“I fancy,” said M. Stutz, “that you live too much with your emotions, Mr. Marlay, and not enough with your brains....”
“Ah,” said Ivor vaguely.
“I am only a little restaurateur,” said M. Stutz, with 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 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.
2
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 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 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.