“PIRACY”

The Author wishes it to be clearly understood that all the persons in this book, except Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Trevor, are entirely of the imagination.

“PIRACY”

A ROMANTIC CHRONICLE OF
THESE DAYS
by
MICHAEL ARLEN
Author of “The Romantic Lady,”
“The London Venture,” etc.

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Manufactured in Great Britain

TO MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

A typical sentence from an ancient copy-book, unearthed with many other curious relics of a polite age during recent excavations at the corner of Pall Mall and Saint James’s Street:—

“When gentlefolk meet, compliments are exchanged.”

PROLOGUE

THE DEPRESSION OF IVOR PELHAM MARLAY ON THE NIGHT
OF THE 1ST OF MAY, 1921

CHAPTER I

1

On the northern fringe of Soho there lies a not ill-favoured little street, about which play many grubby children and barrel-organs, and on whose pathways not even the most distinguished foreigner can look anything but a mere alien; while the veritable alien looks there, in the light of day, even more undesirable than in the shadows of the “night-club” into which, at about midnight, your passing attention might be beckoned. But you and I, in passing up that street in the failing light of evening, would be concerned with none of its alien banalities—except, of course, in so far as a hint of such may lie behind the wide and well-lit windows of the Hotel and Restaurant Mont Agel, at the far end of the street.

On the left of these spacious windows, at the head of a few steps, is the door of the restaurant, pleasantly inviting your pressure, if indeed it is not widely open to show the elegant interior; and on the right is the door of the hotel, a door of a very different air to the other, a sealed and reticent looking door, with a tiny navel through which a worldly eye may judge of your business: a door, in fact, with the secret air of having very important business of its own as a door, which indeed it has. But you and I, concerned only with our dinner—to which, say, I have invited you, being intimate with the excellence of the place—plunge up the steps to the restaurant; reading, as we go in, the small white lettering on the large windows that tell us that therein we may have Lunch, Tea, and Dinner, and, more importantly, that we can have them à toute heure; which, to our pedantic eye, may seem a rather optimistic boast to make in face of the law that—even on this 1st of May, 1921—requires all hotels, cafés, inns, restaurants and eating-houses, to be closed somewhere about ten-thirty o’clock. But I shouldn’t wonder if the fact that the boast is written in French allows us to take it more as one of those beaux gestes that are so frequent in the language of the race that has most need of them, than as a braggart defiance.

Within the restaurant you will find all quiet, orderly and clean. In extent it is only a rather spacious room of uncertain shape (though there are, of course, possibilities upstairs), but it has not the air of being confined to that one room. These four walls, it says to you, might be placed at vastly different and more elegant angles if it wished, but it does not wish. The room wears, in fact, an air of perfect satisfaction with itself, and not insolently, but wisely: not as a young man who thinks he knows everything, but as an old man who knows that it is not worth while to know any more. It is bounded on the north side, as our schoolbooks say, by the wide front windows, which are pleasantly half-curtained with vermilion gauze; on the south side, where the room tapers to its end, by a much smaller window, which is always heavily curtained and may or may not look upon the mysteries of the Mont Agel backyard; on the west by a wall decorated with mirrors, stags’ antlers, and heads of furry beasts, and broken by a small door which leads into the hotel, the famous cellars, and the usual offices; and on the east side by a handsome counter which runs along half the length of the wall, and across which the young and elegant Madame Stutz, with befitting seriousness, hands to her husband’s waiters those concoctions, collations, and confections which have won for the Mont Agel Restaurant its reputation for conservative excellence.

Wines, too, Madame Stutz there uncorks, very deftly and tenderly; during which process her husband, the polite and amiable M. Stutz, while trusting her in this as in all else, cannot resist watching her with a certain anxiety; for the wines of his cellar are the treasures of his heart, and now and then, though all too rarely, if it is a special vintage and a favoured customer, himself will uncork the wine, seeming with the gesture to broach a secret emotion. ‘Ah, you can hear the angels singing!’ sighs M. Stutz, hovering about the table. Mellow and full-blooded wines of Burgundy there are here, to stiffen a man’s heart against the shyness that defeats desire: glistening Château Yquem, too sweet and luxurious for any but the sweetest occasions, and many another: wines, let us say, for beginnings, wines for consummations, wines for tired endings—sweet, bitter-sweet, and bitter! M. Stutz lacks not one, neither Liebfraumilch nor Tokay, nor any liqueur that ever monkery devised with which to tantalise its own asceticism.

This restaurant is no place for a poor man, you understand; unless, of course, he happen to be with a rich one, as must now and then happen in even the most luckless life. The very tables are arranged with a rich sparseness; for they are placed only around the walls, each with its red-shaded lamp. The centre of the room is thus left unchallenged to a large brass contrivance from which flow ferns, palm leaves, and all manner of secondary flowers; on one side of this is a rack for papers; on its other side is a small table weighted with various and unseasonable delicacies, artichokes and asparagus, oysters and strawberries, plovers’ eggs and grouse, caviare and cantaloup. A table of miracles, indeed! About which the most miraculous thing is that there are always those who can afford to look over it and choose from it, fastidious and unperturbed.

Whether the Mont Agel was created for its patrons, or whether patrons were created for the Mont Agel, will now never be known. Let it suffice that they become each other very well, even if not quite so well as the polite and amiable M. Stutz becomes them both. As every civilisation must produce a M. Stutz, so every M. Stutz must produce a civilisation; and the atmosphere he has created in this bye-street of Soho is essentially an atmosphere of civilisation. Not, you understand, that brazen modernity which Mr. Stephen Mackenna’s almost too social eye cannot desist from discerning in glittering heaps and serial form all the way from Berkeley Street to Sloane Square (that happy and horrible land where all young men have Clubs and all young women Lovers), but an air of just sensible civilisation. Here, at the Mont Agel, you will find not the sense of property, about which so much has been written, but that much finer sense of independence, which has written so much. But you would have to know the place pretty well before you found in its customers any sense of anything whatsoever, for this Mont Agel has a singular dignity of its own, which subtly caresses its patrons and is as a mystic cloud between them and an alien eye. Stout yeomen from Wimbledon and honest burghers from Kensington Gore, gallants from Holland Park and beaux from Golders Green—one and all have some time or other been lured hither by some wanton friend; and what have they seen? Rich wines and rare food, delicious to the Battersea palate, made up the sum of that unexpected for which these worthy adventurers did timidly search; they have seen nothing for their money, nothing at all! Or was it, as an afterthought, nothing to have sat and watched the bearded and significant figure of M. Stutz’s most considerable patron—an epic figure, that!—and to have wondered whether that silent detachment betokened a great artist or a great vagabond? And was it nothing to have been made suddenly aware of the strange things men once did and suffered for women, of the quests that were followed and the lances that were broken in the days when there were neither suburbs nor men to live in them—was it nothing to be reminded of all this, by the vivid entrance of those tawny-haired women of almost barbaric fairness, whose faces the men of Putney recognised from the illustrated papers with a thrill of disapproval? Those young women of patrician and careless intelligence, whom it is the pet mistake of bishops, diarists, press-photographers, and Americans, to take as representing the “state” of modern society (whereas, God knows, they represent nothing but themselves, and that too rarely), and who, by some law of sympathy, have found refuge at this Mont Agel from their tedious parentage or tiresome duties roundabout, say, Grosvenor Square. One especially of these the men of Notting Hill will often call to mind, she will arise before their eyes as a rebuke to their passionless lives, as the phantom of the desire that has never become tangible, as the symbol of the life that has never been lived—one, alas, who now knows the Mont Agel no more! And they will be faintly shocked yet strangely stirred, after the manner of honest men, by the cruel indifference of this lady’s look and the casual arrogance of her poise, murmuring among themselves that the Lady Lois—for it was she—is a bit above herself, and insinuating against her thus and thus, after the manner of honest but common men.... And on many nights will come the toughs and roughs and bravoes of the town, to press their ill-favoured noses against the windows of the Mont Agel and watch the leading beauties toying with their food and their poets.

And through and about this atmosphere of his creation moves always the polite and amiable M. Stutz: thoughtful here, smiling there, always and implacably encouraging. No fool ever said a wise thing but that M. Stutz did not quickly commend it, no wise man ever said a foolish thing but that M. Stutz did not gently condone it. He is always about your table, not, you understand, as the servant of his restaurant, but as the director of its amenities. His interests are wide, his dignity not stiff, his formality pleasing, his familiarity appropriate; so that when, with a gesture, he tells you that he is “only a little restaurateur” you will take leave to disbelieve him, vowing that never was a restaurateur so imperially conceived, nor a gentleman so politely informed.... Thus, knowing and appreciating him, it were an offence in you to be surprised at those very rare occasions when M. Stutz, having been prevailed upon to accept a guest’s hospitality a little too freely, has betrayed ever so little of that human dross which his patrons have so often displayed before him.

CHAPTER II

1

So much has been said of the Mont Agel Restaurant mainly because it had always had a considerable place in the life and affections of one whose fortunes this history must closely follow. The polite and amiable M. Stutz will, of course, occur again, gently and encouragingly, even as he occurs about the tables of those whom he honours by describing, with an epic gesture, as “My Customers.”

There, on the evening of the 1st of May, 1921, sat Ivor Pelham Marlay, at the only table in the place where a man could sit alone without attracting the notice of his acquaintances to his solitude; for all but this little table in the shadow of Madame Stutz’s counter were of a size for four, or on occasions ten, so that a sense of fairness to M. Stutz allowed little alternative to one in Ivor Marlay’s situation.

The Mont Agel had been a recurrent fact in that young man’s life for now ten years; between him and it ran that vague current of sympathy which seeks not to define its roots; and many of his memories of merry evenings or tragic solitudes were bound to the place. He was sitting now with his head inclined a little forward and his forehead resting in the palm of his hand, in a detached and thoughtful attitude. The thick hair—which was brushed slantwise back from one of those taut English foreheads that look as though there had just been enough skin to go round—might have been thought to be black, but was really of a variously coloured brown, and reflected sunlight a little more capriciously, some might think (and had thought), than a man’s hair should.

You would not have called his a handsome face: it was a provocative face: it looked as though it suffered from silence. Your first impression of it was that it was an amazingly lean face, and that he was rather uncomfortable with it; your next that, though it was of the species dark, it was also, very definitely, of the species English proconsul—with a quick reservation as to the eyebrows, which in a previous incarnation he might well have raided from some sardonic adventurer of the Orient, they were so curiously straight and dark and immobile. They were eyebrows of the sceptical sort, they were irritating eyebrows. Then take, as matter for a student of such things, that thin-fleshed, aquiline nose, mountainous and significant, the nose historical, obviously recognisable as a Family Nose—but yet, surprisingly enough, not at all predominant in a face that had doubtless been conceived in a turbulent moment; and take the eyes, eyes altogether too dark for really comfortable everyday use, frank yet secret eyes, rather sulky eyes. Take, in fact, the whole face, lean and firm and mature—for this, after all, is the young man’s thirty-second year of maturing—and amazingly, absurdly sulky! Now that sulkiness was perversely set there, for all the world to see, to testify against his nature, which is a man’s most secret property, and to be as a witness against him, most opportune to a feline hand in moments of extreme stress, such as befall adventurers; for it is pleasant for a woman to tell a man that he is sulky when he is really angry and she knows it. That sulkiness seemed to lie all over his face, lurking about the vague shadows of his nose and in the rich shadows of his dark eyes....

