Chapter I: ONCE read, in an essay by a writer whose considerable achievements (1)

in contemporary literature seem to warrant a certain knowledge of the craft of tale-telling, that it is only the trained artificiality of writers--their technique, so to say--that enables them to begin their tales from a certain point and go directly on to a certain ending. While the truth of the matter is (he writes), as you can easily verify from the narrative of any peasant in any inn, that the tales that are spun from life cannot be complacently fitted along a straight line of narration, but incline to zigzag unaccountably from one point of memory to another; until the tale fulfilled, or rather, fulfills itself by these deft and disordered touches of the realism of memory. For, to quote the simile that is almost _de rigueur_ as a cap to these grave abstractions, "the figure in the carpet" can be said to have no beginning nor middle, and so on....

The plain fact of the matter is that, in spite of the sternest intentions, I have the greatest difficulty in nailing my mind down to a clear and ordered conception of the sequence that even the most facile publisher will demand from this history: in ever and again wrenching, as it were, my memory from its erratic piracies, and in beguiling it to sit soberly astride the course of events as they occurred or were told to me. Even though they didn't actually and consistently occur, these events--not, I mean, in the usually accepted sense of things "occurring." They were all so deeply consequent on inside things! and most of them happened inside....

Thus, as I try to shape my shadows as truly as I may, my memory is ever and again confronted by a few nights--mainly three, and very bonfires of nights they seem to me, with their high lights and sinister heat colouring all that came before and all that happened after; though, indeed, to two of us there was very little left that could happen after that third, and last, night.... That last night! Of the many things that can be lost in one night, Roger Poole lost as much as any man can lose, Antony Poole lost more than any man should lose, and Iris--and I--but even a tale cannot play spy for ever, it must surely end somewhere. (And yes, it must begin, too).

Then that other night, which I could rightly call the first, for it was the one which very definitely sent the ball rolling down the slope. And, though I should preface that rolling by first describing that slope and that ball, I see that I must let part of this particular bonfire have its way, else they will all get together to hinder and confuse me. That man Antony never did know how to wait, and so I must tell of the night of his return before even the day of his going away. An unfortunate night it was, even apart from his connection with it, because of my heavy and stupid depression about something that time, in all decency, should have persuaded me to face resignedly.

An hour or so after a midnight one late June, I was walking slowly up Piccadilly; in no hurry to reach my destination, whither I would eventually take a taxi--for Regent's Park is always far enough, but even further on a moonless and rain-heavy night that England must have grabbed from one of our less desirable and more stifling colonies. I was walking on the outer edge of the pavement, with my head bent, as shoddily happened when my mind was clouded--when in crossing the end of that little passage that leads into Albany-courtyard, I was arrested by the stealthy and hurried sound of a scuffle. From first to last the affair took but a few seconds. At the far end of the dim recess two figures were locked together, swaying this way and that and then parting to allow freedom for blows--the which, I could judge, were exchanged with the heartiest ill will; and all in silence, but for quick pantings for breath and the shuffle of feet. There really is an unholy kind of interest in watching two men, presumably of one's own kind if stiff white shirts meant anything at all, fighting in relentless silence, and maybe, in deadly earnest. The slightly smaller one--they were both tall figures--seemed to be getting much the worst of it, but I certainly wouldn't have interfered if I hadn't seen a posse of policemen coming towards us from Vine Street on their usual way to their beats.

"Time!" said I. But it was time enough without my saying so, for one last and not very heavy blow had doubled the smaller against the window of Woodrow's hat-shop; and the other, a giant of a man, picking up his top-hat and ramming it on his head as though it were a Crusader's helmet and without a glance at his crumpled antagonist, briskly walked towards me.

"England's come to a pretty pass when the education of gentlemen has to fall to interested amateurs like myself," he began from a distance. "Eh, Ronnie?"

But I had recognised him without his use of my name, and was staring at him with such bewilderment that he broke out into one of those guffaws I knew so well.

"Antony!" I cried.

"Myself as ever was, old man!" and he clapped me on the shoulder heartily. "I saw you out of the tail of my eye, while I was teaching that young man Spartan history--and, thought I, no luck could be better."

"But when did you get back, and where from?"

"This very afternoon, and from Mexico--where else? And damme," he turned on me to add bitterly, "why the devil should you be so surprised at my coming back to my own country?"

But I could parry that kind of thing from Antony well enough.

"For one reason," said I, "because you yourself told me that you were probably never coming back."

"Never! Well, my friend, isn't two years as good as your 'never'? I'm learning that there's only one bigger lie than 'never,' and that's 'always'--for instance, I was _never_ coming back to England, and a few of my friends were _always_ going to be pleased to see me."

