“Agents provocateurs?”
“Well, have it your own way. But I’ve been watching the police round about here lately, and of course they’re mostly very good fellows, the best, but the police round the Park are quite a different lot. I’d like to kick them for the way they look those poor devils of women up and down as though they were dirt. I never thought much of the type of sneak who went for the Military Police during the war, and these fellows seem rather like that. Anything for an arrest and promotion.” He smiled faintly. Guy’s eyes seemed always to get most frosty when he smiled. “I once promoted some of them the wrong way for being inhuman. Inhuman, that’s what these blighters get if you don’t keep an eye on them. And these Park fellows seem somehow to have got spoilt since the war. I mean, it just looks like that to an outsider. Good Lord, you’ve got to have laws and to keep laws, but you needn’t set a lot of dirty sneaks at the Bolshevik game of ruining gentlemen just for being silly old asses.”
I stared at the one black pearl that from time immemorial had stained Guy’s shirt-front, which somehow seemed to fit him as no one else’s ever could. Guy was easy to listen to, because you always knew what he would say and how he would say it. (He had an enormous reverence for any man of the smallest talent, any man “who did things with his brain.”)
“I saw him for a minute this evening,” I said. “He seemed rather queer, but he said nothing about it....”
“But imagine the young devil! This business happened one night last week, and he doesn’t then come to see you about it—or even Hilary or me, because, of course, I’d have done all I could for him, for old Barty’s sake as well as because he behaved himself in the war. I mean, this will almost kill old Eve Chalice when she sees it in the morning papers. It’s her I’m sorry for, for she’s always been fighting this sticky patch in the March brood—first her eldest brother, old Portairley, then her younger brother, Barty, then her niece Iris, and now young Gerald comes along to make the poor old dear cry her eyes out again. God, the vileness of it! Picking up odd women in parks. I haven’t got a paper with me, but you ought to see the vile way they put down every beastly detail, and you can see as clear as anything that it was more bad luck and childishness on Gerald’s part than anything else. But, good Lord, what’s the matter with the man! I mean, one simply doesn’t go into the Park for women! The accuser, or whatever you call them, was a woman called Spirit, and in evidence two plainclothes men and a constable. I’m going to have an eye kept on Mrs. Spirit, just to see all’s fair and square. I mean, it’s beginning to look as though the law was the ass that St. George forgot to kill while he was showing off with that sickening dragon. This Mrs. Spirit said—wish I had a paper—that she was sitting on a bench waiting for her brother, when Gerald sat down beside her and made ‘indecent’ proposals. Whereupon she was so shocked—and she a grown-up married woman, too—that she jumped up like a scalded cat and let out some sickening howls, and up come the police. Now you can’t help thinking they were waiting behind a tree with old Spirit as a bait, can you? and caught young Gerald instead of a Dean.... They’d get more promotion, I shouldn’t wonder, for a Dean....”
And as Guy spoke I saw Gerald glancing at the evening-paper on the curb of Curzon Street, and I saw him suddenly throw back his head and laugh at the heavens....
Gerald, Gerald! The despiser of the world caught by the meanest trap of the world’s unrest. The worshipper of the hero who had died “for purity” figuring in the filthy columns of the cheap Sunday Press as another peer’s nephew gone wrong. Gerald, starved of life, Gerald who knew no woman, Gerald who wrote the tale of a man who had lived “for purity” ... and he had sat down beside a woman called Spirit on a bench in Hyde Park. Those nightmare women who rave in the minds of lonely men, soft women marvellously acquiescent, possible, the woman Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, silent as marble, but acquiescent ... and Aphrodite had dwindled into Mrs. Spirit, who was sitting waiting for her brother in Hyde Park, and the law lurking nearby to give the Sunday papers “copy.” And I saw Mr. Auk in an angle of the little tunnel, telling a friend of his something funny about Gerald....
“It makes one just sick, Guy. Sick....”
“Now look here,” Guy murmured, tapping my shoulder with one finger. “Don’t you waste any time being sick just now, but go round and see the young devil——”
“I’m going straight away.”