The Green Hat · IV · Chapter 4 1 (1/2)

I

One chapter can’t reasonably be expected to bear the weight of that night. We have so far built but the groundwork of that night, and on that we have now to shape a peculiar edifice, according to the flimsy but saturnine manner of the third decade of the twentieth century; to which majority the twentieth century has attained, as more austere histories will tell you, only after the most unparalleled pains, retchings, belchings and bellowings; but we, taking a more private course, will be more circumspect in our derangements.

We have, so far that night, seen Gerald Haveleur March, by the way. We have seen his evening paper; but we have not read it. (Nor had Hilary read his Evening Standard. He always “glanced at it,” he excused himself later on, as he was going to bed. As I did, if ever.) We have, also by the way, noted the presence in London of the car of the flying stork. We have dined, and had some brandy. We have talked of purity, and discovered an amiable dissonance in our views thereon. We would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed, for after dining with Hilary one somehow always went straightway to bed. That was why, Guy said cruelly, one dined with Hilary. The “hm’s” seemed to soothe the way thither. But that evening, however it came about, I did not feel that I would like to go straightway to bed. One has, I suppose, moods.

But I can’t account plausibly for the fact that Hilary came with me to the Loyalty. Hilary did not go to nightclubs. His moods took a more exclusive course. He ignored nightclubs, and thought he was ignoring the whole of folly. Not so superior, I! Wherefore it passed that I discovered my mood to Hilary as we stood in the hall of his house, for Hilary was accompanying me to the door. Ross, red and silent and amiable, stood somewhere about with my hat. Where we stood, just without the door, the unusually warm June night smiled kindly on us. There is not much sky in London, but that little smiled on us with a faint load of stars, and somewhere behind the roofs there might be hanging a moon. There might? But there was such a pretty tilted silver boat among the chimneys of Curzon House! From the small table in the hall Hilary had absently taken up the evening-paper, which was folded in that way which tells you in the Stop-Press News that Surrey has scored 263 for eight wickets. He held it in his hand with that air of one who has nothing left to do but read an evening-paper. Grey and thoughtful and kind, he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during their holidays. “Hm,” he said. “Nice night.⁠ ⁠…”

“Hilary, why don’t you come with me? It won’t probably be amusing, but we can always come away.⁠ ⁠…”

“Dancing,” he frowned. Hilary likes dancing, really. Only, not being exactly supreme among dancers, he never can understand how good dancers may like dancing so much that they will dance whenever they can. If Hilary had been a writer he would have put very witty and biting bits about dancing into his books. All writers have clumsy feet.

I made to assure him that he would find himself in the most polite company, for the Loyalty Club was notable as a relaxation for Government, diplomacy, and princes of the blood. He “hm’d” viciously at that, but set out with me down Curzon Street and through the noisome shadows of Shepherd’s Market. Gerald’s light was on. But now that I was not there to turn it out, when would Gerald’s light not be on?

Through the deep cavernous artery of Whitehorse Street we emerged on to Piccadilly, quiet as before the storm that would at any moment break on it from the theatres. Buses, their lights within revealing the seats, fled madly as though from a doomed city. Loitering taxicabs, attracted like moths to a flame by walking silkhats, came near the curb, hung in doubt, loitered on.

I wondered whether she would be at the Loyalty. She might. I wondered whether she could have accepted the sacrifice of herself “for purity” without question, without bitterness. She would⁠—that “Chislehurst mind!” Oh, yes, she would have agreed with that idealist’s harshest judgment⁠—indeed, she had agreed with it so completely that she had plucked two words from her heart and given them to the world to whip her with. Boy Fenwick, you could see, had impressed himself like an anchorite’s scourge on the souls of the twins. What was it she had said? “It would be nice to die for purity.” Heavens, but wasn’t she sickened of purity! That pitiful, pitiless moment in the bedroom of the Hôtel Vendôme! The messy kindergarten that men make of love, and call it “romance,” “idealism”! Perhaps Judas was the first idealist⁠—that desperate, exalted betrayal of the body to the soul. They are so certain about their souls, your carnal idealists! Soul, soul, soul! May their punishment be to meet their souls face to face in the afterworld! One could see that boy, a slim pyjama’d figure by the window, a silhouette of cold fire with the ruin of all mankind in his clean eyes, staring through the meretricious dawn of Deauville towards the goal to which he was exalted beyond reason by his disenchantment. He had loved Iris madly.⁠ ⁠… But they do not love, those men! They torture, and are tortured. They take love as they might take a flower out of a garden, and they torture it because it does not thrive so well in the water of their tears as in the water of God’s good sense. They do not love, those men, they stand in wonder before the power to love that is in them. And theirs the pleasure of a spurious conceit; theirs the pain of a spurious disenchantment. If that boy had loved, he would have turned towards the bed on which she lay, beaten, silenced, a child groping for sense, for pity, for any reasonable thing, and he would have tried to understand, and maybe he would have found the grace to understand, that in her, despite and because of the hungers of the body, there was that frightful humility to an unknown purpose which makes the limitless beauty of some women. But the boy had lit a cigarette.⁠ ⁠…