There was a large and full-flavoured kind of bitterness about Antony that seldom quite failed in its appeal to my heart, albeit sourly, and I was about to give the lie to his accusation when he turned his eyes back to the dark passage muttering, "And that was one of 'em." But the luckless wretch had disappeared while we talked, to ponder maybe upon the weight and quality of that word "always," and with a muttered request from me "not to be a fool about his real friends" we walked on towards the Circus. I had been made shy and nervous by Antony's boisterous realisation of his position in England, and now found it difficult to say anything which somehow or other wouldn't remind him of it. Just like the man to be so infernally touchy and talkative about it, I was thinking, when he said:--

"You actually are the very man I want to see, Ronnie. I've got enough questions to ask you to last a day or more, but I dare say a lunch will see them through--though that of course depends on where we lunch ...?" That was ever the way with Antony, he never tried to hide the fact that he wanted something from one--though, thank Heaven, it was now only a lunch!

"You had better come and lunch at my flat to-morrow," I suggested--with my heart in my mouth lest he should scent a possible insult in that seclusion. But he accepted easily enough.

At Piccadilly Circus, where I called a taxi, he said he must leave me as he had to go down to the Carlton: which thankfully relieved me of any embarrassment as to how to be rid of him at that moment. As he went he called back to me, "Don't tell all London that I'm back, there's a good fellow." A quite unnecessary request, I found it on my lips to answer; for the name of Antony Poole, as himself knew very well, would meet with but a grim welcome in any house in London.

II

On the surface, and a good deal below the surface, there was nothing at all to be said for Antony. I had often wondered what thoughts about himself must pass through his mind in solitary moments when he viewed his life (for he was not so insensitive but that that necessity could never have come upon him)--just thirty-six years of life, which had four years before that night finally ended its reckless social passage in the utter loss of everything a man holds essential to the self-respect with which he must face the world! Not, however, that any loss could ever intimidate Antony into facing the world with any other manner but that with which some imp had plagued his birth: a blend of blustering indifference, dangerous humours, and a ripe and racy geniality. But even so there must be some moments of terrible reckonings in his soul, I always thought, when he realises his folly in so spoiling the good life his could have been and had looked to be; when, console himself with his "bad luck" as he may, he reaches a point of self-knowledge that tells him, with his own brutality, how there is a degree of failure that simply cannot be condoned by "bad luck."

I had known Antony for so long that my view of him in his manhood was always brightened to his advantage by my school-day memories of him; those of a gay and careless companion, with sufficient head but little inclination for work: ever more rowdy and reckless than his companions, a good sportsman and a good man at most games, and very popular among those whom his fancy had not led him to treat as enemies. It was maturity (or whatever queer development took its place in him) that went to Antony's head, so that he began to run amok as soon as he left Sandhurst; something seemed to grow up in him that spiced his old faults with new outrage, and quite hid what good there was in him. His, I then found to my astonishment, was the most makeshift mechanism that God ever put into a man--for I had never dreamt of such complex weaknesses in my Antony of old! Who would have thought that this man, inches more than six straight feet of him, with his good looks, his loud and easy geniality, and a certain aptitude of mind that expressed itself in an understanding laugh where your clever man would have been puzzled--who would have thought that this man who laughed with the laugh of the middle ages was so shoddily made that his every organ and moral attribute were as though held in place by oddments of string? For never was there a man so consistently and appallingly weak to do battle with himself, to compel himself to a sanity of living and a balance of thought: a weak man, in that wretched word's most wretched and active sense.

But the key to him lay just further than that weakness: that he would have suffered, and indeed did, any torture rather than reveal it--the indetermination and moral cowardice of those, without exaggeration, giant fibres. This, I grew to realise, was the secret of the contradiction that was Antony--this pose of strength where he himself knew he was weak: the most penalising pose that ever bolstered a man's vanity the more completely to wreck him. For the world might have allowed Antony a certain length of forgiveness if he could have been brought to reveal himself as he actually was, if he could only have bowed his head and revealed the hesitancies of his nature, and his contrition; if he could even for just once have foregone the childish vanities of bluster and bravado with which he thought to carry through every escapade. He thought to outwit punishment, but instead he did the most difficult thing of all, he outwitted sympathy....

And since eventually such a pose as his must make indecency a fact where it had once only been vaguely suggested, so Antony actually became, in the course of time, the rogue and outsider that his crooked vanity had once made him parade as a pose. For, be you ever so arrogant, nature has been proved to have its laws for men as well as for beasts, laws not astral but severely human, that never cease to confound alchemists of every kind to their own hurt; and it is obvious that a man may not play the fool with his soul without covering it with the verdigris of his own folly--that sourness of heart and crookedness that stole gradually on poor Antony, so that in his thirties he was, to stretch a likeness, like a Hyde to the Jekyll of his schooldays.

