Chapter I: ONCE read, in an essay by a writer whose considerable achievements (3)

"You may have known the pair of them together well enough years ago," she said later, "but that _was_ years ago. And now with so much experience, lives full of 'colour' and all that, to bridge their memories of each other, each one has discovered the other one again. Don't you think that's it? And that they've both quite naturally improved in the discovering?... Silly men, of course, not to have been decent about it long before, and saved you from nightmares and Antony from going against the world. For I'm sure he wouldn't have made such a fool of himself if Roger had been his friend. And as for Roger--why, he has actually confessed to me that he hasn't one real friend whom he likes! while all the time there was Antony under his very nose, perhaps the only man who could touch anything in him. And you'll admit that it's odd how the life Antony has led never seems to have made him a great friend, for one always thought that men who lived his kind of life in bars and places made many easy friends, even if they were only down-at-heelers. But there seems to have been something that always kept him apart, I don't know what, but something that has always given one the idea of him as a quite special and solitary outsider: a good drinking companion but a man who never really liked any one--and so people never really liked him, I suppose. And all the while he never had the sense to go to Roger and tell him not to be a fool so that he needn't be one--for you have only to be with them for a moment to realise the sympathy between them, and the similarity, too--"

"Oh, you've noticed that, have you?"

"Yes, you were right about that," she gallantly admitted. "It's a kind of similarity that comes to you as a shock, it's so improbable on the face of it--but, funnily enough, one seems somehow to have known of it always. But I haven't got a psycho-analytical eye, and shall have to see much more of them together before I shall understand anything more about it than that Roger is the thin edge of the same wedge--though if a wedge could have two thin ends and still be a wedge then Antony would be the other one--oh, dear, you know what I mean...."

Oh, yes, I knew what she meant. And though, as Iris said, many things must have been changed between them since I had known them together, yet it seemed that this indefinable sense of their likeness had not changed. It had been unlooked for and quite remarkable even to a not very observant schoolboy as I was, this similarity between such very different brothers as Poole I and Poole II. Roger, quiet, feverish, the best classical scholar in the school, a head-prefect whose authority was severely respected by every one (except Antony, who, however, never seemed to come directly into contact with it), and the first string of our racquets pair at Queens for four years; and Antony, as I've explained, the very opposite, a slacker at work but our best fast bowler and three-quarter--games, said Roger, which it made him sweat to think about. And so, as each went his so very different way, it had puzzled my schoolboy mind to discover in what lay this similarity between their natures, one whose existence had grown upon me as I had become more intimate with them: some deep down, inarticulate sameness, that was at first obscured by the great variance of their personalities, but so strong a sameness that it must show itself as one came to know them--so, anyway, I had incoherently thought at that time. And later, after we had left school, had so seldom seen them even in the same company, that I quite forgot my curiosity about the subtlety--so that when Iris now brought it again to my mind I was where I had been at school; and not likely, I thought, to get very much further.

But I had been really surprised to hear of the obvious pleasure they took in each other's company, of their mutual sympathy and interest. In that, indeed, the years between had made a change! For if their likeness had been ever so dimly apparent to me at school, not so any interest the one might have in the other. They neither showed any nor pretended to any, they went their own ways with a quite unforced indifference; and it would have been better if, when they met, they had met as indifferently--but Antony seemed unable to resist an unpleasantry, to which Roger's generally silent contempt seemed a more than sufficient answer. In fact I rather sympathised with the jeers that Antony now and then flung at him as he passed, for Roger's kind of contempt seemed to have behind it enough conviction to provoke even a reasonable man to a show of temper--and Antony reasonable! But somehow or other Roger cleverly managed not to provoke him beyond the limit until a few days before the end of his last term. I can swear that he purposely brought on that burst, kept Antony's temper dangerously dangling--until after supper that night when he, somehow, finally goaded him into making a perfect ass of himself before the whole house. Poor Antony, so unfairly matched against that grim quietness!

But now, as I saw when I went to Regent's Park that night, it was as Iris had said, the years had made a great difference in their relation to each other. But in spite of the pleasing air of easy friendship about them--with a touch less reticent than usual about Roger and one more "lowered" about Antony--I managed to develop, as dinner went on, another very real grievance; so real indeed that, with some nursing, it lasted from that time on. It came about by my suddenly realizing that I had very little indeed to say to these brothers--an uncomfortable enough feeling about people whom one has known long enough never to worry about having much or little to say to them. But my surprise at being made aware of that constraint was heightened by another: that I had nothing to say to Roger and Antony simply because, for all their geniality, they had nothing to say to me! that they were, in fact, rather resenting my being there at all....

I candidly vented my grievance on Iris, who seemed somehow implicated, the next time I saw her, but she said that I was always apt to be psychic about the wrong things.

