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

II

And that was how, soon after midnight that night, I found myself for the first time in the car of the flying stork. For the first time.⁠ ⁠… Iris had dropped her boyish-looking chauffeur in the course of the evening, because, she said, she only liked driving at night, when the air blew clean and chill. She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel. The great bonnet swept round by the squat Palace and up the slope of Saint James’s Street, which only by night may remember a little of the elegance it has long since forfeited by day.

“But that’s not the point,” I remember saying. “He won’t care a button what anyone else is thinking about it. He’ll just go mad at the humiliation in himself, he’ll worry it, making a mountain of sordidness.⁠ ⁠…” I had told her that Gerald had sent her his love, and her eyes had lit up at that, and she had laughed, shyly. “That’s better,” she had said, and now she said: “Yes, that’s the point. He’s proud, proud as Lucifer⁠ ⁠… and such a baby! Oh, Gerald, you sensitive beast! I’m going abroad tomorrow, and he must either come with me or he must join me quickly, quickly. You’ll persuade him, too, won’t you?” I did not say that, if I knew Gerald, he would probably be in a state far beyond persuasion. But, I thought, there was no harm in trying to see him.

At first, when Guy had told me downstairs at the Loyalty, I had just laughed. It seemed so absurd, fantastic. Gerald had been arrested in Hyde Park for “annoying women!” It was, you can see, unbelievable. How could Gerald “annoy” a woman, Gerald who was so shy that he could never even speak to one? “But there it is,” said Guy.

Perhaps it is because that was the last time I was ever at the Loyalty, but I remember the most irrelevant details and the vivid way each one of them seemed to impress some part of my mind. Guy and I stood in the deserted Bar. Through the open door at the far end came the clean, somehow biting tang of a marble swimming-bath: a faint splash now and then, a rustle of water: a boyish American voice calling sharp and loud: “Dive, you Julie, dive and get it over! You’ve got no hips, kid, and you can’t drown without hips. I want to go eat some food.” Then, I remember, Billy Swift walked intently past us, towards the Cloakroom. He comes to mind vividly because that was the last time I saw Billy Swift alive. His thin, lined, scarlet face glowed with the health-giving breezes that penetrate into corners of clubs and restaurants where men sit drinking brandy; his blue eyes always peered eagerly and kindly at you, as though he had something of the first importance to say. He said, very hoarsely: “There’s a boy up there dancing with two wooden legs. Good boy, I call him. Good night.” And in a minute or two he repassed us, walking intently, his crimson grey-haired head, immaculate in every detail, sticking like an old fighting-bird’s out of the wide astrakhan collar of the coat that he always wore against the midnight chill. Two months later he was found on the cliffs near Dover with that head beaten in, and someone was hanged. Billy Swift wouldn’t have had him hanged. “My fault,” he would have said hoarsely. “My fault, chaps.”

“But there it is,” Guy said thoughtfully. “Sickening, isn’t it? Might appeal, of course.⁠ ⁠…”

“He’ll not appeal,” I said. Imagine Gerald “appealing” against a five-pound fine for “indecently annoying” a woman in Hyde Park!

Guy always spoke low, he murmured in a chill voice, but you could always hear every word he said. Not that you didn’t, after a while, know all his words by heart, for Guy’s was one of those vocabularies that a classical education is supposed to have expanded. As he spoke he would always be looking at some point just above the crown of your head.

“Sorry about that boy,” he was saying thoughtfully. “He’s had no luck. And this Hyde Park business might happen to anyone nowadays.⁠ ⁠…” He looked down at me suddenly from that height of his, and I was, as always, surprised by the profound childishness which would suddenly sweep the ice out of the blue of those eyes.

“Beasts,” he went on, almost pathetically. “But aren’t they⁠—those Park police? Arresting nice old clergymen, Privy Councillors, anyone, just because a poor old boy who’s been brought up too well feels like having a word or two with a sickening woman. I mean, you need torpedo-netting around you to get round the Park in safety nowadays. Well, don’t you? And now they plant poor young Gerald. I’m sure, aren’t you, that these police put the women there on purpose as⁠—what d’you call them?”

“Agents provocateurs?”

“Well, have it your own way. But I’ve been watching the police round about here lately, and of course they’re mostly very good fellows, the best, but the police round the Park are quite a different lot. I’d like to kick them for the way they look those poor devils of women up and down as though they were dirt. I never thought much of the type of sneak who went for the Military Police during the war, and these fellows seem rather like that. Anything for an arrest and promotion.” He smiled faintly. Guy’s eyes seemed always to get most frosty when he smiled. “I once promoted some of them the wrong way for being inhuman. Inhuman, that’s what these blighters get if you don’t keep an eye on them. And these Park fellows seem somehow to have got spoilt since the war. I mean, it just looks like that to an outsider. Good Lord, you’ve got to have laws and to keep laws, but you needn’t set a lot of dirty sneaks at the Bolshevik game of ruining gentlemen just for being silly old asses.”

