I forced my mind to a more legal aspect of her. There were two rings on her wedding finger. A narrow circle of platinum, a narrow circle of gold. I wondered if she had been married twice. I tried to imagine her husbands. They would be tall, handsome men, and she would be passionately in love with them. She would, like all women in love with tall, handsome men, be worshipful as a dog. Physically they would be very courteous to her, but no more than courteous, and mentally they would, if I may say so, treat her rough. They would go to sleep quickly, and she would lie awake far into the night, pressing her breasts, because they hurt her. She would think. She would not think. Then one day, when she was between thinking and not thinking, she would be unfaithful, and the tall, handsome man who was her husband would apologise to her for not having understood her better. But she would say, with cold eyes: “There is nothing to understand. On a envie.” Then he would say, “Oh!” and instruct her lawyers to divorce him.
“I was trying,” I said, “to imagine your husband. …”
The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the hat one blue eye looked at me like a blue stone worn by fire. “Two,” she said. “They are dead.”
I wondered what she saw, looking over my shoulder. She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains. Then suddenly the headlines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled before my mind, stood livid against my memory, slashed with the name of Storm. I had not a doubt but that he had been her second husband. “V.C. murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C. Left on roadside with five bullet wounds. …”
She said suddenly: “I am a house of men.”
“What!” I said. “You surprise me.”
“A house of men. Of their desires and defeats and deaths. Of their desires, yes, of their deaths, yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great responsibility for me, and I have lodged complaints about it, but it is no use. I am a house of men. Ah me, ah me! Oh, dear! My friend, there is a curse, a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You will see it in my eyes one day, and you will be sorry for me.”
“You mustn’t believe in curses,” I said. “Good God, curses!”
“The Marches,” she said, “are never let off anything. That is the curse.”
Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far below, like pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of the sighs of Anaïtis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as they can in their minds. I said: “And so the house of March, fatal and damned, can never avoid its destiny. …”
“Yes,” she said reasonably, “it can avoid it. By not being weak enough to desire so strongly.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.
“I’m glad you see,” she said gravely. They listen to voices whispering dreams. While they listen, they do queer weak things. Of the soil sordid—there is your March. But there is another March, who listens to voices whispering dreams. My father, Barty March, was, I think, one of the most loved men of his time. Like Napier is now, but of course Napier behaves. A policeman found Barty early one morning on the doorstep of a house we had then in Cambridge Square. He used to say he was never drunk until he closed his eyes, but this time he had closed his eyes into pneumonia. He only opened them once again, to look at Gerald and me, sixteen years old apiece. He smiled, you know, because Barty couldn’t help smiling. Besides, he was happy at last. “Avoid dreams,” he said. “Never stop to listen to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run over. Never sympathise with the moon when you can hear it, cold and lonely and blind, crooning to itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You will catch pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which men are men and women are women. You will go mad. …”
Her right hand hung limp over the arm of the chair. It was just faintly dirty, and the nails shone like pink ivory. The emerald on the third finger held my eyes enchanted for a long while. She smiled at my look, and as she lay her eyes swept falcon-like down to the stone. It made me rise out of myself, that falcon-like sweep of her clear eyes, and I thought of the pitiless misbehaviour of life, that had not let her stay within the sensible stability of marriage.
“It’s a bit loose,” she was saying.
“I was wondering. It’s such a beauty! Aren’t you afraid of it falling?”
She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself. “Oo, no! I have a knuckle. I crook it. And lo, it doesn’t fall. …”
“But this sounds like a plot!”
“It is a law,” she said. “There