"And even if you were in the least bit right you might be a little understanding about it," she complained. "For after all, it's not very unnatural that they should be a bit put out by you--because you, see, you've known all about their little bitternesses for so many years. You are somehow the sleuth that has never been shaken off! not, of course, that you ever wanted to be a sleuth, that was just circumstance, nor that either of them has ever wanted to shake you off--very much the reverse with Antony, in fact, poor Ronnie! But if there's any strain at all it must come from that, don't you think?..."

I didn't. In fact I thought it a very poor explanation--and, anyway, I had lately been growing so impatient about the damnable vagaries of those brothers, especially Antony's, that I clutched at this as a last straw; and vowed that several moons must pass before I would again dine with Roger and Antony. And several moons did pass....

Since Antony's return I had discovered in myself a lack of sympathy with him that I had never before felt to such a degree, even on his most unsympathetic days. And now, as the weeks passed and he never so much as came near me, I thought of him as really beyond the limit. After all, I had done a good deal for the man, one way and another. And now, simply because he had no use for me.... There was a shamelessness about the thing that gave me a positive distaste for him, and I really desired to see him as little as possible. But it would have surprised me very much if I had known that, as a fact, I was to see him only once more, on that night a few months later.

I might have known more than I did of what was happening at this time if I hadn't been so full of that stubborn impatience about the brothers; so unreciprocative about them, that, Iris accused me later, even if she had been minded to tell me anything of her feelings and of what was happening (which would only have furiously muddled me without helping her in the least) my attitude of, as it were, "disowning" them would have prevented any such confidence.

I saw very little of Roger throughout that time, and then only casually at the Club; for I never once went to Regent's Park--as much because I didn't want to as because he didn't ask me. But, Iris told me, neither did he ask any one else, except to cards--there were no more parties of the old kind. And the reason for that, as she told it to me one day, came almost as a shock; for when she had asked him why there were no more parties he had simply answered, because he couldn't afford them. It was difficult to think of Roger as not being able to afford things. For years one had thought of him as so rich a man without enquiring how rich, as so magnificent a spender without thinking of how much he spent--he seemed capable of spending so much! There are men in relation to whom one doesn't think of money, it seems natural to them to have so much. But now, it had happened that he couldn't afford things!...

"And what's more," Iris said, as we were childishly wondering about this (for we were both rather stupid about large sums of money, I suppose because she was so used to them and because I had never had any), "he's been having a real streak of bad luck at cards lately. Of course, he's lost before, but he has always managed to get it back in the end and much besides--but lately, you know, as I've watched them playing, it seems to me that he was losing very heavily. But it's difficult to believe that he has ever lost much, he always seems so very unaffected by it--so unbelievably a good loser that one simply can't believe he's lost very much." And thus Roger's philosophy of surface values had at last won its share of Iris's grudging admiration, or so it seemed to me from her wistful silence. And, I remember, I wondered what kind of a man he could be who could, despite so much, so firmly retain a woman's imagination about his personality.

VIII

It was difficult, Iris began (when all these things had settled into the limbo of our past lives), to tell me in a matter-of-fact way exactly when and exactly why she had come to be distressed by the nearness of her husband and his brother to each other. It had just grown, by very devious ways and windings, though not so stealthily but that she hadn't noticed the discomfort of it; but, as with such things, it had seemed altogether so unreasonable and fanciful a feeling that she had never ceased trying to discourage it within herself; and it was only at the end that, with quite a burst, her fear had finally overcome her sense of absurdity, and had scattered it back to the shades that had sent it to delude her for so long--only at the very end!

At first and for a little time after she was, as I had seen that afternoon, happy about their friendship. She was pleased with the success of her plot, it seemed so much like a bad thing put right, one more "bogey" exorcised from this world. And, mainly, she was pleased for Roger's sake.... Ah yes, that would surprise me, to whom she had made such a fuss about wanting to help Antony! But Antony had only been an incident of her plot--she had seized this idea and given him the leading part, while Roger and she would get as much or more benefit from it than he. How the idea of using Antony's suggestion of the masquerade had come to her she didn't know, but it had come forcefully enough for her to take great pains about his disguise; the idea that it would somehow be of great good to Roger to make it up with his brother, that this new affection (she had an instinct that the brothers were really very fond of each other, but pettily arrogant) might make him more, well, tangible--to her!

