And then, a good while later, when I had moved from Algiers to Lagouat, which is right away in the desert, hundreds of miles away in the desert, Ralph Trevor wrote to me, and among other things he asked: “Why haven’t you mentioned Consuelo Brown in your last two letters? I am quite interested in her, and have been wondering whether you have fallen in love with her and had your advances rejected with contumely, which would be a quite sufficient reason for you to have lost all interest in her.”
I wrote back rebuking him for his harsh opinion of me and pointing out various of the less lustrous episode in his own career of celibacy, and then I came to Consuelo. “Yes, there is certainly a reason why I ceased to mention her in my letters, but it is not the reason to which you have quite bestially subscribed. There are some things one simply does not, of one’s own accord, write about, not for any consideration, and so not even to cure you forever of your fatuous pessimism concerning my character will I ever again mention the name of Consuelo Brown. I am, as you see, in Lagouat now, an aeroplane from Biskra dropped me here, and here I will stay until the spring, between the sand and the sun and the beggars....”
But when in the spring I returned to London, loveliest of all towns in the spring, and I dined one night with Ralph Trevor, he said to me, at that period after dinner when such things are commonly said: “Now then, out with it, old man. The later history of Miss Consuelo Brown, if you please.”
Very unwillingly, I told him how one day a young man I knew, not very well, was added to the guests of the hotel on the hill over the bay of Algiers. “A pleasant young man he was, and I was shocked at the sight of him, he was so white and fragile. He said he had been ill of a rheumatic fever for a long time and was now convalescing.
“We had met by chance on the very first day of his arrival, and we did the ‘Hello! Fancy seeing you here!’ business, but I fancied that his ‘Hello!’ was not so hearty as it might have been, considering that I was one of his elder brother’s oldest friends. We sat down, on the terrace there, just before luncheon it was, and he seemed to be getting at something, until finally he came out with: ‘Don’t you know? Haven’t you—haven’t you heard?’ I told him I hadn’t seen an English paper for weeks, and then he sort of gasped out: ‘Just the other day—in Paris—Basil—Basil shot himself! Awful. Oh, my God, awful!’ Your own letter telling me of poor Basil’s suicide was to arrive that very evening, so you can imagine how shocked I was to hear of the ghastly thing like that—and shocked too, at this poor boy’s face, it was so livid with pain! I was so sorry for him that I was quite, quite silent. Here had he, at the end of a long illness, been running away from the turmoil of his elder brother’s suicide—and the first man he meets is one of his brother’s oldest friends! He had somehow had to tell me about it, the poor boy. And then there we sat, staring down at the silent Mediterranean a mile below, but the sea at noon was not more silent than we were. Not until that moment had I seen so clearly the wide, blue-white bay of Algiers, the sea as blue as a pretty doll’s eyes and the bending coast dotted with white villages looking so deceptively clean in the sunlit distance, and away in the west, from the sea to the desert, the long low ridge of the Atlas Mountains with here and there snow-capped peaks towering up behind them, like huge white minarets in the blue haze of the sun ... and then Consuelo came up the steps between us and the sea, pretty Consuelo, so slim, so young, so smart, and the poor boy beside me gasped, ‘My God!’ Consuelo gave him one white look and was gone into the hotel, and that afternoon out of the hotel and, I hope to God, out of my life. Now, if you please, I am tired of this tale, and if you will be a little more active with that not very superior port, as becomes a host to his guest, I shall be infinitely obliged. Thank you.”
“But, my dear man, you have not finished the tale! What the devil was it all about?”
“Yes, the devil and hell certainly had a lot to do with it, Ralph. There was hell in that poor boy’s eyes when he saw Miss Brown and said, ‘My God!’ You see, he loved that girl quite frantically and seriously, and she came to stay with him and his people in Hampshire so that the engagement could be confirmed and all that, and early one morning he saw her coming out of Basil’s room. A hungry girl. After that he went away without a word, to give poor Basil his chance—you remember, we guessed that poor Basil was in love at last, the queer, furtive way he came by of breaking dinner-engagements?—and then the next thing he heard was that the girl had broken the engagement and that Basil had put a bullet into his silly sweet head....
“Perhaps,” said Ralph Trevor, “she couldn’t help it. Life is very hard for very pretty girls, Raymond. Perhaps she just couldn’t help it....”
But I said nothing, what was the use? I had seen that white look she gave that wretched boy, and that white look was like a disease in the sunlight. Lithe limbs and curling lips, laughing eyes and loose heart—a hungry girl, made to rot men.