Part 14

"'Perhaps you, and Ronnie too, have thought sometimes that I was rather a beast to and about him--as indeed I was, but not so much a one as I seemed. As the contrast deepened, it became more than ever unpleasant, as it naturally is unpleasant for the one to be rich and successful and the other everything that isn't. But what could I do--without Antony sending me to blazes for trying to! Which he did once, as I'll tell you.... And all the time I couldn't help a grim sense of laughter when I thought about him, I simply couldn't help a comic view of us both. I still kept my contempt for him intact, in case I might need it again--but, as a fact, I simply did not want to see him at that time. He would have been a serious interruption, he would have got in the way of my life--and without any benefit to either of us. But not a trace of dislike did I have for him--the reverse, I couldn't think of Antony but with that consistent fondness. That early childhood had somehow written deep, ever so deep, and there was no getting away from what it had written. One plain word, "comrade" ... two very little boys who had been "comrades." And neither one nor the other had found another comrade since, not the glint or the glimmer of one. Life had passed and left childhood, mine anyway, on a magic pinnacle! never climbed since, maybe only climbed then by marvellous illusion--but climbed unforgettably it had been. And I could only think of Antony like that, what he felt for me could not make the slightest difference to that. And sometimes, you know, one longed for a comrade.... If I had thought for one moment that he could feel a tithe of that for me I would have held out both my hands to him. But I was necessary to him in a different way, I knew it was no use trying to do anything. I only tried once--just before I met you.

"'One morning I saw him in Jermyn Street as he was turning into the Cavendish. On an impulse, a very sudden one, I called out his name, so that he swung round full at me, not in the least surprised. "If you go shouting _my_ name about Jermyn Street like that the police'll have you for making indecent noises. Now, if it was yours--" But I was in no mood for that stuff, and in a hurry, too.

"'Look here, Antony, if a £1000 a year is any good to you, you can have it and welcome,' I said quickly. There wasn't time for tact--and he stared at me, with all the bluff dying out of his eyes, and a queer twisted little smile.

"'That's very nice of you, old man, but--' he was saying--just keeping time until he could think what to say; and then, finding it, he tapped me suddenly on the shoulder. 'But I'll tell you what, Roger. When I want it I'll come for it--and between us we'll make hay with the whole lot. Now what could be fairer than that?' And, of course out came that same old laugh he tacked on to everything he said, rattling the passing taxis' windows and making people stare to see two top-hats pretty high from the ground shaking with laughter at each other; for I couldn't help but laugh after the long time since I had seen him, he seemed so monstrously comical....

"'And that was the last time I saw Antony until that night you and a draught let him into the house. But how were you to know, Iris dear? How were you to know when you married me that you were the last straw to his wretched fire, that the very fact of you so neatly fitted the last bit of coloured glass into the kaleidoscope of Poole Bros.? and that by letting him in that night, you and Sir Nigel between you, you gave him the kerosene with which to make a really efficient bonfire?...

"'Yes, loving you was certainly the last straw, Iris. And, you know, he did love you! He has told me about it since, as it's a dead thing--dead simply because Antony isn't made to love any one who can't love him. But when he met you, and hung about the street until he saw you enter Ronnie's flat--then he did love you, as he had never loved in his life, nor as he had ever thought to be able to love. If I was his first passion, you were his second and last, this hate and this love. And the passion he felt for you--maybe you would have been frightened to know of it, Iris, for Antony's were strong words--carried him quite away for those few months. There's nothing of the _femme fatale_ about you, but you've certainly got a wonderful talent for obsessing men, making them want to clutch at you with mind and body--Roger, Antony, Ronnie, and I wonder who else! And from the moment Antony met you to the moment you told him you were engaged to me he was absorbed in his passion for you--for the first time he looked to be forgetting about me, was forgetting about me. If you had loved him, Iris, he would have left me quite alone, from that time on. But between his luck and himself and you and me--he lost again. And God knows what rotten furies were added to him from that moment, always a bad loser! He had passionately longed for so many things, and passionately lost so many--and, at last, you! To him, you were his woman.... Maybe he thought he could have won you but for me; and maybe he was right, but I don't think so, for Antony was made to capture only the surface of a woman's fancy.

"'But you mustn't think that he bore the least bit of resentment against you. Oh, no, you didn't come into it after that. You were just an added inch to the height of the barricade between him and happiness. But as for me.... And, do you know, so consistent was the admiration part of his hatred that he admired my being loved, or so he thought, by you! And the only letter I've ever received from Antony is one of congratulation on being engaged to such a marvellous woman. He wrote that from Mexico.

