“PIRACY”

The Author wishes it to be clearly understood that all the persons in this book, except Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Trevor, are entirely of the imagination.

“PIRACY”

A ROMANTIC CHRONICLE OF
THESE DAYS

by

MICHAEL ARLEN

Author of “The Romantic Lady,”
“The London Venture,” etc.



LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Manufactured in Great Britain

TO MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I

On the left of these spacious windows, at the head of a few steps, is the door of the restaurant, pleasantly inviting your pressure, if indeed it is not widely open to show the elegant interior; and on the right is the door of the hotel, a door of a very different air to the other, a sealed and reticent looking door, with a tiny navel through which a worldly eye may judge of your business: a door, in fact, with the secret air of having very important business of its own as a door, which indeed it has. But you and I, concerned only with our dinner—to which, say, I have invited you, being intimate with the excellence of the place—plunge up the steps to the restaurant; reading, as we go in, the small white lettering on the large windows that tell us that therein we may have Lunch, Tea, and Dinner, and, more importantly, that we can have them à toute heure; which, to our pedantic eye, may seem a rather optimistic boast to make in face of the law that—even on this 1st of May, 1921—requires all hotels, cafés, inns, restaurants and eating-houses, to be closed somewhere about ten-thirty o’clock. But I shouldn’t wonder if the fact that the boast is written in French allows us to take it more as one of those beaux gestes that are so frequent in the language of the race that has most need of them, than as a braggart defiance.

Within the restaurant you will find all quiet, orderly and clean. In extent it is only a rather spacious room of uncertain shape (though there are, of course, possibilities upstairs), but it has not the air of being confined to that one room. These four walls, it says to you, might be placed at vastly different and more elegant angles if it wished, but it does not wish. The room wears, in fact, an air of perfect satisfaction with itself, and not insolently, but wisely: not as a young man who thinks he knows everything, but as an old man who knows that it is not worth while to know any more. It is bounded on the north side, as our schoolbooks say, by the wide front windows, which are pleasantly half-curtained with vermilion gauze; on the south side, where the room tapers to its end, by a much smaller window, which is always heavily curtained and may or may not look upon the mysteries of the Mont Agel backyard; on the west by a wall decorated with mirrors, stags’ antlers, and heads of furry beasts, and broken by a small door which leads into the hotel, the famous cellars, and the usual offices; and on the east side by a handsome counter which runs along half the length of the wall, and across which the young and elegant Madame Stutz, with befitting seriousness, hands to her husband’s waiters those concoctions, collations, and confections which have won for the Mont Agel Restaurant its reputation for conservative excellence.

Wines, too, Madame Stutz there uncorks, very deftly and tenderly; during which process her husband, the polite and amiable M. Stutz, while trusting her in this as in all else, cannot resist watching her with a certain anxiety; for the wines of his cellar are the treasures of his heart, and now and then, though all too rarely, if it is a special vintage and a favoured customer, himself will uncork the wine, seeming with the gesture to broach a secret emotion. ‘Ah, you can hear the angels singing!’ sighs M. Stutz, hovering about the table. Mellow and full-blooded wines of Burgundy there are here, to stiffen a man’s heart against the shyness that defeats desire: glistening Château Yquem, too sweet and luxurious for any but the sweetest occasions, and many another: wines, let us say, for beginnings, wines for consummations, wines for tired endings—sweet, bitter-sweet, and bitter! M. Stutz lacks not one, neither Liebfraumilch nor Tokay, nor any liqueur that ever monkery devised with which to tantalise its own asceticism.

This restaurant is no place for a poor man, you understand; unless, of course, he happen to be with a rich one, as must now and then happen in even the most luckless life. The very tables are arranged with a rich sparseness; for they are placed only around the walls, each with its red-shaded lamp. The centre of the room is thus left unchallenged to a large brass contrivance from which flow ferns, palm leaves, and all manner of secondary flowers; on one side of this is a rack for papers; on its other side is a small table weighted with various and unseasonable delicacies, artichokes and asparagus, oysters and strawberries, plovers’ eggs and grouse, caviare and cantaloup. A table of miracles, indeed! About which the most miraculous thing is that there are always those who can afford to look over it and choose from it, fastidious and unperturbed.

