Part 12

"That was the first time I realised a new gentleness about him, something I hadn't seen in him even when he had made love to me before we were married. I was very young then, and thought he made love so well then because of his gentleness, whereas it was only practice, like being good at billiards. But now there was this queer air of gentleness about the way he sometimes looked at me, almost of weakness. And maybe my surprise at it made it seem even more intangible than it was, for it seemed to be nearer the ceiling than to me, I couldn't somehow reach it; and I didn't dare try to, I wanted to touch him but I was afraid--he had done the awful thing, had made my heart suspicious, which is degrading to oneself and to the person one loves. And so, at first, I mistrusted my own weakness for being hurt by him, and I mistrusted him.... But if Antony had been a different sort of man I would have blessed him for somehow or other having brought that gentleness on Roger, for of course he had something to do with it in a contrary way, I thought.

"I suppose my disappointment at his leaving the House had something to do with my boredom at the eternal talks about business. Money, money, money. Something about Mexico and oil, as far as I could gather, that Antony had brought back to England; and I could only hope that there was a lot of oil to make up for the amount of talk about it, and interest in it.... They left together in the morning and came back together in the evening, sometimes quite late, as dull a pair of business men as ever got be-knighted; and the only people that Roger asked to the house were odd Napoleonic kind of men, very good at being 'merchant princes' I've no doubt, and the usual gamblers--who, as far as I could see, were very good at gambling, by the amount that Roger seemed nowadays to lose to them, mainly at poker.

"Roger had never talked to me about money affairs, I being old-fashioned with my affectations of stupidity. But I had realised that things were not going so well with him as they used to, that his immersion in the City and retirement from politics had a great deal to do with being temporarily hard up. He's having a run of bad-luck, I thought, and must be a little worried about it; though it struck me as strange that Roger should worry about money, for he had always such an air of complete detachment from it. But it must be that that is on his mind, I thought as I looked at him, and thus found a plausible reason for his rather feverish and seedy looks.

"His face, as you know, was always colourless, and his eyes very bright, but he had never looked unhealthy; a kind of vitality and vividness had always made him seem very alive and well. But just lately I had thought he looked rather too pale and haggard--and then, one night at dinner, I realised suddenly that my Roger was terribly thin, a long, thin, white-faced man with brilliant eyes--but so thin! Of course, he had always been like that, but one had thought of him as supple, not thin--and now, suddenly, it seemed to me that his thinness was the most apparent thing about him! And there, at the other side of the table, was Antony, redder than ever, burlier than ever, healthier than ever, and growing, I thought, a good deal stouter. And, resenting him, I suddenly resented his healthy good looks in contrast to his brother's nervous paleness, and--why, my dear, I couldn't take my eyes from Roger that night, he seemed so white and delicate, so quite unlike himself, unlike the man I knew! Of course, it was silly of me to be surprised at it, since he had always looked rather white and delicately made--but so self-confidently delicate that one had never thought of him as particularly so. But now a touch of worry and weakness seemed to have pruned that self-confidence away from his body, and I seemed to see what had always been there under a cover; a kind of shadow where I had grown used to a kind of tyrant....

"I accused him of being not well, but he said that it was only that he was a little tired and overworked: 'But if everything goes well I will buy a villa near Cannes, Iris, and we will go there, and leave Antony to do all the work. Antony is a great financier, you must know....' And he left the sentence in the air, looking at him with a smile; while Antony said with a laugh to me: 'If only I had Roger's brain with which to carry out my ideas you wouldn't be able to see me for money, Iris, nor yourself for Teclas.' But you know Antony, how he could never make the most comical boast without giving one an unpleasant idea that he really believed in it--and how unpleasantly absurd it suddenly was, the idea of Antony acquiring Roger's brain just to set me up in pearls!

"That was just about a month before that night you and I will always remember. But how, my dear, was I to know or even dream of what was to come? What did I know about the fall in cotton prices and the upside downs of that oil thing, of which I heard of vaguely as Cascan Oil?...

"All I actually did know was that Roger's health was weak, and that began to worry me to the exclusion of nearly all else; but, from his 'faded' looks, I thought he was probably right in saying that it was overwork, and I didn't dare to pester him about it, for I could trust no amount of gentleness in him to rid him of his contrary perversities--but I would take him away at the first possible moment, which, I vowed, would be very soon indeed! Oh yes, Ronnie, how many chances one gives God for saying that He knows better....