"My dear, of course I wanted to make him tangible to me, possible to me. I always wanted that. Don't you realise that ever since I first met him every thought I had, however little I realised it, was really concerned with him and about him? My feeling for him had crept into my veins, it was as much a part of me as my voice is, and no amount of hardening my heart against him could drive it out. And, as you know, my heart grew hard enough; I had begun to close myself against him soon after our honeymoon, quite, quite tightly, as one can if one tries very hard. It was my only defence, you see, I couldn't hit back nor really leave him, for there's simply no pride in love.... And I had succeeded, hadn't I? By the time Antony came back my defences were so strong, so strong that I began to think I must have exaggerated my love as much as one has always suspected one's friends of exaggerating theirs: almost to treat my love with a bedside manner, it seemed so dim and ailing.... But it was there all the time, I suppose, love only playing at indifference, the only game that grown-ups continue to play after childhood, but never so well as children could play it if they weren't too wise to try. And as soon as Antony said he'd like to make friends with Roger and suggested how it could best be done, some part of my mind fixed on it and made a dream, of how Roger might change, wonderfully. It was just a chance, and anyway it would help Antony.

"I was happy about it at first, it seemed that I might have been right about Roger, perhaps he might become more tangible--until there came the little shocks, earthquakes in the air and under my feet! The first one was their sudden distaste for you, Ronnie, even though I did seem so snappy with your grievance. In Roger it only surprised me, though very unpleasantly, for he was apt to make these sudden dislikes. But in Antony, though I didn't tell you, it shocked me, I couldn't understand it, it seemed the sort of thing a man might do in a book, a renegade kind of thing--not that he said anything in particular against you, he hadn't the face to do that before _me_; but his attitude of a kind of contempt was quite enough in a man whom I knew you had been so very nice to, even though you had always seen through him. But I thought I would wait a little while before thoroughly disliking 'poor' Antony, as it might be just one more of those freak perversities which you and I have often been so impatient about in both of them. So I didn't mind when he came to live at the house about then, and anyway I couldn't see more of him than before, for he was at dinner every night.

"Then came the disappointment of Roger's slacking away from the House and from everything to do with it. And though that seemed to have nothing to do with Antony (how could it?) I couldn't resist a vague idea.... Even before Antony came back he had begun to be more and more interested in the City and less in politics, but now he seemed to have become altogether a business man. There was something particularly dreary about that disappointment, for Roger's public life had never lost its glamour for me. I had always been interested in his career, and interested in him as a bright part of dull affairs. All that political stuff had seemed to become his personality so well, and besides it seemed the only proper outlook for his passion to dominate people--and now I would have to lose even that much of him! that part of him that I read about in the papers, and that had seemed to be really mine. A funny contradiction, that his wife should treasure only that part of him which the whole world knew as well or better than she....

"I showed my bitter disappointment when one day he told me he was thinking of resigning his seat; and, do you know, he actually seemed apologetic about it! It was strange, that air of apology about him, and the way he looked at me from the door as he went out, as though to say he was sorry for having let me down! Let me down!

"That was the first time I realised a new gentleness about him, something I hadn't seen in him even when he had made love to me before we were married. I was very young then, and thought he made love so well then because of his gentleness, whereas it was only practice, like being good at billiards. But now there was this queer air of gentleness about the way he sometimes looked at me, almost of weakness. And maybe my surprise at it made it seem even more intangible than it was, for it seemed to be nearer the ceiling than to me, I couldn't somehow reach it; and I didn't dare try to, I wanted to touch him but I was afraid--he had done the awful thing, had made my heart suspicious, which is degrading to oneself and to the person one loves. And so, at first, I mistrusted my own weakness for being hurt by him, and I mistrusted him.... But if Antony had been a different sort of man I would have blessed him for somehow or other having brought that gentleness on Roger, for of course he had something to do with it in a contrary way, I thought.

"I suppose my disappointment at his leaving the House had something to do with my boredom at the eternal talks about business. Money, money, money. Something about Mexico and oil, as far as I could gather, that Antony had brought back to England; and I could only hope that there was a lot of oil to make up for the amount of talk about it, and interest in it.... They left together in the morning and came back together in the evening, sometimes quite late, as dull a pair of business men as ever got be-knighted; and the only people that Roger asked to the house were odd Napoleonic kind of men, very good at being 'merchant princes' I've no doubt, and the usual gamblers--who, as far as I could see, were very good at gambling, by the amount that Roger seemed nowadays to lose to them, mainly at poker.

"Roger had never talked to me about money affairs, I being old-fashioned with my affectations of stupidity. But I had realised that things were not going so well with him as they used to, that his immersion in the City and retirement from politics had a great deal to do with being temporarily hard up. He's having a run of bad-luck, I thought, and must be a little worried about it; though it struck me as strange that Roger should worry about money, for he had always such an air of complete detachment from it. But it must be that that is on his mind, I thought as I looked at him, and thus found a plausible reason for his rather feverish and seedy looks.

