The Green Hat · V · Chapter 5 1 (2/2)

Iris was asleep⁠—“Oh, as no man can ever know sleep!”⁠—when she awoke dimly to a tall shape at the foot of the bed. (“As no man can ever know sleep!” That, too, puzzled one, as well it might.) Dark it was, the curtains drawn, “and I remember them flapping peevishly because the door behind the tall shape was ajar. And I, scarcely awake, could think but of one thing, my awakening mind was hugging, in pain and joy, but one thing⁠ ⁠… and I called the shape at the foot of the bed by a certain name, a name which was not his name. He made no sign that he had heard the name which was not his name, and I am sure he instantly made himself forget it. For, as you know, Guy would defend a secret not only against the angels of God, but also against himself. ‘Guy!’ I cried at last, and he seemed to smile faintly, like the handsome absentminded god he is. ‘Yes, Guy,’ he said. ‘Sickening, isn’t it?’ Those high good looks of Guy’s, that small poised head⁠—frozen, tireless Guy! But that morning he was very gentle with me.⁠ ⁠…”

He had spoken for me, too, saying that I hadn’t told her of Gerald’s death at the time because she had looked so tired and sad. “Poor Iris,” Guy had said, “the men who don’t know you very well care very much for your comfort, but the three young men who have known you best of all have not cared enough.” Guy had said that, and she lying in bed, stunned, staring, while he sat holding her hand, as he might be an elder brother and she a hurt baby.

“He knew, you see, that I loved Gerald, that Gerald was a part of me, although Gerald had spent ten years in pretending that he hated me. Do you think, my friend, that I would have let myself be crucified on Boy’s death only for the sake of Boy’s cruel relations and friends? Two people Gerald worshipped in the world, but always he would have sacrificed Iris to Boy, that was always the way of Gerald’s heart. Above all things in this world I love the love that people have for each other, the real, immense, unquestioning, devouring, worshipful love that now and then I have seen in a girl for a boy, that now and then I have seen in a boy for a boy, that playmate love. It isn’t of this world, that playmate love, it’s of a larger world than ours, a better world, a world of dreams which aren’t illusions but the very pillars of a better life. But in our world all dreams are illusions, and that is why the angels have crows-feet round their eyes, because they are peering to see why all dreams in our world should be illusions.

“But you can’t, you see, get rid of the funny love between twins like Gerald and me just by the word ‘hate.’ Even Boy couldn’t really upset that. There was something peculiarly us about Gerald and me, something of blood and bone peculiarly us which nothing but death could destroy. And so Mrs. Spirit was sent into Hyde Park that the thing that was us might be forever destroyed.”

She had suddenly asked Guy, half-sitting on the bed beside her, what it was in the world he loved most, and he had said he was sorry to admit that he loved his son more than all the world. “I could have killed him for jealousy, just then I could, he who had everything to have also that. You don’t know the body-ache for a child, the ache that destroys a body⁠ ⁠… the lament for a child of love, a child of lovers.⁠ ⁠…

“He would be two and a half years old now, my son. Hector, you see, didn’t know anything about his son, because he left me in a temper before even I was certain. And naturally when I was certain I wasn’t going to be outdone in silliness by my own husband, and besides, I thought it would be mean to force him to come back if he didn’t really want to come back, and so I didn’t let him know. For men, I would have you know, might make an awful row and stamp away in a tearing jealous fit, and when they are away they might be as pleased as anything to have got away. You can never tell about men, especially when they are convinced that they are being genuine. But, of course, I knew he would rush back quickly enough when the baby came. Oh, I would see to that! And, my dear, the fun I would have all by myself, for Hector and I had always longed for a son, the fun I had thinking of the look on his face when one day he would get my wire in Ireland: ‘Arrival of Hector-not-so-proud. You come too.’ Can you imagine what he’d look like then, and he stern and handsome and all covered with V.C.’s and oddments, wasting his time chasing disgusting Sinn Feiners who wouldn’t know a country of their own if they saw it. I had that wire all nicely written out months beforehand, and I went and hid my ugliness in my old nurse’s home near Peterboro’ and stuck the wire with a pin over my bed, being superstitious, you see, and wanting a winner for once in a way. Well, and then⁠—Oh, and then they killed Hector just in time, and when Hector-not-so-proud came along he thought, the poor sweet, that the proper way for a gentleman to arrive in the world was toes first to slow music, and so away he had to go again.⁠ ⁠…