"And it was about that time of my worrying about Roger's health that I noticed that the relations between him and Antony had changed since I had had the feeling that they were so interested in each other as scarcely to notice me. But I can't express it except by saying that they seemed gradually to have changed from a great amiability to an electric kind of chaff--which, as that about Antony and finance, Roger generally led and Antony followed as best he could. I remembered then what you had told me about them at school, but there was nothing like that between them now, no jeers from Antony, and only a very kindly sort of contempt from Roger. It was contempt surely enough, that look Roger gave him now and then, but a contempt wrapped in a good-natured smile: his 'Antony' smile, I rather jealousy called it to myself, for he had never turned to _me_ with that particular kind of good-nature with which he smiled at Antony. And there was certainly no such quarrelsomeness as we had all come to expect from Antony, even when Roger might sting just a little bit sharply; in fact, the remarkable thing about him, I thought, was his great deference, not so much to Roger, but to Roger's intelligence. He seemed to have convinced himself that his brother was the cleverest man in the world, and he had a way of sometimes repeating what Roger had just said tacked on to one of his great laughs, and an air about him as though to say: 'Just look what a clever brother I've got!'

"What could I think about Antony, my dear! To me he was always charming, but charming, and quite naturally. Antony, as you know, always wore courtesy when he needed it like a rather flamboyant cloak flapping in a north wind, but to me he was always quite natural with it--just as in those days at your flat when I liked him so genuinely. But I had somehow come to mistrust him--and more deeply than one can mistrust one's friends' weaknesses while continuing to like them. And when I saw, or felt I saw, that contempt in Roger's eyes, I was more than ever uncomfortable about Antony. It seemed that Roger mistrusted him too--but that he didn't mind mistrusting him, it made no difference to his liking for him! Imagine the smoke from that dim fire, the theories that would chase through my head as we sat at dinner, often rather silently! And then the next moment I would wonder impatiently what the deuce all the fuss was about. They were such friends, after all!... But no sense of absurdity could so easily rid me of the feeling that Roger knew very well what Antony was about, but that he was just waiting, ever so good-naturedly, just letting things be. Roger to let things be!..."

And as Iris repeated those words about him I understood very well the reflected astonishment in her eyes. It must have been strange, Roger "letting things be!" about whom the most vivid fact had always been that he must try to colour and influence anything that he touched or that touched him, men or work or circumstance.... But, Iris said, _she_ couldn't let things be! As that month grew she realised that, absurd or not, there was something strangely the matter: and that if there was ever to be any levelness forced upon their present life she must be its direct agent. But she couldn't for the moment worry about Antony; nothing could be done until some kind of solidity had been coaxed back into Roger's health, for he seemed lately so gravely feeble.

By this time, although she had not realised its every stage, all her bitterness and resentment at his past scepticisms and perversities had passed from her mind; leaving her, despite her perplexities, happier and lighter, as after the expulsion of ugly grotesques from a sacred place. Her heart had opened to him, not artificially before his new weakness of health, but from a more profound realisation of the man himself. Now that she had lost that mistrust of him, he seemed so near to her; and it was as though the past wretched two years had not been except to deepen and widen her love, this love, it seemed, that had been found good but not good enough, and so had been sealed up for a time to allow builders to shape it into a more workable intensity; and now it had grown more complete and wiser than that first impulse to utter abandon which he had roused in her, and which had never been but an electric current of unhappiness between them. Now she understood him a little better--if it was understanding him to know clearly that she could have awakened this gentleness in him long before. He was one of those men who couldn't give but must be made to. She should have plundered where she had pleaded. She should have played the buccaneer to this man who had grown so used to being taken for one.... But now, she saw, it was too late to fly the Jolly Roger, for he had come by some knowledge of himself from a hidden turning on that well-paved road which he had trod with so well-poised an arrogance; and, in yielding to what had suddenly--and yes, secretly--come, he had yielded something from his health, some part of his vitality. Yes, it was too late to play at buccaneering now. First she must coax back his full health, and quietly wait for him to realise completely her new understanding of him. No half-way fulfilment this time, in this new love-affair that she knew was coming to them! She couldn't bear that--she must wait until he knew himself, so that he could love without any of those retractions that had made such a wretched muddle of it all before.

So, letting love be as well as she could, she now disregarded any irritation she might cause, and began to "pester" him about his health: saying that whether it was overwork or not he must see a doctor. Until one evening, Antony having gone out after dinner, as she was complaining about the stupid insensibility of men to their own well-being, he said that it really was a very common complaint and not worth seeing a doctor about: just bad-luck, he said.

"But how bad-luck? Do be serious, please, Roger.... I am so tired of fantasies...."

"Just the thing itself, my dear--just bad-luck. Now why should that be a fantasy? Isn't it expressive enough, or do you think that the only serious illnesses are those that doctors get paid for discovering and the Lord be thanked for curing?"

"It's not that, but when one hears of some one being ill of his luck one thinks of a boneless, watery kind of man who thinks the world is against him because a favourite has lost him a fiver."

