Part 11

Roger waved a courtly hand towards Iris to present her. But she made no sign as Antony bowed; the little smile had stayed rigid about her mouth since his entrance, it was as though an ironic hand had lightly caressed a shape upon it....

And Roger took a feather from Antony's impudence as the other was bowing. "I am glad you realise," said he, "that our house has now no other claim to distinction than in that lady."

And so my impossible had happened, the breach between the brothers was at last filling in! At this first, on Roger's part as though, I thought, with hesitation, almost perforce--but continued day by day to be filled in so consistently that soon the breach became, as it were, a mountain ridge: the brothers on the one side and the world on the other.

And, too, many another quarrel was tactfully smoothed for Antony that night and from that night; for there were some of our table that night whose first surprise at his entrance had held some repugnance in it, men who thought him "really a bit too much," women who weren't Wesleyans but would not have remarked him in an empty street. But Red Antony had certainly won--what little of that kind of thing there is to win--or to lose, for the matter of that. And if ever a man who was worth his weight in food and drink, that was Antony that night, on the top of his form from floor to ceiling, from midnight to daylight! And Roger only less so--just a little colourless he seemed beside this sudden brother of his. It was strange to think that I was the only one among them all who had ever seen the brothers together before--and that more than eighteen years before, in Roger's last term at school! I tried to find from his face now something of what he thought, but caught no more than an occasional sidewise smile at his brother.

I taxed Iris about her plot with only a laughing, "Well, it was a very good idea, anyway."

"Oh, if I could only claim the credit for it!" she feigned to sigh. "It was Antony's, you see."

The devil it was, I only thought! And as at last I went home found some unrest from the discovery, I was too drunk to know exactly why; and for all the fun of the night I went at last to bed quite bothered about the whole thing--and awoke not less so. I ought to have been pleased, of course: Antony had splendidly got his way and might now make good, and Iris might get the benefit of the new friendship between the brothers. But one never knew what those infernal brothers were at, they both had such a damned sinister way of taking their pleasures! And I really had rather a grievance about the thing, too, I felt entitled to be hurt--for, after all, I'd been a pretty good friend to 'em both, and in long-passed years had time over again tried to bring them together and make them see the error of their ways--and here they suddenly come together without as much as a "by your leave!"

I rang Iris up at about lunch time, and a tired voice from her bed told me to go about my business and "come to dinner to-night, if you like. Roger's asked Antony...." I didn't go simply because my constitution is of this and not the eighteenth century. But I would have liked to, if only to see what those two might be at, or if they were at anything at all. And as for Iris--well, thought I (those late nights never really agreed with me, you understand), a wiser than I has said that it's in the nature of women and cats to scratch the hand that tries to free them from a trap.

VII

Iris was in a flutter. At least no other word can describe the quick gaiety of her entrance, the hidden smile in her eyes, and then, as she sat down, her sudden air of disinterested thought--for all the world as though I hadn't seen her for three days, as though she hadn't really, anything at all to tell me! As sometimes unavoidably happened when some press of work kept me dallying more busily than usual about editors, publishers, or managers--which sounds so much more important than ever the results were--we had not been able to meet since the night of the party; and I had had to restrain my curiosity about both her "relations-by-marriage" until this fourth afternoon: when, as I've said, she as nearly fluttered in as she could, and brought into my room a sudden breath of memorable moments, how long ago! when I had so often seen her with the light of a new idea, a new theory, an old book, or a new friend, in her eyes--a gay, lovely Iris, whose sanity and illusions were marvellously mixed in a wild and tender profusion, like sedate tulips and wanton poppies in a tawny sunlight. But the past two years had a little pruned her carelessness, and had made her mischief less sudden and more shapely, for she had come by a certain depth of mockery....

But at this very moment she was as she had once been, pointing out that I was one of the reasons why "girls go wrong in London. For if I had taken any notice of your pompous warnings to let Roger and Antony be as they were, I would have gone through life with a fixed idea of how horrible men are to each other. Whereas, you know, they aren't that at all--for instance, those two are quite divine together, and very pleased to have made up their absurd quarrel. And as I look at them it's very difficult to believe that all your talk about them wasn't a nightmare, or a bad short story badly translated from the Russian."

In fact it was quite remarkable, she told me, how good they seemed to be for each other; fancifully, as though each one had taken on something of the other's quality--Antony seeming to have become more intelligent and balanced, and Roger more genial, more--well--human. Which, of course, made everything much more pleasant for her....

