In earliest youth we have all sometimes had clear brooding seconds of hopeless vision, when we ever so dimly but acutely foresaw painful hurts that might come upon us from ourselves in manhood. There was a ghastly moment when a jolly boy of thirteen fell suddenly to incoherent brooding: he suddenly mistrusted his future self immensely; and for a full second he paced awefully up the long avenues of a life that seemed carpeted only with autumn leaves. And there comes a moment when life proves that boy to have been unwholesomely right. And though it may be true that things are never so bad as they seem, they are often a good deal worse than you thought they might be.
Throughout that day Ivor Marlay had been aware that the evening would lie heavily upon it. This 1st of May, from its rainy beginning and throughout its pale fore and afternoon, had borne a dour impress. He had been unable to write, quite unable to read; in stern determination not to think, had fiercely wasted many hours in pacing miles of carpet, then of park, and then again of carpet; and, in the late evening, had slammed his door behind him and almost violently set out to meet his dinner face to face, along Brook Street, across Bond Street, through Hanover Square, along Oxford Street, and round the corner to the sign of the Mont Agel. He had run away from these thoughts all day because, he knew, they must take shape as that kind of depression which inexorably dissects one’s life. And what a portentous business the wretched thing would make of it all!... As, indeed, it did.
Of all the places he might have chosen for this momentous dinner, his depression could not have devised a more whole-hearted ally than the Mont Agel; for that is the worst of all Stutz civilisations, when you are gay they make you even gayer, but when you are sad you might just as well be dead. Ivor Marlay had not fully considered his first glass of wine—alone, because of a deep impatience (of which that sulky look might be the outward and deceptive sign) that always prevented him from enjoying others’ company when least he enjoyed his own—before he found that he had stepped into the ogre’s very arms; that, if anything, the wretch had increased upon itself, had as it were fattened upon the associations of the place, and was using now every dead moment of past gaiety and past sadness as a weapon with which to point its plaguey insistence. And of such memories, of course, the Mont Agel was full; even the features of M. Stutz were as though lined with the past enthusiasms, optimisms, tolerances, and encouragements with which he had ministered, in that room upstairs, to the gaieties and reverberations of “My Customers.”
3
It is absurd to suggest that a man sitting at a table, alone with his coffee and his God, and goaded on by no matter how stern a desire to come to some understanding with himself, will anything like consecutively review the dismal pageant of his life; for even as there is no rigid sequence in nature, so there is none in our thoughts. Here and there Ivor Marlay saw pictures, here and there he remembered thoughts, here and there he reheard voices, here and there he relived silences, and here and there an illusion shone wan and faded quickly....
At a moment that he happened to raise his head his eyes met the passing and gentle glance of M. Stutz, who had always treated the young man to that courtly familiarity which is the hall-mark of a restaurateur’s favour.
“You are deeply engaged to-night, Mr. Marlay,” M. Stutz gravely remarked, in that deep tone which pleasantly became his classical address.
The young man made a self-conscious noise which indicated a great confusion rather than a laugh.
“I’m trying, you know, to find an illusion, M. Stutz. About myself, I mean.”
M. Stutz took thought upon this for a space.