The advantages of a commission in the Brigade, of a name sufficient to ensure a reasonable amount of credit and consideration, those details which can so warm the cockles of even a philosophic heart on a dull afternoon, and a little more than the usual pittance that falls to the younger brothers of pukka baronets, warranted, surely, a very fair prospect. And yet, in a few years' time, he had finally convinced people beyond a shadow of doubt of what they had so far only disliked to guess, of his complete failure to be either an officer or a gentleman.

No man could be more noticeable in appearance than Antony, nor more adequately fulfil the name by which he was often known, Red Antony; for he was very tall and stoutly built, rather foppishly dressed, and as consistently ginger as any man could well be--moustaches, eyebrows that no brushing could tame into regularity, hair which waved back from his forehead in a most attractive ginger but ordered profusion; and a complexion appropriately coloured, and always so clear and fresh as to seem to give the lie to the certain dissipation of the night before. A very fine looking man, Red Antony, if you liked that kind of looks; but so noticeable that his own appearance, no doubt, took a hand against him, labelling his escapades with its prominence so that once pointed out he was never forgotten; and men and women could cross the street in good time to avoid the difficulty of acknowledging or of cutting him.

It was an accumulation of escapades, many of which had been overlooked but for his manner of braving them, that had led to his final extinction--which was long seen in coming. A thousand little and unpleasant things were known and more than whispered about him. He was a man of red-hot tempers, which there was no restraint in him to keep within bounds; his weren't the rages that burnt inwardly and grew in brooding, but in their sudden heat must burn outwardly, devouring everything with no care nor heed for even primitive restraint. (There have been times when I've been rather afraid of Antony myself.) And so, from his great height of stature and violence, he had outrageously insulted men in return for a fancied slight. He had committed follies, when drunk, which his companions had hurriedly disavowed. He had, as if by rote, done the one thing a man may still not do and remain this side of Styx, despite all that we hear of the present laxity of etiquette--had been unable to pay his gambling debts, and then paid them with worthless cheques. He had been the centre of innumerable brawls in which, if ever a woman's name was concerned, it was never to Antony's credit; had been twice a corespondent and not once a husband--an apparent failure to act upon his obligations which does no man any good; and from the second (the first had too obviously been the result of carelessness) he had emerged in so discreditable a light that, on top of all his past follies, Antony Poole was no longer a name to be mentioned in any ordinary English company.

That was four years before that night I met him on Piccadilly, when he was thirty-two. He still continued for two years in England, Heaven alone knew why! No one sought him, he was seldom seen--except by me, and later, another. His elder brother, Roger, had not spoken to him for years.

It was about a year before he finally left England that I began to see Antony in his best light; and pretty closely since, in the precarious condition of his affairs and reputation, it was mostly in my flat that he could enjoy that company which presented him in this new and improved light. He was in love, and he was making love: furtively and hopelessly as to manner, for what girl would dream of marrying him! And who ever stood more firmly upon his honour than he who has been proved to have none?... But in his heart there was hope, I am sure there was hope in his heart, else Antony would not have been Antony.

A queer man. For all his appalling rudeness and brutality on a thousand occasions, he could be so very courteous and simple when he was moved to it; could turn a tale, rather candidly it's true, but very amusingly, and had altogether a very diverting way with him in company that didn't offend his absurd feelings or ruffle his dangerous vanity--though even then he couldn't help a, well, cunning satire that might more profitably, for him, have bit into paper.

It is in recalling this time that I feel most uncomfortable, because of the ridiculous position in which my own weakness placed me. During the previous few months I had fallen into the habit of wanting to see Iris Portairley every day--or rather, she had graciously allowed me fall into that habit. And that, indeed, was the only encouragement I had from her, the pleasure which she showed that she had from my company; so that, if we had not happened to meet for some days over lunch or dinner at the same table, she very often managed by some contrivance, say of a tame chaperon, to come to see me of an afternoon. Deliciously often though she managed her contrivances, I was always surprised to see her, who had so many more amusing things to do! And with the carelessness of a man ten years my junior I accepted the pleasure of her company without inquiring of myself whither I was being led. The truth was that it depressed me to think of what might come of it, for the back of my mind could never be entirely rid of an ugly high wall at the far end of my meadow....

And yet I chartered ill luck to my suit, or pretence of a suit, by aiding and abetting Red Antony in his quite impossible and absurd pretensions! Though, in justice to the man, he must have realised clearly how very impossible they were.

The excuse for the anomaly was in the queer sympathy (and a very conscious one) that Antony always had the power to raise in me; and particularly at that time, when he was so definitely an outcast, forced to solitary meals in the grill-rooms of those _maîtres d'hôtel_ who still gallantly pretended to believe in his signature at the foot of a bill. I simply couldn't bring myself just then, whether for my own or Iris's good, to deprive him of the solace he found in her occasional company at my flat, generally at some odd hour between three to seven--more often nearer seven, for Antony allowed that I could shake a cocktail very prettily. And though, from a tentative beginning (if that word could ever be applicable to Antony) it became a bare-faced intrusion on my privacy, even so I hadn't the heart to forbid, or definitely to discourage, the apparent coincidence of his visits with hers; "apparent," for Antony at this time never said a word of his admiration, nor gave any other hint of gratitude for my complaisance than in an added pressure of my hand as he left. Antony was a noisy man, but never by any chance did he make a noise about anything one really wanted to hear.

