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.

CHAPTER V

1

The world which Ivor then touched and tasted so carelessly was a vastly different world from that with which he was surrounded, in his fuller maturity, on the 1st May, 1921, at the Mont Agel. More than war had intervened between that past and this present: some people said that an undue stress of evolution had intervened; and other people said that the very opposite of evolution had frightfully intervened. But no one really knew anything about it, not even Mr. Britling. There was, it was plain, a self-consciousness abroad after the war that had not been before; and, too, a certain sophistication about things that once used to move us exceedingly. There was nothing remarkable in the fact that, with the war and after it, everything was become bigger, even tennis-tournaments, strikes, prizefights, revolutions, and Cabinets—but it was rather remarkable that men seemed to have become much smaller. Maybe, it was suggested, men seemed to have become smaller—in significance, say—because they were now conscious of their relation to the huge and cruel mechanism of the universe. Death had lost something of its terror, and life had gained it. Life had lost something of its value, but death had not gained it—despite all the pomps of honour and medalry with which the survivors had belauded it. And if there had still been a Pythian priestess, and if there had still been any one who believed in priests to ask of her an oracle, she might well have answered even as she answered anent the fortunes of a battle in the days of Greece’s decline: “Conquered shall weep, and conqueror perish there.” But, failing a Pythian oracle, there was Mr. Shaw, who in 1919 very sharply pointed out that “the earth is bursting with the dead bodies of the victors.” ... A very precocious century, this, for it was old and tired and blasé by its twenty-first birthday; a senile and fumbling century it was on its twenty-first birthday, that which had been so gay, so careless, so essentially new, but ten or eleven years before! New....