Michael Arlen

“ And then you told me you had come to see Ralph on a point of honour! At last you had summoned up your courage to see Ralph—on a point of honour. And that’s why I wanted you to be silent for a while, for speech sometimes makes a tragedy unbearably idiotic. I wanted peace, Hugo! I wanted just to taste the peace between the old life and the new, the old life in which there was no honour and the new life in which there will anyway be happiness....” And she touched him, but with a blind gesture of his arm he swept her aside, and strode out of the room. ”

“ The cry cut across the sunlit place, the clear cry that has lit for England the darkest corners of the world, and the huge man in the red shirt stayed his cudgel and looked at us. But the little old woman still moaned, and it was quite dreadful to hear that in the summer silence. Ten yards separated us from that domestic scene, but they were yards of bright sunlight, and we could see every line on that patriarch’s face. For he was a patriarch. He was the most magnificent man I have ever seen; and Tarlyon and I, not small men, felt withered under his straight look. We stood rooted. ”

“ Shelmerdene: Just because, after all these years, he suddenly remembered her one night! Just because, after all these years, he suddenly saw a vision of her dancing—as he had last seen her, he who had suddenly, bitterly, vengefully, left her life because, being a child, she had taken a silly fancy to make him jealous! Oh, no, no! I would not dine with him—like that. Life is not like that. I do not know what life is like, for I am not yet a million years old, but I know that it is not like that. It is not so easy as that. ”

“ But he did not move.
“What sort of a play is this,” he heard his voice ask, “in which a woman goes away like a coward and comes back like a wraith?”
And into the room she came, and with a sigh she sat down in a chair by the window.
“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “I am so tired....”
His heart was so torn with gladness that for a long time he could not move, he could not speak. And then he walked across the room and stood above her chair. She turned up her little face under the tiger-tawny hair and smiled her funny crooked smile like a naughty fairy’s.
“Poor Aubrey!” she whispered. “Poor Gloria!...” ”

“ What do you do?
Shelmerdene: I wait.
The Voice: So serious!
Shelmerdene: I must go on with my dressing now. I am very late.
The Voice: A moment, please, please! You said you had been in love only once in your life. Tell me of that.
Shelmerdene: But the man’s mad! What is there to tell? It ended—it just ended! He said, you know, that love was like religion, for it must be done well or not at all.... And that’s all there is of it. He went. One can’t explain an ideal, one can only explain the failure of an ideal. One can’t describe a love-affair, one can only describe the end of a love-affair. ”

“ She was a pretty girl; that has been remarked before; but then she had been dressed like a flower, a flower from a garden sweeter than the spacious garden of Mrs. Felix Waite, and now she was dressed like nothing at all; and the faded blue of her covering was stained by a flat yellow packet of cigarettes. She was obviously no lady, and had given up pretending she was.
“You dirty beast! How dare you come here!” cried the pretty girl, amazement turning to disgust, disgust to anger. But the cavalier of the streets, still framed in the doorway, his head uncovered, only smiled at her. ”

“ Whereupon Shelmerdene looked at me, those wide and wise and witty eyes looked full at me—men have drowned themselves in Shelmerdene’s eyes—and I saw laughter at all men playing in their dusky-blue depths; and I had to confess to those kind, mocking eyes, that I, Ralph Wyndham Trevor, had also wept, that I had sobbed like a child, and that a woman had seen me at it—the woman who had caused it.{95}
“Exactly,” said Shelmerdene. “For the more virile a man is, the braver and the more adventurous a man is, the more likely he is to weep before a woman and generally make a fool of himself. ”

“ Now the eyes of a man who sees a wraith are more frightening than the wraith that he sees. That is why Joan Loyalty left her sentence in the air, for it had been snapped by his stare.
“But aren’t you—sorry?” he whispered dryly.
And she laughed—her nerves laughed through her mouth.
“Sorry! You dare to ask me if I am sorry! Oh, Hugo, is it absolutely necessary for the love of a man for a woman to be expressed in fatuous questions? Oh, God, what kind of thing is this love that it tricks a mind into loving a man!” ”