"'If you had seemed the "ultimate island" of his bad luck, the finding of that wretched oil-spring was the penultimate. And his luck seemed to have turned, too, since he set foot in America; a few months in Texas had filled his pockets with dollars--actually won at poker! And if a man is slippery enough to win money from such a crew of toughs, and at their own game, then his luck must have turned indeed! And then, with another man, a down-at-heel engineer who was almost his servant--Antony could always find a servant but never a master, and that was his trouble--he had set out in the good old way, prospecting for a fortune in Mexico, rebellions or no rebellions. And actually found it--the oil! And how he must have thrown a mighty chest, thinking that now he would show the world and Roger of what stuff Red Antony was made.... But the only stuff that was proven was that of his luck and his oil. For as I told you, Iris, it was very good oil, but there was not much of it. And the rest, the oil that might have been, the oil that would have made Antony's millions and restored him his self-respect, had to go the way of his other failures, to add one more corpse to the shambles of who knows how many failures.

"'And then came the idea of how, after all, he could use that oil! It came from a profound despair, from a realisation that, do what he would, he could do nothing well in this world. And realising that, he came to want nothing, success and happiness or any coveted thing was too far beyond his reach. But there was one thing, anyway, that would give him a little more rest after its accomplishment, and which just might be within his reach; for the first time, in Mexico, he finally realised that if he was to live he must do something about his obsession, the very root of his discontent. He must somehow prick and burst it, so that he could live more smoothly. And how better flatten the thing out than by bringing my house and goods down on my head?...

"'If a man can come by such an intention at all amiably, so Antony must have done. There was none of your melodramatic stuff about it. It merely seemed to him a clear fact that my success was pitted against his peace of mind, that we must row in the same boat or he would drown too wretchedly. He wanted now nothing from me, neither money nor influence; but, in that last year in Mexico, he very definitely made up his mind that I should have as little of either as ever he had had. So with that in his mind, and armed with his plans and his tame engineer, he came to England. And whether you had let him in or not he would have got into the house. Even Antony wasn't always to be baulked, you know. And especially in his last venture of all.' ...

"'But since you knew him so well, you must have known what he was about from the first moment,' I broke in; and, Ronnie, it was a dangerous protest, for his last few words about Antony's 'inevitability' had brought my anger against him back again. It was my love in arms against some treachery he had licenced--and even the way he looked at me, his eyes dark with pain, didn't soften the silence with which I awaited the explanation that he must make. And a helpless gesture of his hand, the very manner of his explaining, showed that he knew now, now, that no explanation could be good enough, however fully he had once accepted it; that now, and just lately, there had happened something between us that discounted all previous acquiescences to 'inevitability.' ... And he spoke now without a trace of that rather grim fantasy with which he always chose to obscure his most serious moods.

"'Don't you realise Iris, that the man who stopped Antony in Jermyn Street, the man you married, was very different to the man who played host to Antony's tomfoolery on that Nigel Poole night? with you sitting there at the table, and indifference the only apparent fact about your face except its loveliness. Didn't you realise at all that I had changed, and very much? But then how silly to ask that, for you and I never talked of such things, if we talked at all.

"'In those two years my whole view of life, my ambitions, and I once had so very many! had gone awry. Or rather, they had withered, got sour, don't you see? Of all Antony's many follies his greatest was ever to envy me my success--for the penalty of that success went with the very nature of the man who succeeded. Iris, I had to realise I was a bad winner long before I realised I was a bad loser.... I was just about realising it when I fell in love with you. And that pulled me up, indeed it did. Love for you created something worth while winning, worth succeeding about.... I'm trying to tell you that everything had been too easy for me all my life. I suppose one was always just a little rotten with sophistication, and so, as one played and won every throw, the winnings seemed so little worth while--until you came! My dear, I thought I'd have to fight for you--and you so worth fighting for, you with those mysterious cornstalks in place of hair! I didn't tell myself that I wanted to fight for you, but I must have had it at the back of my mind--for I was so disappointed, angry, when I found that I hadn't to fight, that you were as easy to win as everything else. Iris, that was terrible of you, why did you fall so easily and quickly? Why didn't you pull me up, why didn't you resist at all, at all?... I loved you, never any one nor anything more than you. And so much that I simply couldn't believe that any one I wanted so passionately could so easily give herself! The gift seemed to grow less in such giving, I couldn't believe but in the surface of the thing. If I hadn't loved you so much, my dear, I would have been very well satisfied with your love, and we would never have had those first wretched months, leading to so many more. You'll say it was my perversity that caused it all, and of course it was. But how can I ever make you believe that that perversity of scepticism and other beastliness were born of nothing but love for you, of wanting you always and always? And that being built so ungenerously, I couldn't believe but that your love was a shallow thing, just another of those gilt "prizes" that had so often been handed to one for being a "clever boy." I didn't want to be a "clever boy," I wanted to be a real one, to be allowed to play a splendid game with a splendid playmate and the devil take the truffles. And you gave me admiration! Why, damme, you almost glowered at me with admiration--and, my sweet, how terribly articulate you sometimes were with it, weren't you?

