Read Ebook: The green hat by Arlen Michael

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Ebook has 1564 lines and 92513 words, and 32 pages

"Lot of books," she said.

I made to go, but the slightest hint of a start detained me. She suggested her gestures. That was a very quiet lady. She didn't, if you please, intrude her womanhood on the occasion. Women do that unconsciously. But she didn't do it, unconsciously. She met a man on his own ground. That was a gallant lady.

"Oh!" she said. "Oh!"

"Might just as well come away," I muttered. I was used to Gerald, but at the moment, at her sudden whisper, I would have liked to murder him. Here for sixteen months not a soul had come to see him--and now, before his sister, and his twin sister too, he was in this vile state. But she had insisted on seeing him. What could I do? I promised Gerald a pretty speech on the morrow. He would be more or less human to-morrow, for Gerald had those phenomenal recuperative powers that are peculiar to lean drunkards.

"The illness," I told her, "goes in periods of three days. On the first day he is thoughtful, on the second he is thoughtless, and on the third speechless."

I could not see her face, her back was to me. The leather jacket, the brave green hat, the thoughtful poise. But I heard her whisper the name of the inert thing sprawling half on a broken Windsor chair and half across the littered table, and it was as though there was a smile in the whisper, and I thought to myself that these twins must have been great playmates once upon a time. "Gerald!" she whispered. "Gerald! Gerald!"

"Oh, go to hell!" muttered Gerald, and, without looking up, without waking up, twitched his head feverishly to one side, upsetting a tea-cup half-full of whisky.

"He thinks it's me," I explained from the door, and suddenly I found her looking at me over her shoulder, so thoughtfully. I can see her now, the way she suddenly looked at me, half over her leather shoulder, thinking I knew not what, and her right hand spread out on her brother's arm. There was a striking emerald on the third finger of her right hand, livid against the dark thing that was Gerald March.

"Only twenty-nine," she told me gravely, "Gerald and me...."

"Oh," I said. What could one say?

"Bad luck, I do think," she murmured. I wondered, you know, whom she was talking to. Certainly not to me.

"He's a very good fellow," I said.

"Heredity, you see," she suddenly explained. "Father almost died of it. Brandy, though. He liked brandy, Barty did. They said he would die if he had more than half-a-bottle a day, but he had a bottle to make sure, and then he died of pneumonia."

Then, in her silence, she was so still that I grew very uncomfortable. What was she thinking about? She was staring down at the sprawling thing that was her twin brother, the emerald still livid against his arm.

"He wrote a very good book once," I said, to say something.

"Yes. About Boy...."

"Boy?" Gerald, you see, was no talker. He just swore, but automatically; it meant nothing.

"Didn't you know?" She looked at me again, but her eyes seemed to me masked. I was to know later why her eyes were masked just then. I said I knew nothing at all about Gerald.

She passed a finger over one of her eyebrows, and looked at it. "Dirty," she said.

"Years ago," she said, "before the war, Gerald had a very great friend. Gerald, you see, is a hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and everything, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper. And no hero, no Gerald. And so, when his hero died, Gerald died too. Funny, life is, isn't it? Then the war, and that, of course, buried him. And now...." Those absorbed, blazing blue eyes! The sea was in them, and the whisper of all open places: the magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.

"No friends?" she asked dimly. "No women? Nothing?"

And just at that moment I had, for the first time, that feeling of incapacity with her. I was to have it again, profoundly, but I remember vividly that it came for the first time just then, in poor, furious Gerald's room. Dingy--that is what I felt before this quiet, thoughtful woman with the absorbed eyes. Dingy. I felt, I suppose, the immense dinginess of being a human being, for there is an immense, unalterable dinginess in being human, in the limitation of being human. But why I should feel that particularly with her I did not know then. She, too, was human, quiet, gentle, very unaware. But, later, I was to know why.

It was with an effort that I told her about Gerald. That feeling of self-dinginess came somehow to a point in just feeling common. For I was what Gerald was not, what she obviously was not. I could somehow "cope with" my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for privilege in defeat.

Gerald, I told her, was a more solitary man than I had ever known or thought to know. I supposed he had a small income, for he seemed to manage to live. He was very shy, absurdly shy, tortured shy. She nodded gravely, and I went on to say that shyness was a cruel disease with Gerald: it was a shyness, to strangers, without charm, for he never could show his shyness, he must show everything but his shyness. And so it was that he couldn't get on with people, and now he had ceased to try, he just had drinks. Every Sunday afternoon he went to tea with his aunt, Lady Eve Chalice, in Mount Street.

"Iris," she said. "Iris Storm." And she smiled, childishly, formally, saying: "You have been so nice, I had forgotten we didn't know each other." I told her my name, in that embarrassed way one always does tell any one one's name, and we smoked a while in silence. She inhaled her smoke with a faint hiss, and her teeth were a regiment of even bits of rice-paper standing at attention, very smart and sharp. Teeth always give one ideas. These were imperious, dangerous teeth. On a middle one was wedged a small string of tobacco: it lay coiled there like a brown maggot, and when I told her about that she removed it with the nail of her small finger, and regarded it. She had a great talent for looking at nothing in particular, and that was the only likeness I could see between the twins: thoughtful they both were. Suddenly, from the tousled dark head on the table came a jumble of inarticulate words. She listened intently. Gerald shivered, but his face remained buried in his crossed arms.

"He's dreaming," I said. She looked at me, and I thought there were tears in her eyes. But as they never fell, I am not sure. Thoughtful she was, smoking....

"Why does God do these things?" she asked in a suddenly strong, clear voice, a most surprising voice; but I said nothing, knowing nothing of God.

