The Romantic Lady

by Michael Arlen

"And as he told me how he had borne Antony's cheek in silence, I looked at him wonderingly, for such a patience in such a boy as Roger must have been seemed, well, almost unpleasant and unmanlike. He saw what I was thinking, and explained that it was simply because he had not known what to do, he hadn't known. He couldn't retaliate in the same spirit, because Antony's dislike formed no such parallel in him. He was at the disadvantage of loving him as before, though now it was an affection mixed with those dark clouds of wondering. His liking for Antony had never had to do with whether Antony was good or bad. In fact, as a very small child he had realised that his young brother could do strange things, and strangely, but that had never affected his admiration; those little traits went with Antony, that's all. And had so continued to 'go with him,' disturbing Roger every now and then—until, after the tutor came, he realised that those 'traits' looked to make up the whole! And that was terrible, doing away with any admiration—but after all it's a weak love that must admire what it loves; and soon Roger came to accept even that as inevitably Antony, still loving him—and waiting, don't you see, until he could find out where all this dislike came from, what all this fuss was about and why?

"'If it had only been Jacob envying Esau his birthright!' Roger exclaimed. 'But it was nothing like that, and never has been, but a much deeper and more instinctive jealousy—deep enough to make it ridiculous, but instinctive enough to make it as human as all dangerous madnesses are. And you can imagine how instinctive, from his age when he first came by it! Then, of course, it was inarticulate and unrealised by him, but real enough to change his acceptance of me as a comrade into a dislike that grew with every month. At first he knew no more than I what it was about, but he naturally found out much sooner, and made hay with his discovery....

"'I don't suppose you have ever seen it, Iris, but there is a kind of similarity between Antony and me. It's got nothing to do with body and surface, nor, as far as any one can see, with our points of view about anything. But there it is and has always been—and I can only express it by saying that the foundations of our minds must be the same; that—and can you believe it?—our real inclinations of mind are the same, or rather Antony's have always been the same as mine. There's nothing very extravagant or uncommon about that, two men may very easily be made that way—if Antony weren't so obviously the man he is, the child he was! But you can see the curious absurdity of such a likeness from even what you know of him—why, his very voice and face, everything about him, shout out that his inclinations are as far from mine as one man's can be from another's! And even as a child he seemed every bit as different from me, a roystering child to be a roystering man—and so you can imagine how very impossible it was for the one child to discover the secret of the other's dislike. For that dislike came from a strange jealousy, and the jealousy from that similarity—and all so confused and overlaid by every trait that can make one man different from another that the devil himself, though he had put the fantasy there, would have been hard driven to find it. And the fantasies that grip men's minds and destroy them are like mists, it is in their nature to be bodiless yet to obscure: they are like mists that come upon a field in the morning, no one knows whence, and fade no one knows whither, to come again as mysteriously in the evening. And so this jealousy had come upon my Antony—but from where, just where and why? To cloud a baby man's mind with hatred and beastly things....

"'Being that, I suppose it was quite natural for Antony's baby jealousy to date from the tutor's coming. Now, as apart from governess twaddle, we really had to work. And, do you see, Antony, who all his life has seemed a man who cared not a damn for books and learning, who even as a boy seemed more inclined to kick a book than read it, wanted to be as good as I couldn't help being at mastering things easily? He couldn't, he knew he couldn't, and that's why he kicked a book instead of reading it. That was anger not contempt; and, to fan the anger with impotence, a dim idea forming at the back of his little mind that I had been purposely brought into the world a year before him to have good time to steal all the good things of the brain that had been equally allotted to both of us; leaving him only the same foundations and nothing but impotent husk to cover it—so that he must always be the buffoon, and I—and I the one who could do well everything he wanted to! And the basis of the mind must have seemed to him to be the same, for he so wanted to do them, not out of rivalry because I did, but because it came naturally to him to want to. Silly and unreasonable, yes—but then so is all madness that can hurt one.

"'It wasn't only work, but everything, that fanned the idea into Antony's mind, and then kept on blowing into the flame that seems to have burnt the poor fool ever since. At least he might have been good at outdoor things, games of strength or recklessness, whereas I might have been expected to be more an "indoor" man! Since he could do nothing else that I could do, he might at least have been allowed to play games of every kind better! But even there, and at first without trying to, I could do easier and better what he could only do fairly well; though later, at school, I went out of my way to rub the thing in—it had come to that by then, you see.

"'I had found my Antony out, and had my answer to him. I had plumbed a little of the confused issues of his jealousy, I knew now what a large part of his hatred was made of admiration: in fact very nearly the whole of it. And, since hate exaggerates even more than love, he exaggerated to himself what little there was to admire, making me out the devil of a fine fellow—because, you see, in admiring me he was very really admiring himself! never rid of that infernal idea that I was as he should have been, as he had a right to be—but for me! Oh, no, he never belittled me! And you've seen the deference to which he kindly treats me? Well, the idea of that—not, of course, the expression—has always been there. It makes one's head reel to think of him as never but admiring one's mentality and abilities much above their reality, and hating me all the more because of that admiration simply because it kept on creating more things to hate!

"'I remember, at school, Antony was always the first in the gallery to watch me playing a racquets match—racquets, of course, being the one game the poor man simply couldn't get at all, while I played it better than anything else. And sometimes I used to look up from the court at him, sitting with his hands at each side of his face, absorbed—in what? not the game, but only in the way I was playing it—the way he himself was playing it! But, ridiculous as it all was, I had grown cruel about him, and let him see that I despised him as much as he despised himself; which, you know, was very much indeed—though he would have died rather than let the world see it.

"'I had been working at my contempt for him very systematically ever since the age of about fourteen. It was my only protection against him, the only way I could prevent him from getting the better of my love for him—which was always there, mark you, for there was no doing away with that, it was as natural as the lava around a volcano. The advantage had been all with Antony until then, doing what he liked with me in the way of unpleasantness; but now that I had found this contempt (which I worked at just as a goldsmith works at a golden leaf, scratching and shaping and bending and filing it until it's every bit as lifelike as the original, but a good deal heavier), I was far and away the first string in the wretched orchestra; for Antony never did know what to do with contempt but physically smash it, and he and I have never raised a hand against each other except once—I suppose because it would have been such a trivial expression for what we felt. And so, not being able to answer it, it maddened him; but so obviously that I couldn't resist doing it again and again—until one night, at the end of my last term, I went the nagging limit, and he had to throw a bread knife at me and almost killed another man. But I dare say Ronnie has told you about that....

"'After school we saw each other once in a dozen months, if then, and only as acquaintances might in the street—and who, living in London these last fifteen years, could possibly avoid the figure of Red Antony? But step by step the thing went its same way—step by step feeding Antony's first mad idea with conviction. The wheel turned to my tune, never to his ... he who would have liked to be doing things with his brain and otherwise as I was doing them, whereas he had to be a soldier! For what else is there for a younger son with no brains and a little money to do but be a soldier or curate? And Antony believed in Heaven and Hell much too vividly ever to want to tell any one else about them....

"'He simply had to go his destined way, as the noisy, red, attractive and dangerous fool that the world expected him to be, and then blamed him for thoroughly being. And all the while he must have been playing a bitter game, something like chess, with himself: moving his pieces here and there in the way he would love to do in life, and then straining his eyes across the gulf at me to see if I had done in life what he couldn't even do in a game against himself—and, I suppose, I invariably had!