“ Shelmerdene: Silence, silence, silence! What I have done I have done because I wanted the world, but you have done it because you wanted revenge. What I have done I have done because I have too much heart, but you have done it because you have no heart. Through the telephone I can hear that you have no heart, and I can see the hole where your heart should be. My life has made me sad, but yours has made you bitter—oh, why, why? ”

“ Tarlyon restrained me. “We’ll teach Red Antony to walk up Park Lane without a hat.”
Gently we approached, one on each side of the colossal back.
“Oi!” we cried.
A wrench, and he faced us. We are tall, but we were as children beneath him.
“Oi to you!” snarled Antony. “Who the blazes are you, anyway?” And the great red expanse which was given to Antony for a face surveyed us intolerantly. Never what you might call an easy-tempered man, Red Antony.
“We be friends,” said Tarlyon sombrely. ”

“ Do you realise, Hugo, that you and I have scarcely had a minute of silence together for two years—you and I, whose lives are spent in chattering, have had to go on chattering even when we were alone, we could never forget ourselves or Ralph, we had always to be discussing what we would do and how we would do it and when we would do it. Discussing and discussing and discussing! Oh, dear, our love has been one endless discussion! And we are not very young any more, my sweet! ”

“ He sat down on the sofa beside her, very close; on the edge of the sofa, sideways to her, with one knee almost on the ground. She lit a cigarette: and, seeing the appeal on his face, she smiled a little, her lips smiled, and she said softly:
“Forgive me, dear, but I feel very silent. The heat, perhaps. But go on with your speech—please do! And I’m hoping, too, that it will contain some inside information as to why you have not been to see me or even rung me up for a week. It’s such bad luck for a woman,” she said softly, “when a man of honour remembers his honour. Don’t you think so, Hugo?” ”

“ Major Cypress, are you in a position to support a wife?”
“Well, I never!” gasped Hugo. “I’m on half-pay, man!”
“Ho!” said Tarlyon. “I withdraw my consent. I hate to be unkind to majors, but I’m afraid I must. How are you going to live, man?”
“Can’t worry about cheques in Paradise, George.”
“Good for you, old Hugo! Very pretty. Bronx or Martini?”
“Sherry, thanks. George, you don’t know what love is....”
“Keep nothing from me, Hugo. What is love? Ah, what is love? I insist on being told....” ”

“ But you can tell him that until you are blue in the face and he will smile at you and agree with you, but still he will not walk through Lansdowne Passage at night, saying that he is afraid. And when you ask him of what he is afraid, he will smile a shameless smile and reply that he gives Lansdowne Passage a miss because he is afraid of meeting a woman in it. At that you will at once express impatience, disbelief, and disgust, for on no female occasion whatsoever will you have noticed upon George Tarlyon’s brow that cold sweat which denotes a decent bashfulness in a man. ”

“ Do girls of eighteen—really nice ones, I mean, not the meretricious golden things one sees about London ballrooms in July with a tremendous air of having been bored at their first Garden Party—do the really nice ones just go fluttering on and on until a nasty big net comes plump down on them, calling itself Marriage and Womanhood and so on? It is all very puzzling, I do think, and I see no reason at all for my going on calling myself a novelist if I don’t know a damn thing about what goes on behind the brown eyes of a girl of eighteen! ”

“ Tarlyon sighed, “if only she hadn’t got three legs!” I could not at first see Musidora’s third leg, but after he had pointed it out to me I could see nothing else but that ghostly third leg dangling over her knee between the other two.
“You see,” he explained, “Gainsborough painted one leg badly, and so he painted it out and fitted another—but Musidora’s third leg came back. Say what you like, there is something displeasing about a woman with an exaggerated number of legs, though some people rather like that kind of thing, saying that a woman can’t have too many....” ”

“ As, next morning, the countryside sweetly echoed with the songs of birds and church-bells, Lord Paramour and his hostess stepped out of the house upon the velvet sward. The broad sweep of park and woodland lay before them, soft and mellow in the haze of{235} the morning sun, and Lord Paramour suggested a brisk walk, but Mrs. Lyon-West begged to be excused, saying she was enamoured of her rose garden; in which direction, skirting the spacious house, they leisurely betook themselves, talking of this and that in an elegant way. ”

