The Green Hat · I · Chapter 1 3 (2/3)

“Jews,” she said, “are charming. The rich ones, I mean, and preferably the fat shiny ones. They understand luxury and elegance, and elegance is an enchantment that the skin loves. But nowadays only Jews have an idea of enchantment, only Jews and Americans. Furs, jewels, spacious rooms, trellised terraces, all lovely baubles, silks of China, myrrh, frankincense, and motorcars. The Jews are disenchanted, but at least they’re brave enough to insist on having all the enchantments of disenchantment. Luxury, ease, splendour, spaciousness. You’ll say they’re florid. Well, they may be, they are, but they’re also the last towers of chivalry. Mr. Chesterton goes running after them shouting about beer and the Pope, but if you’re going to leave chivalry to beer-drinkers and the Pope, God help enchantment. You’ll say that the Americans’ indulgent admiration for their wives almost borders on the gaga, but they fight for it very really, they don’t just talk and indulge. They fight with money, they have the courage of their cheques, they dare tremendous duels, they get up at unearthly hours in the morning to dash towards the rendezvous, and they draw a cheque just as gallantly as any rather caddish cavalier ever drew a sword.⁠ ⁠…”

“Englishmen,” I said, “respect their women.⁠ ⁠…”

“Maybe,” she said absently.

We were impersonal. Now and then the wicker armchair creaked beneath her, and she looked at it with faint surprise. Now and then a car screamed on Piccadilly, an electric-landau sounded its bells through Shepherd’s Market towards its garage by Camelot House. Now and then her slightly husky voice expired. Then we waited a while. She stared deeply into the eyes of a mask which a Russian artist had once given me in exchange for a poker debt. It lay sideways against a corner of the fender. I waited for her to say something about that, for it was the mask of a Florentine gentleman that was a lecher. I had grown used to it, as one can grow used to anything, but people would remark on it adversely. The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where you are.

We became personal. She said: “Let us talk about our friends now.”

“Tonight,” I said, “I have been to a party at the Hallidays’.”

“Ah, the pitiless vulgarians! Surely, between us, we can do better than that!”

“There’s Hilary.⁠ ⁠…”

“The sweet! Can you not love Hilary? But tonight,” she said very seriously, “I have been dining with old Maurice Harpenden. How he would hate me to say old! I went out all the way to Sutton Marle to do that, because he expects it of me when I am in England. We are enemies, and we watch each other. He was very courtly. They are difficult to deal with, handsome old men who have known one since one was so high. You need to be a woman to know what I mean, but you must try to pretend for a minute. Thank you. Organically, of course, they are perfect. Good features and long legs and iron-grey hair. Character and clothes by Robert Hichens. They are very courtly, and then they touch one. Now, why do they do that? They pretend to do it in a friendly way, as any gentleman of the old school might to the daughter of another gentleman of the old school: but they make opportunities.⁠ ⁠…” The husky voice committed suicide, was buried, and in the third second rose from the dead. “I do not understand men. I do not understand the ‘old school’ type of man, nor what ‘old school’ means, unless it means that you never did anything at school except win the Battle of Waterloo. Then as soon as you left school you were qualified by good-looks, a charm of manner, and a habit of becoming popular with elderly men which is peculiar to right-minded young Englishmen, to become Major-General Sir Maurice Harpenden, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., and to lead your troops in battle with that gallant inefficiency patented by English infantry-commanders who know a good horse when they see one. After which you can spend the rest of your life in bantering. You can see that I do not like Maurice. We dine, and we are enemies, and we watch each other.”

“The sire doesn’t seem very like the son. Napier is a saint.⁠ ⁠…”

The chair creaked. She was looking at me from under her hat, gravely as a Red Indian. “There were two roads leading from a certain tree, and when we were eighteen life said to me, ‘You go this way,’ and life said to Napier, ‘You go that way.’ And so we did that, and so it has been.⁠ ⁠…”

Now I was staring at her mouth, which was a silky red mouth engraved with I don’t know how many deep downward lines, and my heart beat twice so loudly that I wondered if she had heard it, for she whispered sharply: “Listen!” But it was only a clock striking somewhere in London, and its striking was quickly done.

