The Project Gutenberg eBook of Piracy, by Michael Arlen.

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.

[Image of colophon not available.]

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

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I

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{4} 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{5} 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{6} 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{7} 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{8} 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.{9}

CHAPTER II

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.{10}

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{11} 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.

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.{12}

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{13} 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.”

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.{14}

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

“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.

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{15} 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.{17}{16}

BOOK THE FIRST

AN IDEAL, SOME DETAILS, AND A LAPSE

CHAPTER I

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.{20}

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!{21} 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.

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

“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.

“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——”

“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{22}——”

“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....

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,{23} 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. “H{24}e’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!”

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

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,{25} 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.

“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.

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

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{26} 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....”

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

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?”

“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.”

“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.{27}

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

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.

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.)

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{28} 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:

“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.{29} “For you must do something, you know. In this world, nowadays. I will not have you live all your life as my nephew....”

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.”

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

“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?{30}”

“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.

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....

“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....”

“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.{32}

CHAPTER II

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{33} 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{34} 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....{35}

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{36} silence; until, one day, it had taken bodily shape as death, and then down had swooped Aunt Moira....

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{37} 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.{38}

“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,{39} 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.

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....

And the first glimmer of an ideal came to him: the{40} 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.

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.{41}

CHAPTER III

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{42} 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!{43} 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....”

“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{44} 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.{45}

CHAPTER IV

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{46} 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.{47}”

“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{48} 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....

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{49}—

—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{50}—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.

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,{51} 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{52} 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.{53}

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{54} 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.{55}

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....

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{56} 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{57} 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.{58}

CHAPTER V

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{59} “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....{61}

BOOK THE SECOND

THE FRIENDS

CHAPTER I

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{64} 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.

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{65} 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....”

“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.”

“Not at all!” said Trevor quickly, and took another macaroon; whenever Gerald Trevor took another macaroon you were warned—run away, or stay and{66} 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{67} 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....”

“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{68} 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{69} 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.”

“Oh!” cried the very young man; and Trevor was really surprised into his jerky little smile by the sudden pleasure of the exclamation.

“Gerald, you have said a marvellous thing—oh, but you have! I never thought to hear that said about any woman, I’d forgotten that such a phrase was ever made by fine men for fine women—a woman of quality! And{70} here you’ve been ranting a lot of worldly-wisdom stuff for the last half-hour, keeping this pearl of price inside you until the magic of a voice dragged it out! Pah!...”

“A woman of quality!” And Ivor repeated the words softly, tasting in them wine finer than champagne and older than Falernian, while Trevor enjoyed the comedy of his chance phrase. Next time, he comically thought, it will not happen so accidentally.

Ivor was of an age which can confuse the precious and the beautiful into one dim, magnificent whole; and that chance, outmoded phrase had somehow lit a great light, an absurdly great light, within him, it seemed to him so coloured with forgotten splendours and luxuries of race and manners. Everything desirable, everything exquisite, everything damnable, everything that could bewitch his mind and heart, seemed to lie in and about that phrase. It fired him, it so completely contained the rarest secrets of fineness—for him, anyway! He wouldn’t, he thought grandly, ever cheapen that phrase. They were words to fit an ideal. (He was only twenty-three, after all; and he had drunk his share of a bottle of champagne.)

“Oh, no!” cried Trevor. “I’m just too old to make theories out of facts—especially feline facts. Besides, you will soon be meeting her for yourself——”

“But you are only very few London years old yet, Ivor! and she is only just back from two years near Naples.”

“That,” said Ivor, “must be one of those facts you were shy of theorising about.”

“You would learn more,” Trevor gently warned him, “if you understood less, young man.”

“She has a husband,” he condescended to add, “who explores Asia. She explores everything else. He is at present in London, and at this very party, I think, but{71} she does not cease to explore. And so he will go away again, because he is that kind of man.”

“And I,” he said, emptying his glass, “will now go upstairs to ask her to dance with me.”

“Telling her, please,” Ivor seriously detained him, and drew a deep breath, “that her unknown voice was much appreciated and its absence deeply regretted, even during a conversation with yourself.”

“Quite,” said Trevor sombrely. “But, on the other hand, the action of eggs on the liver has given rise to endless discussion.”

It was as Gerald Trevor reached the head of the stairs leading to the ballroom that he saw Magdalen Gray coming down the flight above, with Rodney West. Her dress, he thought, is of the colour of crushed orchids: it would be ... something just a bit rank....

“Magdalen!” he greeted her from below; “the psychological moment has now come for you and me to take the floor together.”

“And Gerald!” the light voice said gaily; “they’re just beginning a lovely waltz with a beard on it, to suit and soothe the dignity of your years....”

And Rodney West, his sharp and legal face more than ever sharp and legal at this smooth buccaneering and smooth surrendering, continued his now solitary way down the crowded stairs. Interruptions did not intrude upon him, not even in the most crowded places. He was a man set apart, the little smile that was crucified on his thin, handsome face set him apart, and rather grimly. Rodney West was one of those “darkish men with intelligent gestures” who are attractive to connoisseurs among women. It was Mrs. Gray who had so described him—and herself.{72}

Dancing, Ivor thought, must be altogether a winter-sport, for it’s certainly too hot for it now. And eventually, after a glance into the ballroom, where he could not see Trevor and partner, he came upon the bunch of young people who centred mainly round Lois Lamprey and Virginia Tracy: both young and cool and remote, and ever so faintly contemptuous of those whom their carelessness about things might shock. They were so untouchable by people to whom they were indifferent—people are “awful,” they said—that their amorous reputations amazed one. (It amazed them, too. It was so untrue, really.) Lady Lois Lamprey was in particularly good looks to-night, in a Byzantine sort of dress of beaten gold that vividly brought out the sheen of her dark silken hair, coils and coils of dark silken hair, like a lustrous black decoration for the white oval of her face and the curiously blue weapons which were given to her for eyes. And Virginia Tracy, golden-white Virginia, her small face as grave as a Persian kitten’s—for she was very young and resented things—was dressed severely in black....

“So that,” she said surprisingly, viciously, to Ivor, who had just come upon them and remarked upon its dark severity, “I can dance with you, black Ivor Marlay, if you should happen to ask me.”

“Virginia has got a crise,” Lois Lamprey commented into some one’s ear, very softly. Lois always commented on Virginia like that, very softly, and without emotion. Lois gave it to be clearly understood that she kept emotion for emotional moments. Watch the Lady Lois! For she will be a power in the land, in the land where she is already a legend, by reason of her great beauty, her birth, her wit, her various talents, and the facility for dexterous publicity which has always been{73} vouchsafed to the Lamprey women. She will be the contriver of her own destiny, so watch her, it will be quite interesting. There is no snob like the well-born snob: Mr. E. F. Benson said that, and he knows about those things. The Lady Lois will get on, but not obviously, she will climb to the ultimate pinnacles of the world’s last aristocracy. Men will call her an allumeuse, but men give many different names to their disappointments. She will have no enemies, but most of her friends will dislike her. Only two weaknesses has Lady Lois of the silken black hair and the curious eyes that seem to see things a long way off and to laugh at things close-to—she is mean with money, and she is partial to a glass or so of wine between meals. But her complexion can stand that, for a thing to wonder at is her complexion. “Ah, ce type anglais!” Nothing in the world can beat it, even though it does sometimes dress atrociously.... Now Virginia was quite, quite different from Lois; though people didn’t realise that for quite a long time.

There was antagonism between Virginia Tracy and Ivor Marlay. There always is antagonism between some one and some one else at a party of the intimate sort. In this case it had something to do with Virginia’s lack of manners and Ivor’s lack of servility, but how were they to know that?

“I’ve asked you to dance so often, and so often been snubbed,” Ivor said, rather too quietly maybe. The formality, the “rightness,” of his manner always irritated Virginia into an impatient shrug. And, in this mood of hers, her blue eyes glittered just a little, dangerously.

Now in the furrow of Virginia Tracy’s little chin, and an inconsiderable little chin it was for a beautiful young lady, lay a tiny brown spot, which Ivor sometimes found very irritating....

It was as though the room seemed suddenly to be going rotten with silence. No one quite knew why—and Virginia and Ivor were the most nonchalant among{74} them. The silence was made more than ever tangible by one Kerrison saying:—

“But Marlay’s not severe, Virginia! He’s a rakish and raffish young man.” But, as usual with Mr. Kerrison, the insolence was in the words rather than the manner, which was ingratiating. Mr. Kerrison was an intellectual architect of a certain reputation and a remarkably anæmic exterior. Kerrison just slops about, people said. He disliked Ivor Marlay because Ivor Marlay had once seen him powdering his nose in a lavatory, because he knew Lois liked him, and because he suspected Virginia of being deeper than her antagonisms....

“He’s suffering,” Virginia said quietly, “from silence. The kind of silence that knows the answer to every question!” Thus were the sayings of the polite and amiable M. Stutz retailed by “My Customers!”

“In the meanwhile,” Ivor was bored enough to say, “why don’t we dance? Or are we not talking about that now?” That manner of his, when irritated, was certainly irritating. You could not like Ivor when he did not like you. He somehow wouldn’t let you. The more he was in the right the less you could like him.

Virginia shook her head, as though a little absent, a little bored; and said something in a low tone to Mr. Kerrison beside her, so that he laughed.... It really was very stupid, all this. Every one was aware of that, and of Ivor Marlay. Everything had been so charming and inconsequent until he had come in—darkly, so as to provoke Virginia, it seemed!—and now everything was pointed and personal. As everything always was when those two met in a room—the atmosphere somehow grew a point, even at the Mont Agel, most difficult of all places in which to be anything but inconsequent! Any one else but Ivor Marlay would have answered Virginia’s first remark in some human sort of way, with a jeer or a laugh or a cry or a grab—but Marlay must go and say the “right” thing, which any fool might know was the wrong thing to say to Virginia.{75}

Ivor Marlay, feeling acutely that he was “out of all this,” just waited for someone to say something. He was damned if he was going to be “put out” by this sort of childishness. And his eyes faintly appealed to Lois Lamprey: who liked him—for she had an instinct about people who might get on—and had watched the little comedy as she watched every comedy, including her own, with lazy intentness. Lois was twenty-five, two years older than Virginia, and it was said that she was more balanced than Virginia.

“Every one is being very typical to-night,” Lois vaguely said, in her deep, soft voice.

“A ballroom,” she said, “is not the place for dancing in, anyway. One should only dance in meadows and green places....”

(It was at that time the fashion to make idiotic remarks in a dogmatic voice. It rather impressed some people.)

“And one should only dance towards the moon and back,” bubbled Pretty Leyton, who couldn’t dance at all. (Thank God that’s over, Ivor thought.) Pretty Leyton always bubbled over like that—and, in bubbling, simply adored you! His business in life was to be an optimist and celibate, and his pleasure in life was to encourage and edit young men’s poetry, dead or alive; and in that the war was to give him his wonderful chance, which he wonderfully took. The poetry Pretty Leyton discovered was often very good, for his was a delicate and conservative taste; but it would have been easier to appreciate the good if one could only have discovered it among the bad, for his was also a delicate and kindly nature. While as for the young poets, of whom many called and all were chosen, he was continually begging his women friends, particularly Lois and Virginia, not to be “too cruel” to them, for they were so sensitive and worth-while. To see and speak to Pretty Leyton in a crowded room was really very comforting, sometimes—which was just as well, since he was always in every room that happened to be{76} crowded, saying: “Isn’t it a marvellous party?” He was so intensely “happy” to be everywhere, people were “so wonderful.” ... And, at some hour or other, in whatever room or company or city you might be in, you would surely espy coming towards you the high, extended waving hand, the swaying shoulder, the mobile eyebrows, the restless hindquarters and the dainty step of Pretty Leyton. And he would be charming, always charming. He gave all his women friends beautifully bound copies of Tristram Shandy, which he said was the only book.

The rest of the circle, innermost of all the young circles of that time and symbolic in the best way of them all, comprised that London “of waiting for the lamps to be lit or of hoping the lamps will never be lit, of waiting for the sun to rise or of hoping the sun will never rise,” as Virginia had said once. Little knowing, Virginia, that the sun was risen so brilliantly on your friends the sooner and more tragically to set....

It was the London of Whitehall, Chelsea, Mayfair, Cambridge, Bloomsbury, Downing Street, Oxford, and the Mont Agel—but of course the Mont Agel! The London of those new young men and women, but mainly young men, who in those few years before the war suddenly confronted and conquered it with a new and vivid charm, now never to be forgotten. They, even more acutely than the Russian Ballet, were the social success of that time, in a new and brilliant way. They were so immediately likeable, so fine! A new kind of young men they were entirely, these few from the Universities, and much less “provincial” than new young men had ever been before. They, just then beginning life, were much less provincial than those who were ending life. They were not good Londoners: for they were good Europeans. They were clean and intricate and pagan, and they were quick to believe in fine things; and they could both drink and think. In everything they were a denial of their fathers, for these young men were sceptical of generalisations:{77} in everything they were a denial of the catchwords for which they were to fight; and in everything they were the finest expression of the paralytic civilisation for which they were to die. Vulgarity of thought was to them the abomination of abominations; and they died because of it. They were to go out to fight in a war for chivalry, and they were to die in a morass of spite.

And these young giants were friends to Lois Lamprey and Virginia Tracy, and often with them—too often, people said. And Lois was conscious of their beauty and her power over them, but Virginia was conscious only of liking them immensely. She loved one and then another, seldom alone but always in a crowd. She was swept magically off her feet, gaily, profoundly, almost impersonally; for Virginia was very much of them in spirit and in endeavour, and she, like them, for all the gaiety and publicity of their lives—for London loved these young men of destiny—had secret places in her being where she could think and strive impersonally—with what Lois could decide in one cunning, physical moment!

Great heights were reached in that swift circle of young people, and deep abysses plumbed. They were the new soldiers of fortune, Lois and Virginia and their laughing men. They intoxicated each other into brilliance, and often into truth. They were much more intoxicating to each other than was the wine which rumour so abundantly uncorked for them.

“Why, just why, have they all gone, so utterly? Of that roomful of people at the Hallidays’ that night, the last night that I ever saw you there, there’s nothing left but the scum—except just you, who weren’t of them at all. There simply isn’t one of them left, Ivor——”

“And not only that,” he said. “But there is nothing of them left. The war killed them, and then{78} Pretty Leyton and the Press killed them even more effectually, by making of them idols of prose and poetry and good looks. And they made idols of them in their own precious image and to suit their own precious ideals, ‘wonderful’ and ‘inspired.’ What was so splendid about them was that they were not inspired: they were thoughtful....”

For the giants had now become little books, a tragic and inevitable fate that often overtakes giants. They, who had never scattered themselves, were now scattered everywhere on the wings of their chance verses and chance letters; and there were Prefaces to bring them near in death who had been so rarely distant in life.

“It isn’t fair,” Virginia sombrely said, “to judge them by what they wrote, even if they had wanted to be judged by that. They’ve made brilliant and gallant poets out of men whose reality was idealism. Their reality was a fierce and gay idealism, Ivor, and poetry and gallantry were only afterthoughts with them....”

It was a lazy afternoon in Paris, and they were in the garden of a studio on the Butte, a garden overlooking Paris from the Mont Valérien to the Lion de Belfort.

“Youth isn’t made of definite things like prose and poetry,” Virginia said. “It’s made of everything. It’s a subtle and versatile thing, I do think, with lovely lapses into carelessness.”

“And besides!” she suddenly said. “Every one forgets the main ingredient of the souls of fine, eager men. Like the Crusaders, you know. It used to be called the Holy Ghost, but there’s no name for it now....”

But that was the Virginia and the Ivor Marlay of more than seven years later, a man and a woman of thirty, who have come intruding into the Halliday room of that night in 1912: ghosts of serious mien, to relive again their brutal young intolerances of that time.... For Ivor Marlay, now too close to reality to separate the chaff from it, was to-night deciding that “all this” was distasteful to him. The fault was all{79} his, he felt certain. He admired so much in them, and especially the way in which all the desires of their fathers were melted into cheap baubles by the magic of their laughter, which held in it so little superiority and so much conviction. And, admiring all that, he yet found it all distasteful, it seemed so, well, gutless and bloodless, it seemed, somehow, to carry its own rot within it—and as he thought that his eyes fixed on Mr. Kerrison and Pretty Leyton, the one white-faced and thin and limp and little-eyed, the other bubbling and fantastic. Ivor could not see them then as he later grew to see them, that such men are inevitably part of the wonderful comedy of cities. He saw them, and men like them, in a devilish light, he loathed them; and he despised those who suffered them....

Mr. Kerrison was sitting beside Virginia on a window-seat, vigorously talking. He was answering something she had asked, and through the smoke Ivor could see the interest on her face. Mr. Kerrison somehow held that lovely golden creature’s confidence, and Ivor thought: her confidence is wrapped away in him as in the folds of a jelly-fish. Semiramis was the first woman to invent eunuchs, and women have had sympathy for them ever since; for all Kerrisons are eunuchs, large and shining and secretive eunuchs with minutely clever little minds ... and women can tell them what they can’t tell other men. And Ivor, suddenly cheered by laughing at his absurd platitudes, and finding himself by the door, was going from the room.

“You are stealing away!” a voice from behind caught him sharply in the doorway.

“That may be because you never seem to be yourself, never genuine, Ivor,” she said. “You seem always to be straining at a leash, straining but never springing....”

“The devil!” he laughed at her. “You have{80}n’t given me much chance of springing one way or the other, Virginia....” But Virginia looked suddenly very tired indeed.

“Oh, dear!” she sighed childishly. “How trivial we are about trivial things, aren’t we? instead of being grand and indifferent about them, as we like to think we are....” And she smiled quickly, and her smile was like a Red Indian’s, it came and left untouched the gravity of her face.

“You remind me of fire,” said Ivor suddenly, softly. “And fire is a glorious thing because it devours uncleanness yet remains clean. I read that in a funny old book about a great actress, but it somehow applies to you, Virginia....”

She was looking at him gravely, and she said nothing, so that he was ashamed of his affectation. He wasn’t genuine, she had said....

“Will we be friends, then?” she asked simply, out of the silence. She was like an earnest child.

And she turned and left him swiftly, as was her way. Thus Virginia always left people and rooms, very suddenly and swiftly, as though she were moved to do so by a purpose that was almost mystic. For hers was not a languid queenliness; she walked always as though she were alone and unwatched and on a hidden quest—and, surely, any quest Virginia might follow would be a secret one, for Virginia was secret, she never confided. And she had such queerly little consciousness of her looks that you could take your fill of staring as she sat or walked, and not offend. You could admire the little fair face that topped the slim height of her figure with that quality peculiar to English loveliness. Her figure and face, you would say, are somehow compact of the same grace and clean lines, the one goes perfectly with the other, whereas a Frenchwoman’s figure can give the lie to her face even as her dressmaker can give the lie to her figure. And, as Virginia so swiftly passed, you could not but marvel at the slim elegance{81} of her ankles, saying to yourself that Virginia had no visible means of support. But most of all you would admire the golden curls which tumbled, not wildly, down each side of her face, while the golden hair from which they tumbled was drawn tightly back from her forehead as though grudging itself the waves that insisted on waving. Those gay and golden curls of Virginia’s! the merry companions of her face! They were her main interest in her appearance; she took the rest of herself for granted, as far as any soignée woman can—but she cared for her curls rigorously, and as often as she was in her room she combed and curled them: ever so swiftly, with a very little comb and a very little “iron,” the treasures of her toilet table. Now these amazing curls on each side of Virginia’s face were named, and their names were mighty in London. They were called “Swan and Edgar,” and never referred to by herself or her familiars but as “Swan and Edgar.” The curls were both alike to the naked eye, in curliness, in sheen and in goldiness, but the curl on the right was Swan and the curl on the left was Edgar—“reading from right to left, you see,” explained Virginia; and he was no familiar of Virginia’s who ever confounded their exact locality. “Swan and Edgar” were a source of endless trouble and annoyance to Virginia: sometimes the damp would affect them, and they would look so limp! and sometimes, damp or no damp, they would be disorderly, just when Virginia was trying to look her best, and she would almost cry with mortification. No matter where she might be, no matter at what party, if “Swan and Edgar” did not behave themselves Virginia would insist on taking them home—“a car, please,” she’d say to a young man—where she would very swiftly curl them anew, with that very little “iron”; and then she would return to the party, gaily, mysteriously. And oh, she was such a pretty girl!...

And Ivor Marlay, walking slowly down the stairs—that “slowness” of a man at a party who might or{82} might not be going home—thought of Virginia Tracy softly; he thought of Virginia in a whisper: how she had so abruptly stood before him and somehow revealed herself to him and somehow stripped him of his antagonism and affectation. Virginia, he thought, was mysteriously adequate to mysterious moments. And, suddenly, queerly, he was sorry for Virginia, alone in that galère—which he himself would never, never re-enter again. And he was sorry for Virginia....

She was borne to him, before he realised it, in the hubbub at the foot of the stairs, on the polished ship of Gerald Trevor’s introduction.

“He writes poetry and his mother makes birds’ nests”—that courtly gentleman was sketching an imaginary Ivor for her benefit.

“And he also dances,” grinned Ivor, responding to her secret smile—and plundering Trevor even as Trevor had plundered Rodney West.

“George, I ask you to observe that women are odd: if you restrain yourself, they resent it: and if you don’t restrain yourself, you bore them. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Treat ’em rough, old man. And so to bed,” yawned George Tarlyon, handsome Tarlyon. Much will come of that young man, it was said. And much indeed was to come of that young man, in the fullness of war and peace. He will meet Ivor Marlay; and he will laugh at him. And George Tarlyon had an eighteenth century kind of laugh: the casual, fearless, handsome Lord Tarlyon....{83}

CHAPTER II

It was about three o’clock now; the ballroom looked a vast place in which three couples were entirely surrounded by parquet floor; and the band was become ecstatic with weariness and repetition. They sang and yelled and rolled their eyes, they crooned and cooned and beat their drums.

Ivor and Magdalen Gray danced silently. For several minutes he was not conscious of her, but only of the pleasure of dancing with her. She was scarcely there at all, she moved so easily with him. She was so wonderfully there that she was scarcely there at all—which may sound silly, but is nevertheless a first principle to be learnt by all women who would be good dancers.

“I too!” the light voice said; but so seriously that it surprised him into looking for the first time at the face beside his shoulder; and he saw that, if indeed she was liking it, it must be in a very subtle way, for she looked sad and tired.

“Oh, no!” and the dark eyes were lifted to his in{84} an almost comic protest; and they suddenly seemed to introduce herself to him. “I don’t wish to seem conceited, Mr. Marlay, but there are too many people waiting to see me home. I would have been safely in my bed an hour ago but that there were so many people to see me safely into it. But if you would rather not dance——?”

“I’ve had one, anyway,” he seriously agreed. “Lovely she was, and a famous dancer—but I thought, you know, that I would like to begin and end my night with a woman of quality.” That made her smile a little smile. Courteous cheek....

They danced on silently, softly. Their feet played tricks to the beat of the tireless measure, that exquisitely asinine blare which is England’s punishment for having lost America.... This is the nicest thing that’s happened to me for a very long time, Ivor thought, taking pleasure in her movement and her looks. Her hair is trying to look black, he thought, but it’s really dark blue, like her eyes.

It was thick hair, soft and thick and Latin, and it was coiled softly about her ears in loose dark masses: a dark setting for her white face, which wasn’t technically beautiful, like Lois Lamprey’s and Virginia’s, but had all the inner meaning of beauty. Her mouth was large and very mobile, a tentative and adventurous mouth.... And all the time he was conscious that she was abstracted, that she wasn’t thinking of him at all. And that was pleasant, he felt exceedingly at peace with her. So he didn’t press her to talk, he made no effort to amuse her; and that is the most intelligent thing that Ivor Marlay did that night.

As they danced past the large doorway he saw two men standing there, one dark and the other gray, talking. She had seen the direction of his eyes, for she said:{85}—

“The distinguished-looking person with the iron-gray hair and the lovely corporation is my husband. But besides being my husband he is a great traveller. Not an explorer, mind you, but just a great traveller. He spends most of his time in travelling about extremely foreign countries, and the rest of his time he spends in feeling extremely foreign in his own.” Mrs. Gray had a delightful way, as she said things, of laughing without laughter, of being intimate without intimacy.

The light voice went on: “And the other one, with the severe expression peculiar to celibate Englishmen of over forty, is Rodney West, the K.C., whom you’ll never really get to know unless you murder or get murdered by some one....”

And, suddenly, Ivor had an acute feeling that he was “up against” those two men, standing there in the doorway in all the conviction of middle years and vast experience. It was the silliest and absurdest feeling he had ever had, but he felt it acutely, and it made him suddenly look quite set and grim—and, of course, sulky. They were now in the far corner of the ballroom, away from the guardians of the door. And Magdalen Gray wondered at his abrupt stopping of the dance, away in the corner there, and at the way he looked down at her, so darkly sulky: the absurd young grimness of this stranger surprised her back into her gaiety.

“Oh, but you look like a man who has discovered something!” she laughed at him. “Picture of young gentleman as pirate on sighting fair merchantman....”

She liked him for refusing to be made ridiculous. It was most unusual in men....

“But aren’t you bullying me just a little bit—and so early in our acquaintance?” she asked quietly—keeping all the foolery in her words and none in her{86} manner, as was her way. “But maybe that’s because you think it’s going to be difficult to see me?”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking—and the previous thought to that was that you were worthwhile,” he dared to say. It was those sceptical-looking eyebrows that helped him to say things like that and look as though he had meant to say something else....

“But I’m just a little tired of being thought ‘worthwhile’!” she cried, with a surprisingly deep impatience.

“And I’d like, please, to be allowed to do the thinking first, just for a change....” And she passed a hand over her eyes and slightly pressed her fingers against her temples, as though to soothe the sickness of a headache.

He was nervously conscious that he had made a mistake. He couldn’t know that the mistake lay in his liking her at all, who was to-night surfeited with men’s likings.... The band had stopped, and they were walking now across the bare expanse of floor towards the door. The two men of middle years had but a second before left it, so obviously as though she were to come downstairs after them. And Ivor’s eyes involuntarily followed them through the doorway.

“There’s only the telephone-book between us, you know,” she chose to soothe him.

“Ah, now I know something about you!” he said eagerly. They were out of the ballroom now; she cast a swift look down the stairs; and she was going away.

“I know now,” he said very quickly, “what I’ve never known before, for I’ve never before met a womanly woman. I know that in the beginning you are profound about superficial things, and that in the end you are superficial about profound things. And I know too, that when you are accused of that you will answer, oh so honestly: ‘But isn’t this how things do end, and is a flower less beautiful because it must die?’”

The wilful arrogance of that moment is quite the{87} best thing in the extravagances of a cub’s life. Cheek so colossal and so uncalled-for, on such a very slight acquaintance, becomes something quite else, something much higher. And Magdalen Gray, following the men of middle years down the stairs, was gay where she had thought to be miserable—that young man was laughing at her, he was liking her with laughter! It was most unusual in men! It was quite pleasant and unusual....{88}

CHAPTER III

In the days that followed, Ivor Marlay brooded upon her a great deal. He showed his youth, that fantastic youth of a young man’s secret longings, in the manner and absurdity of his brooding. He came to think of her as a strange and delicious phenomenon that had somehow happened—and which, he intensely hoped, would somehow happen again. He lavished on her all his curiosity; he fingered the texture of her; and then hastily drew back from this childish dalliance, for his mind seemed suddenly to have become so gross and the texture of her was so fine. He grew aware that she would leave him not a shred of vanity if she had her way with him—not that she would strip him of it, but he would have to strip himself in face of her. And he felt painfully ill at ease with himself, which is commonly the feeling of a very young man who is too impressed by a woman of thirty—and quality.

This deep impression of a first meeting may seem ridiculous to the superior amateur of sensations, but it was quite logical, really. Never before, after all, had he been charmed! And it was an exquisite sensation, to be charmed. Of course, he had often persuaded himself into being charmed—if you didn’t do that you were bored, and then where were you?—but never before had he been actually and actively charmed. And so potent was this enchantment that he had now no stomach for such relations—oh, quite vague things!—as had hitherto entertained him very passably.

The matter was not in the least mended by his frequently calling himself a silly ass; for there was always a secret voice telling him that his admiration{89} was the outcome of a need—for “that kind of woman!” That first impression! He was so sure, he didn’t know why nor how, that “that kind of woman” could arouse a deep emotion without that aftermath of impurity which—even at three-and-twenty—taints so many of the fine passages of an adventurous life. And so Ivor longed for her, and guess-work made strange and lovely arabesques on a background of enchantment.

More than two weeks passed, and still he did not telephone to Mrs. Gray. He had made a brave show of determination when with her, but since then his mind had made her of fine texture, and its fineness appalled him. And after two weeks he couldn’t, for she would not remember his name, he would have to remind her of their meeting—oh, no, no! His vanity, his whole manhood, ran tumultuously away from the thought of her probable forgetfulness on the telephone! He could hear her answer to his name, he could hear her saying, softly, thoughtfully, questioningly, vaguely, “Yes?...” Oh, no! He would wait; he would just wait—but, after all, what for?

The resolution made on the night of the Halliday party held unusually firm, and that galère was now part of a past life. He wasn’t going to “mess about” any more—with a lot of “invertebrates”! So he set himself to work, seriously and rather angrily, and wrote hard to finish a flimsy novel which he had begun nearly two years before, and whose flimsiness, now that he seriously set himself to finish it (and make it less “invertebrate”) was a humiliating reproach to the waste of the last two years. It was finally published,[B] after adventures common to first MSS. in search of a publisher who knows his business, in the spring before the war, when its author was away from England; a slim and unpretentious book—“whose charm,” wrote one reviewer, “is difficult to analyse, but might conceivably lie in the almost senile precocity that informs{90} Mr. Marlay’s style and fantasy.” Wrote another: “Of all the books that don’t matter in the least, this is one of the most excellent. It is one that will appeal to a few, but not necessarily the few.” Whichever few, thought Mr. Marlay’s publisher, is few enough.

His inability to telephone to Magdalen Gray served him not at all, as indeed he did not wish it to. For on a night three weeks after he had met her he was dining with her at her house in Wilton Place. And a remarkable meal that was, a most remarkable dinner, an immaculate conception of a dinner, exquisitely ethereal—yet how sternly of the earth!

One night, as Ivor Marlay was dining alone in one of those underground grill-rooms for which London is famous among capitals, he was extremely surprised at the sudden figure of Rodney West, K.C., standing at his table, with the obvious intention of addressing him. He did not know Rodney West, nor did Rodney West know him. A smile, as nearly self-conscious as it could be, hovered about the severely handsome face of the man of middle years. Ivor half rose in his chair, and sat down again.

“Mrs. Gray sent me over,” Rodney West told him, “to rebuke you for being blind, for we’ve been sitting over there for the last hour, and to ask you to join us over coffee. Is that all right?” Rodney West’s courtesy had no fringes, it was sharp and direct—there was no froth about him, anyway—and from that moment Ivor liked him very much, in spite of himself. He said he would like to join them very much; he was shy; but, a few minutes after the elder man had left him, he followed him to the table indicated, ... for at least half the distance looking directly into a levelled pair of eyes, which seemed wonderfully large and innocent beneath a wide-brimmed black hat. And{91} Ivor suddenly felt extraordinarily happy and unafraid; and not even the so direct scrutiny of Magdalen Gray could perturb him. But perhaps she did not intend that it should.

She greeted him as an old friend. She seemed to be under the surprising delusion that they were old friends, and not the acquaintances of one meeting; she did not address him as “Mr. Marlay,” she did not address him by name at all, but her manner plainly suggested that if she did address him by name it would not be as “Mr. Marlay.” She was in a gay, silly mood, embracing them both in the swift turns of her inconsequence. No one could have guessed that she and Rodney West had dined in silence. Nor did Rodney West show what he felt at the contrast; he seemed to Ivor a very amiable though rather detached elderly person. Only when he occasionally bent his eyes to his coffee cup and gently dropped his cigar ash therein, would there have been perceptible, to a more detached intelligence than Ivor’s, an added grimness to the thin face, a wave of grimness that came and passed; and, surely, a certain grimness is permissible in a man of middle years who, for the last five of them, has given his soul to a woman and has now had it given back to him with maddening gentleness.

The artifice of her intimacy charmed Ivor into ready answer. The gay, silly mood enveloped him. Her wit was adventurous: it was an exploit to follow the twist of her sentences, and breathlessly to be with her at the end.... She told them of the races at somewhere or other, to which she had been taken that afternoon in an “extremely open car.” She was not a racing-chap, she wasn’t very actively interested in the competitive swiftness of horses; but she had not only been to watch them at it that day, but had lost a deal of money on the slower ones, what’s more! Whereupon Rodney West gave it as his opinion that it rather served her right for betting in ignorance.{92}

“But I didn’t, Rodney!” she vividly protested. “Never was a woman in better racing company. No one could have guessed that all-my-people-weren’t-racing-people. My escort were two in number, minus in intelligence, full marks for good-looks, and might quite easily have been called Mr. Beef and Mr. Beer: and they were grimly allied together for the purposes of being entertained by me and the horses. As they had field-glasses and champagne-glasses and hard blue eyes, and knew every horse by sight and reputation, I naturally backed the horse which they were sure couldn’t lose. And when the wretched horse was finally arrested for loitering on the course hours after the race was finished, they told me that at the last moment they’d backed another one—the one that had happened to win, you know.”

“Mrs. Gray, you must know, has made an art of friendship,” he explained. “The art of friendship consists of defending people you’ve met twice by attacking people you’ve known all your life.”

That light laugh of Magdalen’s! it was like a laugh from a Victorian novel, so gentle and smoothing and right! And, as she laughed, her eyes, so large and thoughtful in the shadow of her black hat, rested with ever so passing an intentness on Ivor, secretly. And she seemed to be saying to him: “This man has certain rights and many grievances, and it’s all my fault. So we’ll let him be, shall we, for he’s a sweet man, really.”

And Ivor suddenly felt that all this had happened to him before, to him and to her, in some ancient place long, long ago; and he felt poignantly at ease with her, he understood the things she didn’t say—this slim, soft{93} woman with the soft hair like the night and the wonderfully friendly, deeply joyous eyes.

He knew nothing, nothing in the world, of men and women; he only knew that he was very alone and that shadows were all about, shadows that never flickered, shadows that only stared and smiled, waiting, waiting, waiting for his full worthiness....

It was as they were at last leaving the place—long after the paid bill had been whipped away from Rodney West as though it were an indecency which should never have been committed—and were winding up the stairs to the exalted atmosphere of Piccadilly by night, that she turned to await Ivor, who was a few steps behind them, and said:—

“There’s a kind of dinner-party at my house to-morrow night, to which you are being invited at this moment....”

“The telephone-book,” she said, “is full of little details about my address.”

Kind, curious woman—by saying things like that she made one think oneself had spoken, she made one forget that one was dull, dull, unworthy of the moment....

“Good-night, sir. Thanks so much for letting me join you. Good-night, Mrs. Gray.”

And so, swiftly, almost brusquely, away, leaving them to the care and under the shadow of the commissionaire, man of legendary height and fabulous girth, whose huge gallantry cynically suggested that he would sell not only his own soul but the soul of the taxi and taxi-driver which he had summoned, if only to please this lady and this gentleman. But how could the commissionaire, so long trained in the observation{94} of quick infidelities, guess that nothing in the world would please this obviously sensible gentleman but the love of this lady? whose maddening answer to his bitter-frantic demand, in that very taxi, was gently to touch his hand and whisper that it would surely be disloyal to past loveliness to pretend to things.... Magdalen Gray never, never pretended; maybe that is what kept her so young-looking.{95}

CHAPTER IV

“Ivor, I’m so glad!” she welcomed him simply, the next night at half-past eight. She made no mention of the “dinner-party.” He and she were the dinner-party. Colonel Gray was again on his travels to “extremely foreign parts,” it seemed.

They were in the drawing-room before dinner, and he was too busy adjusting himself to her even to notice the pleasures of the room. He was glad that she was in black, he discovered a particular admiration for her in black; her dark simplicity was an almost startling decoration in the pale amber light of the July evening. And he enjoyed her hair, dark and thick and so soft, coiling about her ears and framing her wide, intelligent forehead and her mysterious, friendly eyes. So friendly.... And he liked being in her house, he particularly liked her in her own house—it somehow added solidity to her enchantment. He told her that, in those first few minutes. She had come to greet him from a far corner of the room, and he now stood above her in its very middle—dark, and seemingly self-confident, and not very young: and so compact of restraint—yes, he seemed very restrained—that she caught her breath with pleasure in him. It was most unusual in men....

But, with a gesture, she put a period to this dalliance—one shouldn’t palter so on an empty stomach, she might almost have said. And now she made fun of him, insisting on his being intelligently appreciative of her room of state. “My room, all mine,” she magnificently boasted. And she took him by the hand, miraculously lifting him to a pinnacle of comradeship,{96} and twisted him to view the vast and rich expanse of her kingdom. But not all the craft and elegance of Sheraton and Chippendale, of Hepplewhite and Adam, had they been in that one room, could have seduced Ivor’s attention from this wonderful and sudden fact of friendship. For this between them was going to be friendship, a rich and immense friendship. He was going to insist on having her friendship, he wouldn’t let this go....

It was a small house, this in Wilton Place, but this room on the first floor was its room of state: it knew not the limitations of lowlier rooms, and stretched its dignity from front to back of the house. Its appointments were more than worthy of it: the darkish blue of the walls, a subtle quality of colour that mingled austerity with a sweet feminine glamour: the gilded craftmanship of the chairs and sofas and footstools and tables and what-nots, those lovely baubles of Louis Seize days which seem ever to coquette for your admiration the better to despise your favour, for they are not very comfortable: and the rich and fading brocades and velvets that covered them, stuffs of quality whose pride increases as their colour fades, velvets of worldly wisdom which know that there’s nothing in the world more assured of respect than velvets that are caressed by the gloss of respectful usage.... One hand lightly in his, her other swept round the room.

“There was a gentleman of Virginia, who lived in Kent,” she comically began; then very gravely: “very old he was, and fierce and contemptuous and gallant, and very, very odd in the way of his affections. For he said nothing, and for the ten years that he was my guardian he scarcely came near me—and then he died and left me all this and much besides!”

“Dinner is served, madam,” a dim voice broke on them from the twilight of the room.{97}

It is a commonplace that a young man in love is very apt to talk about himself. It is also a commonplace that the interest of an intelligent woman will seduce a young man into being exceedingly interested in himself. And so it wasn’t surprising—except, of course, to Ivor Marlay, who had always had a vague idea that commonplaces somehow didn’t, and somehow shouldn’t, apply to him—it wasn’t surprising that he did talk about himself, and at length, during and after dinner on that night in July, 1912. He needed some pressing, of course. Mrs. Gray was very good at pressing.

“For, after all,” she protested, “I know nothing at all about you—except that you are, well, curiously polished and literate, as though you had been educated abroad. But I do hope you weren’t!”

“I was five years at a public-school,” said Ivor, “so I’m quite self-educated.”

She rebuked him, for she was glad of the public-school. She liked her Englishmen to be English. She herself spoke foreign languages quite well enough for two, she said.

And then she led him on by her naïve surprise that he was, and intended to be, a writer. That seemed to her very charming, for he might so easily have been nothing at all, and with every excuse. (The charming things your Magdalens say are as nothing to those they suggest. But there are not many Magdalens.) She had had wide and intimate experience of writers, dramatists, and all manner of artists, so that she was not wildly excited at the fact of entertaining yet another. But that this young man was a writer, interested her happily; for he was so obviously something else as well, which was most unusual in writers. Magdalen Gray did not, as a rule, like writers and suchlike (by “suchlike” she, of course, meant{98} publishers). She only dined with them when there was a “first-night” to go to, only lunched with them before a “private-view.” But she was too wise to explain her dislike by a generalisation, she just mentioned that she didn’t like them very much, especially the younger ones; and she suggested only that, perhaps, the word “I,” an enthralling word when sparingly used, occurred too often in their conversation: “which, on the other hand,” she said, “is very clever of them, for I can’t think how they can manage to squeeze it in so often.”

“But it’s not,” she said, “the most important thing in the world to be clever.”

She led him on to tremendous confidences. She met the sympathetic figures of his life, Aunt Moira and Aunt Percy, with sincere understanding; and she told him that she found his life strange and exciting and adventurous—and Ivor, looking at it with the impulse of her sympathy, also found it strange and exciting and adventurous.

“It’s odd,” he said, “how one minute’s perfect comradeship can discount all previous solitudes.”

She brought the truth out of him, he saw that, and how can a woman bring the truth out of a man except by understanding him? Clearly, then, she was his friend. It was so wonderful a fact that it almost overwhelmed him; her wise friendliness revealed her to him as a marvellous gift of a god, and a much more than fleshly god, too! And his mind so circled about the fact of this grave and gay Magdalen with the friendly eyes and deep, dexterous understanding—that he was probably very dull indeed towards the end of dinner. But Magdalen teased him about that very gently, for she had always thought that no man was a man who wasn’t sometimes frightfully dull.{99}

And yet, as the night grew to midnight and past, all was not well with Ivor Marlay.... They were on the wide divan, a battlefield of a divan, in the window corner of the “room of state”—now changed into a room deliciously intimate and secret, with but the one dim light of a very shaded lamp, near them, to light its rich shadows and make more pregnant the pregnant silences of two people. And there were several silences, in the restless passage over midnight. Magdalen lay full length on the divan, a luxuriously straight figure, her crossed hands supporting the back of her head against a wide cushion of many colours. A tranquil figure she looked, lying straightly there, with her eyes peacefully on him—and yet little peace was there in Magdalen Gray at that moment, or ever! Now, behind her tranquil poise, she wanted frightfully to mock him by inquiring, quite casually, how, at his absurd age, he had discovered that restraint is the highest pleasure of la volupté. She wanted to ask him that, but it was just as well she didn’t, for he wouldn’t have known what she was talking about, being much more completely twenty-three than he (or she) thought.

To the cold eye of the philosopher there is nothing more ridiculous than abandon, except it be restraint: there is nothing more absurd than temptation, except it be the grander temptation not to yield to it. But it is notorious that philosophers never allow for other people’s ideals—which do certainly make the ridiculous even more ridiculous, but rarely fail to make it sublime. And Ivor Pelham Marlay, now fired at last out of the lethargy of two years, was become a very rigid and proper idealist, and very troublesome to himself, which is the way of idealists.... He was distressed, in that restless passage over midnight. He wondered, very dimly, if masculine brutalities were peculiar to essentially feminine woman; years later, he found that they were.{100} She wanted her way of him, in her own way, now! He saw that, because she didn’t hide it; she didn’t hide it because she hadn’t that kind of restraint, she was deplorable. She wanted to “find out.” He had knowledge of her as a woman without shame and without pride in love. He called it love, because he was certain that it was love, as far as he was concerned, anyway. She had no pride, she said. “There is no pride in love, Ivor. Not really. To be proud in love is the mark of little people. Pride is for women who go to balls or night-clubs every night, and who, because they are always tired, bring the worst out of their men; they need pride. But your great lover is so proud that he takes no thought of pride.” But, on top of that, she had no shame either—and that he shamelessly loved! He adored the honest quality of her shamelessness, its elegance and its clear shades of candour. Thus, every minute increased his longing for her, every minute increased his feeling of her nearness; and the slim, soft lines of her body maddeningly suggested the coil of her limbs—but it couldn’t, it simply couldn’t, happen like “this”! “This” was all wrong, in this particular instance. She was too splendid, he wanted her too utterly, to allow it to happen like “this.” He wanted her—oh, vastly! She was wanton, he knew that. He felt that, but he could not understand it—she who was so absolutely right, so sensible! She was amazing. She wanted to be ravished, like a woman in a dream....

There was a basket of them on a little table, in the shadows of the room; and, in the shadows, the peaches that had that morning graced the Piccadilly windows of Messrs. Solomon’s were changed into lovely baubles, they looked like Oriental things of beauty and significance: they looked like the peaches that are found in books, ruddy and ripe and bejewelled.

“And, if you please,” she said, “I’d like it peeled{101} or skinned, or whatever the process is called that uncovers a peach.”

He had it on a plate on his knee, and a toy knife and fork. He set to work on it delicately. But there are peaches and peaches, and some can be very wayward about being undressed.

“This isn’t the sort of peach I’m used to,” said Ivor at last, in disgust.

“Are you making a mess of it, Ivor?” her whisper mocked him; for her head had stealthily left its corner, it was by his shoulder now, and her body encircled him, her body made a prison around him, and her breath and hair were warm on his cheek.

“Yes,” he said—and kissed her, lightly. Their first kiss, that light, flimsy thing! It was his tribute to her enchantment, it wasn’t fired of passion—it wasn’t the sort of kiss a woman of thirty had the right to expect from a very young man on such a divan. It was a pathetic kiss. A begging kiss it was really, that light thing born of a question about a peach, for Ivor was begging her to understand, to understand his hunger for the most absolute intimacy, the most perfect friendship, and not just the mortal thing. But there were depths in Magdalen stronger than her understanding....

“Don’t go!” she said. And her arm swept to his shoulder—and suddenly fell back again to her side; and she looked up at the man standing feverishly above her, she looked at him as though she couldn’t see him for the darkness over her eyes. And suddenly, wantonly, she grimaced at him, oh so vengefully! Whereat they both fell to such a fit of giggling that Ivor was gone and Magdalen alone before either had realised the parting.

