The Green Hat · VII · Chapter 7 2 (2/2)

“Venice, that was kind!” Napier smiled with his whole thin, fine face, and I thought how glad I was that he didn’t know what had caused Iris’s illness, for would he then have smiled gratefully at Venice for inquiring after her? And he said, as though happy in her understanding: “I mean, we can start off first thing in the morning, can’t we? What? It’s rotten luck, cutting in on your holiday like this, but⁠—well, friendship has duties.⁠ ⁠…”

“But of course I understand, Naps!” And Venice turned at me, smiling as though to show me what sort of a man that Napier was. As though she didn’t understand! As though she didn’t know the duties of friendship! She said to Napier, with a fine air of business settled: “Well, I’ll just go upstairs now and tell Mary to unpack some things again. And I do so hope, Naps,” she said with a fine large smile, “that your friend won’t die, for then how will I manage a man who has nothing left to live for?” And Venice turned to me, and her hand was in mine, and we were saying goodbye, when Napier said briskly:

“Come on, then. We’ll go now. Might as well, now the car’s there.⁠ ⁠…”

“But, Naps!” Venice turned on him, stared wide at him.⁠ ⁠…

“Oh, come on,” said Napier, as though eaten by impatience.

“But!” she pleaded desperately. “But, Naps, I don’t really want to go now a bit if you would rather stay until tomorrow.⁠ ⁠…”

“I don’t want to stay,” said Napier, quite reasonably, but he turned away as he spoke. One saw the set white profile. “Come along, Venice. There’s been enough talk about this already.⁠ ⁠…”

“But, Naps,” said Venice bitterly, “it’s wrong of you to go now, if she needs you. You know it’s wrong and naughty, what you’re doing. Naps dear, I’d very much rather not go now if you don’t mind⁠—”

“Well, you’ll jolly well have to go now, if at all,” Napier tore at her so sharply that she stared at him dumbly for a full second, and then she made a white smile, half to him, half to me. “Silly baby,” she said. “Such a silly baby.⁠ ⁠…” And she was again about to say goodbye to the unwilling spectator when Napier broke in, to me, beginning with astonishing grimness and ending quite conversationally: “I say, if you should happen to see Iris in the course of the next few days, you might tell her I couldn’t stop, and”⁠—here the grimness suddenly ended⁠—“say goodbye from me. Will you? What?”

I said of course I would, and then he took Venice’s arm to lead her away. But Venice dragged, her eyes intent on the carpet, and when she suddenly looked round at me I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.

“Men!” she smiled. “Men!”

“Men!” mocked Napier, but he smiled, too. “What?”

“But don’t you think it’s a shame!” she bitterly appealed to me. “There’s Mrs. Storm very ill and expecting to see Napier, all lonely up there, and here Naps puts me in the beastly position of a wife who⁠—”

But I was thinking that the shame of it lay in the disadvantage at which a woman always is with a man whom she loves more than she feels he loves her, the disadvantage of never knowing how far she may use an artificial pride, for there is no real pride in a heart in love, without upsetting the applecart.

“Nonsense, Venice,” Napier was saying, and it was his mildness, his calmness, that was so astonishing now. It was as though the man had suddenly found peace: as though love-lost Tristram raving in the wilderness had, in a sudden flash, realised that he was trying God too far.⁠ ⁠…

“Nonsense, Venice,” he scowled, still holding her arm. “She isn’t beginning to expect me and she never did. I just turned up by chance.⁠ ⁠…” He turned to me with that clear, not conspiratorial, look in his eyes. “You will say goodbye from me, won’t you?”

“Of course,” I said. “I may be seeing her today.”

“Yes, just say goodbye,” said Napier, and as he and I shook hands Venice laughed nervously: “Dear, how serious! I can’t bear goodbyes.⁠ ⁠…” And so she shook my hand without saying goodbye, saying instead: “You have been a darling to let me bore you with my nonsense, and I hope you’ll pray that it keeps fine for us in your sister’s car. See you in London soon.⁠ ⁠…”

And away they went, Napier and Venice, he still holding her arm just above the elbow, she still appearing to drag a little, across the now deserted and darkening lounge to the glass doors, which a small boy opened to them. But the small boy must hold it open, for they stood in the doorway a short while, as it might be they were arguing, and through the gloom of the afternoon I could see Napier’s set white profile, drawn in ivory it might have been, and the way he seemed to be smiling grimly into Venice’s upturned face, and I could see the way Venice’s face suddenly lit right up with a smile, just like a garden with the sun after rain. Now what could he have said to make her smile so, or had he said just any little thing, which her love, most princely alchemist, had straightway transmuted into a golden word?

He has said farewell to his love, I said to myself, and now, if love has left any honour at all in him, he must convince himself that there never was any love to say adieu to, for even so much would be a disloyalty to Venice. He has renounced his love, I thought to myself, as a man of honour should do, but he knows that a man of honour is not worthy the name unless he can also convince himself that there never was any love to renounce, for that would make him feel martyred for his wife’s sake, and that would be a treachery to Venice.⁠ ⁠…

And, smoking one more cigarette in the calm security of the darkening, deserted lounge, while a waiter or two began laying the small tables roundabout for tea, I seemed to understand Napier as he were myself, and he the most different man from me that could well be found. Looking at the thing full and square, you might say that Napier had done a caddish thing; in fact, that was what you had to say, looking at the thing full and square; but it is a mistake to look at everything full and square, and it is too easy to dismiss people’s actions as “caddish” and the like, for such are no more than words coined to save people from wearying their minds with undue thinking, and tiresome people will go on and on using them with a great show of conviction in the very same way that they will put down a book by Mr. Shaw or Maître Anatole France and say: “Look at Dickens!”