Whether the Mont Agel was created for its patrons, or whether patrons were created for the Mont Agel, will now never be known. Let it suffice that they become each other very well, even if not quite so well as the polite and amiable M. Stutz becomes them both. As every civilisation must produce a M. Stutz, so every M. Stutz must produce a civilisation; and the atmosphere he has created in this bye-street of Soho is essentially an atmosphere of civilisation. Not, you understand, that brazen modernity which Mr. Stephen Mackenna’s almost too social eye cannot desist from discerning in glittering heaps and serial form all the way from Berkeley Street to Sloane Square (that happy and horrible land where all young men have Clubs and all young women Lovers), but an air of just sensible civilisation. Here, at the Mont Agel, you will find not the sense of property, about which so much has been written, but that much finer sense of independence, which has written so much. But you would have to know the place pretty well before you found in its customers any sense of anything whatsoever, for this Mont Agel has a singular dignity of its own, which subtly caresses its patrons and is as a mystic cloud between them and an alien eye. Stout yeomen from Wimbledon and honest burghers from Kensington Gore, gallants from Holland Park and beaux from Golders Green—one and all have some time or other been lured hither by some wanton friend; and what have they seen? Rich wines and rare food, delicious to the Battersea palate, made up the sum of that unexpected for which these worthy adventurers did timidly search; they have seen nothing for their money, nothing at all! Or was it, as an afterthought, nothing to have sat and watched the bearded and significant figure of M. Stutz’s most considerable patron—an epic figure, that!—and to have wondered whether that silent detachment betokened a great artist or a great vagabond? And was it nothing to have been made suddenly aware of the strange things men once did and suffered for women, of the quests that were followed and the lances that were broken in the days when there were neither suburbs nor men to live in them—was it nothing to be reminded of all this, by the vivid entrance of those tawny-haired women of almost barbaric fairness, whose faces the men of Putney recognised from the illustrated papers with a thrill of disapproval? Those young women of patrician and careless intelligence, whom it is the pet mistake of bishops, diarists, press-photographers, and Americans, to take as representing the “state” of modern society (whereas, God knows, they represent nothing but themselves, and that too rarely), and who, by some law of sympathy, have found refuge at this Mont Agel from their tedious parentage or tiresome duties roundabout, say, Grosvenor Square. One especially of these the men of Notting Hill will often call to mind, she will arise before their eyes as a rebuke to their passionless lives, as the phantom of the desire that has never become tangible, as the symbol of the life that has never been lived—one, alas, who now knows the Mont Agel no more! And they will be faintly shocked yet strangely stirred, after the manner of honest men, by the cruel indifference of this lady’s look and the casual arrogance of her poise, murmuring among themselves that the Lady Lois—for it was she—is a bit above herself, and insinuating against her thus and thus, after the manner of honest but common men.... And on many nights will come the toughs and roughs and bravoes of the town, to press their ill-favoured noses against the windows of the Mont Agel and watch the leading beauties toying with their food and their poets.

And through and about this atmosphere of his creation moves always the polite and amiable M. Stutz: thoughtful here, smiling there, always and implacably encouraging. No fool ever said a wise thing but that M. Stutz did not quickly commend it, no wise man ever said a foolish thing but that M. Stutz did not gently condone it. He is always about your table, not, you understand, as the servant of his restaurant, but as the director of its amenities. His interests are wide, his dignity not stiff, his formality pleasing, his familiarity appropriate; so that when, with a gesture, he tells you that he is “only a little restaurateur” you will take leave to disbelieve him, vowing that never was a restaurateur so imperially conceived, nor a gentleman so politely informed.... Thus, knowing and appreciating him, it were an offence in you to be surprised at those very rare occasions when M. Stutz, having been prevailed upon to accept a guest’s hospitality a little too freely, has betrayed ever so little of that human dross which his patrons have so often displayed before him.

CHAPTER II

The Mont Agel had been a recurrent fact in that young man’s life for now ten years; between him and it ran that vague current of sympathy which seeks not to define its roots; and many of his memories of merry evenings or tragic solitudes were bound to the place. He was sitting now with his head inclined a little forward and his forehead resting in the palm of his hand, in a detached and thoughtful attitude. The thick hair—which was brushed slantwise back from one of those taut English foreheads that look as though there had just been enough skin to go round—might have been thought to be black, but was really of a variously coloured brown, and reflected sunlight a little more capriciously, some might think (and had thought), than a man’s hair should.

