Hilary indulged me. I was young. “Of course,” he said, “the boy wasn’t quite sane. Hm. But he loved Iris—you know, extravagantly—as Hector Storm did later. Iris isn’t, it seems, one of those women you love a little. And Boy loved purity. And because, of course, the two simply didn’t go together—the shock, man, of realising that, to a boy in love!—he went on his own way. And I don’t think,” said Hilary, as though he was trying hard to be fair to one, “that we should sneer at the things men die for—even that young madmen die for.”
In England, I reflected sulkily, you may not apply the faintest touch of reason to any of the accepted laws of life and death without being accused of sneering. The accusation is invaluable in puissance. It has made England what she is. It at once stops all argument, all nonsense, all sense, all thinking. So powerful is the effect that the one accused, thinking that perhaps he was sneering, at once checks his mind from further thought on that line. The word creates a vacuum. No one likes to be thought he is sneering—when he was merely, for a change, thinking. It is like being told you have no “sense of humour.” It damns you completely, because it makes you damn yourself. And one of the reasons why there can never be a Marxist revolution in England is that the rebels will be told that they are sneering at the King. They will be abashed.
“Seldom,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “have I known a man pull his weight less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.”
IV
Aphrodite
I
One chapter can’t reasonably be expected to bear the weight of that night. We have so far built but the groundwork of that night, and on that we have now to shape a peculiar edifice, according to the flimsy but saturnine manner of the third decade of the twentieth century; to which majority the twentieth century has attained, as more austere histories will tell you, only after the most unparalleled pains, retchings, belchings and bellowings; but we, taking a more private course, will be more circumspect in our derangements.
We have, so far that night, seen Gerald Haveleur March, by the way. We have seen his evening paper; but we have not read it. (Nor had Hilary read his Evening Standard. He always “glanced at it,” he excused himself later on, as he was going to bed. As I did, if ever.) We have, also by the way, noted the presence in London of the car of the flying stork. We have dined, and had some brandy. We have talked of purity, and discovered an amiable dissonance in our views thereon. We would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed, for after dining with Hilary one somehow always went straightway to bed. That was why, Guy said cruelly, one dined with Hilary. The “hm’s” seemed to soothe the way thither. But that evening, however it came about, I did not feel that I would like to go straightway to bed. One has, I suppose, moods.
But I can’t account plausibly for the fact that Hilary came with me to the Loyalty. Hilary did not go to nightclubs. His moods took a more exclusive course. He ignored nightclubs, and thought he was ignoring the whole of folly. Not so superior, I! Wherefore it passed that I discovered my mood to Hilary as we stood in the hall of his house, for Hilary was accompanying me to the door. Ross, red and silent and amiable, stood somewhere about with my hat. Where we stood, just without the door, the unusually warm June night smiled kindly on us. There is not much sky in London, but that little smiled on us with a faint load of stars, and somewhere behind the roofs there might be hanging a moon. There might? But there was such a pretty tilted silver boat among the chimneys of Curzon House! From the small table in the hall Hilary had absently taken up the evening-paper, which was folded in that way which tells you in the Stop-Press News that Surrey has scored 263 for eight wickets. He held it in his hand with that air of one who has nothing left to do but read an evening-paper. Grey and thoughtful and kind, he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during their holidays. “Hm,” he said. “Nice night. …”
“Hilary, why don’t you come with me? It won’t probably be amusing, but we can always come away. …”
“Dancing,” he frowned. Hilary likes dancing, really. Only, not being exactly supreme among dancers, he never can understand how good dancers may like dancing so much that they will dance whenever they can. If Hilary had been a writer he would have put very witty and biting bits about dancing into his books. All writers have clumsy feet.
I made to assure him that he would find himself in the most polite company, for the Loyalty Club was notable as a relaxation for Government, diplomacy, and princes of the blood. He “hm’d” viciously at that, but set out with me down Curzon Street and through the noisome shadows of Shepherd’s Market. Gerald’s light was on. But now that I was not there to turn it out, when would Gerald’s light not be on?
Through the deep cavernous artery of Whitehorse Street we emerged on to Piccadilly, quiet as before the storm that would at any moment break on it from the theatres. Buses, their lights within revealing the seats, fled madly as though from