“I must go,” she said, but not even the armchair creaked, and her green hat was still crushed against the back of the chair, and her eyes were still staring profoundly over my shoulder. There was only the window there. The curtains were not drawn, and I thought I would draw them, but it seemed a pity to move. Her eyes glowed like an animal’s. She was staring, absorbed, over my right shoulder, but there was only the window there. She was asleep. Then her eyes dilated into glowing points, and her lips said: “On a envie.”

Then she made a gesture of distaste.

She said: “There are desires.⁠ ⁠…”

“Heavens, do you need to tell me that!”

“Oh, not those desires!” Expressionless, blazing eyes absorbed over my shoulder, she waved away “those desires.” I was snubbed.

“They call it,” she said, “the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will find it one day when we are dead and all things that live now are dead. They will find it when everything is dead but the dreams we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, nor opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there. Life’s best gift, hasn’t someone said, is the ability to dream of a better life.⁠ ⁠…”

The green hat crushed recklessly against the back of the chair, she stared, still and absorbed, at the names that friends of long-ago had written on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her eyes glowed, glowed like an animal’s. The light of the reading-lamp on the littered table by my elbow kissed her lip, and the light kissed the faint, faint down on her lip into a few minutes of existence as a garden of gold dust. A sword lay in my mind, twisting and shining among the inner grotesqueries where we keep ourselves, in the real sense, to ourselves.

I forced my mind to a more legal aspect of her. There were two rings on her wedding finger. A narrow circle of platinum, a narrow circle of gold. I wondered if she had been married twice. I tried to imagine her husbands. They would be tall, handsome men, and she would be passionately in love with them. She would, like all women in love with tall, handsome men, be worshipful as a dog. Physically they would be very courteous to her, but no more than courteous, and mentally they would, if I may say so, treat her rough. They would go to sleep quickly, and she would lie awake far into the night, pressing her breasts, because they hurt her. She would think. She would not think. Then one day, when she was between thinking and not thinking, she would be unfaithful, and the tall, handsome man who was her husband would apologise to her for not having understood her better. But she would say, with cold eyes: “There is nothing to understand. On a envie.” Then he would say, “Oh!” and instruct her lawyers to divorce him.

“I was trying,” I said, “to imagine your husband.⁠ ⁠…”

The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the hat one blue eye looked at me like a blue stone worn by fire. “Two,” she said. “They are dead.”

I wondered what she saw, looking over my shoulder. She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains. Then suddenly the headlines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled before my mind, stood livid against my memory, slashed with the name of Storm. I had not a doubt but that he had been her second husband. “V.C. murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C. Left on roadside with five bullet wounds.⁠ ⁠…”

She said suddenly: “I am a house of men.”

“What!” I said. “You surprise me.”

“A house of men. Of their desires and defeats and deaths. Of their desires, yes, of their deaths, yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great responsibility for me, and I have lodged complaints about it, but it is no use. I am a house of men. Ah me, ah me! Oh, dear! My friend, there is a curse, a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You will see it in my eyes one day, and you will be sorry for me.”

“You mustn’t believe in curses,” I said. “Good God, curses!”

“The Marches,” she said, “are never let off anything. That is the curse.”

Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far below, like pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of the sighs of Anaïtis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as they can in their minds. I said: “And so the house of March, fatal and damned, can never avoid its destiny.⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes,” she said reasonably, “it can avoid it. By not being weak enough to desire so strongly.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“I’m glad you see,” she said gravely. They listen to voices whispering dreams. While they listen, they do queer weak things. Of the soil sordid⁠—there is your March. But there is another March, who listens to voices whispering dreams. My father, Barty March, was, I think, one of the most loved men of his time. Like Napier is now, but of course Napier behaves. A policeman found Barty early one morning on the doorstep of a house we had then in Cambridge Square. He used to say he was never drunk until he closed his eyes, but this time he had closed his eyes into pneumonia. He only opened them once again, to look at Gerald and me, sixteen years old apiece. He smiled, you know, because Barty couldn’t help smiling. Besides, he was happy at last. “Avoid dreams,” he said. “Never stop to listen to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run over. Never sympathise with the moon when you can hear it, cold and lonely and blind, crooning to itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You will catch pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which men are men and women are women. You will go mad.⁠ ⁠…”

Her right hand hung limp over the arm of the chair. It was just faintly dirty, and the nails shone like pink ivory. The emerald on the third finger held my eyes enchanted for a long while. She smiled at my look, and as she lay her eyes swept falcon-like down to the stone. It made me rise out of myself, that falcon-like sweep of her clear eyes, and I thought of the pitiless misbehaviour of life, that had not let her stay within the sensible stability of marriage.