You would not have called his a handsome face: it was a provocative face: it looked as though it suffered from silence. Your first impression of it was that it was an amazingly lean face, and that he was rather uncomfortable with it; your next that, though it was of the species dark, it was also, very definitely, of the species English proconsul—with a quick reservation as to the eyebrows, which in a previous incarnation he might well have raided from some sardonic adventurer of the Orient, they were so curiously straight and dark and immobile. They were eyebrows of the sceptical sort, they were irritating eyebrows. Then take, as matter for a student of such things, that thin-fleshed, aquiline nose, mountainous and significant, the nose historical, obviously recognisable as a Family Nose—but yet, surprisingly enough, not at all predominant in a face that had doubtless been conceived in a turbulent moment; and take the eyes, eyes altogether too dark for really comfortable everyday use, frank yet secret eyes, rather sulky eyes. Take, in fact, the whole face, lean and firm and mature—for this, after all, is the young man’s thirty-second year of maturing—and amazingly, absurdly sulky! Now that sulkiness was perversely set there, for all the world to see, to testify against his nature, which is a man’s most secret property, and to be as a witness against him, most opportune to a feline hand in moments of extreme stress, such as befall adventurers; for it is pleasant for a woman to tell a man that he is sulky when he is really angry and she knows it. That sulkiness seemed to lie all over his face, lurking about the vague shadows of his nose and in the rich shadows of his dark eyes....

His present thoughts and attitude might well have surprised any of his acquaintances, such as were now sitting about the tables of the Mont Agel and respecting his solitude; for Ivor Marlay was considered a fortunate young man: moneyed, you know, and reasonably accomplished, and quite personable, and so on. Such thoughts might even have been considered to have come upon him by surprise. To put it unkindly, one might have conceived his finger as having been suddenly arrested by some sticky patch when testing the gloss over his good-fortune. But if, as some say, thanks are the highest form of thought, Ivor Marlay had always indulged in a very high level of thinking, in giving thanks for the chance that had given him freedom from every monetary worry and, therefore, freedom from much else. But even freedom, divine among earthly words, can take queer shapes and mean queer things. Freedom, which we all desire, may sometimes mean that no one desires us. To be free may sometimes mean that no one wishes to imprison us; and that, when you come to think of it, is a very terrible thing.

To these grave abstractions must be added the material fact that Ivor Pelham Marlay had only one arm. For of the many things that a man can lose in a proper war, Ivor Marlay had lost only his left arm. His left sleeve, as you saw him at his table at the Mont Agel, hung emptily down into the left pocket of his jacket—adding to his carriage that strange elegance peculiar to tall, one-armed men of a foppish habit. And who, after all, has more right to make the best of his appearance than one who has been deprived of an essential detail of it?

If he had risen from his table you would have observed that he was a tall man: he was, in fact, exactly six-feet-two: but if he were asked, in a friendly way, how tall he was, he would answer, in a friendly way, that he was just under six-foot-one. That was the only illusion about himself that he had managed to preserve until the age of thirty-two.

2

His present state of mind was not due to liver or anything like that. It was in the nature of a logical climax, and Ivor Marlay, like you and me, naturally detested anything in the nature of a logical climax.

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.

“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.

BOOK THE FIRST

AN IDEAL, SOME DETAILS, AND A LAPSE

CHAPTER I

The day on which Ivor Marlay left school had, no doubt, a good deal to do with the acuteness of the discussion, for Ivor Marlay left school suddenly. Now when a man has stayed at a public school, and at Manton in particular, until he is eighteen: when a man has become respected, responsible, and a veteran of that system which will so soon be producing him to the world as that system’s finest (as they are all the finest) product—it is surely his plain duty, in fact his only duty, to hold out to the end and to leave school without a stain on his character. He should, if possible, avoid being expelled.

Ivor Marlay’s expulsion was of the straightforward “Damn you, sir, get out!” kind. And the news of his expulsion, and the obvious reason for it, caused the nearest approach to popular feeling that Manton had ever entertained for Ivor Marlay. Manton laughed, and then Manton smiled for weeks. And when, in later days, Manton saw the name of Marlay on the cover of a book, Manton grinned in memory and bought that book, and having tried to read it wondered what the devil had happened to the man. For Manton didn’t know that he had done the thing in any spirit but that of mischief or adventure, both naturally dear to Manton’s heart. If Manton had known that he had done it in any spirit but that of mischief or adventure, it would have thought it all rather odd, and felt a little uncomfortable. The head master, who knew, thought it very odd and made Ivor a little uncomfortable.