But I had to protest when she said that Antony seemed so interested in talking and listening to his brother that he noticed her very little; that, in fact, she had been rather shocked to see that he wasn't now wasting any time over any remnants of good looks that might still be left to her since he had left England.

"He doesn't ignore me, of course. He is quite charming and courteous, and tries his best to lower his voice when speaking to one, in the old way, but--well, he's only just aware when I am in or out of the room," she added helpfully.

That aroused in me a perverse candour about something so far untouched between us, and I said: "But you know as well as I do, Iris, that you were one of the main reasons, or the main reason, why Antony wanted to make friends with Roger."

She stared at me thoughtfully, as though examining a certain mental aspect of me; but I seemed to have been wrong about the infernal man so often as far as she was concerned that I was now quite reckless about making just one more _faux pas_. "And," I added grimly, "wanted to see if you liked Roger as much or more than you--"

"All right, all right," she impatiently stopped me. "Ronnie, you've developed a great talent for seeming to give knowledge when you're only roasting chestnuts. Of course, I had gathered all that--not too seriously, of course. There is always an indecent part of one that flatters oneself that one just might be worth fighting about--and so it wasn't difficult to work up a dim but thrilling idea that Antony might still be trying out his luck after two years; and, after you had been so beastly about him, that he might be wanting to spite Roger because of me--being a man, you know, and as common-minded as most men about such things as rivalries and revenges about women. But it's very obvious now that all that was just the froth of our diseased minds, and that poor Antony quite sincerely wanted Roger to like him--and for his own, not for my sake."

But as I still looked what she considered "unintelligent" about it she rather brusquely suggested that I had better "come to dinner to-night and see for yourself."

"You may have known the pair of them together well enough years ago," she said later, "but that _was_ years ago. And now with so much experience, lives full of 'colour' and all that, to bridge their memories of each other, each one has discovered the other one again. Don't you think that's it? And that they've both quite naturally improved in the discovering?... Silly men, of course, not to have been decent about it long before, and saved you from nightmares and Antony from going against the world. For I'm sure he wouldn't have made such a fool of himself if Roger had been his friend. And as for Roger--why, he has actually confessed to me that he hasn't one real friend whom he likes! while all the time there was Antony under his very nose, perhaps the only man who could touch anything in him. And you'll admit that it's odd how the life Antony has led never seems to have made him a great friend, for one always thought that men who lived his kind of life in bars and places made many easy friends, even if they were only down-at-heelers. But there seems to have been something that always kept him apart, I don't know what, but something that has always given one the idea of him as a quite special and solitary outsider: a good drinking companion but a man who never really liked any one--and so people never really liked him, I suppose. And all the while he never had the sense to go to Roger and tell him not to be a fool so that he needn't be one--for you have only to be with them for a moment to realise the sympathy between them, and the similarity, too--"

"Oh, you've noticed that, have you?"

"Yes, you were right about that," she gallantly admitted. "It's a kind of similarity that comes to you as a shock, it's so improbable on the face of it--but, funnily enough, one seems somehow to have known of it always. But I haven't got a psycho-analytical eye, and shall have to see much more of them together before I shall understand anything more about it than that Roger is the thin edge of the same wedge--though if a wedge could have two thin ends and still be a wedge then Antony would be the other one--oh, dear, you know what I mean...."

Oh, yes, I knew what she meant. And though, as Iris said, many things must have been changed between them since I had known them together, yet it seemed that this indefinable sense of their likeness had not changed. It had been unlooked for and quite remarkable even to a not very observant schoolboy as I was, this similarity between such very different brothers as Poole I and Poole II. Roger, quiet, feverish, the best classical scholar in the school, a head-prefect whose authority was severely respected by every one (except Antony, who, however, never seemed to come directly into contact with it), and the first string of our racquets pair at Queens for four years; and Antony, as I've explained, the very opposite, a slacker at work but our best fast bowler and three-quarter--games, said Roger, which it made him sweat to think about. And so, as each went his so very different way, it had puzzled my schoolboy mind to discover in what lay this similarity between their natures, one whose existence had grown upon me as I had become more intimate with them: some deep down, inarticulate sameness, that was at first obscured by the great variance of their personalities, but so strong a sameness that it must show itself as one came to know them--so, anyway, I had incoherently thought at that time. And later, after we had left school, had so seldom seen them even in the same company, that I quite forgot my curiosity about the subtlety--so that when Iris now brought it again to my mind I was where I had been at school; and not likely, I thought, to get very much further.

