The green hat

by Michael Arlen

“It’s absurd,” I said, “to talk ‘generations.’ Slack novelists do it to get easy effects. All generations are a mess. Thank you.”

“Your generation,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “has more opportunities for being a mess than ours had. That’s what I meant. And your children will have more opportunities than you have. There is a certain amount of horse-sense in the reluctance of many young fellows nowadays to having wives of their own. They’re afraid of getting it in the neck from the results. For whereas you have motors and telephones and wireless with which to lose your sense of the stabilities, as you are losing them, they will have cheap aeroplanes as well. When you people nowadays begin to break loose there’s no limit to your looseness. There was in my father’s time. They couldn’t get about so quickly. They couldn’t grub about in so many cesspools at one time, rushing in a night between London and any vile paradise of the vulgarities like Deauville or the present Riviera. Even if they broke loose a little—the women, I mean—they generally had to make some compromise with the decencies simply because they had to live in the place, they couldn’t make an appointment with a trunk-call to Paris and go and have a few days’ ‘fun’ there. But now if a woman has kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity there’s the whole world open for her to play the mischief in, there’s every invention in the world to help her indulge her intolerable little lusts....”

I mastered an irrational impulse to try to defend Iris against the friend of her childhood. I would have liked to say that the little lusts were intolerable most of all to Iris. Hilary would almost have sympathised with that in Iris, for it would seem that the only vice a man of principle can understand is the vice of not enjoying what he has forfeited his principles to do. Hilary couldn’t, obviously, forgive Iris for not having grown common and meretricious and, in the slim beastly sense, coarse, as the other “rotten ladies” did. He couldn’t, obviously, forgive her for the continued graciousness of her outward seeming, and of her inner seeming too, if one didn’t know those things about her. He couldn’t, obviously, forgive her for being so indifferent to every distinction of class that she was equally indifferent, with the whole calm of her mind, to being “declassed.” And he couldn’t, obviously, forgive himself for still, God knew how, seeing in her the same qualities that he had seen in the long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. If only Hilary had been a sentimentalist, and could have closed his eyes against what he did not wish to see and could have opened his eyes to see all that he did wish to see! But Hilary was a realist with a backward-seeing eye. The Iris of long ago should have been dead, choked to death by this grown-up Iris—but, and there lay the perversity of this grown-up Iris who had kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity, it wasn’t dead at all, she was still essentially the same Iris who had walked with her governess up South Audley Street. But, the devil, all these men! Yet there she was ... profoundly undifferent, profoundly as though untouched by any more soiling breath than that of the lightest passage of the years. It was, you might hear Hilary thinking, confoundedly unfair to all decent womanhood, Iris’s immunity in the abyss. He should not like her—no, there should not be left anything about her for a decent man to like. The friend of Iris’s childhood couldn’t help a savage anger with her for retaining the interest of a clean, and otherwise balanced, mind. The friend of childhood liked the woman so deeply that, being a man of principle, he could see only her worst side. And then the man of principle would fall into the toils of the friend of childhood, and whilst the two antagonists were wrestling together they could see only the side of the woman that it made them the most wretched to see. The very fact that Hilary was deeply attached to Iris made him see only her worst side. Many good men call that “liking” a woman. Many good women call that “idealism” in men.

IV

It is curious how many irrelevant details will crowd back into the mind when one is trying to reconstruct only the main passage of an evening, which was throughout, now one looks back on it, as though directed to its inevitable end. I remember how, through one of the long silences common to our odd, antagonistic intimacy, I sat staring into my brandy-glass—those Gargantuan ones, Hilary had—and wondering at Hilary’s, well, unsentimental sentimentality; and then I wondered what sort of a fight the man of principle would put up against the friend of childhood should Iris ever show the faintest inclination to take as her third husband Mr. Townshend of Magralt. The man of principle would lose ... happily lose or unhappily, you could not tell, for no man can tell what odd happinesses, more secretly kept than crimes, another man will snatch from intimacy with a woman whom he would detest if he did not desire.