But, even on the morning it happened, the College Prefects thought it was not happening quite usually. The College Prefects at Manton have a sitting-room in the school building, a spacious room adjacent to the masters’ sitting-room: and here they will pass a minute or two on their way to and from classes, to which they are allowed to enter a minute or two after Inferiors. (The difference between a College Prefect—Coll Pree—and a House Prefect—House Pree—is that a Coll Pree can do what he likes everywhere, and a House Pree can do what he likes in his House. Inferiors can do what they like in their studies, more or less. Fags can’t do what they like anywhere. New boys are bacilli, unclean but invisible.) The Coll Prees, at eleven o’clock that morning, gathered in force in their room for their minute-or-two. They knew that Marlay, the third head of their number, was having a little conversation with the Little Man, and they were waiting to hear about it. And the thing only began to look a little unusual when one of their number called out: “Why, he’s not coming! There he is!” And there, through the window, they saw he was! Walking swiftly down the school steps, across the wide lawn, and down more steps towards his House....

“I’ll risk it,” cried Transome, and rushed out. (Transome and Marlay had been the school rackets-pair for the last two years.) He breathlessly caught Marlay up on the “Senior Turf,” that immaculate turf where Manton whacks other Mantons at cricket. Marlay turned round at his hail.

“What happened?” asked Transome breathlessly.

“Sack,” said Marlay.

“Of course,” said Transome. “Was the Little Man cross?”

“He’s a jolly nice little man,” Marlay told him. “He chewed my head off and it didn’t begin to choke him.”

“It nearly choked me, though,” he added.

“Well, what are you going to do now?” asked Transome, interested. It isn’t every day that the other one of a school rackets-pair is expelled; and besides, Transome wanted to know what Marlay was going to do—he hadn’t the faintest idea what he would do if he were sacked, except avoid his people like the plague.

Ivor dug his hands deep in his pockets.

“I’m going,” he said firmly, “down to the House. I’m going to bribe or kick the boot-boy into packing my things and dragging them to the station. I am then going to leap on my motor-bike and shift like hell to London. On my arrival there I shall be made to stand in a corner for an hour. And then I shall dress and go to the Empire——”

“Swank!” said Transome.

“And if you’ve got any sense,” Ivor added, with a grin, “you’ll come with me, Transome. On the carrier. You can come back to-morrow saying you’ve been to see a corn-specialist, and get the sack in perfect order. Your father, being a colonel, would appreciate your sense of discipline.”

“Yes, with his boot. Though I’d come,” Transome thoughtfully admitted, “only I’m leaving at the end of the term anyway. Might as well wait——”

“Well, good-bye, old chap!” And Ivor held out his hand.

He looked extraordinarily happy, Transome thought.

“Won’t your people be sick?” he asked.

“They’d vomit,” said Ivor thoughtfully, “if I had any—in particular, I mean.” And having struck the pathetic note Ivor grinned broadly and Transome grinned broadly back—and then they parted sharply asunder, the one to the conquest of the world and the heavens, and the other back to a routine which was more than usually embittered by an idea that it must be rather amusing to be an orphan.

The only other persons to whom Ivor said good-bye were the boot-boy, whom he tipped; the steward, whom he tipped; the two dormitory housemaids, one of whom he tipped and the other kissed as well, for she was a nice girl; the matron, who kissed him; and the house-master’s wife, a kind and comfortable body who was extremely surprised at having the tips of her fingers very gallantly kissed. Ivor was enjoying himself like anything, and didn’t mind who knew it; for being expelled is not bad fun when it isn’t for dirt, and when you have an “Indian” motor-cycle, T.T. Model, which means that you can do a fabulous amount of miles per hour in an exceeding uncomfortable position and for no earthly reason except to lie about it to your friends....

2

The expulsion came about this way.

At about the middle of that summer term it became obvious to the intelligence of the meanest bacillus that strange things were happening at Manton by night. These strange things were not, of course, defined to bacilli, except that they were uncommonly strange. Bacilli had therefore a lovely feeling that history was being made, and some one’s history in particular.

