The Romantic Lady

by Michael Arlen

It was a very uncomfortable business—for me, I mean. And, as I had let it go on, quite impossible to cut short; since nothing less drastic than an order for ejection, if even that, would have penetrated the thick skin that Antony could so conveniently wear when he chose—and with no better result than a "misunderstanding" with Iris who, thanks largely to me, had come to have certain views about Antony which materially differed from the world's, and even stronger views about deserting one's friends when they were "down and out." There's no end to difficulties when a woman takes her standpoint on the highest pinnacles of the code that men have arranged between themselves for their own convenience and woman's confusion.

I could only console myself with the ungenerous thought that if my own position with Iris, of "dear Ronnie" and the like, was hopeless, how much more hopeless was Red Antony's, the poor braggart who would now be invisible, be he ever so tall and boisterous, to even the most tarnished of her acquaintance. So let the man have his run, since he could never have his way!...

How he had ever met her at all, in fact, I never clearly found out, and had never the effrontery to ask; probably towards the end of his swift downward passage to those underground grill-rooms (oh, those grill-rooms of broken hearts and broken reputations!) just after Iris had come out. Be that as it may, Iris had known him scarcely but by reputation—about which, since it was glamoured by the disapproval of every one who had ever bored her, she had often asked me; so that, when one day they had happened at the same second at my door, she knew a little more than hearsay about him; and was quick to see the poor man's wretched plight, was quick to encourage his longing to talk to some one decent; giving intimacy with that generous hand that makes gentle women so much more dangerous than vampires, searching for what sweetness there lay in him so wisely and deftly as to leave him unaware of the homage he paid her, so that she could appreciate it at its fullest; and so that, after a few weeks, she grew genuinely fond of the wreck—and one day made me openly swear at my folly by suddenly saying: "I suppose there must be many people who think they have met Napoleons, only to find in the end that they are Antonys—and how very much nicer!"

III

But there was another reason, quite apart from any far-fetched call of sympathy, for my putting a fairly good face on Antony's falling in love on my premises. I might as well, thought I, be entertained by what I had to suffer—and so there was cast a play, as though for my bewildered entertainment! Though, of course, I never at that time indulged in any such conceit, it's just the licence of thought that is occasionally apt to flow from one's pen.

For while I watched, perforce, Antony pleading his furtive suit at some hour between three to seven of an afternoon, I could sometimes of an evening watch its parallel contrast in that world which Antony had been at such pains to offend unpardonably. For, of the husbands that had been suggested for Miss Portairley, not one had received more favour than the possibility of Roger Poole; and the idea had been much encouraged of late by the very frequent circumstance of their being of the same company....

Certainly, to that world which finds its pleasure in the sensations of other people's marriages, there was a great deal of apparent fitness about this one; for they were both, in their ways, well-known persons. Iris, of course, trivially, in these days of illustrated journals and the like, a much photographed and commented on "beauty" whose features and "recreations" were so widely known that she looked gradually to become the rumoured subject of any novel that contained the requisite amount of social indecency implied by the "modern society" of publishers' announcements; and Roger Poole, already at thirty-three a personage, "the only young man," I have heard it said, "of this degeneration with any political energy or brilliance": who, in spite of the leisure that his rumoured means might have claimed for him, had actively sat as member for—since he was twenty-six, was now recognised as one of the leaders of the Opposition, and certain, in spite of his youth, of office at the fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after all, so original of him to be so clever and polished and dark and ambitious without being a Jew.

The colouring between the Poole brothers was distributed in some such way as this: Antony, the younger by a year, as red and wantonly extravagant as I have tried to show; and Roger, no less tall than his brother but inclined much more to suppleness both in figure and features—he could sometimes look remarkably like a knife: of a much darker countenance, with dark eyes that were somehow sombre yet witty, and seemed always to be fevered with some secret thought. In fact, there were a great deal too many such "secret" thoughts about Roger to ensure one's real comfort in his company.

But, in spite of this more serious expression, and in contradiction to what one might have expected to appeal to a man of his very real abilities and ambitions, Roger was every bit as much of the material world as his brother—but had what Antony never had, the sanity and balance with which to measure his recklessness and indulgences. Roger Poole always knew what he was about; and, to further his ambitions, had never ceased to discipline himself, outwardly anyway, into line with the world's conventions—of which, funnily enough, if he continued his success, he would one day be an arbitrator!

But, rigorously though he disciplined himself (a really splendid dissimulation, which I who had known him so long had always watched with envy), he could not help his inclinations showing in some way—though in a way that reflected to his advantage as a figure, as it would have reflected to Antony's if he hadn't been so foolish. For they were shown in a manner, a certain air, which couldn't be described but by the help of the word "romantic"—a not unpleasing word to be used about one who has name, appearance, and ability. And he was, even to me, a romantic kind of figure. There was nothing, well, stationary about him, as there so often is about one's acquaintance; in fact, more, there was definitely a sense of movement; one somehow thought of him as a man who would always be going on to things, maybe great things. His shadow will find in him an exciting companion, one couldn't help thinking. Among one's acquaintance, each unit of whom one knew to be travelling on a certain road to a more or less certain end, Roger Poole stood out as a refreshing and unexpected person, a kind of adventurer licensed by the world; an appearance clothed in possibilities, whom it was interesting to know....