“Been having a little feed to celebrate my smash,” he said, waving his hand over the dirty table. “These are my friends. You see before you the members of the Dishonourable Brotherhood of Decadents, an association for the spread of corruption among the upper classes. Dishonourable Brother St. John, I call upon you for a speech.”
“What on earth is all this?” the Duke demanded in a whisper of his neighbour.
The millionaire shrugged his shoulders, as though he were slightly ashamed of his company.
“I suppose they intend it for humour,” he answered in the same key. “It’s one of your brother’s ideas. He’s always starting something of the kind. It used to be a Chinese Guild, and they all dressed as mandarins and wore pigtails. Last year it was an anti-Semite show, and Stuart had the cheek to ask me to join it.” The Jew’s smile as he said this was a trifle threatening. “They parody everything. That Frenchman opposite, Des Louvres”—he nodded towards a man with a thin, wicked-looking face and small dark beard and moustache—“he is at the bottom of it, I believe. They may know something about him in your Office.”
The Home Secretary was staggered. Possessed of too little imagination to see anything in the proceedings but a rather scandalous jest of the kind that undergraduates indulge in at places like Cambridge and Oxford, he felt that the mere fact of the jest being carried out by grown men made it doubly unbecoming. And he felt personally aggrieved that these men should be making merry over an event which had cast a shadow on the house of which he was the head. He recalled his mother’s grief, Prince Herbert’s gracious interest, the money sacrifice which he himself was preparing to make; and his heart swelled with inward wrath and shame.
He could not help wondering privately what Mendes was doing in such company. The keen, remorseless man of business who had executed a masterpiece of legal robbery, and thereby made himself one of the new world powers which were taking the place of Kings and Cabinets, seemed strangely out of place among that crew of mockers. The Brazilian sat for the most part silent, his lips set in an ironical smile. But from time to time his glance wandered in the direction of Molly Finucane, who moved restively in, her chair whenever she caught Mendes’s black eyes fixed on hers.
The rest of the revellers were all excited in different degrees by the wine they had been drinking, and their remarks and interruptions formed a sort of ground-bass to the speech which Alistair had called for. Mr. Gerald St. John, whom the “Court Guide,” more tender of his dignity than he seemed to be himself, described as “Honourable,” was a man of about the same age as Stuart, though his bald forehead gave him the appearance of being older. He had some little reputation as an amateur in music and painting; he had composed songs which were occasionally sung, and painted pictures which the New Gallery did not disdain.
Addressing his friends as “Dishonourable Brethren,” he hailed them as the missionaries of a new gospel. Theirs was the task to purge society of Puritanism and propriety. They were to set the example of becoming artists in Beautiful Sin. It was impossible for Trent to tell how far he was serious. His speech mingled echoes of the cant of a certain class of literary and artistic critics with what appeared to be broad farce.
But two passages in the address made an impression on the Minister, by their curious connection with his recent interests. The first was a surprising compliment to the Church of Rome; the second was a panegyric in a much broader vein of the hooligans.
Of the Roman Church the speaker said that it was the only form of Christianity which deserved their toleration and respect. He regarded it as the true Church of the Decadence, and as such he called upon the Brotherhood to support it. He was not himself a Catholic; he was a polytheist. But he considered that, next to polytheism, the Church of Rome afforded the best rallying-point for all that was beautiful and corrupt in the art and life of the age.