Chapter IV

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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