Perhaps those two had never been such great friends but for the curious issue of that remarkable dinner. Perhaps, if it had ended otherwise, Ivor would have walked away on air, as the saying is, or perhaps he{102} would have crept away and never returned, for this was a queer moment in his life, and he might easily have done a caddish thing because of his foiled desire for a fine one. But if he had returned and enjoyed, this chronicle could not have been written—for never in the whole history of the world, neither in folk-tale or legend or romance, has there been a tale about a merely physical bond. To make a tale there must be a vow, of marriage, of celibacy, or of friendship; and to make a tale that vow must be upheld or broken. There are no other tales than those, there are only experiments.{103}

CHAPTER V

It was difficult for Ivor, at three-and-twenty, to understand Magdalen; for she was so dangerously simple, so deplorably civilised, so utterly childish. He had realised her more easily and quickly had he never before met a woman—for naturally, being a young man of “experience,” he couldn’t help but apply a bit of it to her, and so went quickly all awry. He couldn’t help, any more than any one else, applying to her his almost unconscious knowledge of the petty dishonesties, antagonisms, hypocrisies, and caddishnesses that are peculiarly evident in women in love who are normally very gentle and honourable. But with Magdalen he had to begin right at the beginning; her quality, her artistry, her amazing talent for being articulate about those delicious shades of feelings that our more self-conscious lips do often fumble for but never attain—all this, in her, contained an amazing degree of earth, just common, pungent earth; which meant that everything she did, of honour or dishonour, was terrifyingly spontaneous, and, once done, inevitable.

And such understanding of her as he acquired, came to him only much later, after they had lain becalmed in that Saragossa Sea that is charted between love and friendship: a sea of shameful doubts and deceits and desires, a seaweed sea of broken vows and harsh antagonisms, and one that is very difficult for the tortured voyager to traverse, in the journey back from love and forward to friendship, for there is no compass to point the sad direction....

It was in the nature of Magdalen that her love had in it nothing stationary. She couldn’t help but make{104} everything she loved infinitely remote and desirable and unattainable. How sweet, thus, was the attainment! She had loved and been loved so often, yet she had no base knowledge of love. She was not wise in love, she had no caution. She never wanted to make use of love, she let love use her. And experience had robbed her of no pleasures, nor repetition tainted her tenderness: she was like a fruit-tree to which each ripening season is a fecund joy, whose fruit is sweet to your mouth yet serious in its sweetness, lest your easy looting provoke your levity. Magdalen had no politics.

She romanced, with grave unconsciousness. She loved Ivor, and so pursued him. She couldn’t love him otherwise, she must pursue even a pursuer. To attain and enjoy him with her full abundance she must first make him unattainable. Her mind must grow chaotic with helplessness at the “difficulty” of this man, who seemed to draw back when she advanced—indeed, she romanced seriously!—who seemed never to give himself utterly but ever to be holding back something frightfully essential. Yes, he was holding back something frightfully essential, it was evident—while she loved him, but how much! And she told him everything, she made no mystery of a love that seemed to Ivor exceedingly mysterious. There was no private corner nor secret shadow of her heart that she didn’t wantonly reveal to him. She simply didn’t care! She held him very tight and bewildered him with her love-making—to break off suddenly and swear a mighty oath that he was far beside the mark if he thought that she was repeating what she had sometime said to some previous lover: saying that she had a wonderful talent for love-speeches which hadn’t so far received due recognition, “or else, Ivor, you would be doing something adequate instead of lying there like an Eastern emperor listening to the words of your odalisque.”

“All my life,” she said, “I have had love-speeches on my lips and in my heart, and that’s why I’ve had{105} lovers, for I couldn’t bear to keep them to myself. I simply had to tell them to some one, even if they turned out to be very ordinary, which they mostly did.... Yes, Ivor, it was exactly as I’m telling you. And if you ever put me into a book, which you probably will, for you will never meet another woman who knows so much about the things that are not in books, you will say that I was a kind of love-tailor, forever measuring and fitting men to the things in my heart; and just like any other tailor I sometimes made misfits, but I am very persevering, Ivor, and so it always came right in the end. But never before have I fitted my love-speeches to a man as I’m fitting them to you—and getting very little for my trouble, I might add. It has always been the other way about, Ivor, and I’m not sure that I like this new departure in tailoring. Oh, but you are so secret, my dear! Your brown eyes are so secret, don’t you know they are? And sometimes I wish your eyes were pools of water so that I could drown myself in them, and be done with loving you so much who love me so little.... Oh, Ivor, how base you and all men are! You suspect the fine phrases of love—yes, you do, Ivor! If a woman looks at you speechless with love, you believe she loves you. But if she puts her love to you in sentences, complete with commas, colons, and full-stops, if she gives you her love dressed in the purple and fine linen of her heart—you can’t help thinking her rather odd, can you, dear?...”

Of course this kind of thing didn’t go on every day; it sometimes didn’t happen for days at a time; and for the rest they were great friends. Their time together passed wonderfully in the merry practice of friendship. Magdalen fulfilled every condition of intimacy, wonderfully unasked. She opened the doors of her life and{106} let him look in, while she trembled for fear he might find it altogether too bad. He wanted to know—everything! (He had never known anything before.) Friendship that held secrecy was a sorry thing, they both agreed. There is no secrecy between us, they said. There is restraint, but there is no secrecy—that is more or less what they said. Nor was there! She told him of enormities of inconstancy—to prove her constancy to him! “This talent for exploring makes such a mess of life,” she said. But now at last she had found a friend in love. They were plainly comrades, one to the other. “Playmates,” she insisted.

“The most wonderful thing about miracles is that they sometimes happen,” writes that magnificent Catholic, Mr. Chesterton; but one needn’t be a magnificent Catholic to believe him. Ivor believed him.... She had been a friend to very many people, she told him, but she herself had had no friend. Always to give, to give, to give, she said, and nothing ever given back—to me, waiting for the tender things! “I’ve tried so hard,” she said. But now Ivor had come, he was her first friend. “I’m virginal to friendship, anyway,” she told him gravely; and, thereupon, she emphasised her age, the phenomenal age of one-and-thirty. And, exercising his friendship, she found him a rare man. Anyway, she said he was, and gave her reasons for thinking so at considerable length. There are jealous men, she told him, to whom a woman cannot speak of her past life; there are foolish men who will love a woman foolishly no matter what she tells them of herself; there are absurd men who beg, beseech and implore to be told “everything,” and then make a scene about it; there are strong and silent men in whom a woman trustfully confides, and who use the confession against her at the first opportunity; and there are those rare men who love jealously yet intelligently, to whom a woman can tell everything and, in having told, forget everything—men who can understand without softness and be hard without rancour:{107} men whose dignity is in their hearts and not on their lips, rare men to whom a woman cannot cheapen herself, for they will not have her cheap, they are not aware that she can be cheap—and so she is not, great as is the temptation to cheapness in a woman in love. Anyway, that is what Magdalen said, and she probably knew.

Of course his writing suffered by neglect. Every kind of work always does, in contact with accursed women like Magdalen, who enthral men by enslaving themselves; and who adorn a man’s life by destroying it. But, though his writing suffered by neglect, how much it gained in knowledge! For Magdalen was his real education. She knew so much, of the things that are not in books—“but will be,” she teased him. He learned about men by listening to her, and about himself not a little by loving her. She influenced him deeply; her way of speaking influenced not only his, but also his way of writing: so that when, years later, Rodney West read his best novel,[C] he rather grimly said that there were two people who could have written that book in that way and Ivor Marlay was only one of them. She polished him, and she smoothed down the sharp dogmatisms and conceits which had so far taken the place of conversation with him. Thus was Aunt Percy proved right in thinking that there were other women beside himself, he shouldn’t wonder! Aunt Percy would have liked Magdalen; he would have invited her to lunch at the Bath Club now and then, and as they sat down he would have asked her brusquely: “Well, and how’s that young man of mine? Bit above himself, I shouldn’t wonder.” Magdalen would have made Aunt Percy laugh.{108}

CHAPTER VI

From that memorable night in July when Ivor first dined with Magdalen he almost literally saw no one else during the ensuing twelve months and more—unless Gerald Trevor happened to insist, as he occasionally did. Ivor simply had no interest in any one else throughout that time; for it is the way of certain natures to show their consummate interest in one person by the neglect of all others. And so Ivor missed many exciting happenings, for the summer of 1913 was a very eventful one in many ways.

The season of 1913 was, as every one remembers, more than usually brilliant. Mayfair was brilliant, nothing disturbed Mayfair—and Mayfair disturbed nothing; which curious phenomenon was explained by thinking men by the rather far-fetched theory that Mayfair does not really matter in England, that it is not England: that, in fact, Mayfair does not represent England any more than, say, the Duke of Manchester represents Manchester. But, all the same, young men make fortunes by writing about it, Gentlemen with Dusters by reviling it, gallant Colonels by describing it, and the London Mail circulates tremendously.

Mayfair was the centre of England, America, and Palestine. And it was observed with pleasure that the young Prince of Wales was the only royal person since Charles II. who even looked like being “in” Society. It was the season of very brilliant débutantes, daring matrons, and startling dowagers. Of course suburban people went about saying nasty things about them, silly things like: “You can’t tell a débutante from a déclassée nowadays,” and thought they had{109} made an epigram. Gentlewomen of the middle sort were horrified by the rumours concerning the immoralities and perversities of the lovely young ladies whose photographs they breathlessly looked at in the weekly papers; and a woman had only to be found dead in an elegant flat in Maida Vale for the Press to report: “Strange Death of Society Woman. Believed to have been due to Drugs.” It was commonly said that the number of ‘society women’ who took drugs was unbelievable, while as for drink!... One way and another “society women” began to come in for a lot of contempt. Chorus-girls despised them, and wanted to know what would happen to them if they did Such Things. Young men were very cynical that year.

Every one tried to learn the tango that season, and then every one decided that it wasn’t really a ballroom dance. Young women began to look like the portraits that the fashionable portrait-painters were painting of them—lovely but “untemperamental”; and middle-aged men shook their heads over them, saying that these young women seemed to have no temperament. But the young women knew better, for whereas their Victorian mothers had baffled men with reticence, they baffled men with candour; and every now and then one of them would commit adultery at the top of her voice. [Whereupon—a divorce has been arranged and will shortly take place. Letters: “Dear Bubbles” her lawyers write, “why do you not come back to me? I have always tried to do my duty to you, I have always tried to make a comfortable home for you, and now that I am panting to see you, you won’t come near me. Please, Bubbly dear, why are you so cold to me? Yrs. ever adoring Bunny.” His lawyers passionately retort: “Nothing will induce me to return to you. I have been thinking this out carefully, and have decided never to live with you again. We are too different, temperamentally and financially. Yrs. sincerely, Derek Maltravers.” Restitution of Conjugal Rights. A rest. Nothing doing about Restitution of Conjugal{110} Rights. Formal Adultery proved. Decree nisi. Another rest. Decree absolute. It’s only a trick, of course—but it needs money. There’s nothing at all to prevent poor people doing it—except, of course, that it needs money. Mr. Justice Darling might make a joke about that. He makes such good jokes.] Dancing increased in popularity and violence, night-clubs became fashionable, and young ladies were sometimes seen drunk in them. Many Americans settled in London that season, saying they were crazy about it, but most of them have gone since, crazier than ever about it. The slits disappeared from the back of men’s jackets, but top-hats and gent.’s morning-suits were still worn.

And Lady Lois Lamprey was married to a companionable little earl, a notable wedding that lit the world from Peru to Samarcand. (Samarcand was just then becoming fashionable among those who go down to the sea in poetry). But she was still called Lady Lois. “You have made it so difficult for people to realise it’s your maiden name,” said her mother the marchioness severely. And Lady Lois was loved by many young men, but she loved not one. But they were wonderfully revenged by the artists who painted portraits of her and the writers who wrote novels about her, in which poor Lois was always shown as a femme fatale par excellence with a heart of jade and innumerable lovers. The Hon. Virginia Tracy became more than ever famous for her beauty, clothes and witty silences. Also she painted portraits of her women friends in bed, and made a few trips in a thing called an aeroplane: about which her mother, Lady Carnal, told the Press that she was very annoyed indeed, and that Virginia should not do these things, for she had a weak heart; but there was somehow a misunderstanding about that weak heart, it was never exactly located, the Northcliffe Press saying it was Lady Carnal’s and the Rest that it was Virginia’s, and the question was not finally settled until Lady Carnal’s sudden death a year{111} later. Virginia almost got married twice, but finally made a brilliant coup de cœur by marrying an American during a week-end at Bognor. Which, Lois said, is the kind of thing that might happen to any one who wastes week-ends at Bognor. He was a millionaire, however, which was more than her little earl was.... And there was a wonderful party of celebration at the Mont Agel, one in a chain of many wonderful parties. And then, later, every one went to Venice....

That is more or less how it all appeared to Ivor in his happy corner. And every now and then he would dine with Gerald Trevor at the Café Royal, and he would hear of great dinners and dances and potins, of the hostesses that were made and the hearts that were broken, of the amazing progress of the legend of Lady Lois and of the recklessness of Virginia. But it didn’t seem to Ivor that he was missing much; it seemed to Ivor that he would be missing very much if he hadn’t met Magdalen.{112}

CHAPTER VII

A year had passed, from one July day to its elder brother. And Ivor had not realised the wonder of that special day in July, he had no head for dates—until, calling to see her that afternoon, she suddenly held her date-book-calendar under his nose and very slowly tore off the leaf of the previous day, when behold! there, below the date of that day, was writ largely the name “Ivor!”

“Our birthday,” she told him gravely. “Birthday of that night last year when first you came to dinner....”

“Yes, how thin you were, Ivor! But you’ll be much fatter after to-night, for we will have a wonderful dinner somewhere in the country, because it’s our birthday. I hate my own so much, but I’m sentimental about ours....”

Now there was a mood of Magdalen’s which complained of Ivor’s “splendid isolation,” of his present way of not seeing any one else. Magdalen saw quite a number of other people: it was very difficult for her not to, for the world was full of men and women who, on given occasions, seemed unable to “touch” food unless Magdalen was there to “touch” it with them. At first she had seemed not to realise Ivor’s present way of life; and then there had come a time when she made a gesture against it. But man is not warned by gestures alone, so she had to clothe hers with words. And even then Ivor would not be brought to see that it mattered one way or the other, whether he saw people{113} or didn’t. He read a great deal, he said. And he played rackets.... She teased him with her disfavour, he mocked her with his love. And then one day she got annoyed with him, and he with her.

They were at luncheon at his flat, and she asked him what he had done the evening before. She asked as though she didn’t know the answer, but that did not deter Ivor from giving it.

“Its description, however, doesn’t make for much conversation,” said Magdalen.

“I want to know,” she dangerously said, “why, whenever I can’t dine with you, much as I’d like to, you must always dine alone. I feel there must be a reason for that....”

“That’s all very well,” she protested vividly. “But don’t you see, my dear, that it’s very unfair, your absurd isolation? (a) It’s unfair to me; (b) It’s unfair to yourself; and (c) It’s frightfully unfair to the countless people whom you deprive of the charm of your countenance and company, to say nothing of your conversation....”

“Besides,” she said plantively, “your idiotic isolation is making me what’s called a ‘marked’ woman. And if it’s all the same to you, Ivor, I’d just as soon not be a ‘marked’ woman. I hate being thought of as a woman who snatches young men from their natural surroundings and keeps them in close confinement for fear of competition, if any. To please me, Ivor ...” she suddenly pleaded.

“You’re pretending, Magdalen!” he accused her sulkily. “None of those things matter and half of them aren’t true, especially about your being a ‘marked’ woman because of me. Those things are only true of people who live in restaurants, and you and I have scarcely been in one together since I saw you with{114} Rodney West that night.” He was very young and very sulky.

“What is it all about, Magdalen?” he asked miserably. A year had passed, and this was their first scene—their first scene! No ordinary year, that....

“But, Ivor, I don’t want you to wake up one morning—to find no Magdalen and no friends!” She jerked the thing out....

His eyes would not meet hers, he looked blackly at the table, waiting.... If only he would meet her eyes she would make it all right, he would understand. She knew herself so well ... sometimes. But he was so young!

“There’s a fatality about my kind of love,” Magdalen said softly, miserably, heroically. “It ends.” And in that moment Magdalen loved Ivor as she had never before loved him; she was like that.

“Then if you do,” he said very slowly, “what the devil are you talking about?”

Magdalen leant forward, so that there was nothing but their breath between her earnest face and his truculent face.

“I adore you—mark that, Ivor! Maybe I don’t love you as a dairymaid would love you, but I’m sure that into one month I cram as much love for you as a dairymaid would give in a lifetime; her way is called ‘simplicity,’ and is supposed to be divine. But I am divine in my own way. I adore you. If I were an{115} epithet and you were a noun I’d follow you about on every page of the book of life—until you were oh so tired of me! But I get ideas....”

“Women have moods,” she whispered. “And let me tell you about these moods, Ivor, so that you will learn not to madden the women who will love you. Women have moods every now and then, they can’t help it and no one can help them. You knew that? You poor lamb, you don’t know anything really.... These moods, let me tell you, are vast and inexplicable and untidy and terrible. They devastate everything. Particularly, they devastate men, these moods. I’ve seen them destroy better men than you, Ivor. They change a woman’s personality, they give her a new mind for that short time, a new and unhappy mind, as every one is unhappy who sees too clearly—but lovers go on being lovers, not understanding anything but that it’s a damned nuisance, not understanding that this woman’s mood can change a lover into a man and a man into dross. Women are much given to wanting to speak the truth in this mood, for hysteria seems to act that way—but they generally don’t speak it, life being what it is, and that’s what makes them so evil and bad-tempered to the men they love, but who insist on loving them at any hour of the day and night, regardless of sense or sensibility....”

Now a mood is like a cloud against the sky, it comes and goes and leaves no mark. But that is a lie, for a mood is like nothing else at all.

The Hallidays went abroad that August, or rather they went to Deauville, and Euphemia Halliday lent Magdalen her house near Sonning for that month. In{116} the last few months Euphemia had discovered a surprising affection for Magdalen, to whom she had always referred to as “poor little Magdalen! she is so witty, you know!” Euphemia always referred to women poorer than herself as “poor little——,” and gave it to be understood that she liked to be kind to people. But she had never before been “kind” to or about Magdalen, and Magdalen was quite puzzled about it until she heard that Euphemia had quarrelled with Lois Lamprey, for Euphemia was full of caddish little enthusiasms about women, and as one collapsed she must quickly make another. However, Magdalen couldn’t help being charming to her, and Euphemia gushed over with the gift of her house near Sonning for August.

“A gift,” Magdalen pathetically told Ivor, “for which she will ask me twenty to thirty guineas a week when she comes back—and get it, what’s more! I’m the most easily cheated woman I know, Ivor.”

“That’s just your kind of vanity,” he pointed out. “You’re the vainest woman in the world, really—but it’s a private vanity, and doesn’t hurt any one but yourself, for it consists of letting horrible people impose on you while you just quietly despise them all to yourself.”

“This house we were speaking of,” said Magdalen severely, “is a charming house. What I mean is that it has every modern comfort and convenience, and duplicates of each. There is a bathroom to each bedroom and a divan in each sitting-room, telephones in every corner and servants round every corner. And it’s just far enough from the river to be out of the reach of passing footlight-favourites and energetic men wearing Leander ties. One will be very comfortable there, Ivor.”

“One would prefer a cottage, maybe,” she said thoughtfully. “My husband—with whose tastes you seem to agree so well, Ivor—has always told me that I could wear a cottage very becomingly.{117}”

“Do you know,” Ivor broke in, “that that man seems to me the nicest man in the world, from what you always say of him.”

“But indeed he is,” she cried. “He’s a dear, my Tristram. I married him when I was eighteen, and I still say it, although I’ve been begging him to divorce me ever since. But he’s too wise to do that, and though he has offered to let me divorce him, I’m not quite cad enough to do that—not until he wants to marry some one else, anyway, which I’m afraid is improbable. And when he comes home he stays at the club and we dine together, and I have to confess that being married to him has prevented me from marrying some awful men in my time.... Oh, Ivor!” she suddenly clapped her hands with an idea, “let’s take a flight of fancy and imagine you going to see Tristram one day—he would like you, you’re his sort of man; and let’s suppose you told him what you’ve threatened to tell him as soon as you see him, that if he divorced me or let me divorce him you would marry me. Whereupon he would first of all ask you if you could keep me in the luxury to which I’ve been accustomed. On your saying rather sulkily that you could, he would further ask you what grounds you had for thinking you would make me happy. Then you’d look sulkier than ever, and mutter something about my loving you (which indeed I do). After a silence of a few seconds, spent by both of you in emptying the drinks which Tristram had ordered on hearing that a man had come to see him about his wife—after this short, impressive silence, he would say, quite gently, ‘But she loved me, too!’ Now he’s much older than you, Ivor, and your natural deference for age would be fighting a battle with your stern conviction that the two cases weren’t at all parallel—but before you could explain that he would add, ever so genially: ‘Suppose, Marlay, we talk of it in a year from to-day—how would that do?’ At that you wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, especially if you were sitting in his{118} club; and so you would spend the rest of the time in asking him about the extremely foreign countries he had visited, and then you’d both forget all about me and probably lunch together....”

“This house we were speaking of,” said Ivor, “seems to me a charming house....”

CHAPTER VIII

That August, Ivor Marlay’s car—as swift and handsome a two-seater as any could be at that primitive time of motoring—became almost an institution to the little boys along the London road, from Sonning to London and from London to Sonning, which is by no means the same distance. The conventions had naturally to be observed in some degree, but what time he didn’t spend at Camelot was certainly spent in getting to or away from it. Many people came down to stay with Magdalen, but now and again there would be a divine hiatus between those who had just gone and those who were about to come, and it was Ivor’s business to fill that hiatus as speedily as he might. Magdalen was very good at arranging the frequent occurrence of these hiatuses, but not, she insisted, half so good as Ivor was in filling them up, for his car seemed to swing into the drive within a minute of her having telephoned to London to say: “There is bed and board at Camelot, Ivor....”

But of what happened at Camelot near Sonning during that brilliant August of 1913 when England really showed the world what it could do in the way of Augusts: how those days, stolen from Magdalen’s friends, days of leisure and love and talking—but how they talked, and seriously!—passed like fantasies of sunlight, so bright and quick: how they walked through the lush of August nights in the gardens of Camelot, “towards the moon and back,” and were content in this plenitude of companionship: and how they would sometimes be sad in passing silences, each knowing that these hours could have no parallel and{120} that nothing repeats itself except regret: and how each would sometimes mystify and torture the other by a shadow over the face.... And how, among others, came Rodney West, K.C., as calmly genial as ever, and how the great friendship between him and Magdalen, estranged this past year, was plain to see: and how people wondered at this perfect attainment of peace with honour, but Ivor was glad of it: and how they stole nights together until sunrise, and so wonderfully that even a sunrise by Turner would have been a colourless thing beside the dawn of their awakening. It was all very good, this way and that way and every way....

But to tell of what happened at Camelot near Sonning during that all-too-short month would fill a book. Whereas our way lies, less lyrically, in the direction of disenchantment and death. There’s a pinnacle reached (by the adventurous) and life breathlessly surveyed thence, and found to be but the servant of this moment on this pinnacle; but then there is the coming down from that high estate, two deities becoming every moment more mortal, the one suppliant and the other satiate, or both satiate, which is perhaps even more horrible. Mediæval words there are to fit the case, full-blooded words like treachery and betrayal and dishonour, but nowadays a broken vow does not mean a broken head; it means a headache to the one and a long walk for the other, “to get rid of all this....”

The climax was at Camelot, it was there they climbed the ultimate mountain. But the descent took them several months, and the New Year of 1914 was come before the thing was over. And the damnable part of it was that it was he who seemed to change, and not she!

She remained, as always, his perfect friend; to the naked eye nothing strange could be seen to be happening in her, there were noticeable about her not one of those{121} subtle signs that are supposed to mark a tired woman; and none of the primary emotional stars were seen to stop in their courses. But Ivor’s eyes were not naked, they were jaundiced with love, and he saw that something was happening in Magdalen, from October onwards. He saw it, but of course he didn’t believe it; and he was unpleasant, in the vague way in which men are unpleasant about vague suspicions. In fact, of all the mistakes that a man can make in trying to win back a woman, Ivor neglected to make not one: from suspicion to bitterness by way of silence, from bitterness to suspicion by way of indifference, and a lot of other unpleasantries as well. He was going through hell, and there is nothing more tedious than the company of a sensitive young man who is going through hell....

But Magdalen, if she thought that, thought it philosophically. It was most usual in men.... She bore with him patiently, insufferable though he was. “Waste, waste!” he would say, among other silly things. “To think that all this has been waste!” She assured him that it wasn’t waste, that fine things aren’t wasted. He rounded on her about the “fine” things, and she was quite silent, and then he was ashamed. Poor Ivor! He was spared nothing, for she would tell him of her great affection for him, the like of which she had never felt for man or woman before, it was so great and understanding and unending—the only thing about me that is unending, she said bitterly. She shouldn’t have told him of her affection, she should have kept it secret, she should have pretended to have grown to detest him; so that he could have turned on her and cursed her and gone his way. Poor Magdalen! She couldn’t pretend. And it was her avowed fondness that continually gave him hope, it was the great rock on which he built castle after castle, each to tumble down at sight of her lustreless eyes in his arms....

Magdalen couldn’t help herself—how could she, she was as she was!—but she did try to help him. She was the confidante of his misery about her; she was the{122} great friend to whom he told his griefs about her; and she it was who tried to soothe him about the imperfections of his mistress. But she could never convince him that his mistress was worthless, too used in the traffic of love to be worthy of being so loved; and she utterly failed to convince him that life was worth living in spite of the inconstancy of one wretched woman....

An entirely unmoral woman Magdalen was, but she had a firm etiquette of the heart: and this made her pre-eminent in a man’s regrets, for that etiquette of the heart is the rarest of all things—unless it is, however, that it is rarely observable in good women simply because of the many other commendable qualities that crowd one’s vision of them. Magdalen was a woman of honour in everything but honour. And Magdalen grew in Ivor’s mind to symbolise civilised women, in all the grace of kindness and imperfection, but he was to find that civilised women aren’t really like that; he was to find that the nicest women grow vindictive when they are bored (it is understood that men, when they are bored, just go away, extremely strong and silent); and that their unwilling constancy is often the cause of innumerable little antagonisms and caddishness, and that they are seldom dignified in their sudden dislike of an intimacy. They wish to draw back, that’s what it is. But Magdalen wished only to go on, “to find out.” And Ivor, to these later women, would speak of Magdalen, revenging himself on their crudities. He would not refer to her by name, of course, he would just suggest her somehow, a nameless and polite figure of his past, or he would rather bluntly say, “a woman I knew once,” and fix his dark eyes almost contemptuously on his listener—who perhaps, it was not impossible, knew that he was speaking of Magdalen Gray; and maybe she pitied him for being a fool about such a woman, or maybe she vaguely respected him for she didn’t quite know what. But, anyway, it was after he had known Magdalen Gray{123} that Ivor grew to be vaguely spoken about as one of those men who are “nice about” women: a not unpleasing distinction, though of course vague....

Thus, tiresome though he was throughout that winter, Magdalen bore with him. It was he who finally could not bear with her.... Had she been unfaithful to him? He was her friend—that is what she said. But he knew that he was not her friend—not yet, anyway. He didn’t know how to be.... Had she been unfaithful to him? “What would you like me to answer?” she asked him, in the light of the “very shaded” lamp.

“If it will cure you of loving me,” she said thoughtfully, “I will tell you that I have been unfaithful to you....”

“If it will not cure you but only hurt you,” she said thoughtfully, “I will tell you that I have not been unfaithful to you....”

“It does not matter, anyway,” she said. “This infidelity business ... between you and me.”

And then they were silent for a long time, thinking how it didn’t matter—anyway. But of course it didn’t matter, this “infidelity business”—it was just a thing of the body, almost an accident, but love was a thing of the spirit. Love just swept it aside, love was everything, love took no stock of infidelity at all. Some women simply couldn’t be bodily faithful, that’s what it was; thank Heavens there were only a few women like that, but they were splendid in other ways, divine ways, and love must overlook infidelity. But love simply wouldn’t soar, it descended into the abyss and consorted with infidelity, and together they made a maelstrom that whizzed about young Ivor’s head and sickened him of life and love and himself—particularly of himself. For his supreme misery was not that Magdalen might have been unfaithful to him, but that he was unfaithful to himself.

She had wanted to be ravished, like a woman in a dream; and when the dream faded he found a friend, just a friend....{124}

CHAPTER IX

In January, 1914, Ivor caught a cold in the head. He had always been remarkably immune from such little ailments, and had only once in his life been ill, of a vicious pneumonia long ago at school. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with a cold in the head, he just took quinine and continued to blow his nose. One day he produced his cold to Magdalen, by special request, for he had avoided seeing her for a week; and Magdalen said that he had caught the thing because he was run down and that he must go away. She pointed out that he was the luckiest man in the world, with or without a cold in the head.

“You’re free, Ivor!” she said. “A man with no ties and plenty of money—my dear, the world’s for you! And here you are, hanging about London in January, when you might be in all the lovely warm places in the world, having marvellous adventures in the sun!”

But he couldn’t go away—and she knew, with pathetic impatience, that he couldn’t. And then, in that bitter loneliness, he was sorry for himself. And his cold continued.

Now there came a day that January when he had not seen Magdalen for two weeks. The time was past when he could see Magdalen. He wanted too much—anyway, it was too much now!—and he couldn’t pretend any more to put up with a little. January was doing its worst that particular day; the rain fell icy cold, and every hour or so it would beat down with feverish fury; and the angry damp seemed to penetrate his flat and bones, there was little comfort in his blazing fire—even{125} had he been restful enough to sit before it for any length of time. Outside, Upper Brook Street was quiet and sodden; every now and then a bare-headed manservant would scuttle under an umbrella to the pillar-box; and towards lunch-time several cars—from his window above they looked like large, fat, wet flies crawling in the glistening dirt—swung along from Park Lane towards Grosvenor Square, full of people going to eat each other’s food. And soon they too would be going south, and Magdalen among them maybe....

Towards a darkened four o’clock he thought it might do him good to go out and walk a little in the rain; he had a sudden longing to stand bare-headed in the rain. It would certainly do him good.... There was a throbbing pain in the back of his head. At least it seemed to be in the back of his head, or to have its headquarters there, for the whole of his head was heavy with it. Not a serious pain, but irritating. Every few minutes he would shake his head as though to shake away the pain, but it just went on irritating him. This damnable cold in the head.... He crushed and swallowed two aspirins, and went out.

He enjoyed it, this aimless wandering in the rain. It was fun to walk slackly along while every one else was hurrying by, anxious to get somewhere. He wasn’t anxious to get anywhere! The men looked awful in the rain, he thought; they smelt of it, and looked like weeds that in their hearts suspected as much; but the hurrying little women looked attractive and pathetic, and oh so serious! There was one, a girl with a white serious face and downcast eyes, whom he would have liked to speak to, but she was swallowed up in the crowds that were waiting for buses at Hyde Park Corner. He walked on, towards Knightsbridge. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. Maybe he might go into the Hyde Park Hotel and have tea; he didn’t generally take tea, but this afternoon he just might. But somehow he forgot to go as far as the Hyde Park Hotel, and found himself at Magdalen’s door in Wilton{126} Place. He was in Knightsbridge, after all, and he might just as well have tea with Magdalen as alone at the Hyde Park Hotel.

“Now that’s very disappointing, Foster,” Ivor said. “And it’s raining, too!”

“Yes, indeed it is, sir,” the man said sympathetically. “If you would care to come in I could give you some tea, sir—and it might be that madam will be in herself soon, though she left no word as to when she would be coming in.”

“It’s cruelly wet,” Foster said thoughtfully, helping Ivor off with his overcoat.

The tea question was settled, then—there, in the “room of state!” No peaches in it now, though! and no Magdalen either! But he was not waiting for Magdalen. He hadn’t really expected to find her at home. He had wanted some tea, that’s all—and, after all, he had so often refused tea in this house that it was only fair to come to it on the one occasion when he did want tea. And now that he had had it he was just waiting to finish a cigarette, and away he’d go. But, it was so warm and pleasant in that “room of state,” he smoked another.... Six o’clock it was now. Well, he wasn’t waiting for Magdalen, anyway. God knew where she was! And he had nothing to say to her even if she did come in.... The half-hour struck. And Ivor, in a sudden wild fury, threw away the cigarette he was about to light, and banged out of the house.

He knew very well where Magdalen was. Of course. Magdalen wasn’t the sort of woman to hang about just anywhere all the time between lunch and dinner—like Virginia and Lois and that crowd, who either sat about for hours in one place or dashed about to a thousand places in an afternoon, doing nothing at all. Magdalen was not like that, she either had a purpose or she hadn’t; and if she hadn’t, she sat at home reading a book. She read a lot of books. Hadn’t Gerald Trevor said of her,{127} so long ago, that Magdalen didn’t loiter unless there was something to loiter for? She loiters actively, he had said. And Gerald was always right about the women he wasn’t in love with, he would always make a very good husband to the wrong wife.... But he would have liked to have seen her, if only for a minute. Maybe she would have taken away this pain in the back of his head, or anyway told him what to do with it. Extraordinary how helpless he felt without her! But he would go to a doctor to-morrow, if he wasn’t better. He had never been to a doctor about anything before, but he would easily find one, they were everywhere. He would ring up Magdalen and ask her, she knew several. Maybe if he went back to Wilton Place now, maybe she.... But he strode on. He had forgotten to button his overcoat on leaving her house, and the icy wet wind billowed it out round his tall figure, it added to the confusion of his passage through the dense evening crowds about Hyde Park Corner. No fun in walking in the rain now! It was horribly ugly, this sodden darkness. He felt ill and weak, but he couldn’t find a taxi, he had to jostle through the crowd. Black and furious he looked, and several people stared round at the tall lowering young man with the defiant nose, who strode viciously past them in a billowing overcoat....

He dressed with extreme care and pomp that evening. He had a comical idea that this throbbing pain in the back of his head would respect him more if he put on a dress-suit. One should always be taut and rigid and soigné, he thought. Magdalen said that too. The homely dinner jacket wouldn’t impress any pain, there was no dignity in it. It suited Argentines very well, le smoking. But Englishmen were made of sterner stuff.

It had been his intention to dine at his club, and he{128} was well down the slope of Saint James’s Street before he sharply changed his mind. He loathed his club, or any club. Lot of cow-eyed men. So he turned into Arlington Street and into the Ritz. It was still raining.

In the restaurant he found a corner table, by the windows that face the Green Park. It was a table for four, and may or may not have been reserved, but as the young gentleman (who happened to be quite unconscious of the diabolical frown on his forehead) seemed entirely oblivious of every protest that was made, the second maître d’hôtel shrugged his shoulders and let him have it. The second maître d’hôtel lost nothing by this complaisance, however, for Ivor ordered magnificently. There was naturally no question of offering him the table d’hôte; you can’t singly take a table for four and then play about with a table d’hôte. But the second maître d’hôtel found him every bit as good as four ordinary diners, and much less trouble; and he ordered his waiters to take an interest in le pauvre gigolo....

Ivor also drank magnificently. He had a vague remembrance of some one having once told him that champagne was the best remedy for any kind of cold, and so he drank a bottle. And, because he had drunk a bottle, he also broached a half-bottle. Krug, 1907.

And then a few brandies, ... without, he considered, the slightest effect. It seemed to require a devilish lot of concentration to get drunk, and concentration was just what he hadn’t got. So he gave up the attempt, and after having stood on the hotel steps in Arlington Street for several minutes, he thought to ask George Prest, the commissionaire, if he had any striking and original ideas as to what to do in London on a rainy night.

As Ivor was about to climb into it, he thrust his top-hat into the commissionaire’s hand. He pressed it on him.

“Keep it,” Ivor urged. “It’s quite a good one. My head wants air to-night and the damn thing keeps on getting between it and air. And I’d like you to have it, George. You can shove it into the cloak-room if you like, but if I were you I’d keep it. It’s not a bad hat, as hats go. You’ll need it when you retire....”

The Empire did not hold him for long. He tried, from the promenade, to see what was happening on the stage, but he found that it hurt his eyes to look, they were hot and burning. So he walked up and down for a while, and then sat down on one of the red plush sofas outside the bar. One should take an interest in human nature, he thought, and so he tried to take an interest in the passing crowd. But it was not impressive, that crowd. Of the men, several half-familiar faces nodded to him, and he decided that he must have known them at school. He watched them, and saw they hadn’t changed at all. They were a little pinker and less pimply, that’s all. That’s because pimples grow inwards, he thought. And they were talking to the women whom it had been their ambition, when at school, to talk to. Just like Transome. Dear old Transome.... Later on, when they were a bit more drunk, the women would get money from them, and there would be fumbling with love. Then the women would get more money from them. And to-morrow they would say that they had had a marvellous time—and it would be true, too! But if these harlots, thought Ivor, had anything even remotely resembling brains, and could hold a man when he was stone-cold-sober as well as when he was blind-drunk, they would long ago have been respectably married wives. A harlot is{130} only interesting when she had won her way to respectability. All good harlots die in Mayfair, he thought. But these are no good at their jobs, that’s what it is, and that’s why they’re such crashing bores.

By a quarter-past ten he was in Leicester Square. And by half-past long strides had taken him past Hyde Park Corner—again! Yes, he was going to see Magdalen. He felt awfully ill, not only in his head, but all over, a burning kind of illness, and he wanted to tell Magdalen exactly how ill he was. His skin felt like a damp and unclean shirt. It was still raining, but not much, and it was nice walking bare-headed in the cool rain. It was the nicest part of this awful day, this quick walk. She would see how ill he was, and be sorry for him. Besides, he wanted her to tell him of a doctor; he would have to see a doctor, and to-night, maybe. Had influenza, probably—or worse. That thought pleased him, for she would be frightfully sorry for him. He longed for that, for her to be sorry for him....

Yes, she was in. From the road he could see the dim lights behind the curtains of the two windows of the “room of state.” Dim lights, naturally. Magdalen and he had always had dim lights when they were alone there, on that divan in the corner. Her eyes hated any light except sunlight, she said. That shaded lamp of hers—that “very shaded lamp”—gave a soft, sweet light, he could see the soft light of it in his mind as he stood in the deserted road and looked up at the windows. Then a taxi jerked round from Knightsbridge and moved him on to the pavement by the door. Well, it didn’t matter if she wasn’t alone. He wouldn’t go up, he only wanted to see her for a minute, just to ask her about a doctor. She would be sure to see him, she had never refused yet, anyway. If she did, he didn’t know what he would do, maybe he would go to Saint George’s Hospital nearby, disguised as an accident. The pain had somehow got to his side now, and hurt him when he breathed.

He rang the bell, and waited for a long time, but no{131} one came to the door. He rang again, and heard the tinkle of the bell in the basement. And the third time he rang viciously, keeping his thumb on the button—and Magdalen stood in the open doorway!

“Foster must have gone out,” she explained, staring at him wide-eyed.... “What is it, sweet?”

“I just thought——” Ivor mumbled, as he stumbled past her into the narrow hall.

She closed the door softly behind them; and then she turned to him with a concerned, business-like air. It was so unlike Ivor, to come thus! He stood staring at her limply, with his back to the wall, limply. He just stared at her, with a ridiculous smile. And Magdalen saw the bright pink patches on the sallow cheeks—and how cadaverous he looked!—and the dark eyes bright with fever. And her own grew vivid with concern, she shook him by the shoulder to wake him to his condition, for he was standing against the wall smiling stupidly at her.

“Ivor, how dare you be out in this state!” she cried vividly. “You look frightfully ill, you ought to be in bed....” And with the palm of her hand she lightly brushed his forehead, and the fever of it seemed to stab her with anxiety. But it was cool to him, a white hand of ice on his forehead, adorable ice, and he caught this hand by the wrist and pressed it to his burning skin. He forgot his illness, and the pain in his side which caught at every breath. He was wonderfully comfortable with her, luxurious in the scrutiny of her concern. He wasn’t listening to her quick words, his silly smile bade her to be quiet, ... and, with her palm still pressed by him to his forehead, he caught her round the body with one arm and held her to him, raising her off her feet so that he could kiss her lips. Ice again, ice. He did not look into her eyes, he was afraid to, for his kisses brought no lustre to them now; and how dexterous she was now! somehow luring him to her cheek, where{132} lies only the sulky stuff of love. Magdalen couldn’t pretend, ever. Nervous words of comfort came from her, a small laugh, a tiny, helpless gesture. Dear Magdalen! And so he thought to comfort her for the boredom of his kisses.

His illness was quite forgot—but not by her. She was silent, racked by anxiety as to what to do with him.

“You see, Magdalen,” he whispered dazedly, “life is a most awful mess without you. It’s caddish of me to make you responsible for all the beauty in life, but I can’t help it. I must tell you. You’ve got no right, you know, to be so admirable to a man....”

“And then,” he said suddenly, “to be so admirable to another man.” He wanted to go on, to say something caddish....

“But I haven’t another friend, Ivor!” But she was thinking only of what to do with him.

“No?” his eyes searched her face naïvely. “Well, then, I’ll be your friend, indeed I will. Later on, though. For I somehow can’t yet get used to not being your lover, it’s stupid of me. But I’ll be your friend, Magdalen, you can rely on me.”

“Silly Ivor!” she laughed at him nervously, taking his arm. His absurd seriousness unnerved her. “Why, you’ll have your work cut out to be your own friend, in the state you are in! You’ve got influenza, that’s what you’ve got. And you’ll go straight off to bed, please, straight away, and I’ll send you a doctor. You didn’t think, I suppose, of seeing a doctor, Ivor?”

“Stay a moment,” she commanded, and flew quickly up the stairs. Ivor, with his back to the wall, closed his eyes and tried to breathe evenly, {133}in the hope that the pain in his side was an illusion. Maybe it was ... but it wasn’t. He opened his eyes; she was coming down again, wrapping something up in paper.

“Hot-water bottle,” she explained, giving it to him. “I’m sure you haven’t got one in your flat.”

“The correct procedure is,” she said, “to fill it with boiling water, then go to bed and lay it on your tummy, and go to sleep. Some people say it’s better to put it under your feet, but I’ve always inclined to the tummy school. One sweats.”

“Now, Ivor, no more nonsense!” she almost stamped her foot as he still made to delay. “And I’ll ring up Dr. Harvey as soon as you’ve gone, to go and see you. He’ll be with you in a very few minutes.” She almost pushed him to the door: deciding that she would follow him to his flat as soon as she had telephoned Dr. Harvey.

He wouldn’t let her open the door, he blocked her way, and his fumbling with it strained her nerves. But it was open at last. And without a word he stumbled quickly out.

“You’ve decorated my life, anyway,” he called abruptly back from the pavement, and strode away. She saw the paper round the hot-water bottle flutter down to the glistening pavement. Shivering from the damp cold, she watched the tall figure from the open doorway. Where had he left his hat, she wondered? She hadn’t realised he had no hat. She began to run after him to tell him to come back indoors while she tried to find a taxi, but at that moment she saw him catch one at the Knightsbridge corner....

Ivor, with his hand on the door-handle of the taxi, suddenly found it impossible to direct the man to his flat. He suddenly found he couldn’t bear the loneliness of his flat. And he quite forgot about Magdalen’s doctor.

“Drive,” he told the man, “to Mr. Trevor’s flat in Savile Row. It’s a charming flat, on the third floor....”

He’s certain not to know it, Ivor thought, and in{134} that case I’ll go home. He shifted the responsibility of his intrusion on Gerald on to the man.

Well, thought Ivor, taxis are stranger than fiction. He lay back and closed his eyes. The paper had dropped from the hot-water bottle, and he hugged the rubber thing to him, smiling at the idea of Magdalen.... God, how awful he felt! how his head racked him, and his breathing too!

The taxi pulled up, and after a while the driver jumped out to see to his fare, who seemed to make no movement. He found his fare a heap in the corner, his eyes closed.

“Mr. Trevor’s flat, sir,” said the man sympathetically. And he touched his fare’s arm.

“All right, all right!” Ivor impatiently murmured, and managed to stumble out. The man picked up the hot-water bottle from the pavement and handed it to him; he was a pleasant man.

“Look here, I’m not drunk,” Ivor found sudden energy to protest. “But I’ve got pneumonia, if that’s any good to you....”

“All I want to know is,” he said weakly, “whether you think Mr. Trevor’s in or out? You say you were his valet, so you ought to know.”

It took Ivor a long time to get up to the third floor. He felt worse every second, it was hell to breathe. Doctors ought to be like pillar-boxes, he crossly thought, they ought to be at every corner. Most of them are red enough, but they’re not at every corner. They play bridge every evening.... Gerald would be annoyed with him, dear Gerald! But what could he do, he couldn’t be alone any more, he couldn’t bear it. He ought to be a man, of course.... Trevor’s door{135} swayed before him, he couldn’t find the bell somehow, and so he banged on it with his fist. Where the deuce had he left his stick, the one Magdalen had given him?

“Hallo, Ivor!” Trevor’s voice said genially. He wasn’t annoyed to see him, then!... And then Trevor caught him. Ivor had crumpled up. Trevor, silently, almost carried him into his sitting-room. Ivor tried to explain, but it hurt him so to breathe.... Then he just managed to pull himself together, and stood up straight, and laughed weakly to see the hot-water bottle hanging from his hand. He waved it at Trevor.

