Chapter II

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

M. Stutz took thought upon this for a space.

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

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

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

4

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

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