Part 5 (2/2)

LUNCHEON

He had lunched at the Const.i.tutional with a chance acquaintance picked up on his first week in London, so he knew something of the ways of English clubs, yet the vast hall of this place daunted him for a moment.

However, the club servants seeming to know him, and recognising that indecision is the most fatal weakness of man, he crossed the hall, and seeing some gentlemen going up the great staircase he followed to a door in the first landing.

He saw through the gla.s.s swing doors that this was the great luncheon room of the club, and having made this discovery he came downstairs again where good fortune, in the form of a bald headed man without hat or stick, coming through a pa.s.sage way, indicated the cloak room to him.

Here he washed his hands and brushed his hair, and looking at himself in a gla.s.s judged his appearance to be conservative and all right. He, a democrat of the Democrats in this hive of Aristocracy and old crusted conservatism, might have felt qualms of political conscience, but for the fact that earthly politics, social theories, and social instincts were less to him now than to an inhabitant of the dark body that tumbles and fumbles around Sirius. Less than the difference between the minnow and the roach to the roach in the landing net.

Leaving the place he almost ran into the arms of a gentleman who was entering, and who gave him a curt ”H'do.”

He knew that man. He had seen his newspaper portrait in America as well as England. It was the leader of His Majesty's Opposition, the Queen bee of this hive where he was about to sit down to lunch. The Queen bee did not seem very friendly, a fact that augured ill for the att.i.tude of the workers and the drones.

Arrived at the gla.s.s swing doors before mentioned, he looked in.

The place was crowded.

It looked to him as though for the s.p.a.ce of a mile and a half or so, lay tables, tables, tables, all occupied by twos and threes and fours of men. Conservative looking men, and no doubt mostly Lords.

It was too late to withdraw without shattering his own self respect and self confidence. The cold bath was before him, and there was no use putting a toe in.

He opened the door and entered, walking between the tables and looking the luncheon parties in the face.

The man seated has a tremendous advantage over the man standing in this sort of game. One or two of the members met by the newcomer's glance, bowed in the curious manner of the seated Briton, the eyes of others fell away, others nodded frigidly, it seemed to Jones. Then, like a pilot fish before a shark leading him to his food, a club waiter developed and piloted him to a small unoccupied table, where he took a seat and looked at a menu handed to him by the pilot.

He ordered fillet of sole, roast chicken, salad, and strawberry ice.

They were the easiest things to order. He would have ordered roast elephant's trunk had it been easier and on the menu.

A man after the storming of h.e.l.l Gate, or just dismounted after the Charge of the Light Brigade, would have possessed as little instinct for menu hunting as Jones.

He had pierced the ranks of the British Aristocracy; that was nothing--he was seated at their camp fire, sharing their food, and they were all inimical towards him; that was everything.

He felt the draught. He felt that these men had a down on him; felt it by all sorts of senses that seemed newly developed. Not a down on him, Jones, but a down on him, Rochester, Arthur Coningsby Delamere, 21st Earl of.

And the extraordinary thing was that he felt it. What on earth did it matter to him if these men looked coldly upon another man? It did. It mattered quite a lot, more than perhaps it ever mattered to the other man. Is the soul such a shallow and blind thing that it cannot sort the true from the false, the material from the immaterial, cannot see that an insult levelled at a likeness is not an insult levelled at _it_?

Surely not, and yet the soul of Victor Jones resented the coolness of others towards the supposed body of Rochester, as though it were a personal insult.

It was the first intimation to Jones that when the actor puts on his part he puts on more than a cloak or trunk hose, that the personality he had put on had nerves curiously a.s.sociated with his own nerves, and that, though he might say to himself a hundred times with respect to the att.i.tudes of other people, ”Pah! they don't mean me,” that formula was no charm against disdain.

The wine butler, a gentleman not unlike Mr. Church, was now at his elbow, and he found himself contemplating the wine card of the Senior Conservative, a serious doc.u.ment, if one may judge by the faces of the men who peruse it.

It is in fact the Almanach de Gotha of wines. The old kings of wine are here, the princess and all the aristocracy. Unlike the Almanach de Gotha, however, the price of each is set down. Unlike the Almanach de Gotha, the names of a few commoners are admitted.

Macon was here, and even Blackways' Cyder, the favourite tipple of the old Duke of Taunton.

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