His present thoughts and attitude might well have surprised any of his acquaintances, such as were now sitting about the tables of the Mont Agel and respecting his solitude; for Ivor Marlay was considered a fortunate young man: moneyed, you know, and reasonably accomplished, and quite personable, and so on. Such thoughts might even have been considered to have come upon him by surprise. To put it unkindly, one might have conceived his finger as having been suddenly arrested by some sticky patch when testing the gloss over his good-fortune. But if, as some say, thanks are the highest form of thought, Ivor Marlay had always indulged in a very high level of thinking, in giving thanks for the chance that had given him freedom from every monetary worry and, therefore, freedom from much else. But even freedom, divine among earthly words, can take queer shapes and mean queer things. Freedom, which we all desire, may sometimes mean that no one desires us. To be free may sometimes mean that no one wishes to imprison us; and that, when you come to think of it, is a very terrible thing.

To these grave abstractions must be added the material fact that Ivor Pelham Marlay had only one arm. For of the many things that a man can lose in a proper war, Ivor Marlay had lost only his left arm. His left sleeve, as you saw him at his table at the Mont Agel, hung emptily down into the left pocket of his jacket—adding to his carriage that strange elegance peculiar to tall, one-armed men of a foppish habit. And who, after all, has more right to make the best of his appearance than one who has been deprived of an essential detail of it?

If he had risen from his table you would have observed that he was a tall man: he was, in fact, exactly six-feet-two: but if he were asked, in a friendly way, how tall he was, he would answer, in a friendly way, that he was just under six-foot-one. That was the only illusion about himself that he had managed to preserve until the age of thirty-two.

2

His present state of mind was not due to liver or anything like that. It was in the nature of a logical climax, and Ivor Marlay, like you and me, naturally detested anything in the nature of a logical climax.

In earliest youth we have all sometimes had clear brooding seconds of hopeless vision, when we ever so dimly but acutely foresaw painful hurts that might come upon us from ourselves in manhood. There was a ghastly moment when a jolly boy of thirteen fell suddenly to incoherent brooding: he suddenly mistrusted his future self immensely; and for a full second he paced awefully up the long avenues of a life that seemed carpeted only with autumn leaves. And there comes a moment when life proves that boy to have been unwholesomely right. And though it may be true that things are never so bad as they seem, they are often a good deal worse than you thought they might be.

Throughout that day Ivor Marlay had been aware that the evening would lie heavily upon it. This 1st of May, from its rainy beginning and throughout its pale fore and afternoon, had borne a dour impress. He had been unable to write, quite unable to read; in stern determination not to think, had fiercely wasted many hours in pacing miles of carpet, then of park, and then again of carpet; and, in the late evening, had slammed his door behind him and almost violently set out to meet his dinner face to face, along Brook Street, across Bond Street, through Hanover Square, along Oxford Street, and round the corner to the sign of the Mont Agel. He had run away from these thoughts all day because, he knew, they must take shape as that kind of depression which inexorably dissects one’s life. And what a portentous business the wretched thing would make of it all!... As, indeed, it did.

Of all the places he might have chosen for this momentous dinner, his depression could not have devised a more whole-hearted ally than the Mont Agel; for that is the worst of all Stutz civilisations, when you are gay they make you even gayer, but when you are sad you might just as well be dead. Ivor Marlay had not fully considered his first glass of wine—alone, because of a deep impatience (of which that sulky look might be the outward and deceptive sign) that always prevented him from enjoying others’ company when least he enjoyed his own—before he found that he had stepped into the ogre’s very arms; that, if anything, the wretch had increased upon itself, had as it were fattened upon the associations of the place, and was using now every dead moment of past gaiety and past sadness as a weapon with which to point its plaguey insistence. And of such memories, of course, the Mont Agel was full; even the features of M. Stutz were as though lined with the past enthusiasms, optimisms, tolerances, and encouragements with which he had ministered, in that room upstairs, to the gaieties and reverberations of “My Customers.”

3

It is absurd to suggest that a man sitting at a table, alone with his coffee and his God, and goaded on by no matter how stern a desire to come to some understanding with himself, will anything like consecutively review the dismal pageant of his life; for even as there is no rigid sequence in nature, so there is none in our thoughts. Here and there Ivor Marlay saw pictures, here and there he remembered thoughts, here and there he reheard voices, here and there he relived silences, and here and there an illusion shone wan and faded quickly....

At a moment that he happened to raise his head his eyes met the passing and gentle glance of M. Stutz, who had always treated the young man to that courtly familiarity which is the hall-mark of a restaurateur’s favour.

“You are deeply engaged to-night, Mr. Marlay,” M. Stutz gravely remarked, in that deep tone which pleasantly became his classical address.

The young man made a self-conscious noise which indicated a great confusion rather than a laugh.

“I’m trying, you know, to find an illusion, M. Stutz. About myself, I mean.”

M. Stutz took thought upon this for a space.

“Illusions, sir,” he said, “are like flies. There are always as many alive as dead. Even in the winter, although you do not know it.”

“And the greatest of all illusions,” went on M. Stutz, “is that you have not got one. It is like a man saying that he knows the answer to every question, and then being silent when you ask him: ‘What is God?’”

And with that the polite and amiable M. Stutz again left him to his meditations, himself to indulge in a little wine and conversation at the far corner table with Mr. Cornelius Fayle, the South African artist, who had a great reputation for mixing salads and lengthily commenting upon them and anything else, rather than for his paintings—which, though as yet unseen by any mortal eye, could not possibly have been more charming, more instructive, or more tedious than his cherubic self. Women loved him because they had to take care of him; he was said to have Charm; and he was peculiarly favoured among “My Customers” by M. Stutz’s condescension, for that urbane gentleman discerned in Mr. Fayle a kindred spirit, whose profundities lay in as shallow and untroubled waters as his own.

4

The circumstance is plain, then. A young man was sitting at a solitary table in the Mont Agel Restaurant, towards ten o’clock on the night of the 1st of May, 1921: a darkly serious young man, with a defiant nose and a white flower brave upon the silk lapel of his dinner-jacket—for was he not something of a fop, this one-armed young man? The soft light of the shaded lamp on his table mellowed the hard whiteness of his shirt-front, but it added no light to the dark eyes under the straight eyebrows: eyes that looked like black pits of contemplation, and were staring into a coffee-cup as into an abyss; and in these eyes was a brooding something, which was not regret nor remorse nor despair, but which might be fear or might be anger; for the dark young man was of an angry habit, and he was thirty-two years old, and he was very lonely.

The history of Ivor Pelham Marlay, until this night, is the history of England, two loves, and an ideal.

BOOK THE FIRST
AN IDEAL, SOME DETAILS, AND A LAPSE

CHAPTER I

1

It will, of course, be obvious that Ivor Marlay’s life would have been quite different if he had gone up to the University of Oxford in the ordinary way. Those who have been to Oxford, or even to Cambridge, will realise how very different Ivor Marlay’s life might have been—if indeed they can retain any interest in him—had his first youth been allowed the natural and wholesome outlets of mind and body which either of those mellow places affords in such ripe and enduring abundance to young men of widely different ambitions. The amazing reason why Ivor Marlay did not go up to the University of Oxford in the ordinary way was because he did not want to.

This Oxford matter was discussed between himself and his Aunt Moira on the very afternoon of his leaving school. It had, of course, been discussed before, but that afternoon it was discussed from a rather acute angle. Aunt Moira was seventy-two years old and was apt to discuss things from a rather acute angle.

The day on which Ivor Marlay left school had, no doubt, a good deal to do with the acuteness of the discussion, for Ivor Marlay left school suddenly. Now when a man has stayed at a public school, and at Manton in particular, until he is eighteen: when a man has become respected, responsible, and a veteran of that system which will so soon be producing him to the world as that system’s finest (as they are all the finest) product—it is surely his plain duty, in fact his only duty, to hold out to the end and to leave school without a stain on his character. He should, if possible, avoid being expelled.

Ivor Marlay’s expulsion was of the straightforward “Damn you, sir, get out!” kind. And the news of his expulsion, and the obvious reason for it, caused the nearest approach to popular feeling that Manton had ever entertained for Ivor Marlay. Manton laughed, and then Manton smiled for weeks. And when, in later days, Manton saw the name of Marlay on the cover of a book, Manton grinned in memory and bought that book, and having tried to read it wondered what the devil had happened to the man. For Manton didn’t know that he had done the thing in any spirit but that of mischief or adventure, both naturally dear to Manton’s heart. If Manton had known that he had done it in any spirit but that of mischief or adventure, it would have thought it all rather odd, and felt a little uncomfortable. The head master, who knew, thought it very odd and made Ivor a little uncomfortable.

But, even on the morning it happened, the College Prefects thought it was not happening quite usually. The College Prefects at Manton have a sitting-room in the school building, a spacious room adjacent to the masters’ sitting-room: and here they will pass a minute or two on their way to and from classes, to which they are allowed to enter a minute or two after Inferiors. (The difference between a College Prefect—Coll Pree—and a House Prefect—House Pree—is that a Coll Pree can do what he likes everywhere, and a House Pree can do what he likes in his House. Inferiors can do what they like in their studies, more or less. Fags can’t do what they like anywhere. New boys are bacilli, unclean but invisible.) The Coll Prees, at eleven o’clock that morning, gathered in force in their room for their minute-or-two. They knew that Marlay, the third head of their number, was having a little conversation with the Little Man, and they were waiting to hear about it. And the thing only began to look a little unusual when one of their number called out: “Why, he’s not coming! There he is!” And there, through the window, they saw he was! Walking swiftly down the school steps, across the wide lawn, and down more steps towards his House....

“I’ll risk it,” cried Transome, and rushed out. (Transome and Marlay had been the school rackets-pair for the last two years.) He breathlessly caught Marlay up on the “Senior Turf,” that immaculate turf where Manton whacks other Mantons at cricket. Marlay turned round at his hail.

“What happened?” asked Transome breathlessly.

“Sack,” said Marlay.

“Of course,” said Transome. “Was the Little Man cross?”

“He’s a jolly nice little man,” Marlay told him. “He chewed my head off and it didn’t begin to choke him.”

“It nearly choked me, though,” he added.

“Well, what are you going to do now?” asked Transome, interested. It isn’t every day that the other one of a school rackets-pair is expelled; and besides, Transome wanted to know what Marlay was going to do—he hadn’t the faintest idea what he would do if he were sacked, except avoid his people like the plague.

Ivor dug his hands deep in his pockets.

“I’m going,” he said firmly, “down to the House. I’m going to bribe or kick the boot-boy into packing my things and dragging them to the station. I am then going to leap on my motor-bike and shift like hell to London. On my arrival there I shall be made to stand in a corner for an hour. And then I shall dress and go to the Empire——”

“Swank!” said Transome.

“And if you’ve got any sense,” Ivor added, with a grin, “you’ll come with me, Transome. On the carrier. You can come back to-morrow saying you’ve been to see a corn-specialist, and get the sack in perfect order. Your father, being a colonel, would appreciate your sense of discipline.”

“Yes, with his boot. Though I’d come,” Transome thoughtfully admitted, “only I’m leaving at the end of the term anyway. Might as well wait——”

“Well, good-bye, old chap!” And Ivor held out his hand.

He looked extraordinarily happy, Transome thought.

“Won’t your people be sick?” he asked.

