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.” + 