He was a true soldier of fortune. In the ten years which his business
career covered be had engaged in a score of business ventures. He had
lost two fortunes. Born in the West, educated in the East, he had
flashed from coast to coast so often that he himself would have found it
hard to say where he belonged.
He was the admiration and the wonder and the paragon and the criterion
of his friend Billy Fairfax, who had trailed his meteoric course through
college and who, when the Brian Boru went down, was accompanying him on
his most recent adventure - a globe-trotting trip in the interests of a
moving-picture company. Socially they made an excellent team. For Billy
contributed money, birth, breeding, and position to augment Honey's
initiative, enterprise, audacity, and charm. Billy Fairfax offered other
contrasts quite as striking. On his physical side, he was shapelessly
strong and hopelessly ugly, a big, shock-headed blond. On his personal
side "mere mutt-man" was the way one girl put it, "too much of a damned
gentleman" Honey Smith said to him regularly.
Billy Fairfax was not, however, without charm of a certain shy, evasive,
slow-going kind; and he was not without his own distinction. His huge
fortune had permitted him to cultivate many expensive sports and
sporting tastes. His studs and kennels and strings of polo ponies were
famous. He was a polo-player well above the average and an aviator not
far below it.
Pete Murphy, the fifth of the group, was the delight of them all. The
carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he
could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he
was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass
tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift
in that direction) called "the gift of gab." He lived by writing
magazine articles. Also he wrote fiction, verse, and drama. Also he was
a painter. Also he was a musician. In short, he was an Irishman.
Artistically, he had all the perception of the Celt plus the acquired
sapience of the painter's training. If he could have existed in a
universe which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe
inhabited only by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablest
citizen; but he was utterly disqualified to live in a human world. He
was absolutely incapable of judging people. His tendency was to
underestimate men and to overestimate women. His life bore all the scars
inevitable to such an instinct. Women, in particular, had played ducks
and drakes with his career. Weakly chivalrous, mindlessly gallant, he
lacked the faculty of learning by experience - especially where the
other sex were concerned. "Predestined to be stung!" was, his first
wife's laconic comment on her ex-husband. She, for instance, was
undoubtedly the blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she had
managed to extract a ruinous alimony from him. Twice married and twice
divorced, he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muck
raking articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last
unhappy matrimonial venture.