“They’d vomit,” said Ivor thoughtfully, “if I had any—in particular, I mean.” And having struck the pathetic note Ivor grinned broadly and Transome grinned broadly back—and then they parted sharply asunder, the one to the conquest of the world and the heavens, and the other back to a routine which was more than usually embittered by an idea that it must be rather amusing to be an orphan.

The only other persons to whom Ivor said good-bye were the boot-boy, whom he tipped; the steward, whom he tipped; the two dormitory housemaids, one of whom he tipped and the other kissed as well, for she was a nice girl; the matron, who kissed him; and the house-master’s wife, a kind and comfortable body who was extremely surprised at having the tips of her fingers very gallantly kissed. Ivor was enjoying himself like anything, and didn’t mind who knew it; for being expelled is not bad fun when it isn’t for dirt, and when you have an “Indian” motor-cycle, T.T. Model, which means that you can do a fabulous amount of miles per hour in an exceeding uncomfortable position and for no earthly reason except to lie about it to your friends....

2

The expulsion came about this way.

At about the middle of that summer term it became obvious to the intelligence of the meanest bacillus that strange things were happening at Manton by night. These strange things were not, of course, defined to bacilli, except that they were uncommonly strange. Bacilli had therefore a lovely feeling that history was being made, and some one’s history in particular.

There were rumours, new rumours every morning, delightful and outrageous rumours, so that the lumps in the porridge were swallowed without comment and the fish-cakes were eaten without contumely. The masters looked unusually stern, but it was the sternness of thought rather than of discipline. Coll Prees went about with smiles gravely repressed and an air of being more than usually responsible for everything. House Prees and Bloods (indescribable beings, neither Prefect nor Inferior, amazing centaurs, not divine but certainly not human—just Bloods) were everywhere to be seen in earnest colloquy. For the matter was, that there was some sort of night-prowler about the school grounds. It would have been almost bearable if the night-prowler had prowled only about the grounds, but he prowled into the Houses, he prowled actually into the house-masters’ sides of the Houses; he prowled into their studies, he sat on their chairs, he read their books, he drank their port, he tested their barley water, he smoked their cigars, he left a neat little bit of Greek verse on their desks to thank them for same—and then, as it were for a joke, he bolted the windows from the inside, locked the doors from the outside, and left the keys in such an obvious place that no one ever found them until new ones had been made. And this went on, once or twice a week, for more than a month! Watch was kept, police were stationed about the grounds (for weeks any strange face about the school grounds was held to be that of a “plain clothes man—and jolly plain at that!”) and the Coll Prees were called upon to keep night-watch over the House where each held dominion.... Then there was a memorable night when the night-prowler was chased. Two Coll Prees and Mr. Sandys, of the Lower Fifth and the Hampshire Eleven, were patrolling the borders of the Senior Turf, about which lie the main Houses of Manton in the form of a horse-shoe. Suddenly, just ahead of them, was seen a moving dark thing. They leapt. It ran. They chased, but the dark thing hurled down the slope from the path to the flat darkness of the Senior Turf. “He’s got running-shorts,” grumbled Mr. Sandys, who was in a dinner-jacket. “And gym-shoes,” grunted Mr. Sandys. Then came a laugh behind them, and again they leapt. But the dark thing grew darker and disappeared into the labyrinth of buildings made by the gymnasium, the gates, rackets-courts, and House No. 6. “Blast!” said Mr. Sandys, and gave up. The Coll Prees had given up long before.

Of course the night-prowler was caught in the end, but he need not have been caught so stupidly. The head-master (the late Canon Sidney Wentworth Carr), himself prowling about the grounds at three a.m. one morning, some days after all hope of finding the miscreant had faded, thought he saw, for a bare second, a smothered cigar-end in the little overshadowed lane that runs between Houses No. 2 and No. 9. He promptly scuttled into the garden of No. 9, darted towards a certain point in the wall, secured an ill-tempered victory over the low branches of the trees for which Manton is famous, and finally got to the wall. The Canon was a little man, so he had to stand on his toes; and he looked over the wall. There was the figure, a yard or so away with his back to him, smoking a cigar. “Silly ass,” the Little Man thought. “As if he liked it!”

And then he struck a match sharply. The figure started round.

“Got you!” said the head-master.

“Ah,” said the figure indistinctly. Or it might have been “Oh!”

“Come to my study t’morrow morning at ten,” the head-master said sharply. “Silly ass, Marlay.”

“Yes, sir.”

Thus, it was all over bar the shouting. And there was very little of that, in the head-master’s study at ten o’clock the next morning.

“Well, what did you do it for?” was fired at Ivor as he came in. Ivor had the grace to be very white in the face. The head-master, fierce little man that he was, always fired his questions like that, briskly, brusquely, indomitably. He always spoke as though he was going to swear, which indeed he sometimes did; but always just at the right moment and about the right thing, always knowing when to be a man, when a head-master, and when a Canon; which made him very efficient and popular as all three.

“Well, Marlay?”

“If you want the absolute truth, sir——”

“Get on, man.”

“I was frightfully bored, sir,” Ivor said heavily; and never was boredom more cruelly punished than by its owner’s white face and by the silence that followed its confession. The Little Man stared at him, and he tapped the edge of the table with a paper-knife. Then he jumped up.

“You go, of course,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“To-day.”

“Yes, sir.”

The head-master swung round on him angrily. He had always liked Marlay.

“Look here, Marlay, you’ve spoilt a good thing, and at the last moment! You’re a damn fool, sir!”

“I know, sir. I’m sorry.” It sounded so lame!

“Don’t lie, Marlay. You are not sorry. You are glad to go.”

Ivor fumbled.

“I’m sorry, sir, to have disappointed you,” he muttered weakly.

The head-master paced the room. Then again, suddenly, he swung round on him; and, small though he was, he seemed to tower above the boy’s drooping figure.

“It’s wrong and nasty, this,” he said steadily. “I suppose you know, Marlay, that there’s nothing fine in what you’ve done, and everything far from fine in the spirit in which you’ve done it!”

“It’s the spirit that’s damnable, man!” the head-master said. “Can’t you see? It’s a silly boy’s trick played by a man. The matter with you, Marlay, is that you think you are a grown man and despise boys, and the matter with me is that I think you are a grown man and despise you for not being a boy. That’s why I don’t thrash you, not because you are a College Prefect....”

The way the Little Man said that! Ivor looked at the ground.

“Bored!” snarled the head-master suddenly. “You have grossly insulted me, Marlay. And you have insulted Manton.”

“You may go, Marlay,” said the head-master.

Ivor went very quickly; but he had not opened the door before he was called back by a sharp voice. The Little Man was still standing by the table, lowering at him. Ivor felt, looked, and was a cur.

“I want to warn you, young man,” the Little Man said. “That boredom of yours is dangerous—to you. I mean! To every one else it is merely offensive. I consider, Marlay, that you have been most offensive. So if I were you I would take steps to cure this boredom of yours. Were you, may I ask, intending to go up to Oxford?”

“No, sir.”

(Ivor had finally decided that moment.)

“I shouldn’t,” said the head-master. “You are the first Sixth Form man of mine I have advised not to. It is not a compliment. If you have been bored here at Manton, you will go mad at Oxford. They take their pleasures even more traditionally there. I will write to Lady Moira.”

“You may go, Marlay,” he said.

But, as Ivor was again going, a voice snapped from behind him:—

“You don’t believe in tradition, I suppose, Marlay?”

Ivor swung round with a livid face.

“Yes, I do, sir,” he said flatly. “That’s exactly why I was bored—the tradition here is one of boredom.”

The silence that followed was broken only by a funny noise in the Little Man’s throat. And Ivor was afraid.

“I—I meant,” he stammered, “that it m-must be pretty—boring for you, sir—teaching boys and——”

“You had better go, Marlay,” said the head-master.

And this time it was Ivor who turned round from the door and faced the terrible silence of the room. His face had gone from white to deep red.

“Good-bye, sir,” he said. “And thank you, sir—really.”

The head-master threw the paper-knife on to the table with a clatter, and Ivor Marlay left school.

(It cost the night-prowler a pretty penny, that joke. For, a few days after he had prowled his last, the head-master and house-masters of Manton received each an anonymous box of Coronas. He really hadn’t the face to return the port in kind.)

3

Two hours later he was with Aunt Moira, in the house at Palace Green. He found her alone, erect in a high-backed Queen Anne chair in the bare and gloomy library in which she was wont to pass her afternoons reading, or writing letters. That large room had always awed Ivor: even as a child he had never wanted to play in it, for all that it was so limitless, the parquet floor so vast and shiny and unencumbered, the windows so wide and light with the fairy expanse of Kensington Gardens.

Aunt Moira watched his approach across the parquet floor, an uncomfortable kind of floor to traverse under raking eyes, without remark or sign. Aunt Moira was not given to showing surprise, not even at her nephew coming home alive in term-time.

That nephew approached, stood, grinned sheepishly, but spoke not: unless inarticulate mutterings of scarcely human intelligence be speech. It was Aunt Moira who spoke:—

“That horrible motor-cycle of yours makes a most disturbing noise, Ivor. I wonder the police let you. You might muffle it with something....”

(It was some years later that the Home Office bethought itself to pass a law against the open exhaust.)

And then Ivor explained how it had come about that he had been allowed to use the “red devil” in term-time. It was an idiotic tale to tell, and the telling took him some time, for he was very careful, trying to leave nothing out and to put as little as possible in. Aunt Moira did not interrupt once, she had always too much to say to interrupt; but she listened intently, and still more intently, and she tapped a foot on the floor.

When he had finished she used almost the identical words as the Canon Sidney Wentworth Carr, who was an old friend of hers—and with more weight, if that was possible. But Ivor, crushed already that day, was almost indifferent to this added burden. And though he tried, out of respect for Aunt Moira, to hide his indifference to the mere logic of the situation—for was this not, after all, an epoch in his life?—she must have perceived something of his peculiar nonchalance, for she suddenly cut short the expression of her deep disappointment with a very weary:

“You might just not have done it, Ivor!” Dear Aunt Moira!

“Of course,” said Ivor softly, “it rather puts the lid on my going up to Oxford.” He was so frightfully pleased about not going up to Oxford—he simply could not have told any one why, it was just a tremendous bubbling within him of freedom from all sorts of things—that he couldn’t help playing the fool about it, thus letting Aunt Moira see exactly how pleased he was. She stared at him—at the young man who had so suddenly grown out of her reach! And maybe she realised that the events of that day had somehow released in him something individual which had been in hiding, something unpleasant but individual.

“Then what will you do?” she put to him sharply. “For you must do something, you know. In this world, nowadays. I will not have you live all your life as my nephew....”

“I thought you might go to the Bar,” she said.

“I thought,” said Ivor, “that I might write....”

“Oh dear!” sighed Aunt Moira.

And there was silence. But let it be understood that Aunt Moira had never intended to force Ivor’s preference about a career. Aunt Moira never really forced any one’s preference about anything. Liberty was the one feast to which she commanded her guests—it was only that her invitations sometimes made liberty just a little unrecognisable.

She had always liked people who wrote sensible things. But it seemed so vague, this writing.

“But you could write as well,” she suggested, rather brutally. “You must do something, don’t you see? And though I’ve no doubt you are very clever, as every one is clever nowadays, you can’t possibly have enough to write about at your age to take up all your time.”

“But I don’t want it to take up all my time! That’s just the point, Aunt Moira.”