I stared at the one black pearl that from time immemorial had stained Guy’s shirtfront, which somehow seemed to fit him as no one else’s ever could. Guy was easy to listen to, because you always knew what he would say and how he would say it. (He had an enormous reverence for any man of the smallest talent, any man “who did things with his brain.”)

“I saw him for a minute this evening,” I said. “He seemed rather queer, but he said nothing about it.⁠ ⁠…”

“But imagine the young devil! This business happened one night last week, and he doesn’t then come to see you about it⁠—or even Hilary or me, because, of course, I’d have done all I could for him, for old Barty’s sake as well as because he behaved himself in the war. I mean, this will almost kill old Eve Chalice when she sees it in the morning papers. It’s her I’m sorry for, for she’s always been fighting this sticky patch in the March brood⁠—first her eldest brother, old Portairley, then her younger brother, Barty, then her niece Iris, and now young Gerald comes along to make the poor old dear cry her eyes out again. God, the vileness of it! Picking up odd women in parks. I haven’t got a paper with me, but you ought to see the vile way they put down every beastly detail, and you can see as clear as anything that it was more bad luck and childishness on Gerald’s part than anything else. But, good Lord, what’s the matter with the man! I mean, one simply doesn’t go into the Park for women! The accuser, or whatever you call them, was a woman called Spirit, and in evidence two plainclothes men and a constable. I’m going to have an eye kept on Mrs. Spirit, just to see all’s fair and square. I mean, it’s beginning to look as though the law was the ass that St. George forgot to kill while he was showing off with that sickening dragon. This Mrs. Spirit said⁠—wish I had a paper⁠—that she was sitting on a bench waiting for her brother, when Gerald sat down beside her and made ‘indecent’ proposals. Whereupon she was so shocked⁠—and she a grown-up married woman, too⁠—that she jumped up like a scalded cat and let out some sickening howls, and up come the police. Now you can’t help thinking they were waiting behind a tree with old Spirit as a bait, can you? and caught young Gerald instead of a Dean.⁠ ⁠… They’d get more promotion, I shouldn’t wonder, for a Dean.⁠ ⁠…”

And as Guy spoke I saw Gerald glancing at the evening-paper on the curb of Curzon Street, and I saw him suddenly throw back his head and laugh at the heavens.⁠ ⁠…

Gerald, Gerald! The despiser of the world caught by the meanest trap of the world’s unrest. The worshipper of the hero who had died “for purity” figuring in the filthy columns of the cheap Sunday Press as another peer’s nephew gone wrong. Gerald, starved of life, Gerald who knew no woman, Gerald who wrote the tale of a man who had lived “for purity”⁠ ⁠… and he had sat down beside a woman called Spirit on a bench in Hyde Park. Those nightmare women who rave in the minds of lonely men, soft women marvellously acquiescent, possible, the woman Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, silent as marble, but acquiescent⁠ ⁠… and Aphrodite had dwindled into Mrs. Spirit, who was sitting waiting for her brother in Hyde Park, and the law lurking nearby to give the Sunday papers “copy.” And I saw Mr. Auk in an angle of the little tunnel, telling a friend of his something funny about Gerald.⁠ ⁠…

“It makes one just sick, Guy. Sick.⁠ ⁠…”

“Now look here,” Guy murmured, tapping my shoulder with one finger. “Don’t you waste any time being sick just now, but go round and see the young devil⁠—”

“I’m going straight away.”

“Bright boy. And just⁠ ⁠… Oh, tell him it’s all right and not to be an ass all his life. Tell him we’re all on his side, and if there’s going to be any being sick that we’re all going to be sick together and in one corporate body, or words to that effect. Poor young devil. And I know he’ll be feeling this, because I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string⁠—”

“And drink’s made him worse now. He’s almost certain to be nearly speechless tonight. But I’ll see.”

“Lord, O Lord, what a mess Barty left behind him! But you see what I mean? All you’ve got to tell young Gerald is not to make a mountain of this in his mind, as it’s the sort of thing that might happen to anyone who is ass enough to go into the Park at night without an escort, and you never know but they mightn’t one night arrest the Bishop of London himself for saying ‘How do’ to his aunt.⁠ ⁠…”

Now I have read in books about people “sailing” into places, and I suppose Iris came into the deserted Bar like that. Hilary must have been just behind her, for I heard his voice, but I only saw Iris, and I remember how she seemed to hold the white ermine round her with one clenched hand, and how the great emerald shone like a green fly on the soft, soft white. And the tawny curls danced their formal dance on her cheeks as she came towards us, swiftly, oh swiftly, saying, in that suddenly strong, clear voice: “Oh, Guy⁠ ⁠… and friend of Gerald! Will you help me, dear friend? I want to go round to see Gerald, and Hilary says you still have the key of the house. I went hours ago, but I could get no answer at the door. I wonder, would you come with me?”

