The Green Hat · V · Chapter 5 1 (1/2)

I

On a bitter afternoon in the last week of January of the year 1923 the writer found himself in the Place Vendôme in Paris.

Now here, in the Place Vendôme, is material ready to the hand of the as yet undiscovered chronicler of lofty frivolities: such, unfortunately, as am not. But I can, at least, count up to fifty. There were forty-eight motorcars in the Place Vendôme, and one coach-and-six.

The Place Vendôme is a paradox in grey stone. Spacious, noble, monumental, it is cast, even at the stranger’s first glance, in an everlasting mould. The Place Vendôme is, without a doubt, one among the few things about which we may say with certainty: “That will last.” And yet, monumental and everlasting though it is, what do we find in the Place Vendôme? Do we find therein the practice of the seven arts, the learning of the nine humanities, the study of any one among the august array of sciences, nay, the application of any one among the Ten Commandments? We do not. We find forty-eight motorcars and one coach-and-six. We find that it is given over only to the frivolities of the trivial of two worlds and to every sort of “high-minded depravity” that may occur to the enfeebled wits of the exquisite. We find, in other words, that the Place Vendôme is the centre of that floating population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre of which, under the lofty title of l’aristocratie internationale, the Chevalier Gilulio di Risotto is the ultimate servitor. The Place Vendôme is, therefore, no place for a plain man, nor by any means a safe station for the man in the street: there are motorcars kept in readiness to run them over.

Across the Place, from the rue de la Paix to the rue de Castiglione, dash forever the nimble green Citroën taxicabs; whilst from the rue de Castiglione to the rue de la Paix will march the Renaults de luxe with scarlet wheels, passing in a fancy of cool brown eyes and the poudre à la maréchale of Bourbon days. Here and there among them, maybe, will flash the racing Bugattis of the dark young men a gigolo, a rastacouère, a “racingman.” They will come to no good.

And always the great column on which Napoleon stands rises to the clouds, but no one cares about that. All they care about are the forty-eight automobiles and one coach-and-six which stretch, in ordered array of two lines, from the foot of his column to the entrance of the Ritz. The shops are loaded with diamonds as large as carnations and with carnations as expensive as diamonds. The shopkeepers are very polite, and courteously do not mind how many you buy. Americans buy. Englishmen watch the Americans buying. Grand Dukes wait for the Englishmen to dare them to have a cocktail. A few Frenchmen are stationed at those strategic points where they can best be rude to the English and Americans. Then the English and Americans tip them. The women do not wear stays, and insist on their men shaving twice a day.

“Well, at last!” sighed my sister, as her car, colourless with dust, was added to the forty-eight. I had been in Europe for four months, had lately joined some friends at Cannes, had chanced on my sister there, and had motored back with her to Paris. We were foul with dust, numbed with cold, aching with tiredness, and this was because we had “done” the six hundred odd miles from Cannes in two days and a few hours. The devil was in it if there was any reason why we should not have taken three days, or four, or five. But, then, why do people say “phone” for “telephone”? Thus, they get an illusion of speed.

We went into the hotel. The long, narrow, crimson lounge was crowded with tea-drinkers. “But what a crowd of women!” said my sister. But there were quite a few people in men’s clothes. Au Réception.

“I-want-a-room-and-bathroom-please,” my sister said.

“Madame?” The dark-suited gentlemen of the Réception looked up from their desks at my sister, saw that her clothes were not bad and that she was in a hurry, and looked away again.

My sister repeated herself, in that dead and faintly aggressive tone in which women ask for what is very probably going to be denied them. “I wired,” she added. Liar.

I went towards the concierge’s box. He was a nice man, and had a white imperial.

“Is Mrs. Storm staying in the hotel?”

“Sir?”

“Could you tell me if Mrs. Storm is⁠—”

“No, sir, no, sir. Not at present, sir.”

“I thought that, as her car was outside.⁠ ⁠… A yellow Hispano.”

“That is so, sir. Parfaitement. L’Hispano jaune.”

“But Mrs. Storm, you say, is not in the hotel?”

“No, sir. Not at present, sir.”

“Then, perhaps you may know, she has sold or lent her car to someone?”

“That is so, sir. Madame a prêté l’Hispano. Merci, monsieur.”

“You couldn’t possibly give me any idea of Mrs. Storm’s present address?”

“Pardon, monsieur.⁠ ⁠… Timbre, monseigneur? De quinze centimes, un. Merci, monseigneur. L’automobile à huit heures moins quart? Parfaitement, monseigneur.⁠ ⁠… I have no instructions, sir. That was the gentleman to whom madame has lent her motor. Le duc de Valaucourt.”