“Now don’t be clever with me, Ivor. What I want for you, don’t you see, is a Position in the world, some foothold or other. And a writer, even quite a nice writer, is nothing at all unless he has written something that every one has read, while a barrister is something even when no one has heard of him. He is something, I mean. I insist on your being something, Ivor.”

(Naturally one will be “something,” Ivor impatiently thought.)

“Of course,” said Aunt Moira, “you are very grown-up for your years. I don’t like it.”

“I suppose,” she said, “you’ve got ideas.”

Ivor’s eyes had been intent on his shoes, but he now looked up frankly.

“As a matter of fact,” he said pathetically, “I haven’t got one. But I’ve got a kind of feeling that I may have—you know, Aunt Moira?”

“I know,” said Aunt Moira, not sympathetically—though really very surprised at Ivor’s candour; it was pleasant to hear a young man who had just made an idiot of himself saying he had no ideas—a very good beginning, she thought, for a writer’s career.

It was decided, over tea, that he should stay on with Aunt Moira for a year or so, studying French and literature—and, added Ivor, sociology.

“Sociology,” snapped Aunt Moira, “is a game that self-educated labourers play with half-educated gentlemen. What you doubtless mean is politics.” Ivor let it go at that.

Later on, Ivor could take rooms of his own; and still later on, when he was of age, he could travel and do what he liked—provided, Aunt Moira insisted, he did something! She relied on him to be decent, she said. If she hated anything in this world, it was slackness, flabbiness, and shoddiness—μικροπρεπέια, the Little Man would have snapped, for he never missed a chance of remembering Aristotle against you. If he was going to write, well, he must write, but seriously.

“There must be no nonsense about that,” said Aunt Moira. “And for Heaven’s sake don’t begin to write poetry until you have learnt how to write prose!”

The tea things were removed, and they sat on in silence. Now Aunt Moira’s silence was a formidable weapon, but to-day it was as though Ivor did not notice it, his eyes were so intent on the bright prospect of Kensington Gardens. Through a corner window could be seen a part of Kensington Palace, bathed in the rich shadow of the evening sun.

“Ivor!” she suddenly called.

The boy jerked his eyes away from that enthralling moon outside the windows—it is always outside the windows, that eternal and enthralling moon, or just behind the other person’s right shoulder. He smiled shadowily at her....

“I was just thinking,” he said.

“There’s so much to do, to think about, Aunt Moira,” he said. “And one doesn’t know where to begin!”

“That,” said Aunt Moira, “is just what you have to think out. I can’t help you.” Which, of course, she at once proceeded to do. “I suppose you are being eaten up with the idea, that you must see things, do things, live things. When I was young a young man was not happy until he had travelled—but it’s not enough for you to travel geographically. You want to travel emotionally. You are not childish enough....”

“It’s a twilight age,” said Aunt Moira.

“These two were rapid falcons in a snare,
Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.”

“Meredith wrote that,” she explained—and somehow made Meredith very mysterious.

Ivor’s expulsion was never again referred to between them—unless, perhaps, it was in reference to it that Aunt Moira, as he rose to go upstairs to change, called him to her and gave him one of those rare kisses—the last must have been quite three years before—that so unexpectedly clung to his cheek for a warm second; and then she examined him so straightly that he began a confused smile.

“You have intolerant eyes, anyway,” she said at last. For Aunt Moira was one of those who believed in intolerance; not she to advise youth to be tolerant, indulgent. She would tolerate anything in a nation, but she would not tolerate in an individual what she would not tolerate in herself. Always she had wanted her men to be good and great, and with the passing of the years she had decided that men cannot be good and great and tolerant in this self-scarred world. “Certainly, there are two sides to every question; but one of them looks over an abyss.” That is what Aunt Moira said; for she had looked over an abyss.

CHAPTER II

1

Aunt Moira was the only relation Ivor had, that he was aware of; and towards the end of the year after he left school she sickened of a cancer and was tortured to death. But before she died she told her nephew an ancient tale.

Ivor had originally been told that his father had died of a sudden illness, a few weeks before his birth. His natural curiosity on the subject had elicited the more particular information that his father had died of a sudden inflammation of the lungs—which Ivor somehow never realised meant pneumonia until he himself had it—in the thirty-ninth year of his age, in Italy. Thirty-nine had seemed to young Ivor a reasonable age at which to die, but he had been curious about Italy, for Italy had seemed a curious place for his father to have died in. But nothing on earth could move Aunt Moira to speak of what she did not wish to speak, and Ivor had to wait until a certain gray October afternoon of his nineteenth year, when he was much more curious about himself than about the ghosts that had given him birth, to hear the ancient tale that Aunt Moira must tell from her bed.

But she, who was commonly so impatient of fantasy, as of all excretions of inactive minds, must needs begin her tale with the casual statement that Ivor had never had a father at all! Whereupon Ivor looked very serious, and said nothing. “Technically speaking, of course,” snapped Aunt Moira, as though he had made a fool of himself. His real father, he who had loved and had been loved by his mother, and who had died in Italy, had been, implied Aunt Moira—implied Aunt Moira!—a vastly different person from any Mr. Marlay who could possibly have occurred in any strictly legal relation to his mother. “That,” said Lady Moira, “accounts to your nose and your Christian names.” For, of course, like other rebels, Aunt Moira could be a frightful snob when she chose.

But Aunt Moira’s tale came slowly, for that long-hidden cancer was at last and openly having its way with her, so certain the disease was that no surgeon’s knife could now avail the proud, tired body but in the one way itself made inevitable, from day to day of pain. But though, for press of suffering, her tongue must needs be still every now and then, her eyes were unmastered, keen and suspicious—for she would have no nonsense about her tale being misunderstood by this young man who sat rather too quietly by her bed, looking darker and sulkier than ever in the dim light of the heavily-curtained bedroom; and, in just such a silence, her eyes could dare the young man to feel the least atom of anger against the dead parents who had left him in what she didn’t hesitate to describe as “this mess.” Though, as she rather cynically said later, it was a much less careless mess than commonly happens:

“For you will be very well off, Ivor. There was nothing careless, nothing shoddy, even about your father’s lawlessness; as I hope there never will be about yours—but remember always that all lawlessness, like all cruelty, is fundamentally vulgar.” And Aunt Moira, having successfully contradicted herself, was again subdued by a stress of pain, and lay a while so still and silent that she might have seemed a carved figure but for those ever-open indomitable eyes that brooded suspiciously upon him.

And Ivor stirred restlessly, suddenly uncomfortable in the hard little chair which Aunt Moira had commanded him to pull up to the bed; Ivor stirred uneasily and wanted to stretch his legs and do something sensible with his hands, such as digging them into his pockets, but it was quite impossible to do any of those natural things, for one somehow didn’t lounge before Aunt Moira. But soon the discomfort of his body waned to nothing before the discomfort of his mind, for as she spoke or was silent he somehow began to feel that he was treating Aunt Moira unfairly, he felt a little mean for not thinking about it all as Aunt Moira seemed to expect him to think about it all—dear Aunt Moira, who was so seriously intent on explaining to him his illegitimacy! And so, of course, he ought to be serious too; and he had an uncomfortable feeling that there must be something beastly in him for not taking his illegitimacy so seriously as it was expected of him, and he wondered if it was all part of that same beastliness in him that had made him feel “bored” at school instead of going through with it in the ordinary way. And suddenly he thought of Transome, just a flash of a grinning thought behind his serious attention to Aunt Moira—how amazingly affected Transome would be if it was suddenly sprung on him by an Aunt Moira that the late Colonel Transome had never had any existence, technically speaking, and that therefore, he, Transome, was as illegitimate as any one could be! And the thought of Transome, faced with this news, persisted, how he would think it was the most important thing that had ever happened to any one outside of a book, and how he would be bursting with the tragic news until he simply had to confide in some one, saying: “I say, old boy, I’ve gone and turned out to be a bastard. Now what could be fairer than that?” And then Ivor pulled himself together sharply, feeling frightfully mean and uncomfortable—but the idea still persisted in him that his illegitimacy wasn’t at all important to him, not at all disturbing: interesting, of course, but not really important or disturbing. But, faced by Aunt Moira’s stern eyes—and hurt eyes they were too, just now and then, as though a sudden memory had hurt them—he tried his best to think as he was expected to think, just like the bustling people in Fielding’s Tom Jones....

But suddenly he realised that Aunt Moira was speaking of his mother, and that awoke him vividly, for he remembered his mother dimly, and he remembered to have loved her, even as he loved the idea of her now, she was so gentle and serious a ghost. He wanted Aunt Moira to describe her minutely, her person and character and loveliness, and he wanted to hear about how she had loved his father. But Aunt Moira could never be minute, could not even describe in the ordinary way; but, when moved, would make some gesture of speech, as though to unfold a tapestry that she had long kept hidden, and then she would hold a torch to that tapestry, a flaming torch that cast a great light here and a deep shadow there, and left the listener gaping at so wanton a vagueness cloaked by so grand a manner.

Aunt Moira did not speak of his mother as his mother, at least she didn’t seem to, but as something much finer and grander and more intangible. She created for Ivor not the sad and quiet mother of his faint memory, but a figure of story; and she seemed, as it were defiantly, to speak of Ann Marlay as a woman of women, as of a tradition that is as ancient as song. In fact Aunt Moira, in that large and reckless way you couldn’t help loving in her, filled in a portrait of a lady as Gainsborough might have painted it, in the grand and fearless manner—anyway, his mother seemed very grand and fearless by the time Aunt Moira had done with her torchlight description; but Ivor could not, try as he would, see this fine and exquisite lady as his mother. He could not reconcile this tragic and remote figure of romance with a dimly acute memory: a memory of an emotion that had quite filled a very little boy’s heart and eyes with a tremendous thrill, when there had bent over him a lovely white face and calm, gentle eyes; and these eyes were so wide and deep and dark with a shining darkness that the little boy had just let them cover him with a faëry silence. It had been a marvellous plaything between them, that faëry silence; until, one day, it had taken bodily shape as death, and then down had swooped Aunt Moira....

2

But Ann Marlay’s womanhood, in the historic sense, was only the preface to Lady Moira’s tale—as such, indeed, has been the preface to many a tale, that womanhood so exquisitely contrived to serve love and to destroy ambition. The stuff of the tale, the very heart of all the alarums of the romance, lay—as Aunt Moira saw it, not unnaturally—with that fine gentleman, her younger brother and his father: through whom, of course, for all her gallant talk of his mother, her interest and affection for himself had descended, as she didn’t now trouble to conceal. And Ivor was made to see, vividly, how Aunt Moira must have treasured, inexorably and immensely, that other young man, his father—and how his father, head of his house at a rebellious age, must have evaded and combated and rebelled, very mightily and stormily of course, but always and only to succumb. The sterling intimacy of Aunt Moira’s life, this between herself and her younger brother had been—and how likely a one to bring one of them to trouble, as was well proved!

He was tall, of course, this father of his, and with hair as fair and thick as his own was dark and thick: and, Aunt Moira rather cruelly said, a rather obvious kind of face—though by “obvious” Ivor later found she meant the kind of face that leads crusades or smashes things; and, of course, with that nose piratical and predatory, that mountainous and ancient nose, brother to her own and father to Ivor’s. Aunt Moira, with a toss at her idol, suggested that that other young man might have been all the better for brown eyes instead of blue, for she had very unconventional views about eyes, saying: “There is something musty and expected about blue eyes in that kind of face,” and that Ivor’s looks lost nothing for his mother having given him her dark eyes. “But it is of no importance,” said Aunt Moira.