But I had been really surprised to hear of the obvious pleasure they took in each other's company, of their mutual sympathy and interest. In that, indeed, the years between had made a change! For if their likeness had been ever so dimly apparent to me at school, not so any interest the one might have in the other. They neither showed any nor pretended to any, they went their own ways with a quite unforced indifference; and it would have been better if, when they met, they had met as indifferently--but Antony seemed unable to resist an unpleasantry, to which Roger's generally silent contempt seemed a more than sufficient answer. In fact I rather sympathised with the jeers that Antony now and then flung at him as he passed, for Roger's kind of contempt seemed to have behind it enough conviction to provoke even a reasonable man to a show of temper--and Antony reasonable! But somehow or other Roger cleverly managed not to provoke him beyond the limit until a few days before the end of his last term. I can swear that he purposely brought on that burst, kept Antony's temper dangerously dangling--until after supper that night when he, somehow, finally goaded him into making a perfect ass of himself before the whole house. Poor Antony, so unfairly matched against that grim quietness!

But now, as I saw when I went to Regent's Park that night, it was as Iris had said, the years had made a great difference in their relation to each other. But in spite of the pleasing air of easy friendship about them--with a touch less reticent than usual about Roger and one more "lowered" about Antony--I managed to develop, as dinner went on, another very real grievance; so real indeed that, with some nursing, it lasted from that time on. It came about by my suddenly realizing that I had very little indeed to say to these brothers--an uncomfortable enough feeling about people whom one has known long enough never to worry about having much or little to say to them. But my surprise at being made aware of that constraint was heightened by another: that I had nothing to say to Roger and Antony simply because, for all their geniality, they had nothing to say to me! that they were, in fact, rather resenting my being there at all....

I candidly vented my grievance on Iris, who seemed somehow implicated, the next time I saw her, but she said that I was always apt to be psychic about the wrong things.

"And even if you were in the least bit right you might be a little understanding about it," she complained. "For after all, it's not very unnatural that they should be a bit put out by you--because you, see, you've known all about their little bitternesses for so many years. You are somehow the sleuth that has never been shaken off! not, of course, that you ever wanted to be a sleuth, that was just circumstance, nor that either of them has ever wanted to shake you off--very much the reverse with Antony, in fact, poor Ronnie! But if there's any strain at all it must come from that, don't you think?..."

I didn't. In fact I thought it a very poor explanation--and, anyway, I had lately been growing so impatient about the damnable vagaries of those brothers, especially Antony's, that I clutched at this as a last straw; and vowed that several moons must pass before I would again dine with Roger and Antony. And several moons did pass....

Since Antony's return I had discovered in myself a lack of sympathy with him that I had never before felt to such a degree, even on his most unsympathetic days. And now, as the weeks passed and he never so much as came near me, I thought of him as really beyond the limit. After all, I had done a good deal for the man, one way and another. And now, simply because he had no use for me.... There was a shamelessness about the thing that gave me a positive distaste for him, and I really desired to see him as little as possible. But it would have surprised me very much if I had known that, as a fact, I was to see him only once more, on that night a few months later.

I might have known more than I did of what was happening at this time if I hadn't been so full of that stubborn impatience about the brothers; so unreciprocative about them, that, Iris accused me later, even if she had been minded to tell me anything of her feelings and of what was happening (which would only have furiously muddled me without helping her in the least) my attitude of, as it were, "disowning" them would have prevented any such confidence.

I saw very little of Roger throughout that time, and then only casually at the Club; for I never once went to Regent's Park--as much because I didn't want to as because he didn't ask me. But, Iris told me, neither did he ask any one else, except to cards--there were no more parties of the old kind. And the reason for that, as she told it to me one day, came almost as a shock; for when she had asked him why there were no more parties he had simply answered, because he couldn't afford them. It was difficult to think of Roger as not being able to afford things. For years one had thought of him as so rich a man without enquiring how rich, as so magnificent a spender without thinking of how much he spent--he seemed capable of spending so much! There are men in relation to whom one doesn't think of money, it seems natural to them to have so much. But now, it had happened that he couldn't afford things!...

"And what's more," Iris said, as we were childishly wondering about this (for we were both rather stupid about large sums of money, I suppose because she was so used to them and because I had never had any), "he's been having a real streak of bad luck at cards lately. Of course, he's lost before, but he has always managed to get it back in the end and much besides--but lately, you know, as I've watched them playing, it seems to me that he was losing very heavily. But it's difficult to believe that he has ever lost much, he always seems so very unaffected by it--so unbelievably a good loser that one simply can't believe he's lost very much." And thus Roger's philosophy of surface values had at last won its share of Iris's grudging admiration, or so it seemed to me from her wistful silence. And, I remember, I wondered what kind of a man he could be who could, despite so much, so firmly retain a woman's imagination about his personality.