It was a very uncomfortable business--for me, I mean. And, as I had let it go on, quite impossible to cut short; since nothing less drastic than an order for ejection, if even that, would have penetrated the thick skin that Antony could so conveniently wear when he chose--and with no better result than a "misunderstanding" with Iris who, thanks largely to me, had come to have certain views about Antony which materially differed from the world's, and even stronger views about deserting one's friends when they were "down and out." There's no end to difficulties when a woman takes her standpoint on the highest pinnacles of the code that men have arranged between themselves for their own convenience and woman's confusion.

I could only console myself with the ungenerous thought that if my own position with Iris, of "dear Ronnie" and the like, was hopeless, how much more hopeless was Red Antony's, the poor braggart who would now be invisible, be he ever so tall and boisterous, to even the most tarnished of her acquaintance. So let the man have his run, since he could never have his way!...

How he had ever met her at all, in fact, I never clearly found out, and had never the effrontery to ask; probably towards the end of his swift downward passage to those underground grill-rooms (oh, those grill-rooms of broken hearts and broken reputations!) just after Iris had come out. Be that as it may, Iris had known him scarcely but by reputation--about which, since it was glamoured by the disapproval of every one who had ever bored her, she had often asked me; so that, when one day they had happened at the same second at my door, she knew a little more than hearsay about him; and was quick to see the poor man's wretched plight, was quick to encourage his longing to talk to some one decent; giving intimacy with that generous hand that makes gentle women so much more dangerous than vampires, searching for what sweetness there lay in him so wisely and deftly as to leave him unaware of the homage he paid her, so that she could appreciate it at its fullest; and so that, after a few weeks, she grew genuinely fond of the wreck--and one day made me openly swear at my folly by suddenly saying: "I suppose there must be many people who think they have met Napoleons, only to find in the end that they are Antonys--and how very much nicer!"

III

But there was another reason, quite apart from any far-fetched call of sympathy, for my putting a fairly good face on Antony's falling in love on my premises. I might as well, thought I, be entertained by what I had to suffer--and so there was cast a play, as though for my bewildered entertainment! Though, of course, I never at that time indulged in any such conceit, it's just the licence of thought that is occasionally apt to flow from one's pen.

For while I watched, perforce, Antony pleading his furtive suit at some hour between three to seven of an afternoon, I could sometimes of an evening watch its parallel contrast in that world which Antony had been at such pains to offend unpardonably. For, of the husbands that had been suggested for Miss Portairley, not one had received more favour than the possibility of Roger Poole; and the idea had been much encouraged of late by the very frequent circumstance of their being of the same company....

Certainly, to that world which finds its pleasure in the sensations of other people's marriages, there was a great deal of apparent fitness about this one; for they were both, in their ways, well-known persons. Iris, of course, trivially, in these days of illustrated journals and the like, a much photographed and commented on "beauty" whose features and "recreations" were so widely known that she looked gradually to become the rumoured subject of any novel that contained the requisite amount of social indecency implied by the "modern society" of publishers' announcements; and Roger Poole, already at thirty-three a personage, "the only young man," I have heard it said, "of this degeneration with any political energy or brilliance": who, in spite of the leisure that his rumoured means might have claimed for him, had actively sat as member for--since he was twenty-six, was now recognised as one of the leaders of the Opposition, and certain, in spite of his youth, of office at the fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after all, so original of him to be so clever and polished and dark and ambitious without being a Jew.

The colouring between the Poole brothers was distributed in some such way as this: Antony, the younger by a year, as red and wantonly extravagant as I have tried to show; and Roger, no less tall than his brother but inclined much more to suppleness both in figure and features--he could sometimes look remarkably like a knife: of a much darker countenance, with dark eyes that were somehow sombre yet witty, and seemed always to be fevered with some secret thought. In fact, there were a great deal too many such "secret" thoughts about Roger to ensure one's real comfort in his company.

But, in spite of this more serious expression, and in contradiction to what one might have expected to appeal to a man of his very real abilities and ambitions, Roger was every bit as much of the material world as his brother--but had what Antony never had, the sanity and balance with which to measure his recklessness and indulgences. Roger Poole always knew what he was about; and, to further his ambitions, had never ceased to discipline himself, outwardly anyway, into line with the world's conventions--of which, funnily enough, if he continued his success, he would one day be an arbitrator!

