Part 13

"Almost the first word he said when he came in was, 'Well, that's finished.' But as he said it with almost a smile and quite undramatically I didn't expect, as I 'registered' pleasure, to be pulled up by:

"'I mean there are no more uncertainties to worry about, Iris. The rats have got at everything.'

"'Then,' I said, 'we can go away for a lovely holiday with my money. To-morrow, for instance....' You see I never did believe much in standing on one's dignity about money and honour, for money's a messy thing anyway.

"But he was staring at me so differently, so pitiably almost, and with no smile anywhere to light his tired face, that I had to leave my holiday in the air, miserably wondering at him.

"'If it was only that kind of mess!' he said at last simply, as though I would understand by that!

"He wouldn't talk about anything to do with it through lunch, and I had to sit there with my heart screwed up for fear of what he was going to tell me now. Oh, I loved him so as he sat almost silently facing me, his thin face set so firmly that it looked drawn on that lovely paper you find in Kelmscott books; and his eyes, those so efficient eyes, now and then playing darkly with the sun through the large window behind me.

"It was as we were leaving the table that he suddenly threw his bomb, which hasn't really yet finished exploding in me. He threw it with a sudden, quiet smile and a look over my shoulder. He threw it as though it were a marvellous joke.

"'You very thoroughly let the rats in through that window that night, didn't you, Iris?'

"And I stared at him confounded, while my fingers groped about the table for something to hold, to hold tightly.... And I suddenly saw red, a kind of blind anger tore at me to tear him:

"'Then why didn't you kick him out? Why did you let him stay on and on? I thought he was foul and that he hated you, but you knew for certain all the time--and yet you've let him stay, like a weak fool!' And I felt like screaming out my detestation of the whole atmosphere about them, the silly childish darkness of it all....

"How shrill I must have been at that moment! But you see, all the half conscious fears of the past months had suddenly burst true and shaken me quite beyond myself. And now I was so wildly sick to realise his lassitude--and he looking silently down from his height at me, unmoved by my anger except to that faint, irritating smile.

"'You knew he hated you, you knew he hated you,' I accused him trembling.

"'But I didn't hate _him_,' he said mildly. 'I've loved Antony, you see.'

IX

"And then that long stifling afternoon, when he and I sat under the sunblinds of the library window and he told me from beginning to end the tale of himself and Antony. The sun in the garden to our feet, the gay and livid sunblind over our heads, and across the water the green and yellow openness of the Park--why, it was one of those afternoons that are sent to make all human and animate things seems like nonsense! And nothing in the world but Roger's clear, definite voice could have drawn so thick a line between us and its carelessness. For what he said had no contact with a day of sun, it was a tale for a winter's day with doors and windows sealed, and a bright fire to mock the shadows of the tale into dark corners.

"He had said abruptly that he had loved Antony, as though he meant until that very moment; and now he began by explaining that it had been so ever since he could remember, and that it had grown with childhood and far beyond, this love for Antony. (And, Ronnie, you remember how, well, saturnine and rather hard Roger's face always was? Lately it had been growing softer, I thought, but now it became quite a different face altogether, almost different lines and different depths, the real face of a man you and I never knew, as we never knew of his childhood. There was nothing soft nor sentimental about the way he spoke, he was speaking of naked facts nakedly, but it was merely that the facts spoke for themselves in his voice.)

"When they were both ever so little Antony had been the favourite of the house, he was so much the impish kind of child that naturally is. And Roger had not been the least jealous, but had loved to see Antony made much of, and had spent a great part of his childish ingenuity in still further sending up his younger brother's 'stock' with nurses and parents. It had come so naturally to him to worship the pink, gay, careless little man that then was Antony--growing every year pinker and redder until he seemed just like a sunball, the loveliest child that ever a house and a dark brother were blessed with; for Roger, even then dark-haired and pale--anyway, beside that little meteor--used to despise himself very heartily, and inarticulately fumble with a theory that any one who looked as he did could come to no good in the world, whereas Antony--oh, but the world was made for Antony! God had made the world and then He had made Antony, and just thrown Roger in as his elder brother to help matters on a bit. Well, that he did, and did increasingly as childhood grew, loving to see Antony happy--who cared for nothing but his own wild enjoyments, and expected every one else to join in them; which Roger, of course, did, and nearly always bore the brunt of the results--expecting never a bit of gratitude from the young imp, and getting none, for it all seemed very natural to young Antony. But when, once in a while the chief culprit was detected and punished, then Roger couldn't bear the idea and set up such a hullabaloo that they had to deal with him as well.

