The Green Hat · I · Chapter 1 3 (1/3)

III

Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow stairs to my landing. In the sudden flare of my match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had occasion to rebuke myself on the depravity that is man. She said over her shoulder: “Hilary Townshend has told me about you.⁠ ⁠…”

“But he has never told me about you!”

“Oh, he would if you provoked him!”

“And may I?”

But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary had, I thought, said something about Gerald March having a sister, but I had not connected the vaguely heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I don’t know why, but I had always imagined Gerald’s sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere in the country with a bankrupt old gentleman called Lord Portairley, Gerald’s uncle.

We were on my small landing now, in the light that plunged out of the half-open door of my sitting-room: she with a foot on the stairs leading downwards, away.

“Goodbye,” she said. “Really, I think you’ve been very kind.⁠ ⁠…”

She seemed to me very nice and gentle; yes, nice; and then it seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself. I was on another planet. Hilary tells me now that he also had that feeling with her; but Hilary must have struggled against it, whereas I am incapable of struggling against any feeling.

“Goodbye,” I said.

I was looking not at her but through the half-open door into my room. There lay the disorder of my life, the jumble, the lack of purpose, the silence, and the defeat of my life. I wasn’t, it seems almost an intrusion to say, very happy in those days; but that is by the way in the history of Gerald March and Iris Storm.

Now here is the difficult part of this history. Of the many gaps it will contain, this seems to me the most grave, the least excusable. One should write, if not well, at least plausibly, about the things that happen. And yet I cannot be plausible about this, because I do not know how it happened. I mean, how she came into my room and sat down. I did not ask her. Did she want to? Mrs. Storm was a lady who gave you a sense of the conventions. Mrs. Storm was a⁠ ⁠… and yet⁠ ⁠… I do not know anything about her.

I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together; and, of course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her⁠—foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?⁠—as someone who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.

We have all of us a crude desire to “place” our fellows in this or that category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that, maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with the knowledge that she was Gerald’s sister, that she was twenty-nine years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not, anyhow I couldn’t, “place” Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather despairing one, that she didn’t fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to any nationality. She wasn’t that ghastly thing called “Bohemian,” she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called “society,” “county,” upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England, spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the conventions; but she gave you⁠—unaware always, impersonal always, and those cool, sensible eyes!⁠—a much deeper sense that she was somehow outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one was nonexistent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man can’t get beyond⁠—to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a man like that⁠—indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is not?⁠—but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects the lives of the multitude of his fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so I had with this woman that profound sense of incapability, of defeat, which any limited man must feel with a woman whose limitations he cannot know. She was⁠—in that phrase of Mr. Conrad’s which can mean so little or so much⁠—she was of all time. She was, when the first woman crawled out of the mud of the primeval world. She would be, when the last woman walks towards the unmentionable end.

“Goodbye,” I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green hat were brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned. “Why are you laughing?” I asked, or perhaps I did not ask that, perhaps she had not been laughing at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor her eyes were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt. I pushed open the door of my room.

“How I would like,” she said, that husky voice, “a glass of cold water!” That was what she said, and so I let her go in alone into the sitting-room, whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely and long I let the water run, pleased with the way it was filling the little house with its clean roar, pleased with the clean scent of the rushing water, which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then she said: “You have had a quick bath,” and so we became friends.

She stood among the littered books on the floor, looking round at the disorder, like a tulip with a green head. She sipped the water, looking round wisely over the rim of the tumbler. I explained that I was leaving tomorrow, and therefore the disorder.

We talked.

In that disordered room, so littered with books that you might hardly take a step without stumbling over one, it was not difficult to talk. Indeed, it is never so easy to talk about books as when they are about the floor, so that you may turn them over with your foot, see what they are, pick them up and drop them anywhere with no precious nonsense as to where they should exactly go.

She waved her glass of water about, sipping it. A drop of water clung like a gem to the corner of her painted mouth. It was not fair.

Talking with her in that room was like talking with her as we walked on a windy heath: she threw out things, you caught all you could of them, you missed what you liked, and you threw something back. Now and then something would turn up in a voice which was suddenly strong and clear, and every time her voice was strong and clear you were so surprised that you did not hear so well as when she spoke inaudibly. She had none of the organised, agonised grimaces of the young lady of fashion. But one knew she was not a young lady of fashion, for she hadn’t a sulky mouth.

Hers was that random, uninformed, but severely discriminating taste which maddens you: you try unsuccessfully to think that there is nothing at the back of it, nothing but a misty criterion of enjoyment. She used some words as though she had never heard anyone else using them. “Nice,” for instance, she used in a calmly immense sense. The word seemed turned topsy-turvy, and to turn everything else topsy-turvy. She used the word “common,” I think, to denote a thing attempted and achieved scratchily. Mr. Ernest Bramah was, for instance, not “common.” But Miss Clemence Dane in Legend was. “Oh, come!” I said, for to me Legend is an achievement in literature.

“All those women talking and dissecting and yearning together,” she said. “Their breath smells of⁠ ⁠… oh, red hair!” She thought Miss Romer Wilson was among the greatest writers of the time: The Grand Tour particularly. She was loyal to girlish admirations for Mr. Locke, Mr. Temple Thurston, Oscar Wilde. D. H. Lawrence was “nice.” “Nice?” I said. “Well, wonderful,” she said, with wide eyes, so that I was made to seem slow and stupid. M. Paul Morand was “common,” a “stunt” writer.

“I detest the word ‘stunt,’ ” I said.