Ivor had happened, it appeared, in the tenth year of his parent’s mating—“a word,” said Aunt Moira, “to be used very rarely”—and so the months of storm-tossed wonderings that had preceded that love’s consummation showed Ivor his father as a young man of about eight or nine-and-twenty, unhappily married five years before. And Ivor particularly liked to imagine his father during those first months of strivings this way and that way: this way, a barren and comfortless marriage—“a girl like a stone,” said Aunt Moira, “but not one of those stones that seagulls worship”—and that way the dim figure of lovely Ann Marlay, distracting him to leave quarrying stone and live, just live and love. And as Ivor thought of those preliminary months of strivings, this way honour and that way life, he couldn’t help feeling that, from a certain point of view, a great deal of fuss had been made of an issue, how confused soever. They seemed to have made tragedies for themselves where we would make a trunkcall; they seemed, his aunt and his father, to have debated the thing largely and at large—only in the end to do what it was quite inevitable that they must do, to yield to the most secret and compelling of the laws of life, which is the law of lawlessness. And as Ivor thought of the “girl like a stone,” he saw, dimly and painfully, what Aunt Moira with her sweeping distaste for sub-human people could not see, how even a figure of stone can be absent-mindedly crucified by full-blooded people.

It had been, of course, natural enough for that tempestuous young man to have at once hurried off his elder sister and dearest friend to see and love the girl Ann Marlay: to that house on Putney Hill where she lived with her father, a drowsy old gentleman who collected stamps and books, but little knowledge of men and none of daughters.

“Miracles cannot be explained,” Aunt Moira said to Ivor, in explaining this particular one. “For indeed it was a miracle that happened to your father—to meet, by chance and on the open road, the one woman in the world who could touch him so that nothing else could ever touch him!”

“They met like birds,” said Aunt Moira, and was silent a while. And in her eyes was that expression, profound and absorbed, of one who is going to die.

The actual ingredients of the miracle had been, it seemed, an accident to his carriage, a maimed dog, and a trembling girl on the curb, silently rebuking him for his negligence; and then Ivor’s father, least casual of men and as hurt as the dog, protesting his way with it in his arms into her father’s house near by, to placate her and comfort the dog—and to change the whole manner and colour of his life.

And into Aunt Moira’s manner, into the shadows of her fading voice, as she spoke of those two dear wraiths, there seemed suddenly to have come the explanation of Ivor’s perplexity at all that debate with which his father had challenged his house, and, through it, his world: an air, as absurd and sublime as of a mystic conviction, as of that regicide of long ago, who, in his defence, is said to have deigned only thus far: “This thing was not done in a corner.”

But of course it was done in a corner, inevitably, for in this life there is no sort of adultery that is not done in a corner, not even that of milk and water.... In this case in a corner of Italy, for ten amazing years! For there couldn’t then, Aunt Moira sharply pointed out, be any question of divorce: an Earl then was an Earl, whereas now he might be a Brazilian and no one know the difference.

It was one of those loves, then, whose purity and greatness appals an epithet: one of those loves that have something cosmic in their union, one to the other, down the long toll of centuries; a love immense enough to have demanded from Ivor’s father a clear alternative, his whole life or his absolute restraint—and in so completely surrendering, with his life, his honour, his ambitions and his place in England, he had done, Aunt Moira magnificently dared to say, very well with his bargain. And in that lay the great similarity between Ivor’s aunt and Ivor’s father, this sister and brother, that nothing they did could ever be not worth while to them to have done. They were so terribly genuine and weathered, like two trees on a harassed moor, very sombre in sadness, very mighty in joy. They were a dangerous couple, for some part of the truth was in them.

3

That night Ivor went for a long walk about London, and thought and wondered about what Aunt Moira had told him, about those lovely dead parents of his. And it was as he strode down the hill of Church Street, to Kensington, a tall, thin, boyish figure, completely and carelessly inelegant, that he whispered to himself: “My God, what a marvellous fluke it must be for two people to understand each other, utterly!...”

Ivor Marlay was already growing up. He was already emerging from that painful consciousness of himself which is the burden of our boyhood, into a dim, muddled consciousness of other people, other things, the world. His thoughts were confusing him mightily. He was becoming aware—as dully yet definitely, say, as he might become aware of an approaching headache—of the mad mystery of other people. The years of his boyhood had passed in a world where everything happened by rote, where everything happened inevitably. But from now onwards anything might happen, but anything—to him! The world had gifts to give—and he was alone, irresponsible, tremendously ready to receive. Love might happen, even love....

But of course love would happen.

And the first glimmer of an ideal came to him: the first glimmer of the ideal that comes to all men. But in nearly all men this glimmer dies, and of it nothing is left. That is called life. And in a few men this glimmer waxes into a great light, and then it fades, and then it dies. That, too, is called life.

Ivor Pelham Marlay, in those ensuing days, found his growing awareness greatly helped by an acute consciousness of his father—with whom, he comically thought, Aunt Moira had surprised him in a Jack-in-the-box kind of way. And he found his father marvellously adequate, as a father; he was glad of him, glad of his racking uncertainties, glad of his tearing folly; and altogether glad he was that his father had been a lover.

And thus it was that from the grim lips of Aunt Moira those dead parents passed wanly but finally into the history of their son’s life; a secret memory to last for ever—now strengthened and shepherded, as in their lives, by dear Aunt Moira herself, who died but a few days after telling Ivor of them. As she had lain for so many days, so she died, towards the evening of the seventeenth day of October, 1908, in unutterable fear of God.

Miserere, Judex meus,
Mortis in discrimine....

And so, because he had not gone up to Oxford, Aunt Moira’s death left Ivor Pelham Marlay, at the age of nineteen, intolerably alone.

CHAPTER III

1

Of course there was always Aunt Percy, as there always had been: Aunt Moira’s old friend and man of affairs, and now Ivor’s trustee and guardian—Mr. Percy Wyndham Fletcher, senior partner of the firm of Fletcher, Combe, and Fletcher, Solicitors, of Bloomsbury Square, W.C. Mr. Fletcher was dead long before it became W.C.I; he would not have liked the change, but he would have said nothing; for Mr. Fletcher never grumbled at Progress, though he sometimes had an irritating way of chuckling at it.

During Ivor’s holidays from school Aunt Percy, as the old gentleman was commonly known, used often to come to dine with Aunt Moira. Ivor liked Aunt Percy enormously, and he had an idea that Aunt Percy had once upon a time liked Aunt Moira enormously. “It’s my belief,” he told young Transome at school, “that my Aunt Moira has given the bird to more men than any other woman of modern times.”

“Sounds like prehistoric times to me,” said Transome. (Typical of young Transome, that kind of remark!)

Why the courtly and so masculine old gentleman was called “Aunt” Percy, even by Lady Moira, no one seemed to know, or to inquire, for the matter of that; for there is, somehow, something so inevitable and right—as, say, in an old seal on a mellow parchment—in the very nature of any sweet absurdity which, from some remote past, has attached itself to the years of a man’s life and enwrapped itself about his personality, that it were an offence even to wonder from what ancient quip it sprang.

Now Mr. Fletcher was far from being gaga: he was not that tedious old man who takes complacent pleasure in youthful company: was, in fact, very grown-up for his years; but, if he hated anything, it was to be continually reminded of his approaching dotage and dissolution by his juniors continually addressing him as “sir.” Mr. Fletcher did not feel at all like “sir”; and the only advantage that Mr. Fletcher could see in knighthood or baronetcy was that one could then be “How d’you do, Sir Percy?” instead of having that silly “sir” tacked idiotically on to the end of every other sentence by youths who, anyway, hadn’t half the guts he had at his age, he shouldn’t wonder. So, lacking any such aldermanic distinctions, he made shift as “Aunt” Percy; a straight, tall, stoutish and courtly old gentleman of what is called “the old school,” with a great admiration for men of talent and honour, and a special admiration for Henley the poet and the man, dearest of his dead friends; and a great reputation, kept greatly alive by the servants at his clubs, for having been a fast-bowler and a fast liver in the good old days when fast-bowlers were really devilish fast and so on.

Mr. Fletcher was—quite apart from his special interest in a young man whose birth had followed on such romantic stirrings and rebellions, to all of which he had been privy and sympathetic at the time—very fond of Ivor: fond enough of him to lapse from his usual half-humorous manner with his juniors and to treat Ivor as a man. But the old gentleman was perturbed, every now and then, by some gleam of, well, maturity in Ivor, which seemed to him rather out of place in so young an Englishman and more befitting to a Latin intelligence; and so he came by a number of theories about Ivor. One of them was that Ivor had a deep faith in himself, for all that he was so quiet and well-behaved—too quiet and well-behaved, thought Mr. Fletcher, for a young man who had been expelled from Manton: another theory was that Ivor was conceited; and still another that the conceit would soon be knocked out of him. Not by Aunt Percy, though! Oh, no! There are, Mr. Fletcher thought, other women in the world besides Aunt Percy, I shouldn’t wonder. Mr. Fletcher had a great belief in women; and he suspected Ivor’s rather angry-looking stillness. “If I were you,” suggested Aunt Percy, “I wouldn’t think. It seems to make you angry.”

Mr. Fletcher, in the exercise of that unprejudiced good sense to which, as well as to his social sense, he owed his legal prominence, was not at all sure that much good would come of Ivor’s explorations as a writer of prose. Certain stories and essays of his that he had read had seemed to him, though rather remarkable for their polish, not the stuff of a writer, as such; but rather of a young man with whom writing was merely a reflection of his leisure, whereas his main concern hovered about the business of life—or of love, he shouldn’t wonder! Also, and particularly in the bravura essays on The Decline of Humour and The Function of Daggers, Mr. Fletcher had been disconcerted by a calm and detached arrogance which, he thought, was confoundedly irritating in a young man who couldn’t, possibly, really know anything. “Parlourtricks!” said Aunt Percy. “Standing on your head! All this theoretical stuff....”

“It’ll run away with you, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mr. Fletcher.

“I wish to God it would!” Ivor suddenly let himself go. “I wouldn’t mind if it was a Carter Patterson van that ran away with me, so long as something did.”

“There’s a man in a new book by Arnold Bennett,” Aunt Percy thoughtfully said, “who was run away with by a Pantechnicon. I don’t remember what happened.”

“It probably ran away with Arnold Bennett until the end of the book,” Ivor suggested nastily.

“In that case,” said Mr. Fletcher shortly, “you had better dine with me. And you might shorten that long face of yours too, young man, for I’ve no mind to waste my dinner in front of some one who looks like an epitaph—and me with one foot down with gout and the other in the grave!”

And so they would dine, about once a fortnight during those two years following Aunt Moira’s death. And sometimes went on to a play, but more frequently sat on and talked, in Mr. Fletcher’s celibate house in Green Street: about dead men, of whom Aunt Percy had known so many, and about books that never die, about which the ci-devant fast-bowler knew a good deal more than fast-bowlers are commonly supposed to know.