"Those were the happiest days of all, those days of early childhood, he said. No suspicions then--only games, and dark plots in dark corners, and marvellous escapades that no grown-up could ever discount by punishing. But only in those very early days. For the change came soon enough--when Roger was not more than nine, and they had their first tutor. But the change (or whatever it was, for the possibility of it must always have been in Antony else it couldn't so readily have come out) was at first so slight, and later so incomprehensible and baffling, that Roger was almost on his way to school before he could even dimly realise the cause of it.

"Soon after the tutor came, Antony had grown surly with Roger, inimical; and one day, when Roger had badly hurt his leg in climbing down a tree, had laughed with a queer satisfaction that had made Roger look at him in a shocked silence. He had been hurt by Antony's sudden repudiation of him as a comrade, had wondered how he had suddenly come to prefer his stolen games with the game-keeper's sons--but at this sudden sigh of Antony's dislike, for it could only be such that took satisfaction from his pain, he had been quite shocked in his young mind. And his sky had filled with strange and unbelievable clouds. He could only look at Antony and wonder painfully, realising very little but the monstrous fact that he was hated by some one he loved. Yes, Roger had been quite thrown off his balance by the blow from behind, and the rest of his childhood had passed like that, Antony growing to open and jeering enmity and he continuing silent, just silent....

"And as he told me how he had borne Antony's cheek in silence, I looked at him wonderingly, for such a patience in such a boy as Roger must have been seemed, well, almost unpleasant and unmanlike. He saw what I was thinking, and explained that it was simply because he had not known what to do, he hadn't known. He couldn't retaliate in the same spirit, because Antony's dislike formed no such parallel in him. He was at the disadvantage of loving him as before, though now it was an affection mixed with those dark clouds of wondering. His liking for Antony had never had to do with whether Antony was good or bad. In fact, as a very small child he had realised that his young brother could do strange things, and strangely, but that had never affected his admiration; those little traits went with Antony, that's all. And had so continued to 'go with him,' disturbing Roger every now and then--until, after the tutor came, he realised that those 'traits' looked to make up the whole! And that was terrible, doing away with any admiration--but after all it's a weak love that must admire what it loves; and soon Roger came to accept even that as inevitably Antony, still loving him--and waiting, don't you see, until he could find out where all this dislike came from, what all this fuss was about and why?

"'If it had only been Jacob envying Esau his birthright!' Roger exclaimed. 'But it was nothing like that, and never has been, but a much deeper and more instinctive jealousy--deep enough to make it ridiculous, but instinctive enough to make it as human as all dangerous madnesses are. And you can imagine how instinctive, from his age when he first came by it! Then, of course, it was inarticulate and unrealised by him, but real enough to change his acceptance of me as a comrade into a dislike that grew with every month. At first he knew no more than I what it was about, but he naturally found out much sooner, and made hay with his discovery....

"'I don't suppose you have ever seen it, Iris, but there is a kind of similarity between Antony and me. It's got nothing to do with body and surface, nor, as far as any one can see, with our points of view about anything. But there it is and has always been--and I can only express it by saying that the foundations of our minds must be the same; that--and can you believe it?--our real inclinations of mind are the same, or rather Antony's have always been the same as mine. There's nothing very extravagant or uncommon about that, two men _may_ very easily be made that way--if Antony weren't so obviously the man he is, the child he was! But you can see the curious absurdity of such a likeness from even what you know of him--why, his very voice and face, everything about him, shout out that his inclinations are as far from mine as one man's can be from another's! And even as a child he seemed every bit as different from me, a roystering child to be a roystering man--and so you can imagine how very impossible it was for the one child to discover the secret of the other's dislike. For that dislike came from a strange jealousy, and the jealousy from that similarity--and all so confused and overlaid by every trait that can make one man different from another that the devil himself, though he had put the fantasy there, would have been hard driven to find it. And the fantasies that grip men's minds and destroy them are like mists, it is in their nature to be bodiless yet to obscure: they are like mists that come upon a field in the morning, no one knows whence, and fade no one knows whither, to come again as mysteriously in the evening. And so this jealousy had come upon my Antony--but from where, just where and why? To cloud a baby man's mind with hatred and beastly things....

