Incidentally, he settled which of the rest should go or stay. Next day, contrary to custom, the wind fell, and a torrent of soft mist packed in rain brimmed the land, refilled ceaselessly off the falling sea as it passed in over the hills. They could hear the water slowly thundering and not much else but their rather distressed voices. Carston alone had the serenity of plans. After he had persuaded Scylla to go up to London, Clarence said that he would go over to the cottage or the dust and damp would get in and annoy his young man. Picus had gone already, flitted off, the raining fog hiding him for a time. Carston meant the same landscape to swallow him on the trail of old Mr. Tracy. He asked Ross for his plans.
“Stay here and get on with things. I’ll wait till you come back.”
Felix bolted black and stormy to his hotel and emerged again into the gold light, fresh as roses. He crossed the river, and on the brink of the Champs-Élysées felt the rhythm of Paris begin to stir him and caress. A movement of tireless youth, each instant crystallized a century, illustrated by details small and intimate, grandiose or chic. His lost goodness returned, recomposed out of adoring attention, until like a polished bay, the Place de la Concorde opened before him. There the fragile Paris façades grouped themselves round the bronze ladies washing their faces, round a boy wandering out among the skimming taxis, in love.
He walked some way before he remembered that he had a rendezvous with a person as well as Paris, and turned back along the Rue de Rivoli, drowned in the evening sky. He had forgotten what he had left behind, novice at his first ceremony of mystery, he turned up the Rue Boissy d’Anglas and found himself indoors again.
His friend was with a band. Felix hated bands. No setting for him when he felt that he was not really there. He knew he had an inferiority complex, but there were too many draped legs and wrapped coats, and he might not have heard the last story, would have to pretend it had arrived stale from London. He would be found out, and no one would care how he loved Paris, or how much he knew about art. And with what was left of his generous simplicity, he did not count at all on his clothes which were the original of many replicas, or on his money, which was not borrowed.
Here was a different kind of loneliness. With his own generation, not as at home with the half-generation ahead. Loneliness all the same, self-imposed. In the french-american group he was a distinguishable figure. Boys fresh as roses in a shop-window, as picked and perfect. Only a close observer might have said that Felix was still on his bush. Or having left it, that his stalk was not down in the water.
How to pretend to be the devil you are afraid to be.
How to be a grand seigneur on nothing a year.
How to be yourself when you do not know that self, and are afraid to find out.
How to get tight when you don’t do it regularly.
The café walls were black, filled with mirror panels squared with small red and gold lights. Like an old mirror that has a circle of miniature mirrors inlaid in its glass, the place reflected and repeated a great deal of what is going on in the world. And Felix, with his letter of introduction, could not pull it out, with his pass behind the scene over his heart, could not present it. He forgot the walk he had taken, fell back into the easy trick of disapproval, mask for longing to be a little king in that bright crowd. King over a french boy, pencilled like a persian miniature, discreet and gentle as a cat. Shut absolutely in his race, yet escaping it by an indescribable sweetness, a perfume of goodness uncorrupted by intelligence which would last—how long? Felix told himself that his complexion could not last long anyhow, and retired on a loud excuse to dust a little powder on his own fair nose and chin. Never be able to impress that boy, who was neither in authority or out, who wore his youth for a fairy-cloak which for Felix was a naked skin.
Nor the buddha-shaped musician from the Midi, loved for his wit, serving his turn with each of them in turn as though they were not there. Felix turned to the boy he had come to see, the adorable American who knew everybody. He wondered if he was after all another Carston. (Felix had underrated Carston, having no experience between the man from Boston and his friend from the Middle West.) He was smarter than any Carston, brimmed up with sap and impudence, a boy who, if he had come from the moon, would have made his friends dream until he taught them not to. On whom, if Felix had known it, Scylla reckoned for vengeance. He was glad enough to see Felix, wear him for a night or so in his cap. Remember him as a spoiled, sweet girl remembers. Felix would have the money for several parties and was an authentic specimen. He would give him his turn.
