The Romantic Lady

by Michael Arlen

"'Yes, loving you was certainly the last straw, Iris. And, you know, he did love you! He has told me about it since, as it's a dead thing—dead simply because Antony isn't made to love any one who can't love him. But when he met you, and hung about the street until he saw you enter Ronnie's flat—then he did love you, as he had never loved in his life, nor as he had ever thought to be able to love. If I was his first passion, you were his second and last, this hate and this love. And the passion he felt for you—maybe you would have been frightened to know of it, Iris, for Antony's were strong words—carried him quite away for those few months. There's nothing of the femme fatale about you, but you've certainly got a wonderful talent for obsessing men, making them want to clutch at you with mind and body—Roger, Antony, Ronnie, and I wonder who else! And from the moment Antony met you to the moment you told him you were engaged to me he was absorbed in his passion for you—for the first time he looked to be forgetting about me, was forgetting about me. If you had loved him, Iris, he would have left me quite alone, from that time on. But between his luck and himself and you and me—he lost again. And God knows what rotten furies were added to him from that moment, always a bad loser! He had passionately longed for so many things, and passionately lost so many—and, at last, you! To him, you were his woman.... Maybe he thought he could have won you but for me; and maybe he was right, but I don't think so, for Antony was made to capture only the surface of a woman's fancy.

"'But you mustn't think that he bore the least bit of resentment against you. Oh, no, you didn't come into it after that. You were just an added inch to the height of the barricade between him and happiness. But as for me.... And, do you know, so consistent was the admiration part of his hatred that he admired my being loved, or so he thought, by you! And the only letter I've ever received from Antony is one of congratulation on being engaged to such a marvellous woman. He wrote that from Mexico.

"'If you had seemed the "ultimate island" of his bad luck, the finding of that wretched oil-spring was the penultimate. And his luck seemed to have turned, too, since he set foot in America; a few months in Texas had filled his pockets with dollars—actually won at poker! And if a man is slippery enough to win money from such a crew of toughs, and at their own game, then his luck must have turned indeed! And then, with another man, a down-at-heel engineer who was almost his servant—Antony could always find a servant but never a master, and that was his trouble—he had set out in the good old way, prospecting for a fortune in Mexico, rebellions or no rebellions. And actually found it—the oil! And how he must have thrown a mighty chest, thinking that now he would show the world and Roger of what stuff Red Antony was made.... But the only stuff that was proven was that of his luck and his oil. For as I told you, Iris, it was very good oil, but there was not much of it. And the rest, the oil that might have been, the oil that would have made Antony's millions and restored him his self-respect, had to go the way of his other failures, to add one more corpse to the shambles of who knows how many failures.

"'And then came the idea of how, after all, he could use that oil! It came from a profound despair, from a realisation that, do what he would, he could do nothing well in this world. And realising that, he came to want nothing, success and happiness or any coveted thing was too far beyond his reach. But there was one thing, anyway, that would give him a little more rest after its accomplishment, and which just might be within his reach; for the first time, in Mexico, he finally realised that if he was to live he must do something about his obsession, the very root of his discontent. He must somehow prick and burst it, so that he could live more smoothly. And how better flatten the thing out than by bringing my house and goods down on my head?...

"'If a man can come by such an intention at all amiably, so Antony must have done. There was none of your melodramatic stuff about it. It merely seemed to him a clear fact that my success was pitted against his peace of mind, that we must row in the same boat or he would drown too wretchedly. He wanted now nothing from me, neither money nor influence; but, in that last year in Mexico, he very definitely made up his mind that I should have as little of either as ever he had had. So with that in his mind, and armed with his plans and his tame engineer, he came to England. And whether you had let him in or not he would have got into the house. Even Antony wasn't always to be baulked, you know. And especially in his last venture of all.' ...

"'But since you knew him so well, you must have known what he was about from the first moment,' I broke in; and, Ronnie, it was a dangerous protest, for his last few words about Antony's 'inevitability' had brought my anger against him back again. It was my love in arms against some treachery he had licenced—and even the way he looked at me, his eyes dark with pain, didn't soften the silence with which I awaited the explanation that he must make. And a helpless gesture of his hand, the very manner of his explaining, showed that he knew now, now, that no explanation could be good enough, however fully he had once accepted it; that now, and just lately, there had happened something between us that discounted all previous acquiescences to 'inevitability.' ... And he spoke now without a trace of that rather grim fantasy with which he always chose to obscure his most serious moods.

