was his mildness, his calmness, that was so astonishing now. It was as though the man had suddenly found peace: as though love-lost Tristram raving in the wilderness had, in a sudden flash, realised that he was trying God too far. …
“Nonsense, Venice,” he scowled, still holding her arm. “She isn’t beginning to expect me and she never did. I just turned up by chance. …” He turned to me with that clear, not conspiratorial, look in his eyes. “You will say goodbye from me, won’t you?”
“Of course,” I said. “I may be seeing her today.”
“Yes, just say goodbye,” said Napier, and as he and I shook hands Venice laughed nervously: “Dear, how serious! I can’t bear goodbyes. …” And so she shook my hand without saying goodbye, saying instead: “You have been a darling to let me bore you with my nonsense, and I hope you’ll pray that it keeps fine for us in your sister’s car. See you in London soon. …”
And away they went, Napier and Venice, he still holding her arm just above the elbow, she still appearing to drag a little, across the now deserted and darkening lounge to the glass doors, which a small boy opened to them. But the small boy must hold it open, for they stood in the doorway a short while, as it might be they were arguing, and through the gloom of the afternoon I could see Napier’s set white profile, drawn in ivory it might have been, and the way he seemed to be smiling grimly into Venice’s upturned face, and I could see the way Venice’s face suddenly lit right up with a smile, just like a garden with the sun after rain. Now what could he have said to make her smile so, or had he said just any little thing, which her love, most princely alchemist, had straightway transmuted into a golden word?
He has said farewell to his love, I said to myself, and now, if love has left any honour at all in him, he must convince himself that there never was any love to say adieu to, for even so much would be a disloyalty to Venice. He has renounced his love, I thought to myself, as a man of honour should do, but he knows that a man of honour is not worthy the name unless he can also convince himself that there never was any love to renounce, for that would make him feel martyred for his wife’s sake, and that would be a treachery to Venice. …
And, smoking one more cigarette in the calm security of the darkening, deserted lounge, while a waiter or two began laying the small tables roundabout for tea, I seemed to understand Napier as he were myself, and he the most different man from me that could well be found. Looking at the thing full and square, you might say that Napier had done a caddish thing; in fact, that was what you had to say, looking at the thing full and square; but it is a mistake to look at everything full and square, and it is too easy to dismiss people’s actions as “caddish” and the like, for such are no more than words coined to save people from wearying their minds with undue thinking, and tiresome people will go on and on using them with a great show of conviction in the very same way that they will put down a book by Mr. Shaw or Maître Anatole France and say: “Look at Dickens!”
Now Napier had suddenly come upon a queer sort of peace following on a second’s cruel decision not to go and see Iris again, a very cruel decision, I thought, and she no doubt expecting every moment to see his face in the clouds all about her. “How like a man,” I could hear a feminine voice, “first to stain what he thinks his ‘honour’ by taking a mistress, and then to retrieve his idiotic ‘honour’ by hurting his mistress!” But, maybe, how could one tell? maybe Napier had suddenly realised, in the very moment that Venice spoke, that if he went to sit with Iris even once more he might fall right down into the pit of dark enchantment and he might send all life but that which he found in Iris to the deuce and nevermore return to Venice, to whom he was held by every one of those principles that are born in the blood of a Napier, a Hilary, a Guy de Travest. And I wondered what I would have done had my life been so weighted and tangled with people’s emotions as Napier’s must always have been, and what, I wondered, would I have done had I, in Napier’s place, been as unaware of myself until a fiercely revealing moment three nights before my marriage to my betrothed? The answer to that was very easy, and it was by the measure of the ease with which it came that I could judge of Napier’s struggle with himself to keep his pledge to Venice, for never were two men so different as Napier and me. I, I would have broken my troth, that is what I would have done, and I would have broken away from any other thing that stood in the way of my passion, I would have fled father, friends, career, honour, everything, at the call of the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams. There are better dreams! For so I remembered a phrase in a book telling of the love of a lady of the sea for a mortal man: There are better dreams. …
A waiter, no doubt wishing for something to do, asked me if I would take tea, but I thanked him, saying I would rather not, for it was not yet half-past three, and saying to myself: “In every man there is always unfolding a dream of things that never were and never can be, since life will always be what it is and men and women will always be what they are, and so we will always go on, men of high fancies and low flights, and the higher the fancy is the lower the flight will be, as it is written in the Scriptures concerning vanity. And maybe Napier had had his dream when he was very young, and then the world came along and told him that his dream was very silly, and so he did not dream any more, until one night he was appalled to hear calling him a playmate’s voice, but a playmate’s voice torn with the wonder of life and the sadness of living, whispering to him: There are better dreams. And he listened, and he was lost, and then he found himself again in renunciation, as so many Englishmen will always be doing, for it is as true as any generalisation can be to say of Englishmen that they will often only find themselves when they have lost themselves.”