And throughout that time the old man, with a restraint quite remarkable in one of his years, directed and advised his young friend as little as he might; just “letting him be,” as Lady Moira had instructed him, to find his bent and feet and friends in his own way. Only once did he visit him in the chambers off Saint James’s Square which he had found for him, saying that they would “do” for him until he came of age; and was extremely surprised and almost displeased at the vast amount of books with which Ivor’s rooms were encumbered. He had known that Ivor spent a great deal of money on books—“But I didn’t realise,” said Aunt Percy, “that you went on and on buying them. You’ll have a lot of knowledge to get rid of, young man....”

Mr. Fletcher came away from his one visit to Ivor’s chambers wondering what influences would finally take the boy out of his solitude and an old man’s company. “Those books are not natural for a boy who took such trouble to get kicked out of school,” thought Mr. Fletcher, as he walked slowly along Jermyn Street, which was always a favourite street of his: an unusually tall and upright old gentleman, magnificently hatted, and easily imaginable as having been a very fast-bowler indeed in his time.

CHAPTER IV

1

During the first two years after Aunt Moira’s death, then, Ivor’s only real companion was Aunt Percy: an inadequate one, how sweet and understanding soever his nature, for that purpose of “talking things out” which is essential to every young man of an inquiring mind. His school friendships had been, with one exception, severely temporal; as such friendships so often unhappily are, despite the charming traditions that beglamour them with continuous and vivid life; and Ivor Marlay had come away from Manton with no more (and no less, anyway!) than a fair taste for classical reading and a pronounced one for rackets—which last he indulged several hours a week at Prince’s, often with the pro’s and sometimes with Transome. Dear old Transome!

At school young Transome had been on the “Army Side”—Transome’s people having a theory, Transome said, that the army was indicated. So Transome was sent to Sandhurst; and from Sandhurst he would at every opportunity hurl himself on the heels of a telegram to London. “The idea being,” Transome said, “to have a lot of fun.” So Ivor and Transome had a lot of fun immediately—dear old Transome of the short straight nose and freckled face, so very much liked by every one! Short and slim this Transome was, of a very elegant habit and an incurious mind, fair hair that insisted on curling and waving no matter how much he honeyed and flowered it—see his face, never so relentless as when he was furiously brushing it!—and blue eyes that had never a thought but for what was in front of them. “My dam-fool appearance,” grinned Transome, “and the rugged grandeur of my features indicated the Navy, but they’ve made such a fuss about its being Silent that I couldn’t risk it.”

Transome, having wired, would invade London and Ivor’s chambers. There they would dress, and dine somewhere. Ivor, being much wealthier, naturally paid; and was amazed at Transome. Ivor had always rather despised Transome’s intelligence, but now he despised his own. For Transome knew something. Transome, in fact, knew about Women. How he knew so much about Women, Ivor couldn’t make out. Here was he, Ivor, living alone in London—“disgustingly free,” Transome envied him—and knowing nothing at all about Women! He had had a few “passages,” but they hadn’t been frightfully amusing, and Ivor could only think that there must be something very wrong with him, considering the fuss every one made about all “that.” To young Transome he, of course, pretended to have had great and amazing enjoyments with Women. Ivor felt that Transome expected that of him, as his partner in the Manton rackets-pair for three years; and Ivor also felt that Transome really had enjoyed himself with Women, and was not pretending about it. Transome knew a bit, obviously; he had a great and grinning knowledge of Women, this gay Transom; and Ivor thought to learn a thing or two from him.

“I don’t care what you say,” said Transome, “but Women are all right.” Transome then spoke of Women, thus and thus. Transome was twenty.

It was not long, however, before the superiority of Transome in Ivor’s mind dwindled to next to nothing and then to nothing. He soon discovered that Transome might burst with knowledge about Women and still know nothing of life. Ivor did not know anything of life, either, but he was sure you couldn’t get at life through Women like that.

“If those are Women,” said Ivor to Transome, “then I can understand the Bible being angry about fornication. So would I be if I was the Bible.”

“You talk like God as it is,” muttered Transome.

“The nearest you’ll ever get to God, old boy,” Ivor retorted, “is the top of a bus.”

After night-clubs, on Transome’s occasional visits, the former rackets-pair had been to Women’s flats. Ivor didn’t want to go from the first, but Transome said it would be all right; Ivor said he had never thought it wouldn’t, and went. After a very few visits to these Women’s flats late at night, Ivor’s opinion was that these Women weren’t Women at all, but Crashing Bores. Transome rather crossly remarked that that was jolly superior of him, and what the devil did he want anyway? Ivor said sulkily that he didn’t know, but he did know that he did not want to go messing about in a dingy flat near Bow Street with a woman who was old enough to be his mother or his charwoman.

“My idea of a woman,” said Ivor, “is some one you can talk to Afterwards.”

But Ivor said nothing of a glimmer of an ideal; it would not have been unorthodox of him to, for men and boys quite often speak of their ideals—no matter how dim or foolish-commonplace—to each other, sometimes thinking to excuse this weakness by loading it with slang, or thinking to hide it entirely under that conversational garbage which makes men kin; if he had, Transome might have thought him dotty, or he might have hailed him as a co-idealist, but he would certainly not have thought him damned superior. Ivor was miserable: realising that he and Transome, his only friend, were no earthly use to each other. What a beastly shame.... They couldn’t really take any pleasure in each other’s company, Ivor saw, if they were fundamentally out of agreement—and that’s exactly what they were, fundamentally out of agreement. And Ivor, turning into Saint James’s Square that night, with Transome walking silently beside him, brooded over the fact that his only friend was not a friend at all, but only an acquaintance: and that the next time Transome came to London he would bring another buck with him and they would seek fun in their own way, without any one nearby to make superior remarks about it.

Ivor was right, for his path and Transome’s were to lead in different directions; and it was years later before they again struck the same path, and on that path Ivor was maimed and Transome was killed....

2

During the first two years after Aunt Moira’s death, particularly, of course, in the latter part of them, there were in Ivor’s mind no words strong enough to describe what he thought of London; it was a hell, a wilderness, a prison, a very cruel place: and he was obviously an ass to live in it. He could, after all, travel to Paris, anywhither—but he stayed on, miserably unwilling to run away from London; wherein, if anywhere, he felt but could not have dreamed of saying, lay his destiny. He had not bargained for this tremendous loneliness, he hadn’t bargained for anything but that he would “write.” He would collect experiences, and then he would write. Somehow. How was he to have known that all his energy was going to be numbed into a kind of listless chaos by his utter ignorance of life, of London, of writing—of how to begin on those great ventures! How was he to have known that loneliness, in a nature like his, discounts all benefits of money and freedom, that it inoculates every endeavour with a sense of futility? No taskmaster is crueller than self-pity. Ivor called self-pity “London,” and was furious with London. And he wandered about London.... And as he wanders about London, from crooked streets in Canning Town to valleys in the Green Park, as he stares from an upstairs window of Books’s Club at the bustle up and down Saint James’s Street and the eternal pageant of the Town—

“The dear old Street of clubs and cribs,
As north and south it stretches,
Still seems to smack of Rolliad squibs,
And Gillray’s fiercer sketches;
The quaint old dress, the grand old style,
The mots, the racy stories;
The wine, the dice, the wit, the bile—
The wit of Whigs and Tories.”

—let us flaunt a homily before that defiant nose which is so defiantly probing the unfairness of his loneliness. “Solitude,” writes Gibbon in the grand manner, “is the school of genius.” But there is, for a youth sensitive to the world about him, no such thing as solitude: its name is brooding, and—if we are to answer the grand manner with becoming grandeur—brooding is as certainly the graveyard of endeavour as solitude is the school of genius.

And yet, when trying to write about that distressful time only a few years later, Ivor Marlay was surprised to discover in it a certain splendour. Memories he seemed to find therein, memories unanchored to any reality of that wretched vagabondage that he had felt at the time—yet were they almost tangible, these memories of tremendous arrogances and thinkings. And it somehow seemed to him that in that past, knowing nothing and nobody, he had seen life as he could never again see it this side of death, in flashes of frightful clearness; that he had seen life stark and naked, stripped of everything but its direction from hell to heaven, like a bare tree against a wintry sky. And then, as he thought upon the matters of that first youth, it occurred to him that there must be somewhere a watchful god of sociability—surely, yes! Say, a not very clean but kindly deity, who now and then indulges himself in pity. And this god, a day or two after his twenty-first birthday, when he had almost decided to leave London and venture Paris, had suddenly and for no clear reason plunged him into a multitude of people—by way of a chance acquaintance in a bar in the Haymarket!

There had, of course, been other chance acquaintances during that vagabondage, even from Limehouse to Hammersmith, but they had died the deaths of their own torpidity; for Ivor did not as yet know how to be immediately genial, he was—like so many others—barely sufficient for the ordinary occasion, and that’s all.

That bar in the Haymarket! Something or other in Fleet Street the man was, and frothing with geniality. He was a small and seedy man, the patina of several days was upon his chin and linen, and his name was Otto Something, Ivor never exactly found out what. He approached Ivor in no uncertain manner, as they stood side by side at the bar, describing himself as “well oiled but still rec-ip-ro-ca-tive, ol’ boy.” He also spoke favourably of Ivor’s appearance, saying that Ivor was the best-dressed man in London since he had been the last one. And he gave it as his opinion that Ivor was probably a gentleman.

Very soon they were joined by another, whose name appeared to be Fitz Something. Otto and Fitz had been boys together, Ivor gathered—though Fitz was probably ten or more years the younger. Fitz frothed with geniality in a less aggressive way, and Ivor preferred him to Otto; in fact, he grew to like Fitz very much in the course of the evening. Otto was a Jew, and Fitz had on a gray flannel shirt with collar to match and a deplorable tie. Many drinks were exchanged—between the barmaid and Ivor’s pocket. If Otto Something and Fitz Something were phenomena in Ivor’s life, Ivor was even more of a phenomenon in their lives.

“Looks like a proconsul,” said Otto to Fitz, “and drinks like a fish.”

“And pays, ol’ boy!” murmured Fitz to Otto.

They somehow lost Otto on emerging from the bar. “He gets like that,” Fitz explained. He also explained that Otto was not a great friend of his, but that he, Fitz, was inclined to take a liberal view of him. Fitz was a very gentle man with a very gentle manner: “ruined,” he told Ivor, “through the unfettered exercise of my social qualities, which are considerable.” Whereupon he borrowed a pound from Ivor, and then threw Ivor into the midst of a great multitude of people.

This multitude of people was heaped together, literally, in a very small, low, candle-lit flat hidden away in the purlieus that lies immediately behind the Jermyn Street entrance to the Piccadilly Tube. The multitude, composed of faces in chairs, on the floor and everywhere else, received his conductor and deafened Ivor with cries of “Blind again, Fitz!” Fitz swayed a little and grinned a little—a gentle and sleepy grin Fitz had—and waved a hand at the tall and dark young stranger behind him, whose bewildered head the ceiling was incommoding. “Yes,” said Fitz blandly, “I am indeed blind. I might even go so far as to say I was tipsy, but nevertheless all my people are Service people. And here is one of them, just to show you.” And at that moment certain faces grew hands, and Fitz and Ivor were dragged down into the multitude. Ivor was delighted with his evening. This, he thought, is jolly fine. I like these people. And he expanded.

Ivor could not make out what they were at all; and a queerer collection of people he never met later, not even in his most extravagant wanderings about the worlds of London. One man, who looked like an insurance agent, was spoken of as an etcher; and another, who looked like an etcher, made him an honorary member of a night-club of which he was the secretary. The women were not described at all, and their appearance didn’t describe them. But they weren’t Women. They were rather witty, Ivor thought. Pretty faces here and there, too. Later, he was to find that they were of that formidable army who live their days on, say, the heights of Notting Hill, the better to descend by night into the gay abyss of Bohemian revelry.

