About four o’clock on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1924, as Eugene was entering the Louvre, he met Starwick. Starwick was elegantly dressed, as always, in casual, beautifully tailored, brown tweed garments. He still carried a cane and twirled it indolently as he came down the steps. He was the same old picture of bored, languorous, almost feminine grace, but instead of a shirt he was wearing a Russian blouse of soft blue wool which snuggled around his neck in voluptuous folds and had a kind of diamond-shaped design of crimson threads along the band.
For a moment, half-way down the grey stone steps, worn and hollowed as ancient European steps are worn and hollowed by the soft incessant eternity of feet, as the other people thronged past him, he paused, his pleasant ruddy face and cleft chin turned vaguely up towards those soft skies of time, already fading swiftly with the early wintry light.
As always, Frank looked magnificent, and with his Russian blouse, and the expression of inscrutable sorrow on his face, more mysterious and romantic than ever. Even in this foreign scene he seemed to take possession of his surroundings with a lordly air. So far from looking like an alien, a foreigner, or a common tourist, Frank seemed to belong to the scene more than anybody there. It was as if something very frail and rare and exquisite and weary of the world — Alfred de Musset or George Moore, or the young Oscar, or Verlaine — had just come out of the Louvre, and it all seemed to belong to him.
The enormous central court of the Louvre, the soaring wings of that tremendous and graceful monument, the planned vistas of the Tuileries before him, fading into the mist-hazed air and the soft greying light — the whole tremendous scene, with all its space and strength and hauntingly aerial grace — at once as strong as ancient battlemented time, and as delicate and haunting as music on a spinet — swept together in a harmonious movement of spaciousness and majesty and graceful loveliness to form a background for the glamorous personality of Francis Starwick.
Even as he stood there, the rare and solitary distinction of his person was evident as it had never been before. People were streaming out of the museum and down the steps past him — for already it was the closing hour — and as they went by they all looked common, shabby and drearily prosaic by comparison. A middle-aged Frenchman of the middle-class, a chubby, ruddy figure of a man, dressed in cloth of the hard, ugly ill-cut black that this class of Frenchmen wear, came by quickly with his wife, his daughter and his son. The man was driven along by the incessant, hot sugar of that energy which drives the race and which, with its unvaried repetition of oaths, ejaculations, denials, affirmations, and exactitudes, lavished at every minute upon the most trivial episodes of life, can become more drearily tedious than the most banal monotone. Compared with Starwick, his figure was thick, blunt, common in its clumsy shapelessness, and his wife had the same common, swarthy, blunted look. An American came down the steps with his wife: he was neatly dressed in the ugly light-greyish clothes that so many Americans wear, his wife was also neatly turned out with the tedious and metallic stylishness of American apparel. They had the naked, inept and uneasy look of tourists; everything about them seemed troubled and alien to the scene, even to the breezy quality of the air and the soft thick skies about them. When they had descended the steps they paused a moment in a worried and undecided way, the man pulled at his watch and peered at it with his meagre prognathous face, and then said nasally:
“Well, we told them we’d be there at four-thirty. It’s about that now.”
All of these people, young and old, French, American, or of whatever nationality, looked dreary, dull and common, and uneasily out of place when compared with Starwick.
After a moment’s shock of stunned surprise, a drunken surge of impossible joy, Eugene ran towards him shouting, “Frank!”
Starwick turned, with a startled look upon his face: in a moment the two young men were shaking hands frantically, almost hugging each other in their excitement, both blurting out at once a torrent of words which neither heard. Finally, when they had grown quieter, Eugene found himself saying:
“But where the hell have you been, Frank? I wrote you twice: didn’t you get any of my letters? — what happened to you? — where were you? — did you go down to the South of France to stay with Egan, as you said you would?”
“Ace,” said Starwick — his voice had the same, strangely mannered, unearthly quality it had always had, only it was more mysterious and secretive than ever before —“Ace, I have been there.”
“But why? —” the other began, “why aren’t you? —” He paused, looking at Starwick with a startled glance. “What happened, Frank?”
For, by his few quiet and non-committal words Starwick had managed to convey perfectly the sense of sorrow and tragedy — of a grief so great it could not be spoken, a hurt so deep it could not be told. His whole personality was now pervaded mysteriously by this air of quiet, speechless and incommunicable sorrow; he looked at the other youth with the eyes of Lazarus returned from the tomb, and that glance said more eloquently than any words could ever do that he now knew and understood things which no other mortal man could ever know or understand.
“I should prefer not to talk about it,” he said very quietly, and by these words Eugene understood that some tragic and unutterable event had now irrevocably sundered Starwick from Egan — though what that event might be, he saw it was not given him to know.
Immediately, however, in his old, casual, and engaging fashion, speaking between lips that barely moved, Starwick said:
“Look! What are you doing now? Is there any place you have to go?”
“No. I was just going in here. But I suppose it’s too late now, anyway.”
At this moment, indeed, they could hear the bells ringing in the museum, and the voices of the guards, crying impatiently:
“On ferme! On ferme, messieurs!”— and the people began to pour out in streams.
“Ace,” said Starwick, “they’re closing now. Besides,” he added wearily, “I shouldn’t think it would matter to you, anyway. . . . God!” he cried suddenly, in a high, almost womanish accent of passionate conviction, “what junk! What mountains and oceans of junk! And so bad!” he cried passionately, in his strange, unearthly tone. “So incredibly and impossibly bad. In that whole place there are just three things worth seeing — but THEY!”— his voice was high again with passionate excitement —“THEY are UNSPEAKABLY beautiful, Eugene! God!” he cried, high and passionate again, “how BEAUTIFUL they are! How utterly, impossibly beautiful!” Then with a resumption of his quiet, matter-of-fact tone he said, “You must come here with me some time. I will show them to you. . . . Look!” he said, in his casual tone again, “will you come to the Régence with me and have a drink?”
The whole earth seemed to come to life at once. Now that Starwick was here, this unfamiliar world, in whose alien life he had struggled like a drowning swimmer, became in a moment wonderful and good. The feeling of numb, nameless terror, rootless desolation, the intolerable sick anguish of homelessness, insecurity, and homesickness, against which he had fought since coming to Paris, and which he had been ashamed and afraid to admit, was now instantly banished. Even the strange dark faces of the French as they streamed past no longer seemed strange, but friendly and familiar, and the moist and languorous air, the soft thick greyness of the skies which had seemed to press down on his naked sides, to permeate his houseless soul like a palpable and viscous substance of numb terror and despair, were now impregnated with all the vital energies of living, with the intoxication of an unspeakable, nameless, infinitely strange and various joy. As they walked across the vast court of the Louvre towards the great arched gateway and all the brilliant traffic of the streets, the enormous dynamic murmur of the mysterious city came to him and stirred his entrails with the sensual premonitions of unknown, glamorous and seductive pleasure. Even the little taxis, boring past with wasp-like speed across the great space of the Louvre and through the sounding arches, now contributed to this sense of excitement, luxury and joy. The shrill and irritating horns sounded constantly through the humid air, and filled his heart with thoughts of New Year: already the whole city seemed astir, alive now with the great carnival of New Year’s Eve.
At the Régence they found a table on the terrace of the old café where Napoleon had played dominoes, and among the gay clatter of the crowd of waning afternoon they drank brandy, talked passionately and with almost delirious happine............