“Thank you. But Mrs. Storm, you say, is in Paris?”

“Sir? Je suis sans instructions, monsieur. Madame?”

“What is it, what is it?” asked my sister.

“Nothing,” I said. “Got a room? Good. I am going to the Westminster, and I’ll come at half-past eight, shall I, and take you out to dinner?”

“Yes, but not here. It’s crowded with minor royalties that you can’t stand with your back to anyone except the orchestra. Larue?”

She had no sooner turned towards the lift than my name was cried in an agony of exultation. My sister says that my face as I started round was a face of fear.

“Only the other day,” cried Mr. Cherry-Marvel, exercising, with incredible perfection of gesture, his eyes, shoulders, hands, wrist, beautiful teeth, tiepin and handkerchief, “we were talking about you.⁠ ⁠…” But it was ever one of Mr. Cherry-Marvel’s many social charms that, the instant he saw you after an absence, he would make it his business to give you the impression that people had been interested in nothing else but you during your absence. Not, of course, that he stopped there; he had other things to say, too. “Of course what I really must tell you first of all, is that Henri Daverelle, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day, apropos of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind, will appreciate at its full value.⁠ ⁠…”

Cherry-Marvel was an artist enslaved by his art: he could not see you but he and you must instantly fall under its dominion; for it was an art too perfectly modulated to admit of hurry, it was an art too sensitive to admit of interruption. Indeed, a wicked little gleam would flash across his wicked old eyes if you so much as made to interrupt him. Pitiless to himself, he was only the less pitiless to you in so far as you were not himself; and, should you be a boor and leave him suddenly, you might hear the dry, clear voice dying in the distance, but dying hard, rising and falling to the fullest and most pregnant sense of each period; for his, you understand, was an art not of selection but of detail, and must always and be continually expending itself.⁠ ⁠…

“Ava Mainwaring, whom, of course, you know as well as I do, was saying to me only the other day, apropos of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind.⁠ ⁠…”

Essentially an aristocrat, in person dainty, neat, fastidious, Cherry-Marvel’s art was essentially democratic, for it abhorred all limitations and exacted from him its complete display on every occasion, whether lofty, literary, or plebeian, which came before his relentlessly alert eyes; and you can hear, through the last sixty years of English social history, the rise and fall of Cherry-Marvel’s voice, each word dropping on a stunned silence like a long-polished jewel. Eager, exquisite, always prepared, always with a handkerchief fluttering between his breast-pocket and the corner of his eye, you must imagine him against the tapestry of wasted time, a figure of ancient, aesthetic dandysme, on immaculate lawns, in drawing-rooms, up and down terraces of palazzos, in clubs and cabarets. You might enter a spacious drawing-room in Rome, a museum in Naples, a friend’s villa in Capri, you might stray from your boat in a South Sea lagoon into the smoking-room of the hotel, you might steal a moment from your companions to see the moonlight on the Pyramid.⁠ ⁠… Oh, you might be anywhere, and suddenly you would hear that voice, rising and falling, relentless, ageless, enchanting even lions to silence, with here and there a sudden, profound drawl on one word, any word, “de‑ar,” and you would, fascinated, be compelled to face him⁠—there, with full pale lips drawn wide apart, wicked blue eyes absorbed with cunning ecstasy in your stunned attention, the while, infinite as fate, he joined together the perfected pieces of his art with the word “whereupon,” which lounged from his tongue in a crescendo to a cry of sadic exaltation. And while you laughed at some elaborately phrased conceit, wondering how he had remembered the order of the words so well, he would watch the effect of his art with kind, cunning eyes, one wrist suspended in the air, his handkerchief fluttering towards the corner of his eye, in consummate politeness to show how he, too, by your laughter, was appreciating the full flavour of his art⁠ ⁠… “whereupon Elsa, who, by the way, had really a very amusing experience in Venice last Autumn, and one which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind.⁠ ⁠…”

Now, if anyone could tell me where Iris was to be found, Cherry-Marvel was that man. Cherry-Marvel knew, of course, everybody, and he knew everything about everybody⁠ ⁠… “of course it’s absurd to suppose that Alice, with her intelligence, which I am positive makes its full appeal to you⁠—it is absurd to suppose that Alice could for one moment have thought that her husband, whom of course you know as well as I do, would divorce her for going to Brighton with Cubby Tyrell, because, as I was pointing out to her sister only the other day, for one thing no decent man, and I am sure you will agree with me about this, would care to let it be known that his wife had ever gone to Brighton, and for another, and this, of course, is a Biblical detail which I am sure that you will grasp at once, Cubby Tyrell, who is a very intimate friend of mine, has been allowed, in spite of having been married twice, to remain a member of the Celibates Club.⁠ ⁠…”

At this time I hadn’t the remotest idea as to where Iris was or how she did. I had not seen her since the night of her brother’s death; and had been permitted to gather from Hilary that he knew as little as I did of her whereabouts. Secret she had always been in her absences, Hilary said, or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively in hiding.