“You’re in a state, old boy. Take it easy for a moment.” Trevor’s voice was quiet and kind. He tried to help Ivor to the wide sofa just beside him, but Ivor still stood swaying.

“Look here,” he tried to explain. “I’m not drunk, not really. I’ve got pneumonia.”

“Oh, can’t I!” said Ivor weakly. And he flopped as he was on to the sofa, and closed his eyes.

Trevor was very busy the next few minutes. Ivor seemed unconscious, his breathing came in quick, rasping gasps, and Trevor could feel the fever of him when he touched him. In a moment he had off the wet shoes and overcoat, and had him covered up with a rug and an eiderdown from his bedroom. Ivor still clutched his hot-water bottle.

“Well, I’m damned!” said Trevor softly, beside him; and he stretched out to the telephone which was on a little table by the divan. Ivor opened his{136} eyes to stare round him, and then put a hand feebly across them, for the light hurt them. Trevor switched out the lights, the fire was light enough. He picked up the telephone again. Ivor stared at him.

“That’s all right, old man. Be quiet now. Love to have the honour of saving your life.”

“I’ve had this before,” Ivor just murmured. “At school. Not so badly, though.... But they thought I was done, ... and said prayers for me in the school-chapel.... ‘For one of us who is now at death’s door.’ ... Everyone was very touched....”

“Pooh, that’s nothing!” Trevor mocked. “People have said prayers for me when I hadn’t got pneumonia. But look here, Ivor, try to keep quiet while I get a doctor. There’s a good chap.”

Trevor finally got on to the doctor. He tried to speak as low as he could, not to disturb Ivor, who again seemed as near sleep as could be.

“Hallo, Harvey! Trevor speaking.... Yes, Gerald. I say, Harvey, I’ve got a young man here having pneumonia. I’d be glad of a little help....”

Dr. Harvey’s voice came from the other end: “But look here, Mrs. Gray has just rung up telling me to go round to a flat in Upper Brook Street where a young man has got influenza....”

“Influenza nothing,” Gerald snorted. “The chap’s here, I tell you. And on your way here you’d better book a suite at a nursing home, because I can’t have people having pneumonia all over my flat, there’s no facilities....”

He put up the receiver and turned to Ivor behind him. He could see, in the firelight, Ivor’s eyes painfully on him.

“You won’t die yet, Ivor,” he grinned at him—that jerky, pleasant, wise grin of Trevor’s! He sat beside{137} the sick man, and passed a hand over the burning forehead.

“Wouldn’t mind,” Ivor whispered. And two big tears crawled out of the dark eyes and down the cheeks.

“He’s got it bad,” he whispered to Trevor, having examined him. “Ought to have been in bed hours ago. But we can move him all right. Get your man to help. I rang up Mrs. Gray to say I was coming here. She’s coming on.”

The three of them carried Ivor down the stairs to Harvey’s car outside. He was heavy, for all his thinness. He woke up once, just to say absurdly: “You’re carrying me.”

In the car they had him between them, a large bulky figure in Gerald’s rug and eiderdown. He was past listening to anything now.

“What on earth has he been up to?” Harvey asked Trevor in a whisper, across him. “To go about like this! He must have felt it coming on all day—and yesterday, too!”

But both men knew well enough, in a sort of way. Dr. Harvey knew London as well as medicine, and he had known Magdalen Gray for years. He pursed his lips.

“That woman,” he whispered grimly, “burns whatever she touches. Always.” (It is a well-known fact that doctors in private life get frightfully dramatic about women.)

“It’s an irony about her,” Harvey went on. “She’s kind, oh, very kind! but she always makes a mess of men. This young man, now. She breaks ’em, in the end. I’ve known a few.”

“Yes, but she makes them first,” Trevor said suddenly.{138} “You’re talking without your book, Harvey. She makes men, I tell you, out of the ordinary idiots whom she falls in love with. This one isn’t an absolute idiot, but he’s young, and that comes to the same thing in this case. She’s been worth-while to him, and she will always be worth-while to him. She’s a woman of quality, Harvey.” And Gerald Trevor smiled....

“A little less quality and a little more constancy,” Harvey suggested grimly, “wouldn’t do her any harm.”

“Even so,” said Trevor satirically, “you would love her to-morrow if you thought she loved you, and constancy be damned. It’s the function of women like her to remind men of their littleness and impotence. I’ve been reminded once or twice. But men like you, old man, hate to be reminded of their littleness and impotence. You’ve got an idea that you are worth loving, and Magdalen Gray is in the world to teach you that there isn’t as much foundation for that idea as there might be.”

“You wait till you have pneumonia ...” Harvey whispered viciously across the still figure of Ivor.{139}

CHAPTER X

The days of crisis passed. Dr. Harvey confided to Trevor that it was touch-and-go, but Ivor, in that occasional clarity of intense fever, had no thought of death. One morning, at last, he really did wake up. Weakly, he noticed the room. There was a nurse nearby, and she smiled at him cheerfully, making encouraging noises. He remembered the nurse quite well, she had been about his bed all the time, doing things, and he had asked her for things, too. Yes, she had been there all the time, that nice nurse. And he saw the hot-water bottle hanging from a bed-post at his feet.... He tried to link his memory of a vague face in that room to another memory. What did it remind him of? something so vague and dim, and so long ago.... He remembered Ann Marlay’s face—he never thought of her as his mother, she was Ann Marlay to him—bending over his childhood, and sad, gentle eyes. Of course, yes. And now this other face, so clouded and familiar, hovering about, wide eyes mocking him tenderly—oh, how divine she was, to mock so sadly and tenderly, so unlike every one else! And he spent a long time in trying to compare the two memories, Ann and Magdalen, wondering if they were at all alike, wondering if they would have liked one another....

But she didn’t come that day. He slept, but when he woke up he felt that he had been really watching the door all the time, and that she hadn’t come. He did not ask the nurse about her, he waited. But she did not come. Trevor came in later, and grinned happily to see him better, and said things. Ivor did{140}n’t ask him either, he just waited. But Magdalen never came again.

All the time of his getting gradually better he never asked about Magdalen. It was an effort. Gerald Trevor came every day, but he said nothing about her. Gerald was gay of an idea that he and Ivor should go to South America as soon as he was better. Gerald, it seemed, knew a chap who had a ranch there. “Sun and open spaces and horses and gauchos, Señor Ivor,” Gerald cried to him, and Ivor said he would love to go. It was a divine idea, of course he would go, Ivor said.

And Rodney West came once or twice; he had heard he was ill, West cheerfully said, and so thought to have one more look at him before he died. He asked Ivor why he had never gone to see him, and he wondered if Ivor was thinking of selling his car, but Ivor said he was not. So calm and friendly and practical he was. What a good friend for any man, Ivor thought—and straightway made him one! Which was Ivor’s naïve way with the few people he liked, to claim them quickly—and then quietly wait for them to realise that he had claimed their friendship.

But Magdalen never came, nor news from her. Flowers came every other day or so, flowers that filled the room and exercised the ingenuity of nurses to provide vases, but there was no message in them, they were only flowers. He was indifferent to them, he grew to hate them....

He was convalescent now, well out of weakness, and would very soon be moving from the nursing-home. He had taken the air once or twice, gently. And Trevor came to see him one afternoon. Ivor took out the cards for the game of picquet that they would play.

“She’s gone,” Trevor said, “to Spain. For some time, I think. Magdalen is like that, as you know. When she is in London she stays for years, but once she is away she stays away for years.”

Ivor had nothing at all to say to that. Somehow he had known all the time that Magdalen had gone away. She hated a mess. She would make a wonderful playwright—if plays consisted only of exits! But she might just have written to him....

“I say, Ivor,” Trevor said quickly. “She wrote to me to tell you that she had gone away, as soon as you were better. Just that.... You knew, of course, that she was here all the time you were really ill?”

“I’ve booked passages for Buenos Ayres,” he said, “for the tenth day from to-day. It will be nice for you, I thought, to be convalescent all over the boat. And I chose the best they had, a nice water-tight one——”

And they did. But they had to come back all too soon, hearing there was a war in Europe.

“I wonder what it’s all about, this war,” Ivor wondered on the boat coming home. “I don’t know much about war....”

“That,” said Trevor, “is exactly why people go to war. So it’s said....”

“War,” said Trevor dogmatically, “has got something to do with some one being frightened to death of some one else....”

“War,” he went on dogmatically, “is supposed to{142} have something to do with the Dignity of People. But by substituting the less pleasing word Bowels for Dignity the same result of war will be obtained.” And he turned to Ivor with that jerky little grin of his. “We’ll inquire further into this here war, Ivor, when we land.”

But Trevor inquired no further; for one thing, he had too much sense to try to find the sense in any war; and for another, he didn’t have time. For Gerald Trevor, Colonel Trevor, was killed almost as soon as he set foot in France, in the slaughter of Neuve Chapelle in the spring of 1915. Dear, gay Gerald! There died a courtly gentleman. He had loved a few women and killed a few men. There died a gay and kind and courtly gentleman.... And in the winter of 1916, Ivor Marlay, by then deprived of almost every sense by the noisome dullness of war, was also deprived by a shell of his left arm, from the shoulder; whereupon there followed for Captain Marlay months of hideous and tearing pain.

“That dear old ‘Camelot’ car!” he reminded Magdalen, his first visitor at the London home to which he had finally been moved—Magdalen whom he had not seen since that “hot-water bottle” night! “That dear old ‘Camelot’ car, Magdalen! I refused to sell it to Rodney West, and now some ass has stolen it from the garage, thinking maybe I’d have less use for it now. Whereas——”

“Whereas, Ivor, you’d like to say, but daren’t, to lose only one’s left arm is really more of a decoration than a loss. But you can’t pull any of that ivory stuff on Magdalen....”

Her eyes were alight at seeing him again, she was intensely proud of him—has it not been said that Magdalen was very, very English? And to whom, in all this wide world, did Ivor belong, if not to her! And she could scarcely bear to see the pain that would{143} every now and then twist the dark young face—and set those eyebrows scowling so sulkily! She pretended not to notice, he would like that best. Her old friend Ivor! “The best ever....” And, in the way of her sympathy, she mocked him, for she knew he loved her mockery, saying that the arm he had left was an excellent arm anyway, and that the bit of coloured ribbon for which he had exchanged the other one would look very decorative beneath the pile of handkerchiefs where it would live out its glorious life. “More than ever dark and dangerous Ivor!” she cried softly. Her old friend Ivor!...{145}{144}

BOOK THE THIRD

THE ANTAGONISTS

CHAPTER I

In the first month of the year 1919, when the world, released at last from the epidemic of flags, was racked by the epidemic of influenza (then the most present of the many plagues of peace), Ivor Marlay was living in a small house by the River Kennet in Berkshire, which he had bought furnished towards the end of the previous year. The house was a little beyond the straggling village of Nasyngton, and a little over two miles from Hungerford Station: a Queen Anne house of sweet reserve and severity, with an orchard behind that wandered up a slight incline towards the main road: and, in front, a twisting little drive to the wooden gates by the bridge, and a wide lawn, not at all immaculate, which breasted the quiet waters of the Kennet. To the right of the house and lawn rose the wide stone bridge of Nasyngton, and a mighty bridge it looked in that quiet and small place, a seared and ancient bridge of strength and dignity; and over this bridge passed the traffic of the London-Bath Road, as well it might and as it had done ever since the days when Bath was the splendid corollary of the metropolis and both as one beneath the light step of Beau Nash.... Relieved of the bridge, the main road swept widely to the right, and, skirting the back of Ivor’s domain, so through the village of Nasyngton towards its immense destiny. But even this wide road, so arrogantly unrolling its Tarmac through the quiet places of Berkshire, could be humbled by things greater than itself; by things not eternal, but{148} magnificently temporal. For how furtively this London-Bath road swept by the great iron gates of Lady Hall, two miles Londonwards from the village, the seat of the Earls of Kare! How meek and shrunken did that haughty Tarmac become as it slunk by the wide circle of asphalt of the yellow sort, that was loosely strewn before the great iron gates of Lady Hall as a forerunner of the consideration that awaited the guests of Rupert, Earl of Kare, whose fortunes had lately been revived by a Chilian marriage.

His small house by Nasyngton suited Ivor very well. He had bought it from two spinster sisters, the Misses Cloister-Smiths, and not only because of its pleasant situation but because its interior and its simple appointments had instantly pleased his taste. And, keeping his flat in Upper Brook Street, there he had settled since November: adding to its comforts only his cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Hope, his man Turner, and as many books as he had thought to require.

Ivor’s nature, while not at all of a solitary bent in itself, was the direct cause of his solitude; for though he had surprisingly little of that self-consciousness which so often gets between a sensitive man and his power to entertain or be entertained, he was definitely a “rather difficult person”: in that he was neither easily amusing nor easily amused—an irritating lack of accommodation which was growing on him every year, every month almost. People thought him superior. He was, however, a very concentrated person in his intimacies; and to his friendships he had always applied himself with steady and undiminished pleasure, he intensely enjoyed the practices of intimate friendship. “Let there be restraint, but no secrecy!” Where was secrecy, there Ivor was not; which was silly of him, for thus he was to a great degree cut off from that amiable pastime which is called friendship in cities, those manly and uninquiring companionships that have lasted for years (since we were boys together, say) and will last till death do us part, and were among{149} the most charming of the many charming ties that bound together our public life and body politic until the recent advent of rude adventurers from the Board schools.

Rodney West, since Trevor’s death, had become Ivor’s most intimate male friend; but Sir Rodney, as he by now inevitably was, was as a rule too busy being a foremost K.C. and a rather bad-tempered M.P. of the outmoded Liberal persuasion, which he and a few other bitter-reasonables had just succeeded in dragging through the Hang-the-Kaiser Elections of 1918. No one but a half-wit or a non-combatant ever thought the Kaiser would be hanged, but at the time there was a premium on half-wits, and Rodney West made himself rather unpopular in the House by pointing that out at every opportunity. “But some one’s got to do it,” said Rodney West; and he could afford to, with his income.

As for Magdalen, she had been away from England for the last year, and maybe she would never return. Magdalen had gone with her husband—to Peru! Tristram Gray, a keen and gray man of more than fifty (who had never in his life compromised about anything but his wife, which his friends considered rather interesting of him, as an instance of the queer effects love can have on a reasonable man), had surprised Magdalen and every one else, on being invalided out in 1917, by an absurdly grim determination to set out on his travels again. Modern England, it seemed, did not at all please that hardened and decisive gentleman: it was too confused and too confusing, he pleaded. He was going to Peru, where he had years ago acquired, in an adventurous way, a kind of minor castle in the mountains of the interior. “A splendid home,” Colonel Gray described it, “and, let’s hope, an imposing sepulchre. Mountains, you know, all over the place, and not toy ones. Things you can get hold of. You’d better come with me, Magdalen.” That is all he said, and never before had said as much. And Magdalen,{150} surprising woman, had straightway answered, “I will!” And had gravely gone with him—to Peru!

Rodney West and Ivor had accompanied them up to Liverpool to see them off, and there had been a last dinner at the Midland Adelphi Hotel. Those three men and Magdalen—those two men of more than middle years (for West was five-and-fifty) and Ivor, just thirty, equalised all in a quite amazing friendship. A good friendship it was, with a kind of chivalry about it which was not the less real because it was rather odd—very odd, some might think. But Magdalen had a way of melting things and men, a Renaissance way she had of bringing the godlessness out of a man so that it seemed to him he was a god. She was romantic to the end, this Magdalen, in her shadowy way, saying to the youngest of her three friends: “Perhaps one day you will come out to join us, Ivor. But not until you are very tired, remember, for I hear it’s no place for a striving person, and you are a striving person, you know. No, you mustn’t come until you are certain that you don’t want to come back here again—and oh! I hope that won’t happen! But I don’t think it will, for you’re not stationary and still absurdly young, and maybe soon the lovely thing you want will happen to you. And please promise me, Ivor, never to believe those tiresome people who will tell you with a plausible air of impatience that there are more important things in this world than love or who will tell you to stick to one woman and be done with it. Such people lie in wait for young men with crusading eyes, but don’t you believe them—go on until you find a woman worth living for and dying with, for love fills a man’s life while ‘more important things’ can only occupy it. And that’s the truth I’m telling you, Ivor....”

Magdalen had looked her age the night of that last dinner, she had seemed a little strange, a little remote, a little tired, as though she had already arrived in Peru and the journey had tired her.{151}

During this last year his solitude had, as it were, forced Ivor to an ambition; for it is in his solitary moments that a man conquers men. He was reading now, for the first time in his life, with a set and serious purpose; and as he read he thought, and when he had thought he made notes, any amount of them; for he was not going to waste what knowledge he purposed to acquire, he quite definitely wanted to talk and write about it—especially to talk. There were two things this maddened world of to-day plainly wanted, special knowledge and fine endeavour; and Ivor Marlay was trying to discipline himself....

In the wake of many older and wiser men of Europe and America—that surge of disenchantment, in 1919!—Ivor was realising that “though the war was over nothing else was over;” and that the world was still sliding to a queer hell. It wasn’t enough to say that the world was in an infernal mess and showed no likelihood of getting out of it, the good old world of progress and respectability. It was in more than the infernal mess through which it had so often safely plunged: it was deeply dirtied and befouled with every lawless idiocy of which angry peoples seem increasingly capable. France was still livid with the passions of nationality. France had learnt a cruel lesson, and was intent to profit by it. France was angry, France was patriotic, France was pathetic, France was sensitive, France was determined not to open any windows to let the air in. Frenchmen set their shoulders, they had ceased to shrug their shoulders: other people shrugged their shoulders at them. La France, la France.... The mess of Reparations and Reconstruction was already foreshadowed; and Mr. Maynard Keynes was sharpening his pen. Wise men saw, even then, whither the passions of nationality would lead Europe in the next few years; and while some said the aggressive{152} instinct of nationality was a fine thing, others pointed to the mess. Wise men saw, but wise men can do nothing. Wise men cannot deliver, they can only hail a deliverer.

It was obvious that if ever there was a time to be up and doing things, in a quite heroic sense, this was the time—this changing, transitional time! Here, now, was chance for fine endeavour. Whosoever was articulate could now be heard, ... which was very strange in the life politic, a quite new departure; for once on a time the Commons held only gentlemen, but now they let in quite clever fellows—if such could be persuaded to enter it; so that anything might happen, anything—in this transitional time! And it was the business of English youth to make things happen, in the finest way. But the basis of every endeavour must be work and knowledge; and it was the impulse to the one and the desire for the other that were now so plainly lacking in the “young men of opportunity”; which was a favourite phrase of Ivor’s in many talks with Magdalen and Rodney West.

All men who thought and wrote were at this time thinking and writing about the conflicting aims and principles of labour and capital. The calamity of Europe’s tumbling credit did not yet obsess people to the degree that it very soon did—indeed it had not yet crashed to anywhere near its lowest depth; but it was crashing. It seemed, then, that everything would come out smooth and straight if only a sensible accommodation could be found between the wage-earners and the employers in each country; but in each country angry men never tired of passionately crying in capital letters that there can be no accommodation between Principles of Living, that each must have its day—“or night!” dramatically thought sober men with their eyes on Russia. For sober men were as like the men in Mr. Beresford’s Revolution as a fish in the sea is like a fish in an aquarium, and in them was a growing fear of the spectre of anarchy.{153}

“The best way to beat a real revolution is to lead it; the next best way is to talk to it; and the worst way of all is to fight it. Just because some ancient idiot—probably the same Roman idiot who wrote si vis pacem, para bellum, so that other idiots throughout history could take it for gospel truth simply because it was in Latin—just because some idiot once said that there’s no use talking to an angry man, no one has ever tried it until knocking the angry man down has failed. There’s no use doing anything else but talk to an angry man; and the idea that an angry man must temporarily be a fool is one of the misconceptions on which civilisation has been based ever since Saint Peter lost his temper with the ear of the law....

“You cannot fight and beat revolutions as you can fight and beat nations. You can kill a man, but you simply can’t kill a rebel. For a proper rebel has an Ideal of living, while your only ideal is to kill him so that you may preserve yourself. And the reason why no real revolution, or religion, has ever been beaten is that rebels die for something worth dying for, the future, but their enemies die only to preserve the past: and makers of history are always stronger than the makers of Empire. It is foolish to fight a revolutionary machine-gun with a loyalist machine-gun, gun for gun, or a Soviet machine-gun with a bourgeois machine-gun, gun for gun. You can only fight and beat them with an Idea, a clean and fearless Idea. And there is only one such Idea, the oldest in the world, the most blooded in the world, the aristocratic idea: which really means that you can only keep and strengthen your own freedom by acknowledging other peoples’. Mainly, it must mean that....”

Ivor Marlay made notes. He was trying to get somewhere: as, one day much later, he finally did. But a solitary man becomes very theoretical; which, maybe, is why all revolutions have been born of solitary men and all religions have come from the East.{154}

CHAPTER II

One very cold and overcast afternoon towards the end of that January, he was walking up one of the lanes that skirted the parkland of the Kare estate. The lane led gently up the hill for a long and twisting way, and the hill led gently down to the Thames valley. Ivor was walking bareheaded, for his thick dark hair was covering enough on the bitterest day; and his remaining arm was deep in his trouser pocket. He looked a curiously still figure, walking thus: walking swiftly but nowhither, taking thought and air, taking very deep thought: a lonely and defiant man of affairs. How Aunt Percy would have chuckled to see him now!... And then a sudden crash to break his thoughts, a rustling crash of angry leaves and broken boughs, the wintry crash of a raped hedge! Three yards in front, almost on top of him, a horse pirouetted in the little lane; it pawed the air and ground, it made gestures towards equilibrium after its sudden dash through the barrier of Kare Park on to a strolling man. A sleek and quivering picture, drawn with a fine point against a dour background. The horse snorted, it quivered, it eyed the astonished Ivor, and then it pawed the ground with an arrogant air. And a woman laughed.

Thus Virginia happened—she who had been Virginia Tracy, then Mrs. Sardon, now Lady Tarlyon. But the years that had passed sat as lightly on her as pearls about her throat, her years decorated Virginia; and yet where was the young poet among the many young poets she knew, to take folly by the horns and sing of{155} her complexion, crying that white samite was black beside its sheen?

They grinned at each other, she above and he below. Fairly caught they both were.

“That’s me!” she laughed at him. The horse doubtfully came to rest, and it breathed contemptuously into Ivor’s face.

“After all these years, these long years!” she exclaimed wonderingly, staring down at him. Her eyes were clear, blue lights in the gloom. “Did I frighten you, Ivor Marlay?”

“You nearly killed me, that’s all. But I would have died happily, Virginia, saluting you with my pleasure at seeing you again....”

“You see,” he explained, “I had no idea you were so lovely. Someone should have told me....”

“Oh, you’ve changed, Ivor Marlay!” Virginia mocked him deftly. “You are being nice to Virginia. You are not despising Virginia....” That slightly hoarse, breathless voice of hers—so pregnant somehow!

She was so fair and straight and cleanly drawn; and there was gallantry in her poise and in the way she dared his eyes. Was this the sharp, antagonistic Virginia, this woman ...?

“I simply can’t tell you,” he said, from her stirrup, “how pleased I am to see you, Virginia. And it’s a heartfelt truth dragged out of me by my surprise at seeing you, by my pleasure at being nearly killed by you....”

“That’s all very well, my friend, but it’s up to me to say that kind of thing to you.” She swayed, and waved an intimidating gauntlet across his eyes. “I’ll say them too, but later. People talk about you here and there....{156}”

He was beside her, beneath her. The horse and the lady, a warm picture. She swayed above him in her saddle, she was exquisite. And there was that clearness over her small face, that clear, dry sheen of chill air; and the taut lips, bitten dry by the winter air, hard riding.... The same Virginia, but how different! The same little white face, so white and firm-featured, so proudly set and lightly carried; the same tiny little flesh spot in the furrow of the chin—an inconsiderable little chin it was, you remember?—the same wide blue eyes, so lazy in look, so quick to retort, so light and dark, so kind and mocking, so hard and soft: a soldier’s eyes they were really, but a soldier of fortune. And “Swan and Edgar,” there they were! Ivor laughed to see them, he asked after their unruly health—those twin Virginian curls, tumbling down each cheek in golden-gay cascades from the wide-brimmed, so very rakish, black felt hat! And how it became her in her severe habit, that wide anarchist hat set gallantly about her golden hair!

This sudden meeting of the two former antagonists seemed to bring all the sweetness out of each. It was in their eyes as they smiled at each other in the January gloom of that little lane, with darkening Kare Park on their right, on their left the wintry rolling land of Berkshire, and all about them the pungent smell of sodden earth.

“I’m glad enough for you,” he said. She understood. She charmed him by her quick little smile of understanding. He admired her frankly....

“I say, Virginia,” he said eagerly, “we must talk a good deal. I want to hear all about your life since we last spoke together at the Hallidays’ that night. I’ve seen you often in the distance since then, but we’ve somehow never come to grips, it’s just not happened. And whenever I go to the Mont Agel, M. Stutz always tells me that you were there the evening before or that{157} you will not be there for a long time for you are abroad. M. Stutz worships you, Virginia, and quite right he is. But he never tells me anything about you—and now I’ve found you I want an official account of your life, for the rumours about you are so conflicting....” He seemed to plead; and he was really pleading for her to intrude upon his loneliness.

“You haven’t believed the nasty things, have you, Ivor?” she asked him very suddenly. Her eyes were very serious on him. Hard eyes they were, sometimes. Lady Tarlyon knew a lot.

“Oh, stuff!” he smiled at her. “Didn’t we make a pledge, Virginia, the very last time we met? We’ll be friends, we said. Those were our exact words. Well then!”

She pointed a finger dramatically down at him. “That pledge,” she said, “is going to be redeemed. See if it isn’t!”

“I always thought,” he mocked, “that a man and a woman didn’t meet in a lonely place for nothing.”

And then she thought to ask him how he came to be there anyway, in that little lane. He told her of his house by the bridge, and of the Misses Cloister-Smiths, remembering how in the old days Virginia had been amused by the oddities of names. And as she listened, her first gaiety at seeing him seemed somehow to leave her, she grew very quiet and silent, as though a cloud from the bleak sky had sombrely caressed her; and her eyes, so clear and merry but a moment before, wandered about the bleak countryside, beyond his shoulder. Virginia’s eyes were like sentinels, put there to beguile you while Virginia was far away, in some curious unknown place. Only once she swayed to a sudden step of her horse: she was quite immobile, a little sad. He watched her.

Then she told him what he had already guessed, that she and her husband were staying with Rupert Kare for a week or so. No one in the place, she remarked, had said a word about his living round above.{158}

“I doubt if they know,” Ivor said. “I’m living a frightfully private life.”

“So you never go up there, then?” she wondered curiously. “Though I seem to remember your knowing Rupert quite well once upon a time.”

“Oh, yes!” But he might just as well have said, “Oh, no!” for all the real answer he gave. But he knew that Virginia was peculiarly able to understand people’s dislikes and distempers, and that she allowed for them; it used commonly to be her own feeling about a good many people. Yes, she understood.

“But it isn’t so easy for me—to outlaw myself like that,” she told him gravely. “For there I am, you see, still in it. Same men, same women, same places, same baubles. And only dress and dancing changes.... And so I insisted on escaping this afternoon for an hour or so.”

“You are very wise, Ivor,” she suddenly said, “to have left all that as suddenly as you did, so long ago. You annoyed us, but then you wanted to annoy us, and you were wise. And do you know, I’ve always said that you are very wise. Whenever your name is mentioned, whether it’s about a book or a woman, I always say I knew you once and that you are very wise. He knew us all once, I add, but now he is very wise and exclusive. He is indiscriminately exclusive, I say....”

“It’s only that I’m trying to work,” he earnestly explained, looking up at her. And she stared down at him, and under the shadow of her hat her mouth seemed twisted into a queer little smile which puzzled him.

It was darkening; and it was as she was about to leave him that he suddenly asked her:—

“I say, Virginia, do you remember being made to copy out in your first copy-book as a child that marvellous sentence: ‘When gentlefolk meet, compliments are exchanged’? Do you remember, Virginia?”

Her eyes contracted just a little, quizzically. And{159} with her head a little sideways, she examined him. She was curiously detached, this Virginia, yet curiously warm....

“Yes, but that’s not me, Ivor. It’s not my nature.” And it was as though she wanted to tell him an ulterior something; but there was no time, it was quickly darkening; the horse stamped eagerly, and she swung away with it. “I’m not like that at all, really, Ivor,” she said swiftly. “It’s you who draw it out of one ... maybe.”

“That’s your particular quality, Ivor,” she cried to him, a woman on a horse, going away. Strangely come, strangely gone! He stared after her through the hedge, a swaying figure through the darkening parkland. A shadow astride a horse ... so fair and gallant! She turned and waved a hand to him, she cried a word, but he didn’t hear it, it was a lost word. A sable wraith she was in the parkland, fading away into the dolorous crypt of winter. She was a symbol for something....

And he wondered if he would see her again. He wondered.... And he didn’t know. He knew nothing about this Virginia—whom he had thought he had judged so well! And as he strode homewards through the chill gloom he mocked the judgments of his early “twenties” a little viciously. “Christ, how they must have loathed me!” he thought.{160}

CHAPTER III

He sat a while over his port that night. He contemplated Virginia. A strange woman she is, he thought. Every woman has a legend, there is a legend to every woman, but what is Virginia’s? She’s so pitiful—yet why? You see, he explained to himself, she seems to have made a fool of herself in a deep, secret way. People don’t understand her, and she despises people, and because she despises people she thinks she despises life....

Her name and face were familiar—too familiar—to that increasing part of England that must read its daily and weekly lot of gossip in the papers. The Romans had gladiators to amuse the mob, Ivor thought, but England can do it quite cheaply, for the mob has learned to read.... Yet, somehow, Virginia had licensed this interest; maybe she had licensed it by so whole-heartedly despising it, for there are ways and ways of despising things. No one could deny that there was a glamour about her, certainly there was a glamour. But there was a rottenness in that glamour—now where did that come from? And why? Quite decent men took faint licence with her name, while lewd men who had never met Virginia, could never have met her, said that they had touched her, they chuckled at the mention of her name....

Glamour! Now this glamour is a very remarkable thing, a strange and indefinable thing, and very rare: for it does not fall on women because they have many lovers, it does not fall on women because they are wonderfully constant to one lover, and it certainly does not fall on women who Do Things. Sometimes it{161} happens on a courtesan, sometimes on a great lady; but this glamour is no snob, it cares nothing for the claims of fashion, for it may quite well happen on a dairymaid, so that a whole countryside grows aware of her and a whole country sorrows for her death. Philosophers have spun and metaphysicians toiled, yet this stuff of glamour still evades the mortal coils of definition. And whence it comes, no one can tell; nor why it comes—nor whither it goes! though poets do say that they can smell the faint, musty smell of tragedy in its destiny, and historians can never resist ascribing it to luckless men and women of high degree. And sometimes you may love a woman mightily, yet try as you will you cannot find glamour in her, you simply cannot; she is just a woman, yours to love but not to dream about. Yes, this glamour is a wayward thing, it just comes and touches a lovely woman in each generation, and because of it her youth is long remembered and her middle-age forgiven, if she live so long. It carries something fey with it, this glamour. It is a mysterious and uncommon thing. Poetry is written about it, and it is as wan as the poetry that is written about it....

Virginia’s marriage to the American in 1913 had turned out a sorry business. He was never known but as “the American”—but how unlike Henry James’s it only appeared later!—and it was only by an effort of memory that Ivor remembered his name had been Hector Sardon. He was dead. Ivor had never met him, but had heard of him as a small, very feverish man, and handsome of his kind, which was deep-eyed and sardonic; he was said to speak with charming and vivid gestures of the hands. It had been a love-match between him and Virginia, people said. Later, it was whispered that “the American” had turned bad. The fever of his deep-set eyes and nervous gestures was now{162} explained. Cocaine. But all this leaked very gradually out, for Virginia was secret, she never confided. Virginia was always with him, they were silent companions, exquisite dancers together; other people might whirl round a ballroom—for exercise?—but Virginia and “the American” danced slowly, softly, in exquisite certainty of movement. In life they might fumble, but not in dancing.... And then, in the awful winter of 1915, Hector Sardon died suddenly.

He died so suddenly that there had to be an inquest; and the question of drugs was for some time uppermost in the minds of the public, the press, and the coroner—so intimate did they become with it, indeed, that it was never called but by its christian name of “dope.” The coroner, Mr. Odleby Ingle, was inclined to be critical, though of course always just. The press was also critical. And in warlike minds the question of “drugs” was found to be inseparable from the question of “aliens.” It was suggested that this kind of thing was un-English; and the “Huns” got somehow mixed up with the death by cocaine of an American gentleman. The Daily Mail, in quest of honour, Mr. Asquith’s head, two-million circulation and as yet uninterned Germans, jousted once again with The Hidden Hand of the Hun. Fierce gentlemen in Parliament were moved to denunciation of England’s levity in its treatment of “aliens”; and Mr. Pemberton Billing got the whole thing frightfully mixed up with the inadequacy of London’s Air Defences.... The war-fever was at its highest in 1915. The only person who kept his head, besides the soldiers who were too busy fighting, was Mr. Bernard Shaw: which was why every one wanted to punch it for him. It was generally conceded that England was altogether too kind to aliens. (Before the war only foreigners without money were called “aliens”; during the war all foreigners were called aliens. Bella, horrida bella!) It was suggested that the march of civilisation had taken us past the point when gentlemen need be gentlemen in war-time.{163} “Remember we are at war!” you could say, and at once forget everything else. Only the police exempted themselves from this remembering business in their treatment of aliens; for the English police are the most courtly and the most incorruptible police in the world—which was why every one said they were inefficient about the “alien menace.” Soldiers laughed, but among civilians the alien-fever ran brave and high, and ever braver and higher. “We cannot fight in Flanders, but we will do our duty here!” cried fierce, and otherwise quite pleasant, old gentlemen in clubs and trains.

The French civilian, imagined by the English civilian to be so excitable, managed these things differently; the French civilian, in fact, did not manage them at all; the French civilian said “Nous sommes trahis!” at least once every day, and then, carelessly leaving the “alien menace” to the police, set about the bloodshot business of life in war-time. But the English civilian was made of sterner stuff; and while young men were dying in the sky and on the land, on the sea and under the sea, old men waxed worthy of the sons and nephews they had “given” to England. “We are all pacifists at heart,” they said grimly, “but war is the test of manhood.”

(It has become the fashion to slang old men in general. It is not a bad fashion. Superior people despise all fashions; they smile. But it is a pity that superior women despise all fashions.)

The inquest on Hector Sardon, conducted though it was with every tact and discretion by Mr. Odleby Ingle, gave the alien agitation yet another impetus. All this “dope” mess was due to aliens, it was said. No Englishman took dope, unless he was lured to it by an alien’s fiendish charm. (The fiendish charm of aliens in war-time, male and female, is of course notorious. Ladies of title were supposed to fall to it every day, and policemen had to harden their hearts like anything. Every one had to harden his or her heart.) Nor did our allies take “dope.” Neither France, Italy, Belgium,{164} Portugal, Serbia, Roumania, Czecho-Slovakia, Japan, Montenegro, Siam, nor the Hedjaz—only neutrals and “alien enemies.” And it was suspected (shrewdly) that an American citizen would not so readily have died of “dope” if America had been fighting with us; the death by cocaine of Hector Sardon was considered to serve President Wilson jolly well right for being “too proud to fight.”

The inquest was, of course, a very sad business for Virginia. Many people carried away from the inquest an “indelible” picture of a hard, white face with tired, defensive eyes; and the illustrated papers had to pay through the nose for her likenesses from the photographers who had always made Virginia’s life a burden by clamours for a “sitting.” The traffic in “dope” was noticeably on the overworked police’s nerves that year; and common-or-garden policemen were discovering an acute nose for opium—“It makes you sick, the first pipe,” said people who had friends who knew—all the way from Dover Street to Chinatown. (Poor little Chinatown! what a boon thou hast been to Mr. Burke, and what little profit hast thou had from him!) The dead American, that quiet and feverish gentleman of the nervous gestures, was made the scapegoat of the public’s interest and the press’s violence. An overdose of cocaine was found to be the direct cause of Hector Sardon’s death. And the just but severe inquisition of Mr. Odleby Ingle, “in probing this matter to its very core,” unearthed some nasty details about Hector Sardon’s even more private life. It was a bad look-out for certain gentlemen of his acquaintance, it seemed. People began to read Petronius. It was only too evident that Hector Sardon had gone the limit in more ways than one; and Mr. Bottomley was furious about it, crying: “What shall be done with these Pests? Shall England never be clean?” A nasty business! Virginia suffered her ordeal intelligently, but in cold contempt. What had she to do with this? There was no one but{165} sympathised with her, and even Mr. Odleby Ingle was noticeably considerate, though just, towards innocence in so sorry a plight. Every one sympathised with Virginia; it was an awful shame for her, they said. And yet, somehow, there was in their voices a suggestion, ever so faint, that it was rather the kind of thing which just might happen to Virginia rather than to any other woman....

“The American” had left her all his money, and Virginia was thus a very rich woman, for her mother, a Colter from Yorkshire, had already left her a considerable income. (Lady Carnal had adored her only child. As Virginia, before her first marriage, would come in late from a party, her mother would dart out at her from her bedroom and peck at her. Virginia hated being pecked at, especially at that time of night, and her face was a mask. “Pouf! you’ve been drinking!” would cry Lady Carnal in desperation, and dart back into her bedroom again.) A year after the American’s death Virginia married George Tarlyon—George Almeric St. George, sixth Viscount Tarlyon. It was commonly admitted that you couldn’t do better than marry George Tarlyon, for he was the perfect thing of his kind. The war lost him nothing, had gained him everything in an extraordinary degree—Major the Viscount Tarlyon, D.S.O., M.C., etc. Foreign countries contributed magnificently to the et ceteras, while Virginia contributed herself and her fortune; for George Tarlyon, at thirty-four, had spent everything he had ever had, except his place in Galway, which was as unsaleable as it was uninhabitable—by him, anyway. It was said to be a love-match. They had been seen together now and then during Hector Sardon’s last year, and after his death they were always together. Natural enough that she should try to forget that unpleasantness in such gay{166} and gallant and clean companionship. But their marriage had not been thought quite inevitable, for nothing was quite inevitable in dealing with people like Virginia and George Almeric St. George—especially George Almeric St. George. Virginia, for all her wits and beauty, might not hold Lord Tarlyon, poor though he was. It was commonly said, and easily believed, that many women had loved him.

They were married in 1916. And there they were, Lord and Lady Tarlyon, a notable couple everywhere. The only thing George Tarlyon had ever lacked was money, and now he had as much as he wanted, for Virginia was indifferent about money, she was generous. They spent magnificently during his “leaves.” And their lives were open for the world to see, a straight pair of English people: a gallant pair of the same colour, the same quality, and the same hazardous blue eyes. Tarlyon’s eyes were of a slightly frozen blue, a little mocking, very charming. He was an extraordinarily fair man: weathered brick-dust face generally smiling, just a little: an easy man to get on with, a very easy man. A remarkably amusing man, Tarlyon. It was said that he and Virginia were very good companions for each other.

And pleasant it was to see them together, fair to fair, height to height, English to English, most perfectly and elegantly paired. A charming sight for foreigners to see, walking together of a morning from their house in Belgrave Square: George Tarlyon in the long gray coat of the Brigade, that extravagant, high-waisted, red-lined gray coat, tall and straight and with a swing in his walk: and Virginia, his lady, enwrapped in furs—not, like so many women, smothered in them, for Virginia was always mistress of what she wore—or better still, on an autumn morning, in a high-collared black coat lined with green, which very gallantly became her tall, slim person and imperious head. They looked what they were, perfectly, people of degree—and how rare that is nowadays, people said.{167}

Yet Virginia did not lose her glamour, nor did her glamour lose that queer rot; it was always there, about her, something musty in something fine. Her father’s friends wondered a little about it. She had always something in reserve, a vague something, and people took vague licence with that vague something. That is a way people have. Virginia seemed not to be quite of the society which she graced so brilliantly; she seemed to despise it, she passed people swiftly. A queer provocative indifference there was about her.... Take a drawing-room full of people at any hour of night, and watch Virginia there, an ornament in the most brilliant company. Watch now! Watch the pretty lady, the lovely, the remote, the queerly ungracious Virginia! Suddenly, swiftly, silently, she leaves the room. She waits for no man. She leaves the house. Just like that, she leaves it. Maybe this departure offends—Virginia doesn’t care! And if she cares, she will be forgiven. Now, whither does this swift and secret passage take her? Sometimes to her house in Belgrave Square, a mausoleum of a house which Virginia bitterly hates: sometimes to meet some one in some place: more often to the Mont Agel.

She would enter the Mont Agel at any hour of night by the hotel entrance, having rung the bell; and she would sit in the deserted and shuttered restaurant, in the light of a candle stuck in its own grease on a saucer—it was war-time then, you understand. There she would sit, with the polite and amiable M. Stutz hovering about, for that urbane gentleman never went to bed, never. Sometimes M. Stutz would be encouraged to sit at the table and discuss a glass of Vichy Water with Lady Tarlyon, for she seldom drank anything but Vichy Water, which just shows how little mothers know about their daughters. But more often he would leave her alone, guessing that it was for solitude she had come hither, this lady of high fashion in all her finery: not hard, nor brazen, but queerly childish and infinitely remote.{168}

She would write letters, sitting there, and every now and then she would sip her Vichy Water. Half a glass of Vichy Water would last Virginia a long time; but cigarettes would fade before her contemplation, a box of ten cigarettes would fade away. Her doctor would have something to say about that soon. She never wrote her letters but in pencil, a scrawling hand. And she would write, maybe, to Mr. Kerrison, in his semi-demi-quasi-social part of Hampstead, telling him in an ironic way of what she had done that night, and of the people she had seen; she would comment on the people she had seen and talked to that evening, ironically. It wasn’t that she liked Mr. Kerrison, in fact she thought of him as a very absurd man indeed, but she had somehow got into this habit of writing letters to him in a particular spirit; and when people protested about Mr. Kerrison, or any other of her friends, saying that some of them were really too awful, she would give her slight, hoarse little laugh, and answer that they were quite inevitable in her life, quite inevitable; and, having said that, she would laugh a little again, and the subject of Mr. Kerrison or any one else would be closed for the time being.... Or she would write letters to a young artist whose work, person, or “mentality” (oh, useful word!) had made some call on her sympathy. Her letters from the Mont Agel, addressed in that pencilled scrawl, would suddenly drop on studios in all parts of London, sometimes on very poor studios indeed, asking them what they were doing and if they were working well these days, and if they would care to come to luncheon with her one day, and naming a day for that luncheon, either at the Mont Agel, the Café Royal, or Belgrave Square. And sometimes, if it was a very poor little artist she was writing to, there would be a cheque tucked away in the letter. But no poor little artist ever received a cheque twice who was tactless enough to thank her, no matter how elegantly.

And then, in the early hours of the morning, she{169} would leave the Mont Agel. Swiftly she would penetrate the black solitudes of Soho in war-time: a rich and fragile figure braving all the dangers of the city by night, an almost fearful figure to arise suddenly in an honest man’s homeward path: so tall and golden and proud of carriage, so marvellously indifferent to his astonished stare! Sometimes she would have to walk a long way before she could find a taxi—through Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue, and up that to Piccadilly Circus. Sometimes men would murmur in passing, sometimes they would say the coarsest things, and once or twice a man caught at her arm as she swiftly passed him; and Virginia looked at him straightly, for a swift second, as though secretly understanding his desire and mocking it; and then she went on her way as though her way had been uninterrupted ... homewards to Belgrave Square.

Virginia often capped the most conventional evenings with this swift and solitary vagabondage of the early hours, homewards from the Mont Agel.

“Virginia has a mind like a cathedral,” said her father, gay Lord Carnal of the Gardenia.

“Of course every cathedral has its gargoyles,” added my Lord Carnal wistfully.

Lord Carnal was the ninth baron. It will be remembered by students of Court history that the first Lord Carnal [D] was so created by the exceeding love of that charming Stuart king who, however, later again lost his head about his Grace of Buckingham—the more justly, Puritans have said, to be deprived of it by Oliver Cromwell. Since when the Carnals have come to be known for many things, not the least among which is{170} their quality of sociability and their talent for longevity. “No Carnal ever dies—but, my God, how well they live!” some one is reported to have said sometime. And of the baron of the day, whose portrait by Gainsborough is one of the treasures of Carnal Towers in Hampshire, Lord George Hell found breath to exclaim: “There’s no fight but a Carnal’s in it, no bed but a Carnal’s on it, no table but a Carnal’s under it—no Carnal has ever been seen alone, sir!”

The ninth baron, who never said a careless thing and never condemned a correct one, looked not at all likely to break the record of the previous eight’s longevity. There was only one day in the year when Lord Carnal did not wear a gardenia, and that was on Alexandra Rose Day, when he wore a carnation.

CHAPTER IV

Late in the afternoon of the day following the meeting in the little lane, as Ivor sat reading over the fire in the sitting-room, Turner announced: “Lady Tarlyon, sir.” And there was a note akin to surprise in Turner’s voice.

“And I should think so indeed!” cried Mrs. Hope indignantly. “After all this time alone....”

“My movements,” said Virginia, in her slightly hoarse, low voice, “are cloaked in mystery. I’ve come to see you, Ivor.”

