They arrived at the club in the car.
The Club
Priam had never been in a club before. The statement may astonish, may even meet with incredulity, but it is true. He had left the land of clubs early in life. As for the English clubs in European towns, he was familiar with their exteriors, and with the amiable babble of their supporters at tables d'hôte, and his desire for further knowledge had not been so hot as to inconvenience him. Hence he knew nothing of clubs.
Mr. Oxford's club alarmed and intimidated him; it was so big and so black. Externally it resembled a town-hall of some great industrial town. As you stood on the pavement at the bottom of the flight of giant steps that led to the first pair of swinging doors, your head was certainly lower than the feet of a being who examined you sternly from the other side of the glass. Your head was also far below the sills of the mighty windows of the ground-floor. There were two storeys above the ground-floor, and above them a projecting eave of carven stone that threatened the uplifted eye like a menace. The tenth part of a slate, the merest chip of a corner, falling from the lofty summit of that pile, would have slain elephants. And all the façade was black, black with ages of carbonic deposit. The notion that the building was a town-hall that had got itself misplaced and perverted gradually left you as you gazed. You perceived its falseness. You perceived that Mr. Oxford's club was a monument, a relic of the days when there were giants on earth, that it had come down unimpaired to a race of pigmies, who were making the best of it. The sole descendant of the giants was the scout behind the door. As Mr. Oxford and Priam climbed towards it, this unique giant, with a giant's force, pulled open the gigantic door, and Mr. Oxford and Priam walked imperceptibly in, and the door swung to with a large displacement of air. Priam found himself in an immense interior, under a distant carved ceiling, far, far upwards, like heaven. He watched Mr. Oxford write his name in a gigantic folio, under a gigantic clock. This accomplished, Mr. Oxford led him past enormous vistas to right and left, into a very long chamber, both of whose long walls were studded with thousands upon thousands of massive hooks--and here and there upon a hook a silk hat or an overcoat. Mr. Oxford chose a couple of hooks in the expanse, and when they had divested themselves sufficiently he led Priam forwards into another great chamber evidently meant to recall the baths of Carcalla. In gigantic basins chiselled out of solid granite, Priam scrubbed his finger-nails with a nail-brush larger than he had previously encountered, even in nightmares, and an attendant brushed his coat with a utensil that resembled a weapon of offence lately the property of Anak.
"Shall we go straight to the dining-room now," asked Mr. Oxford, "or will you have a gin and angostura first?"
Priam declined the gin and angostura, and they went up an overwhelming staircase of sombre marble, and through other apartments to the dining-room, which would have made an excellent riding-school. Here one had six of the gigantic windows in a row, each with curtains that fell in huge folds from the unseen into the seen. The ceiling probably existed. On every wall were gigantic paintings in thick ornate frames, and between the windows stood heroic busts of marble set upon columns of basalt. The chairs would have been immovable had they not run on castors of weight-resisting rock, yet against the tables they had the air of negligible toys. At one end of the room was a sideboard that would not have groaned under an ox whole, and at the other a fire, over which an ox might have been roasted in its entirety, leaped under a mantelpiece upon which Goliath could not have put his elbows.
All was silent and grave; the floors were everywhere covered with heavy carpets which hushed all echoes. There was not the faintest sound. Sound, indeed, seemed to be deprecated. Priam had already passed the wide entrance to one illimitable room whose walls were clothed with warnings in gigantic letters: 'Silence.' And he had noticed that all chairs and couches were thickly padded and upholstered in soft leather, and that it was impossible to produce in them the slightest creak. At a casual glance the place seemed unoccupied, but on more careful inspection you saw midgets creeping about, or seated in easy-chairs that had obviously been made to hold two of them; these midgets were the members of the club, dwarfed into dolls by its tremendous dimensions. A strange and sinister race! They looked as though in the final stages of decay, and wherever their heads might rest was stretched a white cloth, so that their heads might not touch the spots sanctified by the heads of the mighty departed. They rarely spoke to one another, but exchanged regards of mutual distrust and scorn; and if by chance they did converse it was in tones of weary, brusque disillusion. They could at best descry each other but indistinctly in the universal pervading gloom--a gloom upon which electric lamps, shining dimly yellow in their vast lustres, produced almost no impression. The whole establishment was buried in the past, dreaming of its Titantic yore, when there were doubtless giants who could fill those fauteuils and stick their feet on those mantelpieces.
It was in such an environment that Mr. Oxford gave Priam to eat and to drink off little ordinary plates and out of tiny tumblers. No hint of the club's immemorial history in that excessively modern and excellent repast--save in the Stilton cheese, which seemed to have descended from the fine fruity days of some Homeric age, a cheese that Ulysses might have inaugurated. I need hardly say that the total effect on Priam's temperament was disastrous. (Yet how could the diplomatic Mr. Oxford have guessed that Priam had never been in a club before?) It induced in him a speechless anguish, and he would have paid a sum as gigantic as the club--he would have paid the very cheque in his pocket--never to have met Mr. Oxford. He was a far too sensitive man for a club, and his moods were incalculable. Assuredly Mr. Oxford had miscalculated the result of his club on Priam's humour; he soon saw his error.
"Suppose we take coffee in the smoking-room?" he said.
The populous smoking-room was the one part of the club where talking with a natural loudness was not a crime. Mr. Oxford found a corner fairly free from midgets, and they established themselves in it, and liqueurs and cigars accompanied the coffee. You could actually see midgets laughing outright in the mist of smoke; the chatter narrowly escaped being a din; and at intervals a diminutive boy entered and bawled the name of a midget at the top of his voice, Priam was suddenly electrified, and Mr. Oxford, very alert, noticed the electrification.