Now, if anyone could tell me where Iris was to be found, Cherry-Marvel was that man. Cherry-Marvel knew, of course, everybody, and he knew everything about everybody … “of course it’s absurd to suppose that Alice, with her intelligence, which I am positive makes its full appeal to you—it is absurd to suppose that Alice could for one moment have thought that her husband, whom of course you know as well as I do, would divorce her for going to Brighton with Cubby Tyrell, because, as I was pointing out to her sister only the other day, for one thing no decent man, and I am sure you will agree with me about this, would care to let it be known that his wife had ever gone to Brighton, and for another, and this, of course, is a Biblical detail which I am sure that you will grasp at once, Cubby Tyrell, who is a very intimate friend of mine, has been allowed, in spite of having been married twice, to remain a member of the Celibates Club. …”
At this time I hadn’t the remotest idea as to where Iris was or how she did. I had not seen her since the night of her brother’s death; and had been permitted to gather from Hilary that he knew as little as I did of her whereabouts. Secret she had always been in her absences, Hilary said, or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively in hiding.
She had, a few weeks after that terrible night, written me one long letter: from some place near Rome, from a draughty house, so she wrote, on a hill of strangled olives. There was no address on the notepaper, and this, she wrote, was because she did not want me or anyone to write to her. “Please,” she added to that.
Her letter was presumably in answer to two of mine addressed to the care of Mrs. Oden of Montpellier Square, but she was at the pains to excuse it on the ground that she and I were tied together—“no, tied apart!”—by a bond, the existence of which I would never, never know. Well! It was, you can see, a feverish, mysterious letter; and made how much more mysterious by that almost illegible, pencilled scrawl! There were whole sentences on the first few pages which I could not make out at all, which I made almost blind guesses at, while at some I could not even contrive so much.
“It is your fault, my friend. You paved the road up which I raced in chase of the Blue Bird. Yours was the appointed dark finger in the darkness. May God forgive you, for I can’t. I will try, but I think I can’t. There is a waterfall of fire. …”
Sheets upon sheets of it, that letter is before me now, and still I am unable to decipher whole sentences from that maze of pencil-marks on the thin Italian paper. There was one that stared at me, shocked me, in the middle of the second page—“I may hate you”—but I could not, do what I would, make out the words above or below.
“… I am lonely beyond bearing, and afraid. I am so afraid. I wonder, will you understand? But if I bore you take courage, for I will not bore you again. You are my friend, and this is my goodbye. Forgive me, dear, the arrogance of calling you my friend. But I am so afraid. Et, satyr bien-aimé, j’ai raison. …”
I could, you can understand, make neither head nor tail of it. She might hate—me! She might, heaven knew, be indifferent to me, but why, how, hate? And satyr bien-aimé was all very well, but it meant nothing.
On the later pages she seemed to have controlled her hand a little, but her mind, if one might judge, remained … well, was that, perhaps, the effect on a mind of a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives? “I am lonely, but I have always been lonely since I was eighteen. Yes, I can trace my loneliness since then. It is a long time.”
This letter, you must remember, came only a month after Gerald’s death. She wrote of that night, and here her haunted pencil was at its most firm, if that is saying anything. “There I stood in the old, old darkness—how old darkness is, have you ever felt?—while you were upstairs in Gerald’s room. And I listened, but I could not hear you moving, so I imagined you to be staring at Gerald from the door, as you and I did that night a million years ago, when, do you remember, you suddenly, strangely from your heart, made that defiant courtesy to my hand? And, do you know, I almost cried because of your kindness to that poor, helpless sweet. Oh, Hilary has told me about you, and you luring Gerald off to a Home, but all in vain, my poor Gerald. And then I heard you switch out the light, and down you came, slowly, slowly, more silent than the darkness, and when you spoke your voice was as old as the darkness. But you are very young really, else you couldn’t be so defiantly, so imperiously, kind. And I remember wondering why you
