“Goodbye,” I said. And suddenly the hand that lay in mine pressed mine, and she gave a vague, brittle laugh.
“It seems a pity,” she said; and then the eyes in the shadow of the brim seemed to open wide, wide.
“You see?” she whispered. “You see?”
But I could see nothing but her silhouette against the future days. I said: “We have begun at the wrong end; but can’t we work back?”
“Oh, no!” she whispered. “It is not like that a bit. You don’t understand. …”
Suddenly I said many things.
She seemed, her hand still in mine, to be absorbed in something just behind my right shoulder. There was such fear in her eyes that I cried sharply: “What is it?”
“The beast,” said the lips of the eyes of fear. “Just the beast. …”
The word I said was drowned in the din of a lorry that smashed through Whitehorse Street to Piccadilly. She took her hand gently from mine. “There is a dream,” she said, “and there is a beast.”
She smiled.
“That’s all,” she said.
“I can understand regret,” I said, “but—”
“Ah, we can understand, you and I! We are as old as sand … at this moment.”
“But, Iris Storm, regret seems like a scar on you!”
“Not regret,” she said, so calmly. “Shame.” And she took my hand again, closely. “You must forgive me. I couldn’t have said that to any other man. My shame mustn’t shame you, please! But you have a cold mind, you are disenchanted, you understand. And oh, if one could be assoiled in human understanding! You see, I am not what you think. I am not of the women of your life. I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun. I am the meanest of all, she who destroys her body because she must, she who hates the thing she is, she who loathes the thing she does. …” The breathless, pregnant voice seemed to fall to the floor, like a small bird with broken wings, and as it struggled upwards I said: “You are like a boy after his first love.”
“Oh, if it was boyishness!” And she took from the pocket of her leather jacket a tube of gold, and she broke it into two pieces, and she stared moonstruck at the carmine tongue of the lip-salve.
“To be born a chaste woman,” she said to the carmine tongue, “is good. I am in favour of chastity. I would die for purity, in theory.” She painted her mouth, staring moonstruck into the daylight. “Yes, I would die for purity. I wouldn’t mind dying anyhow, but it would be nice to die for purity. …”
I said thus and thus.
“Yes,” she said, not having heard a word of mine, “it is not good to have a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind, as I have. It is hell for the body and terror for the mind. There are dreams, and there are beasts. The dreams walk glittering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire, the beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret. Goodbye.”
“Then it must be ‘goodbye’?”
She looked at me with a strange, dark friendliness, and nodded.
“Because of shame,” she said. “But if I were different, I would like you for my friend—”
To my interruption, which she did not hear, she said: “I have only one lover. But I know that only because I always feel unfaithful to him. It would be good to be really bad, but I am not even that. I only misbehave. I will see you again, when I have found my only love. Or I will see you again when I am qualified to die for purity. I will let you know, so you can be there. God bless you, dear.”
And I said what I said, that He had, with Iris Storm.
She went very white. “That shall be written down,” she whispered, “as the prayer of the only man who ever shamed a woman of her shame.”
“My days of adventure, Iris Storm, are over. A few years ago it would have seemed nothing to me that you should disappear as you came, into the great hole of London. To experts in adventure that is, I think, the usual procedure. But now I would like a trace of you. You must not leave me, quite. If I may not see you again, mayn’t I perhaps talk to you? Or, what is the main thing, feel that I could if I dared?”
She said she was in London now only on business that would last a few weeks, and lived always abroad. “But this is the telephone-number,” she said, and I was looking round for paper and pencil when she said “Here!” and her leather arm darted to the floor and came up with a book, and on the flyleaf of the book she scrawled the number with her lipstick.
High above the sharp noises of the young day I heard the scream of an electric-horn.
II
The Cavalier of Low Creatures
I
And that, I think, is all that there really is about me, as a person, in the tale. Of course, this first person singular will continue, and there’ll no doubt be any amount of “I this” and “I that,” but that is because of the nature of the work, and there’s never, the way I see it, much more than a pen behind it. Hilary, however, and Guy de Travest are not of my mind about this. We have recently been talking about these affairs, and a sad enough talk they made, and my two friends, my two seniors, were reluctantly compelled, they said, to disagree with me about my lack of responsibility in the events to be related hereinafter.
To me, the way I see it, it looks as though certain things were decreed to happen and that, therefore, they did happen: they had it in their