“Iris,” said Guy sternly, and I remember the way she threw back her head to look at him, and I thought again of the queer, unconscious way she had of always meeting men on their own ground. “Why don’t you ever look up your old friends when you’re in London, Iris? Or aren’t we your old friends? Or is that fine representative English gentleman, Colonel Duck, your old friend? Answer me yes or no.”

“Oh, Guy!” she said softly, sadly. “I wouldn’t have you be a humbug. I wouldn’t have you and Hilary be humbugs⁠—you two, out of all the world.”

“But, honest, Iris, I’d like to see you. Ask Hilary. ‘Where’s that girl got to?’ I asks, and he says ‘hm,’ says he, if you see what I mean.”

“Whereas I, Guy, have learnt not to regret old friends. I’ve become an old woman on my travels, and one of the first things an old woman must learn is that the best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends⁠ ⁠… which is, perhaps, a little different from being ‘old friends.’⁠ ⁠…”

“Iris, don’t be so bitter!” snapped Hilary. That, I thought, came rather well from Hilary. Just at that moment a woman screamed from the swimming-bath, there was a resounding splash. Guy was saying: “You’d better take Gerald away for a while, Iris.”

“If he’ll only come,” she said, “that’s what I want to do.⁠ ⁠…”

I remember thinking just then that I mustn’t forget to thank her for that beautiful notepaper, and also to ask her what was that last word in her note.

“I’ve got an idea,” Hilary was saying, in the specially detached voice he keeps for ideas, “that now we are in this foul nightclub we might as well do a bit of good. There’s old Pollen upstairs, and we might⁠ ⁠… hm, well, perhaps not.”

“Perhaps not what, Hilary?”

“Hm. I was thinking of Eve seeing the thing in tomorrow morning’s papers. She only reads one wretched picture-paper, and that’s Pollen’s, so I thought, hm, that if we asked him not to.⁠ ⁠…”

“Eve, the poor darling!” Iris whispered. We seemed to be in a desert, three shadows of men, three shadows of voices, and Iris, very white and alight. That is how I always remember her, alight.

“No good, Hilary,” Guy was murmuring. “He won’t, because it’s what those fellows call News. And if you try you will only upset young Venice and make her perhaps feel she’s in the other camp, rather the wrong camp for her, she might think, and just as she’s marrying Naps. She’s a good girl, loyal as anything to her father⁠—and he’s a good fellow enough, but he’s got a queer complaint called Consistency. It’s something you make money out of, I think. I know him very well, as I’ve blackballed him from three clubs. My God, ever seen the man’s jaw?”

“She’s lovely, I thought,” Iris said.

“Good girl, Venice.⁠ ⁠…”

“Hell⁠ ⁠…” said Iris suddenly, breathlessly.

“What?” Hilary jumped.

“Only⁠ ⁠… hell is raving with millionaires with jaws like Mr. Pollen’s. I’ve dreamt, I know. People who snap ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ very brusquely and then stick to it, no matter what it is. This century likes them like that. Come along, my friend, come along!”

And in a trice Iris and I were walking up the long passage which connects the Loyalty Club to the pavement of Pall Mall. On one side it is hung (but this is two years ago) with glass cases laden with fine cut jades and ambers, while small blue and green figures of animal men, human animals, and bestial gods will delight the eyes of Egyptologists: on the other the faces of beautiful women and children will testify to the photographic art of Sebastian Roeskin of Dover Street. Iris walked swiftly, heroically, her eyes intent before her, impersonal, utterly unselfconscious. The glaring lights in the passage lit her swiftly-moving green-and-silver shoes, or were they sandals with high heels? and so intent were the flippant silver-flashing ankles, briskly striding on, as though chiming the never-to-be-known marching song of a lady who must always meet men on their own ground.

She said: “You’ll be wondering how I came to dine with a man like Victor Duck. Well, I’ve been wondering myself. Poor Victor Duck. He has taken to caddishness like a drug, and he goes on increasing the doses. It’s almost fascinating to watch, just to see what inevitable things he will say next. And he said and did them all, every one, even to ‘Dear little girl’ and to ordering a private room. But I said I never dined in private rooms on Fridays.”