Very soon Ivor found himself on a corner of the overcrowded divan: juggling with a teacupful of whisky and water, and making love to a fluffy and surprised-looking little woman, who said her name was Myra Bruce, and then said it wasn’t but would be when she could get a job on the stage. Could Ivor help her to get a job on the stage? He looked as though he might be able to, she said. So Ivor lived up to that for a while.

She was faded and rather dejected, this fluffy little Bruce, as though, perhaps, she had tried and tried and tried again at life too long. She was faded, this little Bruce, but she awoke wonderfully, and glittered—even as her little upturned nose, which was brilliantly affected by the heated atmosphere and her inability to find her powder-puff. But at first she glittered shyly, for this different and dark young man had a way of making her aware of herself—and the little Bruce had no great opinion of her looks. He was aggressive, she thought; and not in his speech, in the usual way, but with his understanding, which seemed to be of a peculiarly bodily kind. “Cynical,” she called him. “Trying to be clever,” she said. He was making her feverish, and she glittered shyly.... But, on a moment, she glittered fully, that little Bruce! for the thing suddenly dropped to a more accustomed plane, she and the atmosphere were stronger than him: when, in a very tired moment on that crowded divan, he let his head fall against her shoulder—and she realised that he was “only a boy!” And suddenly, hungrily, she smothered the tired boy’s face with kisses ... so that the multitude was gleeful at the little Bruce’s passion for the dark young stranger. And that, but an incident among the adventures of vagabondage, lasted three days and nights: almost violently.

3

Thus, his first introduction to London; for, following queerly on that chance meeting in a bar in the Haymarket, Ivor met people upon people; and so swiftly, so variously, so increasingly, that barely six months later he realised, with something like a shock, that among the men and women he was at the moment seeing there was not one whom he had met through Fitz’s hazy introduction! There had happened, ever so quickly, the process of selection. And Fitz, he of the gentle manners, he of the polite thirst—where now was Fitz? And Otto the Jew, frothing with geniality—where now was Otto? Were they, at this moment, still in the Haymarket bar, would they to-night be in the little flat in the purlieus behind Jermyn Street? If he went thither to-night, would he find them? But Ivor did not go, he was ashamed; he was aware that he was, shamefully, not of them or like them, he had not their honest geniality; he had used them—unconsciously, yes, but he had used them. Such, then, was Ivor.

London is an amazing city—not so much because of the numbers of its population, which it simply cannot help, but because of its hospitality, which it can. Take a man without money—say, £800 a year—without particular wit, without a Lancashire accent, of no stock to speak of and of less education; let him have a slightly constrained manner, as of one who simply can’t be ingratiating, and a few other properties of a gentleman—and, if he be not by nature too vulgarly disposed, if he steel himself against the lure of the footlight favourite and the guile of the wanton bourgeoise, he will find himself, without particular effort, among People. He will, anyway, meet People; and whether or not he gets to know them intimately depends on his charm or his cheek. For society in London is sociable: its dignity is that of ease; and its polish is so deeply ingrained that even the offences of its more boorish juniors can no more than slightly ruffle its surface—to the annual confusion of our more serious American hostesses, who can never realise that the most difficult thing to lose in London is a reputation. Whereas society in Paris is not sociable, as every one knows. There is in Paris a superstition called the ancien régime, and another superstition called the haute noblesse; and these superstitions (having been almost recklessly encouraged by the late Henry James, who glossed them with his charm) are supposed to lead exceedingly patrician lives on nothing a year in very musty hôtels in the Faubourg St. Germain. The superstitions have riders to the effect that, the régime being so extremely ancien and the noblesse so very haute, their wearers have now no money left and do not entertain. Whereas the facts, as known to all right-thinking men, are that the ancien régime and the haute noblesse, having long since acquired Italian or American dowries, now live in very rich and modern hôtels about the Avenue du Bois and the Parc Monceau; that what is the matter with their hospitality is not that they don’t entertain, but—well, there it is—that they don’t entertain well enough; and that their hospitality would be simply charming if it were a little more ancien and a little less of a régime. For how, students of hospitality may well ask, how the devil can a man be gay at a party on a thimbleful of nasty white wine or even nastier sweet champagne, which is so cheap that one has never dared to order it at a restaurant? And the difference between the hospitality of London and that of Paris (excluding, of course, that part of it known as Gay) is made significant by the fact that the Frenchmen who live longest are those accredited to the Court of Saint James’s.

4

At one-and-twenty, then, Ivor Marlay could touch and taste the fringe of this London, and it burnt him just a little, pleasantly, like a liqueur brandy. (Later, it hit him on the head; but that was later.) And he rolled and wallowed in it, he let life “blood” him. He not only killed time, but he disinterred it and killed it again and again. In the two years following the incident of the little Bruce he forgot to write. He lived vividly but slackly; and his days and nights were confused in an all too earthy mess. Women happened, with surprisingly little subtlety: they just seemed to happen, in a swift moment, into his physical life, and then they would fade away, sometimes gradually and sweetly, sometimes quickly and noisily. One of them said that he had Magnetism, and he was frightfully pleased about that, it seemed so funny. Magnetism indeed! And one or two said they liked him only physically, but that mentally he was too hard, not tender enough. They didn’t believe him, they said. When he annoyed them, as he often did, they would say: “You’re very young, my poor child!” That glimmer of an ideal (which is given to all young men, but is not treasured by them) unconsciously helped Ivor to despise quite a number of things: it helped him to despise quite a number of women, and it is not a bad thing for a young man to despise a certain number of women, if he knows what he is despising in them. But Ivor didn’t know: he only thought he knew....

It was at about this time that he was introduced to the Mont Agel....

Gone, then, were his vigils in the Green Park, gone the furious pacings about galleries and museums, gone the vagabondage about the India Docks, gone the desiring of glorious women who passed him so lightly in the sunshine of the streets, gone the whole mad mystery of the passers-by! He was in it all, now. Life seemed so little worth while as to be quite enjoyable—for these were the days of “easy cynicism,” you understand. “Life,” says the king of all paradoxes (as appointed by Mr. Chesterton), “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” Ivor was not twenty-three: this, it was indicated, was life; and so he lived it. He was a success, in a small way; and the precious gentleman who said that nothing fails like success knew more than people think.

And Aunt Percy, now confined in Green Street with gout and the sense of approaching death, was disappointed: holding that a young man with Ivor’s capacity for theorising might just as well have gone through this particular phase in theory instead of in practice. But Aunt Percy said nothing—or rather, he said everything, in shortly telling Ivor one day that drink was not the only dissipation that one should not carry about in one’s appearance. Now when Aunt Percy said that kind of thing, which was very rarely, he had a way of looking at a young man which made that young man feel a little mean, a little ashamed—as though, maybe, that young man had not played up to the expectations of his side, and in particular, up to the expectations of his side’s fast-bowler.

Mr. Fletcher would have been happier about Ivor if he had known of that glimmer of an ideal, much happier; in fact, it was that lack that lay at the core of the old man’s growing disappointment, for this young man seemed to have no ideals, commonplace or fantastic, and his young eyes were somehow hard when he smiled, and there was somehow a sharpness about his laughter. So, being kept at arm’s length from the deep places of Ivor’s heart, Mr. Fletcher, who was now a very lonely old man, could only tell himself that Ivor must soon get over this present rot, just as himself and his friends had done. It was a pity, however, Mr. Fletcher thought, that Lady Moira had not insisted on her first idea of Ivor being called to the Bar, instead of letting him have his own way about this writing business, which was no more than philandering and wouldn’t come to anything much, he shouldn’t wonder. He had too much money, that’s what it was. And for the first time in his life, at the so lonely end of it, Mr. Fletcher suspected his old friend of an unwisdom, thinking that he, after all a man, should have advised her more definitely about the boy’s upbringing: instead of just tamely letting her make him promise to “let Ivor be, to find his feet and bent and friends in his own way.” His way was just like every other young fool’s way, he shouldn’t wonder. And Aunt Percy died with the nearest approach to a deep rebuke that Ivor had ever seen in those gallant old-blue eyes, those eyes that could make a young man feel a little mean, a little ashamed.

CHAPTER V

1

The world which Ivor then touched and tasted so carelessly was a vastly different world from that with which he was surrounded, in his fuller maturity, on the 1st May, 1921, at the Mont Agel. More than war had intervened between that past and this present: some people said that an undue stress of evolution had intervened; and other people said that the very opposite of evolution had frightfully intervened. But no one really knew anything about it, not even Mr. Britling. There was, it was plain, a self-consciousness abroad after the war that had not been before; and, too, a certain sophistication about things that once used to move us exceedingly. There was nothing remarkable in the fact that, with the war and after it, everything was become bigger, even tennis-tournaments, strikes, prizefights, revolutions, and Cabinets—but it was rather remarkable that men seemed to have become much smaller. Maybe, it was suggested, men seemed to have become smaller—in significance, say—because they were now conscious of their relation to the huge and cruel mechanism of the universe. Death had lost something of its terror, and life had gained it. Life had lost something of its value, but death had not gained it—despite all the pomps of honour and medalry with which the survivors had belauded it. And if there had still been a Pythian priestess, and if there had still been any one who believed in priests to ask of her an oracle, she might well have answered even as she answered anent the fortunes of a battle in the days of Greece’s decline: “Conquered shall weep, and conqueror perish there.” But, failing a Pythian oracle, there was Mr. Shaw, who in 1919 very sharply pointed out that “the earth is bursting with the dead bodies of the victors.” ... A very precocious century, this, for it was old and tired and blasé by its twenty-first birthday; a senile and fumbling century it was on its twenty-first birthday, that which had been so gay, so careless, so essentially new, but ten or eleven years before! New....

In the world, when Ivor first entered it and it blooded him, there was abroad a new generation, newer than any generation had ever been before; and in all things, even beauty, singularly distinguished. Whereupon the old, instead of growing older in decent contrast, grew young again in a fury of contemplation. And meanwhile earthquakes shook the social fabric, but who cared? Hadn’t earthquakes always shaken the social fabric, and wasn’t the thing called “the social fabric” just so that earthquakes could shake it? Doctors and other professional men took to asking, with twinkles in their eyes: “What would happen if we went on strike?” They asked that every day, with twinkles in their eyes, but no one among them ever dreamed of answering. The answer was a lemon.

And in the meanwhile, Society shivered a little feverishly, filled now with the scions of those who had come over with the Jewish and American Conquests. Escutcheons were becoming valueless, how sinister soever the blots and clots upon them. And so, among the many Movements of the day—Movements to Clothe Poor Children beautifully, Movements to bring Sanity into Art, Movements to call the U.S.A. the Y.M.C.A.—there was brought to birth a Movement of Laughter among industrial classes at fine ladies and fine gentlemen, a Movement of Ridicule among artisans at aristocrats who were not now aristocratic enough whatever they may once have been.[A]

Every one was very serious, at that distant time, but very careless about other people’s seriousness. That is the difference between peace and war.

