“Iris,” I said, my mind charged with that mask, “you have us all at a great disadvantage....”
Slowly, thoughtfully, she made a circle of air with a small golden tube that had a crimson tongue, and then she passed the golden tube through the circle’s heart. She was thinking.
Chapter Ten: THE FALL OF THE EMERALD
I
AS I think of that wretched night of the children’s party there will be two pictures that cross my mind. The first, of a group of brightly coloured people, for we were in white flannels and the women in those mad, barbaric colours which fashion, goaded on by Chanel and gallantly led by Captain Molyneux, has lately flung as a challenge to our dark civilisation, around a table lit by the cameo flames rising from eight tall cast candlesticks by Paul Lamarie; and I remember that in the still air of Guy’s great, bare diningroom those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat.
The second picture is of a darkness. A darkness torn here and there by the sudden flame of a match which drove the stars trembling back into the invisible and joined to groping eyes the silky soft blackness of the water. The black night pinned round the world with stars, shouts, laughter, splashings, an empty boat, silence, shrieks, a whisper from the black face of the water, and so home. Total losses: one stocking and one emerald. “I’m so glad, so glad,” she whispered, just before going to sleep against my shoulder, for it was Hugo Cypress who was riding the stork homeward.
But I have said that whilst we were on our way riverwards, and I sitting beside Iris as she hurled us headlong through the still night, we stood at enmity, she and I—for Venice! And yet, so far as I could make out, there was not a soul but myself out of that party, Guy, Napier, Venice, Hugo, Shirley, Iris, who seemed in the least degree uncomfortable. Those people had been, throughout dinner and afterwards, completely and supremely normal. For all you knew, I mean, they might have been having fun. There weren’t any undercurrents. Not even what you would call any undercurrents. Those people were quite calmly themselves, they just behaved as themselves in that confoundedly unassailable way which is peculiar to the people of this small island: as though, to be sure, they weren’t giving away anything of a personal nature even to themselves. You can’t help seeing why Napoleon found these people so detestable.
And it was all, you couldn’t help feeling, so mean, such a humbug of a thing. I suppose, of course, that I was the only one besides Iris and Napier who knew of their departure together in three days’ time. “I have always wanted,” she had said to me, “to go to Rio, and then across the continent. One can’t talk in Europe, it’s got so stuffy now. But I always thought I would keep the Americas until my fate should be fulfilled.” Yet, I was quite certain, every one at the table must have known that something was wrong, else why was that fell, beautiful lady there at all? For Guy, in the ordinary way, wouldn’t, it simply wasn’t in Guy’s nature to be able to, ask Iris Storm to the same dinner with the young wives of his two young friends, his protégés almost, Napier and Hugo. And if he had asked Iris to-night, knowing that she wouldn’t funk coming—though the real reason why she had come was that Iris simply did not attach any importance to such things, “and besides,” she had said, “I want to see dear Hugo again, and as a married man”—it was just because he wanted Iris to realise the scene on which she was intruding so wickedly. It is such catholic cruelty as Guy’s that, by always lopping off the rotten limb, has kept the heritage of so many English houses almost, despite the common talk of the day, unimpaired. To-night he was wanting Iris to see that her old friends, her old playmates, Hugo and Napier, had grown up differently from her—better or worse, that wasn’t Guy’s point, but differently—that while she had lived according to her nature they had lived according to their country, they and their young wives, Shirley and Venice. Not the most prejudiced eye, Guy knew, could but see that they made a fine, harmonious, clean four. Youth was there, and simplicity, and friendship, and love, too. And Guy had dared Iris to come to the children’s party merely to say to her, with her eyes: “See, Iris, here are four people, two by two, happily paired, friends and lovers, husbands and wives. See, Iris, and let them be. One of these men you may be able to introduce to the magic mysteries of love more completely than his young wife ever can. But see, Iris, how much you deprive him of, how utterly you deprive her! You have put yourself outside this long ago, you never can be of this again. See, Iris, how happy they are, and young, and clean, and earnest to do right: most earnest to do right, Iris, despite the most damnable enchantments. And as they are so you might have been with Boy Fenwick, but you chose differently. Iris March, the death of Boy Fenwick puts you out of court. See, Iris, and for God’s sake let these children be!”
But that catholic Guy had not seen that beautiful white mask between the tawny formal curls and the two amethysts for eyes. I have told him since that had he seen that mask he would have foreseen the little profit he might expect to derive for his friends from Iris’s presence at that dinner. I have told him how it was in my mind that night that nothing could move Iris, because it was as though in winning Napier she was winning the thirty years’ war of her life. The shameless lady had at last lopped off the limb that was called the shameful lady; and so she had come again out of the darkness to Napier, she had come again as the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams, and not all Guy’s Englishry could hold Napier now from following that enchanted whisper across the seas, that Iris March might at last come to fulfil her fate.
And yet, by the perfection of their normality over dinner, it might have been this person, me, who was being treacherous to his friends by fancying disloyalties among them! Shirley, for instance. Shirley, little sister to George Tarlyon, was of the same age as Venice, they had been at Heathfield together, they had always been together, and where Venice led there Shirley followed, and what Venice saw that Shirley saw, and where Venice raged there Shirley raged. And Venice was raging now. Oh, she must be raging frantically! Yet Shirley never once, as they say, “let on” about her state of mind. She was just Shirley all the time, sweet in a small way, sarcastic in a large way, Shirley of the brown eyes and unbreakable spirit, pretty Shirley. Maybe she was behaving a little better than was her general wont, for Shirley was so well-bred that she never practised what you would call deportment, but that was the only way the strain of that evening seemed to affect her....