Virginia swiftly surveyed the comfort of the low-ceilinged room, and with a sigh of relief threw herself into one of the two deep arm-chairs on each side of the fire.

“A long and cold and lonely walk it was,” she complained. He gave her a cigarette.

Her hat, that so black and anarchichal hat, made a loose black stain on the polished table; and her golden-tawny hair shone bright between the firelight and the lamp. Lithe and long and slack this Virginia looked, deliciously at rest in the deep expanse of her chair. And her bright, yellow silk jumper coloured the room with a sudden luxury and meaning. Fantasy has come into the room, thought Ivor.{172}

“I’m finding,” he told her, “that this room is not the complete room I had thought. I have liked the decoration of this room until this moment——”

“—— but now I see that the decoration it really needs, Virginia, is that yellow silk jumper—how nice it would be if you left it behind with me, so that I could hang it up on the wall! and every time I saw it I would think: ‘Virginia came to see me once!’”

Her face was laid sideways against her palm, and her eyes smiled faintly into the fire; and she held up a very little foot to the fire.

“I walked three miles on a winter day,” she said, “to hear you talk. That was my great idea for to-day, Ivor. I myself have not been doing very much talking of late—and, you know, I’m very tired of being with people whose main purpose in conversation is to massacre syntax and evade sense.”

“But it’s not quite fair to come to talk to a man who has been alone for weeks! Maybe you will be washed away in the raw stuff—and there will be headlines in the papers: Disappearance of famous beauty—thought to have been washed away in the froth of a hermit’s sudden speech.’ ...”

But she was silent, provoking him. She was yielding up her interest in him to him, to do as he liked with—on a January afternoon! And in the nervous stress of that moment he jumped up from his chair and stood by the fire, and bent to it to light a spill for his cigarette; and he stared into it, his face sideways to her.

“You told me yesterday that you were working, Ivor. Now I would like to hear about that—may I? Are you writing a new novel?”

“I’m not writing anything, Virginia—I’m trying to learn how to play a game. It’s called a ‘game’ anyway—that one which it used to be the fashion for{173} you and me and all cleverish young people to despise—the game of trying to understand the country we live in so that we might help in the working of it. It sounds a pompous business, and so we despised it.”

“Oh!” And Virginia made a little face, as though a little puzzled and a little bored. “Do you seriously mean to tell me that you are going to stand on that hearth and talk politics to me? Oh, Ivor, must you do that!” She put such pathos into her words that they laughed together.

“But I’m very serious about it, Virginia, so it’s no good your saying, “Yes, Ivor” at me as though I needed humouring. I’ve got a frightfully English feeling about me these days,” he explained, “and I can’t bear to think of the way we’ve all slacked—all we young and youngish people. Just utterly slacked!”

“But what about losing lives and legs and arms?” she put to him. “How did you manage to do all that and slack as well?”

“People are getting fat on that remark,” he told her darkly, “and are going to get still fatter—until one day something pricks them and then they’ll be all thin and miserable. I beg you not to play the fool with your lovely slim figure, Virginia. But I’m sure you said that as a way of sympathising about my arm, which is nice of you, but not an argument....”

“I’m not arguing,” Virginia said. “I’m being treated like a public institution. Very queenly I feel....”

“But you do know, don’t you, that it’s as easy to fight for a country as for a woman, particularly if they are yours? And that it’s much easier to fight for a country or a woman than to understand either—or even want to, for the matter of that! Why, Virginia, they said the war was going to teach us things, they’ve actually got the cheek to say now that the war has taught us things, fine things. Well, I’m damned if I{174} see what the war has taught us except that it’s pretty easy for every sort of man to die—and now the peace is mobilising to teach us that it’s jolly difficult for every sort of man to live. That’s a platitude, of course, but that doesn’t make it less true.” He seemed to be angry about it.

Virginia nodded. It wasn’t difficult for her to live, if having money is living, but she understood. This was fairly good sense, anyway, for politics. Virginia had always thought that politics were only interesting from a bad-tempered point of view.

“That’s what I meant,” he went on, “when I said all the youngish people are slacking. They are taking no hand in the work of the country, they are doing nothing about it and thinking nothing about it. At least our fathers tried to use what energy and intelligence they had left over from riding horses and talking about them; they tried to do something as a matter of course, even if they had to sandwich that something between a salmon and a grouse, and a pretty fine mess they made of it—but we don’t even make a mess, we sit and watch other people making a mess for us.”

“You don’t seem to realise,” she said, “that England expects every young man not to get in the way of other people doing their duty. So our young men have simply had to stand aside—or go into the Foreign Office, which is the same thing—for it’s been so dunned into them that they’re no use for anything that now they jolly well aren’t. You can’t tell the public-schools for years and years that they produce nothing but fatheads and then expect them to turn out geniuses....”

“It’s got something to do with the will to enjoy,” she went on. “I heard some one say that....”

“And we did enjoy, too,” she added oddly, “just before the war and during the war—we and our lovely dead and dying men!”

And that is about the last word Virginia said. For Ivor talked—tremendously. Talk was seething darkly within him, and it had to come out—and this woman had asked for it! And so out came the “Ivory” intolerances and prejudices which Magdalen had used to tease and Rodney West to encourage, thinking that no man was good for anything if he wasn’t fierce about something. Here, in this animus of Ivor’s against the “young men of opportunity,” in that they strove to be so little worthy of it, spoke the Aunt Moira in him: “Whatever you do, you must do Something! For Heaven’s sake, Ivor, don’t be slack, don’t be shoddy, don’t be sodden! You must think Something, do Something!” That Aunt Moira who, ever mightily contradicting herself, had so efficiently helped that fine gentleman of promise, her younger brother, to do nothing at all, nothing but love....

And Ivor made a joke. The occasion, Virginia suggested, called for a little imagination on his part, so he had better imagine something. So Ivor imagined a revolution for her—oh, a very imaginary revolution! There was blood, of course. He told her how one day, with a crash and a bang and a mighty cry, the people of England rose in one body and hurled themselves at Whitehall. Of course there was a reason for this, as they tried to explain to Whitehall. They had come from factories and mills and mines and all the other places that rebels come from, all with the one mighty cry, “We’ll larn ’em to be gentlemen!” For this revolution was one of the people at last utterly sick of government by feeble gentlemen. A young man from Owens College headed the revolution, but he died soon after. And at that time the charming but sinister M. Caillaux was President of France....{176}

“We are the New Gentlemen,” the rebels cried. Men of the lower sort had everywhere raised their heads, and behold! they had seen England as one vast knighthood, but what knights were those! Whereupon men made a great cry that the land of England was being sloppily governed and that something must be done about it. And of course there was no lack of agitators to point out, with plausible arguments, that the war had helped the British Lion to find out the British Ass—which last, the agitators insisted, was an immaculate man, hitherto known as a gentleman, with red tabs and gold braid about him, a long tradition behind him, and a bloody fine mess all round him. “It is up to you,” the agitators cried, “to put the lid on all that.” Which thing was done, so that traditions were instantly withered into offal, the mad dream of Master Jack Cade came true at last, and the hapless middle-class had more reason than ever to wail, “What shall we do with our sons?” for no one cared what they did with them so long as they made them work. And Chivalry, most shy and most beautiful of all the birds that grace the aviary of human virtues, was found at last with broken wings in the gutters of Fleet Street, was tenderly nursed back to life and on a memorable holy-day was released from Hyde Park Corner—a lovely thing to entrance the eye and stir the heart of Britain, from Cornwall to Aberdeen and even farther. The king was escorted in exceeding splendid state to Windsor, the route thither being lined by such a vast concourse of cheering people as had never before been seen gathered together but at a football match. And there was instantly begun the building of a National Opera House, in which Sir Thomas Beecham could conduct for evermore without breaking his heart or his purse. And there was organised a massacre of maîtres d’hôtel, who have gone so far in making English youth obsequious. Many of the old order were tried for their lives before an extraordinary tribunal especially got together to try people for their lives on the capital charge of whether{177} they had or had not been gentlemen: of course there was the usual controversy as to the exact definition of a gentleman, and many suggestions were put forward, among which that “a gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude to any one,” was accorded the most favour; but in the end Mr. Bernard Shaw’s definition was unanimously adopted, as being both brief and practical, that “a gentleman is a man who puts more into life than he takes out.” Good old Shaw, people cried. Mr. Churchill and some few others were finally acquitted on their disarming plea, that they belonged to a different age from this, a feudal age, and were therefore not responsible for their actions in this; it was further pleaded on behalf of Mr. Churchill that he had been educated without heed to cost, in that England had spent more than a hundred million sterling in giving him a thorough working knowledge of geography alone, particularly as regards Gallipoli, Antwerp, Mesopotamia, and Russia; and that England could not afford to waste, but must rather reserve for the highest office, one to whom she had given the most expensive public-school education obtainable. But there were many who did not discover so much ingenuity, and were never heard of again. While there were some who proved their worth by banding themselves together with warlike cries, to the effect that though they might not have put more into life than they had taken out, they had taken out of their banks a good deal more than they had put in, and so did not mind dying. And these straightway entrenched themselves within Devonshire House and the Ritz, the last a very stout and solid building in the manner of the old Bastille, originally conceived, no doubt, with a fearful eye on class-prejudice. Devonshire House was stormed through a breach on the Stratton Street side, and many were killed but none taken, but the siege of the Ritz was long and bloody, as of course it would be. Both sides were fertile in invention, and Piccadilly was a shambles from Bond Street to Clarges Street; but both in{178} bravery and invention the besieged had something of the advantage, for they were led by the men of White’s, the most gallant of all those who asserted their right to be gentlemen when and how they pleased: and were, moreover, greatly assisted by their exact knowledge of every corner of the building, which was of course known to the New Gentlemen only from passing buses or from the Green Park on Sunday afternoons. But one night Wimborne House, which lies behind the Ritz and was valiantly held by my lord Viscount Wimborne and his men, all veterans of his Irish vice-royalty, was betrayed by a Hebrew gentleman lately black-balled from the Royal Automobile Club: the New Gentlemen poured through the breach, and the defenders of the old order were slain to the last man—and he a gay and handsome man of stuttering speech and many parlour-tricks, now at last dying formidably on the steps of the foyer with a great laugh and a cry, “For King and Cocktail!” And when again the old order raised its head it was only to be finally crushed at the rout of Kensington, where the flower of Oxford and Cambridge, marching to the relief of London, was surprised and overthrown while awaiting the issue of a dog-fight at the corner of Church Street....

“Do you think,” she asked shyly, “that I could share your homely kipper! ‘Now I’m here’ sort of thing, you know....”

“Turner,” cried Ivor to the man at the door, “you heard that? What are you going to do about it?... You see,” he explained, when Turner had gone out, “you are my first guest in this house.”

“Well, you are an odd man, I do think!” Virginia suddenly attacked him. “Do you mean to say that you aren’t in the least curious to know what my host, friends, and husband will think at my not turning up to dinner?{179}”

“But, Virginia, they wouldn’t be your host, friends, and husband if they were very surprised at a little thing like that, would they? Of course we can send a message,” he added. “I’ve got a kind of car somewhere about the house. It’s an American car——”

“Oh, no! To send a man three miles to say I’m not turning up for a dinner which they’ll have eaten by then—oh, no! They’ll just think I’m lost, that’s all.”

She touched her hair, she jumped up and looked into the mirror, and she made a face at what she saw.

“If you will show me to your bedroom, Ivor,” she turned to him to say, “I will somehow or other put the fear of God into ‘Swan and Edgar’....”

It was after eleven when they heard the rustle of a car on the little gravel drive. The rustle stopped.

Ivor grandly waved a hand towards the curtained windows: “Here come the messengers of Kare and Tarlyon to demand a very fair lady.”

Virginia, again in the depths of her chair after dinner, looked mildly surprised; but just a little more than mildly when her husband came in almost on top of Turner. George Tarlyon stood grinning at Virginia from the doorway, and at Ivor. And Ivor couldn’t help smiling back at the “clever fellow” expression on the handsome face.

“Here we are, you see!” Tarlyon cried; and the grin was all over his face, a gay, mocking grin.

“Well, I’m very pleased,” Ivor met him in the middle of the room. They were of a height, dark and fair, but Tarlyon was much the stronger set of the two. His extraordinarily fair hair was crisply curly from his wide, reddish forehead; he looked clean and scrubbed and weathered—always as though the salt of the sea had{180} just whipped his face. And so gay, with that attractive smile that never left the slightly frozen blue eyes....

Virginia vaguely introduced the two men. And she examined her husband, rather severely.

“I say, you know, I’m awfully sorry to have rushed in on you like this. But, don’t you see——”

“Certainly. Used to hear about you, you know, from a man in my mess called Transome. Thought no end of you, he did. I was sorry he went....” He turned to Virginia, still appealing: “What I mean to say is, my dear, that I knew you’d be grateful for a lift home in the car, so I brought the blessed thing along....” He took the glass from Ivor. “Damned good husband I am, I do think,” he teased Virginia. Splendid he was, standing there by the table between the two, simply glowing with the pleasure of the moment, laughing at them, teasing Virginia with that sideways little grin under his fair, clipped moustache. He mocked Virginia. He toasted Virginia....

“Yes, but how did you find out I was here?” Virginia asked. “For I left no word as to where I would be, and my footprints are too small to be visible to the human eye....”

“Easy, my dear, dead easy! On your not turning up for dinner, with every excuse, I must say”—he bowed to Ivor—“Kare put inquiries through the butler to the servants’ hall to find out whether anything had been heard of any dark, handsome strangers of superior mentality in the neighbourhood. On the name Marlay being mentioned we all naturally stood to attention at once. That’s our man, we cried with one voice. Anyway, I cried and they echoed. And so here I am! Easy, Virginia, dead easy!”

“But it won’t be so easy to get home,” Virginia remarked, “if you have another drink....{181}”

George Tarlyon leaned against the edge of the table: enjoying himself immensely, it seemed. So gay, so slack.... Ivor was immensely amused by him; anyway, he thought he was. He gave him another drink.

But Virginia looked tired, staring into the bright fire. She seemed suddenly to have lost all interest in the two men in the room.

“I say, I liked that book of yours,” Tarlyon said comfortably to Ivor. He stretched his legs out a little, towards the fire. “You know, that one called—something about a courtesan....”

“That’s it, Virginia! Splendid book, I thought. I don’t have time to read as a rule, but I finished that—Virginia saying she knew you once, you know, and that you were clever.... Just the kind of book I’d like to write myself if I wasn’t a half-wit....”

“There you are, Marlay!” Tarlyon cried; and he laughed with his head thrown back and his eyes wrinkled up. “Virginia thinks I’m a most consummate ass, but when I do try talking the clever stuff for which I’ve a natural aptitude she quickly puts the lid on me.... But, seriously, Marlay, I did like that book of yours. You got the eighteenth century uncommonly well, I thought. And I think that word ‘courtesan’ is a considerate word—what I mean is that it was very decent of you to trouble to write a long word like ‘courtesan’ time over again, when you could have used a couple of short but septic ones just as well. Virginia, are you with me in this?... She yawns at me! Marlay, my wife yawns at me! All women yawn at the men they love—did Oscar Wilde say that, Marlay, or have I said a marvellous thing?”

“A marvellous thing, I think,” Ivor just managed to say. “Wilde said something like ‘All men kill the thing they love....{182}’”

“Oh, that’s just a quibble—they come to the same thing. The man loves, the woman yawns, and then the man kills her! So I have said a marvellous thing after all! Are you listening, Virginia?”

Virginia looked very tired indeed. She smiled at him sleepily. George always made her smile in the end.

“I feel myself getting more brilliant every moment,” Tarlyon said comfortably. “It’s this room, Marlay, that’s having a witty effect on me, I think. And I also think it’s pretty clever of you to have a quiet little house like this, where you can receive the lovely ladies who get bored with our conversation at Rupert Kare’s....”

“But their husbands can come too,” Ivor pointed out, “if they behave themselves.”

Virginia suddenly jumped up. In desperation, it seemed. And with a gesture the black anarchical hat crowned her head, her coat was to hand, and she was ready to go; and she was gone. Tarlyon followed reluctantly.

As he started off the car, she said to Ivor, in the front doorway: “We’ve had a lovely talk, Ivor—I’ve loved my evening with you. I’ll try to come again, only we are due off to the South any day——”

“Come on, Virginia!” came Tarlyon’s voice from the glistening shape of the car—charming young Charles Rolls’s legacy to England.

“Good-night, Marlay, good-night,” came the gay waving voice of George Tarlyon, as the car curved softly round the drive and away to the London road. Ivor heard his laugh in the distance. An amusing man. Those two, out there....{183}

CHAPTER V

Virginia came only once again. Four nights later, a little after ten o’clock. Ivor, his book laid aside, was pacing the room in the suddenly restless way which was growing on him, when he heard the soft rustle of the car on the drive. He stood very still. And then an apparition came into the room. The apparition came towards him. He smiled at it, but the apparition was grave of face. Its face looked bleak.

“Oh, Ivor, I’ve come to tell you we are going to the south of France to-morrow. I just thought I’d tell you.” It said that shyly.

She had come alone, driving the open car. Virginia hated closed cars, she loved air, bitter, chill air; it made her feel ill, for she was very delicate, but she loved bitter, chill air. And now her face looked blanched with it, her blue eyes bitten bright with it; and a strand or two of golden hair played loose about her forehead, for her head had been uncovered but for that transparent stuff now on the table. She smiled vaguely, there was no light in her.

“Oh, Ivor, I’ve come to tell you we are going to the south of France to-morrow. I just thought I’d tell you....”

It was a queer moment for him, an upside-down kind of moment. He was still smiling at the amazing fact of seeing her—amazing because he had so wanted to!—when those words, intruding at the same moment, quite upset the equilibrium of his pleased gesture. He felt vividly that he didn’t want her to go away, but not at all. She stood close by him, in front of the fire. The little white face.... And all he could say{184} was plaintively, absurdly: “But I hate your going away, Virginia—suddenly, like this!”

She had slipped off her fur-coat on to a chair, and now stood revealed in her evening-dress: a dress too rich for the ordinary occasion, a Venetian kind of dress, a deplorably beautiful dress of the kind which, women said dispassionately, only Virginia could “carry off.” What Madeleine Vionnet had created as a beautiful joke, Virginia made into a magnificent illusion. Throat and arms and shoulders exceeding white, her bosom tight in deep red silk of taffeta—but lo! this deep colour ended shortly, its coloured richness was but to tease your senses and ensnare your eyes! For suddenly there billowed from it a filmy white skirt, filmy and intangible, white upon white subtly flecked with golden-dust: a wide and waving whiteness which swayed as she walked, which swayed as she stood, gently, as though it lived a delicious life of its own: and from the deep red bodice there fell baubles on to the wide white skirt for a short way, short golden baubles of golden rope in arabesques—the curious fancy of a crafty designer who surely never thought his dress would be worn so inconsequently, taken three miles on a chilly night to a lonely house by a tiny English river....

“Well?” she asked, opening her eyes very wide at him; and then she gave a sharp little laugh at his darkling brows—as though, good Heavens, he were offended!

“And what’s more,” she added, “we won’t be meeting again for some time. Maybe we will never meet again, Ivor! For I’m sure you won’t take any steps about it—just like all these years you have known me and never tried to see me, never once!”

There she stood, a head below him, white face up{185} at him, eyes wide and very grave, amazing and somehow unearthly! and the breasts under that tight red bodice, little full breasts. And suddenly his one arm took Virginia bodily, and pressed her to him and her face up to him. He kissed her lips: and her little tight breasts were hot against him. For a long time, a long time utterly lost to time in the violent softness of Virginia’s lips, his arm pressing her to him. So thin she was, tall and thin and breakable. And she shivered a little, her eyes tight closed, and her face a white mask: startling white between those twin gold curls, gay “Swan and Edgar!” She swayed a little, and her skirt rustled, and when his arm loosed her she seemed to fall right down into the wide chair behind her. Helpless white mask, carnival dead of carnival! She opened her eyes and stared up at him, the man darkly up there. But a crypt was not darker than Virginia’s blue eyes....

“I’m sorry ...” he fumbled. It killed all assurance, that look of hers. He took a cigarette from the box on the table.

“I didn’t mean to, either,” he said coldly. Then why had he done it? He loathed fumbling. And suddenly he got furious. What was all this about, anyway?... “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said bitterly.

And somehow, as she lay there like a broken Venetian toy, his eyes fixed on her mouth. He had never seen it before, Virginia’s mouth, but now his eyes desperately found it. A queer mouth it was somehow, queer lips for a lovely woman to have: there was nothing soft, nothing yielding about them: beautiful but somehow unwomanly lips, so taut, so dry: the lips of a woman who liked the wind in her face.... He had never seen Virginia’s mouth before. And now the touch of it was on his own, hot and dry. Nothing moist about Virginia. He smiled at her helplessly....

“I didn’t come here for you to do that—I didn’t,{186} Ivor!” she cried up at him, and her eyes glittered with tears—Virginia in tears!

He wanted to laugh and brush it aside. As though Virginia had never been kissed before—Virginia! “Forget it,” he wanted to say coarsely. She was too serious.... But, somehow, he was serious, too. He stood above her in her chair, a long way above her. He murmured something....

“But you do know that, don’t you? I didn’t come here for you to do that—that particular kiss....” And she leant back her head and closed her eyes against him. Ivor played nervously with a match for his cigarette—one arm makes striking safety-matches rather difficult, sometimes. He swore a little at the match.

“You see,” whispered the lips of the closed eyes, “your kiss means something. I knew it would ... I knew years and years ago.”

And she jumped up and faced him pitifully. “That’s why I’m making such a fuss about it, don’t you see—Ivor, you fool! For your kiss means all the things I haven’t got left, the lovely things! Oh, I’m not just trying to make a scene, I want you to understand.... I haven’t got one left, my dear, not one....”

He couldn’t deny that—he didn’t know anything about it. She was too serious—but, somehow, nothing light would come from him.

Again she closed her eyes, and her eyebrows contracted, as though with pain; and she gave her head a sudden shake, backwards.... You are a pet, he thought.

“That’s why I so wanted you not to make love to me—you, Ivor! Deep down in my heart I didn’t want you to. For we simply can’t be lovers, you and I. I thought that years ago. I hated you....”

All this ... talk! Why, he wondered, does a woman always pretend to a deep and mysterious knowledge of anything to do with love? He knew, quite clearly, that she had expected him to kiss her—but he also knew, just as clearly, that she was miserably{187} sincere in not having wanted him to kiss her—once he had done it! She made him feel a vulgar beast.

“Thoroughly,” he admitted; he smiled a little, self-consciously; he hadn’t wanted to admit it.

“But it’s just as well you should know.” She didn’t heed his gesture. “It’s just as well you should know that it’s easy for men to make love to me—‘easy, my dear, dead easy’! Why, Ivor, making love to me has become a recognised institution, it was the only careless game that the war didn’t make more expensive. I assure you. And not so very careless with some, either, for I’m still beautiful. D’you notice, Ivor, that I’m being funny, so that you can laugh? Poor Ivor.... Didn’t you know, dear, that Virginia at thirty-one is a perfect mess? You ought to have known, clever Ivor, you ought indeed—you who write so bravely about women, not to say courtesans!”

She had said just the things to make him angry. But he only lit another cigarette; he held the safety-match to the fire this time.

And she stamped her foot at him in a sudden fever. “Don’t you see, you fool, that I’ve never yet met a man in whom I haven’t brought out the beastliness? Never once—it’s my fault, I bring it out. Somehow....”

“Virginia,” he said, “you’ve got nerves. And I’m not a cad—I don’t think so, anyway.” It was her scene entirely—he implied that. And he wanted to show that the whole thing rather bored him—her attitude.

“I know.” She nodded her head. “That’s why all this. For we wouldn’t suit each other at all, you and I. I’m no use to you, Ivor....”

“For where you are so wrong is,” she went on{188} reasonably, “that you think I’m like you. But I’m nothing like you at all. I’m just a little cad....”

“My telling you all this,” she gravely assured him, “is entirely on your own head. You shouldn’t have kissed me—like that! It wasn’t fair, Ivor. And very upsetting.... Oh!...”

“You see, Ivor, I misbehave,” she explained. It was her air of being reasonable that irritated him most. “Yes, I do! I misbehave frightfully. People will tell you.... And where you are so wrong is that you think I’ve been natural when with you, whereas I’ve really been on my very best behaviour with you—all the time. Even now....”

If she had set herself to anger him to silence she could not have succeeded more completely.

He held her furs for her. And she went so swiftly that he could only follow her to the door. The large shape of the car swallowed her up; and the car twisted softly round the little drive and away to the London road. Minutes later he heard its Klaxon, just one sharp keen, like the harsh cry of a sea-bird....

Now two weeks later Ivor received this telegram from Cimiez: “Please come to stay with us here if possible. Trains packed, and sleeping cars unobtainable. Will order car to meet you Ritz, Paris, noon Saturday, to bring you down. Please wire.”

He fingered it, and he thoughtfully stared out of the window. A February prospect is not the best prospect to stare at thoughtfully. It provokes comparisons. The world outside his window was bleak and desolate. The world within his window was bleak and desolate. He wired, and went.{189}

CHAPTER VI

Virginia was certainly right about the trains from Paris to the south being packed: there was not a sleeping-car to be had for months to come, and for an ordinary seat one had to fight; so that the capacity of French railway officials for being rude and being bribed was being exercised to the utmost. The douaniers were also charming, and people remarked on the genial smiles with which the passport officials at the ports greeted them.... The dawn of peace, the new year of 1919! What wonder that those who could rushed quickly away from the homes they had so long and vigorously protected, to the bright Mediterranean coast! The Sketch and the Tatler said that the Riviera had “at one bound” regained its pre-war glories of rank, fashion, and riches, and published photographs in proof of same. Carelessness was upon the world again—in 1919—and life glittered as of old, or even brighter. And what wonder—in 1919! Spectres there still were, but solaces abounded....

The hill of Cimiez, as all the world knows, adorns the background of the town of Nice; and the hill of Cimiez, as all the world knows, was adorned by Queen Victoria, who stayed there for a period, or two periods, upon its very crest. That crest is now distinguished by a statue of her person and a monument to her name—which is no less than the Hotel Victoria Regina, a very large and white hotel indeed, from whose windows the prospect of the Mediterranean seems but a little thing. A huge white palace it is, reigning on the hill of Cimiez, and quite dominating the smaller white palaces which are scattered about the slope of the hill, one here and the{190} other there, on each side of the winding road that takes adventurous quality down to Nice, the pleasaunce of the mob. The presence of the great queen has left a deep impress on Cimiez, for what streets are not named directly after her despise any but the nomenclature of English majesty: whence come the rue Edward VII., the Avenue de Prince des Galles, the Place Regina, and recently the Avenue George V. Of course there are no shops on Cimiez. Those white patches of elegant shape that you see as your car climbs the winding road from Nice, are villas; and in the villas are rich Greeks from Egypt, India, and Smyrna; Jews from Egypt, India, Smyrna, and England; Englishmen from Lancashire; Americans and Grand Dukes from Paris; and Lord and Lady Tarlyon. And these last in the whitest and most elegant villa of all (the property of Mr. James Michaelson of Lancaster Gate) at the far end of the rue Edward (not Edouard) VII.

This villa was long and low and white, and severe after its manner: for upon and about it were none of those playful ebullitions of taste, such as conical towers, domed roofs, embattlements, statues, coloured tiles and crenellations, such as are dear to architects of villas all the world over. Lady Tarlyon’s chauffeur, sent long in advance of her to choose a villa not too utterly offensive, for she considered him a man of discernment, had been instantly pleased by its air of quiet dignity qualified by a certain bravado: its air of frankly yet discreetly compromising between a Georgian mansion and a Texas ranch, with both of which Lady Tarlyon’s chauffeur was familiar. One of its main attractions, and perhaps the one mainly indicative of Texan influences, was a verandah that ran the length of the house on its front and southern side. Now this was a real verandah, not one of your merely decorative ones, a verandah about which men could pace and smoke cigars and women drop fans to break strained silences: a verandah with a wide prospect{191} over the distant Mediterranean, for that brilliant blue sheet was cut short some way without the coast by the trees that cover the flanks of Cimiez and make Nice invisible to those who would rather live out of it. It was, in fact, a verandah of chairs and gossip and silence, to seduce each to the indulgence of his own nature, whether it most pleased him to look upon his companion or over the sea: to dream, maybe, of nothing but what lies in that wanton sea, for ever so tenacious of men’s homage and for ever so reckless of their honour.

On an afternoon that February, Lady Tarlyon’s house-party were sitting in an uneven group on the verandah. From the verandah were imposing marble steps—the chauffeur had apologised for those steps—to lead leisured feet down to a considerable lawn; but the gardeners of Mr. James Michaelson of Lancaster Gate had rather neglected the lawn during the war, and it looked a little odd, as a lawn. However, no one needed to look at it twice, for there was always the Mediterranean, which is a tidy sea during the season.

George Tarlyon (blue serge jacket, white trousers, a Brigade tie, and brown-and-white shoes) was there, also a brandy-and-ginger-ale. Virginia was there. Major Cypress was there—Hugo Cypress, the last of the beaux sabreurs, bless him! Lois was there, and her husband, the companionable little Earl. And Mrs. Chester was very evidently there, in a chair beside Tarlyon.

Ann Chester, quiet and soft-moving as was her elegant habit, was always very evidently everywhere; you couldn’t help but notice her, you understand, as she came into a room, a restaurant, or a theatre. She was a woman of thirty-five: which is not very old for a woman nowadays—and is, as a matter of fact, considered a proper age for a lovely woman, if only she can stay at it: Mrs. Chester could. She was of a tall and{192} slightly full figure—only slightly full—and she wore clothes so that Frenchwomen looked like Englishwomen beside her. Mrs. Chester was American originally. It was said that she sprang from the F.F.V.,[E] but it was also said that she had sprung so far that she wouldn’t be able to get back. Mr. Chester was nonexistent, in that no one had ever met him or heard of him until the death was reported of an American gentleman, Mr. Beale Chester, during a week of misunderstandings in Odessa. Ann’s accent was just faintly American enough to be very attractive—she would say, “I’m going to Paris, France, to-morrow”—and she was, indubitably, a lady. She was really very lovely, in quite a classical way, of feature, complexion, and hair: and always softly smiling, softly. Her eyes were gray and understanding—the eyes of a dear! which, you know, she was. The stage had missed a great beauty when Ann Chester had decided on life as a career: which is such a banal witticism to make about women that it is sometimes true about a few of them. She attracted by sheer womanliness of body and mind, and sheer stupidity. And hers was that mature and exquisitely soignée womanliness which, they say, drives sensible Jews and newly-created peers to madness and bankruptcy. If a precious young man were essaying a precious study of her in a precious magazine, all of which might quite easily happen, he would say, “Even her soul was manicured,” and he would be utterly wrong—for, mysterious Mrs. Chester, she could fall in love! It had been remarked about her, she could fall in love! and not only within the commonplace limits of a béguin either, which are the only limits that nice women allow to the passions of women not so nice. She had been known to sacrifice things, even jewellery. Now a man beloved of Ann Chester appalled the imagination of other men—of what stuff was he made, what queer virtue was his? For imagine Ann clinging, clinging, moved at last out of her softly smiling acquiescence{193} into a fullness of surrender, beseeching your sincerity in return for hers, that hair of cosmopolitan gold at last malsoignée with abandon—imagine it!—our Ann clinging in desire! Oh, it was inconceivable!

The hour of four-thirty is not a lively hour in Southern Europe. Lady Tarlyon’s guests sat on the terrace lazily, in white becushioned wicker arm-chairs, talking just enough. Later on they would dress and motor eastwards, along the higher Route de la Corniche, to Monte Carlo: there to dine at the Paris and gamble at the inevitable Sporting Club. The house-party of the villa at the far end of the rue Edward VII. despised Nice and all its works, but one and a half kilometres below them; they did not like Nice, it bored them; and so far they had done nothing at all about Nice except to motor through it.

“He once knew a man who had some picture-postcards of it,” Mrs. Chester explained. “Yes, George?” and her gray eyes enfolded him, and he grinned sideways at her. Virginia’s lips were smiling, just a little, at the sea. George often made her smile.

“Nice,” he said, “is just like Blackpool, except that the air is cleaner at Blackpool. We are thus led to the unpatriotic conclusion that if Blackpool were as far from England as Nice is, we would at this very moment be in Blackpool.”

“I wouldn’t,” Virginia said. She turned in her chair to stare definitely at her husband. She would sometimes turn that sudden and definite stare on to a man she knew well, as though recasting a theory about him. Virginia never uttered her theories about people, so one could never tell if they were silly or not. He gave her a cigarette.

The flank of the hill of Cimiez, as has been described, did homage to their prejudice, for the white town of{194} Nice was not visible below them, there was but the sea and the bending coast towards Cannes. Far on the right lay the little town of Antibes, a wan little cluster of luxury in the sunlight: and the hills that hid Grasse waved gently back into the distance of more serious (and less expensive) France. The sun owned the day and the sea, and to the sun belonged all that was on the land. The awning over the terrace was bright in its bravery of red and white stripes, and through it the sunlight was subtly diffused over their faces, it was as though the awning extracted the scent from the sun and sprinkled it over the company below. Good-looking people....

George Tarlyon, at the side of Mrs. Chester, who was lazy in deliciously silver crêpe de Chine, said nothing which couldn’t be sufficiently answered by her smile. Lois was vaguely reading the Daily Mail (continental edition), which fully reported arrival of self and husband at Lady Tarlyon’s villa in Cimiez, and threw in a photograph of Virginia out of sheer exuberance. The companionable little Earl was asleep. Hugo Cypress was talking to Virginia about, of all things, Forestry! And maybe Virginia was gaining much knowledge about Forestry, and maybe she was not, for she seemed to listen with every now and then a quick smile of understanding, but her eyes wandered vaguely about the horizon, and they looked like eyes that suffered from expectation.

The villas in the rue Edward VII., so luxurious in every other respect, do not have carriage drives through their gardens to their doors. Cars stop without the little white wooden gates, and the company must needs walk to further luxury, which was a nuisance when it rained, but then it didn’t often rain. A large and dusty car stopped before Lady Tarlyon’s gate this February afternoon; there was luggage behind it, a{195} chauffeur driving it, and a dark man in it—all very dusty. The dark man stepped out, stretched himself, smiled at the driver, and passed through the white wooden gate. It was a quite considerable walk from the gate to the villa, up the narrow path that divided the neglected lawn. And as he was rather cramped from his very long drive, he walked lazily.

He could not see the people on the terrace, under that awning, but they saw him; they stared at him. He had taken the alternative path from the gate, not towards the marble steps, but to the left of the villa, where he could see a door and open French windows.

Lois screwed up her eyes at the figure coming up the path. Lois always screwed up her eyes like that when looking at a distance, because she saw more that way.

“But he’s not such a stranger as all that, either!” she cried. How many years was it since she had seen Ivor Marlay? And Virginia had told no one he was coming to the villa—typical of Virginia, that!

“Please, someone, who is he?” begged Mrs. Chester. “He’s so very tall and black....”

“Marlay, novelist,” explained Hugo Cypress. “But comes of quite good people—on one side. Missed an earldom by an heir’s breath....”

“Well, I never!” sighed Mrs. Chester. “And is that what makes him so bad-tempered looking? Tell me, George....” Ivor was bareheaded and looked rather tousled, that’s all.

Tarlyon grinned at Virginia, but addressed Mrs. Chester. He waved his hand towards the figure.

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “He is one of our leading authorities on courtesans.”

“In that case,” Lois turned sharply on him, “he’ll talk less about them than you do, George.”

“Oh, pretty!” said Hugo Cypress. And lashed out{196} with his foot at the companionable little Earl—Johnny was his name—who thus woke up just in time to miss the pleasure of his wife’s wit. Lois could be sharp, very. But Tarlyon never minded her.

“Hallo, they’re off!” he cried now. For the company on the terrace was decreased by one. Suddenly, swiftly, silently, Virginia had left them. Down the steps went her feet, and the others stared after her as she walked across the grass towards her guest: who, seeing her, stepped from the path towards her. They met. The lady had no parasol, and the sun made festival of her hair. The sun shone furiously down on them, revealing the gold of a woman’s hair and the mystery of a man’s smile, for all smiles are mysterious from a distance; and Virginia had her back to the terrace, they could see only Ivor Marlay’s smile of greeting. And Lois thought: “That same rather courtly smile—how it used to annoy Virginia years ago! Well, well, even Virginia grows up....”

“Yours is a nice car,” he said, “but it’s got no ambition on the hills. We were delayed a little.” That was their greeting.

They walked towards the house. The chauffeur, a suitcase dependent from each hand, passed them and went ahead. There was a silence; and then Virginia said suddenly:—

“You mustn’t mind what George says. My husband, I mean. He’s a child and adores to annoy—and he’s terribly pleased if he succeeds. You won’t let him succeed, will you, Ivor?”

He had realised now the battery of eyes from the terrace; it was a curious feeling, after that long and solitary journey from a solitary place in answer to a telegram; and he suddenly felt very hot and bothered.{197}

“My dear, I won’t mind what any one says if you will let me have the loan of your bathrooms for half an hour or so. I’ve got more than two days’ worth of French dust sticking to me, and feel monstrous.”

“You will find,” she said, “as many bathrooms as you’ll need, scattered about the first floor. And then tea on the terrace.... It was nice of you to come, I do think,” she added in a quick breath.

He went indoors swiftly, without looking at her. Shy, she thought. It pleased her that he was shy, for he had seemed rather inhuman ... long ago.

She lingered on her way back to her guests. She took a cigarette from her little case, which to-day was of lapis lazuli. Virginia had many cigarette-cases, small ones, they had somehow come her way: of gold, of platinum, of jade, of tortoise-shell, of crystal, of onyx, and little boxes of worked silver that had once been snuff-boxes, but she nearly always used this one of lapis lazuli, for she liked lapis lazuli. She confined herself to five cigarettes a day, but to-day, somehow, she was smoking more.

“What have you done with the dark young man?” Ann Chester asked her as she rejoined them.

“He’s preparing himself for you, Ann,” Virginia answered rather shortly. Lois glanced at her. A servant came out, wheeling a tea-table through one of the windows.

“You are a divine hostess, Virginia,” said Johnny suddenly. He had not said anything for a long time. “You are the only hostess I know who ever gives one tea at tea-time. They generally offer you a wretched little cup at about a quarter to six, when it tastes like a warm cocktail.... Would you like me to go on about this, Lois, or shall I shut up now?”

When people said that Lois and Johnny were very happy together, other people exclaimed, “Well, who couldn’t be happy with Johnny?{198}”

CHAPTER VII

At the last moment only George Tarlyon, Mrs. Chester, and Hugo Cypress motored to Monte Carlo. Major Cypress, authority on Forestry as he was, was even more of an authority on all varieties of “dicing”—under which name, in this particular set, went every game of hazard—and could always be counted on to go towards a Casino. He was the author of an unwritten play called Limejuice Nights, an unwritten romance called The Profligacy of a Pork Butcher, and of that splendid marching song of the Grenadine Guards, which begins:—

but never ends. “For,” said Major Cypress, “it needs genius to finish a poem like that, and I’m frightfully afraid I’ve only got talent.” And then he would give that funny, gurgling little chuckle of his, a deep “cluck, cluck, cluck.” Hugo Cypress was a very useful man in a battle or a house-party; sometimes he would get drunk before a battle, “just to appal the enemy,” and sometimes at a house-party, “just to amuse your guests,” he would explain to his hostess, who generally adored Hugo, the last of the beaux sabreurs. He was an uncommonly agreeable companion for any man or woman—or for a man and woman.

Virginia and her three remaining guests dined very pleasantly; and Johnny remarked how glad he was that they hadn’t gone to that “beastly Monte Carlo, where they shoot pigeons all day and pluck them all night.{199}”

“Give me home,” said Johnny, “a little conversation, and a nice-glass-of-wine....”

The conversation, however, was not very “little.” For Lois, his wife, had charge of it, and Lois had a reputation to keep up. Lois’s conversation—which, people and papers said, was witty—consisted in asking rather sharp questions about a given subject, listening impatiently to your replies, and then saying that that wasn’t what she had meant and asking another question, beginning: “But don’t you think, now....” To-night she was talking, or rather asking witty questions about, publishing. Mr. Worth Butterthorn, the publisher, had recently offered her five thousand pounds for her memoirs, and so Lois was rather interested in publishing; so had Mr. Worth Butterthorn been, when Lois had capped his offer by saying that she would be charmed to write her memoirs for him or any one else for seven thousand pounds; and Mr. Butterthorn was thinking about that, probably at that very moment. Lois was clever about money....

They discussed publishing. Ivor was naturally expected to know something about it, but didn’t. And as for Johnny, he of course never knew anything about anything, let alone publishing.

“Who pays who?” he asked. “And why?” (The silliest part of Johnny’s silly questions was that no one could ever answer them.)

“What I want to know is,” Lois dangerously put to the table, “if, say, 30,000 copies of my memoirs are sold at 18s. 6d. per memoir, and if my royalty is, say, 22 per cent. per cost price per memoir, will I make more or less than by selling my rights outright to Mr. Butterthorn for £7000?”

“What about,” Johnny suggested, “a nice little monograph instead, on Artists I Have Sat To, Off and On?”

“My idea is,” she said briskly, “that Mr. Ivor Pelham Marlay should tell us a story on a given theme.{200} We will give him the theme, and he will tell us the story.... Now won’t that be nice for you, Ivor?” she sweetly asked him.

“I know!” cried Lois. “The theme must be the most fatuous theme ever put to a man. It must be a motto, a moral, or an Oscar Wilde epigram—but it must be fatuous!” She turned to her husband. “Johnny dear, you’ve said so many fatuous things in your life, can’t you think of one someone else has said—just for once, dear?”

“Well,” snapped Ivor, “without a little familiarity you can’t breed anything, can you?”

“But you must, Ivor!” Virginia insisted seriously. “I shall count up to five, and if by then you can’t tell us a tale to prove that Every Good Action Brings Its Own Reward, your reputation will be for ever blasted—not only as an author, Ivor, but as an officer-and-a-gentleman.”

“All right!” Ivor stopped her with a grin. He addressed them all: “Now this is a story about a comb——”

“That’s done it,” sighed Ivor. “I won’t play any more. Let Johnny try.”

“That’s all right,” said Johnny. “I am not an author, I am a man of ideas. Watch me. Now this is a story about a comb——”

“This story,” snarled Johnny, “is not only about a comb but about a Mr. Jones and a Mrs. Jones as well. If you guess that they were man and wife you will not be wrong. And what’s more, Mr. Jones loved his wife very dearly, even though he hadn’t enough money to do it with from every angle. For of all the things Mrs. Jones passionately wanted, besides of course Mr. Jones, was a tortoise-shell comb; which, she thought, would become her very well, for her hair was of the colour of a landscape at sunset, streaked with ochre. So at last Mr. Jones secretly managed to scrape together as much money as he could find lying about in his employer’s offices, and bought her a very adequate tortoise-shell comb——”

“—— comb. Mrs. Jones adored it and adored him, and every one was happy. Now I ask you, how were they to know that the shopkeeper had seen Mr. Jones coming and had sold him a celluloid imitation comb instead of a tortoise-shell one? And so one evening, as Mrs. Jones was doing her hair for Mr. Jones’s arrival, celluloid being very inflammable, it caught fire, and the fire caught her hair, and Mrs. Jones was utterly burnt up when Mr. Jones arrived for dinner....”

“And a very good story, too,” said Ivor pleasantly. “I liked the sting at the end....”

“Well, my dear,” said little Johnny humbly, “I’m frightfully sorry, but, don’t you see, Mr. Jones drew the insurance-money for his wife’s death....”

They had dined late, and it was nearly midnight when Ivor and Virginia were at last comfortably stretched on two of the wicker arm-chairs on the{202} verandah: for, of course, it was perfectly clear from the moment of his arrival that they must in the next few hours be sitting together on that verandah. The air was chilly with the chill of a Riviera night in February, and Virginia, lying deep in her chair, had wrapped her moleskin coat well about her: for in the year 1919 the moleskin coat was at its ascendant, whence it has since been driven by barbarians, led by one Mr. Kolinsky....

There was no moon, only stars set brilliantly in the soft black onyx of the sky: a black night, and very silent on Cimiez; and a black and silent prospect from the verandah, intensified rather than broken by the distant reflection below of the lights of Nice on the velvet void which was a sea by day.

The hill of Cimiez is always of a silent habit at night, for its world is either in bed or the Casino, and the rattle of the tram-cars up and down the hill ceases by ten o’clock. Ivor and Virginia seemed to have borrowed something of the silence of the Cimiez midnight, for they sat silent for a long time, for what seemed a long time. And the light from the long windows opening out on the terrace fell brilliantly on them.

Now it was quite dark. Ivor could barely make out her face, a yard away from him: a dim, white thing above the soft darkness of her coat. It had not the remotest likeness to flesh, that face. It was made of some thin, white stuff....

“Have you ever had a beast in your life, Ivor?{203}” And the dim, white thing grew bigger as she turned her face towards him. “A beast in your life, right in it, Ivor?” she insisted. “Have you? Think, my dear, for it’s most important....”

“When I was much younger,” he seriously told her, “I had a beast. I’ve almost got over it now. The beast in my life was Other People. I resented them....”

“I meant,” she said at last, “a personal beast. A beast, you know, with a face and arms and legs. A face that’s always there, in one’s life....”

