1

So much has been said of the Mont Agel Restaurant mainly because it had always had a considerable place in the life and affections of one whose fortunes this history must closely follow. The polite and amiable M. Stutz will, of course, occur again, gently and encouragingly, even as he occurs about the tables of those whom he honours by describing, with an epic gesture, as “My Customers.”

There, on the evening of the 1st of May, 1921, sat Ivor Pelham Marlay, at the only table in the place where a man could sit alone without attracting the notice of his acquaintances to his solitude; for all but this little table in the shadow of Madame Stutz’s counter were of a size for four, or on occasions ten, so that a sense of fairness to M. Stutz allowed little alternative to one in Ivor Marlay’s situation.

The Mont Agel had been a recurrent fact in that young man’s life for now ten years; between him and it ran that vague current of sympathy which seeks not to define its roots; and many of his memories of merry evenings or tragic solitudes were bound to the place. He was sitting now with his head inclined a little forward and his forehead resting in the palm of his hand, in a detached and thoughtful attitude. The thick hair—which was brushed slantwise back from one of those taut English foreheads that look as though there had just been enough skin to go round—might have been thought to be black, but was really of a variously coloured brown, and reflected sunlight a little more capriciously, some might think (and had thought), than a man’s hair should.

You would not have called his a handsome face: it was a provocative face: it looked as though it suffered from silence. Your first impression of it was that it was an amazingly lean face, and that he was rather uncomfortable with it; your next that, though it was of the species dark, it was also, very definitely, of the species English proconsul—with a quick reservation as to the eyebrows, which in a previous incarnation he might well have raided from some sardonic adventurer of the Orient, they were so curiously straight and dark and immobile. They were eyebrows of the sceptical sort, they were irritating eyebrows. Then take, as matter for a student of such things, that thin-fleshed, aquiline nose, mountainous and significant, the nose historical, obviously recognisable as a Family Nose—but yet, surprisingly enough, not at all predominant in a face that had doubtless been conceived in a turbulent moment; and take the eyes, eyes altogether too dark for really comfortable everyday use, frank yet secret eyes, rather sulky eyes. Take, in fact, the whole face, lean and firm and mature—for this, after all, is the young man’s thirty-second year of maturing—and amazingly, absurdly sulky! Now that sulkiness was perversely set there, for all the world to see, to testify against his nature, which is a man’s most secret property, and to be as a witness against him, most opportune to a feline hand in moments of extreme stress, such as befall adventurers; for it is pleasant for a woman to tell a man that he is sulky when he is really angry and she knows it. That sulkiness seemed to lie all over his face, lurking about the vague shadows of his nose and in the rich shadows of his dark eyes....

His present thoughts and attitude might well have surprised any of his acquaintances, such as were now sitting about the tables of the Mont Agel and respecting his solitude; for Ivor Marlay was considered a fortunate young man: moneyed, you know, and reasonably accomplished, and quite personable, and so on. Such thoughts might even have been considered to have come upon him by surprise. To put it unkindly, one might have conceived his finger as having been suddenly arrested by some sticky patch when testing the gloss over his good-fortune. But if, as some say, thanks are the highest form of thought, Ivor Marlay had always indulged in a very high level of thinking, in giving thanks for the chance that had given him freedom from every monetary worry and, therefore, freedom from much else. But even freedom, divine among earthly words, can take queer shapes and mean queer things. Freedom, which we all desire, may sometimes mean that no one desires us. To be free may sometimes mean that no one wishes to imprison us; and that, when you come to think of it, is a very terrible thing.

To these grave abstractions must be added the material fact that Ivor Pelham Marlay had only one arm. For of the many things that a man can lose in a proper war, Ivor Marlay had lost only his left arm. His left sleeve, as you saw him at his table at the Mont Agel, hung emptily down into the left pocket of his jacket—adding to his carriage that strange elegance peculiar to tall, one-armed men of a foppish habit. And who, after all, has more right to make the best of his appearance than one who has been deprived of an essential detail of it?

If he had risen from his table you would have observed that he was a tall man: he was, in fact, exactly six-feet-two: but if he were asked, in a friendly way, how tall he was, he would answer, in a friendly way, that he was just under six-foot-one. That was the only illusion about himself that he had managed to preserve until the age of thirty-two.

2

His present state of mind was not due to liver or anything like that. It was in the nature of a logical climax, and Ivor Marlay, like you and me, naturally detested anything in the nature of a logical climax.