“Only ... hell is raving with millionaires with jaws like Mr. Pollen’s. I’ve dreamt, I know. People who snap ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ very brusquely and then stick to it, no matter what it is. This century likes them like that. Come along, my friend, come along!”
And in a trice Iris and I were walking up the long passage which connects the Loyalty Club to the pavement of Pall Mall. On one side it is hung (but this is two years ago) with glass cases laden with fine cut jades and ambers, while small blue and green figures of animal men, human animals, and bestial gods will delight the eyes of Egyptologists: on the other the faces of beautiful women and children will testify to the photographic art of Sebastian Roeskin of Dover Street. Iris walked swiftly, heroically, her eyes intent before her, impersonal, utterly unself-conscious. The glaring lights in the passage lit her swiftly-moving green-and-silver shoes, or were they sandals with high heels? and so intent were the flippant silver-flashing ankles, briskly striding on, as though chiming the never-to-be-known marching song of a lady who must always meet men on their own ground.
She said: “You’ll be wondering how I came to dine with a man like Victor Duck. Well, I’ve been wondering myself. Poor Victor Duck. He has taken to caddishness like a drug, and he goes on increasing the doses. It’s almost fascinating to watch, just to see what inevitable things he will say next. And he said and did them all, every one, even to ‘Dear little girl’ and to ordering a private room. But I said I never dined in private rooms on Fridays.”
There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for their women from the Cloak-Room, maybe waiting for sirens to come to them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young men will. Admirably formal they looked, admirably toned to the dress-coats of Davies, the trousers of Anderson and Sheppard, the hats of Lock, the waistcoats of Hawes and Curtis, the ties of Budd. Handkerchiefs by Edouard and Butler. The glory to God. They looked furtively at Iris in the way that decent men will at a woman who is said to have had lovers, like cows at a bull. One of them said gloomily: “Might go to the Albert Hall Ball.”
Pall Mall seemed wrought of stately marble palaces, and Iris said that the reason why so many English people seemed to prefer Paris to London was that English people saw Paris mostly at night, while if they could see enough of London by night they would never leave it. “And the people!” she said. “All these years I’ve spent abroad, and never met any people so good, so decent, as the English. Couldn’t you sometimes kill people for the quality of their admiration? Oh, I’ve committed so many murders in foreign streets....”
“But, if you like England ... why are you going away? You’re free....”
“Ah,” she mocked, and, as we walked, a hand darted out from her white cloak and touched my sleeve, and startled me very much. “Wait till you’re so free that you just daren’t do what you like. Wait till you’re so free that you can be here one minute and there another. Wait till you’re so free that you can see the four walls of your freedom and the iron-barred door that will let you out into the open air of slavery, if only there was some one to open it. Ah, yes, freedom....”
Then up the street of ghostly dandies we flew behind the silver stork, and the wind rushed down from Hampstead Heath and the wind ran out of Jermyn Street and jumped like a drunken man on the tawny cornstalks that were her hair, and waved them about and danced with them. But not she to notice, she who seemed to have a great talent for just not noticing things! She was silent, serious, intent. The light of an arc-lamp kissed the long slender legs into silver.
Once she turned to me, smiled, and looked away again. I wondered if she meant me to see that our friendship was in that smile. I hated her, I think, because she made me feel so incapable, unwise. As the stork, with scarcely a rustle of its wings, flew towards the Christian Science Chapel at the head of Half-Moon Street, she said: “I’m tired. All day seeing lawyers and trustees, and then taking sweet old Eve all round and round Selfridge’s because she had never been there before and some one had told her she could find everything she wanted there. And she was quite upset at being unfaithful to Harrod’s.... And Gerald! Oh, but why couldn’t they let Gerald alone! Just because, I suppose, the Marches are never let off anything....”
“Here we are,” I said, and she pulled up beneath the lamp by The Leather Butler in East Chapel Street. From the footboard a lane of low houses and shops stretched in a vague, squalid line towards the open Market Place at one end and the darkness of the mews at the other; somehow like an etching in a clouded light by an uncertain hand. Bits of newspapers and torn placards, the nameless odours of yesterday’s economies. The wind that came from Hampstead Heath could find no way into Shepherd’s Market, and it lay still as a tramp sleeping. Cats watched us intently from the middle distance, and a striped cat leapt with a scream from the shadow of the door of my old house. Gerald’s light was on. “What’s that mean?” Iris whispered. She seemed to be frightened, and she said sharply: “Why are you looking at me like that?”