“I suppose,” she said, “that you’ve loved sanely ... knowing more or less what and why you were loving. Or probably you haven’t loved, you’ve just liked people very much.”

He didn’t answer that. There was no special answer to make, except that he hadn’t loved or liked often; and then one would have to qualify that....

“That’s why, maybe, you have never had a beast in your inner life, Ivor. You are lucky, I do think....”

Her voice was making no appeal; it was just her voice of daylight undressed by the virtue in the night. But the way of her words was intensely pathetic, and he intensely felt the pathos of her in that moment, a dark moment. That pitifulness again! He seemed to understand things about this Virginia.... And she went on softly:—

“I’d like to draw a beast for you, Ivor, so that you could understand. But it’s difficult, so entirely a thing of feelings. You know? It’s just hell in the fourth dimension, and how can one explain that?”

“But one loved the beast, Ivor! Oh, yes, frightfully! That’s why he’s so real, so awfully there....” He saw the white of her hand as she made a sudden gesture. “He’s so fine, don’t you see? In a conventional way, if you like, but still.... The blond beast of devilish philosophies maybe, Ivor! And he entered{204} one’s life and swept one up, so airily! If only Ouida had been alive to see his type! He came, you see, as something quite strange—a man among the weaklings of my life with Hector Sardon. Oh, I seem to have known so many weaklings! Poor, poor Hector! Ah, you never saw me all that time, Ivor. It was a terrible time, terrible—and so rotten! But you probably guess.... And the beast came during the worst of it, when I couldn’t hold out against it all any more, not alone.... A lovely man the beast was, Ivor, and not at all the fool he mockingly pretends to be. Oh, no, not a fool at all! And so fresh and weathered and solid.... With him I felt the earth under my feet again, good old English earth in all its immense and lovely solidity. I thought I felt that, anyway, for it was only an illusion that he gaily mocked into me....”

“They mock one,” Ivor said, “and then one hates oneself. It’s beastly....”

“Mockery!” There was a soft and remote meaning in the way it dropped from Virginia’s lips. “Mockery! that soft and sweet mockery of a man in first love—oh, Ivor, it’s the finest thing—at first.” Her wicker chair creaked loudly as she suddenly turned towards him, and his accustomed eyes could see hers through the darkness, wide eyes fashioned out of the mystery of the night, eyes sombre with query. “Have you ever felt that in a woman for you, Ivor?”

“Yes,” he said. And he nodded gravely: “but mine wasn’t only at first—it meant nice things all the time.”

“I’d like to be dramatic in my speech just for once—please may I, Ivor? Though I’ve already been frightfully dramatic with you once, haven’t I? It’s most unusual in me, I assure you, Ivor.”

“Well,” Virginia confessed sweetly, “I feel that{205} there’s nothing so terrifyingly masculine and magnetic as the feline male. For that’s what he is, my beast! The perfect thing of his kind.... So very representative, Ivor, that he’s exceptional! In the dirt of cities, round about Shaftesbury Avenue maybe, it must be that kind of man, I suppose, that makes women do queer things for them, walk the streets and the like. They have a queer effect on women, my kind of beast. My particular one has made me put up with some odd things, I can tell you, Ivor! Standing aside and watching him make love. It was awful, awful, at first.... And then he sort of magnetises one by his perverse understanding of oneself, he forces one to treat him as he treats oneself. He judges people by his own beastliness, you see—and he’s so often right, Ivor! He’s so often been right about me....”

“And then,” she said, “he has queer, soft moments. He sometimes smiles at me from across a crowded room, in a most sweet and understanding way. And he seems to say: ‘Only you and I know what you and I are really like, and we’ll never tell any one—will we, Virginia’?”

And her wicker chair broke out in fantastic chorus as her whole body seemed to turn to him.

From behind them the noise of a piano suddenly burst on their silence. It lashed out into the darkness in a furious medley, then softened down to classical sobriety—then again a furious medley, then a jingling step, then to something very softly played.

They listened. For Johnny had the art of seducing attention while he played; he played perversely, his touch had a delicate and impish genius, and he mixed up fugues and fox-trots with almost passionate cheek; he played like a tired genius, and they listened. He stopped soon....{206}

“He always does that for five minutes before going to bed,” Virginia told him, “drunk or sober. So if you pass any house anywhere in the night and hear that noise, you will know that Johnny is about to go to bed. He says it’s his swan song, and that he likes to repeat his swan song every night so that he won’t feel it so much on his last on earth. Nice Johnny....”

Suddenly she stretched out a hand and touched Ivor’s arm, so unexpectedly that it startled him. There are women who appear incapable of touching one, and when they do, no matter how lightly, their touch seems to have a fabulous meaning. He had not looked at her for a long time, he had been staring into the darkness, but now she startled him into staring at her.

“You may be thinking,” she said wistfully, “that it’s rather indecent of me to speak so plainly to you about George. Please don’t think that, Ivor, for I’m not used to confiding in people; in fact, I’ve never done it before, and I shall be so easily frightened off.”

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “And that’s why I wired to you to come down here. I’m generally supposed to be a secret kind of person, you know. ‘She never tells,’ people say. But I wired to you because I felt I couldn’t bear the burden of things alone for another second. It seems silly....”

“And I thought,” she said shyly, “that telling you all this might explain a bit of that terrible last night in England....”

“You needn’t explain that,” he said quickly. “One’s always afraid, somehow....”

He nervously waited for her to speak; and he was puzzled, faintly irritated, by her silence, for he wanted her just to tell him that she didn’t now want him to believe that she was a “perfect little cad.” But, after a while, she only said, dimly:—

“Now that I’ve told you why I asked you to come, I’d like you to tell me why you did come, please. It’s a very leading question, isn’t it?{207}”

“I was lonely,” he said. “And I thought that maybe you were lonely too. I just thought it. And, Virginia,” he earnestly leaned towards her a little, “I’m so glad you’ve told me about your personal beast, indeed I am! But are you quite, quite sure that it’s such a personal beast as all that—that it isn’t just your, well, distaste of your present life that you have somehow personified?”

“Anyway,” he went on, “I thought we might help each other somehow.... One has these brilliant ideas....”

“Was it an impertinence to come in that spirit, I wonder?” he asked suddenly.

She stared at him; and faint memories stirred in her of those very young days round about Mont Agel and the Hallidays, when she had been so impatient of this man’s “rightness,” his bursts of defensive formality. She stared at him. And realised with a start that he was speaking.

“You’ve asked me a question, Virginia, and now I will ask you one—a baby question. What is it you most want in the world?”

“Then there’s only one answer, and that is in one word—understanding! Just that—understanding! The second childhood of a woman’s dreams lies in the word, Ivor....”

The night was so dark and still, yet somehow noisy with their personalities, that Ivor had a feeling that she and he were children....

“We’re like children playing in the dark, Virginia—I feel, do you know, that nothing we say this moment matters at all! It simply doesn’t matter, it just belongs to this childish moment....”

“Then I will ask you your question back,” she took him swiftly up. “What is it you most want in the{208} world, Ivor? Remember,” she added, “you have said this is a childish moment, so you can be sincere.”

“I want,” he said firmly, “the loveliness in people. No less. You’ll say that’s pretty arrogant, and I suppose it is. But I want it all the same....”

“I’ve had a bit,” he explained, “so I know it’s good—oh, wonderfully worth having, Virginia! But one can’t keep it—anyway, I couldn’t keep my little bit. Wasn’t worthy, I suppose. But if you’ve got to wait quietly until you are worthy of a thing you might wait till the Last Trump and still not get it. Better to snatch than get left, I think.... One’s best moments draw that loveliness out of people, and then one loses it. Little demons of prejudice and resentment make one lose it—that shining loveliness in people, Virginia! And when that’s in them they have clean eyes—amazing, isn’t it?—but later on their eyes are not so clean, and one’s own are mirrored in theirs. People say that’s ‘life.’ Everything that gets dirty is called ‘life,’ Virginia. Everything that dies is called ‘life.’ ...”

He stared towards the sea, over it. The Mediterranean slept profoundly; and then it seemed to him that the Mediterranean was not asleep, only pretending; it was a prowling beast, ever prowling about the shores of Europe and Africa....

CHAPTER VIII

George Tarlyon entered his wife’s bedroom fairly early the next morning. There was a door connecting their rooms, but he came in by the ordinary door; for when they had entered into occupation of the villa the servants had somehow forgotten to unbolt the door between their master’s and mistress’s rooms, and no one had thought of doing it since. Lord Tarlyon was no slacker, and could do with as little sleep as any man; for no matter at what hour he went to bed, he was generally up and about by ten: as now, entering his wife’s bedroom, gently, as fresh and clear of eye as though Casino smoke was balm to his health. Virginia lay very still, her golden head sideways and deep in the hollow of her pillow, and he was about to withdraw when she opened her eyes. She looked tired.

“I wasn’t asleep,” she said. And she stared at him as he smiled at her from the foot of the bed; and through the half-open door she heard the noisy filling of a bath. She wondered if it was Ivor’s or Hugo’s. Johnny believed in daylight sleeping.

He let the sun into the room with a mighty rattle of curtain rings; and the sunshine kissed Virginia’s hair—especially “Swan and Edgar,” so unruly in the early hours!—but her eyes would have none of it. She shaded them with her palm.

“I slept so badly,” she complained softly: but not to him, to the space about her.

Tarlyon loitered at the foot of the bed, splendid in the light, his hands in his pockets, frankly admiring her.{210}

“I hope you won’t mind, Virginia, but we brought Julie Gabriel back here with us last night.”

“Couldn’t really help it, in a sort of way,” Tarlyon explained. “She had quarrelled with her young man, it seemed, and she really looked in rather a mess, so I asked her down here for a few days—until she gets over it, you know. Oh, come, Virginia,” he teased her, “have you no heart?”

Virginia imagined Julie Gabriel “getting over it!” What, on this earth, had ever “got over” Miss Gabriel?

“I’m sure you’ll quite like her,” Tarlyon assured her. “She’s quite a nice little thing, really....”

“Yes,” Virginia agreed softly, “at some one else’s table in a restaurant.” Virginia hated all restaurants—except, of course, the Mont Agel.

Miss Julie Gabriel had made her name as an actress in the year before the war, by showing her naked back to the audiences of a London theatre for ten minutes every night for six months. It was a charming back, people said. However, she had since retired from the stage, finding, no doubt, that she could make her fortune more swiftly and with less public exposure. She had a house in Curzon Street and a palace on the river, and young Royalty was supposed to have supped with her. People liked her—she’s common, but so full of life, they said. It was also said that George Tarlyon was the only man she had ever loved, and it was believed.

“George St. George,” a little voice said from the depths of a pillow to the ceiling, “you do know some low people, I do think....”

He was at once very considerate; he sat on the edge of the bed; he appealed to her as a friend.

“Virginia, you don’t really mind, do you? Because, of course, if you do we can have her thrown away at once....{211}”

“Besides,” she said, “haven’t I always said that you could ask any one you liked?”

And then Virginia had a grim thought about Mrs. Chester. Poor Ann! But she said:—

“Oh, our Lois! I’ll fix her all right—besides, it will come in handy for her Memoirs! She won’t mind.” And he got up from the bed with a lazy swing.

“Before you go, you might give me the hairbrush and small mirror from the table,” Virginia asked him.

Virginia and her husband never talked of any subject for more than five minutes; and never referred to a subject again. That is called “getting on” with a person.

But Lois did mind. She had a reputation to keep up. But when Lois minded, she minded secretly. For when George Tarlyon, raiding her bedroom with little ceremony, told her of the addition to the party, she instantly cried, “Oh, splendid!” And that very moment decided that the Riviera was perhaps seen to best advantage from Cannes, to which she and Johnny would repair that very afternoon. Johnny was informed.

She mentioned their departure to Ivor, without, of course, giving the reason for it, as they walked about the garden before luncheon. Virginia had not yet come down. Lois said:—

“Well, Ivor Marlay, I’m glad to have seen you again, if only for a passing moment. Try not to be a beast, my dear, and come to see me in London{212}——”

“Why, are you going to-day?” The surprise in his question seemed to her a little out of proportion to the fact. She glanced at him as they walked.

“Yes, but not to London direct. Johnny and I are moving to Cannes this afternoon.”

“I’m going to ask you such an impertinent question,” he said, “that I must first light a cigarette. If you will strike a match for me....” His one arm made striking safety-matches just a bit of business; he traded on it sometimes.

“You aren’t surely going to ask me not to go, Ivor Marlay! That wouldn’t come very well from a man who has simply refused to come near me for—how many years? Seven or eight, I think.”

“That’s exactly what I am going to ask you, Lois,” he said earnestly. “I’m hoping you will understand. Can’t I really tempt you to stay a few days longer?” The question was light, but the manner earnest enough. But that Lois appreciated its earnestness was evident only in her glance, for she laughed—the laugh with which she turned things away, a gay laugh, the Lois laugh. (All these people had each their own particular laugh; thus, it was fun to imitate each other’s.) She understood very well why the question was “impertinent.” She knew he was asking her what Virginia, however much she wanted her to stay on, would never ask her—he was asking her not to leave Virginia stranded. It was certainly “impertinent.”

As Lois had said she was going, Ivor had had a sudden vision of Virginia stranded in that galère, Virginia deserted by her friend rather shamefully. But, with these people, where did friendship begin and where end?

“No, really. I’m so afraid I can’t,” she said sincerely; and added: “Johnny would be ever so disappointed at putting it off now!{213}”

“Virginia will be disappointed the other way,” Ivor just pointed out, bluntly.

They continued their leisurely walk in silence. Then Lois turned her head to him.

“Virginia, you know, makes everything all right by not noticing things. And she has no need of friends—I assure you, Ivor Marlay! She works things out for herself and by herself.”

“And I don’t think,” Lois added secretly, “that she will be altogether sorry at our going. Not so sorry as all that, I mean....”

Then they talked of other things, and Lord and Lady Lamorna left for Cannes immediately after lunch, in Virginia’s car. They were great car-borrowers, Lois and Johnny.

Virginia and Ivor were not alone that day, but he didn’t gather from her expression that she was in the least put out by her friend’s sudden departure. She seemed to enjoy her guests that day, and Ivor not less and not more than the others. And the day and evening passed in a crowd, to which the voice and person of Miss Gabriel were certainly vivid additions. Virginia was charming to her, and gayer than Ivor had ever seen her, except perhaps during those first moments of their sudden meeting in the lane by Lady Hall. It was a little difficult to imagine this easy and social Virginia, inattentive to anything for more than a minute, as the faint and wistful figure of the dark terrace a few hours before. Not that she glittered in the Lois way, but she was gaily promiscuous of her attention, she was a woman without preferences....

Tarlyon and Miss Gabriel disappeared for the latter part of the afternoon in the other car; and Ivor and Virginia spent the hour or so between Lois’s and Johnny’s departure and tea in walking with Mrs. Chester, who was rather silent, and Hugo Cypress, who thank God wasn’t, about the winding lanes that lead about the crest of Cimiez—what part of that crest is{214} left uncovered by the mammoth luxury of the Hotel Regina.

The “dicers” stayed at home that evening—Tarlyon and Cypress had both won a packet at chemin de fer the night before, which was nice for them. Mrs. Chester did not dice, saying she had no unusual parlour-tricks. Dinner was therefore something of a festival. And later on they somehow fell to dancing to the gramophone in the wide drawing-room: which was apt for that purpose, for it had been fitted with a parquet floor by the luxurious forethought of Mr. James Michaelson of Lancaster Gate. A rather strange thing for Lady Tarlyon and her guests to do, thus to dance, for nowadays they only danced when they had to, considering that they had already danced enough to last them their lifetimes. (They adored Fancy Dress Balls, however—oh, let there be carnival, lovely carnival!) Tarlyon danced with Julie Gabriel, Major Cypress with Ann, Ivor with Virginia.

It was the first time Ivor had been alone with her that day; but when he looked down at her face while they danced it was masked by a smile. He noticed her mouth again, the taut mouth that looked as though it liked to be whipped by the wind.

“Well, Ivor?” she smiled at his look. They were dancing a very slow step—“Oh, very patrician,” cried, in passing, George Tarlyon, whose own dancing was not remarkable.

Ivor suddenly had a desire to force the smile from her face. He would have liked to take the smile from her face with a sweep of his hand, and put it in his breast-pocket, and suddenly give it back to her some other time. He liked her gravity, it was real, but he suddenly felt that this smile was unreal; she had worn it all day, with its variations, and he felt now that she had been unreal all day. Didn’t she know that she needn’t be unreal with him? She had seemed to know last night....

She stared up at him, funnily, with lifted eyebrows. “Is this man mad?” they seemed to ask, those lifted eyebrows.

“Baby!” he thought. She added, as though they had been discussing the subject for hours and she was weary of it:—

CHAPTER IX

On that fourth morning, towards noon, Ivor was taking the air on the rather unkempt lawn. No one else seemed to be about that morning, no one had as yet come out of the long, low, white villa; though every now and then, as he passed near an open bedroom window, he heard voices: Julie Gabriel’s voice, Tarlyon’s laugh, and once the Cypress “cluck, cluck.”

Ivor was taking a little thought about what exactly he was doing as Virginia’s guest; and as he had very carefully not thought about it before, he now tried to put it to himself as bluntly as he could. How long was he going to stay, and what for, anyway? They didn’t wildly amuse him, these people, nor he them. Oh, yes, of course, Virginia was the reason, he admitted that. But he didn’t admit anything else; there was nothing else to admit. (There never is when one is thinking out a thing “bluntly.”) Virginia had been distant from him these last two days. He hadn’t felt in the least hurt about that—he didn’t expect anything. But he could not be rid of an idea that she was just letting things drift, in a rather helpless but defiant way: but perhaps she was always letting things drift in a rather helpless but defiant way: just letting things drift until something happened. Did she expect something to happen from him?... And he suddenly realised that he wasn’t in the least treating her as he might some one else. But he wasn’t treating her in any way at all! He was behaving like a polite old man....

Ivor loathed “fumbling about”—“messing about”; trying, he thought impatiently, to get at uncertain things uncertainly. There was an {217}uncleanness in “fumbling about.” ... He wondered what, in particular, it was that Virginia liked in a man. One generally knew that with women. They generally told one. It was generally about the first thing a woman let one know about her, the kind of man she liked; and it was always interesting to know the kind of man a woman liked. But one couldn’t tell with Virginia: her men contradicted each other.... And then the figure of George Tarlyon came into his mind. He had barely spoken a direct word to Tarlyon since his coming—it hadn’t, he fancied, been expected of him. Tarlyon didn’t like him, it seemed. “There’s only one thing George hates in this world,” Virginia had said, “and that is to be disliked. It doesn’t happen often. But he feels you don’t like him, Ivor.” Well, that was a pity, because he had wanted to like him. He couldn’t help it. They always thought the worst, that kind of man; they thought it rather clever of them to think the worst, and other people thought it rather clever of them, too. He would never, about anything in the world, have any explanations to offer George Tarlyon, Ivor thought; he could go on thinking the worst until he burst. Good God, he had probably thought the worst that night he came to fetch Virginia at Nasyngton!

And then he thought of Virginia being attracted by Tarlyon, and loving him, adoring him perhaps, and being held by him even when she had found him out—odd, that, however attractive the man was! The things women create in men, for their own hurt generally! Even Virginia, an intelligent woman! Take a——

He spun round, tremendously interrupted. Virginia was ten yards away, walking towards him with her swift, easy stride. It occurred to him that this was the first morning he had seen her before luncheon.... Had he wanted gravity on Virginia’s face? Here was enough now, it was more evident about her than the golden sheen of the hair that framed it! Grave indeed{218} Virginia looked, as she came to him. Her calling of his name from a distance was her only greeting, there was no smile to bear it company. Virginia looked her age this morning, for the first time. She came right to him.

“I am going away to-day,” she said quickly, “to Paris, I think. Are you coming with me, or will you stay here?”

“Of course I won’t stay,” he replied abruptly. “About time I went, anyway.”

“My God, have I always got to be asking you questions!” she cried. “First I had to ask you to come here, and now I’ve had to ask you to come away—don’t your lips form questions or what is it, Ivor Marlay?”

She turned her face away from him. The bright sun, on that open lawn with the windows of the villas glittering full at them, was cruel to her young face at this moment; it probed its pallor and revealed its weariness. Her lips were trembling. She said, away from him, very quietly:—

“When I woke up this morning I decided I couldn’t bear all this another minute. But are you sure you would like to come?” She asked it as though they were going to a tiresome function which would weary them both.

“Yes, very much,” he said gravely. He wondered what on earth she had expected him to say—be enthusiastic? She wasn’t enthusiastic....

“I’d better go and tell some one to pack my things,” he said, but made no movement.

“I’ve told them,” she said in her suddenly absent way. Where on earth did Virginia get to when her{219} eyes looked like that? Those sentinels.... He felt flat.

“On the other hand,” she said, “I’d better go and supervise my own packing. It’s a bit complicated, this hot to-day and cold to-morrow....”

And then she left him, walking quickly towards the villa; but she wheeled round from a short distance—and he was suddenly amazed by her smile, a gay smile it was, and it made her face look all golden. She called to him softly:—

“I’m ready now,” he cried back to that glorious smile. And standing there, he watched her all the way to the house, the tall, the fearless, the mysterious Virginia....

It was the lesser and more comfortable drawing-room; in which, before lunch or dinner, was always a cocktail for any one who cared to mix one, or sherry and the like for those with more “old world” tastes. George Tarlyon was being “old world” this morning, sprawling in a large arm-chair with a glass of sherry to hand. George Tarlyon’s white-flannelled legs were stuck straight out, and his blue, slightly frozen blue eyes were mocking the brown tips of his white shoes with an almost serious expression; and George Tarlyon’s crisp fair hair shone with the water of his bath. Handsome, careless, reckless George Tarlyon.... A Viking, thought Ivor, as he came in at the window. And George Tarlyon awoke lazily from his contemplation.

“Hallo!” he said quite genially. “Have you been thinking out another book on courtesans, pacing up and down like that? God, I wish I could think!...”

“Ah!” said Ivor absently, and took a cigarette{220} from a box on the table. Tarlyon at once struck a match and held it out to him from his chair.

“Must make striking these awful French matches awkward sometimes,” Tarlyon referred sympathetically to his arm.

“Not so awkward,” Ivor said, “as it makes a good many other things. As you can imagine——”

“I’ve no imagination,” Tarlyon complained frankly. “Have a glass-of-wine instead?” (One referred even to a tankard of ale as “a-glass-of-wine.”)

“Well—perhaps a little later,” Ivor said, leaning against the edge of the table. “I’m not the man I was at daylight drinking.”

“I don’t know what you mean by a little later,” he said, “for I hear you are leaving us before lunch.” And he grinned, just a little, directly up at Ivor. Trying to confuse one, Ivor thought. Well, he wasn’t going to be confused....

“And you’ll dine, I suppose, at Avignon,” he suggested. “Romantic old place, Avignon....” And then he added, first to the brown tips of his shoes, then directly at him: “By the way, Marlay, there aren’t any other women you’d like to take away with you from my house, are there?”

“I wasn’t trying to be clever, you know,” Tarlyon pointed out. “We can’t all try....”

“Well,” said Ivor, “if that insult was a sample of your wit, you’d have to try pretty hard.”

“What I mean is,” said Tarlyon, “that you can’t expect to be patted on the back when you are trying to play the fool with a man’s wife....{221}”

“That, of course,” said Ivor thoughtfully, “is a sound point of view. In fact it is the only point of view. But it seems to come strangely from you, Lord Tarlyon.”

“Then why the hell,” asked Lord Tarlyon, “are you mixing yourself up in it?”

The slightly frozen blue eyes were looking very steadily, very mockingly, at Ivor. And Ivor suddenly blazed away at them: “I haven’t given a thought to your life, Tarlyon. And I am so little thinking of playing the fool with your wife, as you call it, that you are the last person in the world with whom I would discuss your wife!”

And Ivor, whose back was to the door as he half-sat against the edge of the table, screwed his head round....

“I’ve been ready for some time,” Virginia strangely told her husband, not coming into the room. Ivor turned his head away.

“It would be nice of you,” she added, in that way she had of saying things as though she wasn’t there, “to give the man a hand with the luggage across the garden to the car. I seem to have rather a lot of luggage. Would you, please?”

“I can do it,” Ivor said quickly: but a hand fell lightly on his maimed shoulder.

“Don’t you worry, Marlay. I’m the backbone of Pimlico, I am.” And Tarlyon lounged by Ivor without a glance, an immensely unperturbed man. Virginia stood aside and let him pass through the doorway, and, without glancing after him, came swiftly across the room to Ivor, whose back was still to her. In his slack position against the table her eyes were level with his.{222}

“Ivor, don’t be too angry,” she pleaded gently. “It’s so unimportant, that kind of thing!”

She was getting on his nerves, and it was a tremendous effort not to tell her so. She shouldn’t have heard, she shouldn’t have come in. Tarlyon and he might have got the thing more or less right, a bit cleaner anyway. He felt foul, foul. Like a thing from a pest-house. God, how queerly Virginia chose her men!

“Do you know,” she was saying, “I could have reminded him from the doorway—I was just outside, by the stairs—that it wasn’t his house, and that he was my guest, just like you. But I thought that would be common—wouldn’t it have been, Ivor?”

“So I thought I’d punish him by sending him to help with the luggage instead. I had to end it somehow, don’t you see? That was also common, I know, but less common—wasn’t it, Ivor?”

She simply made him smile, she was like a schoolgirl. And as he unwillingly smiled, she began to laugh, right into his sombre eyes, a long and low laugh of pleasure. He protested with nerves:—

“Look here, Virginia, if you can’t leave a man in peace to be angry with another man, what will you let him do?”

But she laughed, standing there almost against him, her face close to his: she laughed right into his sombre eyes....

“Oh, Ivor, you are a funny man, I do think!” she cried softly. “Though that isn’t why I’m laughing—in fact, I don’t know why! But maybe I’m laughing because I feel there simply must be something to laugh at in all this—and your very angry face, Ivor! Ther{223}e’s always something to laugh at in everything, dear, and if one can’t quite put a finger on what that something is, one must just pretend. So I’m pretending—and frightfully well, I do think! Don’t you? Answer me, Ivor?...”

“And also answer me this,” she whispered. “When George was beastly to you and about me, and you were beastly to him back, weren’t you awfully glad that you hadn’t made love to me down here? Now weren’t you?... Oh, Ivor, what fun it must be to be a gentleman whose lawlessness is all according to rule, precept, and precedence!”

“Indeed I’m not, dear!” She was contrite. “It was George who tried to do that, and whether he thinks it did or didn’t come off we won’t now have time to find out....”

“You see, Ivor,” she explained, “George made a small mistake. He has always laughed at my men—and so have I, for the matter of that!—and he thought he would have a go at laughing at you. He’s generally found it very effective. But when he found it didn’t come off with you he got angry and gave himself away.... It’s really entirely your fault, Ivor, for not being a laughing matter. You are a damn bad-tempered man, that’s what’s the matter with you, dear. Whereas all men should on certain occasions be laughing matters, or else other men will hate them.”

“So he hates me then, does he?” Ivor rather naïvely asked. “Is that, do you think, because of you or because he just happens to hate me, anyway?”

“Maybe he thinks you’re dangerous,” Virginia told him seriously. “Or maybe it’s because he’s not sure of the kind of man you are. George hates not being sure of people. He also hates not being sure of the{224} income my trustees allow him as my relation-by-marriage—and a charming income it is, too, I do think! Anyway it won the First Prize at the Islington Income Show....”

You could never tell with Virginia in this mood: one moment she was quite serious, and the next she would say silly things like that.

“And has he any idea,” Ivor began sharply, but he never finished that question for she did the most surprising thing in the world: she drew a cross on his forehead with her finger: and she was not smiling.

“I think he has an idea,” she whispered, “that I may be going away for good....”

They went. And as they went no one was visible—except dear Hugo in his shirt-sleeves at his bedroom window; and he cheerfully waved to them and they threw farewell gestures to him, for Hugo was really very, very nice—and always so very aloof from everything! His friends might quarrel with each other, but they could never quarrel with Hugo Cypress, the last of the beaux sabreurs.

The large touring-car, with chauffeur and maid (known as “the Smith,” because her name was Mdlle. Louise Madeleine Dupont) in front, and Ivor and Virginia behind, swiftly approached Antibes, on the road to Cannes. And it passed Antibes.

“I’m damned if we’ll lunch at Antibes!” Ivor suddenly said: but gave no reason to Virginia’s, “Is this man mad?” eyebrow-look.

They did dine, however, seven hours later, within the blond ramparts of Avignon. “Romantic old place, Avignon!{225}”

CHAPTER X

No car, not even such a one as Lady Tarlyon’s, can reach Paris from the south within a day, or even within two days without particular preparation; and besides, it is a chilly kind of nuisance to motor at night over some of the worst roads known to man—especially when one can stay so very comfortably at that ancient hostelry of modern comforts, the Hôtel des Cardinaux, just within the blond ramparts of Avignon, as you enter Avignon through the village of Villeneuve-les-Avignon and across the broad sweep of the Rhone. The Hôtel des Cardinaux, four square and stout sides enclosing what the hasty traveller may remember as a labyrinth of courtyards—in which loiter the queenly ilex-trees and upon which seems to open every window in the place, a multitude of small-paned windows—is also blond, a seared and dirty blond reminiscent of a century when fine ladies did not mind a little dirt so only their lovers were laced and perfumed. In fact, the only thing in Avignon that seems not to be of that dirty and delightful blond is the crucifix on the hill which rises above the centre of that ancient town—that gray symbol of a great idea, which even the vast and glowing Castle of the Popes cannot mortify. Stare one way—if you can find any altitude from which to stare, for this is a stuffy and enclosed town, a town of crooked side-streets and cramped movements, a town of bustling commerçants—stare one way, and you will see this crucifix upon its hill; stare another, over the crenellated ramparts that now look so amazingly useless, and you will see the broad sweep of the Rhone over which you blissfully hurried into Avignon; and when you have{226} looked at the Rhone for a few minutes, you will say that it looks a hard and heartless river, a river of steel. The land of Provence is green and light in spring, but the Rhone beside Avignon is always of steel, and the reflection of the sun upon its smooth waters is but an illusion to placate the romantic stranger. And over it the mistral hurls itself at you as you stand, say, at your open bedroom window at the Hôtel des Cardinaux, so that you cry, “My God, I thought it was warm in Provence!” and you close the window very quickly, and you draw up a chair to the ugly fireplace in which a fire is struggling smokily with the mistral in the chimney. And you say gloomily to yourself that Avignon is not a place in which to be happy in this century: in some past century, maybe Mr. George Moore’s century, but not in this. For, though you are in the land of lovers and troubadours, your thoughts are not of romance: certainly not until you have dined.

Ivor and Virginia dined in a private sitting-room upstairs. Obsequiously was the door opened for them upon a dark and cumbersome room with high walls of faded red damask: and so long deprived of youth and light that, as the light crept in with Ivor and Virginia, the mirrors stirred sleepily with reflections of ancient candelabras and musty golden patches of Empire luxury on the background of red damask. They dined almost in silence: very companionably, but almost in silence.

The day seemed to have tired Virginia, as well it might; and, excusing her silences, she complained, ever so little, of a pain. It baffled Virginia to describe this pain but as a sick little pain, something between a tummy-ache and an ear-ache, and very disturbing in its frequent comings and goings. And she mocked her pain, saying it was a busy little pain—and very mysterious too, or else French and English doctors had been very unintelligent about it. And to deal with it Virginia always carried about with her some clear, white-looking stuff in a little bottle—“it’s got opium{227} and mint in it,” she said—and she would take a drop or two of this in a thimbleful of water, and it would presently soothe away the sick little pain inside her. And sometimes she would make her friends try a little of the stuff in which there was opium and mint, just to see what it was like, and they generally said it was pretty foul. That is what Ivor sympathetically said to-night, as they sat after dinner in two frightfully uncomfortable arm-chairs in front of the smoky fire. There they sat and talked of nothing in particular, nothing personal. And, quite soon, Virginia said she was tired and wouldn’t mind going to bed; and Ivor said he was also tired, and yawned a splendid yawn to prove it.

They had to walk across the corridor from the sitting-room to their bedrooms, two doors side by side. Virginia let herself into her room; and swiftly she stretched out her hand and took his, and smiled very sweetly at him.

Once in his room Ivor found he was indeed tired. And when he was tired his mutilated shoulder hurt him: it often hurt him devilishly, but he was almost getting used to it. It tired one a good deal more, he thought, to be driven in a car a long distance than to drive one. He would ask Virginia to let him drive to-morrow, he had driven quite a lot with his one arm, and after all there was young David Harley, who drove splendidly with only one arm and a wooden leg. Then he stopped and stared at something, quite intently; and as he stared at it he was very still, scarcely breathing. Of course, he had seen it before, while he was dressing for dinner, but he had only seen it out of the corner of his eyes; he hadn’t touched it, he hadn’t the faintest idea if it was bolted or not.... Then, suddenly, he felt very weary in mind and body; quickly undressed,{228} and went to bed. It was a wide, low, and very comfortable bed, with no antique nonsense about it. His shoulder hurt like hell.

Ivor slept, and had a dream. He dreamed of golden hair falling about his face and body, creepers of golden hair entwining him. And then a strange turn happened, strange even in a dream about golden hair, for he was made to see his mind as a column of marble. And a very tall and shapely column it looked, too! standing on nothing, directed nowhither, just an Attic column looking very beautiful with the rare beauty of an indestructible thing. That column was his mind, in the dream. And he looked at it for a long time, he was made to examine it very carefully. “Look, look!” someone seemed to keep on crying in his ear, rather impatiently, Ivor thought. And then at last he saw what he was intended to see—there it was, oh so high up on the column! There it was, a naked creature, a woman, a slight and naked thing, and so dazzling white! She held on there in a marvellous abandon of fulfilment, white arms and legs deliciously entwining the column, golden hair wanton about her shoulders, and lips destroying the marble column with kisses. Ivor stared at it for a long time, a very long time, and as he stared the column seemed to come nearer and nearer to him, until he could hear what the golden woman was whispering as her lips destroyed the column. But although he could distinctly hear what she was whispering, his mind couldn’t form what he heard into words, simply couldn’t; and he miserably racked his brain about it, thinking that it was very important indeed for him to form her whisperings into words. And when at last he opened his eyes to the dark room he could still hear the whispering, but now he could form what the whispering voice was saying; it was saying: “Oh,{229} Ivor! dear Ivor....” And she wasn’t kissing a silly marble column at all, that golden woman, she was kissing his lips, and her hair was falling about his face, tickling just a little. Oh, she wasn’t real, of course! she was only a legend, a legend of a night in Avignon! And, stretching out his hand, he touched her body lying across the bed, and her body under the very thin nightdress was icy cold to his hand.

CHAPTER XI

Naturally, they did not now hurry to Paris: or hurry anywhither, for the matter of that. They had no plans, there was no hurry, the weather was perfect; and the world was far too busy enjoying the lack of killing—the spring of 1919!—to notice or care what two people were doing. Ivor and Virginia had too much to talk about to discuss such banalities as destinations. “We are going towards Paris? Very well then, let’s go towards Paris.” Thus they motored gently towards Paris, staying at places. Nach Paris is the vaguest and most uncertain destiny in history, as all men know; and the route these two adventurers took would have broken the heart of a motoring-map, if they had consulted one. They somehow got to Chartres, among other places. Chartres has about as much relation to Paris from Avignon as Canterbury, and they got to it only by the divine accident of seeing, one evening, the two towers of its magnificent cathedral from the far distance. Ivor and Virginia never forgot the catch in their hearts at the sudden beauty of the great cathedral high against the evening sky. “Oh, it’s somehow like a great horse!” Virginia whispered in the silence of their wonder at that great shape high against the sky: for the cathedral of Chartres is built upon an eminence in the town, and from anywhere on the straight roads that lead out of Chartres to the four corners of the world you will see its lofty genius against the sky.... From Chartres to Paris is but a three hours’ drive at most, but it took them a week: part of which time they spent at a hotel in the forest of{231} Fontainbleau. A lovely and indescribable fortnight, this from Avignon to Paris....

Virginia always stayed at the Ritz in Paris: it was just a habit: but the habit was confined to the rue Cambon side of it, saying it was quieter there. Ivor, who also stayed on the rue Cambon side, pointed out that as a matter of fact it was much noisier than the Place Vendôme side, but that as all hotels were beastly, it didn’t very much matter. There are certain gentlemen of mean and truculent appearance, who, in the early hours of every morning, enter the central streets of Paris, and bang large tin cans against the walls on the thin pretence of clearing out the dustbins.

Virginia had found a letter awaiting her at the bureau: and she had looked at the envelope with that vague, far-away look. But when Ivor, dressed for dinner, came into her room to see if she was ready, which of course she was not, she gave him the letter with a mischievous laugh: saying that it was a masterpiece of Tarlyonry, and an instructive essay for any man on the perfect way to treat a vanished wife and a possibly vanishing income. “Which, though, he wouldn’t think very much about,” she conceded, “for no Tarlyon was ever quite penniless.”

“Am I, or am I not, going to like this letter?” Ivor asked her frankly. “Because if not, I would much rather read it after dinner, if I’ve got to read it at all....”

Virginia was before her mirror, subduing “Swan and Edgar”; and she turned to him in her chair, with her face sideways, holding that small iron toy to Swan. She made a little face at him.

It was addressed from Monte Carlo, and dated five days back. Ivor sat on the edge of the bed and read:{232}—

“Dear Virginia,—I hope you won’t mind the liberty I’ve taken with the villa. I’ve closed it up and scattered the menials, as I gathered that you won’t be returning to this part of the country for some time, and being solitary host of a villa like a wedding-cake isn’t my strongest suit. Hugo and I moved on here, and haven’t enjoyed it as much as if you’d been here too. The ‘dicing’ hasn’t been going so well as it was—poor old Hugo came a crash the other night, and has gone clucking back for to be a toy soldier at Aldershot, saying that ‘dicing’ isn’t what it was in the early seventies and that he’s going to fight the Bolsheviks instead, for the only person who took his money with even a pretence of sympathy was a Grand Duke, who probably needed it himself. I’m leaving for London to-morrow, but as I’m only passing through Paris, where I suppose you are—you might have written to me, I do think!—I shan’t have time to look in on you. I shall stay at Belgrave Square, and look at London for a period, and then go down to Rupert Kare’s. In the meanwhile, should you suddenly feel the call of England in your blood and want to come home, be a dear and send me a wire to White’s, so that I can meet you with a couple of plovers’ eggs on a plate, it being the season for plovers’ eggs and you adoring same. Virginia, don’t tell me that you and I aren’t going to break an egg together at the Mont Agel this year! Remember that you would never have married me if I hadn’t drugged you with plovers’ eggs—and will so drug you again, Virginia, or my name isn’t George St. George, ever your lord but never my own master.”

Ivor folded up the letter, rather slowly and clumsily, with his one hand. Virginia was ready, radiant with the peculiar glitter of a very fair woman in a sleeveless black dress, and looking at him with that mischievous smile of hers. It put him rather on his guard, that smile.

“Odd man!” Ivor said thoughtfully. “Might have{233} been written by a Dago, parts of that letter—and yet he’s the most gallant man in England.”

“Don’t you see that that is the way of his pride?” she pointed out. “He has a great deal of pride, and common sense too, but they’ve both somehow got motheaten in him. And so he writes in that casual and bantering way, as though nothing in particular had happened——”

“Now don’t be snappy, Ivor,” she begged him mischievously. “You and I know something most particular has happened, and so does George really, but he wouldn’t give that away, even to himself, not he! He thinks and writes about it in that unimportant way just so as to make it seem unimportant, something not at all serious. You see, he’s always been quite sure of his hold on me, and he can’t get out of that conceited habit all at once. Some Englishmen never think their wives can be unfaithful to them, not because they think so well of their wives but because they think so well of themselves. And so George simply can’t help thinking that I am only playing—we must give him a little time to realise that I’m not playing, Ivor,” she added gently.

“For him to realise that, or for you to realise that?” he asked, and put the light out of her eyes.

He had meant to hurt, on a sudden impulse to lance a grievance that had risen within him; and now was shamed by her sincere anger, and would have pleaded his reason and begged her forgiveness, but she turned her head from him, and her face was set. And he told her unlistening face how he had noticed during the last two weeks, and divine weeks they had been, that she had avoided the subject of what they were going to do, the definite thing which was essential to people who weren’t babies. “Every time I wanted to talk about it,” he told her, “you somehow stopgapped me, and sometimes so cleverly that I forgot{234} what I wanted to say in admiring you—but all the time I couldn’t help wondering why you avoided the subject, and feeling you must have some reason for that, a reason so weak that you didn’t dare let it out, for fear I might just laugh at you.” He smiled a little. “It’s been an uncomfortable feeling,” he explained. “Like a cold hot-water bottle.”

But there was no response in her set face. She had sat down with her back to him, on the chair by the toilet-table, and was playing with the lid of a little ivory box. Never before had she looked like this; for the face he saw in the mirror was set in an inexplicable anger, a deep and almost venomous anger which amazed him; and he had a curious feeling that this Virginia’s spine was made of steel, it would bend and bend and bend until one day it snapped up straight and stayed straight, rigid and unyielding. He felt, as it were psychically that there were wastes in this Virginia unexplored by man, wastes where she roamed in utter disregard of human laws, wastes where she could wander untrammelled by human emotions. Give her an inch of excuse, and she would become a snake, to swish away with implacable and unfathomable face. American women were said to get like that when angered, hard. He knew, quite dearly, that she wasn’t now angry at what he had said, but that her whole nature had been given a twist to anger at some hidden aspect of him.

“Well?” he asked softly, from behind her. She had humoured him often, after all....

“I’ve got nothing to say,” she said steadily. “You say that I haven’t wanted to discuss what we are going to do. Having discovered that I don’t want to, I’m merely wondering why you are insisting on it—that’s all.”

“Don’t try to bully me, Virginia, and I’ll not try to bully you,” he warned her. “You see, dear, I{235} think we ought to discuss it, whether you want to or not. It’s really rather important—and you can’t just get out of it by looking like an angry queen and saying, ‘I have nothing to say.’ I’m in love with you, Virginia, and not with love, so I want us to be sane about it. There’s a great deal more pleasure in sanity than people think—for, you know, one doesn’t have to be mad because one is in love....” And then, from behind, he bent down and gently tilted up her chin with his hand and kissed her lips; and, surprisingly, they held to his lips!

“It was a proposal of marriage,” he said gravely. It was the first time that word had occurred between them; but it had occurred within them for now two weeks. Virginia stared at him seriously, and her hand gently brushed his forehead, a very fond gesture. The curious anger in her had died as suddenly as it had come.

“That’s what I was being angry about,” she explained. “And that’s why I’ve made you avoid the subject these glorious two weeks, these lovers’ weeks. I don’t think I want to marry you, Ivor. In fact, I don’t think any woman has ever wanted to marry you.”

“I’ve only asked one,” he told her darkly. “But I’m afraid you will have to marry me, Virginia. Things seem to point that way. I am not philandering with you, I’d have you know. I have finished with philandering. It doesn’t matter a button to me if we are married or not, and I’ve no one in the world to consider but you—but marriage seems to be indicated, for several weighty reasons which I will explain to you if you’ll cease laughing at me.”

“You must yearn,” he said firmly. “We can always dine, but we can’t always talk sense——”

“Not even now,” she interrupted with a great weariness. “As far as I can make out you are trying to{236} make an honest woman of me. Well, you can’t do it. No one can do it. And I want my dinner, please.”

“Damn dinner! It’s no good being funny about this, Virginia, because I’m frightfully serious. I will not have us slopping about Europe in this hole-and-corner way. You are too fine and I am too old.”

“Don’t, please, drive me into being disloyal to all this——” he was begging her impatiently, when she swiftly interrupted him with a gesture.

“Oh, got you!” she cried, laughing into his astonished eyes. “Don’t you see, you poor Ivor? No possible or prospective husband could have said that—only a lover could have said it, in just that particularly idiotic way! Oh, Ivor, you are too sweet! And that’s why it’s perfectly absurd, all this talk about our marrying. You simply don’t look or think or talk like any possible husband; it’s perfectly obvious to the meanest intelligence that you are a lover and always will be. You simply aren’t casual enough to be anything else, Ivor. I assure you, dear. You will never make any woman feel, deep down in her, that you could be anything so casual as her husband. Anyway, you can’t be mine—oh, please don’t insist!” she pathetically begged him. “For I will give way, and then we will look so silly as husband and wife—or rather, feel silly. Oh, my dear, it’s ever such an impossible relation for Ivor and Virginia!...”

But he insisted that they must be reasonable and responsible people, not vague drifters on the scum of life.

“It’s just a matter of orderliness,” he explained earnestly, “our getting married. You are quite right, it is an effort to see myself as your husband and you as my wife—but we needn’t make the effort once we’ve committed the fact. When I said that you were too fine and I was too old to slop about Europe in a hole-and-corner way, I meant that this disorderly kind{237} of life is unworthy of you, and that I’m not young enough any more to enjoy doing no work all the time. For, you know, one never can do any real work unless there’s some stability in the way of life—one simply must be a responsible person, even a lover must be a responsible person, if he is ever to get any work done. And the idea that a man and a woman of your position can live together and say, ‘the devil take the world’ is bosh, there’s never any conviction about that ‘devil take the world’ remark. I know you don’t care anything about social position, I know you quite sincerely don’t ever want to do social things again—but, Virginia, there’s something displeasing and slack, like two people being in dressing-gowns all day long, in a state about which people can make remarks—and in which you can get mocking letters from Tarlyon! I’m talking sense, Virginia, so don’t argue with me because I want my dinner as much as you do and it’s my turn to be angry next....”

