In the first month of the year 1919, when the world, released at last from the epidemic of flags, was racked by the epidemic of influenza (then the most present of the many plagues of peace), Ivor Marlay was living in a small house by the River Kennet in Berkshire, which he had bought furnished towards the end of the previous year. The house was a little beyond the straggling village of Nasyngton, and a little over two miles from Hungerford Station: a Queen Anne house of sweet reserve and severity, with an orchard behind that wandered up a slight incline towards the main road: and, in front, a twisting little drive to the wooden gates by the bridge, and a wide lawn, not at all immaculate, which breasted the quiet waters of the Kennet. To the right of the house and lawn rose the wide stone bridge of Nasyngton, and a mighty bridge it looked in that quiet and small place, a seared and ancient bridge of strength and dignity; and over this bridge passed the traffic of the London-Bath Road, as well it might and as it had done ever since the days when Bath was the splendid corollary of the metropolis and both as one beneath the light step of Beau Nash.... Relieved of the bridge, the main road swept widely to the right, and, skirting the back of Ivor’s domain, so through the village of Nasyngton towards its immense destiny. But even this wide road, so arrogantly unrolling its Tarmac through the quiet places of Berkshire, could be humbled by things greater than itself; by things not eternal, but magnificently temporal. For how furtively this London-Bath road swept by the great iron gates of Lady Hall, two miles Londonwards from the village, the seat of the Earls of Kare! How meek and shrunken did that haughty Tarmac become as it slunk by the wide circle of asphalt of the yellow sort, that was loosely strewn before the great iron gates of Lady Hall as a forerunner of the consideration that awaited the guests of Rupert, Earl of Kare, whose fortunes had lately been revived by a Chilian marriage.
His small house by Nasyngton suited Ivor very well. He had bought it from two spinster sisters, the Misses Cloister-Smiths, and not only because of its pleasant situation but because its interior and its simple appointments had instantly pleased his taste. And, keeping his flat in Upper Brook Street, there he had settled since November: adding to its comforts only his cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Hope, his man Turner, and as many books as he had thought to require.
Ivor’s nature, while not at all of a solitary bent in itself, was the direct cause of his solitude; for though he had surprisingly little of that self-consciousness which so often gets between a sensitive man and his power to entertain or be entertained, he was definitely a “rather difficult person”: in that he was neither easily amusing nor easily amused—an irritating lack of accommodation which was growing on him every year, every month almost. People thought him superior. He was, however, a very concentrated person in his intimacies; and to his friendships he had always applied himself with steady and undiminished pleasure, he intensely enjoyed the practices of intimate friendship. “Let there be restraint, but no secrecy!” Where was secrecy, there Ivor was not; which was silly of him, for thus he was to a great degree cut off from that amiable pastime which is called friendship in cities, those manly and uninquiring companionships that have lasted for years (since we were boys together, say) and will last till death do us part, and were among the most charming of the many charming ties that bound together our public life and body politic until the recent advent of rude adventurers from the Board schools.
Rodney West, since Trevor’s death, had become Ivor’s most intimate male friend; but Sir Rodney, as he by now inevitably was, was as a rule too busy being a foremost K.C. and a rather bad-tempered M.P. of the outmoded Liberal persuasion, which he and a few other bitter-reasonables had just succeeded in dragging through the Hang-the-Kaiser Elections of 1918. No one but a half-wit or a non-combatant ever thought the Kaiser would be hanged, but at the time there was a premium on half-wits, and Rodney West made himself rather unpopular in the House by pointing that out at every opportunity. “But some one’s got to do it,” said Rodney West; and he could afford to, with his income.
As for Magdalen, she had been away from England for the last year, and maybe she would never return. Magdalen had gone with her husband—to Peru! Tristram Gray, a keen and gray man of more than fifty (who had never in his life compromised about anything but his wife, which his friends considered rather interesting of him, as an instance of the queer effects love can have on a reasonable man), had surprised Magdalen and every one else, on being invalided out in 1917, by an absurdly grim determination to set out on his travels again. Modern England, it seemed, did not at all please that hardened and decisive gentleman: it was too confused and too confusing, he pleaded. He was going to Peru, where he had years ago acquired, in an adventurous way, a kind of minor castle in the mountains of the interior. “A splendid home,” Colonel Gray described it, “and, let’s hope, an imposing sepulchre. Mountains, you know, all over the place, and not toy ones. Things you can get hold of. You’d better come with me, Magdalen.” That is all he said, and never before had said as much. And Magdalen, surprising woman, had straightway answered, “I will!” And had gravely gone with him—to Peru!
Rodney West and Ivor had accompanied them up to Liverpool to see them off, and there had been a last dinner at the Midland Adelphi Hotel. Those three men and Magdalen—those two men of more than middle years (for West was five-and-fifty) and Ivor, just thirty, equalised all in a quite amazing friendship. A good friendship it was, with a kind of chivalry about it which was not the less real because it was rather odd—very odd, some might think. But Magdalen had a way of melting things and men, a Renaissance way she had of bringing the godlessness out of a man so that it seemed to him he was a god. She was romantic to the end, this Magdalen, in her shadowy way, saying to the youngest of her three friends: “Perhaps one day you will come out to join us, Ivor. But not until you are very tired, remember, for I hear it’s no place for a striving person, and you are a striving person, you know. No, you mustn’t come until you are certain that you don’t want to come back here again—and oh! I hope that won’t happen! But I don’t think it will, for you’re not stationary and still absurdly young, and maybe soon the lovely thing you want will happen to you. And please promise me, Ivor, never to believe those tiresome people who will tell you with a plausible air of impatience that there are more important things in this world than love or who will tell you to stick to one woman and be done with it. Such people lie in wait for young men with crusading eyes, but don’t you believe them—go on until you find a woman worth living for and dying with, for love fills a man’s life while ‘more important things’ can only occupy it. And that’s the truth I’m telling you, Ivor....”
Magdalen had looked her age the night of that last dinner, she had seemed a little strange, a little remote, a little tired, as though she had already arrived in Peru and the journey had tired her.
2
During this last year his solitude had, as it were, forced Ivor to an ambition; for it is in his solitary moments that a man conquers men. He was reading now, for the first time in his life, with a set and serious purpose; and as he read he thought, and when he had thought he made notes, any amount of them; for he was not going to waste what knowledge he purposed to acquire, he quite definitely wanted to talk and write about it—especially to talk. There were two things this maddened world of to-day plainly wanted, special knowledge and fine endeavour; and Ivor Marlay was trying to discipline himself....
In the wake of many older and wiser men of Europe and America—that surge of disenchantment, in 1919!—Ivor was realising that “though the war was over nothing else was over;” and that the world was still sliding to a queer hell. It wasn’t enough to say that the world was in an infernal mess and showed no likelihood of getting out of it, the good old world of progress and respectability. It was in more than the infernal mess through which it had so often safely plunged: it was deeply dirtied and befouled with every lawless idiocy of which angry peoples seem increasingly capable. France was still livid with the passions of nationality. France had learnt a cruel lesson, and was intent to profit by it. France was angry, France was patriotic, France was pathetic, France was sensitive, France was determined not to open any windows to let the air in. Frenchmen set their shoulders, they had ceased to shrug their shoulders: other people shrugged their shoulders at them. La France, la France.... The mess of Reparations and Reconstruction was already foreshadowed; and Mr. Maynard Keynes was sharpening his pen. Wise men saw, even then, whither the passions of nationality would lead Europe in the next few years; and while some said the aggressive instinct of nationality was a fine thing, others pointed to the mess. Wise men saw, but wise men can do nothing. Wise men cannot deliver, they can only hail a deliverer.