But Napier seemed able to hear nothing, to see no one but his father. Again he put his hand to his mouth to stop it twitching. Venice, a flame in a leather jacket, suddenly threw an arm round Iris. “Darling, darling, darling! How dared you come here! But how dared you! Oh!” she stamped her foot, “these beasts of men, these beasts, beasts!”
“Venice,” Guy murmured, “take these two children of yours away at once. Go along now.”
Napier started at Guy’s voice. He had admired and worshipped Guy always. Guy smiled faintly, helplessly, was about to say something when Napier said bitterly: “Guy, I know it wasn’t your idea to bring Iris down here and throw that mud at her. I know that——”
“It was mine,” Sir Maurice rapped out with the paper-knife. “And it’s over now. You may go, Napier. I am asking you to go, boy! And you, Iris March. You and I, Napier, must part from to-night. For some time, at least. You will prefer that, too. You have every right to be angry with me, according to your lights. I gambled—for your future, boy—and I have lost. I am not sorry to have tried. I am sorry to have lost. Now you may be as angry as you like—but go!”
Napier’s voice trembled: “Before I go, sir, I’d like to say——”
“Naps, enough of this!” Guy snapped. “The more we talk the worse we make it. Go along, for God’s sake.”
Napier shouted: “I will not go!”
And in the deep, startled silence that must always follow a shout in an English house, he said, livid quiet, to his father: “I’ve ceased to be a boy of eighteen, sir. And I’ve ceased to want to be any of the things you seem to admire. This last year it has seemed to me that not one of the things that have made my life as you directed it have any reality. You’ve only got to think once and the whole ghastly pretence of a life like mine drops to the ground. And I’ve been trying lately to understand the point of view that makes men admirable in your eyes, sir—and I can’t get near it. It seems to mean sacrificing all the things that are worth while to all the things that aren’t worth while. You sacrificed Iris for what you call my future, my career. Weigh Iris on one side and on the other my future, my career, now that I am thirty! You sacrificed my happiness to the ghastly vanity of making our name something in this world. You call that ‘working for my future,’ sir. And I call it the cruel sort of humbug which has dragged God knows how many decent people into a beastly, futile unhappiness. Here I am at thirty, a nothing without even the excuse of being a happy nothing, a nothing liked by other nothings and successful among other nothings, a nothing wrapped round by the putrefying little rules of the gentlemanly tradition. And, my God, they are putrefying, and I bless the England that has at last found us out. And if they hadn’t been putrefying, sir, and if we hadn’t been going rotten with them, you couldn’t have taken advantage of the fact that Iris never funked anything in her life to bring her down here and drag her through the slime——”
“Napier, you must allow me at least the quality of patience. My one desire, boy, was to protect your happiness. I do not take what you say in the least seriously, for it isn’t you speaking but Iris with your voice. You are enchanted——”
“And I should jolly well think he was enchanted!” cried the boy that was Venice, her arm round Iris. A warrior was Venice then, and her leather jacket like a shining breastplate. “And I’m enchanted, too—and if you really want to know what’s the matter with the whole lot of you, you’re all enchanted—by the love of Napier and Iris. I’d stuff all our marriage-laws down a drain-pipe rather than keep them apart for another minute. And I think you must be mad and bad not to see the loveliness of a love like Iris’s—and after all this time she’s beaten you all in the end, and I’m so glad, so glad, so glad!”