“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.