But through the silences of that evening there walked mainly the figure of the legend of Boy Fenwick, a boyish figure midst a babble of confused rumours and knowing silences. Yet I was so concerned not to appear, to that watchful and dangerous friend of childhood, too interested in Mrs. Storm, that the name of Boy Fenwick hung on my lips before I was out with it. Oh, that name of Boy Fenwick! One knew it so well and so dimly, it would so often be just dropped into a conversation by some friend of his or some friend of a friend, just the name with a passing regret, to the perpetuation of his charm and his time....

Many will, no doubt, remember the details of what must have been one among the minor sensations of that time better than I can pretend to. It happened during the summer of 1913, when I, having just left school, was enjoying a first taste of freedom up and down Switzerland, and was far from the long arm of even the Continental Daily Mail. Boy Fenwick was found, on that dawn of his wedding-night, lying in the courtyard of the Hôtel Vendôme in Deauville, dead of a broken collar-bone. He had fallen, it appeared, from his bedroom window on the third floor. His beautiful young wife (I collect the bits of rumour that came to me later) had been asleep, had suddenly awoken to a sharp feeling of solitude, had happened to look out at the dawn....

Tests were made, and it was found that a man could, given certain conditions, have fallen out of that window. The hotel management suggested that a man could, given certain conditions, fall out of almost any window. Among the certain conditions suggested, tactfully, was champagne. That was, I believe, adopted, tactfully. Much, of course, must have been said and printed about the beautiful girl, Mrs. Fenwick; and there was provided a little comic relief to the affair in the scarcely suppressed indignation of the illustrated papers, for the beautiful Mrs. Fenwick had in some way prevailed on Sebastian Roeskin, the photographer in Dover, not to issue any of her photographs, and had shown a remarkable ingenuity in evading the street-camera. And, the tragedy happening at Deauville during the Grande Semaine—Deauville at that time was still in the first flush of its victory over Trouville—it was hushed up as quickly as possible.

Boy Fenwick had only that year come down from Oxford, and his memory was treasured by his many friends both there and in London. Indeed, to one who heard of him only when he had become legend, and when the first edition of a slim book of poetry by him, published posthumously with a charming introduction by P. L., had attained to a price only surpassed later by Rupert Brooke’s memory, he appears to have been the most beloved of the beloved young men of that time. To youth of this decade, grown now a little impatient of the careless wise-seeming pastime of indulging “sound” scepticisms or catholic idealisms, those youths of the days before the war must seem to have been the most gifted of God’s creatures who ever walked this earth, always excluding the glory that was Greece. Several, to be sure, survive until this day, but nothing could be more unjust than to approach a man’s youth in the light of the shadow that he casts in his early thirties. Yet they would verily seem, those few dead young men, to have a certain god-like quality of immortality denied to the multitude that died with them and for whom cenotaphs and obelisks and memorials must do duty for memory: that they should retain the regret of their many friends is not remarkable, but it is odd, and pleasant, how they will ever and again loiter, gay and handsome and “sound,” in the imagination of those who never knew them. Boy Fenwick’s name, now, would ever and again pass like a phantom of beauty and laughter across some conversation: so real, so dim. He had been notable, it seemed—and this is the only clear thing I had ever heard about him—for a certain catholic idealism that was almost an obsession with him. So, I was to think this night, thrusting from me the legend of Boy Fenwick, so it would seem. An idealist! Yes, Boy Fenwick was an idealist. But would I had the debonair truculence of that puissant nobleman, the Earl of Birkenhead, who has dared to say, in an age given over to the new-rich snobbery of exalting plain, normal men: “I do not like meek men.” I, had I that presence, would say: “I do not like idealists.”

Yet it was not to be over this dinner with Hilary that I was to be given the full sum of the idealism of that handsome young god who, beloved of many, was the hero of one March and the fate of another. That was to come much later, on a night that was the sister of this night.