“Don’t we cross?” muttered Hilary, and we crossed towards Jermyn Street, for the Loyalty Club lies in Pall Mall, to the end that, in immediate contact with the Royal Automobile Club, it may at least boast, as might occur to a student of Ruskin, a degree of eminence in the abyss.

One is, one can’t help being, impelled by a sense of decorum to disavow at once any connection which may be fancied by worldly readers between the Loyalty Club and the Embassy Club. Such connection could not, of course, be fancied if the Loyalty were so well known as the Embassy; but the Loyalty is, or was⁠—yes, was⁠—the daughter of the Embassy, and although it is not yet so well known to the people of the town, who shall say that a daughter is not more of the mode than her mother? Even, life being what it is, in spite of the mother.

The Loyalty sprang from the Embassy, and it sprang in a polite direction, from Bond Street down the hill of Saint James’s to Pall Mall, where it might lie over against Carlton House Terrace. It sprang because certain persons of ton had found that the Mother Society, while never ordered but with the most polite amenities, was growing perhaps just a little crowded with what-nots; had, by banding themselves in a body financial and social, founded the Loyalty; and were there assured of more freedom for the exercise of a reasonable exclusiveness since, the floor-space of the Loyalty being large enough to accommodate only one hundred and fifty dancers, the membership was strictly limited to one thousand and five hundred. Below were a swimming-bath and squash-courts, besides the more orthodox facilities; and while the whole place was appointed with the severest economy, if not with downright meanness, it is well known that those who spend more than a certain amount of money for supper, and see other people spending as much, will need no other assurance of being in surroundings of the first quality. That is a well-known French invention, of which England has only recently acquired the recipe.

The Loyalty Club can, however, claim no historical notice but in the person of the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, its directeur du restaurant. We need not interrupt ourselves here to envy the salary at which the Chevalier was with difficulty persuaded to leave his retreat at Rapallo; but that he was worth it nobody can gainsay, for wheresoever Risotto went he took with him his invention. His invention he called l’aristocracie internationale; his name, you understand, for his people; they loved it.

A study of the lives of philosophers and statesmen will inform and ennoble the mind; but a sideways glance at such a phenomenon as the twentieth-century Risotto cannot help but make it supple. One of the menials of all time, he is one of the successes of ours; and a portent of the doom of aristocracy in England. Born of Machiavelli by Demoiselle Demimonde, crafty, thin, pale, dry-shiny as shagreen, he had walked to fortune about every great restaurant in Europe, adding always, but with discrimination, to his order of l’aristocracie internationale; and to bankruptcy twice, of truly patrician magnificence, about the baccarat tables of his less inspired but more cautious colleague, M. Cornuché of Cannes and Deauville. The “creation” of the Loyalty Club must serve his biographers as the pinnacle of Risotto’s career. L’aristocracie internationale was ultimately served at last. Not an American was left on Fifth Avenue, nor an Argentine in the Americas; while Australian fruit-farms deplored the absence of their masters, and Canada adored the ton of her peerless millionaires.

We had no sooner entered among the company than Hilary was for going at once: but Risotto having rewarded us with a sofa-table⁠—for he and Hilary had, as the saying is, been boys together when Hilary had been attached to the Embassy in Paris and Risotto was ennobling patrons of the Ritz to l’aristocracie internationale⁠—he and I prevailed on Hilary to stay by ordering for him an angel-on-horseback, to which he was notably partial; while I, Risotto said, would have a haddock with a nice egg on it.

Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest nightclubs, at once left me to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. This was Mrs. Ammon. Whereas I, in not dancing, was following an example set by many present. We, we watched our elders dance with each other’s mothers, and for them the band on the balcony played with a sensibility approaching grief. There was no tune. But it is absurd, this querulous demand of young people for “tunes”! Our fathers and our mothers have done with “tunes.” Let there, our uncles say, be a rhythm. Let there, say our aunts, be syncopation. There was a rhythm. There was syncopation. Grave, profound, unforgettable, there was a rhythm. It had a beat like the throbbing of an agonised heart lost in an artery of the Underground. Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of past and passing things. It reminded you of the days when, people over forty had still enough restraint not to crowd out every ballroom and nightclub with their dancing in open formation, playfully aiming at each other’s tonsils with their feet. It reminded you of the scent tangled in the hair of she with whom you had last danced to that rhythm. You saw the soft line of her face by your shoulder, the tender pocket behind her ear, the absorbed excursion of her breath through her nostrils, the dark eyebrow over which you would lightly pass the third finger of your left hand but that it would soil the tip of it. You mourned the presence of the dead. You mourned the memory of the living. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of regret. It reminded you of a small white face suddenly thrown back against your arm with a smile that disturbed the dance. It reminded you of the desire that pleasantly turns to dust when you are desired. It reminded you of things you had never done with women you had never met. You danced again at the Ambassadeurs at Cannes, with the masts of yachts drawn ebony-black between the tall windows and the pale blue night over the sea. The Lido lay like a temptation before your mind, and the songs of the gondoliers raved into the measure of whispering feet. The Spanish King brushed by you at San Sebastian, eating salted almonds, again you hesitated in the dance at Biarritz to listen to the roar of the Atlantic, and across a perfumed street in Seville you again saw the shiver of a mantilla through the cracked window of a cabaret. You danced again beneath the vermilion moon of Algeria, between the American Bar and the pyramid-cypress tree. You danced again in the Bois in Paris, the trees like monstrous black pagodas against the night, the stars brilliant as sequins on an archangel’s floating cloak, the magically white faces of women, the lights in the night making love to the black shadows in their hair, their lips red as lobsters, their armpits clean as ivory, the men talking with facile gestures, the whole tapestry of the Château de Madrid like a painted fan against a summer night. They call this rhythm the Blues, which is short for a low state of vitality brought about by the action of life on the liver. O Baby, it’s divine!

That is what they say, our elders.

Astorias, chef d’orchestre, stood at rest by the edge of the balcony, his violin under his arm, his bow gently tapping the edge of a bowl of nameless ferns that hid his feet. His negligence is informed with depression, his poise leans on melancholy. The Blues, that man knows. He seems to wonder why he is there, why anyone is there, why everyone is there. No one can tell him, so he goes on doing nothing, lonely as a star in hell. He does not toil, nor spin, nor play his violin. From the crowded floor a woman, her face powdered brown, her mouth scarlet as the inside of a pomegranate in a tale by Oscar Wilde, beseeches him with an arm black-gloved to the shoulder to continue to play. He yields.

Nearby was a corner-table of eight young people. Maybe they would dance later on. Suddenly one of the girls would give a loud laugh, and then there would be silence. Of the four young men one looked as Richard of Gloucester might possibly have looked, a little bent, a little sinister, and pale, as though he had been reading a treatise on diseases far into the night before. They were four married couples, and they had all been boys and girls together, and they had a son and daughter apiece, and they all went to the same dentist. The women had white oval faces, small breasts, blue eyes, thin arms, no expression, no blood: literally, of course, not genealogically. One of them stared with wide blue eyes right into people’s faces, and blinked vaguely. She was lovely. These eight young people were very happy. They ignored everything but themselves, in whom they were not very interested. Presently a prince of the blood joined them, there was a little stir for a minute or two, a little laughter, and then he rose to dance with the girl of the blind blue eyes. As she danced she stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the ceiling. She looked bored with boredom.