“ We wandered about for some time, up little twisting lanes, down tangled untidy lanes, up no lanes at all: we ploughed through the growth and lush of the wood, like angry flies beating about a crypt to which the sun filtered in tortured patches{117} of light. We perspired enormously—and Tarlyon lost his temper. He had had no luncheon, you understand, and it was now past five; and so he was fluent in the forbidden language. But the sergeant of police was a tough and silent man, he neither sweated nor spoke. ”

“ I know what you’ll say. Good-bye.”
“Oh, oh!” cried Shirley. “How awful men are! And how d’you know what I’ll say, Hugo? You are a clever chap, aren’t you? Are you a psycho-analyst, Hugo? Can you tell what is passing in a woman’s mind by looking at her instep? And for heaven’s sake don’t go on standing in that doorway looking like a draught!” ”

“ Tarlyon picked up a liqueur-glass which the thump had upset. “Sorry about your unhappy marriage, Antony,” he said, “but, you know, it takes a Napoleon to marry a beautiful Creole. How did it happen?”
“How?” And Antony laughed; at least he made a noise which was perhaps intended to sound like laughter. “How? Because she made it happen—how else? D’you think because she’s dumb that she hasn’t got more fascination than a thousand women rolled together? Those eyes? Met eyes like that before, George? If hell has a face its eyes will be like that. ”

“ But perhaps I will meet one to-night, Foster, and fall in love with him! Oh, dear, it is such a long time since I was in love with any one! What shall I do, Foster?”
“You had better let me do your hair now, madam. It’s getting on.”
“Yes, but how awful it would be never, never to fall in love again! Particularly now that the days are drawing in. Don’t pull so hard, Foster. Hair is, after all, but hair. Wintering in England is a cold business without a man in one’s life. There’s that wretched telephone again! ”

“ I was a fool, of course—I mean, to believe what he said about not loving me. Oh, what an utter fool I was to believe him! But, all the same, I clung to my pathetic love-affair with both hands, ever so tight. I did indeed, Raymond. It is extraordinary how unattainable a woman can make a man she isn’t sure of! Maybe you have been unattainable to some woman, Raymond, or maybe you will be. It will be fun for you. ”

“ One of the many silly legends about Carmion Wood is that only foreigners may hear the singing of the birds therein, while for Englishmen there is no sound but the rustling of the leaves and the sighing of the boughs. How that sort of nonsense ever gets hold of a countryside, I don’t know. And the fact that, as George Tarlyon rushed the car along the twilight road—for although it was a bright summer’s day, the leaves are very thick on Carmion trees—we could hear no birds singing was, without a doubt, simply because they were singing somewhere else that afternoon. ”

“ I do not often lose money at poker, Mrs. Avalon—in fact, I make a point of not losing money at poker, in so far, of course, as a man of honour may make a point about a hazard. But, whether it was the memory of your beauty, for I may not ever forget it, that came between me and my skill, or whether—Oh, what does it matter why it was, since the fact remains that I have lost money, and must pay what I owe or forfeit my honour.... ”

“ Trevor, and you, Lord Tarlyon, you may see at the present moment a man undergoing heavy punishment for the pettiest of all crimes, the crime of thoughtless kindness. I am now suffering for my lies, for I told more lies about that dead husband than you could believe possible in a man whose imagination has hitherto been considered financial rather than fanciful. ”

“ It won’t be in the least interesting to find out what she thinks of things when she is in her twenties, for her fascinating kind of beauty—you want to pass your hand over it, that kind—can’t help spoiling her, the mere daily business of refusing proposals of marriage can’t help spoiling her—but now! Well, those brown eyes are the devil’s own barrier, and she’s so infernally simple that one has to talk intelligibly about everything, which is a habit one has almost gotten out of ever since one grew up and lived among grown-up people. Do girls of eighteen, does Consuelo, know anything? ”

“ I murmured.
“And we thought he was dead!” muttered Tarlyon—as though Red Antony could have died without the noise of his death-rattle confounding the thunder of the guns that killed many better men! Could a man who lived so noisily die as other men? And yet, because the lean years of peace had passed without sight or sign of him, we had believed the rumour that had had it that Sir Antony Poole had risen to be sergeant in a Canadian storm battalion and had then died ”