“Iris!” Napier’s voice, sharp. “You dressed? What? Risky for you, messing about, after your illness.”
“I’m almost ready, Napier.” Impatient, Iris’s voice was, I thought.
“Naps, get a rug from the car. She’s shivering.”
“Please!” Iris whispered, frantically, desperately. “For pity’s sake, please not!”
Silence. …
As we collected round the two motorcars, Guy, fiddling about with his starting-arrangements, seemed, I thought, to be saying something. But he was only swearing.
At the back of the Hispano Iris went to sleep against my shoulder. She spoke in her sleep: “You will find me quite light on you, as I haven’t got a chemise. They say it is very smart, to be chemiseless. Already I feel less of an outlaw from society. She did it on purpose.”
“Iris!”
“She did. Half on purpose. I know she did. The pet! Oh, dear. …”
“But, Iris, why?”
“Because, dear. So that I should like her. …”
“Oh! Well, do you?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“Well?”
“I’m sorry if my hair is tickling your face.”
“Well, now you like her, does it make any difference?”
“No. Oh, no.”
“Oh!”
“Good night.”
XI
St. George for England!
I
Now as I come to that last night of all, a night that was as though set on a stage by a cunning but reckless craftsman of the drama, and as I look every way I may at the happenings that were staged on the platform of that night, I do sincerely thank my stars that it is no novel I have set my hand to, but a faithful chronicle of events. For it would seem that the novelist, so he is an honest man and loves his craft, must work always under a great disadvantage in his earnest wish to tell of life truthfully; since, as the old, old saying is, he never can dare to be so improbable as life. He may, to be sure, be as dingy as life, according to the mode of the day, or he may even achieve the impossible and be more dingy than life, also according to the mode of the day, but to be as improbable as life will be as far beyond the honest novelist’s courage as it must be against the temper of his craft; for should his characters have to “break out,” should the novelist be so far gallant as to concede something to the profligate melodrama of life, his people may only “break out” along lines which the art of their creator has laid out and made inevitable for them; whereas you and I know that living men will do queer things which are desperately alien from what we had thought their possibilities—nay, impossibilities—to be, living men will defy the whole art of characterisation in the twinkling of an eye and destroy every canon of art in a throb of a desire: so that we may make no count or chart of the queer, dark sides of our fellows, nor put any limit, of art, psychology, romance or decency, to the impossibilities which are, within the trembling of a leaf, possible to men and women.
It is not often that I see Venice nowadays, for she lives for the most part with her father in the country, but now and again she will ask me to luncheon in her house in Upper Brook Street, or maybe I will call there on a sudden and find her sitting alone with an unopened book. We do not ever talk of that night, nor of the two chief players of that night, but the other day it came about that I found her sitting absorbed in the shadows of a dying fire, and I somehow said: “Waiting, Venice, waiting!”
She was crouched like a child in the gloom of a Dorothy chair, and as I sat in another nearby a friendly flame darted through the twilight and made toys of her eyes. They were looking at me with every appearance of deep reflection, but now it was a woman who was looking out at me from Venice’s eyes, and the woman seemed to smile, and she said: “He is in India, with Bruce’s expedition. He will be coming home soon.”
And then for the first time we spoke of that tempestuous night in July, the night but one after the children’s party. But of course I did not tell Venice all, particularly about the last part, according to the promise sworn between Sir Maurice Harpenden, Hilary and me.
My clock was about to strike nine o’clock, as I very well remember for I had nothing to do but stare at it, when the telephone-bell beat it, may I say, by a short head, and Iris’s voice said:
“Is that you?”
“And who should it be,” I said, “but me? I am so glad you rang up, Iris.”
“Oh, you are lonely!”
They shout on the telephone, people do, so that one cannot always hear them very, very well. But this fell lady’s slightly husky voice was considerate and clear.
“But fancy,” she said, “finding you at home now, and all the world at dinner or the play! Dear, are you, too, a social outcast? I am so sorry you have had to dine alone.”
“Iris, you should have brought up the friends of your childhood to a better understanding of the arts of peace. I was to have dined with Hilary tonight, and because of my engagement with him I did not go to a dinner where I was to sit beside a woman who has studied the Yogi philosophies and was divorced last year in New York with nine corespondents, the tenth being disqualified on the ground that he was a black man weighing seventeen stone in his boots. And then Ross rings me up at half-past seven to say that Hilary has been called to the country!”
“Yes, I knew you had been put off for dinner. I was so shocked.”
“Thank you. But, Iris, you knew?”
“Oh, I know everything! But listen, I am ringing you up to ask you a plain question, and I would like, please, a plain