But, rigorously though he disciplined himself (a really splendid dissimulation, which I who had known him so long had always watched with envy), he could not help his inclinations showing in some way--though in a way that reflected to his advantage as a figure, as it would have reflected to Antony's if he hadn't been so foolish. For they were shown in a manner, a certain air, which couldn't be described but by the help of the word "romantic"--a not unpleasing word to be used about one who has name, appearance, and ability. And he was, even to me, a romantic kind of figure. There was nothing, well, stationary about him, as there so often is about one's acquaintance; in fact, more, there was definitely a sense of movement; one somehow thought of him as a man who would always be going on to things, maybe great things. His shadow will find in him an exciting companion, one couldn't help thinking. Among one's acquaintance, each unit of whom one knew to be travelling on a certain road to a more or less certain end, Roger Poole stood out as a refreshing and unexpected person, a kind of adventurer licensed by the world; an appearance clothed in possibilities, whom it was interesting to know....

Besides, there was nothing silly nor banal about his good looks; a thin, long face of such firm lines as to give an impression of hardness, and noticeable, in an Englishman, because of its pallor; attractive, too, because of a certain saturnine quality which seemed to lurk about its expressions: an intangible _something_ that made one, in talking to him, inquire within oneself a little fussily--a vastly different state to that into which Red Antony's boisterous ill humour had, in his hey-days, so frequently put one!

And so the discomfort of my position with regard to Antony allowed me to stand in the wings, as it were, and watch the only game in this world that is fairly played with "packed" cards; the two brothers, in everything but age and name as far apart as favour can well be from its opposite, at their love-making to a woman whom I loved as much as they, perhaps more, but without that visible and reckless ardour that will make a man's love at least significant to the most unloving woman. I suppose that theatricalism, such as is not difficult to find in any one's nature, may have tinged my view of the queer spectacle; but there certainly was something very sad and pitiable about it all, and made the more pitiable, too, by the inevitable course it must pursue--for there is a certain logic to everything, be a woman ever so lovely and remote. And Iris, for all her pride and looks, for all her tawny hair and sometimes too distant eyes, had really as little to say in the matter as Antony or I; for Roger Poole had a reputation to keep up, not so much with the world as with himself, the reputation of a man who always played in luck! Besides, luck or no luck, Iris had straightway fallen in love with him.

She was twenty-two, and had up to that age lived as full and as amusing a life as, one supposes, it was possible for her to live. But there must somehow have been born with her a certain _distance_ of mind, which always kept her detached from any surroundings she couldn't wholly and utterly accept; a certain quality that, whether she would or would not, kept her intact and untouched, as though destining her never to accept anything which she couldn't wholly accept. Thus she had inevitably to be rejecting much, and always; rejecting, indeed, a great deal more than she was ever given the credit for by even those who knew her very well. At first I naturally took this distance of mind from her surroundings to be yet another of the usual and tedious affectations of the "younger generation," but very soon found that it was as sincere an affectation as any that can trouble a mind and make a heart deeply restless.

It wasn't that she was superior or blasé (of being which she was, of course, commonly accused by those who were disconcerted by her reception of those trivial indecencies that pass for humour among the cultured inane); but simply that she was never lulled into thinking that the life in which she found herself was anything but a phase of her youth, and a makeshift one at that. There would, of course, be other things! And of the men who came her way, the interesting ones were mainly too old--now why is courtesy always so much older than oneself?--the younger ones mainly too foolish, and as little worth loving as they were able to love. Some day, some day, she once laughed to me, there will be darkish men with intelligent gestures....

Well, there came one, Roger Poole. He at last was vital, giving her what she had been starved for, a sense of achievement, of movement. That expresses it so badly, for it might imply that Iris was a sycophant to success, which she never was--unlike her ridiculous but amiable mother, who thought she had a _salon_ whereas she only kept a restaurant. Iris had a longing to be allowed to admire, a longing that was a fiercely integral part of her nature. And she was a woman with tangible desires, who would, one thought, lay claim to her man's body and mind with every part of her own, and with no illusions about the spirituality or intelligence of her love. Iris was of the earth divinely, and perhaps that's why she couldn't help obsessing a man's mind....

But for Roger's coming, she might have continued for years being proposed to decently and indecently by the young fops and financiers whose piracies the world so completely licences; not one of whom she would ever like enough, not one of whom could ever lead himself or her to anything but a country-house or to Deauville. So, as I imagine it, as she looked around her life, at the supposed pageantry and possibilities of it, she must have been in a state of watchful coma, just waiting, with a growing inner sadness, for that "something" to happen; that "something," that fulfilment of a longing, which would bring into actual being the woman in her--that thing compact with elemental passions and fierce desires which had so far only been present in an involuntary stiffening of her body, her spine, when a kiss, and maybe one that had faintly attracted her, had touched her. Her mind might compromise, it often desperately did, but it was as though an unhesitating iron had entered her body, so that it could never be lulled to even a pretence of acceptance. And so, as she was one night surveying the accustomed character of a crowded room, with what relief she must have realised, howsoever dimly at that first moment, that the "something" was at last about to happen, that Roger Poole was crossing the room into her life.