"'Being that, I suppose it was quite natural for Antony's baby jealousy to date from the tutor's coming. Now, as apart from governess twaddle, we really had to work. And, do you see, Antony, who all his life has seemed a man who cared not a damn for books and learning, who even as a boy seemed more inclined to kick a book than read it, wanted to be as good as I couldn't help being at mastering things easily? He couldn't, he knew he couldn't, and that's why he kicked a book instead of reading it. That was anger not contempt; and, to fan the anger with impotence, a dim idea forming at the back of his little mind that I had been purposely brought into the world a year before him to have good time to steal all the good things of the brain that had been equally allotted to both of us; leaving him only the same foundations and nothing but impotent husk to cover it--so that he must always be the buffoon, and I--and I the one who could do well everything he wanted to! And the basis of the mind must have seemed to him to be the same, for he so _wanted_ to do them, not out of rivalry because I did, but because it came naturally to him to want to. Silly and unreasonable, yes--but then so is all madness that can hurt one.

"'It wasn't only work, but everything, that fanned the idea into Antony's mind, and then kept on blowing into the flame that seems to have burnt the poor fool ever since. At least _he_ might have been good at outdoor things, games of strength or recklessness, whereas I might have been expected to be more an "indoor" man! Since he could do nothing else that I could do, he might at least have been allowed to play games of every kind better! But even there, and at first without trying to, I could do easier and better what he could only do fairly well; though later, at school, I went out of my way to rub the thing in--it had come to that by then, you see.

"'I had found my Antony out, and had my answer to him. I had plumbed a little of the confused issues of his jealousy, I knew now what a large part of his hatred was made of admiration: in fact very nearly the whole of it. And, since hate exaggerates even more than love, he exaggerated to himself what little there was to admire, making me out the devil of a fine fellow--because, you see, in admiring me he was very really admiring himself! never rid of that infernal idea that I was as he should have been, as he had a right to be--but for me! Oh, no, he never belittled me! And you've seen the deference to which he kindly treats me? Well, the idea of that--not, of course, the expression--has always been there. It makes one's head reel to think of him as never but admiring one's mentality and abilities much above their reality, and hating me all the more because of that admiration simply because it kept on creating more things to hate!

"'I remember, at school, Antony was always the first in the gallery to watch me playing a racquets match--racquets, of course, being the one game the poor man simply couldn't get at all, while I played it better than anything else. And sometimes I used to look up from the court at him, sitting with his hands at each side of his face, absorbed--in what? not the game, but only in the way I was playing it--the way _he_ himself was playing it! But, ridiculous as it all was, I had grown cruel about him, and let him see that I despised him as much as he despised himself; which, you know, was very much indeed--though he would have died rather than let the world see it.

"'I had been working at my contempt for him very systematically ever since the age of about fourteen. It was my only protection against him, the only way I could prevent him from getting the better of my love for him--which was always there, mark you, for there was no doing away with that, it was as natural as the lava around a volcano. The advantage had been all with Antony until then, doing what he liked with me in the way of unpleasantness; but now that I had found this contempt (which I worked at just as a goldsmith works at a golden leaf, scratching and shaping and bending and filing it until it's every bit as lifelike as the original, but a good deal heavier), I was far and away the first string in the wretched orchestra; for Antony never did know what to do with contempt but physically smash it, and he and I have never raised a hand against each other except once--I suppose because it would have been such a trivial expression for what we felt. And so, not being able to answer it, it maddened him; but so obviously that I couldn't resist doing it again and again--until one night, at the end of my last term, I went the nagging limit, and he had to throw a bread knife at me and almost killed another man. But I dare say Ronnie has told you about that....

"'After school we saw each other once in a dozen months, if then, and only as acquaintances might in the street--and who, living in London these last fifteen years, could possibly avoid the figure of Red Antony? But step by step the thing went its same way--step by step feeding Antony's first mad idea with conviction. The wheel turned to my tune, never to his ... he who would have liked to be doing things with his brain and otherwise as I was doing them, whereas he had to be a soldier! For what else is there for a younger son with no brains and a little money to do but be a soldier or curate? And Antony believed in Heaven and Hell much too vividly ever to want to tell any one else about them....

"'He simply had to go his destined way, as the noisy, red, attractive and dangerous fool that the world expected him to be, and then blamed him for thoroughly being. And all the while he must have been playing a bitter game, something like chess, with himself: moving his pieces here and there in the way he would love to do in life, and then straining his eyes across the gulf at me to see if I had done in life what he couldn't even do in a game against himself--and, I suppose, I invariably had!