"His face, as you know, was always colourless, and his eyes very bright, but he had never looked unhealthy; a kind of vitality and vividness had always made him seem very alive and well. But just lately I had thought he looked rather too pale and haggard--and then, one night at dinner, I realised suddenly that my Roger was terribly thin, a long, thin, white-faced man with brilliant eyes--but so thin! Of course, he had always been like that, but one had thought of him as supple, not thin--and now, suddenly, it seemed to me that his thinness was the most apparent thing about him! And there, at the other side of the table, was Antony, redder than ever, burlier than ever, healthier than ever, and growing, I thought, a good deal stouter. And, resenting him, I suddenly resented his healthy good looks in contrast to his brother's nervous paleness, and--why, my dear, I couldn't take my eyes from Roger that night, he seemed so white and delicate, so quite unlike himself, unlike the man I knew! Of course, it was silly of me to be surprised at it, since he had always looked rather white and delicately made--but so self-confidently delicate that one had never thought of him as particularly so. But now a touch of worry and weakness seemed to have pruned that self-confidence away from his body, and I seemed to see what had always been there under a cover; a kind of shadow where I had grown used to a kind of tyrant....

"I accused him of being not well, but he said that it was only that he was a little tired and overworked: 'But if everything goes well I will buy a villa near Cannes, Iris, and we will go there, and leave Antony to do all the work. Antony is a great financier, you must know....' And he left the sentence in the air, looking at him with a smile; while Antony said with a laugh to me: 'If only I had Roger's brain with which to carry out my ideas you wouldn't be able to see me for money, Iris, nor yourself for Teclas.' But you know Antony, how he could never make the most comical boast without giving one an unpleasant idea that he really believed in it--and how unpleasantly absurd it suddenly was, the idea of Antony acquiring Roger's brain just to set me up in pearls!

"That was just about a month before that night you and I will always remember. But how, my dear, was I to know or even dream of what was to come? What did I know about the fall in cotton prices and the upside downs of that oil thing, of which I heard of vaguely as Cascan Oil?...

"All I actually did know was that Roger's health was weak, and that began to worry me to the exclusion of nearly all else; but, from his 'faded' looks, I thought he was probably right in saying that it was overwork, and I didn't dare to pester him about it, for I could trust no amount of gentleness in him to rid him of his contrary perversities--but I would take him away at the first possible moment, which, I vowed, would be very soon indeed! Oh yes, Ronnie, how many chances one gives God for saying that He knows better....

"And it was about that time of my worrying about Roger's health that I noticed that the relations between him and Antony had changed since I had had the feeling that they were so interested in each other as scarcely to notice me. But I can't express it except by saying that they seemed gradually to have changed from a great amiability to an electric kind of chaff--which, as that about Antony and finance, Roger generally led and Antony followed as best he could. I remembered then what you had told me about them at school, but there was nothing like that between them now, no jeers from Antony, and only a very kindly sort of contempt from Roger. It was contempt surely enough, that look Roger gave him now and then, but a contempt wrapped in a good-natured smile: his 'Antony' smile, I rather jealousy called it to myself, for he had never turned to _me_ with that particular kind of good-nature with which he smiled at Antony. And there was certainly no such quarrelsomeness as we had all come to expect from Antony, even when Roger might sting just a little bit sharply; in fact, the remarkable thing about him, I thought, was his great deference, not so much to Roger, but to Roger's intelligence. He seemed to have convinced himself that his brother was the cleverest man in the world, and he had a way of sometimes repeating what Roger had just said tacked on to one of his great laughs, and an air about him as though to say: 'Just look what a clever brother I've got!'

"What could I think about Antony, my dear! To me he was always charming, but charming, and quite naturally. Antony, as you know, always wore courtesy when he needed it like a rather flamboyant cloak flapping in a north wind, but to me he was always quite natural with it--just as in those days at your flat when I liked him so genuinely. But I had somehow come to mistrust him--and more deeply than one can mistrust one's friends' weaknesses while continuing to like them. And when I saw, or felt I saw, that contempt in Roger's eyes, I was more than ever uncomfortable about Antony. It seemed that Roger mistrusted him too--but that he didn't mind mistrusting him, it made no difference to his liking for him! Imagine the smoke from that dim fire, the theories that would chase through my head as we sat at dinner, often rather silently! And then the next moment I would wonder impatiently what the deuce all the fuss was about. They were such friends, after all!... But no sense of absurdity could so easily rid me of the feeling that Roger knew very well what Antony was about, but that he was just waiting, ever so good-naturedly, just letting things be. Roger to let things be!..."

