Part 11 (1/2)

We herded back along the pa.s.sage. A voice cried, ”Be seated, please, gentlemen.”

At the far end of the room was a table for the chairman and the committee, and to the left stood a piano. Everyone had now sat down except the chairman, who was apparently not in the room. There was a pause. Then a man from the audience whooped sharply and clambered over the table and into the place of the chairman. He tapped twice with the mallet. ”Get out of that chair,” yelled various voices.

”Gentlemen,” said the man in the chair. A howl of execration went up, and simultaneously the door was flung open. A double file of white-robed Druids came, chanting, into the room.

The Druids carried in with them a small portable tree which they proceeded to set upright. The chant now became extremely topical. Each Druid sang a verse in turn, while his fellow Druids danced a stately measure round the tree. As the verse was being sung, an imitation granite altar was hastily erected.

The man in the chair, who had so far smoked a cigarette in silence, now tapped again with his mallet. ”Gentlemen,” he observed.

The Druids ended their song abruptly, and made a dash at the occupant of the chair. The audience stood up. ”A victim for our ancient rites!”

screamed the Druids, falling upon the man and dragging him towards the property altar.

The victim showed every sign of objection to early English rites; but he was dislodged, and after being dragged, struggling, across the table, subsided quickly on the floor. The mob surged about and around him. He was hidden from view. His position, however, could be located by a series of piercing shrieks.

The door again opened. Mr. Maundrell, the real chairman of the evening, stood on the threshold. ”Chair!” was now the word that arose on every side, and at this signal the Druids disappeared at a trot past the long-bearded, impa.s.sive Mr. Maundrell. Their victim followed them, but before he did so he picked up his trousers which were lying on the carpet.

All the time this scene had been going on, I fancied I recognised the man in the chair. In a flash I remembered. It was Dawkins who had coached First Trinity, and whom I, as a visitor once at the crew's training dinner, had last seen going through the ancient and honourable process of de-bagging at the hands of his light-hearted boat.

”Come on,” said Malim. ”G.o.dfrey Lane's going to sing a patriotic song.

They _will_ let him do it. We'll go down to the Temple and find John Hatton.”

We left the Barrel at about one o'clock. It was a typical London late autumn night. Quiet with the peace of a humming top; warm with the heat generated from mellow asphalt and resinous wood-paving.

We turned from Bedford Street eastwards along the Strand.

Between one and two the Strand is as empty as it ever is. It is given over to lurchers and policemen. Fleet Street reproduces for this one hour the Sahara.

”When I knock at the Temple gate late at night,” said Malim, ”and am admitted by the night porter, I always feel a pleasantly archaic touch.”

I agreed with him. The process seemed a quaint admixture of an Oxford or Cambridge college, Gottingen, and a feudal keep. And after the gate had been closed behind one, it was difficult to realise that within a few yards of an academic system of lawns and buildings full of living traditions and a.s.sociations which wainscoting and winding stairs engender, lay the modern world, its American invaders, its new humour, its women's clubs, its long firms, its musical comedies, its Park Lane, and its Strand with the hub of the universe projecting from the roadway at Charing Cross, plain for Englishmen to gloat over and for foreigners to envy.

Sixty-two Harcourt Buildings is emblazoned with many names, including that of the Rev. John Hatton. The oak was not sported, and our rap at the inner door was immediately answered by a shout of ”Come in!” As we opened it we heard a peculiar whirring sound. ”Road skates,” said Hatton, gracefully circling the table and then coming to a standstill.

I was introduced. ”I'm very glad to see you both,” he said. ”The two other men I share these rooms with have gone away, so I'm killing time by training for my road-skate tour abroad. It's trying for one's ankles.”

”Could you go downstairs on them?” said Malim.

”Certainly,” he replied, ”I'll do so now. And when we're down, I'll have a little practice in the open.”

Whereupon he skated to the landing, scrambled down the stairs, sped up Middle Temple Lane, and called the porter to let us out into Fleet Street. He struck me as a man who differed in some respects from the popular conception of a curate.

”I'll race you to Ludgate Circus and back,” said the clergyman.

”You're too fast,” said Malim; ”it must be a handicap.”

”We might do it level in a cab,” said I, for I saw a hansom crawling towards us.

”Done,” said the Rev. John Hatton. ”Done, for half-a-crown!”