"'He must have had the devil of a bad time all those years, the best years of a man's life, poor Antony. You see, he took no pleasure from the kind of life he led, but there was nothing else he could do. He made no real friends--himself an unwilling fool, despising complacent fools. I don't blame him smashing up a dinner party now and then, out of sheer, magnificent boredom.... And he had as bad luck as any man can have. Nothing ever went well with him, neither the motor he was driving nor the horse he was backing. He couldn't, somehow, touch anything but he lost by it. He never did anything without being found out--even those quite conventional indecencies which the world generally conspires _not_ to find out. He couldn't make love to a woman without being cited as a co-respondent, and then in the worst light. And even so he must have been a pretty inefficient kind of lover, for the woman invariably refused to marry him after the case--which always looks bad for the man, the world having a vague idea that a touch of "chivalry" changes mud into _foie gras_.... He couldn't even make a good and dashing rake, don't you see? Dashing enough, but always at the wrong moments--because he was weak inside, he had no heart for the things he did, but was somehow compelled to do them by bravado and helpless desperation. Vanity and bravado were the secrets of the particular mess Antony made--always terrified lest people should find out how weak and hesitating he really was, and so covering up his tracks with Heaven knows what further stupidities! Ronnie is the only man who has ever guessed that pathetic part about him, and that's how, I suppose, he has managed to keep some sympathy for him for such an amazing long time.

"'Even there, about luck, the thing went the way of his mad idea about our minds. Maybe he worked himself up into thinking that "luck," a kind of smoke hanging in the air, fell on a man according to the turn of his mind (which is no sillier nor more sensible than the eminent theory about mixing cocktails after death, don't you think?). And the blessed smoke had fallen on me, while he had been done out of it! His mind turned to gambling as mine did, but he couldn't gamble well, couldn't even lose his money without his temper, and then threw after it what name he had left. He lost every penny he had between horses and cards--while, as you know, Iris, I made almost enough from both to further the land-owning ambitions of every communist in the fullest Albert Hall.

"'Yes, it certainly must have been a wretched time for him, the most wretched of a wretched life. Without even the consolation of thinking he'd had a good time for his loss of name and money, for no man ever knew himself better than Antony--nor ever concealed that knowledge more stupidly! Nothing left for him, nothing to do, nothing he could do! and still a very young man, and better looking than most. If he had only allowed the world to pity him he might still have made something of himself, but even if he had tried he couldn't have looked an atom as sorry for himself as he really was.... He had flashes, streaks of genius almost, about ways of making money, but not one bit of ability or concentration to make anything of them. His own incompetence hitting him hard, always hard, and always below the belt--poor Antony!... I heard of him sometimes as penniless, but still immaculate, and having even to bully his Turkish bath on credit. What use, after all, to look and sound like Antony and not get credit from even a Scotch tobacconist! In fact the only job he could have done at all well would have been to be paid for persuading other men's tailors into adding more suits to long bills--but I've never heard of any one daring to offer it to him.

"'I don't think he could have lived through that conscious welter of helplessness and despair but for something to hold him together. What, simply what, was there for him to live for? And even with that "something to hold him together" there was very little, but still it was a spirit of sorts, and vital enough--that dear old hatred for me! Just that, nothing else. Unbelievable or not, I'm sure that Antony, big and hefty though he is, would have wilted and faded away but for that emotion that kept him bound together. Two big men, and arrogant enough, the one's health resting on his luck, and the other's on his hatred of it!...

"'But he couldn't do anything about his one real emotion. There was nothing to do about it, it wasn't that sort. Just an inevitable endless thing, leading nowhere but on forever: a part of the man himself, and the only consistent part--but, of its very nature, with no possible outlet of any possible advantage to himself. He hadn't the faintest desire to kill me, to get my money and be a baronet, or any stuff of that kind--in fact, Antony heartily despised any one being a baronet without the battlements, the men-at-arms, and the serving wenches to be a proper baronet with. None of your modern Pink Peerages for Preposterous People about Antony! In that sort of thing he was a man after G. K. Chesterton's heart, all noise and muscle and an appetite adequate to deal with a keg of rum and a round of cheese--and the whole lovely simplicity of it all run wild and sour in him because of this plaguy madness about me!