Now Napier had suddenly come upon a queer sort of peace following on a second’s cruel decision not to go and see Iris again, a very cruel decision, I thought, and she no doubt expecting every moment to see his face in the clouds all about her. “How like a man,” I could hear a feminine voice, “first to stain what he thinks his ‘honour’ by taking a mistress, and then to retrieve his idiotic ‘honour’ by hurting his mistress!” But, maybe, how could one tell? maybe Napier had suddenly realised, in the very moment that Venice spoke, that if he went to sit with Iris even once more he might fall right down into the pit of dark enchantment and he might send all life but that which he found in Iris to the deuce and nevermore return to Venice, to whom he was held by every one of those principles that are born in the blood of a Napier, a Hilary, a Guy de Travest. And I wondered what I would have done had my life been so weighted and tangled with people’s emotions as Napier’s must always have been, and what, I wondered, would I have done had I, in Napier’s place, been as unaware of myself until a fiercely revealing moment three nights before my marriage to my betrothed? The answer to that was very easy, and it was by the measure of the ease with which it came that I could judge of Napier’s struggle with himself to keep his pledge to Venice, for never were two men so different as Napier and me. I, I would have broken my troth, that is what I would have done, and I would have broken away from any other thing that stood in the way of my passion, I would have fled father, friends, career, honour, everything, at the call of the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams. There are better dreams! For so I remembered a phrase in a book telling of the love of a lady of the sea for a mortal man: There are better dreams.⁠ ⁠…

A waiter, no doubt wishing for something to do, asked me if I would take tea, but I thanked him, saying I would rather not, for it was not yet half-past three, and saying to myself: “In every man there is always unfolding a dream of things that never were and never can be, since life will always be what it is and men and women will always be what they are, and so we will always go on, men of high fancies and low flights, and the higher the fancy is the lower the flight will be, as it is written in the Scriptures concerning vanity. And maybe Napier had had his dream when he was very young, and then the world came along and told him that his dream was very silly, and so he did not dream any more, until one night he was appalled to hear calling him a playmate’s voice, but a playmate’s voice torn with the wonder of life and the sadness of living, whispering to him: There are better dreams. And he listened, and he was lost, and then he found himself again in renunciation, as so many Englishmen will always be doing, for it is as true as any generalisation can be to say of Englishmen that they will often only find themselves when they have lost themselves.”

I could see Napier during those two days and two nights before his marriage, I could see him casting his mind this way and that way, to find that each way lay dishonour, on Venice’s side dishonour with cruelty, and on Iris’s side dishonour with whatever happiness can go with dishonour to a man such as Napier; and that, I thought, would be very little, for can a man of honour embark on any dishonourable adventure without first of all taking every care and precaution that neither he nor his companion shall enjoy the fruits of it? But that, I thought to myself, is a woman’s thought, surely I am not becoming effeminate!

And you could see Napier scowling as he beat his mind to know what a man should do, for you might be sure that Iris had not tried to persuade him, she would have loved him and left him, putting the seal of her kiss on his lips and the seal of her voice on his ears, telling him only to do what he thought was right. So Napier would be beating his mind, always driving from him the phantom of a compromise, a fair enough phantom, that: how he would go to Venice and tell her that it had happened to him, born vile, to do thus and thus, and would she please forget him, for forgive him she could not? But that was just what Venice would do, proudly and imperiously she would forgive him, and then he would have to confess the real truth, which was not that he had held Iris in his arms, but that he loved Iris with his body and soul as he never could love Venice, that he loved Iris and Iris loved him as though they had drunk a love-philtre together, and in that way he did not love Venice⁠ ⁠… but Venice, unfortunately, did love him in that very same way, and you could see Napier just quailing before the cruelty of telling Venice that, after all, he did not love her. And you could see him marrying Venice, thinking the while that maybe the best could be made of a wretched business if Iris and he kept to the promise they had sworn together, never to meet again. And they had kept to it very stoutly, the Iris who had plucked the device “for purity” from her heart had kept to her promise, and Napier would have kept to his promise forever and a day but for the chance of illness in the obscure silence of the Paris night; and so it had come to pass that he must see Iris yet once again, and Iris maybe thinking that she was seeing her lover in a dream, she who had nothing to live for and did not care one farthing if she lived or died. But that dream, said Conrad Masters later, saved her life, that dream was the angel appointed to save Iris from death, for that time. How wise was Iris, how wise, she who knew that the Marches were never let off anything. For even the angels were against her.

But it was to Conrad Masters that I had first to break the news of Napier’s⁠—well, from Masters’ point of view, desertion while on duty. And very wholeheartedly did that man swear, the telephone simply throbbing with his pregnant mutter; but I, thinking there could be little profit in arguing at this time of day that the whole thing wasn’t and never had been any of my business, merely suggested: would it be any sort of idea for me to see her for a minute?

“You!”

“But your instructions!” I pointed out. “Whereas, if I may say so, you have so far been so ‘nice’ to me that I have lost five hundred francs at bridge on your behalf.” That is what I was driven to saying, but I doubt if he heard me, the telephones of Paris being very well adapted for selective hearing, for all he said was that he was due at the Boulevard Pierre Abel in half an hour, and he would pick me up on the way if I liked. If I liked! As though, Heavens above, there was one single thing in all this wretched business about which one might say, with any hope of being attended to, “If I liked, this,” or “If I liked, that.⁠ ⁠…”