I could see Napier during those two days and two nights before his marriage, I could see him casting his mind this way and that way, to find that each way lay dishonour, on Venice’s side dishonour with cruelty, and on Iris’s side dishonour with whatever happiness can go with dishonour to a man such as Napier; and that, I thought, would be very little, for can a man of honour embark on any dishonourable adventure without first of all taking every care and precaution that neither he nor his companion shall enjoy the fruits of it? But that, I thought to myself, is a woman’s thought, surely I am not becoming effeminate!
And you could see Napier scowling as he beat his mind to know what a man should do, for you might be sure that Iris had not tried to persuade him, she would have loved him and left him, putting the seal of her kiss on his lips and the seal of her voice on his ears, telling him only to do what he thought was right. So Napier would be beating his mind, always driving from him the phantom of a compromise, a fair enough phantom, that: how he would go to Venice and tell her that it had happened to him, born vile, to do thus and thus, and would she please forget him, for forgive him she could not? But that was just what Venice would do, proudly and imperiously she would forgive him, and then he would have to confess the real truth, which was not that he had held Iris in his arms, but that he loved Iris with his body and soul as he never could love Venice, that he loved Iris and Iris loved him as though they had drunk a love-philtre together, and in that way he did not love Venice … but Venice, unfortunately, did love him in that very same way, and you could see Napier just quailing before the cruelty of telling Venice that, after all, he did not love her. And you could see him marrying Venice, thinking the while that maybe the best could be made of a wretched business if Iris and he kept to the promise they had sworn together, never to meet again. And they had kept to it very stoutly, the Iris who had plucked the device “for purity” from her heart had kept to her promise, and Napier would have kept to his promise forever and a day but for the chance of illness in the obscure silence of the Paris night; and so it had come to pass that he must see Iris yet once again, and Iris maybe thinking that she was seeing her lover in a dream, she who had nothing to live for and did not care one farthing if she lived or died. But that dream, said Conrad Masters later, saved her life, that dream was the angel appointed to save Iris from death, for that time. How wise was Iris, how wise, she who knew that the Marches were never let off anything. For even the angels were against her.
But it was to Conrad Masters that I had first to break the news of Napier’s—well, from Masters’ point of view, desertion while on duty. And very wholeheartedly did that man swear, the telephone simply throbbing with his pregnant mutter; but I, thinking there could be little profit in arguing at this time of day that the whole thing wasn’t and never had been any of my business, merely suggested: would it be any sort of idea for me to see her for a minute?
“You!”
“But your instructions!” I pointed out. “Whereas, if I may say so, you have so far been so ‘nice’ to me that I have lost five hundred francs at bridge on your behalf.” That is what I was driven to saying, but I doubt if he heard me, the telephones of Paris being very well adapted for selective hearing, for all he said was that he was due at the Boulevard Pierre Abel in half an hour, and he would pick me up on the way if I liked. If I liked! As though, Heavens above, there was one single thing in all this wretched business about which one might say, with any hope of being attended to, “If I liked, this,” or “If I liked, that. …”