She had met him only once before, four years ago, just after she had come out--and he had only just lately re-entered her world. She had, of course, often heard about him during that time, and not only in political chatter; for Roger, with a certain superciliousness, had withdrawn himself only from what he found dull and boring in life--from which Iris hadn't yet thought it worth while to rebel; unless braving an hysterical scene with her mother for a latchkey was rebellion. But as to the flouting of conventions and the like, it is easy enough to do as one likes; but so very much easier, after all, to know without doing so that the entertainment gained won't be worth while.

Iris, many of whose friends had long since indulged their sense of pleasure as it pleased them, or as it displeased others, had never but given an inquiring side-glance to that life; and had been forced to admit to herself that she must lack some essential _verve_, for she had found as little entertainment in, say, an absinthe at the Café Royal in the company of, presumably, artists, as in the noisy dinners that are sometimes given by Argentines and other rich men to women whose jewels, at least, led Iris to suppose that it must be worth their while to attend them. It was at the only one of these dinners that she had ever gone to that an American millionaire, a fussy little man of an engaging candour, had straight away offered to give her a Rolls-Royce, and she had only succeeded in dissuading him from that intention by revealing that her mother already had a quite adequate car. Thus young was it revealed to Iris that she would make an inefficient kind of cocotte. She was always, she had once told me rather brazenly, conscious of a disturbing sense of laughter which, she was sure, would tiresomely interfere with her enjoyment of any of those indiscretions and adventures in which some of her acquaintance would now and then indulge; and also, had never found any reason to think otherwise of life round about studios and the like than as really a rather tedious affair, of a kind of anæmia and uncleanliness--the kind, you know, that can be cleaner without costing another half-penny--that caused in her no more and no less than a vivid feeling of self-consciousness; about which she bitterly reproached herself, for it was difficult to be rid of an idea that she ought to be a little, well, humble before these young men who were, after all, trying to do _something_. Nor did protracted meals and cigarettes and liqueurs in grimy restaurants round about Soho and Fitzroy Street with young men more or less just down from Oxford "and pretty far down at that," appeal to her as anything but a wearisome duty to that side of her mind which, so some of her friends always urged, "must surely be sick of the boredom and mental inertia of the life she led." ... But she had honestly done her best, had vividly plunged into both alternatives; and, thank Heavens, had emerged unscathed, with but an offer of an "automobile" and several of marriage--not of course from the millionaire, who very genuinely implied that he respected her too really to ask that much, but from the young invertebrates. There seems, she had long since concluded, to be much nonsense talked about the unfair advantages that rich men take, for after all they are prepared to pay very reasonably for one's virginity, whereas those young men have the cheek to ask for one's lifetime in exchange for their devastating passions.

All this about what Iris might have done has its place because, had she strayed out of her accustomed path more determinedly, she would have seen more of Roger Poole; who--and ever with that peculiar and antagonising air of a man with a fine sense of conduct and deportment who knew himself to an exact and rigorous shade--was in the most inner background of these feverish activities, though never too feverishly; who was as much at home with our more presentable celebrities as with those less efficient; and who, in the rather different atmosphere round about St. James's, was known as a very cool and fortunate gambler; and had once been heard to make the profound paradox that "a good gambler never takes any risks"--which, it was said, had so impressed a certain very rich young fool with its apparent impossibility that he had at once married an elderly millionairess.

Roger intended, in brief, to revive in himself and his station a certain tradition; and with no affectation, for that tradition was his very own and became him as none other could; in fact, it became him as well or as ill as it had once become the younger politicians of a past century. It had needed little perspicacity on his part to see that there was a strange defect in the young men of his generation; that they seemed quite unable and unwilling to combine their abandon with any such brilliance as might help them to achieve something, or their brilliance with enough abandon to make them seem sympathetic fellows--that, in short, they were either wasters or dons. They seemed quite unable to accommodate their pleasures and their business into one lurid whole, as did those men in the days when there were still clubs in St. James's Street and not curiosities; when men of brains or birth never so entirely forgot their self-respect or breeding were they ever so debauched, as to be wholly indifferent to the politics or culture of their country; when it was as nothing against a gentleman to have it said against him that he had seduced a friend's wife, so only he had wittily done the same to the House of Commons on the same night; when, in short, it was commonly considered the part of a gentleman to be interested in upholding or demolishing the pillars of the constitution....

