III
In an obscure but not unclean street towards the northern fringe of Soho there is to be found by the seeker after experience a restaurant, where gentlemen in Mr. Wagstaffe’s predicament may dine very passably; and, on having inscribed the bill with their temporarily worthless signatures, pay on some happier day. Very seldom, indeed, had the cavalier of the streets actually fallen to this pass; these were his most unfortunate days; and not even a bottle of the Rhine wine for which M. Stutz was famous—for such was the name of the polite and amiable patron of the Mont Agel Restaurant—was, on this evening, able to support him in the sardonic optimism with which he had always parried the most cruel thrusts of a vagabond destiny.
Than the year 1922 there has never been a more dolorous year for gentlemen of enterprise, as instance the luckless experiences of Mr. Gerald Lee Bevan and Mr. Bottomley; and though the cavalier of the streets was not only a gentleman of enterprise but also of imagination, even he could not imagine money where money was not. Whereat he was depressed.
But money, though naturally of the first importance in an adventurous life, was not the immediate cause of Mr. Wagstaffe’s depression as he dallied with a morsel of caviare and a piece of toast Melba. A face haunted his memory. A lovely face it was, mature and gracious and remote—ah, from him how remote! This face (and with it grey eyes, witty and understanding eyes) had happened to him in the course of a most unfortunate episode some months ago. He would never see her again—or, rather, she would never see him. She would look through him, the cavalier of the streets who had blackmailed her and then repented of his sin because of the beauty of her face and the bravery of her voice. But he would certainly see her, as an outcast in a wilderness may, through the leaves and tree-trunks of his prison, just glimpse a brilliant figure in a noble pageant; for the face that haunted him was of the world, and, in these days of many illustrated journals, had acquired an international reputation as one of the five leading faces of Europe. Thus, it had come to pass that the cavalier of the streets, meshed in a hopeless admiration, nowadays found little pleasure in his way of life; nor did the pursuit and beguiling of Mugs, which had been his source of income and entertainment ever since he had acquired a taste for it at the University of Oxford, any longer divert him. The face of his lady love, ever haunting his memory, deprived him of his wonted pleasure in living dangerously. Whereat he was depressed.
“I must leave England,” he thought. “I must go to some foreign city and lead a quite different life. But to leave England requires money; and to lead a quite different life also requires money.” He came to a sudden decision; made the gesture of payment upon the bill, and, thanking the courtly M. Stutz, left the restaurant, and walked swiftly westwards through the twilight of the streets.