The resolution made on the night of the Halliday party held unusually firm, and that galère was now part of a past life. He wasn’t going to “mess about” any more—with a lot of “invertebrates”! So he set himself to work, seriously and rather angrily, and wrote hard to finish a flimsy novel which he had begun nearly two years before, and whose flimsiness, now that he seriously set himself to finish it (and make it less “invertebrate”) was a humiliating reproach to the waste of the last two years. It was finally published,[B] after adventures common to first MSS. in search of a publisher who knows his business, in the spring before the war, when its author was away from England; a slim and unpretentious book—“whose charm,” wrote one reviewer, “is difficult to analyse, but might conceivably lie in the almost senile precocity that informs Mr. Marlay’s style and fantasy.” Wrote another: “Of all the books that don’t matter in the least, this is one of the most excellent. It is one that will appeal to a few, but not necessarily the few.” Whichever few, thought Mr. Marlay’s publisher, is few enough.
2
His inability to telephone to Magdalen Gray served him not at all, as indeed he did not wish it to. For on a night three weeks after he had met her he was dining with her at her house in Wilton Place. And a remarkable meal that was, a most remarkable dinner, an immaculate conception of a dinner, exquisitely ethereal—yet how sternly of the earth!
One night, as Ivor Marlay was dining alone in one of those underground grill-rooms for which London is famous among capitals, he was extremely surprised at the sudden figure of Rodney West, K.C., standing at his table, with the obvious intention of addressing him. He did not know Rodney West, nor did Rodney West know him. A smile, as nearly self-conscious as it could be, hovered about the severely handsome face of the man of middle years. Ivor half rose in his chair, and sat down again.
“Mrs. Gray sent me over,” Rodney West told him, “to rebuke you for being blind, for we’ve been sitting over there for the last hour, and to ask you to join us over coffee. Is that all right?” Rodney West’s courtesy had no fringes, it was sharp and direct—there was no froth about him, anyway—and from that moment Ivor liked him very much, in spite of himself. He said he would like to join them very much; he was shy; but, a few minutes after the elder man had left him, he followed him to the table indicated, ... for at least half the distance looking directly into a levelled pair of eyes, which seemed wonderfully large and innocent beneath a wide-brimmed black hat. And Ivor suddenly felt extraordinarily happy and unafraid; and not even the so direct scrutiny of Magdalen Gray could perturb him. But perhaps she did not intend that it should.
She greeted him as an old friend. She seemed to be under the surprising delusion that they were old friends, and not the acquaintances of one meeting; she did not address him as “Mr. Marlay,” she did not address him by name at all, but her manner plainly suggested that if she did address him by name it would not be as “Mr. Marlay.” She was in a gay, silly mood, embracing them both in the swift turns of her inconsequence. No one could have guessed that she and Rodney West had dined in silence. Nor did Rodney West show what he felt at the contrast; he seemed to Ivor a very amiable though rather detached elderly person. Only when he occasionally bent his eyes to his coffee cup and gently dropped his cigar ash therein, would there have been perceptible, to a more detached intelligence than Ivor’s, an added grimness to the thin face, a wave of grimness that came and passed; and, surely, a certain grimness is permissible in a man of middle years who, for the last five of them, has given his soul to a woman and has now had it given back to him with maddening gentleness.
The artifice of her intimacy charmed Ivor into ready answer. The gay, silly mood enveloped him. Her wit was adventurous: it was an exploit to follow the twist of her sentences, and breathlessly to be with her at the end.... She told them of the races at somewhere or other, to which she had been taken that afternoon in an “extremely open car.” She was not a racing-chap, she wasn’t very actively interested in the competitive swiftness of horses; but she had not only been to watch them at it that day, but had lost a deal of money on the slower ones, what’s more! Whereupon Rodney West gave it as his opinion that it rather served her right for betting in ignorance.
“But I didn’t, Rodney!” she vividly protested. “Never was a woman in better racing company. No one could have guessed that all-my-people-weren’t-racing-people. My escort were two in number, minus in intelligence, full marks for good-looks, and might quite easily have been called Mr. Beef and Mr. Beer: and they were grimly allied together for the purposes of being entertained by me and the horses. As they had field-glasses and champagne-glasses and hard blue eyes, and knew every horse by sight and reputation, I naturally backed the horse which they were sure couldn’t lose. And when the wretched horse was finally arrested for loitering on the course hours after the race was finished, they told me that at the last moment they’d backed another one—the one that had happened to win, you know.”
“What awful people one knows!” breathed Rodney West softly.
“Oh, and I was trying so hard not to be personal!” she said.