Gaymer directed a last furious look at his muddy boots, then turned from Carstairs and walked rapidly down Piccadilly. He would have liked to tell the interfering old admiral what he thought of him; he would have liked to thrash that damned boy, to thrash any one... Cursing him was good in its way, but he had been stopped before he attained any satisfaction....
The desire for food had passed; but Gaymer reached his club in time for a drink and felt better for it. The desire for a fight remained. In the open noon of his life as a soldier he had never known this maddening itch of truculence. To be able to call some one a German!... He prowled through the smoking-room in search of a victim, but people would only say “Hullo, Johnny! Coming to join us?”... And he had already been reported to the committee and forced to apologize “for conduct unworthy of a gentleman” in the card-room....
At five o’clock he returned to Ryder Street, only remembering when it was too late that he had not yet looked for Eric Lane’s number in the directory. Ivy must come out some time!... Unless she spent the night there... Gaymer checked in his short, loathed beat, for this was a question that had to be faced and answered. Imprimis, all these writers—and especially the fellows connected with the stage who could blackmail a girl before they would give her a speaking part—helped themselves to anything that came their way; they were an immoral lot, but a man did not need to be a plaster saint in order to feel that some forms of immorality were worse than others, that the lethal chamber was the only place for the long-haired gang who pretended to be above the ordinary rules... Lane did not grow his hair long, he had been taken up by quite decent people; but what was true of all was true of one. He posed as a delicate idealist—with the caressing voice of a woman and a soulful, ‘not-long-for-this-world’ look in his eyes; so familiar was the pose become that Gaymer had been deceived by it into thinking he had nothing to fear. The fellow talked “spiritual beauty” to a little fool like Ivy until he won her, soul and body... And all the time looking like a parson....
Gaymer rang at the nearest door without looking at the number. He might have the luck to meet Ivy; failing that, he could always bait the parson-poet... Somewhere inside, a clock chimed seven, and he flung away in disgust without waiting for the door to be opened. Two hours! Ivy was home by now. Two hours walking up and down that forsaken street because a consumptive-looking Grub Street hack had walked off with the girl that he wanted... What could she see in him? Gaymer caught sight of his own sturdy, well-groomed reflection in a shop-window. In the name of Heaven, what could she see in the fellow?
It was still broad daylight, owing to this accursed “summer time”; and London was never so intolerable as by day. He walked aimlessly along Piccadilly and up Regent Street, along Oxford Street and up Tottenham Court Road. His course would be a zig-zag on the map... Zig-zag... Everything was zig-zag; purposeless, wearisome... He remembered suddenly that he had eaten no food all day. Zig-zag... His feet had strayed out of Tottenham Court Road into a side-street, and he found himself staring at a newly painted shop-front. Inside, a band was playing; appetizing savours of hot food floated up from the basement; and women with arms white and eyes darkly mysterious in the gathering dusk pattered through the door-way with a half-glance back in universal invitation.
“What’s this place?,” Gaymer asked the commissionaire.
“Fleur de Lys Dance Club, sir.”
“Well, I want to be a member. Make up a name for me and fix it with the secretary. Add my subscription to the dinner-bill and keep this for yourself.”
Without waiting for an answer, Gaymer walked through the hall, threw his hat on to a counter at the end and mounted to a gallery overlooking a garish green-and-gold ball-room. Dinner was being served at small tables round three sides of the gallery; in the fourth was ensconced a negro band. Gaymer looked and listened, forgetting himself for a moment in his effort to classify the place and the company. Cheap and tawdry, he decided, without even the appearance of spontaneous hilarity; respectable, in all probability... The men looked like clerks earnestly aping the life of gaiety and wantonness created for them in illustrated papers and cinematograph theatres. The women, presumably, were typists, milliners, hotel clerks, mannequins. In cut and material their clothes were too good to have been bought new; here and there a draggled flounce or soiled shoe hinted at long service. Gaymer had always wondered what girls did with their cast-off finery....
It was a new world peopled by an unknown race, and he was uncertain of the technique for gaining admittance. At the table nearest to him a girl was sitting alone, and he asked leave to join her.