"'There have been found grown-up men to say that love can change a man's nature, whereas, as you and I know, it can only intensify his traits, sometimes the good and sometimes the bad. And, Iris, somehow, somehow, in spite of all the lovely things about you, you intensified the bad.... Oh yes, I know, I knew then, how stupid and cruel I was, but I seemed to be goaded to it. Bitter little knives, weren't they? I couldn't believe in your love, and it irritated me when I egged you on to plead it--and then it irritated me when I found I couldn't egg you on any more, when there was no making you say that you loved me. And all the time I loving you, wanting you always to be there but always. Never leaving the thing alone, full of fear that I might lose grip of it.... I'm not trying to find any excuse for my caddishness, for there isn't any, since it's easier for a murderer than for a cad to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.... And then, at last, my scepticism seemed to be justified, or rather it had justified itself. For as you became indifferent--and how indifferent you can look, Iris!--I thought to myself that of course you had never loved me, except as the "clever boy" and weren't now loving even that since you had found him out to be a bad boy as well. The most grotesque perversities can be justified if one looks crookedly enough, and so I justified the indifference I had forced on you as indecently as I had wrecked your love. And so, too, when the time came, I justified Antony.

"'You remember how nasty I was when you first said something about him wanting to make friends with me again? That was the first I had heard of his return, but with no surprise. And I was angry with you only because it seemed, suddenly, very distasteful that you should be mixed up with Antony and myself--you seemed so cold and unsympathetic that I was sure you would never care to understand the thing. But as for Antony, I really wanted to see him. And he conceived the plot, you know, to save his baby pride and vanity rather than as a means of forcing himself on to me, about which he knew there could be no real difficulty. My mind had turned to him, often, particularly since that new bitterness about you. And how far from each other you and I were, weren't we? And so I had gradually come to let Antony into my thoughts again, to want him with me. My life, it seemed to me, had not been complete without him. I didn't care whether he hated me or not, my life had been incomplete without him, he was my comrade. The world seemed to have rushed by us both and left us stranded together, as we had once been. And so I was very ready for him when he so aptly appeared that night....

"'You didn't notice, but I was looking more at you than at him when he came in through that window. I didn't doubt what he had come for, you see--those "hay-making" words so long ago.... And as I looked at you, your face closed, a sphinx whose only secret was indifference, I suddenly thought, "Well, we will, indeed we will!" With a vicious kind of gaiety.... Oh don't you see, in the state I was in you seemed to have justified me! You were the only person I could put beside Antony, and ever so much higher with only a real smile from you to unscrew me--but you didn't care at all, at all! A queen who didn't care enough about her kingdom even to try to rule it....

"'There's no good, Iris, in indulging any creepy feelings about Antony having come to turn my luck, by force of evil or any other such stuff. No black magic about Antony--his magic was never but schoolboy red, at its worst. And, anyway, my luck had begun to turn before I saw him; I knew it was turning because I seemed to have lost some of my confidence, I wasn't so sure of my insight. I felt worn thin, you know, like a coin kept too long in circulation.... But what Antony did do was to help matters along. His very presence helped me to let things rip, and how wildly! With luck going from bad to worse, and not the devil of a win anywhere. And good money rushing away after bad, running hell-for-leather after it, money thrown wildly to win back what had been lost wildly, like any amateur.... And Antony all the while chuckling at my elbow, as I'd sign away some more on a jumpy market. Not that I minded his chuckling! I rather liked it, in fact. I was very interested in his consistency, never before having been really face to face with this blessed obsession of his; and found myself enjoying the simplicity of it, the simplicity of this thing that had clouded his whole life, and mine too! A marvellous and deferential hatred I found it, with a large, full-blooded malice about it that was as different from the petty malice in ordinary circulation as a sabre from a paper-knife; bitter enough, of course, when in self-defence you dammed it up, but once you let it have its run a very genial and naïve part of him; and certainly the most reliable.... It was as though we were children again, and I paying for his escapades while he grinned impishly and admiringly from a corner.