And as Iris repeated those words about him I understood very well the reflected astonishment in her eyes. It must have been strange, Roger "letting things be!" about whom the most vivid fact had always been that he must try to colour and influence anything that he touched or that touched him, men or work or circumstance.... But, Iris said, _she_ couldn't let things be! As that month grew she realised that, absurd or not, there was something strangely the matter: and that if there was ever to be any levelness forced upon their present life she must be its direct agent. But she couldn't for the moment worry about Antony; nothing could be done until some kind of solidity had been coaxed back into Roger's health, for he seemed lately so gravely feeble.

By this time, although she had not realised its every stage, all her bitterness and resentment at his past scepticisms and perversities had passed from her mind; leaving her, despite her perplexities, happier and lighter, as after the expulsion of ugly grotesques from a sacred place. Her heart had opened to him, not artificially before his new weakness of health, but from a more profound realisation of the man himself. Now that she had lost that mistrust of him, he seemed so near to her; and it was as though the past wretched two years had not been except to deepen and widen her love, this love, it seemed, that had been found good but not good enough, and so had been sealed up for a time to allow builders to shape it into a more workable intensity; and now it had grown more complete and wiser than that first impulse to utter abandon which he had roused in her, and which had never been but an electric current of unhappiness between them. Now she understood him a little better--if it was understanding him to know clearly that she could have awakened this gentleness in him long before. He was one of those men who couldn't give but must be made to. She should have plundered where she had pleaded. She should have played the buccaneer to this man who had grown so used to being taken for one.... But now, she saw, it was too late to fly the Jolly Roger, for he had come by some knowledge of himself from a hidden turning on that well-paved road which he had trod with so well-poised an arrogance; and, in yielding to what had suddenly--and yes, secretly--come, he had yielded something from his health, some part of his vitality. Yes, it was too late to play at buccaneering now. First she must coax back his full health, and quietly wait for him to realise completely her new understanding of him. No half-way fulfilment this time, in this new love-affair that she knew was coming to them! She couldn't bear that--she must wait until he knew himself, so that he could love without any of those retractions that had made such a wretched muddle of it all before.

So, letting love be as well as she could, she now disregarded any irritation she might cause, and began to "pester" him about his health: saying that whether it was overwork or not he must see a doctor. Until one evening, Antony having gone out after dinner, as she was complaining about the stupid insensibility of men to their own well-being, he said that it really was a very common complaint and not worth seeing a doctor about: just bad-luck, he said.

"But how bad-luck? Do be serious, please, Roger.... I am so tired of fantasies...."

"Just the thing itself, my dear--just bad-luck. Now why should that be a fantasy? Isn't it expressive enough, or do you think that the only serious illnesses are those that doctors get paid for discovering and the Lord be thanked for curing?"

"It's not that, but when one hears of some one being ill of his luck one thinks of a boneless, watery kind of man who thinks the world is against him because a favourite has lost him a fiver."

"But I told you, Iris, that I meant just the fact of bad-luck, not any particular loss from it." And then he explained, but ever so mildly, as though to a child who mightn't very readily understand an obvious fact.

"'It's very simply, and quite logical, I think. Have you ever realised, Iris, that since you met me I have always won? Well, all my life has been like that, I have always won--I don't mean only at cards and racing but at everything that is supposed to make life worth living, those various prizes that we put our names down for. Some men take their paths in life steadily and calculate their progress step by step by hard work, and some men just have a throw at what they most want from time to time--they may work hard to have deserved it after they have got it, but they get it by a chance, by backing themselves against the field. But that is such a poor description, for it's never such a conscious thing as that, the throw comes from a real part of one's nature. It's only a conscious trait in that awful type of "hotel-lounge" American who has many diamond tie-pins and wants every one to know that he lives by bluff and hazard, and in other fools who think that a strange glamour reflects on them from taking chances--whereas to take a chance is just the business of one's nature, it's the business of one's life, just like art or grocery. One gambles naturally or not at all, and the people who lose are mainly those who gamble for some other purpose than the mere fact of gambling, as any _croupier_ in any Casino will tell you....'

"He stopped and looked absently across at me with that half satiric smile that crept about his face when he spoke about himself--which was so seldom that I was now listening with all the nerves of my body. And then, each word very slowly and distinctly, as one might count the caskets of a fabulous treasure--

"'I have always won,'" he said.

(I'll leave you to imagine, Ronnie, that if it is possible for any man to make such a statement without seeming to boast his good fortune, Roger so made it).

"I can't tell you any more about it than you can find from just that sentence,' he explained, 'I don't know why I've won. I don't know. But I suppose that it somehow came naturally to me to win every time I ventured--whether it was for money or anything else. Always a good seat on the front bench, and sometimes the very first seat of all.... I know how difficult it is for you not to think I'm exaggerating, for every one does exaggerate one way or the other when talking roundabout the chances they've taken. But, Iris, dear, please believe that I'm exaggerating less than people usually do when I tell you that I grew to take the fact of winning as, well, my right--as part of me, don't you see? Without very particularly realising or fostering it, it grew to work out like that....