And, throughout those days, Ivor Pelham Marlay loitered prodigiously. He was careless with his money and concerned about his person, which had now acquired those elegant lines peculiar to affected young men who deliberately owe for their clothes. He was absent-minded at the right moments. He was a very pretty lover, especially over dinner: after dinner he would generally suggest dancing. He was audacious at conventional moments and conventional at adventurous moments. He had cheek, money, and moments of sincerity. He was apt at a misquotation, which is, of course, the only amusing part of a quotation. And he had a sudden smile which made one rather like him just when one had decided he was an unbearable young cub: he was, in fact, quite unbearable, even to himself; and exactly ripe, at the age of three-and-twenty, to be brought sharply to his senses. Magdalen Gray was very good at bringing men to their senses; but she used her own to do it with.

Magdalen Gray occurred suddenly: like a symbol with a lovely face, suddenly shaped out to his startled eyes from the shoddy stuff of his life. And the glimmer waxed into a great light....

BOOK THE SECOND
THE FRIENDS

CHAPTER I

1

Mrs. Gray occurred suddenly, as has been said, but in accustomed surroundings: at one of those parties, in fact, that are nightly scattered about a corner of London, and are, through open first-floor windows, apt to hit the solitary passer-by of the small hours across the eyes with the vivid glare and gesticulation of their gaiety. These parties are much despised (a) by the people who go to them; (b) by the people who don’t get the chance; and (c) by essayists who begin their essays with: “I sometimes ask myself what hidden pleasures there are to be found in Crowds....”

This particular party, in June, 1912, in the Halliday house in Deanery Street, was quite small; or rather it looked small, for although there were present about a hundred people they were, as usual at a Halliday party, so scattered about the various rooms upstairs and downstairs that there were never more than ten or twelve couples to encourage the band in the ballroom; so that, if you were a bad dancer, you had no chance to use the excuse so often effective on a crowded floor, that the art of dancing is not to dance but to avoid other dancers.

This was an intimate party: no decorations or dowagers. The frequent Halliday parties of the intimate sort were justly renowned, for Euphemia, Mrs. Halliday, was expert in achieving that pleasant impromptu effect which is the result of a lavish and organised hospitality. (The name must not, by the way, be confused with that of the famous brewers. The Hallidays, Euphemia said, were, and always had been, bankers and gentlemen, not brewers and aristocrats.) No one “received” you at these parties, though they were by no means of that slack order to which “every one” could go; you just happened on your host, John, or your hostess, Euphemia—so dark and florid she always was!—as time went on; and you talked with the one and danced with the other according to the press of your business elsewhere. You had gone there that night in response to a casual telephone message from Euphemia’s butler, the formidable Hebblethwaite, and you left as casually; and you always left very late, and you always left wondering why you had stayed so long. But there was one young man, anyway, who on leaving Deanery Street that night did not wonder why he had stayed so long, and that young man’s name was Ivor Marlay. He was wondering about something else.

On his entrance, just after midnight, he had happened on Gerald Trevor descending the stairs alone, to have a peaceful “glass of wine” in the as yet uncrowded supper-room. From the stairs Trevor’s face lit up with his quick little smile of pleasure. There was a great deal of courtliness in the man, but he summarised it all in that jerky little smile: keeping his speech as free from it as every one else’s, or nearly.

“Join me,” he said, taking Ivor’s arm, “and we will talk a little.”

Gerald Trevor was inevitable at all such parties, but not nearly so boring as you might think from that inevitability. No one ever thought Gerald Trevor boring, not even the women who were tired of him. He was that rare person who can join two others without interrupting their conversation. He was in between the generations, neither the old nor the new, neither too courtly nor too careless; and he looked, with his small slender figure, his thick fair hair and fair moustache cropped very close to his lip, his keen and scholarly blue eyes, and the nose which rather surprisingly stuck out from his face like the peak of a cap and gave his features a surprising look of keen aggression—he looked delightfully like a man who has loved a few women and killed a few men. And he probably had, for he had been through the Boer war and had been divorced by his wife, though that was by arrangement, as she wanted to marry some one else; whereupon Gerald Trevor had thought to himself: “Thou shalt not commit alimony,” and didn’t.

“You and I,” said Trevor, juggling with a macaroon, a cigarette, and a glass, as they stood at the long table of Hebblethwaite’s kingdom—“You and I are always meeting at these places, Ivor. And, it seems to me, we’re meeting in spirit, as well as in fact. Now that’s very strange, don’t you think, considering——”

Ivor grinned. “You are about to refer,” he said softly, “to the amazing fact that you are old enough to be my father—yes, you are, Gerald. I never see you but you say that at least once and would like to say it twice, and I can’t help thinking that it’s a kind of parlour-game peculiar to the house of Trevor. I feel I ought to slap you on the shoulder twice and say “Bo,” and then you’ll tell me where you’ve hidden something....”

“Ass,” said Trevor.

“Age,” meditated Ivor gravely, “can’t matter in a man. I haven’t as yet the faintest idea what does matter in a man, but I’m sure age doesn’t. Consider how many children of ten are their father’s ancestors! Read Mrs. Besant. Read the late Mrs. Blavatsky. Read the late Mrs. Eddy. Read what you like....”

“When,” said Trevor gently, “you have finished gloating over your superficial knowledge of the indoor activities of elderly widows, two of whom are now quite old enough to know better, you may let me suggest that the spirit in which you and I meet at these parties is one of Looking for Something. But the difference is that I know what I’m looking for and you don’t.”

“I always was a backward boy,” lamented Ivor.

“Not at all!” said Trevor quickly, and took another macaroon; whenever Gerald Trevor took another macaroon you were warned—run away, or stay and listen. “It’s I who am the fool! Don’t you see, Ivor? You’ve got a right to begin, but I’m a fool to repeat things. You are searching for an enchantment, but I’m waiting for a repetition. Life is empty at the moment, and I want to fill it again—and the same thing will fill it again in almost the same way. It always does.”

“I know now,” said Trevor, “so much about women that I know no woman has ever loved me, nor can ever love me, as I want to be loved. I say that in no spirit of false modesty, Ivor, but judicially—and the frightfully funny part of it is that it’s not just a remark over a glass of wine, it’s true. I’m the legendary man who was born to be the perfect co-respondent, but has failed to live up to the promise of his birth....”

People were crowding round about, they flowed to and ebbed from Hebblethwaite’s kingdom; they sat at the various tables scattered about the supper-room, and the two men were casually interrupted, but nothing could distract Gerald Trevor from his rare mood of self-revelation. This young man, Ivor Marlay, with his attentive eyes under those sceptical-looking eyebrows, called up a mood of intimacy in the man of middle years which would have outraged him if applied by some one else to himself. He admitted, now, the outrageousness of his mood to Ivor, comically pleading Ivor as his excuse. (Hebblethwaite had placed a bottle before them, from which they automatically filled their glasses.)

“You’re so outrageous yourself, you see,” Trevor accused him, with that jerky little smile. “You goad me on! Not with the things you say, of course, but with the things you understand—or pretend to, anyway.”

“All my life,” Trevor said, “I’ve loathed men. And effeminate men worst of all, for that’s adding insult to injury. Yes, I’ve loathed men—they are, mentally, either too hairy or not hairy enough, and physically they are almost as deplorable as women. Taking, however, a liberal view of the flaws which are present in even the loveliest of the daughters of Eve, I have been partial to women, I have loved women. Sacredly, you’d never believe how sacredly—for one’s manner of speech rather hides the sacred things in one. Only to realise the other day that the only two women I’ve ever really loved were both harlots. Mentally, I mean, not financially....” And Gerald Trevor fell silent.

“That,” said Ivor sincerely, “must have been a great disappointment to you.” He had to say something.

Trevor emptied his glass. “That’s why I’m rather indecently telling you about it, Ivor,” he apologised, self-consciously. “They were both, don’t you see, so fiendishly complicated in their emotions and so direct in their direction—which, stripped of all the baubles of polite speech, was from one man’s bed to another. They talked of love, but they only desired. Damn it, that sounds dramatic....”

“But I like it like that!” cried Ivor.

“It all comes from the progress of science,” said Trevor. “All this easy infidelity and messing about. One is not protesting against a woman liking some one else, one is protesting against the chances of her liking some one else. The chances are so against one....”

“There are too many facilities for getting about,” he said. “A man nowadays has got very little chance of keeping a woman to himself as compared to even eighty years ago. She gets more chances of seeing other men, and comparing and developing and evolving—away from you. In the old days, if you lived at Wimbledon—well, why not?—your wife never met a soul without your knowing about it. Infidelity was a lengthy and ponderous business—it simply isn’t possible to snatch a quiet half-hour with a young man while your coach and footmen are waiting outside. But now, motors, undergrounds, telegrams, telephones! All modern life is directed towards letting your wife or mistress see as many men as she likes and when she likes. And out of those men how easy to meet one she likes as much as, and then more than, you. The way women go about finding Magnetism in impossible men is appalling! So where the devil are you? There’s no security, Ivor, simply none! A lover is a husband and then a cuckold before he knows what and where he is. And then people say the telephone service is too slow!”

“The pleasant thing about you, Gerald,” Ivor suddenly broke in, “is that you never speak of women as though you had been loved by them, but always as though you had done all the loving. It’s a very pleasant fiction, that....”

“The matter is, of course,” said Trevor reasonably, “that one wants rather too much. One wants a simple and direct love spiced with the divine and complex subtleties of a Cleopatra—and the two can’t go together at all. One wants the love and constancy of a dairymaid and the lust and pride and wit of a great lady....”

It was at that very moment, as Ivor Marlay will always remember, that he first heard the voice of Magdalen Gray, and was arrested by it. Trevor and he were still standing at the long table with their backs to the room and bunches of people, and Trevor was just thoughtfully exploring the bottle for what it might still contain—when the voice, but a phantom of a passing voice borne above the clatter of the room by some peculiarly light quality in it, suddenly caressed Ivor’s ear: like, he thought, a very sweet unscented breeze from the shadows of a green place to a sweating road where two men are breaking stones, for Trevor’s worldly wisdom is made of stones.... He looked round and peered among the accustomed faces round about, but he couldn’t hit on the face of the voice, nor the “Rodney” to whom it had been addressed.

“A pleasant voice, that,” he only said to Trevor—so little thinking that Trevor had also heard it, that he was very surprised when he returned:—

“Yes, isn’t it! A voice in this wilderness. Did you see her?” And Trevor looked round the room, keen eyes searching swiftly. Gerald Trevor was very popular—among men as among women, for all his “hatred”—and many eyes caught his and beckoned gaily, a voice here and there called “Gerald!” and a few men wondered what on earth Trevor found to say at such length to that rather mysterious young man, Marlay. They quite liked Marlay, he seemed and looked quite all right, but they weren’t, absurdly enough, quite sure whether he liked them! And that vague doubt is a most improper one for a young man to instil, no matter how vaguely, in other men. Thus, throughout his life Ivor was to find that it was to be made always much easier for him to be unpopular rather than popular. His was a nature to like a few people and be entirely indifferent to every one else; and very few people were to matter in his life, but they were to matter very much. As now, when Gerald Trevor, at five-and-forty, who was every one’s easy acquaintance and no one’s particular friend, was surprisingly Ivor’s good friend, and was steadfastly to remain so. For it is the consolation and distinction of a man whose instinct is to like very few people to be instinctively liked by those very few.

“She must have just passed through and gone upstairs,” Trevor said at last. “Anyway, she belongs to a generation that doesn’t loiter in bars, not even when they’re called buffets....”

“She loiters secretly,” he said mischievously, “and in secret places—which, after all, is what loitering is for.”