"'Don't you realise Iris, that the man who stopped Antony in Jermyn Street, the man you married, was very different to the man who played host to Antony's tomfoolery on that Nigel Poole night? with you sitting there at the table, and indifference the only apparent fact about your face except its loveliness. Didn't you realise at all that I had changed, and very much? But then how silly to ask that, for you and I never talked of such things, if we talked at all.

"'In those two years my whole view of life, my ambitions, and I once had so very many! had gone awry. Or rather, they had withered, got sour, don't you see? Of all Antony's many follies his greatest was ever to envy me my success—for the penalty of that success went with the very nature of the man who succeeded. Iris, I had to realise I was a bad winner long before I realised I was a bad loser.... I was just about realising it when I fell in love with you. And that pulled me up, indeed it did. Love for you created something worth while winning, worth succeeding about.... I'm trying to tell you that everything had been too easy for me all my life. I suppose one was always just a little rotten with sophistication, and so, as one played and won every throw, the winnings seemed so little worth while—until you came! My dear, I thought I'd have to fight for you—and you so worth fighting for, you with those mysterious cornstalks in place of hair! I didn't tell myself that I wanted to fight for you, but I must have had it at the back of my mind—for I was so disappointed, angry, when I found that I hadn't to fight, that you were as easy to win as everything else. Iris, that was terrible of you, why did you fall so easily and quickly? Why didn't you pull me up, why didn't you resist at all, at all?... I loved you, never any one nor anything more than you. And so much that I simply couldn't believe that any one I wanted so passionately could so easily give herself! The gift seemed to grow less in such giving, I couldn't believe but in the surface of the thing. If I hadn't loved you so much, my dear, I would have been very well satisfied with your love, and we would never have had those first wretched months, leading to so many more. You'll say it was my perversity that caused it all, and of course it was. But how can I ever make you believe that that perversity of scepticism and other beastliness were born of nothing but love for you, of wanting you always and always? And that being built so ungenerously, I couldn't believe but that your love was a shallow thing, just another of those gilt "prizes" that had so often been handed to one for being a "clever boy." I didn't want to be a "clever boy," I wanted to be a real one, to be allowed to play a splendid game with a splendid playmate and the devil take the truffles. And you gave me admiration! Why, damme, you almost glowered at me with admiration—and, my sweet, how terribly articulate you sometimes were with it, weren't you?

"'There have been found grown-up men to say that love can change a man's nature, whereas, as you and I know, it can only intensify his traits, sometimes the good and sometimes the bad. And, Iris, somehow, somehow, in spite of all the lovely things about you, you intensified the bad.... Oh yes, I know, I knew then, how stupid and cruel I was, but I seemed to be goaded to it. Bitter little knives, weren't they? I couldn't believe in your love, and it irritated me when I egged you on to plead it—and then it irritated me when I found I couldn't egg you on any more, when there was no making you say that you loved me. And all the time I loving you, wanting you always to be there but always. Never leaving the thing alone, full of fear that I might lose grip of it.... I'm not trying to find any excuse for my caddishness, for there isn't any, since it's easier for a murderer than for a cad to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.... And then, at last, my scepticism seemed to be justified, or rather it had justified itself. For as you became indifferent—and how indifferent you can look, Iris!—I thought to myself that of course you had never loved me, except as the "clever boy" and weren't now loving even that since you had found him out to be a bad boy as well. The most grotesque perversities can be justified if one looks crookedly enough, and so I justified the indifference I had forced on you as indecently as I had wrecked your love. And so, too, when the time came, I justified Antony.

"'You remember how nasty I was when you first said something about him wanting to make friends with me again? That was the first I had heard of his return, but with no surprise. And I was angry with you only because it seemed, suddenly, very distasteful that you should be mixed up with Antony and myself—you seemed so cold and unsympathetic that I was sure you would never care to understand the thing. But as for Antony, I really wanted to see him. And he conceived the plot, you know, to save his baby pride and vanity rather than as a means of forcing himself on to me, about which he knew there could be no real difficulty. My mind had turned to him, often, particularly since that new bitterness about you. And how far from each other you and I were, weren't we? And so I had gradually come to let Antony into my thoughts again, to want him with me. My life, it seemed to me, had not been complete without him. I didn't care whether he hated me or not, my life had been incomplete without him, he was my comrade. The world seemed to have rushed by us both and left us stranded together, as we had once been. And so I was very ready for him when he so aptly appeared that night....