There were rumours, new rumours every morning, delightful and outrageous rumours, so that the lumps in the porridge were swallowed without comment and the fish-cakes were eaten without contumely. The masters looked unusually stern, but it was the sternness of thought rather than of discipline. Coll Prees went about with smiles gravely repressed and an air of being more than usually responsible for everything. House Prees and Bloods (indescribable beings, neither Prefect nor Inferior, amazing centaurs, not divine but certainly not human—just Bloods) were everywhere to be seen in earnest colloquy. For the matter was, that there was some sort of night-prowler about the school grounds. It would have been almost bearable if the night-prowler had prowled only about the grounds, but he prowled into the Houses, he prowled actually into the house-masters’ sides of the Houses; he prowled into their studies, he sat on their chairs, he read their books, he drank their port, he tested their barley water, he smoked their cigars, he left a neat little bit of Greek verse on their desks to thank them for same—and then, as it were for a joke, he bolted the windows from the inside, locked the doors from the outside, and left the keys in such an obvious place that no one ever found them until new ones had been made. And this went on, once or twice a week, for more than a month! Watch was kept, police were stationed about the grounds (for weeks any strange face about the school grounds was held to be that of a “plain clothes man—and jolly plain at that!”) and the Coll Prees were called upon to keep night-watch over the House where each held dominion.... Then there was a memorable night when the night-prowler was chased. Two Coll Prees and Mr. Sandys, of the Lower Fifth and the Hampshire Eleven, were patrolling the borders of the Senior Turf, about which lie the main Houses of Manton in the form of a horse-shoe. Suddenly, just ahead of them, was seen a moving dark thing. They leapt. It ran. They chased, but the dark thing hurled down the slope from the path to the flat darkness of the Senior Turf. “He’s got running-shorts,” grumbled Mr. Sandys, who was in a dinner-jacket. “And gym-shoes,” grunted Mr. Sandys. Then came a laugh behind them, and again they leapt. But the dark thing grew darker and disappeared into the labyrinth of buildings made by the gymnasium, the gates, rackets-courts, and House No. 6. “Blast!” said Mr. Sandys, and gave up. The Coll Prees had given up long before.

Of course the night-prowler was caught in the end, but he need not have been caught so stupidly. The head-master (the late Canon Sidney Wentworth Carr), himself prowling about the grounds at three a.m. one morning, some days after all hope of finding the miscreant had faded, thought he saw, for a bare second, a smothered cigar-end in the little overshadowed lane that runs between Houses No. 2 and No. 9. He promptly scuttled into the garden of No. 9, darted towards a certain point in the wall, secured an ill-tempered victory over the low branches of the trees for which Manton is famous, and finally got to the wall. The Canon was a little man, so he had to stand on his toes; and he looked over the wall. There was the figure, a yard or so away with his back to him, smoking a cigar. “Silly ass,” the Little Man thought. “As if he liked it!”

And then he struck a match sharply. The figure started round.

“Got you!” said the head-master.

“Ah,” said the figure indistinctly. Or it might have been “Oh!”

“Come to my study t’morrow morning at ten,” the head-master said sharply. “Silly ass, Marlay.”

“Yes, sir.”

Thus, it was all over bar the shouting. And there was very little of that, in the head-master’s study at ten o’clock the next morning.

“Well, what did you do it for?” was fired at Ivor as he came in. Ivor had the grace to be very white in the face. The head-master, fierce little man that he was, always fired his questions like that, briskly, brusquely, indomitably. He always spoke as though he was going to swear, which indeed he sometimes did; but always just at the right moment and about the right thing, always knowing when to be a man, when a head-master, and when a Canon; which made him very efficient and popular as all three.

“Well, Marlay?”

“If you want the absolute truth, sir——”

“Get on, man.”

“I was frightfully bored, sir,” Ivor said heavily; and never was boredom more cruelly punished than by its owner’s white face and by the silence that followed its confession. The Little Man stared at him, and he tapped the edge of the table with a paper-knife. Then he jumped up.

“You go, of course,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“To-day.”

“Yes, sir.”

The head-master swung round on him angrily. He had always liked Marlay.

“Look here, Marlay, you’ve spoilt a good thing, and at the last moment! You’re a damn fool, sir!”

“I know, sir. I’m sorry.” It sounded so lame!

“Don’t lie, Marlay. You are not sorry. You are glad to go.”

Ivor fumbled.

“I’m sorry, sir, to have disappointed you,” he muttered weakly.