"'Yes, my good-luck or whatever it was, was certainly a part of me,' he repeated. 'And a very important part, if one's good health is important--why, Iris, my good-luck was the very key and centre of it! It must have been.... And does that, after all, seem so fantastic? that my whole zest and confidence and vitality, everything you first saw in me, were made up of my luck? I was nothing without them, the things of my luck--and you didn't know the man, Iris, you only knew the luck. The luck was the man, don't you see? and without it the man was--well, I'm damned if I know what he was! I can't remember ever not winning, so I've never had to examine myself until lately. For, of course, I didn't realise all I have told you until just lately--I suppose I am the kind of man to prospect rather than introspect when on top of a mountain. But I realise it all well enough now that there's such a poor view from the lowest ridge. I know now what my worst enemy would never have dreamt of saying of me, that I am a bad loser--a very bad loser in its really fundamental sense. Other people may lose or win with their faces, but it seems that I win or lose with my whole being.... The fact is that I can't lose, I simply don't know how. Don't you see that I can't lose, Iris? It saps all my vitality.... Poor Iris, to be married to a man who is only a man so long as he wins.'

"The little smile had clung to his face all the while, like a faint light about its shadows; and maybe it was the self-mockery of it that made his manner so much lighter than his words--which towards the end had seemed to fall wearily and listlessly, as though he had resigned himself to do a duty. And it must have been a deeper self-accusation than any words could express that had helped him to humiliate himself in a matter-of-fact way of explanation. For to him, Roger, what humiliation! To have realised within himself that he, of all the men in the world, was that strangely contemptible thing, I don't quite know why, a bad loser! To confess that realisation to me could add nothing to the humiliation, for Roger was never but first audience to his own acting, never but the main person in any gallery to which he might play! He stood or fell by himself, and if he fell, no other's judgment could count beside his own.

"How, then, could I tell him at that moment on what, as he was speaking, my mind had fixed--so that I could scarcely restrain the cry of my discovery, scarcely bear not jumping up from my chair to hold him to me. But to him, an egoist, realising that aspect himself, what possible consolation in telling him of my discovery? the reverse, maybe, another blow.... The vivid fact that I was intensely glad at the failure of his luck! All those arrogancies and dominations with which he had first charmed, then repelled, and always baffled one (they had seemed so out of one's reach to prick them, perched so confidently on a highest pinnacle of assurance): the whole of his easy mastery over life that had bred his 'confidence,' 'vitality'--I saw now that they were just the scum over his good-luck, a kind of verdigris that had made me grow to despise them, however unwillingly. 'You never knew the man, you only knew the luck. The man was nothing.' ... Poor dear, he was so sunk in that realisation that he couldn't possibly realise the vastness of the parallel one that it had roused in me: that the man was everything, the luck worse than nothing, just a slaughter-house for every quality with which my love had dowered him.

"And so, glad as I was at the result in himself from his change of luck, its result in his health lost some of its seriousness--as a thing that is explained generally does, unless it is too bad. For I certainly didn't take his explanation of it as 'fantasy,' it was quite obvious that he had his finger on the real cause of his weakness. Given the other extreme, as he had so candidly explained it, why shouldn't a man fail in health with the failing of his luck? But I felt that he was more affected by the shock of it than by its contemplation--and, after all, I didn't love him weakly, I could deal with a shock, be it ever so mental. His air of resignation, so foreign in him, disturbed me a little; but, I thought, that is a natural part of the ailment and one will deal with them both at a time. Yes, the thing would mend of itself, for it carried its own cure with it, in a new and deepening knowledge of himself. He would be better even before the pendulum of this strange 'luck' of his had swung back again; and I had no fear from what its swinging back to 'good' might bring to us both, for he was now learning the lesson of himself beyond all un-learning.

"So I thought, anyway, after I had persuaded Roger, that same night, to explain just a bit of what had been happening to him in the great world--where, it seemed, luck of sorts made such a mess of men. And indeed it was only a very little bit that he explained, for he was tired, and said that it was a long and dull history, even though it hadn't taken very long to happen. 'Exactly how long?' I asked, but he evaded that--else maybe I had known so very much more!

"'As you know, when a writer wants to be done with one of his characters,' he explained, 'he sometimes throws a few bad investments and bucket-shops at the poor man and he's done for before you turn the page. Well, there are plenty of such things outside books, and I somehow seem to have happened on one or three of late. And these _debacles_ always happen in the same way, if they are going to happen at all, to men whose money is mostly on paper. The paper actually becomes paper--and now even a French _gendarme_ wouldn't accept as a tip most of the stuff that was once my fortune. I thought I had tried every way there was of spending money, but I had never realised that losing it was the quickest. I know now. And that's all, Iris.'