She had, a few weeks after that terrible night, written me one long letter: from some place near Rome, from a draughty house, so she wrote, on a hill of strangled olives. There was no address on the notepaper, and this, she wrote, was because she did not want me or anyone to write to her. “Please,” she added to that.

Her letter was presumably in answer to two of mine addressed to the care of Mrs. Oden of Montpellier Square, but she was at the pains to excuse it on the ground that she and I were tied together⁠—“no, tied apart!”⁠—by a bond, the existence of which I would never, never know. Well! It was, you can see, a feverish, mysterious letter; and made how much more mysterious by that almost illegible, pencilled scrawl! There were whole sentences on the first few pages which I could not make out at all, which I made almost blind guesses at, while at some I could not even contrive so much.

“It is your fault, my friend. You paved the road up which I raced in chase of the Blue Bird. Yours was the appointed dark finger in the darkness. May God forgive you, for I can’t. I will try, but I think I can’t. There is a waterfall of fire.⁠ ⁠…”

Sheets upon sheets of it, that letter is before me now, and still I am unable to decipher whole sentences from that maze of pencil-marks on the thin Italian paper. There was one that stared at me, shocked me, in the middle of the second page⁠—“I may hate you”⁠—but I could not, do what I would, make out the words above or below.

“… I am lonely beyond bearing, and afraid. I am so afraid. I wonder, will you understand? But if I bore you take courage, for I will not bore you again. You are my friend, and this is my goodbye. Forgive me, dear, the arrogance of calling you my friend. But I am so afraid. Et, satyr bien-aimé, j’ai raison.⁠ ⁠…”

I could, you can understand, make neither head nor tail of it. She might hate⁠—me! She might, heaven knew, be indifferent to me, but why, how, hate? And satyr bien-aimé was all very well, but it meant nothing.

On the later pages she seemed to have controlled her hand a little, but her mind, if one might judge, remained⁠ ⁠… well, was that, perhaps, the effect on a mind of a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives? “I am lonely, but I have always been lonely since I was eighteen. Yes, I can trace my loneliness since then. It is a long time.”

This letter, you must remember, came only a month after Gerald’s death. She wrote of that night, and here her haunted pencil was at its most firm, if that is saying anything. “There I stood in the old, old darkness⁠—how old darkness is, have you ever felt?⁠—while you were upstairs in Gerald’s room. And I listened, but I could not hear you moving, so I imagined you to be staring at Gerald from the door, as you and I did that night a million years ago, when, do you remember, you suddenly, strangely from your heart, made that defiant courtesy to my hand? And, do you know, I almost cried because of your kindness to that poor, helpless sweet. Oh, Hilary has told me about you, and you luring Gerald off to a Home, but all in vain, my poor Gerald. And then I heard you switch out the light, and down you came, slowly, slowly, more silent than the darkness, and when you spoke your voice was as old as the darkness. But you are very young really, else you couldn’t be so defiantly, so imperiously, kind. And I remember wondering why you said you had no matches left, for before you went upstairs I had seen a box half-full in your hand, but I said to myself: ‘He has forgotten, and he is wretched at his friend’s weakness.’ Ah, you should have told me about Gerald there and then, indeed you should! But you did not, for my unworthy comfort’s sake. Dear, you have a fine touch for the affections⁠—but cruel, that is what you were, cruel. You laid your foot down on the soil of kindness, but where your foot fell there leapt up a dandelion⁠ ⁠… and in the heart of the dandelion a tiny little rose; but what, my friend, is one little rose surrounded to suffocation by a huge dandelion?”

Well! Puzzle this way, puzzle that way, I couldn’t make a glimmer of sense out of that passage. I was pleased, of course, that she seemed to like me, but as to the rest.⁠ ⁠…

Guy, as he had told me he would, had been to see her early in the morning. He had⁠—another friend of childhood⁠—overruled Mrs. Oden, saying it would be better not to wake Iris and bring her downstairs at that hour, for could there be a better place than bed in which to receive bad news? Mrs. Oden knew him of old, he was Apollo Belvedere to Mrs. Oden. She had been desperately upset about his news, coming as it did on top of what she had read about Gerald in that morning’s paper. Poor Mrs. Oden.