The head-master paced the room. Then again, suddenly, he swung round on him; and, small though he was, he seemed to tower above the boy’s drooping figure.

“It’s wrong and nasty, this,” he said steadily. “I suppose you know, Marlay, that there’s nothing fine in what you’ve done, and everything far from fine in the spirit in which you’ve done it!”

“It’s the spirit that’s damnable, man!” the head-master said. “Can’t you see? It’s a silly boy’s trick played by a man. The matter with you, Marlay, is that you think you are a grown man and despise boys, and the matter with me is that I think you are a grown man and despise you for not being a boy. That’s why I don’t thrash you, not because you are a College Prefect....”

The way the Little Man said that! Ivor looked at the ground.

“Bored!” snarled the head-master suddenly. “You have grossly insulted me, Marlay. And you have insulted Manton.”

“You may go, Marlay,” said the head-master.

Ivor went very quickly; but he had not opened the door before he was called back by a sharp voice. The Little Man was still standing by the table, lowering at him. Ivor felt, looked, and was a cur.

“I want to warn you, young man,” the Little Man said. “That boredom of yours is dangerous—to you. I mean! To every one else it is merely offensive. I consider, Marlay, that you have been most offensive. So if I were you I would take steps to cure this boredom of yours. Were you, may I ask, intending to go up to Oxford?”

“No, sir.”

(Ivor had finally decided that moment.)

“I shouldn’t,” said the head-master. “You are the first Sixth Form man of mine I have advised not to. It is not a compliment. If you have been bored here at Manton, you will go mad at Oxford. They take their pleasures even more traditionally there. I will write to Lady Moira.”

“You may go, Marlay,” he said.

But, as Ivor was again going, a voice snapped from behind him:—

“You don’t believe in tradition, I suppose, Marlay?”

Ivor swung round with a livid face.

“Yes, I do, sir,” he said flatly. “That’s exactly why I was bored—the tradition here is one of boredom.”

The silence that followed was broken only by a funny noise in the Little Man’s throat. And Ivor was afraid.

“I—I meant,” he stammered, “that it m-must be pretty—boring for you, sir—teaching boys and——”

“You had better go, Marlay,” said the head-master.

And this time it was Ivor who turned round from the door and faced the terrible silence of the room. His face had gone from white to deep red.

“Good-bye, sir,” he said. “And thank you, sir—really.”

The head-master threw the paper-knife on to the table with a clatter, and Ivor Marlay left school.

(It cost the night-prowler a pretty penny, that joke. For, a few days after he had prowled his last, the head-master and house-masters of Manton received each an anonymous box of Coronas. He really hadn’t the face to return the port in kind.)

3

Two hours later he was with Aunt Moira, in the house at Palace Green. He found her alone, erect in a high-backed Queen Anne chair in the bare and gloomy library in which she was wont to pass her afternoons reading, or writing letters. That large room had always awed Ivor: even as a child he had never wanted to play in it, for all that it was so limitless, the parquet floor so vast and shiny and unencumbered, the windows so wide and light with the fairy expanse of Kensington Gardens.

Aunt Moira watched his approach across the parquet floor, an uncomfortable kind of floor to traverse under raking eyes, without remark or sign. Aunt Moira was not given to showing surprise, not even at her nephew coming home alive in term-time.

That nephew approached, stood, grinned sheepishly, but spoke not: unless inarticulate mutterings of scarcely human intelligence be speech. It was Aunt Moira who spoke:—

“That horrible motor-cycle of yours makes a most disturbing noise, Ivor. I wonder the police let you. You might muffle it with something....”

(It was some years later that the Home Office bethought itself to pass a law against the open exhaust.)

And then Ivor explained how it had come about that he had been allowed to use the “red devil” in term-time. It was an idiotic tale to tell, and the telling took him some time, for he was very careful, trying to leave nothing out and to put as little as possible in. Aunt Moira did not interrupt once, she had always too much to say to interrupt; but she listened intently, and still more intently, and she tapped a foot on the floor.

When he had finished she used almost the identical words as the Canon Sidney Wentworth Carr, who was an old friend of hers—and with more weight, if that was possible. But Ivor, crushed already that day, was almost indifferent to this added burden. And though he tried, out of respect for Aunt Moira, to hide his indifference to the mere logic of the situation—for was this not, after all, an epoch in his life?—she must have perceived something of his peculiar nonchalance, for she suddenly cut short the expression of her deep disappointment with a very weary:

“You might just not have done it, Ivor!” Dear Aunt Moira!