"'But, my dear, it doesn't matter all that much! After all, bad-luck was never more than bad-luck seen in the Book of Job. It's inconvenient, of course--'

"'It's certainly that. But, of course, all your money is quite safe and doing very well, and I'll see any creditor to hell before you dare pay him one penny of any debt of mine. I'd have you know that the best bankrupts are always very touchy about the thoroughness of their bankruptcies.... But, as you say, Iris, all that doesn't matter very much.'

"If he agreed about that, then why was he getting himself ill over it? I was going to heckle him, when he explained--and with what so far unknown deference, in him, to one's bewilderment!--that he had not been worrying about losing the money, nor so very much about the now almost certain bankruptcy: 'Although that is really so serious for me that I've got to joke about it or be as entirely silent as I have been--and will be after to-night,' he excused his levity to warn me. 'But it's actually the naked fact that these things can and have happened to oneself that has got on my nerves--which must, I suppose, be very tender nerves. Just the change of luck, you see, rather than its particular results, however serious.' ...

"But before we went upstairs he took me by the shoulder with some of his old air of authority, and warned me that he would be very disappointed if I worried over what he had told me. 'Because, after all, I didn't tell you about it because I wanted to--but simply so that you shouldn't worry so much about my health now you know that it isn't due to a weak heart or a damaged lung--only damaged luck, after all! And I may, just possibly may, find a way out of everything in the next few weeks.'

"'With Cascan Oil?' I asked, as though it were a magic oil.

"But I didn't gather anything from his smile except that it was one of those smiles that never answer questions in the way you want them answered. 'It's certainly very good oil!' he only said.

"'And will you promise to tell me as soon as you have found your way out, as of course you will, you being you, luck or no luck?' I asked him firmly. 'And will you also promise to drop some of this air of resignation or whatever it is that has lately been growing on you? please, Roger, for although it makes you very kissable at home, I'm sure it's likely to make you quite "broke" in the great world--which doesn't care how much your wife loves you so long as it can get your money.'

"He promised to tell me--for I had fixed in my mind that as soon as he came to me with never so little brighter news I would at once snatch him away from London to some place like Tangiers, to mend his health and let the deuce take his luck, which was a plague, good or bad. And you know when he brought me news, at lunch-time two weeks later, the day before that....

"He rang up from the City to ask me if I would be in for lunch; and it was so unusual for him to come home for lunch that I quite ran wild in putting you off, so that you developed a wonderful theory about my having found a new young man from the back row of the Russian Ballet.

"Almost the first word he said when he came in was, 'Well, that's finished.' But as he said it with almost a smile and quite undramatically I didn't expect, as I 'registered' pleasure, to be pulled up by:

"'I mean there are no more uncertainties to worry about, Iris. The rats have got at everything.'

"'Then,' I said, 'we can go away for a lovely holiday with my money. To-morrow, for instance....' You see I never did believe much in standing on one's dignity about money and honour, for money's a messy thing anyway.

"But he was staring at me so differently, so pitiably almost, and with no smile anywhere to light his tired face, that I had to leave my holiday in the air, miserably wondering at him.

"'If it was only that kind of mess!' he said at last simply, as though I would understand by that!

"He wouldn't talk about anything to do with it through lunch, and I had to sit there with my heart screwed up for fear of what he was going to tell me now. Oh, I loved him so as he sat almost silently facing me, his thin face set so firmly that it looked drawn on that lovely paper you find in Kelmscott books; and his eyes, those so efficient eyes, now and then playing darkly with the sun through the large window behind me.

"It was as we were leaving the table that he suddenly threw his bomb, which hasn't really yet finished exploding in me. He threw it with a sudden, quiet smile and a look over my shoulder. He threw it as though it were a marvellous joke.

"'You very thoroughly let the rats in through that window that night, didn't you, Iris?'

"And I stared at him confounded, while my fingers groped about the table for something to hold, to hold tightly.... And I suddenly saw red, a kind of blind anger tore at me to tear him:

"'Then why didn't you kick him out? Why did you let him stay on and on? I thought he was foul and that he hated you, but you knew for certain all the time--and yet you've let him stay, like a weak fool!' And I felt like screaming out my detestation of the whole atmosphere about them, the silly childish darkness of it all....

"How shrill I must have been at that moment! But you see, all the half conscious fears of the past months had suddenly burst true and shaken me quite beyond myself. And now I was so wildly sick to realise his lassitude--and he looking silently down from his height at me, unmoved by my anger except to that faint, irritating smile.

"'You knew he hated you, you knew he hated you,' I accused him trembling.