“That is why,” she said, “I used it about Monsieur Morand. He is an abbreviation, like nightie for nightshirt.” I did not agree with her. She did not like abbreviations, even lunch for luncheon. “What,” she asked, “is the hurry?” I could not tell her. She thought that perhaps English was not the language for abbreviations and diminutives. She deferred to my judgment about that, and I said what I said. One just didn’t discuss Barrie: there he was. “You can’t laugh me out of him,” she smiled, “by calling him whimsical.” She had once enjoyed a book by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, a garden catalogue called Guy and Pauline. There was Hergesheimer. She put up a gallant, insincere defence for the Imagistes, but it turned out that she had never read any, and wasn’t at all sure what they were. “They’re short for poetry,” I said coldly, “like nightie for nightingale.” But perhaps the book she most profoundly liked was The Passionate Friends, with perhaps the last part of Tono-Bungay. “And, of course,” she said, “The Good Soldier,” Mr. Ford Maddox Hueffer’s amazing romance. From a table she picked up Joyce’s Ulysses, looked at it vaguely, dropped it absently on the floor amongst the others. I held a watching financial brief for it. One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.

“It’s a funny thing,” she mused.⁠ ⁠…

“What’s a funny thing?”

“Satirists.⁠ ⁠… They are all very plain men. Grubby, too. Why?”

“Why?” I said. “But, really⁠—”

She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about.⁠ ⁠…

“Genius,” I said, “has⁠—”

“Of course, genius. But⁠—”

“They are striving,” I said, “for⁠—”

“Yes, I know. But why are they always so ugly? I mean, these people called ‘satirists.’ One sees them abroad, at the Rotonde, or in Rome, Florence.⁠ ⁠…” I saw her among them, the small white face, the cool, sensible, huge eyes, very attentive, deferring. “They marry plain, too. Always. Invariably. Why? And man and wife hang on to each other like grim death, despising everything hard. And they come out in spots. Why? One just wonders.⁠ ⁠… It seems to need very ugly men with very unattractive wives to despise things, to show us our ugliness. Has ever any even fairly human-looking person ever been a ‘satirist’? But I suppose if they weren’t so plain they wouldn’t have so much time to be obscene on paper. Or am I talking nonsense?”

“It’s absurd,” I said, “to make it a question of looks⁠—”

“But it makes me furious!” she said in that suddenly strong clear voice. “These despisers. These grubby clever men with their grubby genius. The heroes of the weekly reviews. Their impotent little obscenities. I’ve tried to find, in knowing them and reading them, a great, real contempt, something as fierce and clean as fire, a nightmare of contempt, so that from the pillars of burning smoke we can build beings of better shape than ourselves. I’ve read, watched, listened, wanting to know.⁠ ⁠…”

I said things, too. But who am I? For instance, I said: “You don’t allow to all men one common failing, which shows particularly when the men are satirical writers: they must always write about women rather in the spirit of uncleanminded undergraduates. You should be more tolerant, Mrs. Storm.⁠ ⁠…”

We talked of vulgarity. She had once read a book of mine, and I complained bitterly of my vulgarity, saying, you know, that one didn’t begin by being vulgar, “but one began,” I suggested, “by being just bumptious. The meeker you are, the more bumptious you probably are inside, but that does not harm. Not that I was ever really meek. And at the beginning there’s a tremendous humility in you to yourself. You can’t have any achievement without that humility, and yet you lose it later on because you find out all the wrong things about yourself. People are only too ready to show you the wrong things about yourself. They like doing it. They seem to think there is something wrong with conceit. It irritates fools, because they think it is unwarranted. How do they know if it is unwarranted, and what does it matter if it is or not? Or it irritates them because they too once had in themselves a humility to themselves, and then allowed it to be, according to that Bottomley-Kipling-John-Bull gospel, ‘knocked out of them.’ And so if a young man is not very strong he lets the mischievous fools take his conceit away from him, he turns his back on his real conceit, which is himself⁠—he has it ‘knocked out of him,’ just as any taste for music was knocked out of him by his public-school⁠—and goes out for one of the spurious conceits which are called ‘being as others are.’ Then he has put his feet on the endless and never-ending road of vulgarity, and there are very few turnings.⁠ ⁠…”

She sat in the deep wicker armchair, which had come with me from Chelsea six years before but would travel nevermore. It creaked madly as she sat down, and she glanced at it in surprise. “Of course,” she said, “it’s contagious.⁠ ⁠…”

“You are quite wrong,” I said. “The real sticky part seems to come from inside one. And there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of defeat⁠—a writer, I mean, who must earn his living by writing, and so must always write. For it is more difficult for a second-rate writer not to be vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. It uncoils from somewhere inside you, like a nasty, sticky snake. So slick it is, too. So helpful, often. And when you see it for the first time you stare at it transfixed, and you say, ‘But I am not vulgar!’ But you get used to it later on. Very few people notice it. Most people like it. And, of course, it pays.”

“The golden snake,” she said. “It’s quite a good snake. It is silly to despise money.”

“Writers,” I said, and, I think, said rightly, “love money, they adore money! Successful writers, I mean. The ones who have become venerable, the ones who have made great names by writing about the irony of life and the incapabilities of wealth, the writers of the people for the people. They worship money, they hoard money. One and all despise rich people, and are perfectly beastly about the upper-classes. You should ask any publisher about the business capacity of any great author who writes about the Irony of Life. To really intelligent men of the middle-classes, living in sin does not seem nearly so wicked as living in luxurious sin. I only know one successful author who has the decency to get drunk with his easily-earned money. One should keep a sense of proportion about money, and you can only do that by throwing it away. The Jews, for instance⁠—”