"'But as we pegged away at our foolishness in the City, every bit as seriously as though we were actually making money, I kept on thinking of you. In spite of Antony and my interest in him, you came into my mind more and more. I thought and wondered about you. And I realised that I knew no more of you than if you had been a strange, beautiful woman whom I had met and loved in a lane, and who had passed me by and away with a quivering, careless look. I knew you so little that I wondered what you would think when the crash came, as I saw that it must come, probably sooner than later. I had often wondered before why you had not asked me to give you your freedom, but now I would offer it to you, and you couldn't but take it. Maybe you would marry Ronnie, I thought. And I would take Antony away with me, perhaps to the South Seas.... You see, dear, Antony seemed inevitable in my life, fatally inevitable, while I have never been able to think of you as that, but as something outside my life that I always longed to bring into it. But I had thrown away that hope.

"'I told you, didn't I, that I hadn't reckoned what a bad loser I fundamentally was until I had lost? Well, I hadn't reckoned with the deuce it would play with my health. But, my darling, if I'm grateful to anything in this world it's for that weakness, for it has given me a vision of you, it has given me the "you" that I am talking to now. As I lost all my confidence, everything about me that I had treasured, all those baubles of my luck, I seemed to feel a cloud settling about my head--and I could see you more clearly through that cloud than ever I had through daylight. You grew vivid, touchable, more than ever Iris. At last, I saw you, and I knew--oh, I knew so much that I hadn't known! And since then, Iris, I've tried, I have tried so hard, but it was too late. I hadn't dreamt of the depths of Antony's consistency....'

"It was curious, Ronnie, how he seemed to bring my temper round in a circle to that same stiffening point against him. He seemed always to end on that angering weakness, resignedly implying some hurt to us both. But I didn't understand what he meant by his 'too late,' he had said it so inconsequently. His eyes never left my face, I knew he wanted to touch me, wanted me to go to him, that very moment--but my back was stiff against him, I could not move nor speak until I had heard about this new terror to our love, that had suffered so many.

"'That oil,' he explained hurriedly, and with a sudden harshness. 'I told you that Antony had worked out an idea how to use it, didn't I? And a damned cunning swindle Cascan Oil was, as efficient a bubble as ever swindled money out of the public. Antony and that engineer got their own back on that oil right enough. And it took me in at first--me, of all people! For, when I said I didn't mind helping Antony let things rip, I didn't mean to let him drag my name through the mud. But _he_ did. And when I found the thing was a barefaced swindle, with just a plausible crust over it, and that it was only an amazing kind of chance that had so far hidden it--my good-luck again, you see, just the swan-song of it, for bubbles aren't so easy to blow as they were--it was too late for me to get out. I had to go on and try to mend it. My name was tacked on to most of the papers.... I think I must have been mad during those first few months after Antony's return not to have enquired more closely--and mad not to have realised the depths of his madness! But I had never dreamed that he wanted to bring my part of the name down even lower than his! I found it out about six weeks ago. Just about the same time that I found you out, Iris, that I found out you did love me--you do, don't you? I can't tell you any more than you can guess about those two realisations, angel and bogey to happen at the same time! But what was the use of cursing Antony? I ought to have known about him. My fault for being a fool, rather than his for being so insanely consistent. And if it hadn't been for you, for what you suddenly meant, I wouldn't have kicked so much, for there's always one way out of these things. But I did kick--Iris, I've worked in the last month as I never thought to work, to try and raise the money to pay off the holders, to stave off the certain discovery or make it better when discovered. That was "the way out" I told you about, you remember?... And I came home to lunch to-day to tell you that I've done all I could--and that now there's nothing but a miracle between me and the police.'

"I haven't any memory left for what I actually said or did then, Ronnie. And I've read somewhere that despair keeps no diary. He threw those last words at me, just threw them, as though he was past caring how brutally he got rid of them--and, at the end of the fuse he had been lighting all the afternoon, they simply burnt up my nerves. I was hysterical, perhaps.... Anyway, the very next moment we seemed to be standing together, weirdly almost fighting; but it was only that he had me by the shoulder, very close to him, shaking me a little. And I staring blindly at him, and he trembling with a feverish impatience.

"'For God's sake don't go on about it, Iris, else I won't be able to bear it at all. I wish I hadn't told you now--but, my dear, I had to tell you, I had to tell you the whole thing. No one but you matters in my life--and I had to tell you why I can't matter in yours any more. Antony's got what he never dreamed to get, he's got me to hate him at last.... Oh, but that's just nonsense. He doesn't matter any more, he might be dead or alive for all I care. Nothing matters but you....'

"I think I said something about our having to run away, quickly. I must have repeated that several times, for he was staring down at me so thoughtfully that he seemed already to have run away, a thousand miles away.

"'Yes,' he said, but ever so vaguely, 'we might do that. There'll be no cry for two or three days. Longer perhaps, if I can arrange things. Yes, we might run for it. I'll see.... But there will be no happiness for us now, Iris. I know.'