But now! there were only wasters, at best inefficient dilettanti in art and gambling, and drunkards who appalled you not by their drunkenness but by their dulness. You could walk London W. from midnight to daylight and see neither hint nor hope of your accomplished buck.... And that last description, Roger must have known, would so agreeably become the seeming contradictions of his public ambitions and private life, that from the presidency of the Union he stepped plumb into it; in solitary elegance re-created it, as it were, in the public and social eye, both of which were never far from his consideration; and having re-created it, successfully lived up to and never budged from it--until, when he was thirty-four, he again re-entered that society which he had always despised as dull but had never offended except with the most sympathetic disorders; and could now walk into it with the comforting thought that no dowager could say worse of him than a doubtful "He's a remarkable young man...."

I knew by the little he told me that the main reason for his emergence was marriage. It was time to take a wife--but he had never bargained to fall in love with her as he did with Iris Portairley. And I've tried to explain Iris, at the age of twenty-two wanting a deal more vitality and reality than her surroundings could give her, half-consciously waiting for "something to happen"--is it very wonderful that she fell in love with him, not only with his person, but with the idea of him? It is only a very callous kind of critic who will discount reality from a love because--it is touched with glamour--for was there ever in all history a lovely reality without a lovely glamour? Since, be you ever so young, to kiss a courtesan is to kiss a courtesan, but, be you ever so calm, to kiss a lover is to make a fairy-tale....

I didn't wonder whether Iris had told Roger that she was seeing his brother. I knew very well that she hadn't--and, as Roger never mentioned even Antony's name, not even to me (and there was that rigidity about Roger that allowed no trespassing upon a distasteful subject), there was little chance of the subject ever being mentioned between them. But did Antony know of his brother's suit, so ironically parallel to his own? I suppose that he must vaguely have heard of something, from a remark he once let drop; but it could only have been vaguely and distantly, for the spirit of the thing, of his new gentleness, would have been broken much sooner if he had definitely heard what was commonly said, that Iris was to marry Roger Poole.

I had often wondered how Antony would take the news of the engagement when it officially happened.... I left them alone that afternoon; and only re-entered the room when I had heard the front-door close to. He was sitting at my writing-table, and looked round at me without a smile, wearily.

"I thought you must have gone out somewhere, and was leaving you a note," he explained--and then, at my inquiring look, with a flash of his brazen impudence; "just to thank you for having been a good fellow, Ronnie--and a very good hand at staging a play, too!"

That was the only reference he made, then or ever, to what had gone--and with a sneer underlying it! which I had certainly answered but for the evident hopelessness that had let it out. I was angry at his morose resignation, at the weariness on his face--an ingrate if ever there was one, who thought life was treating him badly! Whereas, God knows, he had never ceased to buffet it into being his enemy. He ought to have been grateful for knowing Iris at all....

Ten minutes later he left me, saying: "I'm going abroad, Mexico way, and I don't suppose you'll be seeing me for some time, Ronnie--in fact, there's no earthly reason why you should ever see me again." And to his suddenly outstretched hand was tacked on the glimmer of a really grateful smile; very like him that, to tack on a little gratitude to a long good-bye....

And so Red Antony went away, leaving behind him nothing in England but a question now and then in Iris and myself as to where exactly he might be and what he might be doing. And as I had often wondered why he hadn't left England long before, I never doubted but that now he had taken the step he would keep his distance--a contemptuous distance, mark you!--from it. For what, after all, was there for him to come back to?

About a month after he had gone Iris and Roger were married. I was the best man.

IV

That was two years before. And there I am, on that night two years later, still in that taxi and running up an unconscionably high fare towards Roger Poole's house in Regent's Park; and Antony back again in England....

The intervening two years were full of an exaggeration of my state; which in itself would have no importance for this tale but for the reasons that caused it. Most of us, nowadays, seem, after all, to have developed our emotions to a more, well, civilised plane than that of mere constancy; an Armenian I know once told me that his father and mother had loved each other for fifty years, but I shouldn't wonder if that wasn't one more of those exaggerations for which oppressed peoples are remarkable, so it must be almost unbelievable that a normal kind of man could still be in a feverish state about a woman for so long a time--and with, to be frank, so little for his trouble.

But there's no cynical twist about the thing, it is very easily explained. One can't be dogmatic about the state of love, except just to say that it is full of profoundly logical contradictions. For, however serious you may be about your passions, you (you and I, I mean; not odd people) cannot for ever go on plaguing a woman who is not only so insensible to your attractions that she marries some one else, but is actually happy with him when married. A belated sense of humour must come to your rescue eventually, to point in a tired sort of way at the rather ludicrous figure you cut to yourself, fussing about with a passion that is of no earthly use to any one. Anyway, it stands to reason that the appalling certainty of her happiness must inevitably draw something from the fire of your love, so that it fades and fades--unless, of course, you are a minor poet and worried with your own sense of superiority and sonnets, in which case you will write to her a cycle of the latter explaining the former, and choosing, if possible, a date in another world when your bodies (both of which have caused _you_ so much trouble) shall be rotten.