"'But I didn't hate _him_,' he said mildly. 'I've loved Antony, you see.'

IX

"And then that long stifling afternoon, when he and I sat under the sunblinds of the library window and he told me from beginning to end the tale of himself and Antony. The sun in the garden to our feet, the gay and livid sunblind over our heads, and across the water the green and yellow openness of the Park--why, it was one of those afternoons that are sent to make all human and animate things seems like nonsense! And nothing in the world but Roger's clear, definite voice could have drawn so thick a line between us and its carelessness. For what he said had no contact with a day of sun, it was a tale for a winter's day with doors and windows sealed, and a bright fire to mock the shadows of the tale into dark corners.

"He had said abruptly that he had loved Antony, as though he meant until that very moment; and now he began by explaining that it had been so ever since he could remember, and that it had grown with childhood and far beyond, this love for Antony. (And, Ronnie, you remember how, well, saturnine and rather hard Roger's face always was? Lately it had been growing softer, I thought, but now it became quite a different face altogether, almost different lines and different depths, the real face of a man you and I never knew, as we never knew of his childhood. There was nothing soft nor sentimental about the way he spoke, he was speaking of naked facts nakedly, but it was merely that the facts spoke for themselves in his voice.)

"When they were both ever so little Antony had been the favourite of the house, he was so much the impish kind of child that naturally is. And Roger had not been the least jealous, but had loved to see Antony made much of, and had spent a great part of his childish ingenuity in still further sending up his younger brother's 'stock' with nurses and parents. It had come so naturally to him to worship the pink, gay, careless little man that then was Antony--growing every year pinker and redder until he seemed just like a sunball, the loveliest child that ever a house and a dark brother were blessed with; for Roger, even then dark-haired and pale--anyway, beside that little meteor--used to despise himself very heartily, and inarticulately fumble with a theory that any one who looked as he did could come to no good in the world, whereas Antony--oh, but the world was made for Antony! God had made the world and then He had made Antony, and just thrown Roger in as his elder brother to help matters on a bit. Well, that he did, and did increasingly as childhood grew, loving to see Antony happy--who cared for nothing but his own wild enjoyments, and expected every one else to join in them; which Roger, of course, did, and nearly always bore the brunt of the results--expecting never a bit of gratitude from the young imp, and getting none, for it all seemed very natural to young Antony. But when, once in a while the chief culprit was detected and punished, then Roger couldn't bear the idea and set up such a hullabaloo that they had to deal with him as well.

"Those were the happiest days of all, those days of early childhood, he said. No suspicions then--only games, and dark plots in dark corners, and marvellous escapades that no grown-up could ever discount by punishing. But only in those very early days. For the change came soon enough--when Roger was not more than nine, and they had their first tutor. But the change (or whatever it was, for the possibility of it must always have been in Antony else it couldn't so readily have come out) was at first so slight, and later so incomprehensible and baffling, that Roger was almost on his way to school before he could even dimly realise the cause of it.

"Soon after the tutor came, Antony had grown surly with Roger, inimical; and one day, when Roger had badly hurt his leg in climbing down a tree, had laughed with a queer satisfaction that had made Roger look at him in a shocked silence. He had been hurt by Antony's sudden repudiation of him as a comrade, had wondered how he had suddenly come to prefer his stolen games with the game-keeper's sons--but at this sudden sigh of Antony's dislike, for it could only be such that took satisfaction from his pain, he had been quite shocked in his young mind. And his sky had filled with strange and unbelievable clouds. He could only look at Antony and wonder painfully, realising very little but the monstrous fact that he was hated by some one he loved. Yes, Roger had been quite thrown off his balance by the blow from behind, and the rest of his childhood had passed like that, Antony growing to open and jeering enmity and he continuing silent, just silent....

"And as he told me how he had borne Antony's cheek in silence, I looked at him wonderingly, for such a patience in such a boy as Roger must have been seemed, well, almost unpleasant and unmanlike. He saw what I was thinking, and explained that it was simply because he had not known what to do, he hadn't known. He couldn't retaliate in the same spirit, because Antony's dislike formed no such parallel in him. He was at the disadvantage of loving him as before, though now it was an affection mixed with those dark clouds of wondering. His liking for Antony had never had to do with whether Antony was good or bad. In fact, as a very small child he had realised that his young brother could do strange things, and strangely, but that had never affected his admiration; those little traits went with Antony, that's all. And had so continued to 'go with him,' disturbing Roger every now and then--until, after the tutor came, he realised that those 'traits' looked to make up the whole! And that was terrible, doing away with any admiration--but after all it's a weak love that must admire what it loves; and soon Roger came to accept even that as inevitably Antony, still loving him--and waiting, don't you see, until he could find out where all this dislike came from, what all this fuss was about and why?