“Nonsense, Venice,” Napier was saying, and it was his mildness, his calmness, that was so astonishing now. It was as though the man had suddenly found peace: as though love-lost Tristram raving in the wilderness had, in a sudden flash, realised that he was trying God too far. …
“Nonsense, Venice,” he scowled, still holding her arm. “She isn’t beginning to expect me and she never did. I just turned up by chance. …” He turned to me with that clear, not conspiratorial, look in his eyes. “You will say goodbye from me, won’t you?”
“Of course,” I said. “I may be seeing her today.”
“Yes, just say goodbye,” said Napier, and as he and I shook hands Venice laughed nervously: “Dear, how serious! I can’t bear goodbyes. …” And so she shook my hand without saying goodbye, saying instead: “You have been a darling to let me bore you with my nonsense, and I hope you’ll pray that it keeps fine for us in your sister’s car. See you in London soon. …”
And away they went, Napier and Venice, he still holding her arm just above the elbow, she still appearing to drag a little, across the now deserted and darkening lounge to the glass doors, which a small boy opened to them. But the small boy must hold it open, for they stood in the doorway a short while, as it might be they were arguing, and through the gloom of the afternoon I could see Napier’s set white profile, drawn in ivory it might have been, and the way he seemed to be smiling grimly into Venice’s upturned face, and I could see the way Venice’s face suddenly lit right up with a smile, just like a garden with the sun after rain. Now what could he have said to make her smile so, or had he said just any little thing, which her love, most princely alchemist, had straightway transmuted into a golden word?
He has said farewell to his love, I said to myself, and now, if love has left any honour at all in him, he must convince himself that there never was any love to say adieu to, for even so much would be a disloyalty to Venice. He has renounced his love, I thought to myself, as a man of honour should do, but he knows that a man of honour is not worthy the name unless he can also convince himself that there never was any love to renounce, for that would make him feel martyred for his wife’s sake, and that would be a treachery to Venice. …
And, smoking one more cigarette in the calm security of the darkening, deserted lounge, while a waiter or two began laying the small tables roundabout for tea, I seemed to understand Napier as he were myself, and he the most different man from me that could well be found. Looking at the thing full and square, you might say that Napier had done a caddish thing; in fact, that was what you had to say, looking at the thing full and square; but it is a mistake to look at everything full and square, and it is too easy to dismiss people’s actions as “caddish” and the like, for such are no more than words coined to save people from wearying their minds with undue thinking, and tiresome people will go on and on using them with a great show of conviction in the very same way that they will put down a book by Mr. Shaw or Maître Anatole France and say: “Look at Dickens!”
Now Napier had suddenly come upon a queer sort of peace following on a second’s cruel decision not to go and see Iris again, a very cruel decision, I thought, and she no doubt expecting every moment to see his face in the clouds all about her. “How like a man,” I could hear a feminine voice, “first to stain what he thinks his ‘honour’ by taking a mistress, and then to retrieve his idiotic ‘honour’ by hurting his mistress!” But, maybe, how could one tell? maybe Napier had suddenly realised, in the very moment that Venice spoke, that if he went to sit with Iris even once more he might fall right down into the pit of dark enchantment and he might send all life but that which he found in Iris to the deuce and nevermore return to Venice, to whom he was held by every one of those principles that are born in the blood of a Napier, a Hilary, a Guy de Travest. And I wondered what I would have done had my life been so weighted and tangled with people’s emotions as Napier’s must always have been, and what, I wondered, would I have done had I, in Napier’s place, been as unaware of myself until a fiercely revealing moment three nights before my marriage to my betrothed? The answer to that was very easy, and it was by the measure of the ease with which it came that I could judge of Napier’s struggle with himself to keep his pledge to Venice, for never were two men so different as Napier and me. I, I would have broken my troth, that is what I would have done, and I would have broken away from any other thing that stood in the way of my passion, I would have fled father, friends, career, honour, everything, at the call of the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams. There are better dreams! For so I remembered a phrase in a book telling of the love of a lady of the sea for a mortal man: There are better dreams. …
A waiter, no doubt wishing for something to do, asked me if I would take tea, but I thanked him, saying I would rather not, for it was not yet half-past three, and saying to myself: “In every man there is always unfolding a dream of things that never were and never can be, since