“I have done with England, and England has done with me. But I don’t think I shall be able to go and have tea with the Empress of China yet awhile, for just now I love England as I never before have loved it. The captains and the kings of England⁠—clean eyes, long shadows, low voices⁠ ⁠… why, I must hover, held in running as in a nightmare. And from the distance, from these lands of loud shrill voices, I will hear the low, low voices that I had long since thought I had given up regretting. Indeed, I was quite sure I had given up regretting them. But I am regretting them now, like a baby. Goodbye, dear, and God bless you. And when you think of me think instead of your words, ‘He has, with you,’ and you will have the sum of my pride in being liked by you.”

Often, during these past eight or nine months, that scrawled writing would pass my mind, but as I could hit on no clue to her fantasies, and as I might never see her again, I had put Iris carefully away into that part of our minds wherein we keep fancies, images, regrets, the things that we will do one day, the things that we would like to do one day, the things that we will never do again⁠ ⁠… when, but a moment ago, the great yellow car had leapt from the Place Vendôme into the first place in my mind, and I would like, I thought, to learn from my friend, Cherry-Marvel, anything that might be learnt about Iris. But as I listened to him, the way he had said this and had done that and had heard the other, I wondered how I would ever get the chance to suggest so much as her name to him. “… apropos of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind.⁠ ⁠…”

We stood, for we had not yet had time to sit down, in the little reading-room of the Ritz that leads from the entrance-doors, while stern-faced Americans turned over the pages of The New York Herald on the long marble-topped table in the centre, and a woman or two sat here and there absorbed in waiting, and the dowager Lady Tekkleham’s voice nearby was grimly suggesting to the Baron de Belus that he could not do better than let her drive him in her coach-and-six to dinner at her villa at Saint Germain-en-Laye.

Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey and my heavy coat, and weighed down, too, by the gloom of the early winter evening that was falling about us, so that my eyes, borne down by Cherry-Marvels amenities, could scarcely make out the chairs and flowers and vases in the long courtyard through the windows; and suddenly I fell to wondering how it had come about that Iris, who loved her proud swift car, had lent it to a friend, but the instant I mentioned her name Cherry-Marvel’s little eyes gleamed with fury at the interruption. I was abashed, yet I would try again, but⁠ ⁠… “whereupon Auguste de Maupin, whom, of course, you know as well as I do.⁠ ⁠…”

But at last I achieved the impossible, in inserting a wedge into the fabulous monologue, and then I murmured: “Ill? But are you sure, Cherry? Mrs. Storm is ill?”

But illness appalled Cherry-Marvel, from illness he could not help but turn away the neat, lined mask of his face, from illness his Florentine dandysme trembled away in the only unaristocratic emotion I have ever observed in Cherry-Marvel, the emotion of fear. “Quiet we call Silence, the merest word of all!” For, appalled by illness though he might be, his art could always rise to a general view.⁠ ⁠… He had heard in a roundabout way that Iris had had a “sort of minor operation⁠—”

“But,” I said⁠—

“Whereupon,” said Cherry-Marvel, his little eyes gleaming for a second with fury, “what I said was, ‘Operations, where are thy stings?’ for, as of course you know as well as I do, women are scarcely women without them, and I have not the faintest doubt that in Lesbos they suffered, if I may put it like this, from the impolite insistence of their womanhood even more than if there had been any men there, for as I was saying to Marc only the other day, apropos of the particular shade in which she had dyed her hair, men may come and men may go, but the moon, my dear boy, is always there. Now here, for instance, is Iris, quite one of the loveliest women I have ever seen, and one who, I am convinced, must be very fond of you with your sort of mind, here she has, I hear on the very best authority, fallen a victim to one of those mental derangements which seem, if I may put it like this, to be an irresistible incitement to polite surgery in quite another and more individual part of the person. But what I have always said about Iris is this, that I admire her so, and I am so positive that you also must, with your sort of mind, because she is one of the very few Englishwomen I have ever met who can, as I am sure you will agree with me, live abroad without becoming more and more English.⁠ ⁠…”