The Romantic Lady

by Michael Arlen

Influenza had already gripped and released me, so that I was now in an irritatingly robust state of health in which to visit a less fortunate friend who had succumbed to its second wave; for that second wave was more virulent and more treacherous than the first, mocking its victim into partial convalescence and then, with a jeer and a snarl at the ambuscaded wretch, fixing again upon the damaged lungs, so inexorably that there was only the one release. And thus Howard Wentworth, who was thought, even by himself, to have cheated the thing, in the end died; not ten days after that afternoon when I had sat listening to him, as he lounged in the happy déshabillé of convalescence, and was reminiscent about a girl called Fay Richmond.

The difference in our years had not prevented an acquaintance ripening into a steady friendship. What I liked about Howard Wentworth was that—unlike so many Englishmen of middle years—he was not young for his age. He was completely, sincerely, and normally over 45, which was so refreshing of him among the crowds of 38's to 42's passing all the way from Coombe to Sunningdale of a Sunday morning.... And it was after our occasional dinners in his house in Upper Brook Street that I would be interested by a solitary photograph in a plain sandal-wood frame; one could not help contrasting its prominence on the grand piano with the total absence of any other photograph in that austere house—austere, in spite of that slight Chinese element of tapestry, strange green horsemen and the like, which even the best of celibates are nowadays growing to affect.

I used to wonder, quite shamelessly, who the girl with the sad, sincere face was, and whether my host and she had loved unhappily; for the girl's eyes were large and sad, and the firm set of her young mouth had not tried to obey the exhortation to smile; which must, indeed, have been given very hesitatingly, for there was a frightening sincerity about her face. You felt, looking even upon the poor mockery of a likeness, that you would have to dance very well indeed before you begged the favour of such as she to dance with you. You imagined to yourself fine arrogances behind those young eyes, to attract and appall you in a venturesome moment....

But, of course, I could not ask my host about her, I had to wait; until, on his reported convalescence, I went to see him in Beaumont Street, and I suppose too obviously noticed the sandal-wood frame on the dressing-table. He smiled:

"It always seemed to go with me," he said. "And I don't quite know why, as I don't remember ever having made a point of it. But Briggs somehow got into the habit of treating it like a toothbrush, so that it now goes with me even for weekends. I don't think I've even really looked at it for years and years.

"Though, I suppose, I've always got the feeling that it's there," he said, "or that she's there...."

"No," he corrected himself quickly. "I can't aspire to that consistency. Even in a sentimental mood with you sitting there trying to look as though you had come to amuse a sick man, whereas you've come to be amused, and well you know it...."

Then it was that he told me her name, dwelling on it.

"As a preface, I was a very sane young man," he went on, smiling. "I know I must have been, because when I try to find in my youth even one among those rare mornings in which a giant wakes up with the feeling that he could break a lance for a fair lady that day, I can't find one. There never was one, I never woke up so recklessly. And the fact that I may have grown to have that feeling when it's too late and I'm too old to joust carelessly is neither here nor there; it can't bluff me into thinking that once upon a time I, too, could have followed His Grace of Dorset into the river for a Zuleika Dobson—or, more splendidly, for a Fay Richmond, no conjurer nor coquette! For I know dismally that my wildest youth couldn't have shared in that fantasy of love—I was too sane or too stupid, whichever you like. And that's why, instead of being the chief actor, I am only a humble observer in the only play that has ever really mattered in my life....

"One February afternoon, about six years ago, I drove past two people on the Route Corniche between Nice and Monte-Carlo. I was driving alone, a noisy Mercèdes. And I had just swung round a corner on to a straight stretch, when ahead of me I saw a man and a woman come out of the garden gate of a villa. The woman had on a white dress. I looked at it until I was abreast.... And I don't know how I got round the next corner. I don't know if she really recognised me as I whirled past, if she really smiled—perhaps it was only a mocking game that the sun had played on a woman's comely face! Indeed, I thought she had smiled, that old, gentle smile.... For me the whole thing was just a sudden stare, and then a long acute, acute pain. The sort of pain that fixes on the heart and mind, with a doubtful smile to crown its ache.... Wondering about that smile, as of a ghost in a white dress, all the rest of my way on that fiendish, lovely mountain road, I suppose it wasn't my fault that car and self didn't add one more wreck to the credit of Les Alpes Maritimes.... I hadn't seen Fay Richmond for fourteen years, and I have never seen her since then.