"But I told you, Iris, that I meant just the fact of bad-luck, not any particular loss from it." And then he explained, but ever so mildly, as though to a child who mightn't very readily understand an obvious fact.

"'It's very simply, and quite logical, I think. Have you ever realised, Iris, that since you met me I have always won? Well, all my life has been like that, I have always won--I don't mean only at cards and racing but at everything that is supposed to make life worth living, those various prizes that we put our names down for. Some men take their paths in life steadily and calculate their progress step by step by hard work, and some men just have a throw at what they most want from time to time--they may work hard to have deserved it after they have got it, but they get it by a chance, by backing themselves against the field. But that is such a poor description, for it's never such a conscious thing as that, the throw comes from a real part of one's nature. It's only a conscious trait in that awful type of "hotel-lounge" American who has many diamond tie-pins and wants every one to know that he lives by bluff and hazard, and in other fools who think that a strange glamour reflects on them from taking chances--whereas to take a chance is just the business of one's nature, it's the business of one's life, just like art or grocery. One gambles naturally or not at all, and the people who lose are mainly those who gamble for some other purpose than the mere fact of gambling, as any _croupier_ in any Casino will tell you....'

"He stopped and looked absently across at me with that half satiric smile that crept about his face when he spoke about himself--which was so seldom that I was now listening with all the nerves of my body. And then, each word very slowly and distinctly, as one might count the caskets of a fabulous treasure--

"'I have always won,'" he said.

(I'll leave you to imagine, Ronnie, that if it is possible for any man to make such a statement without seeming to boast his good fortune, Roger so made it).

"I can't tell you any more about it than you can find from just that sentence,' he explained, 'I don't know why I've won. I don't know. But I suppose that it somehow came naturally to me to win every time I ventured--whether it was for money or anything else. Always a good seat on the front bench, and sometimes the very first seat of all.... I know how difficult it is for you not to think I'm exaggerating, for every one does exaggerate one way or the other when talking roundabout the chances they've taken. But, Iris, dear, please believe that I'm exaggerating less than people usually do when I tell you that I grew to take the fact of winning as, well, my right--as part of me, don't you see? Without very particularly realising or fostering it, it grew to work out like that....

"'Yes, my good-luck or whatever it was, was certainly a part of me,' he repeated. 'And a very important part, if one's good health is important--why, Iris, my good-luck was the very key and centre of it! It must have been.... And does that, after all, seem so fantastic? that my whole zest and confidence and vitality, everything you first saw in me, were made up of my luck? I was nothing without them, the things of my luck--and you didn't know the man, Iris, you only knew the luck. The luck was the man, don't you see? and without it the man was--well, I'm damned if I know what he was! I can't remember ever not winning, so I've never had to examine myself until lately. For, of course, I didn't realise all I have told you until just lately--I suppose I am the kind of man to prospect rather than introspect when on top of a mountain. But I realise it all well enough now that there's such a poor view from the lowest ridge. I know now what my worst enemy would never have dreamt of saying of me, that I am a bad loser--a very bad loser in its really fundamental sense. Other people may lose or win with their faces, but it seems that I win or lose with my whole being.... The fact is that I can't lose, I simply don't know how. Don't you see that I can't lose, Iris? It saps all my vitality.... Poor Iris, to be married to a man who is only a man so long as he wins.'

"The little smile had clung to his face all the while, like a faint light about its shadows; and maybe it was the self-mockery of it that made his manner so much lighter than his words--which towards the end had seemed to fall wearily and listlessly, as though he had resigned himself to do a duty. And it must have been a deeper self-accusation than any words could express that had helped him to humiliate himself in a matter-of-fact way of explanation. For to him, Roger, what humiliation! To have realised within himself that he, of all the men in the world, was that strangely contemptible thing, I don't quite know why, a bad loser! To confess that realisation to me could add nothing to the humiliation, for Roger was never but first audience to his own acting, never but the main person in any gallery to which he might play! He stood or fell by himself, and if he fell, no other's judgment could count beside his own.

"How, then, could I tell him at that moment on what, as he was speaking, my mind had fixed--so that I could scarcely restrain the cry of my discovery, scarcely bear not jumping up from my chair to hold him to me. But to him, an egoist, realising that aspect himself, what possible consolation in telling him of my discovery? the reverse, maybe, another blow.... The vivid fact that I was intensely glad at the failure of his luck! All those arrogancies and dominations with which he had first charmed, then repelled, and always baffled one (they had seemed so out of one's reach to prick them, perched so confidently on a highest pinnacle of assurance): the whole of his easy mastery over life that had bred his 'confidence,' 'vitality'--I saw now that they were just the scum over his good-luck, a kind of verdigris that had made me grow to despise them, however unwillingly. 'You never knew the man, you only knew the luck. The man was nothing.' ... Poor dear, he was so sunk in that realisation that he couldn't possibly realise the vastness of the parallel one that it had roused in me: that the man was everything, the luck worse than nothing, just a slaughter-house for every quality with which my love had dowered him.

