But now! there were only wasters, at best inefficient dilettanti in art and gambling, and drunkards who appalled you not by their drunkenness but by their dulness. You could walk London W. from midnight to daylight and see neither hint nor hope of your accomplished buck.... And that last description, Roger must have known, would so agreeably become the seeming contradictions of his public ambitions and private life, that from the presidency of the Union he stepped plumb into it; in solitary elegance re-created it, as it were, in the public and social eye, both of which were never far from his consideration; and having re-created it, successfully lived up to and never budged from it—until, when he was thirty-four, he again re-entered that society which he had always despised as dull but had never offended except with the most sympathetic disorders; and could now walk into it with the comforting thought that no dowager could say worse of him than a doubtful "He's a remarkable young man...."
I knew by the little he told me that the main reason for his emergence was marriage. It was time to take a wife—but he had never bargained to fall in love with her as he did with Iris Portairley. And I've tried to explain Iris, at the age of twenty-two wanting a deal more vitality and reality than her surroundings could give her, half-consciously waiting for "something to happen"—is it very wonderful that she fell in love with him, not only with his person, but with the idea of him? It is only a very callous kind of critic who will discount reality from a love because—it is touched with glamour—for was there ever in all history a lovely reality without a lovely glamour? Since, be you ever so young, to kiss a courtesan is to kiss a courtesan, but, be you ever so calm, to kiss a lover is to make a fairy-tale....
I didn't wonder whether Iris had told Roger that she was seeing his brother. I knew very well that she hadn't—and, as Roger never mentioned even Antony's name, not even to me (and there was that rigidity about Roger that allowed no trespassing upon a distasteful subject), there was little chance of the subject ever being mentioned between them. But did Antony know of his brother's suit, so ironically parallel to his own? I suppose that he must vaguely have heard of something, from a remark he once let drop; but it could only have been vaguely and distantly, for the spirit of the thing, of his new gentleness, would have been broken much sooner if he had definitely heard what was commonly said, that Iris was to marry Roger Poole.
I had often wondered how Antony would take the news of the engagement when it officially happened.... I left them alone that afternoon; and only re-entered the room when I had heard the front-door close to. He was sitting at my writing-table, and looked round at me without a smile, wearily.
"I thought you must have gone out somewhere, and was leaving you a note," he explained—and then, at my inquiring look, with a flash of his brazen impudence; "just to thank you for having been a good fellow, Ronnie—and a very good hand at staging a play, too!"
That was the only reference he made, then or ever, to what had gone—and with a sneer underlying it! which I had certainly answered but for the evident hopelessness that had let it out. I was angry at his morose resignation, at the weariness on his face—an ingrate if ever there was one, who thought life was treating him badly! Whereas, God knows, he had never ceased to buffet it into being his enemy. He ought to have been grateful for knowing Iris at all....
Ten minutes later he left me, saying: "I'm going abroad, Mexico way, and I don't suppose you'll be seeing me for some time, Ronnie—in fact, there's no earthly reason why you should ever see me again." And to his suddenly outstretched hand was tacked on the glimmer of a really grateful smile; very like him that, to tack on a little gratitude to a long good-bye....
And so Red Antony went away, leaving behind him nothing in England but a question now and then in Iris and myself as to where exactly he might be and what he might be doing. And as I had often wondered why he hadn't left England long before, I never doubted but that now he had taken the step he would keep his distance—a contemptuous distance, mark you!—from it. For what, after all, was there for him to come back to?
About a month after he had gone Iris and Roger were married. I was the best man.