No: an unhappy love such as I speak of must be fed so that it can continue; and, if by nothing positive, by what more acutely fed than by her unhappiness? So, since it came about that Iris was unhappy, that sufficiently explains my persistent love for her. But its exaggeration? How can I hope to give any reason for that, but in my own fatuity? How trivial it seems merely to say that there were moments, in that second year of her marriage, when Iris gave me an acute sense of nearness, of almost physical nearness; as though, in our destined journey, we were every day nearing a point where the road would be so narrow that perforce we must touch, where she and I would at last have to face each other in a complete moment....

Not, however, that I knew anything of Iris's unhappiness for some time--it had not outlasted her honeymoon, and yet her best friend knew nothing of it for many months! Simply because, of course, it is always the most tiresome of one's friends who confide in one.... Had I suspected that she might be unhappy I might have expected it sooner. But, as it was, that first year of their marriage seemed to confirm every hope one had for its success. A vivid, crowded year it was--for Roger did do things supremely well! The original Poole money had not been quite negligible, but from all one heard "the present baronet" must have more than trebled it by lucky speculation (of course there must always be those who slur away the "s" from that word) and gambling; and his wife had brought him a considerable dowry. So that he could and did let himself go, and indulged his passion for entertaining in every sense in which that wretched word can possibly rob people of their sleep.

The house in Regent's Park, with its large and decorous, too decorous, rooms, and gardens down to the water (is it river or lake? One only saw it at night, and then not very clearly, when it was either beautiful or sombre) became a more frequent scene of parties than any other responsible dwelling in London: a kind of holocaust of drink, cards, and dancing from which one emerged an entirely different person to the one who had entered a few hours before. One never entered that house without drinking more than one had ever drunk before, the thing was somehow in the atmosphere, and time over again one heard some poor wretch tell another that he had never been so drunk since Oxford.

But the frequent parties were not merely rowdy affairs, though rowdiness was never far absent for those who liked that sort of thing. Roger, as I've said, knew what he was about; and now there was forming around him, around the card-tables and the buffets, a small but dominating nucleus of people whose serious purposes were decently shielded, let's say, rather than submerged, by the riot and extravagance of the passing moment. He was becoming, in fact, the leader of a new old-school: and one as inimical to wasters as it was indifferent to dullards. From the, after all, considerable eminence of his means and position he was influencing the most promising of his contemporaries and juniors to what he considered a useful, sympathetic, and amusing mode of life: to think well and to live well, to live hard and to work hard.... Not, if you look full at it, a very elevating philosophy, not very original, since Haroun-al-Raschid lived and died so many years ago. But, elevating or no, it was one with a deal of practicable arrogance in it, and it is surprising how people will be influenced by anything that appeals practicably to their arrogance. And, I suppose, it is not so difficult as all that to influence people to one's own conception of life if one has Roger Poole's advantages; not only those of his means and his abilities but, as definitely, of his looks and air; and, to top it all, the possession of such a wife--an advantage more vivid and compelling than any he could find in himself.

Of course I took it for granted that she was happy during that year! She seemed supremely content--as why, one might ask, shouldn't she be? Of all the men who had and might have come her way, Roger Poole, in spite of his indulgences in cards and brandy-and-ginger-ale, was certainly the most distinguished and eligible; and, what's more, the most courteous and considerate of husbands, who so far forgot the sardonic reticence one had thought natural to him as to seem, even in public, always to be making love to his wife.

Personally, I found that year, full of Poole extravagance, so entertaining that I think my vision of Iris, who since her marriage, and her busy household's calls upon her time, came much less often to see me in the afternoons, must have been as much confused by the gaiety and bustle always round her, as by her hypocrisy about the thing. She was, I think, as perfect a hostess as ever made a demand on one's time (for I, her old friend, was allowed no excuse by which to absent myself from any gathering whatsoever. Who else, said she, could give her the necessary confidence in herself?) She evoked gaiety. And how bald that sentence seems when I mean it to imply the elation caused in me, anyway, by the mere sight of that figure here and there about the now faintly and now brilliantly lit, whitepanelled rooms of that familiar house. And her hair, that wanton, tawny hair! It was so cunningly contrived of rich amber colours that it was always the most noticeable ornament in the richest room; there was about it some curious and wondrous quality of bedizening itself to suit and startle the various pleasures of every eye, even the most accustomed, that traced its vivid course round a crowded room.

It was not until almost the middle of the second year after her marriage that Iris again began to come more or less frequently to see me in the afternoons; but even then several weeks had to pass before I came to realise, and ever so dimly, what lay behind her quietness and silences, to understand the splendid, to me, faith which she put in my companionship.... What had from the first drawn me to her, as to one different from her tiresome and worldly friends, was that she was never noisy in her personal relations. And so, when she now again came to see me after the lapse of that feverish year I had allowed myself, I was slow to see the difference in her usual quietness and silence, slow to find sadness where I had ceased to suspect any.