“Kids!” murmured Hilary, with a sort of grudging smile. And they looked just that, for all their beauty—“kids.” One saw them playing together under a tree. A long while ago, they had played together under a tree. The favourite of the gods and the shameless, shameful lady. …
“Hm,” grumbled Hilary. “Imitation. …”
But I knew, for I once had a friend who was a taxidermist. There were 396 white ermines round Iris. White and tawny and white. She was like a light, and you hadn’t realised what an infernal dungeon the place was until the door had suddenly opened and she had come in, wrapped in cloth of soft snow. Boy’s head, curly head, white and tiger-tawny. She was like a light, a sad, white light. I can’t describe her but like that. Napier had been standing by the door, waiting for the dance to cease, so that he might join Venice. Then Iris had come in, grave, very unselfconscious. She didn’t see Napier. He didn’t see Iris. Her companion was Colonel Duck, M.F.H.
“God, that man!” sighed Hilary. Oh, Iris was hopeless! Why, of all men, Colonel Duck?
Napier made to walk away. Iris and Colonel Duck made to follow Risotto. Maybe one of the 396 white ermines just brushed Napier’s sleeve. Maybe this, maybe that. “Kids!” said Hilary. Napier had started round, looked blank: tall, slender, dark-haired, dark eyes always fevered with a fear of you could never tell what—they almost blinked now, you thought, at the light that Iris was, and she with her pools of eyes simply blazing with surprise and an unsure smile parting the painted mouth. “Napier!” “Iris!” As though, you know, someone with a soft “There!” had turned a tap somewhere. They smiled completely. Well, they would, the old friends. Naturally. She wouldn’t, I was sure, be calling him “Naps,” and she detesting abbreviations and the like.
The wrong sort of Jewess gave a short, audible outline of Iris to Mr. Trehawke Tush. Hilary stared at her venomously. Then he stared across the room at Colonel Duck venomously. Colonel Duck stood behind Iris’s white shoulder, a red dragon of a man, smiling relentlessly with his well-known geniality. Napier did not appear to see Colonel Duck, M.F.H. Napier and Iris were talking very quickly, laughing, maybe rather shyly. Then Astorias, refreshed, hurled his men against the conversation; bravely it held on for a second or two, then lay shuddering and shattered, and gone was Napier, gone Iris towards a table with Colonel Duck, whose red, relentless geniality showed no hint of the certain fact that the next time he was at that talkative club of his he would say that Napier Harpenden had been another of Iris Storm’s “affairs” and might quite well be again, Iris Storm being what she was. Notably good at all games and sports was Colonel Duck, M.F.H., and therefore tolerated with respect by decent men.
“I wonder if she knows anything about Gerald,” I was saying, when from her table across the room she seemed to be beckoning. To Hilary, not to me. She looked very serious. The emerald shone on the third finger of her right hand. She did not appear to see me. I felt bitter.
“Hm,” growled Hilary. He wanted to be persuaded to go. He wanted to go reluctantly. “Hate that Duck man so,” he said pathetically.
“Go on, Hilary. She might know something. I’ll get a paper.”
“Why, there’s Guy!” said Hilary. “Must have just come up from Mace. There, by the door. …”
The carpet of colours, on which the men were sprinkled like the black smuts on a town garden, swayed between us and the doorway, but no crowd might hide that man, for he was tall as a tree and his crisp yellow hair glared like a menace above the intervening heads and his frozen blue eyes petrified smoke, noise, and distance. Hilary was standing, about to go towards Iris. He looked rather sheepish at being found by Guy at the Loyalty. Most unsmiling was Guy that night.
“Ross must have told him we were here,” I said. “He’ll have come about Gerald. …”
“This foul place!” Hilary snapped. “You go downstairs with Guy, and I’ll get Iris to rid herself of her fancy friend and bring her down. …”
II
And that was how, soon after midnight that night, I found myself for the first time in the car of the flying stork. For the first time. … Iris had dropped her boyish-looking chauffeur in the course of the evening, because, she said, she only liked driving at night, when the air blew clean and chill. She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel. The great bonnet swept round by the squat Palace and up the slope of Saint James’s Street, which only by night may remember a little of the elegance it has long since forfeited by day.
“But that’s not the point,” I remember saying. “He won’t care a button what anyone else is thinking about it. He’ll just go mad at the humiliation in himself, he’ll worry it, making a mountain of sordidness. …” I had told her that Gerald had sent her his love, and her eyes had lit up at that, and she had laughed, shyly. “That’s better,” she had said, and now she said: “Yes, that’s the point. He’s proud, proud as Lucifer … and such a baby! Oh, Gerald, you sensitive beast! I’m going abroad tomorrow, and he must either come with me or he must join me quickly, quickly. You’ll persuade him, too, won’t you?” I did not say that, if I knew Gerald, he would probably be in a state far beyond persuasion. But, I thought, there was no harm in trying to see him.
At first, when Guy had told me downstairs at the Loyalty, I had just laughed. It seemed so absurd, fantastic. Gerald had