Her silence was serious, her eyes wide with thought. He waited, close beside her, staring at her with a crooked little smile. Then, suddenly, she nodded, just once.

“All right,” she said, almost absently. “George will let me divorce him—yes, we can manage that. He’s got a lot of common sense hidden away somewhere....” She got up from her chair with a sudden little shake. “That’s settled then, Ivor. No more talk about it, please—oh, please!” she suddenly pleaded in her breathless little voice. “Let’s have our summer, and then in the autumn we can get down to this business of arrangement and divorce—down from our mountains, Ivor, right down!” Her eyes seemed clouded, he had a queer idea that she was going to cry; but she didn’t, she picked up a tube of lip-salve from the toilet-table and took it to her lips, and then on a sudden thought held it away again.

The corridors of a hotel at the hour of nine-fifteen at night are consecrated to the activities of valets de chambre: it is at that mysterious hour, when the quality are at dinner or the play, that the white-aproned valets raid their bedrooms and rudely snatch away their clothes; and, with jackets and trousers screwed deftly under their arms, go searching the most noisome holes of the hotel for boot-brushes and oily rags with which to dust and clean them.

But to-night the last of messieurs et mesdames were late in their descent. And it was as the valets were waiting in a little group about a bedroom door, in final gossip before the raid, that there passed them down the corridor two silent dandies: a very fair lady—“Ah, ce type anglais!”—and a very tall, beak-nosed, clean-shaven man with one arm and a white flower brave on the silk lapel of his smoking. The white-aproned group stared after monsieur et milady; they saw the hand of the fair lady suddenly laid upon the sleeve of the tall gentleman, and the way she raised her head to him and spoke words which, they saw, the dark profile was quite helpless to answer.

“Elle l’aime, vous savez,” said the doyen of the valets, a wise man.

“Elle s’amuse, mon vieux,” sneered a young Italian with a broken nose; but his heart had been broken too, several times.

Now these were the sudden words of the fair lady, which her companion was quite helpless to answer.

“And I think,” she said, “that there’s somewhere a son of yours who needs me—frightfully!”

“Comedia!” whispered the young Italian with the broken nose, as the lift swallowed up the silence of monsieur et milady.{239}

CHAPTER XII

The pact was made, then: there was to be no talk of “arrangements” until the autumn, it was to be a clear summer of—“unreason,” Virginia teased him. So they had no thought of returning to England that spring or summer, and did not—except for one reckless night in April, to a masque at the Albert Hall. Carnival, lovely carnival! And they were so weirdly and completely disguised—for Virginia was an adept at the art of masque and fancy-dress—that not one of her thousand acquaintances recognised her, or him; and they had much fun to watch the cheerful passages of Lois and many another, including Tarlyon and Hugo Cypress, who had both adopted the same fancy-dress in the form of an Assyrian beard each: with which Tarlyon looked quite magnificent and royal, and Hugo quite too comical. And once, as she passed him, Hugo caught her and insisted on her complaisance for the dance; but as she danced, she didn’t, of course, dare utter a word, lest he should recognise her and “cluck” the news to every one; though even so he might have perceived her had he not been so tipsy—“entirely to amuse the guests, lovely lady,” he earnestly assured her choking silence. And then, in the early morning, swift bathing and changing in Ivor’s flat in Upper Brook Street, and so back to France by the eight o’clock train. “Unreason,” indeed!...

What had they to do with England, those two, and what had England to do with them, during those months? They would outlaw themselves until the autumn....

They were violently happy in each other. They were{240} great lovers, Ivor and Virginia. And sometimes it was a consuming love, and then again it would be very gentle: silent now and bubbling then, gay and grave in changing moods, and sometimes it would be passing sombre—and then again the thing would burst upon them. “Like a flash of very white teeth,” Virginia said. But she said many strange things in nearness, for she was very shameless with him, which was strange in her. (Gerald Trevor used to say that it was the business of a good mistress to be shameless, and the business of a good lover to appreciate it. Men can’t afford to be shameless, they get nasty, he said. Prejudice, of course. Dear Gerald!) One day she wondered about her shamelessness with him, saying that she had never been like that before.

“But never, Ivor! Men have wanted me to say things, of course, but one just wasn’t able to, even if one liked them very much. One just couldn’t. But now! Oh, you lovely beast, Ivor!...”

Now when Virginia said she had “never” done a thing before, there was no question of not believing her (the word “never” is really frightfully difficult to believe), for the amazing thing about Virginia was that she never told a lie. She had never been known to so far, anyway. And Ivor accused her of never telling a lie, saying that it was inhuman, and that he felt rather out of it, having told a-many.

“But that’s where I’m beastly,” she pointed out vividly. “I go silent, you see. I just sit still and say nothing. It’s much worse than lying, and much crueller, to be silent—and I’m known, you know, as a very silent woman. Of course I get a bit chatty with you ...” she suddenly giggled at his expression. That was how things generally ended with those two....{241}

One day Virginia cried. Looking up from the page of a book, Ivor saw her eyes dimmed with tears.

She smiled a little, in sudden confusion. And she spitefully dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

“I’m realising, you see, that I haven’t deserved a bit of this—oh, not a bit of it!” she cried miserably. “Ivor, I’ve deserved it much less than other people might deserve it. I am too lucky, Ivor, and I’m afraid....”

Vividly the scene of his first kiss that January night in Nasyngton came back to him. He remembered it against her.

“Don’t, please, Virginia!” he begged her. “I do hate your thinking of all that....”

She stared at him miserably. There were no tears in her eyes now, they were intent beyond his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said plaintively. “Only I see men. Suddenly, sitting here—I see men. You and I are so happy, you think such fine things about me, and you make me fine—but sometimes I see men! Men who wanted to be happy with me, you know. I was so easy, Ivor ... and then I was so cruel.... Some haven’t forgiven me yet. There are a few men in the world this minute who hate me for a beastly woman, and they are right, for they’ve never seen me with you. I’ve been awful vicious, Ivor....”

And he remembered the feeling she had once given him of the “wastes” within her, the lawless wastes where Virginia’s soul wandered in lawlessness, the{242} bleak wastes of angry indifference; and how he had seen her, felt her, dropping thither from his love, and how he had somehow clutched her back, he never knew how—this soft and tender Virginia, pitiful and so full of pity!

“You are thinking lovely things about me!” she cried in distress. “I see by your eyes, Ivor.”

For all these things came to pass in a studio in the Place du Tertre, which is a small square lying flat on top of the Butte above Montmartre, in the white shadow and beneath the white cupolas of the queer church of Sacré Cœur.

This studio lay behind a shabby little house in the Place du Tertre, and was built low and wide and elegant to the caprice of an adventurous artist, one Kay Benson; and with it was a garden of flowers by day and lanterns by night, a little garden replete with the secret of all lovely gardens, for a man and a woman could sit in it: thence to stare down at the mists of the busy city and the thin and lively riband of the Seine, at the whole pageant and the confusion of mighty Paris, from the Mont Valérien to the grim old Lion de Belfort.

It was by devious ways and for various reasons that, on that first of May, Ivor and Virginia climbed from the luxury of the Place Vendôme to the solitude of the Butte, to the studio over against the queer church of Sacré Cœur; for is it not queer that men should have climbed so high and laboured so long to build so ugly a church as Sacré Cœur? which is thus a fitting ambition for the silly revellers of Montmartre to reach by dawn, for it is an ugly church even in the dawn and only distance can make it beautiful.{243}

CHAPTER XIII

Their pact was to outlaw themselves from England and all men, from the March day when they arrived in Paris until October. But one cannot be undisturbed in the heart of Paris: which must, of course, be only a figure of speech, for surely the heart of Paris must lie otherwhere than about the rue de la Paix, else men would not so easily die for it. And, too, it was now the chattering Paris of departing armies and approaching Conference, when Lady Tarlyon could not take a step without being recognised and hailed: and Ivor had to be continually standing aside and trying to look as though himself had met her by chance only a moment before.

So they had left Paris, very shortly after their first arrival, and again by car. The world was before them, but they had not a wide choice of direction. Northwards were still soldiers and ruins, westwards were armaments going to rest, eastwards was never but rather dull—so they went towards the Pyrenees, staying where they happened. They went to Hendaye and to St. Jean de Luz—but not to Biarritz!

“Oh no, not Biarritz! We are not feeling at all smart these days!” Virginia cried in his ear, and jolly nearly bit it; which was a sudden habit of hers that caused words between them, for she seemed to like doing it, but it hurt him. “Who has more right to bite your ear than I?” Virginia cried, and because he remarked that she should have said “me” instead of “I,” she punished him. “Oh, you beast, Ivor! you like it, you know you do! And besides your own grammar in your books is rotten....{244}”

But no god known to man can be so absurdly and unreservedly kind to two people; and so there travelled in the car with Ivor and Virginia, the chauffeur and the maid (the amiable “Smith”), an invisible but impish little traveller—none other than that “sick little pain”! It plagued Virginia increasingly, that sick little pain inside her; and soon its mark was laid softly upon her face, always clear-white as a white camellia; but lately it was as though the deity of her father’s button-hole was becoming the deity of Virginia’s complexion, for a gardenia was not more wan nor peculiar-white than the disturbing pallor of her face. Her lips Virginia coloured, but never a touch of rouge touched her cheek, for she said that many Carnal generations had established her complexion, and who was she to risk breaking the entail of so precious a property? And Ivor agreed with her, saying that she was quite right to have the courage of her own complexion....

Now one day it came to pass that the stuff in the little white bottle, in which there was opium and mint, lost all its soothing properties; and the bravery of Virginia—it was only a very little pain, after all!—was of no avail against the solicitude of Ivor, so that Paris saw them again on an afternoon in April.

“I know of a doctor Lois had once,” Virginia said. But when she came out of that doctor’s consulting room, Ivor saw that she was impatient.

“The man’s a fool,” Virginia said; and when they were well outside, she said: “He has the indigestion theory on the brain. He shook his head over me—such a nasty little man, Ivor! And he said that it might be due to too many cocktails and irregular habits—me! And so I didn’t even trouble to tell him that I hadn’t touched anything but Vichy for years, and{245} not much of that.... Now what are we going to do, Ivor?”

“We are going to find a better doctor,” Ivor said; and found a famous one the very next day. “This sick little pain,” Ivor said, “has had a long enough run....”

Le docteur David was a very tall and bearded old gentleman who lived in a very small and stuffy apartement in the rue Ponthieu, a narrow street off the Champs Elysées: a famous specialist and a kind and genial man of the world, with a perfect command of many languages and without a trace of that aggressive optimism which makes so many Gallic doctors quite unbearable to their victims. Virginia liked him, saying that he was a most superior man and that the word indigestion had not dominated their conversation, but that Dr. David had suggested that X-ray photographs would be interesting. She was not very communicative about it, Ivor thought.

They went again to the rue Ponthieu after the X-ray photographs had been taken. And the first sight Ivor had of le docteur David was when, pacing up and down the stuffy and overfurnished waiting-room in his restlessness, a wide double-door opened and there appeared the back of Virginia and the heavily bearded face of the specialist. Virginia was saying:—

“Then it will be all right until October? Oh, please say ‘yes,’ doctor!”

“Yes,” smiled the tall, old gentleman. They came into the room, and Ivor fully saw him as a very courtly, very bearded, and very wise-looking man of the world. Virginia introduced them, and said quickly to Ivor:—

“It’s a long story. Dr. David says I must be operated on, but that I can wait until October....”

“But when I say quiet, madame, I mean very, very quiet,” Dr. David insisted gravely; and his eyes{246} smiled gravely down on her, so that she should understand him well.

“And you say,” Virginia went quickly on, “that it will be quite all right for me to be cut into little bits in London? For I was once in a French maison de santé for a few days, and though the nurses were very kind they were dreadfully inefficient, and looked as though they were or might be nuns. It was most depressing....”

The old man chuckled in his beard. Unlike most Frenchmen, he stood on his own and not on France’s dignity.

“But yes, London is easily managed! I have often worked with Ian Black—but you know him, probably? Who in London does not know Ian Black?”

“Yes, I know him,” Ivor said, and Dr. David smiled across at him. Ivor had often met the surgeon, Ian Black, at Rodney West’s house....

“You must come to see me once a week for a while,” the specialist told Virginia, “to let me know how you are. Thus we will cure you.”

“I will come twice a week,” Virginia cried gaily, liking the old gentleman more every moment.

“Well, then, once as a patient and once as a friend,” Dr. David smiled gallantly. “But remember, Lady Tarlyon,” he added gravely, “you must keep very quiet. I warn you that it will be much, much more comfortable for you....”

As Virginia passed out he detained Ivor for a moment. He looked thoughtfully at Ivor.

“If you are a great friend of Lady Tarlyon’s,” said le docteur David, “you will persuade her to keep quiet for the next few months. You will help her to keep quiet, perhaps? These things are very difficult, I know....” And Ivor silently agreed that these things were very difficult indeed.{247}

“You see,” Virginia began, as the car swallowed up the Champs Elysées towards the Ritz, “when I first went to see him, he patted me about here and there, and then he asked me the questions which even the nicest doctors must ask women. He didn’t seem any more satisfied with my answers than I am with the facts—for I do get so unnecessarily weak, sometimes, Ivor! And then he asked if I had ever had a motor accident or a fall from a horse, and I remembered a fall I had had in the second year of the war, over a ditch. Not a really bad fall, you know, but just bad enough to shake me up and keep me in bed for a day or two. And then, after the X-rays had been taken, he said I was a bit wrenched about inside—it’s all very technical, dear—and that he could fix it good and proper with an operation. Not a very serious operation, he said, but not so very minor either. So that’s why I must keep quiet until October—oh yes, I insisted on October, so that we can have our summer out!—for he’s afraid of ever so little a hæmorrhage or something. It would be very bad for me, he said, Ivor,” she added, in a funny little way.

“Please!” she agreed. “But where shall we go to, Ivor? I couldn’t bear one of those dazzling flats in the Avenue Victor Hugo or round about the Parc Monceau, even if we could find one; and the Latin Quarter is now an annexe of New York—where can we go, Ivor?”

He thought and acted to such good advantage that—with the help of wires to Turner to hunt up old addresses—within twenty-four hours he had routed up Kay Benson in his studio on the Butte. Ivor had known Kay Benson in the feverish months of new acquaintance succeeding on his meeting with Otto and Fitz in 1910: had lent him money—which Kay had repaid—and had never entirely lost touch with him. Now Ivor liked the studio at sight, dirty and unkempt as it was; for Kay Benson, having built and decorated it in a suddenly rich period before the war, had since fallen from that high estate, and was become again the impoverished and earnest Kay of old. His absence during the war had not improved the general ensemble of the place—but still, thought Ivor, a few days, a few stuffs, a little furniture, and Virginia would put it splendidly right. And the garden over Paris was a marvellous accident, a miracle to happen to a lover....

Kay Benson was eager—the poorer he was the more eager he was about everything, poor Kay!—to go to Tripoli: “and leave this bloody Europe for good and all,” he said furiously. So the matter of letting the studio to Ivor, from that very day if Ivor liked, was easily arranged.

But when Virginia saw it in the candle-light of that same night—Kay was adventuring, earnestly of course, and had given Ivor the key—she cried out that she simply must have it for her own: it was so divine with its wide yet dim roominess, its little stairs up to a little gallery at the end, and its little rooms leading from the little gallery.

“Smith can take care of us and cook for us here,” Virginia cried, quickly planning. “And there’s a sweet little room for her. And a bigger little room for Ivor. And the biggest room of all for Virginia, who{249} will sleep on a bed in the corner of the studio, which bed will be a lovely divan by day....”

“But will he sell the lease?” she asked anxiously, and Ivor said Kay Benson would sell anything.

“But I will buy it,” Ivor said. “I found it, and I’m going to buy it. Yah!”

“Oh, Ivor, our eyrie! Over Paris, out of ken—our eyrie, Ivor!” And Virginia’s eyes were brighter than a room of a thousand candles....

Thus it was, then, that Ivor and Virginia came to be in a studio on the Butte, on the first day of May, 1919; and intended to stay there, until the business of life should take them to London in October.{250}

CHAPTER XIV

But the “sick little pain” was not to be tamed into regularity so easily as all that, and it cared nothing for pacts. Virginia’s body was rebellious of Virginia’s heart. And London saw them long before October; it saw them approaching from the sky in a wide-winged, colourless thing which many men had died to make so convenient for Ivor and Virginia.

Maybe Virginia had not been quiet enough. Although she very seldom left the studio and its little garden over Paris, maybe she had not been quiet enough. Le docteur David, on every one of her weekly visits, reminded her—and sometimes Ivor, when he accompanied her—of his urgent command. But, as Dr. David himself had said, these things are very difficult. And Ivor and Virginia were in love.

Everything seemed to be going very well until a certain morning in July. Ivor was leisurely dressing—with one arm one dresses either very leisurely or very frantically—in his little room off the gallery, when the Smith came in. She would often come in thus, of a morning or evening, to help him with his tie or suchlike; for though Ivor was now very expert in managing his clothes, he was not averse from a little help from the amiable Smith. But she looked concerned this morning.

And indeed, when in a few minutes he came down into the studio, Virginia was “too pale.” She lay propped up in the bed—that which was “a lovely{251} divan by day”—and her face was whiter than the pillows behind her head.

“This bed is not going to be a divan to-day,” she turned her head to him to say, as he came down the little stairway. And she smiled at his concern through the loose mass of her hair, for she was brushing it. Whenever Virginia felt tired and lazy in bed she would brush her hair for a long time, with a very special and hard brush; and as she brushed it she would incline her head a little this and that way, peering at you the while through the golden mesh, which shone gloriously with the brushing.

As he stood, his hand gently held aside the spilled golden hair that almost hid her face.

“But you’ve got no right to look as white as this, my dear! You’ve given Smith an awful fright.”

“Oh, Smith!” she smiled up at him. “She ought to know better, I do think—that ever-anxious little Smith!”

“It’s really quite all right,” she assured him. “I’m apt to get like this now and then—more or less. I’ll just lie about in bed to-day, and to-morrow I’ll be as well as anything. Especially if you’ll read me out that new Shaw play Smith brought up from Brentano’s yesterday. But don’t read the preface, please, for he always gets so angry in his prefaces, and I couldn’t bear any one to be angry with me to-day.”

Ivor sat down on the edge of the bed. He took her hand, and looked very miserable.

“Don’t be silly, Ivor! What on earth has it to do with you?” And she opened her eyes very wide at him, and raised her eyebrows with the “Is this man mad?” look.{252}

Then Smith came in with breakfast, which they had from a little table beside the bed. Virginia always took a large glass of milk at breakfast: to make her strong and fat, she said.

It was half-past nine by Ivor’s watch. He rose. “I will now dash down to Paris,” he told her sternly, “to have a little speech with Dr. David. And then Dr. David will dash up here to have a little speech with you.”

“Now you are being silly,” he only said to that; and put on his hat, a soft gray thing which he was quite unable to wear straight.

“Well, go, then!” Virginia cried with feverish venom. She had asked him to read her a Shaw play, and he was going to fetch a doctor! “Oh, the fool!” Virginia wildly thought, in the impatient surge of her weakness.

Ivor paced about the garden while the doctor was within the studio: and he had no eyes for the glory of the July morning over Paris, they worried the ground and distance with dark absence.

At last Dr. David came out, and Ivor walked with him to his car: through a small green door, up a narrow passage between two dingy houses, and through a wide door on to the pavement of the Place.

“Oh!” said Ivor; then turned frankly to the old man. “Tell me, doctor, is this operation really serious or not?”

“Well, it is not negligible,” the old man answered. “But it isn’t really serious—particularly in the hands of Ian Black. It will be painful for her, you understand—I am afraid Lady Tarlyon will consider that{253} part of it extremely serious. But I should say as little as possible to her about the pain, if I were you. I daresay you know all there is to know about pain....”

“I am writing to Ian Black to-day,” he went on, “to make arrangements for next Thursday. So you will please cross next Tuesday, a week from to-day, for she must be well rested.”

“It is a small nuisance,” he said, “that Lady Tarlyon must have it done in London, for the jolting in trains and on the boat will do her no good, you understand. Particularly as everything is so crowded now. Even an aeroplane would be better, if she had ever been up in one.”

“Oh, but she has—several times, I think!” Ivor cried; and smiled to remember the press photographs of Virginia Tracy “going up, gone up, come down and out” in 1913. “And I should think we could easily manage an aeroplane for next week.” The idea took hold of him. “Oh, yes, why not?”

“In that case you had better ‘manage’ it with your friends in England,” said Dr. David, “for the service here is not yet organised, and they might make difficulties. The Embassy might help, of course....”

“We won’t ask them,” Ivor said quickly. “We can manage one from England, I’m sure. Lady Tarlyon has aerial connections.” He laughed gaily. “Oh, splendid, doctor! She will be awfully pleased about that.”

They were now on the dingy pavement of the Place du Tertre, and Dr. David had his hand on the door of his limousine; but with the other he suddenly touched Ivor’s shoulder, a charmingly intimate gesture.

“Let me know,” he said, “what you have arranged. I shall be pleased to hear that Lady Tarlyon is going to have a little pleasure before the pain. For only thus is life bearable—whether the pleasure comes before or after the pain. But it generally comes before, I understand....” Charming old man, who contrived such courtesy out of commonplace!{254}

Merriment and gravity were but the width of an eyelash apart in Virginia: which was well proved that same night, after dinner, as she lay in bed and smoked a cigarette. It was understood that Virginia smoked but four cigarettes a day now—which, of course, it was remarked by Ivor, always made the fifth so much more enjoyable. He was sitting now in an arm-chair near her, and hanging from his hand over the arm was the book of Shaw plays, from which he had been reading to her.

“I suppose you know,” Virginia breathed suddenly into her smoke, “that I’m not to have my baby after all.”

“I don’t mean,” she explained, “that this operation affects that. It might and it mightn’t—oh, the beastly mess that women’s bodies are, and the lovely way that Swinburne wrote of them! Has a doctor ever written a great poem, I wonder, Ivor? I can’t imagine it.... Dr. David told me when I first went to see him that I’m not built the way of a child-bearing woman, and that if I ever had one it would be the kind of miracle that happens on the last page of a book. And you can’t imagine how sweetly the old man turned it into a compliment, the way he said: ‘You are the childless woman of the ages, madame.’ Oh, compliments are divine when they are quite meaningless, which may be why women like those men who are always thinking of something else. It’s almost worth while being ill to have met Dr. David....” She took a deep breath of her cigarette, then crushed it into the ash-tray by her pillow.

“Come near,” she begged him, “and I will tell you something ever so interesting.”

“You have made me tell you many stories,” he reminded her. “And now you tell me one....{255}”

“Ah, but your stories have sharp endings—the way your life will end, maybe! You tell cruel stories, Ivor. I sometimes think you have a very cruel mind. And that leads me to think, I don’t know why, that you will die with a hard collar on, Ivor! But the story I’m going to tell has no ending at all—the point of my story, dear, is that it has no ending! Unless you say that a ‘dead-end’ is a proper ending....”

“Yes, listen,” she begged him. “Years ago, when first you met me, I was running amok. Lois was, too, and so we ran amok together; and made quite a pretty little tradition of it, you remember? And every one seemed awfully pleased about it: the more we ran amok the more most people admired us and photographed us and said of us the kind of beastly things that make a woman certain she’s beautiful—except just a few severely romantic people like you, dear, who brushed us aside for the shoddy people we were. People said we were newer than any new generation had ever been before, which was quite true of some of us, but the rest of us were all the dear old generations wrapped up together and gone rotten. For, you see, Lois and I were ladies gone rotten—that’s exactly what we were, Ivor, rotten ladies. The only time Lois has ever lost her temper was when a man once called her a rotten lady. He was a nice man.... And so running amok was great fun for us, and great fun for our men too—though I do think that if the finest of them hadn’t died they would have sickened of us pretty soon; and perhaps they wouldn’t have been so eager for ‘fun’ if they hadn’t vaguely known that they weren’t long for this world—which must sound nonsense, I suppose. But perhaps they were fey, Ivor! But the few stern people who cursed us were on the wrong tack, for they said we were young fools trying to be mighty clever and thinking ourselves no end of fine people; whereas the one thing we were{256} all very clear about in our minds was that we were nothing at all in England, that we didn’t matter one way or the other, that we didn’t represent anything in particular and had been somehow left behind in a valley or pushed on ahead into a kind of bog. Quite a nice bog it was, we thought, but still it was a bog, and we were stranded in it. Yes, it was just as though people had got together and said to us: ‘Look here, you dashing young people, push on ahead and see what it’s like out there’—and ‘out there’ we had found a bog with purple and yellow funguses all over it, and slimy pools of queer colours, and it looked so strange and lovely that we stepped right into it; and then people pointed to us, saying: ‘Just look how depraved they are! They are covered with verdigris, but they call it wet-white!’ But we weren’t all that, you know, we were just silly and rather cruel. And all that time I didn’t like what I was doing a bit. I liked it so little that I used to write letters to Kerrison about how fatuous life was, and death was, and love was, and I was, and of course he was. He understood things, you know, even though you couldn’t bear him. But somehow I went on, there seemed nothing else to do—and something shoddy and inevitable seemed to be pushing one on from behind, always and always. Rather like those poor wretches in Tchekov’s plays, you remember, who go on and on doing things in a kind of frantic boredom and despair, and talk cleverly about meaningless things.... Lois was different, she was always more decided than me; and she did a thing because she liked it and as long as she liked it, and she stopped when she was bored with it. In her heart Lois was always ambitious, she wanted to use the ‘Lady Lois’ legend as well as she could; she wanted to be ‘the famous beauty who is representative of the best artistic and intellectual qualities of the British patrician’—though there was never anything patrician about Lois except her lovely face, for her soul is an innkeeper’s soul; like those of all patricians who{257} succeed in life, I think, for the real patrician tradition seems to be carried on in people’s hearts by those who fail, like Coriolanus—which, maybe, is at the root of snobbery, something fine at the root of something silly, a kind of spiritual respect for fine people who fail.... And so she married nice little Johnny, and now she lets Cabinet ministers and artists make love to her or get drunk and disorderly in her house so that she can influence their Work, and when she dies she will be as famous and as respected as Lady Ripon, but not nearly so nice inside.... But I went on. Or other people went on and left me behind. I don’t know. I did as I liked, and that’s a lonely business, for doing as one likes means always to be leaving one thing and going to another, it means that there are tags and ends of things and people sticking out all over one’s past life. I slopped about with such a determined face, Ivor! And all the time I felt I was going to a ‘dead-end,’ that there was a ‘dead-end’ at the end of my life. I couldn’t think round that ‘dead-end,’ my mind went to a cul-de-sac when I thought about it. And I was right, you know, for a woman of thirty-one was making for her ‘dead-end’—her ‘dead-end’ was in sight, it just was, as her horse cleared the hedge into that dark little lane by Lady Hall—and, behold! you were there, Ivor! Do you remember how gay I was at seeing you! Oh, I knew, you see, that something marvellous had happened! I knew that my ‘dead-end’ was beaten as it came—you were there, Ivor! And then I was a little sad, you remember, wondering whether you were still the same defensive and antagonistic person you had been years ago, and hoping you weren’t; for you were the man who had got in the way of my ‘dead-end,’ and I wanted you....”

And then her lover comforted Virginia, saying that there would be no “dead-end” for them now. And from some corner of his memory there leapt out Aunt Moira’s lines from a poem by Meredith, but he did not quote the lines, he just said: “We will be{258} rapid falcons, Virginia, and we won’t be caught in any snare, but fly together to very high places. And, oddly enough, I know what I’m talking about....”

But some fantasy had come to Virginia, for suddenly she sat up in bed in almost frantic disorder.

“But why don’t you work, Ivor? Why are you so happy with me—why don’t you work?” That is what she cried; and her eyes glittered piteously with the perverse fear that comes to people in a fever.

“You are choking me with your happiness—in a lovely way, but you are choking me, I can’t explain. And you are choking yourself, too. Oh, I know! You are a striving person, Ivor, but now you are too happy, you are soaking yourself in happiness. It’s my fault.... This is unnatural for you, this life of ours, you want to work and strive and think things as well as to love—and here you are, being softened and choked! Why don’t I see you miserable, Ivor, why aren’t you wretched at all this waste? You are losing yourself in love, and as you lose yourself I will lose you. Oh, yes, it’s like that with us....” She had overtaxed her strength, and as she lay back she looked as though she might faint, if a wraith can faint.

And he laughed at her and reminded her of their pact, and of the things they had said that first evening in Paris....

“Oh, that!” she cried. And his face was so near to her that he kissed her lips, those taut, dry lips—burning dry now.

“Yes,” she whispered, “it’s been divine—it is divine. But now it’s ending, Ivor! We are flying back to London next week—you are taking me back to London! And I’ve got the feeling of the ‘dead-end’ on me again, for the first time since I met you in that lane—it’s stolen back! For you’ve become like me, you know, this love has been stronger than you, and you are going soft and rotten with it—you are drifting with me, my sweet, instead of my striving with you! That is what’s called being lovers, and it’s very bad{259} for people. I told you, don’t you remember, that we shouldn’t be lovers, you and I. Oh, I am so wise sometimes!” ...

“When we are married,” he mocked her, “a slight difference will be perceptible in our relations. We will be busy lovers, then. There are so many stars in the sky, Virginia, that there’s no reason for us to stay on one....”

“Oh, when we are married!” she echoed his mockery very queerly; and she held up his chin with her hand and looked deep into his eyes. And she mocked his bewilderment at her mood, whispering, “Poor child!” so that he was uncomfortable. She was very wise sometimes, she had said.

“How can you say that, Ivor, when you know I may die next week? How do you know I won’t die—and I wouldn’t care but for you! I’ve got like that. But what I am thinking now is that maybe it would be better for you if I did die, much better maybe. You could strive all you wanted then!” she breathed with a sudden catch, and feverishly pushed his face from her. “How do you know anything, Ivor, to talk so glibly about our marrying? You are very arrogant, I do think.... There was a lot of destiny in Greek plays, and how do you know there isn’t some left for us—for unanchored people like you and me? Destiny for the undecided.... Perhaps it’s fated that you take me to my death as Iphigenia was taken to sacrifice. Perhaps you are taking Virginia to sacrifice to the god of your life, so that the voyage of your life will be helped with favourable winds! Oh, Ivor, don’t protest, for how can you know anything? These things are very secret from us....”

“Women have moods,” Magdalen had said. “They can’t help it, and no one can help them....{260}”

CHAPTER XV

But Virginia didn’t die. Ian Black saw to that. But he told Ivor, downstairs in the waiting-room of the Wimpole Street nursing-home where Ivor spent many distressed hours, that his patient wasn’t “resisting” very, very much.

“I don’t mean that she’s giving way,” Ian Black said, “or that she seems to want to collapse. But she’s too busy analysing the pain—and herself—and me, too! Of course the pain is terrible, terrible....”

Ian Black was a chubby little man of very neat appearance and a round, boyish face, on which an expression of pleased or anxious surprise was always dominant. But he was the most restful man in the world to be with, for he had no gestures and made no little fusses with the things of his body, hands and eyebrows and hair and feet and the like, while he talked. He stood before you and stared up at you—he always had to look “up” to every one except when he was operating on them—with round eyes, his hands clasped on his funny little belly, and said what he had to say very gently, very gently and convincingly. To see him, it was too difficult to imagine that he was the most famous surgeon in London: to listen to him, it was easy.

“I think you might see her for just a minute this morning,” Black suggested. “Buck her up a bit....”

This was the third morning after the operation, and Ivor had not yet seen her. He had not asked to. She was in great pain, he was told. She had asked to see him several times, but it had been thought it might upset her as yet.{261}

Now, at ten o’clock in the morning, he went into her room. Very dark and dim it was with its curtains drawn, and about it was that aggressively clean smell of a very serious sick room. Virginia’s eyes were closed. The nurse whispered to Ivor that she would go out for a moment, leaving the door a little ajar....

Ivor stood by the bed, stealthily, wondering what to do. He felt ashamed, somehow.... Virginia wasn’t asleep, she was in pain. In great pain. Her face was thin and gray and it was somehow screwed up, and her eyes were tightly screwed up. Then she opened them and stared at him, and he saw that her eyes were wet. His were, too. She moistened her lips with her tongue, staring at him with terribly hurt eyes. He murmured something.

“There’s things inside me,” she said, with a sob. “Steel things.... They’ve left them in there ... holding things together.... Oh, it hurts, Ivor....”

“Look,” she whispered, with screwed-up eyes. She tried to lift up the covering to show him something. He had to help her. “Look,” she said pitifully. And she lifted up her hands under the clothes, and he saw that they were tied together with a handkerchief. “That’s to stop me tearing the things out and killing myself,” she explained with amazing clarity. “There’s things sticking in underneath....”

“I can’t bear it,” she sobbed dryly. “All the time ... like being ploughed up inside, Ivor—with a plough.... All the time.... I can’t bear it.{262}”

He lingered on the way down the stairs, for his eyes were wet and he didn’t want to look a fool. Ian Black was still in the waiting-room, drawing on his gloves. He had waited for him, it seemed.

“Well, what d’you think?” Black asked casually. Amazing man! he asked it as though he could possibly care a damn what Ivor thought about it. But it was reassuring, that casual question.

“We do,” Black assured him. “We give her a piqure now and then, and she sleeps all right. But we can’t give her piqures all the time.” He stood so still while he talked, like a chubby little image.

“But how long does this pain last?” Ivor asked impatiently. “These things that she says are sticking inside her?... It seems awful.”

“It is,” Black agreed. “It lasts three more days. Then everything will be all right. Assure you. 65 per cent. chance now. Only 10 per cent. chance yesterday. You didn’t know....”

“Well, must be going now,” Black said briskly. “Don’t worry, Marlay—everything all right except the pain, and that will be. If she was only delirious, it would help her forget it a bit. But her mind’s amazingly clear—too clear—she’s got a strong mind, you know. I asked her this morning if the doctor pulling faces at her would make her delirious, and she asked me how I could ‘bear my life, inflicting pain on people?’ I said I preferred golf, and that life was pretty rotten all ways, now. Can I drop you anywhere? I’m going to St. George’s....”

“Rodney West’s coming to dine to-night. You might come, if you like. Eight-thirty. He’s getting rather Germanophile in reaction to the French, and we might drive it out of him. No good reacting from idiocy to idiocy. And I’ll have some more news for you by then, probably....” So of course Ivor dined in New Cavendish Street.

He did not see Virginia again for a week. For even when “the things” were finally out she was in frightful pain. Naturally, for a little while, the matron said. (Ivor did not like the matron at all: she was a brisk matron.) The “dressings” were the worst ordeals—which Ian Black and the doctor paid her the compliment of doing themselves, every morning at some time between ten and eleven. Ivor knew about “dressings,” and shuddered. And he felt he couldn’t bear to see her, nor she him really, and that he could do no good anyway. But he was there first thing every morning, in the waiting-room, and Ian Black would come down after the “dressing” and say a word or two. The way Black could get from his patient to politics and back again was continually amazing Ivor. “Practice,” Black explained.

Ivor would return in the evening, with flowers or whatever little thing Virginia had required of the nurse; for he had begged the nurse to telephone him instantly whatever, no matter how slight or even absurd, the patient might want, so that it could be produced at once. And Virginia asked for a special cold-cream, a bright green silk handkerchief, a bottle of Chablis (which she was allowed to sip), some grapefruit, a paper fan, another kind of cold-cream, some real Eau de Cologne (not English stuff), and some{264} coffee-ice-cream; which, Ian Black and the doctor said, wouldn’t do her any harm, just a very little. She kept on asking for it, the nurse said.

The operation was to have taken place in great secrecy, for Virginia didn’t want any one to know. So she had gone straight to the nursing-home on her arrival at the Croydon landing-station, and had written to no one. She would have written or telephoned to her father, only she said he couldn’t help talking and every one would know in a minute.

But every one did know, in almost a minute. The brisk matron had seen to that. And what are gossip-columns for, but to report the living, the dying, and the dead? One cheerful gossip reported Virginia as good as dead (with photograph), but another quickly brought her to life again (with photograph). They had ever detail pat, and of course gave the address of the nursing-home. They commented on Ian Black, what a good surgeon he was and how popular he was; they spoke of his distinguished services during the war, wondered about a K.B.E., and made guesses at his income. They reminded their readers of Virginia’s beauty, her painting, her aeroplane-trips, the sudden death of her charming mother, and the extremely sudden death of her first husband. They referred to her second husband, the gallant and handsome Viscount Tarlyon, said he had two bars to the D.S.O. and sympathised with him in his anxiety. They mentioned her recreations (dogs and travelling), and reminded their readers that her father always wore a gardenia and that he was the last of a splendid type of Englishman....

So, as the season was not quite over, every one called. Lois, Kerrison, Euphemia Halliday, Rupert Kare, Pretty Leyton, Hugo Cypress.... Every one called to leave messages and flowers. The polite and amiable{265} M. Stutz called and said he would call again; and, having asked whether Lady Tarlyon needed anything, and having heard that she did not, he sent her a superb fruit-salad. And of course Lord Carnal called, almost the first, and more than once. Ivor saw him one morning, from the window of the waiting-room, as he was emerging from a car, a huge bunch of white roses under one arm and a small bunch of orchids in his hand: a very elegant and clean-shaven old gentleman, with nothing at all “old world” about his clothes, and looking exactly as George Alexander always wanted to look but never quite could. And of course George Tarlyon called, several times.

Ivor kept well out of the way when the rush began; when he called at the home he was, after the first day or two, shown into a secondary and smaller waiting-room at Ian Black’s request to the matron who, being a brisk matron, had an objection ready for everything; but, in spite of her, there Ivor would wait every morning until Virginia was a little better, for his “word or two” with the doctor or Black....

Now on the morning when the last of “the things” were to be taken out of Virginia, the maid who answered the door—by one of those criminal aberrations peculiar to maids and classed by them as “mistakes,” whereas they are generally catastrophes—ushered into that secondary and most private waiting-room, George Tarlyon.

“Hallo!” said Ivor; and thought crossly: something’s very wrong with that maid, for she’s gone and left the door open now.... There was a short silence. Tarlyon, with his hands in his pockets, stared absently out of the window.

“Rotten business, isn’t it?” Tarlyon said shortly. “Poor child.... Awful pain, I suppose?”

“Just once. She was feeling it a bit. Beastly to watch and feel quite well....”

“A doctor chap once told me,” Tarlyon said thoughtfully, “that women can bear pain much better than men. He said that there’s scarcely a man alive who would go through the pain of child-bearing twice, or even once, while look at women....”

They looked at women for a while, in silence; which was broken by a very faint cry from somewhere.

“Yes, I suppose so,” Ivor said vaguely. He wanted to close the door, but somehow didn’t. And he couldn’t help intently listening ... that cry again, almost a shriek, then a sob, and a jumble of faint, broken words....

“Lord, man, what’s up!” cried Tarlyon. Ivor’s face was white, then green.

“That’s Virginia,” he said, with an effort. “Makes me feel sick.... Sorry.... For God’s sake shut that door, Tarlyon!”

“I say—poor child!” he murmured; and he looked at Ivor puffing a cigarette with a green face. “I don’t wonder ... didn’t realise myself.”

“Some fool of a nurse must have left her door open for a second,” Ivor said angrily. He pointed vaguely to his mutilated shoulder. “I’ve had some, and so I know,” he tried to apologise for his weakness.

“Hallo, Marlay! Ah, Lord Tarlyon!... Well, things are looking up now, quite all right.” His hands folded across his little port, he stared up at Ivor with round, surprised eyes. “I say, Marlay, you do look green! Want brandy?”

“The maid left this door open,” Ivor said darkly, “and you went one better by leaving your patien{267}t’s door open. What do you expect? And I don’t want brandy....”

“That must have been the nurse coming in and out with the things,” Ian Black gently explained, and turned to Tarlyon. “Worst part’s over, Lord Tarlyon. A few days now, and she’ll be out of pain. Fairly long convalescence, though....”

“Main thing’s to get better,” Tarlyon said; and he lounged briskly towards the door. “Well, good-bye, Marlay—see you here again, probably. Good-bye, Mr. Black—take care of my wife, won’t you? Not many lovely women like that....”

Ivor was by the window, staring sombrely at Wimpole Street. There was a car just outside: it was a closed car, and the driver sat facing him. Some one in the back of the car smiled at his face at the window—a woman—and Ivor vaguely smiled back. Of course, Ann Chester, “pretty Ann.” ... Good God, what a man!

“Seems a good fellow, Tarlyon,” Black said from behind, “in spite of his popularity.”

“You can see her for a moment now, if you like,” Black told him. “Just a quick moment....”

“I’d rather not, you know. Much rather. And she would talk about the pain, too——”

CHAPTER XVI

But, it later appeared, that was not all that had interested her. “Oh, one’s been thinking such a lot!” she told Ivor weakly, when he saw her a few afternoons later.

“Well, such as?” Ivor smiled. The commonplace of treating an ill person like a child occurred to him vividly. One couldn’t help it.

“My clouds,” she said, “were different. They rolled off people, and I saw people clearly. They’ll be rolling back again soon, I daresay....”

“Where did I come in?” he asked. And he wanted to know, too. He loved Virginia.

“You didn’t, Ivor.” She turned her head on her pillow and stared at him very seriously. How gray and wan she was! “There haven’t been any clouds on you for ages—we pushed them off together, don’t you remember? We insisted on that.... You did, anyway. You are the nice man of my life, Ivor.... I kept on telling myself that I would mention that to the higher authorities when I was dead.”

“This dying business,” Ivor said almost frantically, “has got on our nerves, Virginia.”

“I was only telling you,” she said. “But about people—I saw them very clearly, Ivor. I saw George....”

“I know.” He followed her eyes to the mantelpiece, and there, in a basket like a nest, were plovers’ eggs cushioned on a pile of the stuff that plovers’ nests are made of.

“They’re made of sweet stuff,” Virginia explained. “Mr. Selfridge makes them, and they’re supposed to be eatable....”

“George,” she said, “is an inventive man. He is also an inevitable man. I mean, he’s always there, somewhere about, and one can’t get rid of him. One can’t get rid of him, Ivor, because he won’t be got rid of—he simply won’t take one seriously, don’t you see? And how can one get rid of a man who doesn’t take one seriously?”

“Men like that,” she said softly, “want nothing. So unlike you, dear....”

Ivor’s eyes had darkened. So! But she had him at a disadvantage, she was so gray and wan! So he only said, “Pouf!” and tried to say it easily, but her little, amused smile penetrated him.

“Oh, Ivor!” she teased him, “I didn’t mean what you thought I meant. You are so suspicious, Ivor! I didn’t mean that I was going to let George come back into my life....”

Virginia got stronger very gradually: too gradually, the doctor said, but still, she got stronger. She did not seem to wish to get strong in any way but gradually, saying that there was no hurry. “The month of August,” she said, “demands to be spent in bed. I’ve always thought so....”

Ivor, however, was not so sure about there being “no hurry”; there was a great deal to be done, and{270} the sooner the better, now that they were back in England. That divorce business, now.... But even when Virginia was much stronger and could sit up in bed and take human meals again, he was shy of pressing her on that point. It was so inevitable, after all, so why worry himself about it? Ivor had learnt to be afraid of his impatience.

Ivor was now very definite about his feelings for Virginia. He had been definite about them for some months, but from some time before her illness until now that definiteness had been growing into, and had now become, the amazing fact of his life; and as such it went about with him, it was his companion—he didn’t tread on air, he wasn’t that kind of man any more, but he trod on solid earth with the determination of a man who has a good tale in his heart. For it wasn’t that that amazing fact made everything else—the things of life and living, of strife and thinking—look insignificant, or that everything else was entirely at its beck and call. It was merely that nothing else was worth while to him without the company of that amazing fact. With that fact in his life everything else seemed tremendously worth living for. And there was a great freedom about it, too, for he didn’t feel he had to be worthy of it or strive for it or earn money for it; that fact was just part of him and he was part of it, and work was inconceivable without it; for the real and jolly thing about love is not when nothing else matters but love—but when everything else matters because of love. The last is love, but the first is waste of time. Ivor had always thought that.... More than anything else in the world, he hated being “messed about.” It was something deep and fundamental in his character, a birth-mark, a creed, a principle—he hated being “messed about.” A great number of nuisances went into that phrase, it was a useful phrase: even to think of being “messed about” made him hot; and it was growing on him.{271}

CHAPTER XVII

Until she was fairly strong Virginia was not allowed to see people—except, of course, Ivor, who sat with her for a while in the afternoons, and sometimes in the evenings. But when she was allowed to see people, few came. For was it not the August of 1919, when money was plentiful and London “empty”! Here and there some one called and left in a rush and a clatter, on his or her way to France or Scotland. Ivor, of course, had no intention of going away; and neither, it appeared, had George Tarlyon.

When Virginia was stronger Tarlyon called every day at any hour that happened, often when Ivor was there, and sat with her for a few minutes; or rather, he lounged about in his splendid way and made a few remarks about things in general. He pointed out, to Ivor and Virginia, that August was the month in which to stay in London. “It’s amusing,” he said, “because as every one thinks every one else has gone away, a good many every ones stay behind to amuse themselves in the wilderness. There were eight couples at Claridge’s for lunch to-day, and I’ll swear each couple had thought the other was at Deauville or Scotland....”