"Let us go," she said.

"Shall I tell him you came?"

She thought about that, looking at me. "Yes," she said, "will you? Please. Just that I came. You see, Gerald doesn't ... well," she smiled somewhere in those eyes, "let us say he is against me...."

We were in the doorway of the soiled room of the drunkard. I was going to switch out the light. Often I would come upstairs and switch out Gerald's light.

"Gerald," she said suddenly, in that strong voice, and I thought of a prefect's voice at school, down the corridor of a dormitory. "Good-bye to Gerald."

"You see," she said to me, "Gerald and I are the last Marches, and we ought to stand together. Don't you think so?"

"Yes, you ought," I said gravely. One hand, the hand of the great emerald, hung against her leather jacket. "Certainly you ought," I said, and raised the hand to my lips. Her hand smelt dimly of petrol and cigarettes, and a scent whose name I shall now never know.

"These defiant courtesies," she said thoughtfully. "They're very nice, I always say...."

Slowly, she first, we went down the narrow stairs to my landing. In the sudden flare of my match there was revealed a threepenny-bit of flesh just above the heel of her left shoe, and I had occasion to rebuke myself on the depravity that is man. She said over her shoulder: "Hilary Townshend has told me about you...."

"But he has never told me about you!"

"Oh, he would if you provoked him!"

"And may I?"

But she did not seem to hear. Once Hilary had, I thought, said something about Gerald March having a sister, but I had not connected the vaguely heard name of Mrs. Storm with her. I don't know why, but I had always imagined Gerald's sister as a schoolgirl living somewhere in the country with a bankrupt old gentleman called Lord Portairley, Gerald's uncle.

We were on my small landing now, in the light that plunged out of the half-open door of my sitting-room: she with a foot on the stairs leading downwards, away.

"Good-bye," she said. "Really, I think you've been very kind...."

She seemed to me very nice and gentle; yes, nice; and then it seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself. I was on another planet. Hilary tells me now that he also had that feeling with her; but Hilary must have struggled against it, whereas I am incapable of struggling against any feeling.

"Good-bye," I said.

I was looking not at her but through the half-open door into my room. There lay the disorder of my life, the jumble, the lack of purpose, the silence, and the defeat of my life. I wasn't, it seems almost an intrusion to say, very happy in those days; but that is by the way in the history of Gerald March and Iris Storm.

Now here is the difficult part of this history. Of the many gaps it will contain, this seems to me the most grave, the least excusable. One should write, if not well, at least plausibly, about the things that happen. And yet I cannot be plausible about this, because I do not know how it happened. I mean, how she came into my room and sat down. I did not ask her. Did she want to? Mrs. Storm was a lady who gave you a sense of the conventions. Mrs. Storm was a ... and yet ... I do not know anything about her.

I am trying, you can see, to realise her, to add her together; and, of course, failing. She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her--foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?--as some one who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours when we, with that marvellous indirectness of purpose which is called being human, shall have finally annihilated each other in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.

We have all of us a crude desire to "place" our fellows in this or that category or class: we like to know more or less what they are, so that, maybe, we may know more or less what we shall be to them. But, even with the knowledge that she was Gerald's sister, that she was twenty-nine years old, that she was the niece of Lord Portairley, you could not, anyhow I couldn't, "place" Mrs. Storm. You had a conviction, a rather despairing one, that she didn't fit in anywhere, to any class, nay, to any nationality. She wasn't that ghastly thing called "Bohemian," she wasn't any of the ghastly things called "society," "county," upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn't intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not. In her eyes you saw the landscape of England, spacious and brave; but you felt unreasonably certain that she was as devoid of patriotism as Mary Stuart. She gave you a sense of the conventions; but she gave you--unaware always, impersonal always, and those cool, sensible eyes!--a much deeper sense that she was somehow outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge as to what is and what is not conventional. That was why, I am trying to show, I felt so profoundly incapable with her. It was not as though one was non-existent; it was as though, with her, one existed only in the most limited sense. And, I suppose, she affected me particularly in that way simply because I am a man of my time. For that is a limitation a man can't get beyond--to be of his time, completely. He may be successful, a man like that--indeed, should he not blow his brains out if he is not?--but he who is of his time may never rise above himself: he is the galley-slave working incessantly at the oars of his life, which reflects the lives of the multitude of his fellows. Yes, I am of my time. And so I had with this woman that profound sense of incapability, of defeat, which any limited man must feel with a woman whose limitations he cannot know. She was--in that phrase of Mr. Conrad's which can mean so little or so much--she was of all time. She was, when the first woman crawled out of the mud of the primeval world. She would be, when the last woman walks towards the unmentionable end.

"Good-bye," I said, and then, as I looked from the disordered room and my disenchanted life at her, the eyes in the shadow of the green hat were brilliant with laughter, so that I was stunned. "Why are you laughing?" I asked, or perhaps I did not ask that, perhaps she had not been laughing at all, for when I was recovered from my stupor her eyes were quite grave, and dark as in a crypt. I pushed open the door of my room.

"How I would like," she said, that husky voice, "a glass of cold water!" That was what she said, and so I let her go in alone into the sitting-room, whilst I turned on the tap in the bathroom. Fiercely and long I let the water run, pleased with the way it was filling the little house with its clean roar, pleased with the clean scent of the rushing water, which is always like the scent of cool sunlight. Then she said: "You have had a quick bath," and so we became friends.

She stood among the littered books on the floor, looking round at the disorder, like a tulip with a green head. She sipped the water, looking round wisely over the rim of the tumbler. I explained that I was leaving to-morrow, and therefore the disorder.

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