“Of course,” said Ivor softly, “it rather puts the lid on my going up to Oxford.” He was so frightfully pleased about not going up to Oxford—he simply could not have told any one why, it was just a tremendous bubbling within him of freedom from all sorts of things—that he couldn’t help playing the fool about it, thus letting Aunt Moira see exactly how pleased he was. She stared at him—at the young man who had so suddenly grown out of her reach! And maybe she realised that the events of that day had somehow released in him something individual which had been in hiding, something unpleasant but individual.

“Then what will you do?” she put to him sharply. “For you must do something, you know. In this world, nowadays. I will not have you live all your life as my nephew....”

“I thought you might go to the Bar,” she said.

“I thought,” said Ivor, “that I might write....”

“Oh dear!” sighed Aunt Moira.

And there was silence. But let it be understood that Aunt Moira had never intended to force Ivor’s preference about a career. Aunt Moira never really forced any one’s preference about anything. Liberty was the one feast to which she commanded her guests—it was only that her invitations sometimes made liberty just a little unrecognisable.

She had always liked people who wrote sensible things. But it seemed so vague, this writing.

“But you could write as well,” she suggested, rather brutally. “You must do something, don’t you see? And though I’ve no doubt you are very clever, as every one is clever nowadays, you can’t possibly have enough to write about at your age to take up all your time.”

“But I don’t want it to take up all my time! That’s just the point, Aunt Moira.”

“Now don’t be clever with me, Ivor. What I want for you, don’t you see, is a Position in the world, some foothold or other. And a writer, even quite a nice writer, is nothing at all unless he has written something that every one has read, while a barrister is something even when no one has heard of him. He is something, I mean. I insist on your being something, Ivor.”

(Naturally one will be “something,” Ivor impatiently thought.)

“Of course,” said Aunt Moira, “you are very grown-up for your years. I don’t like it.”

“I suppose,” she said, “you’ve got ideas.”

Ivor’s eyes had been intent on his shoes, but he now looked up frankly.

“As a matter of fact,” he said pathetically, “I haven’t got one. But I’ve got a kind of feeling that I may have—you know, Aunt Moira?”

“I know,” said Aunt Moira, not sympathetically—though really very surprised at Ivor’s candour; it was pleasant to hear a young man who had just made an idiot of himself saying he had no ideas—a very good beginning, she thought, for a writer’s career.

It was decided, over tea, that he should stay on with Aunt Moira for a year or so, studying French and literature—and, added Ivor, sociology.

“Sociology,” snapped Aunt Moira, “is a game that self-educated labourers play with half-educated gentlemen. What you doubtless mean is politics.” Ivor let it go at that.

Later on, Ivor could take rooms of his own; and still later on, when he was of age, he could travel and do what he liked—provided, Aunt Moira insisted, he did something! She relied on him to be decent, she said. If she hated anything in this world, it was slackness, flabbiness, and shoddiness—μικροπρεπέια, the Little Man would have snapped, for he never missed a chance of remembering Aristotle against you. If he was going to write, well, he must write, but seriously.

“There must be no nonsense about that,” said Aunt Moira. “And for Heaven’s sake don’t begin to write poetry until you have learnt how to write prose!”

The tea things were removed, and they sat on in silence. Now Aunt Moira’s silence was a formidable weapon, but to-day it was as though Ivor did not notice it, his eyes were so intent on the bright prospect of Kensington Gardens. Through a corner window could be seen a part of Kensington Palace, bathed in the rich shadow of the evening sun.

“Ivor!” she suddenly called.

The boy jerked his eyes away from that enthralling moon outside the windows—it is always outside the windows, that eternal and enthralling moon, or just behind the other person’s right shoulder. He smiled shadowily at her....

“I was just thinking,” he said.

“There’s so much to do, to think about, Aunt Moira,” he said. “And one doesn’t know where to begin!”

“That,” said Aunt Moira, “is just what you have to think out. I can’t help you.” Which, of course, she at once proceeded to do. “I suppose you are being eaten up with the idea, that you must see things, do things, live things. When I was young a young man was not happy until he had travelled—but it’s not enough for you to travel geographically. You want to travel emotionally. You are not childish enough....”

“It’s a twilight age,” said Aunt Moira.