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.