“Dear, that was not a turban!”
“Turban is a pretty word, Iris. And suitable, too. …”
“Turkey, polygamy?”
“Just a boyish fancy.”
“And Guy? You haven’t told me?”
“But, Iris, he never, as you know, gives away gratuitous information. He just asked me to ask you to dine tonight, as I have done. ‘My idea, tell her,’ he said. In fact, he repeated that. And you’re coming?”
“Why, of course!” she said absently, so absently.
“But why do you ask about Guy, Iris? I fancied you didn’t care what anyone thought.”
Throughout that passage her face had been turned to mine, but only now could I master the courage to raise my eyes from the third finger of her right hand, to see that her face was as though turned to a mask of white stone with two amethysts for eyes. It was a mask, that face, and those were the eyes of a mask. Yet it was far from a mask of concealment, it was the mask of herself, of her very self, of the self that was, in some remote part of her being, really herself. And again I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality. Strong were the people of that land, stronger than the gold they despised but used, deterred by not qualm nor fear, strong and undefeatable. And just like that was the white mask of this beautiful woman, strong and undefeatable. It knew not truth nor lying, not honour nor dishonour, not loyalty nor treachery, not good nor evil: it was profoundly itself, a mask of the morning of this world when men needed not to confuse their minds with laws with which to confuse their neighbours, a mask of the evening of this world when men shall have at last made passions their servants and can enter into their full inheritance. …
“I don’t,” she said at last from a remote distance, the amethysts absorbed in the air between us. “I don’t.” And then she smiled faintly, but even so much was enough to change the amethysts into eyes. “I don’t,” she said very huskily. “But I just asked. …”
“Iris,” I said, my mind charged with that mask, “you have us all at a great disadvantage. …”
Slowly, thoughtfully, she made a circle of air with a small golden tube that had a crimson tongue, and then she passed the golden tube through the circle’s heart. She was thinking.
X
The Fall of the Emerald
I
As I think of that wretched night of the children’s party there will be two pictures that cross my mind. The first, of a group of brightly coloured people, for we were in white flannels and the women in those mad, barbaric colours which fashion, goaded on by Chanel and gallantly led by Captain Molyneux, has lately flung as a challenge to our dark civilisation, around a table lit by the cameo flames rising from eight tall cast candlesticks by Paul Lamarie; and I remember that in the still air of Guy’s great, bare diningroom those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat.
The second picture is of a darkness. A darkness torn here and there by the sudden flame of a match which drove the stars trembling back into the invisible and joined to groping eyes the silky soft blackness of the water. The black night pinned round the world with stars, shouts, laughter, splashings, an empty boat, silence, shrieks, a whisper from the black face of the water, and so home. Total losses: one stocking and one emerald. “I’m so glad, so glad,” she whispered, just before going to sleep against my shoulder, for it was Hugo Cypress who was riding the stork homeward.
But I have said that whilst we were on our way riverwards, and I sitting beside Iris as she hurled us headlong through the still night, we stood at enmity, she and I—for Venice! And yet, so far as I could make out, there was not a soul but myself out of that party, Guy, Napier, Venice, Hugo, Shirley, Iris, who seemed in the least degree uncomfortable. Those people had been, throughout dinner and afterwards, completely and supremely normal. For all you knew, I mean, they might have been having fun. There weren’t any undercurrents. Not even what you would call any undercurrents. Those people were quite calmly themselves, they just behaved as themselves in that confoundedly unassailable way which is peculiar to the people of this small island: as though, to be sure, they weren’t giving away anything of a personal nature even to themselves. You can’t help seeing why Napoleon found these people so detestable.
And it was all, you couldn’t help feeling, so mean, such a humbug of a thing. I suppose, of course, that I was the only one besides Iris and Napier who knew of their departure together in three days’ time. “I have always wanted,” she had said to me, “to go to Rio, and then across the continent. One can’t talk in Europe, it’s got so stuffy now. But I always thought I would keep the Americas until my fate should be fulfilled.” Yet, I was quite certain, everyone at the table must have known that something was wrong, else why was that fell, beautiful lady there at all? For Guy, in the ordinary way, wouldn’t, it simply wasn’t in Guy’s nature to be able to, ask Iris Storm to the same dinner with the young wives of his two young friends, his protégés almost, Napier and Hugo. And if he had asked Iris tonight, knowing that she wouldn’t funk coming—though the real reason why she had come
