“He wrote a very good book once,” I said, to say something.
“Yes. About Boy. …”
“Boy?” Gerald, you see, was no talker. He just swore, but automatically; it meant nothing.
“Didn’t you know?” She looked at me again, but her eyes seemed to me masked. I was to know later why her eyes were masked just then. I said I knew nothing at all about Gerald.
She passed a finger over one of her eyebrows, and looked at it. “Dirty,” she said.
“Years ago,” she said, “before the war, Gerald had a very great friend. Gerald, you see, is a hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and everything, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper. And no hero, no Gerald. And so, when his hero died, Gerald died too. Funny, life is, isn’t it? Then the war, and that, of course, buried him. And now. …” Those absorbed, blazing blue eyes! The sea was in them, and the whisper of all open places: the magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.
“No friends?” she asked dimly. “No women? Nothing?”
And just at that moment I had, for the first time, that feeling of incapacity with her. I was to have it again, profoundly, but I remember vividly that it came for the first time just then, in poor, furious Gerald’s room. Dingy—that is what I felt before this quiet, thoughtful woman with the absorbed eyes. Dingy. I felt, I suppose, the immense dinginess of being a human being, for there is an immense, unalterable dinginess in being human, in the limitation of being human. But why I should feel that particularly with her I did not know then. She, too, was human, quiet, gentle, very unaware. But, later, I was to know why.
It was with an effort that I told her about Gerald. That feeling of self-dinginess came somehow to a point in just feeling common. For I was what Gerald was not, what she obviously was not. I could somehow “cope with” my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for privilege in defeat.
Gerald, I told her, was a more solitary man than I had ever known or thought to know. I supposed he had a small income, for he seemed to manage to live. He was very shy, absurdly shy, tortured shy. She nodded gravely, and I went on to say that shyness was a cruel disease with Gerald: it was a shyness, to strangers, without charm, for he never could show his shyness, he must show everything but his shyness. And so it was that he couldn’t get on with people, and now he had ceased to try, he just had drinks. Every Sunday afternoon he went to tea with his aunt, Lady Eve Chalice, in Mount Street.
“It was Eve who really created my impulse,” she told me, then: “Oh, here!” and I found I had an empty cigarette-case in my hand and that she was offering me hers. It was an oblong white-jade case, and chained to it by a double chain of gold was a hectagonal black onyx box which may or may not have held powder. One corner of the hectagonal black onyx was initialed in minute diamond letters: I. S.
“Iris,” she said. “Iris Storm.” And she smiled, childishly, formally, saying: “You have been so nice, I had forgotten we didn’t know each other.” I told her my name, in that embarrassed way one always does tell anyone one’s name, and we smoked a while in silence. She inhaled her smoke with a faint hiss, and her teeth were a regiment of even bits of rice-paper standing at attention, very smart and sharp. Teeth always give one ideas. These were imperious, dangerous teeth. On a middle one was wedged a small string of tobacco: it lay coiled there like a brown maggot, and when I told her about that she removed it with the nail of her small finger, and regarded it. She had a great talent for looking at nothing in particular, and that was the only likeness I could see between the twins: thoughtful they both were. Suddenly, from the tousled dark head on the table came a jumble of inarticulate words. She listened intently. Gerald shivered, but his face remained buried in his crossed arms.
“He’s dreaming,” I said. She looked at me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. But as they never fell, I am not sure. Thoughtful she was, smoking. …
“Why does God do these things?” she asked in a suddenly strong, clear voice, a most surprising voice; but I said nothing, knowing nothing of God.
“Let us go,” she said.
“Shall I tell him you came?”
She thought about that, looking at me. “Yes,” she said, “will you? Please. Just that I came. You see, Gerald doesn’t … well,” she smiled somewhere in those eyes, “let us say he is against me. …”
We were in the doorway of the soiled room of the drunkard. I was going to switch out the light. Often I would come upstairs and switch out Gerald’s light.
“Gerald,” she said suddenly, in that strong voice, and I thought of a prefect’s voice at school, down the corridor of a dormitory. “Goodbye to Gerald.”
“You see,” she said to me, “Gerald and I are the last Marches, and we ought to stand together. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, you ought,” I said gravely. One hand, the hand of the great emerald, hung against her leather jacket. “Certainly you ought,” I said, and raised the hand to my lips. Her hand smelt dimly of petrol and cigarettes, and a scent whose name