It was curious, Ivor thought, the way Virginia changed when Tarlyon was about. She became at once more thoughtful, more retired, more secret; and, watching her one day when Tarlyon was there, he realised with almost a shock that Virginia’s face wore exactly the same expression as on that evening when she had sat in his room at Nasyngton and Tarlyon had come to fetch her: a little tired, a little bored, a little{272} secret.... But Tarlyon seemed to amuse her, in a rather hidden kind of way. The idea of him seemed to amuse her. She would laugh a little when he had gone, vaguely.

“George is getting very considerate,” she said one day as he had just gone. “I can’t believe he is staying in London just to come and see his sick and ailing wife—and yet what on earth can he find to do in London in August?”

“God knows!” shrugged Ivor. Having seen Ann Chester that morning in Bond Street, he thought God wouldn’t have to be very clever to know.

“Naturally,” Virginia said, “there’s always ‘pretty Ann.’ He can do what he likes with ‘pretty Ann.’”

Ivor suddenly decided that Tarlyon was bad for Virginia. He fumbled in his mind as to, exactly, in what way, but didn’t quite get it....

“But why less and less?” Virginia opened her eyes very wide to ask. “You couldn’t like him less than you’ve always done....” Now that was not quite fair of Virginia to say that; and she herself had once discovered a theory that George and Ivor might have been great friends—might have. “You’d have laughed together,” she said. “You are both braggarts, in an internal, headachy way....”

“What, me! Oh, Ivor, tell me how?” she begged him childishly. “You are subtle to-day, I do think!”

“He’s got a queer effect on you,” Ivor tried to explain, prowling about at the foot of the bed. “You somehow go hard, different. I don’t know....”

“Do you remember,” her voice came dimly to him, “one night ages ago when I told you that I was{273}n’t really natural with you, that I was always on my best behaviour with you? And I scarcely knew you then....”

“The point is,” he said, “that you are only natural with me, and unnatural with the others. Exactly....”

“Maybe,” she said—and smiled up at him mischievously. And he smiled too, but the gloom was deep in him to-day. He sat on a chair at the foot of the bed.

“Now don’t be silly, dear! This Tarlyon and Marlay business, of course—husband and lover—and you in between—and Ann Chester in Bond Street....”

“But I’m not in between, silly!” she cried sharply. “I’m with you. What has come over you to-day—you’re getting quite gaga, Ivor!”

But he jumped up from his chair with an impatient gesture of his one arm. He prowled about. Never had Virginia seen him like this! So dark.... Propped high up on the bed she stared at him wondering; then she screwed up her eyes a little, examining him.... He turned to her, trying to look very reasonable.

“What I mean to say is,” he said, “that we ought to settle this once and for all. I can’t bear these vague positions—his coming to see you, and me here—both of us hanging round you—and both of us hating each other. It’s common, Virginia!”

“It is, the way you put it,” she remarked. She was very tranquil. “But the fact is that George only comes out of cussedness and a desire to annoy. And he seems to be succeeding, with you anyway....”

“Personally,” she said thoughtfully, “I don’t get{274} annoyed with George nowadays. He never wants anything....”

“You’ve said that before,” he said savagely, “and I didn’t like it then. What does it mean, Virginia?

“Well, you want things, don’t you, Ivor?” she put to him, very softly. She looked up into his face. “You want everything—don’t you, Ivor?”

Her softness humbled him. He turned away from her and prowled about. And her voice followed him about the room like a weary little bird.

“And I’ve given you everything, haven’t I, Ivor? I’ve given you more than I’ve given any man. Ivor, I’ve given you more than I thought I could give any man ... or god....”

Her eyes were very wide and steady on him, as he stood above her; they were sentinels put there to delude mankind, while Virginia’s soul was somewhere else, in some funny, unknown place; dolorous eyes, it occurred to him. So steady and blue and deep.... And he felt himself sinking into those eyes, right into her, he felt things snapping in his head, and he felt that if he lost himself in those eyes now he would be drowned for ever, he would be lost—and she too! He hardened; he pretended to.

Still they looked up into his face, those sentinels. And when at last she closed her eyes he suffered a queer feeling that a great chance had gone from him, a great chance full of light and blessedness. She pressed her head back against her pillow, in a very tired way, and her lips smiled a little. She shook her head very gently.

They often played picquet: Virginia in bed, Ivor in a chair by the bed, and between them the back of a copy of Vogue, on which they played. Enormous sums of money were won and lost on that polished and uncertain surface. Sometimes Ivor would win as much as £5000 at a sitting, and the next day maybe he would lose all that and some besides. Slips of paper were exchanged and treasured.

“If,” Virginia said, “you were to look at that slip of paper every morning and say to yourself it was worth £5000, it soon would be. It’s a matter of imagination....”

They were merry afternoons, those of her convalescence in August. Virginia had to stay in bed, very quietly, until her wounds were quite healed. She was allowed to lie on a sofa in the room for a very few minutes every day, and that’s all.

“I don’t see much sense in it,” Virginia said to the doctor and Ian Black, “being moved from a bed to a sofa—and a nursing-home sofa at that! Why can’t I sit up in a chair?”

“Taking no risks,” said Ian Black, who was going to Scotland that afternoon. The doctor nodded.

“You are being beastly to me,” Virginia told Ian Black steadily, “because you have a reputation to keep up. What would have happened to me, I’d like to know, if I hadn’t happened to be a rich woman and been able to afford all this care? Suppose I’d been very poor?”

August rained. It rained, in London, from its beginning until its middle, and then it hesitated a while. It was during that while that Virginia was moved to her house in Belgrave Square—“the mausoleum{276}” which she so hated. But, at the nursing-home, they were glad of the August rain. “One always really knows,” Virginia said, “that one isn’t missing anything by not going away. But one likes to be certain.”

The gloom had passed off Ivor quickly. “Nerves,” he had explained to Virginia, and neither had referred to it since; each secretly feeling that they had walked into, and a little way up, a strange by-path, and had then come running out again. But now, as often as not, Virginia told her nurse to say she was asleep when Tarlyon called.

One day she told Ivor that she was to be moved to the “mausoleum” the day after next.

“I’m to be allowed to drive for an hour or so every day,” she told him. “But I mustn’t go out at night just yet, the doctor said, especially as it’s so damp. We have, however, our own ideas about that....”

“Having stayed in the mausoleum for ten days,” she said, “we will have a tremendous dinner at the Mont Agel. And then we will go away somewhere to get fat and strong. At least I will get all that and you will watch me.”

“And where, Virginia?” Places simply didn’t matter to Ivor: people were important.

“Well, not at my place, that’s quite certain. Besides, I’ve lent it to Lois and Johnny. I’d like to go to Galway, Ivor ... but maybe the journey will be too long for me. We’ll think about it....”

“And then,” she said, “maybe we’ll go back to Paris. Or Morocco—or just anywhere? What do you think, Ivor?”

“We’ll go back to Paris,” Ivor said, “or just anywhere, while you’re waiting for your decree nisi, Virginia. Or else the King’s Proctor will be unkind to us. And we ought to get the thing moving before we go for this present holiday—we’ll begin while you’re at the mausoleum, shall we? For it’s a long and boring business, this divorcing of husbands, with or without collusion. You’ve got to write that usual whining{277} letter asking him to come back ‘and make a home for you,’ and then he’s got to write to you saying he jolly well won’t, and so on, for a long time.... It would be much easier, of course, if Tarlyon were divorcing you. The placards would say, ‘Viscount Divorces Wife,’ and there you are.”

“He’d never do it, Ivor! And besides, he couldn’t bring it off, for the King’s Proctor would be on him in a minute, George is so careless. No, dear, we had better stick to the first scheme, which I’m sure he will agree to quite comfortably....”

And she suddenly shook her head a little, just a little shake. And she brightened.

“Oh, Ivor!” she cried. “I am looking forward to our dinner at the Mont Agel! Are you? We’ll have the room upstairs, and dear Monsieur Stutz will come and make us drink a very rare wine, saying with impressement and his fingers bunched to his lips: ‘You will hear the angels singing, Mr. Marlay....’”

CHAPTER XVIII

On the morning of the day on which they were to dine at the Mont Agel—Virginia having said that she would risk it, muffled there and back in the car—Ivor in Upper Brook Street received a letter by hand. The letter was addressed in pencil, a pencilled scrawl, and Ivor fingered it with a smile. He had never before received a letter from Virginia—what occasion had there been, indeed! And what occasion was there now? for he had left Virginia at the mausoleum but the night before, indeed only a very few hours ago. Thoughtfully he weighed the letter in his hand, and it was a heavy letter. The Smith had brought it, Turner told him.

Yes, it was a long letter, several sheets scrawled over on both sides, in Virginia’s careless way. To read it he sat, in his dressing-gown, on a chair by the window. September was carrying on August’s tradition; it rained dispassionately.

“I’m writing to you, Ivor, because I can’t talk to you sometimes. I mean, dear, that I can’t talk of certain things without you getting very, very dark; and then, you see, I get frightened for us both, of what will happen—to you and me, Ivor, in those dark moments! You prowl about so, you know! And so I’m sitting up in bed now, just after you have left me, to write to you about a most important and tiresome matter—what the papers so rightly call ‘that much vexed question of divorce.’ Keep your eyebrows straight, Ivor! Don’t bring your eyebrows down into the darkness! Keep your eyebrows straight, my darling, and listen to Virginia. For although you are{279} intelligent and I am not, I am very wise, Ivor. Sometimes. And this is what I know——”

“Breakfast on the table, sir,” Turner reminded him. Ivor looked up and stared at Turner for several seconds. “Yes, yes,” he said at last.

“Ever since we spoke of marrying, that first night in Paris, I’ve known somewhere deep down that I should sometime have to write this letter. But that doesn’t make it any easier, dear, for you can be very difficult. Ivor, I can’t marry you. I won’t. And I’ve known that all the time—and haven’t you known it too? I could have stopped you thinking of it right at the beginning, by saying that George wouldn’t dream of divorcing me or letting me divorce him, but I can’t tell little lies, Ivor, so I told you a big lie. I’ve been pretending, Ivor. Darling, tell me that you knew I was pretending, just so that we could be happy—and that it doesn’t now come as a shock to you? I told you, that night, that I didn’t think any woman would, or could marry you. I don’t know now.... Maybe there is such a woman. Maybe your mother, as you’ve described her to me, was such a woman. But I don’t think so, for she let your father quite lose himself in her, she changed him from a man into a lover, and he was so lost to the world that he might just as well have died ten years before he did. But you, Ivor, want things both ways, and that’s why I can’t marry you. We would choke each other. Don’t you see? I’m not strong enough and you simply aren’t casual enough—you aren’t casual at all! I’m not trying to make any music-hall comparisons between husbands and lovers, but there must be some capacity for casualness in a husband, else people would go mad. I don’t mean that I’d go mad with you—it’s you who would go mad. I love you. Too much, maybe—oh, yes, Ivor, too much! And I’ve never loved any one before, except George, and that was a defiant kind of thing: I’ve just let men touch me, because they so wanted to. I’m thinking of you in all this, much more than of myself. I know I’m not{280} strong enough to marry you. You want to do things, you will not be happy unless you are doing things and writing things. You think you want to do things, anyway. And in your mind you are never really at rest, you are always striving about something, sometimes quite unimportant things. And you say to yourself that you will be able to strive tremendously when we are married, but I say you will not, and I’m very wise about some things. For, I tell you, I’m not strong enough inside to cope with your love and the burden of mine, I just sink under them and you sink with me—you are not casual enough, Ivor! You don’t push one back, ever! Why, among your many impatiences, haven’t you got that of sometimes pushing one away? And if we many we will sink, and you will never do the work you want to do—have you had a thought about it all this time, you who despise slackers so much? Just loving a woman—even me!—isn’t enough for you. You only think it is, dear. Dear Ivor, I can see you prowling about my life with a smile nailed on your face, wondering why it is that you can’t do or write anything ‘nowadays.’ Your father must have been a different man to you, I think, for he just damned everything and lost himself in love and Italy, quite lost to the world that had hoped such things from him. You are stronger than your father, and you want to master the world and mould it to your desire—and me too! and you almost have, but not quite. And that’s why our marrying can only make us unhappy in the end, for under your strength lies your father’s weakness of loving too completely—your ambitions are just added to you, poor Ivor, to make you unhappy! I am your mistress, and you are my lover. I am your woman and you are my man. Oh, Ivor, let’s go on like that, let’s go on as we’ve done, free to come and go, free to love and work—let me be free, Ivor, to keep your love for me by letting you be free—isn’t that how you once described the ‘patrician idea,’ dear? Well, it’s hitting you back now....{281} I get weak in your arms, and so I am writing this to you. I will not marry you, Ivor. And you will be glad, sometime. But I shall be sorry if you are angry now.”

Turner had lied about the breakfast, for it was not on the table; he had kept it warm, but that availed the breakfast not at all, for it was not eaten.

It had been arranged that Ivor should lunch at Belgrave Square that day; but he told Turner to ring up and say that he would be unable to lunch, but would call in the afternoon if he might. Not casual enough, he thought grimly.... He did not want to go to lunch, not because he was angry, but because he wanted to think. He wanted to do any amount of thinking. And he prowled about his flat all the morning, thinking.

One of the greatest mistakes Ivor ever made in his life was not to go to luncheon with Virginia that day, so that he could “think.” It was, in fact, the great mistake of his life. For a man of his impatient temper does not, at certain times, think. He broods. And how far that brooding can take a man from the reality of a thing! How venomously it colours a thing or a woman, so that they would be unrecognisable to a clear eye! What beastliness it unfolds, what lies it verifies, what disloyalties it makes bitterly reasonable!...

To be “messed about” by Virginia! by, of all the people in the world, Virginia! “Let’s go on as we have done,” she had written. “But how the devil can we?” he tried in his mind to answer reasonably. “We can’t go on, we grown-up people, playing a game of loving in corners, beastly corners—oh, you want to make this thing a liaison, Virginia! and that I won’t have. I’d rather——” What would he rather? he pulled himself up to wonder. And because he couldn’t face the words that might come after that “rather” he suddenly became furious with himself, with Virginia, with everything. He was being bullied, somehow....{282}

He went out, at last, in the afternoon. He hadn’t, in his flat, noticed the closeness of the day, but as soon as he was out it met him very uncomfortably. “Damn!” he said. September had ceased to rain, but soon would again, it was so close and gray. He walked into Park Lane and down Hamilton Place. There weren’t many people about, somehow.... The Bachelor’s, at the corner, was closed for cleaning, and it looked frightfully closed. And then, at Hyde Park Corner, he had a vision. The vision held him up as he was about to cross to St. George’s and thus to Belgrave Square, it held him on the curb staring at the navvies tearing up the road. The vision was of another young man on another gray afternoon, but wintry gray. That other afternoon, that other walk, that other young man! Was it like that again? There the buses were by the Park Gates, and the people crowding into them; then there had been a young girl with a very white and serious face, and maybe there was one now; and it had been raining then, and it had been raining now.... Was the only difference between that young man and himself that the young man had had two arms whereas he had only one? Oh, ass.... Whereat he smiled, and crossed Hyde Park Corner. He felt suddenly quite gay. Oh, it was so different! He had admired Magdalen, he had admired her with his heart, as he still did. But he loved Virginia. And he would talk to her now—dear Virginia!—and make her take it all less, well, dramatically. That’s just what was wrong, they were both taking it too dramatically. Lovers are idiots, he thought. He would point out that it was fearful rot about his ever growing to hate her because she made him slack—“Why, my dear,” he’d say, “it’s only with you I can conceive doing anything at all!” And he would tell her again how impossible it was for them to go on as they had been doing, that they had so far{283} only been on holiday, and that holidays must end. And then they would easily arrange something.... And then, to-night, they would dine at the Mont Agel, in the upstairs room. And how surprised M. Stutz would be to see them together again, for he hadn’t seen them together since 1912, and then only in crowds....

“The Smith is rather odd,” Ivor thought. He saw her on the stairs of “the mausoleum,” as he climbed to the upstairs drawing-room where Virginia would be. The Smith was on her way out, it seemed. “To the cleaners, I’ll bet,” thought Ivor, seeing the parcel under her arm.

“Milady vous attend, monsieur,” she told him seriously; and left him almost gaping at her as she toddled quickly down the wide stone stairway.

Milady was playing the piano. She played very seldom, and not at all well. As she sat at the piano, at the far corner of the room, her back was to him; she was in a loose, low-cut, crimson gown, not the appalling crimson of velvet but the soft, enchanting crimson of georgette, and on its loose folds were strewn large golden squares of cabbalistic import; and the whiteness of her slender neck above the crimson gown was a more than human whiteness, it was the legendary whiteness of those Greek boys who lead Greece astray; and her hair, which had been waved that morning, was more golden than gold, even on such a dull September day. And his feet lingered with his eyes, while she played absent-mindedly, as one who knew she did not play well....{284}

“Oh, Virginia!” he cried from behind her, softly, gaily. Everything suddenly seemed so easy.... Her fingers hung absently on the notes, they loitered, they fell; and she turned on the stool, not quickly. She looked up at him, standing happily there.

“How quietly you came in,” she said. And he was amazed at her looks. Virginia was startling white to-day—not ill particularly, but just white, so that her red mouth looked wanton and peculiar, a carmine, flaunting mouth. It looked quite strange to him, her mouth: she had put on too much lip-salve, being ill. And her eyes were dark, dead blue, like inland seas in sultry weather.

“Oh, yes, yes!” she abruptly stopped him; and abruptly got up from the stool. She took a cigarette from a box on a little table.

“And I don’t want to hear about that,” she said sharply, right at him. “So don’t, please, go on about it....”

“But I say, Virginia——” he began out of his surprise, and then had to stop because of it. He stared at the white face a yard away from him, and at the eyes. Good God, they were quite livid—with something! He tried to smile. This was too silly....

“We’ll make it quite all right about that—that letter, you know,” he assured her, rather lamely. “We’ll find a way out, somehow....”

“Oh, for pity’s sake don’t go on about it!” she cried bitterly. “You’re always pestering and pestering, Ivor. You never let a thing alone—but never! You get on my nerves....” Her voice was sharp, and it hurt, like a silken thread ripped across a finger.

“I’m bored with the whole subject,” she added wearily, turning away. “And if you’ve read my letter there’s no more to say.”

And then she turned back to him with a queer, strained look. Maybe she was trying to appear reasonable—in spite of him!{285}

He wondered at his own calmness. He didn’t feel in the least angry—but he knew that somewhere in him there was a lot of anger. And he tried, consciously, to level away even the possibility of anger within him. “This is where sense comes in,” he thought. He was so surprised—at this Virginia! She seemed to want to insult. Her whole manner.... Queer! So she had been thinking, too—and away from him! She hadn’t given him a chance—writing that letter, and then, because he’d stopped away to think.... He hadn’t dreamt that her eyes could look at him like this, so curiously livid. But, of course, she was still weak—after that awful pain. And she had thought herself into a feverish state. He “got on her nerves.” ...

Virginia, standing by a little table, was cutting the pages of a French novel. Often, when her mind was absent, Virginia would cut the pages of a French novel....

“George rang up,” she said, “to say he would come in for a few minutes about five.”

“Ah,” said Ivor. It was nearly five now, he saw. He almost said that this wasn’t perhaps the most opportune moment for Tarlyon to call, but that would only make things worse.

He didn’t know what to say. Dinner at the Mont Agel, or going away to Galway, as they had finally arranged, were about the only things he could talk about now, and they would seem a little forced, he thought. Nothing would fit this stupid moment.... He didn’t want to make things worse; and he didn’t want to let her make him angry, certainly not that! If both of them.... He didn’t understand this Virginia. There’s a queer caddishness about her that I can’t understand, he thought. He felt terribly flat.... He stood by the open window and stared{286} out at the wide, rain-soaked square and the thick plesaunce of trees that shone and smelled of rain. The leaves looked delicious, in a rich and rather beastly way, like green velvet shot with bronze. Nice to bury one’s face in wet leaves.... It was awfully close, and spitting again. He held the French windows as far open as they would go. The square was very still, expecting thunder maybe.... She’s thinking away from me, he thought. And I can’t stop her, somehow. She won’t let me. But I must.... He, no matter how angry he might be with her, was always thinking towards her. “Why don’t you ever push one back?” Well, why should he? He knew what he wanted ... one must live cleanly.... And suddenly he swung round into the room. She was not looking at him.

“But this is absurd!” he said violently to the bent head, to the golden hair. He passionately wanted to put this silly thing right—it was so silly! What right had she to write him that letter and then look queer just because he hadn’t run to agree with her!

As she stood at the little table, her face was bent to it, to the book her paper-knife was absently cutting; and as she stood, she raised her face to his cry, and looked at him; she just looked, and her eyes were quite expressionless, as though she was not there. Oh, that unearthly look! But he didn’t care: he had suddenly felt his strength.

“This is absurd,” he repeated firmly, but almost gaily; and he took quick strides towards her. He didn’t know what he was going to do, how he would force her. But he felt his strength.

And George Tarlyon came in. Ivor stopped in his stride. Virginia turned her face to the door.

“Better, my dear?” Tarlyon asked, taking Virginia’s hand; and to Ivor: “Septic weather, Marlay....”

“Will you have tea, George?” Virginia asked, “or{287} does this septic weather call for a brandy-and-soda?”

“Then perhaps you’ll dine with me here?” Virginia cut sharply in. “I don’t want to go out, and——”

The door slammed to with a crash, and startled Virginia’s hand to her heart. Tarlyon stared, and then he laughed. He had an eighteenth-century kind of laugh; and he threw back his head a little, and his eyes wrinkled up, as he laughed. It really was rather funny, that sudden exit.... Far below them in the great house, like a cry in the bowels of the earth, a door slammed massively.{288}

CHAPTER XIX

When, very soon after, Turner received his master’s command to pack “things,” he did not delay; for though he had seen his master darkly furious before now, he did not remember ever to have seen him so very darkly furious.

“Oh, for a few days, man! I don’t know....” Ivor impatiently drove him from the room; then called to him: “Tell Mrs. Hope she needn’t come down. We can manage.”

Ivor had lost his temper. He wanted now but one thing, and that violently—to get out of London, out of “all this”! What he would do then, he had not the faintest idea. He had no other thoughts, there was a furious jumble in his mind. Now and then he would see a white face, a very white little face with livid blue eyes. Caddish eyes.... He would think later, out of London! And his impatience dragged him and Turner to Paddington a good half-hour before a train was due to leave for Reading, Newbury, and Hungerford; and when at last it was in, it was passionately mobbed by the crowds going riverwards in the heat—but who stood a chance against the tall, one-armed young man with the straight eyebrows and the defiant nose? Turner breathlessly squeezed in after him, travelling “first” with a “third” ticket. “Get there somehow,” Turner muttered.{289}

And thus to Nasyngton village, by The Swan’s Neck dog-cart from Hungerford: to the house of the Misses Cloister-Smiths beside the ancient bridge over the River Kennet, towards eight o’clock on a damp and sultry September evening. Turner had bought some eggs in Hungerford: having understood that his master had indicated eggs as the only possible food in such weather.

Of course, it was a little thing. Just a tiff.... His mind accused Virginia, but not resentfully: reasonably. Quite reasonably. And he thought of how he had first been angry when she had said to him, “You get on my nerves!” Good God, he thought, are there ever two people who don’t get on each other’s nerves sometimes! It’s an abominable thing, but it happens—but it’s ever so much more abominable when it’s expressed, in words! She’s got on my nerves before now, but I haven’t said anything; one doesn’t. It’s one’s own fault when some one gets on one’s nerves, and one must just let it pass in silence. One doesn’t tell the person—it’s one of those commonplace insults that are still the deepest. No restraint, Virginia dear, no restraint! Nor me, either, banging the door on you like that!... But that made him angry again, when he thought of what had driven him to that furious exit. That was such a grotesque insult.... He had been trying so hard to put the thing right! And then, suddenly, without a word to him, to turn to Tarlyon and ask him to dine with her! Of course the dinner didn’t matter, what was a dinner more or less? But to use Tarlyon as a weapon of her sudden displeasure with him! Oh, it was childish, grotesque, caddish! Ivor wanted to laugh when he thought of it,{290} but his slamming of that door on them got into his ears, and he couldn’t help retasting the fury of that moment. He tried to tell himself that the situation required a sense of humour....

The only trace of temper that Turner could find in Ivor in the morning was a little grimness added to his ordinary manner. Turner had scrambled eggs again for breakfast, and Ivor pointed out that he hadn’t meant him to go on doing it all the time.... There was the soft light of a hesitating sun over the morning.

“This morning,” he said, “we will fish, Turner. We will cast for trout so that we may catch grayling.” Ivor had acquired more than a mile of fishing rights with the house; he was not at all a good fisherman, but one must do something; one generally, however, banged a ball with a squash-racket against a wall.

“They’re rising pretty well, sir,” said Turner enthusiastically. He liked going out fishing with his master, for it meant that after a few impossible casts and a few poor ones his master would mutter something about arms and say he would try again later: and would spend the rest of the time prowling up and down while Turner cast for trout—which nearly always turned out to be grayling. His master’s capacity for pacing up and down anywhere and everywhere had never ceased to astonish Turner. Carpet or wet grass, all the same to ’im, thought Turner.

“Must walk miles!” he would tell Mrs. Hope. “Potterin’ up and down like that, one cigarette after another. And what ’e can find to think about all that time beats me.”

“Beats ’im too, I s’d think,” said Mrs. Hope sympathetically. “Pore lamb, the worried way ’is eyebrows get fixed!”

But Ivor was not doing very much thinking this morning as he paced up and down, just far enough behind the river-bank not to offend the fishes’ sensitive nerves. Get on their nerves perhaps, he thought. He had come to a conclusion by the time he had{291} fallen asleep last night; and his awakening had confirmed it. One quarrels, he thought, almost naturally, being human; and then, being human, one makes it up. But in a few days, not straight away! I know what I want in this thing—and Virginia must get to know what she wants, or else we’re in a blind alley. There’s no sense in being nasty and then falling on each other’s necks without having got rid of all the nastiness. She simply must not be able to look at me like that in that horrible way. Caddish eyes.... And there was something so, well, blasphemous about those “caddish eyes” that he had to force his mind away from them, else the thought of them would make him angry again. There are rotten mysteries in us all....

The morning was not very eventful as to fishing. Perhaps there was too much light, Ivor vaguely suggested. The afternoon, however, very quickly put that all right, for the hesitating sun was quite obscured by three o’clock, and a little later it began to spit; and by four it was raining steadily, a wet and steady drizzle. They had passed to the farther side of the bridge, where Turner had seen “them rising”; and it was there that a telegraph boy, a very wet and sulky little boy who might have been any kind of boy but for the coloured envelope in his hand, found them. He had tried the house, he said sulkily. Turner quickly tore open the envelope and handed the wire to Ivor.

Turner looked sharply at him and then down at the basket. The boy thoughtfully examined the three grayling in the basket and remarked that they would be getting wet in the rain.

“No answer,” a voice told him; and the little boy ploughed sulkily back through the sodden grass to his bicycle against the bridge.

“Getting too wet now,” Ivor remarked; and long strides took him towards the bridge and the house. Turner followed slowly; he would have liked another cast or two, but Turner never fished alone, for the{292} unwritten law of Turner’s fishing was that his master was going to have “another go in a minute.”

Within the house Ivor had another look at the wire. “Come back.” That’s all! Dear Virginia! She must have rung up his flat and heard where he was from Mrs. Hope.

But one either does a thing or one doesn’t. One can’t go dashing about the country because of whims and wires. It’s no good our being babies about this, Virginia, he thought. We must get sensible, somehow—find out what we want and then not mess about with it like this. “Come back.” Of course he would go back, he had never intended otherwise. But in a day or two—say the day after to-morrow, when our minds are rested from the folly of the thing and we’ll never need to speak of it again. Of course he didn’t want to attach too much importance to childishness—but still ... those eyes! He couldn’t entirely forgive those strangely livid eyes, they had startled and hurt him frightfully, and they kept on coming into his mind. Caddish.... The day after to-morrow, he thought firmly. Not going back until I’ve forgotten that look.

After dinner he read the Life of Disraeli, the third volume. And once, when he looked up, he caught a vivid glimpse of a lovely grave face between golden “Swan and Edgar.” And at that very moment he almost went to London, to run to the heart of that “mausoleum.”

Now Ivor was not fool enough to confound his weakness with his principles: not entirely. And he had never had any principles in love but love. And so the next afternoon, as he was prowling about the river-bank in preparation for “another go in a minute,” he reasoned between his desire to go to Virginia there{293} and then and the hitch that kept him back. Firstly and mainly, he candidly thought, it’s hurt pride. In fact, it’s only that. But it’s not resentment against her that keeps me from going until to-morrow—it’s just that I want to wipe away all trace of that hurt pride, so that I can meet her clean. Yes, clean.... I can’t go with a nasty secret in my heart. And although I want so much to see her to-day, I shall want to see her so much more to-morrow that the whole thing, hurt pride included, will bubble away in the rush. Oh, yes, oh, yes....

For all that, he spilled his after-dinner coffee. He spilled it by jumping up from his chair as Turner was at his elbow with it. And the cup broke on the table.

“Going to London to-night, Turner!” Ivor cried gaily. What was a coffee-cup?

“Well, we might look anyway,” Ivor said briskly. “Get the key and candle and come along....”

The Misses Cloister-Smiths had not kept a car, but there was a small shed to the right of the house in which such a “car” as Ivor’s could quite well be kept. It was a poor looking car, and it gained rather than lost in the light of the candle that Turner held to it. It was an American car. After the splendid two-seater, the “dear old Camelot car,” had been stolen—that epidemic of car stealing!—Ivor had bought this “off a man”: it was the kind of car that one does buy “off a man.” But Ivor didn’t care what it looked like, so long as it could “get about” and was easily driven with one arm. “It’ll do,” he had said with a grin, when he had first seen it. And it had done, so long as he used it constantly; but once out of commission for any length of time it seemed to retire within itself, and then to show a great disinclination ever to{294} move again. It had now been in the shed for nearly six months, and looked it.

“Bit damp for it here,” said Turner. They looked at the car. Turner knew a “bit” about cars, but he hadn’t troubled to know much about this one. Turner despised this car—compared to that shining two-seater!

“Petrol,” said Ivor. And while Turner emptied a green tin, Ivor fiddled about with the switchboard—there wasn’t much to fiddle about with on that switchboard!—and then threw up the bonnet and pressed things thoughtfully.

Turner thought of the rain outside, and he looked at the car. Won’t get to London in this, he thought disgustedly.

“Come on, man!” cried Ivor! “It won’t start by staring at it. Give it a twist.”

Turner gave it several twists, for the American’s starting-handle was not one of those fierce ones that object to being twisted. Turner twisted furiously, but only the thinnest of gurgles resulted.

And Ivor suddenly laughed. He had suddenly seen a picture of Turner and himself battling with that absurd and dirty old car in a ramshackle shed, trying to get to London and Virginia, and he laughed.

“All right,” he comforted Turner. “I’ll go up to-morrow morning by the nine-fifteen. You can come up later with the things. I won’t be coming back here for some time, I expect. Not for a long time.”

CHAPTER XX

But, of course, Turner did not need to call him; and Ivor was striding along the road to Hungerford by eight o’clock. He had plenty of time in which to do the just over two miles before the train was due to leave, but his impatience needed swift movement.

Ivor never could loiter: not even on a fine morning in Berkshire; and even in his pacings up and down he would sometimes go at a furious rate and find himself perspiring—about nothing at all! Ivor didn’t, couldn’t, notice the country when there was anything on his mind: it was an inability, like that of those tiresome people who can not appreciate poetry unless it’s read to them by some one they like. A mountain would have to be an enormous mountain before Ivor, with anything on his mind, could become aware of it; and even then he would be more aware of it if there was a man on top of it. A landscape would have to be an amazing landscape before Ivor, with anything on his mind, could become aware of it; and even then he would feel it more acutely if there was a figure against the landscape. People were important to Ivor; that is why he was a solitary, and that is why men become solitaries, because people are important to them. People could make places beautiful or ugly for Ivor.... And now he simply tore along the road to Hungerford as though it had been a street in a slum, and through the fine September mist as though he hated cigarette smoke. And as he strode along his mind was gay on life and Virginia, and his hat swung from his hand, and his thick hair shone black and brown with the water of its brushing.{296}

It was about a mile from Hungerford that, as he turned the corner which led to a path across the fields directly to the station, he almost collided with the little telegraph-boy on his bicycle. The boy jumped off sulkily, and tugged at his pocket.

Ivor read: “Please come back.—Virginia.” And he saw that it had been sent off at 5.45 the day before.

“Office closes 6.30,” the boy explained. “Can’t deliver tel’grams Nasyngton after 6.”

“If——” he began, and then, to the boy’s amazement, he started to run away.

Ivor pulled himself up with a kind of fierce laugh. No good running to catch a train before it’s in a station, he thought. It was the “Please” in the wire that had set him running—suddenly, the idea of it! “Please!” One was always hearing and saying that word, and yet it had that amazing and potent meaning! The pity of it, and the generosity in it! “Please,” she had written. It stabbed his heart, that word. He saw her lips saying it, those taut and dry and beautiful lips that liked the rush of a chill wind—he heard them saying it in his ears: “Please, Ivor!” And all his gaiety was lost in regret for his folly of yesterday—his folly of “wisdom” in not having gone to her before. He had let her write “please” to him! God, Virginia and her beastly men!

It was beyond his power to prevent himself walking quickly; and he had a long wait at Hungerford Station, up and down the far end of the London platform—it seemed like hours—before any one but a porter or two was visible. But at last motors began to twist round the slope from Hungerford and down to the station, and soon the platform was dotted with people and suitcases. Then the train from London bustled in at the opposite platform, and soon a boy came round with papers.{297}

Ivor bought The Times, and, as an afterthought, The Daily Mirror: thinking to while away the minutes before his train came in, and one arm not being sufficient to cope with The Times in the open. With that pressed under his arm he held up the picture-paper at an angle: and then, with a frown, he held it up straight: as he did so, dropping The Times from under his arm. He didn’t pick it up: he stared at one of the several pictures on the front page—a face he knew, looking so strange! so odd, just there! And he knew the photograph too, it was an old one and often reproduced, for it was a “stock” photograph and used on the smallest provocation. They had often laughed at it together, calling it “Virginia arrogant.” ... It was a little blurred.... But why there? And though he saw the large type above it, though his eyes read it, and then read it again, he simply could not take it in. Oh, absurd! “Death of the Viscountess Tarlyon.” Oh, but rot! His hand trembled ever so little as he held the paper higher to read the small type below “Virginia arrogant.”

“We regret to announce the sudden death of the beautiful Viscountess Tarlyon at her house in Belgrave Square towards eight o’clock last night——” Ivor very consciously, very determinedly, closed his eyes and then he opened them again. Yes, there was “Virginia arrogant” in front of him. Then he looked about the platform—it seemed suddenly to be crowded with people, and they all seemed to be yelling about something. He turned to the small type again: “Lady Tarlyon, who will perhaps be better remembered as the Hon. Virginia Tracy and later as Mrs. Hector Sardon, underwent a serious operation some weeks ago, from which it was thought she had quite...” he skipped a few words “ ..presumably went out too soon, walking in the rain of the day before yesterday, and contracted a chill which, in her weak state of health, only too soon.... Every one will regr—— Viscount Tarly——” He simply couldn’t see any more of the{298} type, his eyes wouldn’t take it in; and there was a frightful noise in his ears, every one seemed to be yelling right at him. People shouting, people pushing, porters.... “London train! Stop at Newbury and Reading! London Train!” bang into his ear. Doors slammed to, and then the train seemed to move across his eyes, kept on moving....

“Come on, sir, come on!” a voice cried impatiently. Ivor shook his head at the voice and bent down to pick up The Times at his feet. Someone had trodden on it.

He left the station very slowly: the way he had come, through the turnstile into the fields, clutching the papers. Oh, rot.... “In the rain of the day before yesterday,” it said. He stopped and looked at the paper again; and, somehow dropping them both on to the path, left them both there.... But that was the day she had sent him the first wire! How then?... He couldn’t understand it at all, he couldn’t make head or tail of the thing. Why, damn it, she’d sent him a wire only yesterday evening—5.45! And then, quite clearly, he knew that Virginia hadn’t written that wire herself—she had told little Smith to write it! Virginia wouldn’t have signed the wire “Virginia”—she would never have signed a wire to him—she hadn’t signed the wire that had taken him to Cimiez—she hadn’t signed the first wire. “In the rain of the day before yesterday.” ... Oh, my God!

He must have been walking at a furious pace, for he had to stop to wipe his face with his handkerchief. His face was wet, dripping wet.... That wire, that first wire! “Come back!” He saw it now, all of it, everything. His thoughts tore round that first wire in a kind of fierce circle, a clear circle, round and round it, round and round every detail of it. “In the rain of the day before yesterday!” He saw and heard Virginia, very white of face. As though he was there now, he saw Virginia on that day. Just after luncheon. Virginia always called it luncheon, never lunch. “And where{299} shall we luncheon to-day?” she’d say.... Drizzling outside. He heard her voice, rather sharp and hard.

“Oh, mais il pleut, milady!” That anxious little Smith! so fearful of and for her mistress!

And he saw the sharp and dangerous gesture with which Virginia cut short poor little Smith’s cry that she could send the wire. “Mais il pleut, milady!”

“But I wish to send it myself! No more now. You can come with me if you like.... No, I can’t wait for the car. And I want to walk. Good God, why shouldn’t I walk just for once!” The sudden and sweeping impatience! “Oh, milady, milady!”

And he saw Virginia walking. Long swift strides through the drizzle towards the Post Office in Knightsbridge. She wanted to send it herself! It was an idea.... Oh, he knew, he knew! He saw everything—he saw Virginia’s heart! She wanted to send that wire herself! Ivor would know....

And the anxious little Smith trotting along just behind her, breathlessly. “Oh, milady, milady!” Holding up an umbrella in front of her, trying to cover Virginia with it, panting a little after those swift Virginian strides. Never in her life had Virginia walked under an umbrella, you couldn’t conceive it! Always she had been just ahead of an umbrella, just outside it, and someone panting, laughing, crying behind her. Not an umbrella-woman, Virginia.... Striding towards Knightsbridge with set white face, so determined, heroically set. But she was heroic! Eyes straight ahead—a soldier’s eyes, fearless eyes! Those curious eyes that could make molehills out of mountains—Ah, why had he never thought of that before? And agonised little Smith in her blue waterproof, panting behind with her umbrella inclined forwards. “Oh, milady, milady!”

And then she had sent that first wire. Those two words: “Come back.” Everything was in those two{300} words—imperious and humble, ashamed and forgiving—and so generous! Everything of Virginia and of love was in those two quick words—and he hadn’t seen it! He hadn’t seen Virginia’s heart, that lovely and mysterious heart! He had been like a swine before the two pearls in that wire. He just hadn’t seen! And then she had gone back home, maybe not so swiftly; and happily—oh, yes, happily! He could see the light in her eyes as she walked back home, not so swiftly: the merry light in Virginia’s eyes—trusting Ivor! He would come back quickly. And little Smith had been glad.... But he hadn’t gone. And when she had got back to the “mausoleum,” she had shivered a little from the damp, and was soon in bed with a chill: quite slight at first, “Oh, very minor!” but quick to feed on Virginia’s so weak health, terribly quick and wanton in its fierceness: and to her lungs, easily.... And he had not gone. My God, he had not gone!

And then that second wire—5.45 yesterday! Virginia had waited all day, growing worse all day. She had waited for him. And at last—at 5.30, say!—she had commanded Smith to send that wire: “Please....” And she had commanded Smith on pain of death to say nothing of her being ill. “Just write ‘Please come back.’” Weaker and weaker every minute, the chill in her lungs—poor Virginia, brave Virginia! “Oh, milady, milady!” Pitiful at last! Dying ... maybe she knew she was dying when she told Smith to send that wire, maybe she was at last seeing the “dead-end” of her fears—and no Ivor in the “dead-end” this time! Ah, she was fey, this Virginia. He had always known.... And how he had started to run this morning—ages ago! He had known something. “Please,” she had said. And now in his ears.... And he had wanted everything! He! “And haven’t I given you everything, Ivor?” she softly asked. He heard her.... How she would say, “Ivor!” telling him that the name pleased her heart.... Funny Virginia, she was so mysterious.... Every woman has{301} a legend, there is a legend to every woman.... His was a terrible crime. From a silly, trivial thing this crime had been born, but it was a terrible crime. He had killed Virginia, ... he had closed the reckless light in Virginia’s eyes. The brave and hazardous eyes ... of white Virginia! But why did he see her, think of her, as white? And his mind searched furiously, and at last his mind found a dream in which was a column of marble.... Oh, yes, that funny dream! and the naked white figure clinging to that column, so white she looked up there, clinging to it with white arms and legs, and destroying it with kisses.... That dream had given him Virginia and him to Virginia. And as he walked headlong up the roads of Berkshire he dreamed that dream again.

The first shock Turner received that day was on seeing a tall figure approaching from Hungerford. “Well!” he thought. Turner and luggage were in the Nasyngton grocer’s cart on their way to the station.

And the figure was coming quick! As he approached them, drawn up at the side of the road, Turner cried, “I say, sir!” But though he cried “I say, sir!” twice more, the figure passed them without stopping. The figure certainly glanced at them, but seemed to see or hear nothing. “Balmy,” said the Nasyngton grocer. And the figure strode on, his hat swinging furiously from his one hand. Turner took off his Derby and scratched his head.

The old nag wheeled slowly round, and ambled after the figure with the waving right arm.{302}

“Like the Wandering Jew,” he said softly. “No less....” And Turner whistled softly, patiently.

The Nasyngton grocer’s horse was old and unused to hurrying: it did not hurry now; and the striding figure of his master was soon lost to Turner’s solicitous eye round a bend.

But when he reached the house he was offended to find no one there. “Well!” Turner muttered. Whereupon the Nasyngton grocer thought fit to ask a question.

“Oh, go ’ome!’ said Turner sharply. Then he waited for a long time. And he got bored to death; for there was nothing for him to do about the house, he didn’t know whether they were to stay or go to London. “’Anging about!” he muttered. Turner, like his master, liked to know where he was; and now he wasn’t anywhere, unless being between Nasyngton and London and going without lunch was being somewhere.

He waited for hours; it was after two o’clock, and he was hungry; and, examining the kitchen, he found half a loaf of bread and one egg. “Scramble it!” he mimicked viciously. He boiled it.... And then Turner had a curious feeling: he felt that he didn’t belong to this Nasyngton house to-day, he belonged to Upper Brook Street, where he would have been this moment but for having said “Right about turn.” And so, having that curious feeling, Turner stood on the front door steps and smoked a cigarette. He stared at the Kennet. It was still, placid. “Nothing rising.” ...

And then he had to throw his cigarette away—for round the corner of the drive strode a dark figure. Right at him.... Turner was shocked. “Talk about sweat!” he said later to Mrs. Hope. His master’s face glistened with it, it dripped from him; if he had been wearing a hard collar it would have melted; his dark hair was all over the place, and there was a dry, red rim around his eyes as though he had been in a great wind. Turner pulled himself together and took a letter{303} out of his pocket. It was addressed in pencil, and he had great hopes of that letter.

In the sitting-room Ivor looked at the letter. That pencilled scrawl, so careless always—so much more careless on this envelope, so faint! But how? He stared at it.... Dear God, she had written it in bed yesterday, just in case he might not come! Fearing.... Forgiving him, humbling herself. And then, for the first time, he gave a sob. He knew everything that was in that letter, every word. Her lips were by his ear, telling him the words of that letter. “I’m sorry to have been a beast, Ivor, I’m so sorry. Everything is all right, Ivor, everything. I’m so sorry I hurt you ... only, you see, you aren’t casual enough.... Keep your eyebrows straight for me, my darling, don’t bring them down into the darkness. Be a little more casual, Ivor....” Oh! he not casual enough!... And it was impossible for him to open that thin envelope crushed in his hand.

Turner tiptoed to the door of the sitting-room. He had heard that sob, and was amazed and afraid. And then Turner saw a strange thing. He saw a one-armed man without resource in his mind trying to tear across an unopened envelope. The one-armed man had his knee up to and pressed against the edge of the table, and under the knee was half the envelope, and his fingers were childishly tearing at the other half; and at last the other half came away in his fingers.... Then eyes looked at Turner at the door; and Turner ran away.

“Like a lot of mad babies crying in a man’s inside,” he tried to explain that look to Mrs. Hope.{305}{304}

EPILOGUE

THE IMAGE IN THE HEART

CHAPTER I

Towards midnight on the night of the 1st of May, 1921: at the sign of the Mont Agel: and, at this moment, under the passing glance of the polite and amiable M. Stutz—who never went to bed, never; but his wife did, and had.

Ivor Pelham Marlay, looking up at last from the abyss of his coffee-cup, now a sad looking mess of ashes and ends of many cigarettes, caught M. Stutz’s eye gently on him: Ivor smiled self-consciously; and he made a displeased little gesture at the untouched glass of Napoleonic brandy before him.

And he looked round him stealthily, his first look round for ever such a long time, and saw but three other people in the shuttered restaurant: Cornelius Fayle, Mr. Kerrison and a young woman with tawny hair, pallid face, and crimson lips that smiled without meaning: a pathetic rebel....