VIII

It was difficult, Iris began (when all these things had settled into the limbo of our past lives), to tell me in a matter-of-fact way exactly when and exactly why she had come to be distressed by the nearness of her husband and his brother to each other. It had just grown, by very devious ways and windings, though not so stealthily but that she hadn't noticed the discomfort of it; but, as with such things, it had seemed altogether so unreasonable and fanciful a feeling that she had never ceased trying to discourage it within herself; and it was only at the end that, with quite a burst, her fear had finally overcome her sense of absurdity, and had scattered it back to the shades that had sent it to delude her for so long--only at the very end!

At first and for a little time after she was, as I had seen that afternoon, happy about their friendship. She was pleased with the success of her plot, it seemed so much like a bad thing put right, one more "bogey" exorcised from this world. And, mainly, she was pleased for Roger's sake.... Ah yes, that would surprise me, to whom she had made such a fuss about wanting to help Antony! But Antony had only been an incident of her plot--she had seized this idea and given him the leading part, while Roger and she would get as much or more benefit from it than he. How the idea of using Antony's suggestion of the masquerade had come to her she didn't know, but it had come forcefully enough for her to take great pains about his disguise; the idea that it would somehow be of great good to Roger to make it up with his brother, that this new affection (she had an instinct that the brothers were really very fond of each other, but pettily arrogant) might make him more, well, tangible--to her!

"My dear, of course I wanted to make him tangible to me, possible to me. I always wanted that. Don't you realise that ever since I first met him every thought I had, however little I realised it, was really concerned with him and about him? My feeling for him had crept into my veins, it was as much a part of me as my voice is, and no amount of hardening my heart against him could drive it out. And, as you know, my heart grew hard enough; I had begun to close myself against him soon after our honeymoon, quite, quite tightly, as one can if one tries very hard. It was my only defence, you see, I couldn't hit back nor really leave him, for there's simply no pride in love.... And I had succeeded, hadn't I? By the time Antony came back my defences were so strong, so strong that I began to think I must have exaggerated my love as much as one has always suspected one's friends of exaggerating theirs: almost to treat my love with a bedside manner, it seemed so dim and ailing.... But it was there all the time, I suppose, love only playing at indifference, the only game that grown-ups continue to play after childhood, but never so well as children could play it if they weren't too wise to try. And as soon as Antony said he'd like to make friends with Roger and suggested how it could best be done, some part of my mind fixed on it and made a dream, of how Roger might change, wonderfully. It was just a chance, and anyway it would help Antony.

"I was happy about it at first, it seemed that I might have been right about Roger, perhaps he might become more tangible--until there came the little shocks, earthquakes in the air and under my feet! The first one was their sudden distaste for you, Ronnie, even though I did seem so snappy with your grievance. In Roger it only surprised me, though very unpleasantly, for he was apt to make these sudden dislikes. But in Antony, though I didn't tell you, it shocked me, I couldn't understand it, it seemed the sort of thing a man might do in a book, a renegade kind of thing--not that he said anything in particular against you, he hadn't the face to do that before _me_; but his attitude of a kind of contempt was quite enough in a man whom I knew you had been so very nice to, even though you had always seen through him. But I thought I would wait a little while before thoroughly disliking 'poor' Antony, as it might be just one more of those freak perversities which you and I have often been so impatient about in both of them. So I didn't mind when he came to live at the house about then, and anyway I couldn't see more of him than before, for he was at dinner every night.

"Then came the disappointment of Roger's slacking away from the House and from everything to do with it. And though that seemed to have nothing to do with Antony (how could it?) I couldn't resist a vague idea.... Even before Antony came back he had begun to be more and more interested in the City and less in politics, but now he seemed to have become altogether a business man. There was something particularly dreary about that disappointment, for Roger's public life had never lost its glamour for me. I had always been interested in his career, and interested in him as a bright part of dull affairs. All that political stuff had seemed to become his personality so well, and besides it seemed the only proper outlook for his passion to dominate people--and now I would have to lose even that much of him! that part of him that I read about in the papers, and that had seemed to be really mine. A funny contradiction, that his wife should treasure only that part of him which the whole world knew as well or better than she....

"I showed my bitter disappointment when one day he told me he was thinking of resigning his seat; and, do you know, he actually seemed apologetic about it! It was strange, that air of apology about him, and the way he looked at me from the door as he went out, as though to say he was sorry for having let me down! Let me down!