“It’s a bit loose,” she was saying.

“I was wondering. It’s such a beauty! Aren’t you afraid of it falling?”

She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself. “Oo, no! I have a knuckle. I crook it. And lo, it doesn’t fall.⁠ ⁠…”

“But this sounds like a plot!”

“It is a law,” she said. “There are four laws, variously entitled a, b, c, d. The law (a) declares, against all formerly-held beliefs, that a flower is less beautiful because it is sure to die. That is a religious law, having to do with the unworth of perishable things, if you see what I mean. The law (b) has something to do with the fact that all men with long legs make poor lovers. That is a pagan law. You might write an essay on the long arm of coincidence and the short legs of corespondents. It would be fun for you. The law (c) has something to do with exhorting a woman never to trust a man of honour, for he serves two mistresses. That is the law of good sense for amorous women, and will save them disappointment. The law (d) has to do with this ring, which is a bit loose, according to the directions of Jehovah.”

“You have mighty friends, Iris Storm!”

“Ah, I need them! Desire is a child with hungry eyes, and for him a dragon lies waiting. This ring is a charm against dragons.” The slightly husky voice dreamed. It was an hour for dreaming. She would mask unhappy things with passing talk. “I called him Jehovah because the same was a jealous God. And I would mock him with that, saying that it was I who should be jealous of him, for doesn’t a man of honour serve two mistresses, while it is well known of women of dishonour, I would mock him, that they never serve but one god at a time. But he never was a worldly man, and so eaten by doubt that you would have laughed if he hadn’t been such a pet.⁠ ⁠…”

“And so he gave you the emerald to be as a witness against you, and to testify against your frailty?”

“Now take,” dreamed the husky voice, the great eyes fixed on the ceiling; and there was a smile in them, like a distant wave of music; “now take a night in Algeria. Take also a hill, and on the hill a garden.⁠ ⁠…”

“The Hotel St. George, Mustapha Supérieur, Algiers⁠—”

“Ah, don’t forget the American Bar!”

“And the Benares bowls⁠—”

“And calorifères too hot or too cold⁠—”

“And Arab carpets from Victoria Street⁠—”

“And Americans with low heels⁠—”

“And a passion for ‘mailing postals⁠—’ ”

“Not to mention veal every day⁠—”

“And a Soirée de Gala every Saturday⁠—”

“And the best-dressed women⁠—”

“Of Tunbridge Wells.”

“But take instead some red and purple flowers against a yellow wall, some oranges, a tangerine or two, three gazelles on a tennis-court, poppies tall as choirboys, the cactus, the palm, and the pyramid cypress-tree. And watch, my friend, two shadows that walk in the wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress, that stands in the garden like a dark torch keeping watch over disillusion. It is night, or have I already told you that? Ah me, ah me, now will she who walks there ever forsake her love, will she ever be disloyal to her vows, that were made with so much pomp and circumstance in the Guards’ Chapel at Westminster before a congregation notable for the absence of all her husband’s relations? Why, her heart is confident, her heart is fragrant with the honey of that moon’s passage, and she knows what she knows. And yet, and here is a most pitiful thing, there must be something in her, some fatal abandon, that sets men doubting, for he who walked with her in the wicked shadow of the pyramid cypress wore the silence of the destroyer, so that her heart cried that he was misnamed, for the mortal disease of his heel was suspicion. Now I must tell you that it was Christmas Eve, and after a little desultory conversation he said: ‘Here is a present for you, sweet,’ and he gave me this emerald which you are kind enough to admire. ‘Alas,’ I said, ‘it is a little big for me! It may fall from my finger, don’t you see?’ ”

“ ‘Yes, it may fall,’ said he. ‘But if you are careful, my sweet, if you curve your knuckle in time, it won’t dream of falling, not it!’ And then I cried miserably, knowing there was a catch in this somewhere, for at that time I was not yet broken in and was still fearful of suspicion. And I cried: ‘Hector Storm, what do you mean?’ ”