"And so, glad as I was at the result in himself from his change of luck, its result in his health lost some of its seriousness--as a thing that is explained generally does, unless it is too bad. For I certainly didn't take his explanation of it as 'fantasy,' it was quite obvious that he had his finger on the real cause of his weakness. Given the other extreme, as he had so candidly explained it, why shouldn't a man fail in health with the failing of his luck? But I felt that he was more affected by the shock of it than by its contemplation--and, after all, I didn't love him weakly, I could deal with a shock, be it ever so mental. His air of resignation, so foreign in him, disturbed me a little; but, I thought, that is a natural part of the ailment and one will deal with them both at a time. Yes, the thing would mend of itself, for it carried its own cure with it, in a new and deepening knowledge of himself. He would be better even before the pendulum of this strange 'luck' of his had swung back again; and I had no fear from what its swinging back to 'good' might bring to us both, for he was now learning the lesson of himself beyond all un-learning.

"So I thought, anyway, after I had persuaded Roger, that same night, to explain just a bit of what had been happening to him in the great world--where, it seemed, luck of sorts made such a mess of men. And indeed it was only a very little bit that he explained, for he was tired, and said that it was a long and dull history, even though it hadn't taken very long to happen. 'Exactly how long?' I asked, but he evaded that--else maybe I had known so very much more!

"'As you know, when a writer wants to be done with one of his characters,' he explained, 'he sometimes throws a few bad investments and bucket-shops at the poor man and he's done for before you turn the page. Well, there are plenty of such things outside books, and I somehow seem to have happened on one or three of late. And these _debacles_ always happen in the same way, if they are going to happen at all, to men whose money is mostly on paper. The paper actually becomes paper--and now even a French _gendarme_ wouldn't accept as a tip most of the stuff that was once my fortune. I thought I had tried every way there was of spending money, but I had never realised that losing it was the quickest. I know now. And that's all, Iris.'

"'But, my dear, it doesn't matter all that much! After all, bad-luck was never more than bad-luck seen in the Book of Job. It's inconvenient, of course--'

"'It's certainly that. But, of course, all your money is quite safe and doing very well, and I'll see any creditor to hell before you dare pay him one penny of any debt of mine. I'd have you know that the best bankrupts are always very touchy about the thoroughness of their bankruptcies.... But, as you say, Iris, all that doesn't matter very much.'

"If he agreed about that, then why was he getting himself ill over it? I was going to heckle him, when he explained--and with what so far unknown deference, in him, to one's bewilderment!--that he had not been worrying about losing the money, nor so very much about the now almost certain bankruptcy: 'Although that is really so serious for me that I've got to joke about it or be as entirely silent as I have been--and will be after to-night,' he excused his levity to warn me. 'But it's actually the naked fact that these things can and have happened to oneself that has got on my nerves--which must, I suppose, be very tender nerves. Just the change of luck, you see, rather than its particular results, however serious.' ...

"But before we went upstairs he took me by the shoulder with some of his old air of authority, and warned me that he would be very disappointed if I worried over what he had told me. 'Because, after all, I didn't tell you about it because I wanted to--but simply so that you shouldn't worry so much about my health now you know that it isn't due to a weak heart or a damaged lung--only damaged luck, after all! And I may, just possibly may, find a way out of everything in the next few weeks.'

"'With Cascan Oil?' I asked, as though it were a magic oil.

"But I didn't gather anything from his smile except that it was one of those smiles that never answer questions in the way you want them answered. 'It's certainly very good oil!' he only said.

"'And will you promise to tell me as soon as you have found your way out, as of course you will, you being you, luck or no luck?' I asked him firmly. 'And will you also promise to drop some of this air of resignation or whatever it is that has lately been growing on you? please, Roger, for although it makes you very kissable at home, I'm sure it's likely to make you quite "broke" in the great world--which doesn't care how much your wife loves you so long as it can get your money.'

"He promised to tell me--for I had fixed in my mind that as soon as he came to me with never so little brighter news I would at once snatch him away from London to some place like Tangiers, to mend his health and let the deuce take his luck, which was a plague, good or bad. And you know when he brought me news, at lunch-time two weeks later, the day before that....

"He rang up from the City to ask me if I would be in for lunch; and it was so unusual for him to come home for lunch that I quite ran wild in putting you off, so that you developed a wonderful theory about my having found a new young man from the back row of the Russian Ballet.