“Illusions, sir,” he said, “are like flies. There are always as many alive as dead. Even in the winter, although you do not know it.”
“And the greatest of all illusions,” went on M. Stutz, “is that you have not got one. It is like a man saying that he knows the answer to every question, and then being silent when you ask him: ‘What is God?’”
And with that the polite and amiable M. Stutz again left him to his meditations, himself to indulge in a little wine and conversation at the far corner table with Mr. Cornelius Fayle, the South African artist, who had a great reputation for mixing salads and lengthily commenting upon them and anything else, rather than for his paintings—which, though as yet unseen by any mortal eye, could not possibly have been more charming, more instructive, or more tedious than his cherubic self. Women loved him because they had to take care of him; he was said to have Charm; and he was peculiarly favoured among “My Customers” by M. Stutz’s condescension, for that urbane gentleman discerned in Mr. Fayle a kindred spirit, whose profundities lay in as shallow and untroubled waters as his own.
4
The circumstance is plain, then. A young man was sitting at a solitary table in the Mont Agel Restaurant, towards ten o’clock on the night of the 1st of May, 1921: a darkly serious young man, with a defiant nose and a white flower brave upon the silk lapel of his dinner-jacket—for was he not something of a fop, this one-armed young man? The soft light of the shaded lamp on his table mellowed the hard whiteness of his shirt-front, but it added no light to the dark eyes under the straight eyebrows: eyes that looked like black pits of contemplation, and were staring into a coffee-cup as into an abyss; and in these eyes was a brooding something, which was not regret nor remorse nor despair, but which might be fear or might be anger; for the dark young man was of an angry habit, and he was thirty-two years old, and he was very lonely.
The history of Ivor Pelham Marlay, until this night, is the history of England, two loves, and an ideal.