“At once,” said M. Stutz, very low; and quickly concerned himself with it behind the counter.

This matter of whisky-and-soda was, you understand, something of a conspiratorial rite in the establishment of M. Stutz: he disapproved of whisky-and-soda. “It is an untidy drink,” said M. Stutz. He discouraged it among “My Customers,” and it was only to the most favoured among them that he would dream of serving it. To others he would say, rather stiffly: “I do not serve whisky, sir,” and did not. Thus, the most favoured must in all decency look carefully round{308} the room before begging M. Stutz’s complaisance in this particular, lest the less favoured should be envious and also demand whisky instead of the wine they were drinking. And that would never do at all, for the wines of M. Stutz’s cellar were not only the treasures of his heart but also the columns which supported the formidable edifice of his income.

This matter of the whisky-and-soda must be pursued yet a little further, before we are finally done with it, the Mont Agel, and M. Stutz; for it was on its wings, if such will be allowed to so vulgar a drink, that Ivor finally left the Mont Agel. His way with a whisky-and-soda was drastic and medicinal: the glass was raised, and lo! the glass was laid down empty.

“It’s raining, just a leetle,” M. Stutz told him. “Shall I send for a taxi?”

Ivor said he would walk, thanks very much, and was politely preceded by M. Stutz towards the side-door into the hotel passage—for the restaurant-door was closed and locked in pursuance of certain regulations to that effect—and up that narrow passage to the hotel door: which was pierced, you will remember, by ever such a little eye-hole....

It was as M. Stutz had his hand on the latch of the door that he turned to Ivor behind him; and he examined Ivor, for a moment, seriously and thoughtfully.

“You know, Mr. Marlay,” said M. Stutz softly, “you are a clever man, but you do not know how to live. I have observed it....”

“I’ve never observed anything else,” returned Ivor, with the shadow of a smile.

“I fancy,” said M. Stutz, “that you live too much with your emotions, Mr. Marlay, and not enough with your brains....”

“I am only a little restaurateur,” said M. Stutz, with{309} his epic gesture, “but I hear things. They say you are very clever, but that you are doing nothing now. Of course people are only too ready to say that a young man who has done something is going to pieces—but I would not like you to go to pieces, Mr. Marlay.”

“That is very kind of you, M. Stutz,” said Ivor sincerely, “I’ll make a note of what you say. Good-night, M. Stutz. And thank you.”

The amiable restaurateur, from the hotel doorway, meditated a little on the tall figure that swung swiftly out of sight round the corner into Oxford Street; and then, carefully and thoughtfully, he closed and bolted the hotel door, for the Mont Agel would not be “at home” to any more visitors that night, no matter of what degree. And who, in the lists of sudden visitors by night, was left to replace Virginia? that fair and grave figure of the night, that so lovely ornament of the closed and shuttered Mont Agel! Who now was left, among the gallants of the London night, who could so perfectly compound complaisance with quality, silence with speech, ease with distance? who so soignée, yet so understanding of others’ carelessness, as Virginia Tarlyon? Ah, it was death’s most blood-thirsty joke to kill Virginia—the lady of the merry golden curls and of the fair, small face in which was something gay, something sombre. Often, very often, the eyes of M. Stutz, looking round at the familiar faces of “My Customers,” would acutely miss the loveliness of that fine lady; and, moved unawares to a considerable sincerity, he would ache for her. For M. Stutz was a connoisseur of quality.

M. Stutz was concerned and sympathetic about Ivor not entirely because he, of course, knew of the love of Ivor and Virginia, and had considered it a happy fusion. M. Stutz was a snob, in a real and literary sense, and loved a grand seigneur; he loved the thing without a title, he loved the face and gesture of the thing; and, to his mind, a certain degree of silence best accorded with features on which was stamped the{310} tired mark of race. It was M. Stutz’s daily business to deal with people in whom there was much froth, and he dealt with them very amiably, but he did not like frothiness. Here it was that Virginia had pleased him, and here Ivor Marlay pleased him—there was no froth in him, he sought no favour but what was accorded to him in courtesy in return for courtesy.... And so it had always pleased M. Stutz to expect great things from the dark young man whom he had first seen in his early twenties; and his expectations had waxed rather than waned on hearing the faint bruit of the love of Ivor and Virginia—for Virginia, M. Stutz had thought, would bring fineness to a point in a man like Ivor Marlay, even though she had seemed to fail so deplorably with Hector Sardon and Lord Tarlyon. But now! Allowing for the havoc of her death in him, M. Stutz did not think that a sum of three books, the first of which was negligible, was worthy of a man who must have turned two-and-thirty. And M. Stutz was unconsciously echoing a sentence of Aunt Percy’s when he told himself that perhaps Ivor Marlay was too much given to thinking, and that thinking made him angry.

But Ivor, striding along Oxford Street, was not thinking about anything in particular. His mind had suddenly taken a lazy turn—even as he had left the Mont Agel. It will be remembered that the air on the night of the 1st of May, 1921—or rather, in the early hours of the 2nd of May, for it struck half-past twelve as Ivor reached Oxford Circus—was cool but soft, a first herald of what was to be a summer of “unprecedented warmth and drought.” The drought, however, as will also be remembered, was not then so remarkable as it later became; and on this particular night there was noticeable, to a student of London, a{311} vague kind of rain in the air (it would naturally not be anywhere else, but on the other hand it didn’t seem to reach the ground: not quite), which was not unpleasing: to a student of London, anyway. Such a one was Ivor Marlay become, for he had long since overcome the bitterness of his loneliness in London, and now he loved London with what a ladies’ journal would call a “bitter love.” Of late months he had very often walked about London by night, and the feel of it had somehow crept into his bones: it was not a sleek city, like Paris: it was a city of splendid and ordered carelessness, there were holes and gashes in it where your Parisian would have had boulevards, there were sharp turns and funny little slums where any other city would have had an immaculate Avenue leading to a most immaculate Place full of corrupt taxis and unshaven police....

He was at Oxford Circus, and stood debating there, just by the Tube station. The rain held, but did not incommode. There were very few passengers, a figure or two, a woman or two, and taxis hurtling by. Ivor was wearing, above his dinner-jacket, a black Trilby. Now a short man wearing a black Trilby looks like nothing on earth—or, say, like something from South America; but it is quite becoming to a tall man, and can lend an almost sinister air to the usual convention of faces. Ivor, as he stood looking across Oxford Circus, with his black Trilby at the usual angle and a white flower brave upon the lapel of his jacket, looked just a little sinister. He stared across Oxford Circus. He wanted to walk, anywhere. Down Regent Street, or across the Circus towards the Park?... And this last he suddenly did, thinking that the only thing to do with Oxford Circus was to cross it.

He walked; and this walk, so usual in character, in place, in circumstance, was yet to chance on so strange a happening that for ever after Ivor couldn’t help trying to find in it some faint atom of forewarning—say, in his thoughts! But his thoughts, after having left{312} the Mont Agel, had taken that lazy turn. The fierce depression of that day and evening had gone, leaving behind but the usual, half-humorous gloom of his present nature; for he had acquired—or rather rediscovered, for it had always been in him—a way of treating things nonsensically with himself, just as though Virginia was beside him in that little garden of the studio over Paris, “our eyrie, out of ken!” He managed, within himself, to twist many things to comic phrases and the like, so that the mind behind those straight and sulky eyebrows was often roaring with laughter about something which wouldn’t have seemed in the least funny when spoken.

He walked. To the Marble Arch, and thence down Park Lane, where was little movement. The not unpleasing rain still seemed to encounter certain difficulties in reaching the ground. He chose the Park side of the road, and walked by the railings. He peered into the darkness of the Park, and it displeased him. A closed and shuttered Park by night, with wide and empty roads laid across it like the arms of a sprawling skeleton, is a most abominable thing; there is no beauty in it thus, no mystery, and sensitive eyes must reject its dark and dank attractions through the railings. He walked. “Fight on all occasions.” Now who the deuce had said that? Ah, yes, d’Artagnan’s father to d’Artagnan. Wise old man, ... for if you fight on “all occasions” you simply must, by the laws of chance, win now and then.

He walked. To the corner of Hamilton Place and Piccadilly, and there stayed a while, for it is a romantic station by night. The vague and careless rain looked like threads of gossamer silver passing across the light of the arc-lamps. Standing here, at the corner of Hamilton Place, Piccadilly grows wide to the eye and sweeps to far distances: here, by night, there are palaces all about you, there are spacious places before you, the Green Park is a mysterious valley, and somewhere in the spaciousness is a horseman on a horse{313} and a chariot on a triumphal arch, an arch that is much more impressive by night than in that festive daylight when under its squat curve pass the automata of royalty. Here, at the corner of Hamilton Place, Piccadilly ceases to be Piccadilly and becomes something more than Hyde Park Corner: surely it becomes a wide and elegant gesture, the magnificent gesture of Babylon towards the barbaric extremities of its tributaries. Here motor-cars, that but a moment before looked large and luxurious on the thin spine of Piccadilly, dwindle to small and flying atoms, hurling themselves headlong into the fat bosom of Belgrave Square, straight ahead to the narrow rectitudes of Brompton, or still farther to the very frontiers of the town, where is said to lie Holland Park and beyond which is Hammersmith and a great darkness.

He walked. Down the slope of Piccadilly, that slight downward slope of Piccadilly as it gathers strength to hunch itself up for its onslaught on the town. And Ivor saw a much younger man, so gay, so careless, in a swift and shining car—“that Camelot car, Magdalen!”—racing down and up the switchback of Piccadilly by night, on the wings of love from Camelot. Ah ... les tendresses! Admirable Magdalen! “You have decorated my life,” he had cried to her—so cheekily! But so she had—and so Virginia had too, and almost destroyed it as well! While he had utterly destroyed Virginia....

Down Street. He would walk up Down Street, through Shepherds’ Market, and so home to Upper Brook Street. And he began the ascent, on the side opposite to the Tube station. A clock gave one distant knell—one o’clock of the 2nd of May. The puny rain held.

The Tube station was closed, and shutters were laid across its face. Now by Down Street Tube Station is a passage-way, no one knows why or whither; whether or not this passage-way belongs to the Tube station has never been established, nor if it does for{314} what purpose, nor if it does not for what purpose; in fact, nothing is known about this passage-way but that it looks a cavernous place. But now this passage-way was made remarkable to a passing man by the fact that a woman was standing within it; there, just within the passage-way, Ivor saw a woman. He saw her as he passed up on the opposite side: her face and head were in the darkness of the cavernous place, but the light of the adjacent lamp fell brightly on the lower part of her cloak; and this cloak looked gray and soft and shining with a furry shine, it looked like a cloak made of delicious shillings, and Ivor thought to himself: “If that isn’t chinchilla I’d like to know what is.”

Beyond that passing glimpse he had, immediately, no other, for he walked on up Down Street. But the chinchilla coat waved before his mind. “It’s all very odd,” he thought. “What’s a chinchilla coat doing out alone at this time of night? It’s not decent.” He had walked far enough to be able, decently, to turn and look again. The soft gleam of the chinchilla was still there: more than ever like a delicious shilling wantonly awaiting a beggar’s grasp. “Give her five minutes,” thought Ivor, “and if her man hasn’t turned up by then I must see about her. Wandering about in a chinchilla coat on a night like this! I will offer her my friendship for five minutes, stressing the word friendship so that she will know I am a man without casual desires. Ha!” He felt, at this moment, very gay; lighting a cigarette, he walked slowly as far as Hertford Street; and slowly back, down the hill of Down Street. The rain was at last managing to reach the ground. “Let it,” thought Ivor. He felt gay. The hours of his life stretched before him like a desert, but he felt gay; the days and years of his life stretched before him like a wilderness of stones, but he felt gay; and he didn’t know why....

Quickly Ivor approached, on the opposite side, the soft and furry gleam of the chinchilla coat. He laughed{315} at himself. “What a dog I am!” he thought. “If,” he thought, “I were a poet, I would write a poem about a lonely lady in a chinchilla coat. Not being a poet, I will speak to her instead. Thus.”

And he crossed the road with a swing. He didn’t care.... The face of the chinchilla was not visible, as he approached. Above the face was a suggestion of hair. A tall figure, taller than Virginia—very tall. But he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t care.... And with his one arm he swept off his hat.

“Certainly,” said Ivor, and instantly left her, to search for it. “Autocrat,” he thought. “None of your meek stuff about her.” ...

Piccadilly again. There were taxis on the rank a hundred yards or so up on the sulky side—nice and polite taxis now that the war was over.

“In Down Street,” he told the first driver, “there’s a Tube station and a chinchilla coat. Stop by them.”

The driver grunted, and drove. And, as he slowed down by the Tube, the chinchilla coat stepped out from the cavernous place and was visible as a tall woman in a chinchilla coat, no more; for over her head was thrown a kind of motoring veil which obscured what might be golden hair and suggested what might be a young and lovely face. “But of course,” Ivor thought, “she’s lovely. A plain woman wouldn’t have the cheek.”

There was silence in the cab: the lady seemed to have no desire to speak; and Ivor, though he wanted to hear her voice again, suddenly found he had nothing to say at all—to this strange lady! It was like an occasion out of a book by a young romanticist, yet she was very real, this woman; he could feel her clean reality, and her voice had had that low and careless charm of a woman whose feet are on an Aubusson carpet and whose heart is not subject to sudden impulses. She was calm. Calm! A delicious state.... He wanted her to speak; and she suddenly did.

“Tell me,” the voice came with gentle interest, “are other men like you, or are you exceptional?”

“Well——” Ivor hesitated. “I’m afraid I have been rather impertinent....”

And he deprecated his presence just a little, towards the dark poise of her head.

“Yes, you have been impertinent, I suppose,” the voice said softly. “But I wasn’t thinking of that. I was wondering if it was usual with men to be gallant....”

“You see,” the voice explained, “I know very little about men. About young men.”

“I say,” he almost blurted, “I’m all right, you know. I mean—well, I don’t want anything. You mustn’t think that I have any—well, ulterior motive, because I haven’t. I just thought I’d speak to you.... It’s rather difficult to explain....”

Ivor stepped out, with reluctance, for the drive had been short, too short; and, though he had no “ulterior motive,” he would have liked to speak to her a while longer. But, even as he stepped out on to the curb, he murmured softly: “Well, I’m damned!” For{317} he saw that they were in Hertford Street—and just at that part of Hertford Street which is at the head of Down Street! and there, a hundred yards or so down the slope of it, was the Tube station!

The chinchilla coat laughed, a slight wave of a laugh it was, from the recess of the taxi.

“I live here,” she said. “But I told him to drive round by Hamilton Place....”

“I thought it would be fun to see your puzzled face,” she said. “I’ve never had much fun.”

Her sudden plaint from the darkness made him, standing by the door, frightfully shy; and he said nothing, awkwardly.

He stood aside while she stepped out. And, in the lamplight, he saw her face for the first time, as she brushed by him: a young and beautiful profile—curiously sedate, too, it seemed!—passing by his eyes.

He remained by the throbbing taxi; he did not follow her to the door of the house, lest she should think he wanted to follow the occasion indoors. And he did want to, very much; but he could make no move lest she should be made uncomfortable at a thought of his insistence.

He watched the tall figure—she was very tall, taller than Virginia—fit a latchkey in the door; he watched her open the door; and he saw her turn her head to him. He took off his hat quickly.

“You must be a very dangerous man,” she said thoughtfully, “to be in such a hurry not to put your restraint to the test....” It was, after all, very surprising of her to say that, just that.

“You can come in for a moment,” she said. “I would like you to come in for a moment.”

And Ivor, making a sign to the taxi-driver, followed the chinchilla coat into No. 78 Hertford Street.{318}

CHAPTER II

Once in the hall of the house she did not look round at him: her steps rang sharply on the stone flags as she passed to a door at the far end of the wide and sombre hall of stone—for in it only one lamp was alight. He threw his hat on a chair and, in following her, had time to be surprised at the spaciousness about him. For, from the outside, the house had looked one of those tall and narrow houses common in Mayfair, where ground-rent is high: there had been no hint of this wide and spacious hall in which the lightest steps resounded portentously. It was like the hall of a house in, say, Carlton House Terrace, it was a hall to hold two butlers—now that footmen have become vulgar—the one to take your hat and the other your name; and at its extremity, near the door through which the chinchilla had passed, there swept upwards with a wide sweep a noble marble stairway, the kind of stairway from the top of which men may fairly envisage the ascending grace of the women who might have loved them or the shortcomings of the woman they have married; for very grievous for a mediocre figure is the ascending of such a gracious stairway as this.

The house was very still, but it is not unusual for a house to be very still towards half-past one. And as Ivor followed the tall lady into the room at the foot of the noble stairway, he wondered why she was doing this odd thing; but (since men cannot help thinking of such things) he did not seriously consider the idea that her invitation would finally include her bed, for any fool can tell a romantic lady from a calm lady, and she was deliciously calm. Probably she was bored, Ivor{319} thought, and would amuse herself a while; and so, though he did not feel very amusing to-night, he would try to be as pleasant as possible.... And he wouldn’t mind a drink, anyway; but he didn’t get a drink.

Her voice met him as he went into the room: it was a large and wide room, and it was dim, for she had switched on but a few lights, faint electric-lights hidden in subtle vases here and there about the expanse of the room.

“Don’t, please, be shy,” her voice met him, the calm voice, “for I’m quite shy enough for two. And I asked you in because I want you to talk to me—just a little.”

He came forward towards her across the rugs that strewed the parquet floor. There were many things in that room, chairs and footstools and sofas of quality, but yet it was a room for leisured feet, a room easy to move in. She stood by the nobly carven fireplace, a figure in chinchilla, under which was visible a low-cut black dress: and this shone a little as though it were made of black armour, even as black sequins do sometimes shine.

“Well, it makes a man shy,” he protested, “to try to live up to the fact that you’ve let him speak to you.”

The candid eyes of the tall lady examined him; they were gray eyes, wide and inquiring and amazingly innocent, and now there was a subtle light of laughter in them, as though she was infinitely but quietly amused about something. But he did not meet her eyes, for his were suddenly engrossed in a large portrait on a farther wall, a portrait startling and remarkable even in that dim light. It was a portrait in oils of a woman in a green dress sitting in a high-backed chair, and her head was pressed back against the back of the chair so that her throat was a clean and white line, and appalling in its suggestion of luxuriance; and the eyes of the{320} woman in the green dress, as her head leant back against her chair, had in them the frightening candour of innocence, and they laughed at you, without mockery, as though she was infinitely but quietly amused about something; and her hair was golden, and yet only a fool would have called it golden, for it was of the colour of fallen leaves on an October afternoon, russet brown and very dull gold shot with a fantasy of carmine. Anyway, the colour of her hair was more like that of an October leaf than anything else, and as for her dress, who shall describe that green dress? For it was a strange and surprising dress, yet it was not a cheeky dress but witty, and it required from its wearer more than the virtue of dignity, though even that is a considerable virtue in young women nowadays. At its foot was just visible the sweet tip of a cherry shoe—but at its other end, the queenly end, at that end where a dress must die so that a woman’s flesh may live for men’s admiration and distress, at that end where a dress curves in glorious luxury over breasts and dies in a last effort to reach and clutch a slender throat! What of that queenly end of that green dress? It was contrived, without detracting an iota from the elegant formality of its wearer, so that it swept in a thin green strand from the bosom over one shoulder—and never returned over the other! for that other shoulder was startling white and naked, it was the kind of shoulder that men dream about in lonely moments; it was a shoulder wantonly divorced from the green dress which curved, ever so luxuriously, over but half one of the breasts of the subtly laughing woman with the eyes of innocent candour. And Ivor stared at her.

“Ah, yes,” he said, towards the portrait, “I know you now. I know you well.”

“Oh, but am I so famous then!” the lady cried pathetically, and Ivor turned to her thoughtfully.

“That portrait is famous,” he said. “It set every one talking, even in war-time—and it set me longing. Years ago....{321}”

The “Portrait of Pamela Star,” by Augustus John—who, in the autumn of 1916, when it was on exhibition at the Grosvenor Galleries, did not hear of it? Never did portrait create such a stir or leave such an impression as the portrait of Pamela Star. The Daily Mail at once called her a “mystery woman,” and the Evening News discovered a theory that the lovely creature was a Belgian refugee whom Major John had rescued at the risk of his life; and tried to interview the artist, but failed deplorably. And though there were not wanting fellow-artists to say that the portrait was a literary masterpiece rather than a painting, which is a boring remark and means nothing, and though Mr. George Moore was heard to say, as he walked away from a long contemplation of the portrait, that painting had died with Manet—yet it was commonly admitted that whereas Gainsborough had painted a lady like a landscape, Augustus John had made a lady into a legend; and what lady, it was asked, would not rather be a legend than a landscape?

“I was on leave in 1916,” Ivor told her, “and I happened to walk into the Grosvenor Galleries. And there you were! You were a great help to me, Pamela Star. You were indeed....”

“And were you as curious about me then as you are courteous now?” she asked him with a smile. They were standing close together, the room was an island and they were solitary and close on it; she smiled at him curiously; and Ivor had a funny feeling that he had never yet met a woman with such a clean, unveiled smile: absolutely frank. And he wondered about her age, thinking it must be that mysterious and intangible age which lies somewhere between twenty-five and thirty.

“Every one was curious about you,” he told her. “People wondered about you. They knew a little about you, you see, and on that little they built all kinds of gossip....”

“And didn’t Mr. John ever explain how quiet and harmless his sitter was?” asked Pamela Star.{322}

“John never speaks about his sitters. If you should ask him a question about them he wouldn’t hear you. John is an artist, not a table-decoration....”

“And what kind of things did people wonder about me?” asked Pamela Star. “I want to know, please. For, you see, I know as little about people as they know about me. Less even....”

“They wondered,” said Ivor, “if you really want to know, whether you were a courtesan or a virgin. And that’s a great compliment to you, Pamela Star, for there’s generally no doubt about it one way or the other....”

“I’m not wondering,” he explained quickly, “whether you are a courtesan, for I think I know just enough about them to know that you’re not one. And you look too wise to be a virgin. I’m just wondering about you, that’s all.”

“Well——” she began childishly, and hesitated. Her eyes, those candid eyes, were very full on him, they searched his. She gulped, smiled, and spoke swiftly:—

“I’m a plumber’s daughter, and yet I own this house and all that’s in it and very much besides. In fact I’m very, very rich.”

And suddenly, from the recesses of that curious moment, there crept out laughter; and they laughed, those two, right at each other, a little shyly, a little wonderingly, like children uneasy under the burden of a new friendship. And then she said, very seriously:—

“I wouldn’t have let you speak to me in Down{323} Street, if I hadn’t seen that you hadn’t the usual number of arms. You could do less damage with only one arm, I thought....”

“Oh, I can do quite a lot! One’s mind has a thousand arms to hurt with, after all.”

And then that one arm made as though to sweep away some debris. “But how did we get talking of myself?”

“I was just trying to find out about men,” she confessed sweetly. “I’ve known so very few....”

“Ah, yes, you were telling me how you came to let me speak to you in Down Street,” he remembered. “Well, you know, I certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of speaking to you if I had known who you were. I would have been frightened....”

And again they laughed together, but, suddenly, she became very earnest; and he wondered at himself for not having observed before that the candid eyes were sad and that her mouth was just a little sad, as of a woman who might cry but will not.

“And now I’ll confess to you, since you say you like me,” she told him without jest, “that I asked you here under false pretences....”

“But you’ve made no pretences at all!” he broke in quickly. “That’s what is so nice about you....”

“I told you,” she insisted, “that I asked you to come in because I wanted you to talk to me a little. I lied, my friend. I asked you to come in because I wanted to make sure if I liked you or not. And if I did like you I intended to show you something. I’ve simply got to show it to someone, don’t you see? Something important.”

“In fact,” she said very slowly, “I’m going to show you the most important—how does one say it?—factor in my life. Come, stranger.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him. “I have known men with names, but known them no better for them. This will be in the nature of an experiment....”

“If ever,” she said, “you should see my eyes searching for a word, you will tell me your name. That will be the word I need.” And she smiled faintly at his absorbed face, and with a slight shake the chinchilla coat dropped off her to the floor, soft and shining silver about her feet, and she was a woman in a black sequin dress cut low about her throat and severely distant from her arms. Somewhere about the shining black was a splash of vivid green, maybe it was about its middle: just a little splash of vivid green on the shining black dress....

“Come,” she said again. And he followed Pamela Star across the room to double-doors at a far end. She laid her hands on the two knobs, as though dramatically to swing the doors open; but instead, as she stood thus against the dark panel of the door, she suddenly threw her head backwards to him with an adorable gesture, and she said:—

And Pamela Star threw open the doors to introduce her newest friend to her oldest, a dead man laid out on a great couch in the serene light of two tall candles, at its head, in two tall candlesticks of barbaric design in dull and twisted gold.

They stood, the two young people, even as straight as the two candlesticks of the dead old man’s desire, in the open doorway: Ivor staring in wonder, and she in deep thoughtfulness, at the still and bearded figure on the great couch. Her oldest and best friend! And she, beside him in the doorway, was as still as the dead....{325}

They stood facing one another on each side of the figure on the great couch, he staring down in wonder and she in thought; and the calm light of the two candles shone softly on her hair, so that red and gold and bronze danced on the waves and magic shades chased magic shadows in the depths.

The couch was low, it did not reach above Ivor’s knees; and it was very wide, but the old man was not lost in it, for even in death he could bewilder size and confuse proportion. Patriarchal he looked, that old man, where he lay with fine head and beard uncovered by the sheet—for what shame to cover the head, no matter how inert, of Aram Melekian! Of whom it had been said that he was the only proud gesture that wretched race has ever made since Jesus died to save the souls of men and to make a hecatomb of Hayastan, which is Armenia’s true name. A wise old man, Sir Aram Melekian, but bitter: the friend of man he had surely proved himself by many charities and endowments, but as surely he despised mankind; he lent money to it. It was said that he had financed several little wars, and it was known that, with the great Greek millionaire, he had helped the Allies considerably in the last war—his idea being, some people said, that since England and France had befriended Armenia almost out of existence he was only too pleased to do what he could for them: which does not show him in a very pleasant light, but is almost certainly a malicious fabrication of envy, for Sir Aram Melekian had always let it be known that he yielded to no one in his admiration for the recent civilisations of the West, saying: “The West is much more cunning than the East, which is why the East is called cunning, I suppose.” It was to such fresh and boyish remarks, no doubt, that the old multi-millionaire owed his amazing popularity among the societies of Paris, New York and London. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton,{326} however, were understood not to like him very much, and the Morning Post had made several disapproving references to him in connection with Mr. Lloyd George’s Near Eastern policy—but all this was no doubt due to a pardonable misunderstanding about Sir Aram Melekian’s nose, which was what’s called a decidedly Jewish-looking affair; whereas, though Armenians have frequently been described as very Jewish-looking, the truth of the matter is that Jews are very Armenian-looking, for the Armenians are the senior race and have, therefore, a prior right to that nose which the Jews, perhaps rather indiscreetly, have always claimed as their own. Sir Aram Melekian, like the late Viscount Northcliffe, had read the history of Napoleon; but, unlike the late Viscount Northcliffe, he had forgotten it....

But the death of the great Armenian, on the 1st of May, 1921, is too recent to deserve particular comment; and, indeed, little could be added to the biographical details, appreciations and tittle-tattle which filled the newspapers of the day; for editors, whose hands are nowhere if not on the pulse of the public, know that, though a multi-millionaire is but a fable while he is alive, the great heart of the public is at once touched by his death and deeply interested in the disposition of his fabulous monies; though in this case that disposition was found to be of less than usual interest, for the number of words in Sir Aram Melekian’s will did not exceed the rumoured number of his millions.

Ivor did not need to be told who the old man was. The curiosity about the “Portrait of Pamela Star” in 1916 had, anyway, ascertained one certain fact about Pamela Star, that she was in some way connected with Sir Aram Melekian; and though the old millionaire gained a little glamour from that connection, whether of love or guardianship no one knew, it was thought a little “peculiar” of him to keep her, “that lovely, tall creature,” so severely to himself; for there had been no chance of meeting her, even those brilliant and energetic hostesses who were intimate acquaintances of Aram{327} Melekian’s were by him refused the slightest introduction to Pamela Star. “Later,” he would say; and always “Later.” They would be seen, however, now and then, side by side in the tonneau of a car; now and then riding in the Row, a fine pair for all his age, which must have been well over sixty: “the lovely, tall creature” and the iron-gray old man with the Assyrian beard and the deep eyes that only smiled at disconcerting moments: a suspicious man. And so Pamela Star remained unknown, a legend created by Augustus John and enjoyed only by an eccentric old man....

It was as Ivor at last raised his eyes from the old man’s face, to see if Pamela Star really existed, that she spoke. She said, in a very low voice:—

“He died this evening—at about seven o’clock. Gently—just as he looks. He expected to die, his heart was like that. And I expected it, too....”

“Dear, dear Aram!” her voice came so softly, so tenderly. “He was so strong—and so contemptuous—about everything but me!”

Ivor looked down again at the noble head on which age had left a mane of gray hair, and at the face, which was as though bleached white and taut with many years, many tempers.

“He looks,” Ivor said thoughtfully, “as I thought no man in the world could look, the richest man in the world.”

“And I?” Her sharp question startled him; he stared across the couch, into the gray irises into which the candlelight had dropped spots of gold. “And I? Do I look like the richest woman in the world?”

He stared; it was somehow appalling, the matter and manner of that swift question, so brittle and infinitely wretched! And he suddenly felt as though all his life had been leading to this particular and amazing point, that he had lived thirty-two years for nothing more—and nothing less!—than to be asked, across the body of an old man, this magnificently absurd question. And he tried to be silent, but he said something, he never knew what....{328}

CHAPTER III

They were back on the other side of the closed folding-doors: almost as they had been before, standing together as on an island in artificial twilight. The occasion was not, somehow, one for sitting down.

“I’ve made a great demand on your patience, haven’t I?” she asked him. “All this mystery....”

“But you’ve made it very easy for me to meet that demand,” he told her sincerely.

“And now I’ll explain—something, anyway. You’ve a right to know something—after my strange behaviour.” And she seemed to wait for him to say something, but he had nothing to say: the thing was too mysterious.

“Yes?... Well, listen. There, in that room, lies my oldest and dearest friend—though I don’t know why I put it that way, for I’ve never had another. But it’s not to be pathetic I’m being so expansive to you. And it’s not for grief at Aram’s death. I’m being selfish, my friend. I am thinking only of myself—and there’s a great horror in that word, myself, when there’s not another to put beside it....”

She stopped, and seemed to consider him; and she made a slight, helpless movement of her hand, so that a sense of her impotence touched him closely.

“I’ll understand, whatever you say,” he begged her to believe. “Anyway, I think I will.”

“If you’ve ever been lonely you will,” said Pamela Star. “Though even so it may be difficult, for I’ve only been lonely since seven o’clock this evening. But I am suffering from all the loneliness of my future life, I don’t see how it can be mended. That’s hysteria,{329} maybe. You have met many women, I’m sure, and so you may know this for hysteria....”

“Listen,” she said again: and spoke impulsively, swiftly. “I’ve been with Aram Melekian since I was ten. I’m twenty-eight now—eighteen years in that wise old man’s care, for he was very wise, you know. I was a grubby little girl playing about in the Fulham Road, the daughter of a plumber’s foreman and the sister of a little boy who was even grubbier than me, when Aram saw me on his way to the studio of one of his protégées in Redcliffe Road. He saw me several times, he said, and was amazed at my beauty....” She smiled faintly. “I think he has been amazed at it ever since. And of course I’ve been only too pleased to be able to return, if only like that, a little of the great debt I owe him.”

“At first,” she said, “he was my guardian. He had arranged things with my father—who would never receive any help for himself, dear father is such an independent kind of plumber! And a great success he’s made of plumbing, too, he and my brother—Snagg & Son, of the Fulham Road. For my name was Pam Snagg, but Aram changed it to Pamela Star, saying it was more apt for me....”

“Yes, Aram had a flair,” she agreed. “And, though he was so bitter, he could make even plain things beautiful by understanding them. That’s surely very rare....”

“At first he was my guardian,” she repeated, “and then, when I was twenty, he was my lover. And then, after that, he was my friend. He was my lover for a year, and he said that that year was the great mistake of his life—the only mistake of his life, he said. For one day he cried—Aram cried, hard Aram!—and after that he was my friend. My great friend.... The great mistake of his life! Well, I don’t know. I{330}t’s easy to judge these things by morality, so easy that morality must be sometimes wrong. It’s too cocksure.... I’m glad to have been his mistress. I feel I would have been very—small and little, without that. You understand? It somehow balances one—the knowledge. And I’m sure you wouldn’t be here and I talking to you so frankly but that once upon a time I let Aram love me—oh, yes, it was just that, there’s no excuse for me at all except that I’m glad of it.”

“Yes?” she asked softly; and he had a conscious moment of wondering what she was going to say. “And was it enough excuse, my friend, for him to leave all his property, every bit, to me, to do just as I liked with? Me, Pamela Star!”

“Quick you are!” she murmured. She passed a hand across her forehead. “I don’t know,” she said. “I should have said ‘it is,’ I suppose. But you’re here, after all—aren’t you?”

“It was dreadful,” Pamela Star insisted. “This evening—all alone here! The doctor came and went—an impressive man. His patients always have bulletins about them in the morning paper—a most impressive man. He pressed my hand most encouragingly as he went away. Then the secretaries came and went—automata, just automata! They seemed to find a tremendous lot to do, though I’m sure I don’t know what it was, for I couldn’t find anything to do at all. One automaton whispered to me that he would see ‘about the Press’—the silly man, as though I cared what he saw about! And at last he went too, the last automaton, with whispering feet. The servants seemed more human—Rose, the butler, is a very nice old man, but the{331} plumber’s daughter wasn’t somehow able to put her head on his shoulder and say that she was very, very miserable. Then he went to bed at last, I suppose, and I was left all alone with Aram and all this money: ... left all alone with to-morrow and all the to-morrows! Don’t you feel sorry for me, my friend—what shall I do with it all? Must I sacrifice all my life to that ghastly money—even as he did! Oh, I don’t despise money, but this is too much, it’s endless! I can’t sign it away, heap by heap—oh, delicious heaps of gold to give away! ‘Will you take it, sir, or shall I send it for you?’ But that’s no use, I can’t sign it away, for he trusted me with his millions to direct them to their best advantage. He educated me for that purpose, he said I was the one woman in the world who would be able to do it. Oh God, what a compliment! They will always be his, I will be their slave! That looks to be my life, my friend....”

“But why did he keep you so—well, closed up?” Ivor asked. “It seems strange of him—not giving you a chance to know people, to make friends, to know things!”

“Oh, but I know such a lot!” she protested, with a vast, sweet arrogance. “I know a devil of a lot, sir, about life and things. He taught me, you see—and he was a most uncommon man, I assure you. And he didn’t keep me ‘closed up’ at all—I just took his advice, respecting him as I did. I was lonely sometimes, of course, but I was happy with him, we laughed together often, and then he would show me the world. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know a younger man than Aram was really—even his contempt for people was a young thing, don’t you see! And, as for me, I never had a desire to keep a salon of my own or decorate some one else’s. I didn’t want all that. I’m of the people, and I always will be of the people, money or no money. And Aram always said that if I went about my face{332} would make a mess of my life—forgive my being candid about my face, but living with him has made me so—for, he said, my beauty wasn’t the kind that men are just content to look at, they would want to touch it, being men. And I couldn’t remain untouchable, he said, being a woman and warm—that’s what he said, anyway, and he probably knew for he was once my lover for a year. A man will come, he said, who will also be your friend. He said that often, he seemed somehow to be certain about it. But by the time he died this evening no such man had come at all, not even the shadow of one. And so I wandered about the house, and then at last I put on this dress, just for something to do; and then, still for something to do, I crept out of the house and walked, and at last I stood by the Tube station, wondering if anything had ever happened to any one in Down Street. At last I decided it hadn’t—even though, you know, I didn’t expect anything to happen, and I don’t think I really wanted anything to happen, for I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if it did....”

“And then,” she said, “you happened, with your one arm. That made things ever so much easier. Somehow....”

“I just happened,” he said, quite sincerely, “as anyone else might have.”

“Don’t be silly!” she cried—so suddenly! And she laughed at his humility, shattering it—and then, shattering her laughter, came a great noise and thundering through the stone hall, so that they were shocked into staring silence.

They started to the door; and again that thundering through the stone hall shattered the stillness and marred the dignity of Sir Aram Melekian’s tomb.

“I bin ringin’ this ’ere bell for the larst ’our,” explained the shape with commendable restraint. “And not jest for fun, but to know if you’ve fergotten me or going to keep me till the next war. Bein’ now parst four——”

“We’d forgotten the taxi!” said the giggle, quite unnecessarily, for the taxi was very manifest to the eye.

“I’m so sorry,” said Ivor to the driver, and grinned at him. “I quite forgot you....”

“It’s not a question of change,” whispered back Ivor, pulling out notes.

“Good-night, sir,” said the taxi-driver, with empressement. “Sorry to ’ave woken you.”

The taxi hurled itself down the hill of Hertford Street towards the blind turning to Shepherd’s Market. It was an astonishing taxi.

As they walked back through the wide and sombre hall of stone Ivor suddenly stopped; she stopped too. The light of a great idea was in his eyes.

CHAPTER IV

They walked. Dawn still lingered, and the night was gray and wan, yet it was clear with the clarity of scudding gray clouds far above the slower moving destinies of mankind. The pavements were dry, and the world was not yet conscious of this 2nd of May.

They walked up Park Lane, and the talk bubbled out of them; and they laughed at the things each said, for the things they said seemed funny to them.

They came to the Marble Arch, and their feet crossed the deserted place unbidden by them; and they stood at the corner where the wide place stretches out two fingers, one elegant and shapely towards Lancaster Gate beside the Park, the other lean and ugly up the Edgware Road towards the north. Every minute was tearing open the envelope of the night, and the gray clouds scudded frantically over London on their mystic and purposeless way.

“Our way is obvious!” cried Ivor to her inquiry. “Romance must plant its feet firmly on reality, for it’s life that makes us beautiful, not we that beautify life. So we will acknowledge our debt to life by walking up the ugly Edgware Road rather than towards the fat and horrid squares of Bayswater. Why, Pamela Star, anything might happen up the Edgware Road—even Cricklewood might happen, the legendary source of Bus 16!”

“I’ve got an aunt,” said Pamela Star, “who lives in Cricklewood. Fordwych Road. Aram and I used to go and see her often, and he flirted with her and she adored him. She’s knitting a muffler for him now. If she likes you she’ll knit one for you too....{335}”

And, thus and thus, they came to speak of images, such as are not to be seen in museums. They spoke of images secretly, they spoke cabbalistically about the facelessness of images in hearts, and how an image might suddenly grow a face without a by-your-leave, but what they said about them is of no importance; and they forgot what they had said as soon as they had said it, which is a peculiarity of all cabbalistic conversations.

The day was plain as they again neared Hertford Street; and six strokes of a clock hung loose in the still air as they entered it from the Park end. The sky overhead was mother-of-pearl, but an absurdly angry cloud still played darkly among the chimneys of Knightsbridge; and somewhere out of Whitechapel rose the pale gold of the London dawn. The world was awake to the 2nd of May, but Mayfair is not the world, and even the menials of Mayfair lie long abed. As they turned into Hertford Street they startled a robin from a poet’s head on the barren fountain, and he fled away with a cameo note. “There!” sighed Pamela Star.

Hertford Street was still as night as the two tall figures, the dark one-armed man and the woman with the hair that was of the colour of an October leaf, walked silently down it. Three fingers of her hand were lightly within his arm: they did not know how they had got there, but there they stayed, even to the pavement before her house—which stood where Hertford Street, having run a straight course, slopes suddenly downwards towards Shepherd’s Market.

They faced each other—their eyes almost level, she was so tall!—and he took her hand in his.

“I said ‘good-bye, Chinchilla,’ to you years ago,{336}” he said. “But now I’m only going to say good-night.”

And there was a rushing and a turbulence in his ears, pierced sharply by Aunt Moira’s distant voice: “They met like birds, in the open....”

But that was not the only noise in that still moment, there was another, a great clattering as of tin against glass and glass against wood....

But it came, they saw at last, from a milk-boy pushing his green hand-cart smartly up the slope of Hertford Street.

Ivor suddenly passed his hand over his eyes, he pressed his eyes, and the eyes of Pamela Star were queerly wet as they stared unseeing at the approaching milk-boy.

“If I don’t go this moment,” said Ivor fiercely, “I’ll never go!” And he strode away from her, down the slope.

“You’ll come back?” she cried softly, in the sudden fear of a great gladness.

“In a few hours,” he cried back over his shoulder, and went his way, determinedly. She watched the tall, striding figure, hat swinging from one hand, until it disappeared round the corner of the blind end of Hertford Street.

The clatter of the milk-cart had fallen to a gentle murmur, and Pamela Star found the milk-boy staring curiously at her.

“I s’pose this’ll be for you, lady,” said the boy politely, offering her one of those bottles of milk that are stopped with a cardboard disc. “As I leaves one ’ere, at No. 78, every morning.”

“Do you mean to say that you’ve brought me my{337} milk all this time and that I’ve never seen you before!” she cried. “Why, you are one of the most important people in my life!”

The boy grinned; he was a very clean boy, in a cap, shirt-sleeves and an apron almost as white as his milk—for was he not born and bred in Shepherd’s Market, which is the aristocrat of slums?

“Well, it’s a bit early for you to be up as a rule, lady,” he excused her.

“Or a bit late,” she added softly. “And I’m not a lady anyway—not really. I had a brother just like you. Not so clean, though.”

The boy didn’t believe any of that. No one but a lady could have so suddenly pulled the cardboard disc from the bottle of milk and raised it to her lips, as she was doing now. The boy stared at her; he had seen her look after the one-armed man, and he was interested. Nothing like that had ever happened to him.

The lady drank deep of the milk. And then she said, with a happy sigh: “I needed that!” She could feel, and the boy could see, the white dew of the milk clinging about her mouth. “I’ve forgotten my handkerchief,” she complained.

The boy tugged at his pocket and pulled out an amazingly crumpled but amazingly clean handkerchief. He offered it to her shyly.

She touched her lips with his handkerchief, and she offered him some milk in return.

She gave him back his handkerchief; and she asked him seriously: “Did you see that man?” And the plumber’s daughter jerked her head, just like a plumber’s daughter, in the direction of the man’s going.

The boy grinned. “Mother ’as got a bust of Queen Victoria without an ’ead,” he said.

“But I had an image without a face,” she told him softly, “until that man came and put a face to it....”

The boy stared at the door which closed behind the loveliest lady he had ever seen, and he decided that she was probably mad. But Pamela Star, alone again in the tomb of Aram Melekian, knew that she was mad and that the world was mad—the lovely world which could hold the contemptuous spirit of her stern old friend, those ghastly heaps of gold and the living image in her heart.

The novel sensation of the year; lavish praise and bitter abuse were showered upon it. Everyone read it—and still is reading it. A “best-seller” and a brilliant book.

These are airy, cynical, polished inquiries into the actions and reactions of women’s loves, tickling the reader’s sense of humour and sense of style from the moment he picks up the book, to find “The Romantic Lady” glancing down at Noel Anson from her box, to the last page, where the revolver smoke is veiling from her the husband of Iris Poole.

“Pure coquetry, of course, but what perfect technique.”—Evening Standard.

Being a tapestry, or, if you like, a panorama of the fortune, misfortunes, and gallanteries of Shelmerdene (that lovely lady), Lord Tarlyon, Mr. Michael Wagstaffe, Mr. Ralph Wyndham Trevor, and others of their friends of the lighter sort, written down by Mr. Ralph Wyndham Trevor and arranged by Mr. Michael Arlen.

“Its humour, its wit, its elegant charm....”—Rose Macaulay in the Daily News.

“The art of Guy de Maupassant is rare among English storytellers, but Michael Arlen can reflect glimpses of the great Frenchman’s genius. He has a story to tell, and he tells it.... Michael Arlen is a fine literary artist.”—Sunday Times.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] But all that is changed now. It has lately been observed that the quality was never before held in such high esteem as it is at present. Some people say that this is a good sign, as denoting a healthy reaction against the spirit of Bolshevism that is abroad; but some people will say anything.

[B] Fair Ladies of London! A Novel by Ivor Pelham Marlay (Heinemann, 1914).

[C] The Legend of the Last Courtesan. A Romance by Ivor Pelham Marlay. Collins 8/6 (October, 1918). Eighth Impression.

[D] The narrative of this favourite’s brilliant life and unhappy end will be found in that great romance by Miss Mary Johnston, By Order of the Company.

[E] First Families of Virginia.

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Copyright

First	Impression,	October, 1922
Second	”	November, 1922
Third	”	November, 1922
Fourth	”	December, 1922
Fifth	”	January, 1923
Sixth	”	May, 1924
Seventh	”	July, 1924
Eighth	”	August, 1924

PROLOGUE
	PAGE
THE DEPRESSION OF IVOR PELHAM MARLAY ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRST OF MAY, 1921	1

BOOK THE FIRST
AN IDEAL, SOME DETAILS, AND A LAPSE	17

BOOK THE SECOND
THE FRIENDS	61

BOOK THE THIRD
THE ANTAGONISTS	145

EPILOGUE
THE IMAGE IN THE HEART	305