Everybody asked me if I had met so-and-so in Cairo. I felt with embarrassment that my social ignorance must seem almost uncanny. When I said my time in Egypt had been short and that I had spent it in sight-seeing, I knew I had utterly lost caste. To the official Englishman in a foreign country the only objects worthy of regard are other Englishmen and women.
One elderly and evidently important person informed me that he had been twenty-five years in Egypt and had never seen the Pyramids. “And I never mean to,” he added with a glance of mingled pride and indignation. I had not seen the Pyramids myself, but I felt it would be presumption on my part to say so, a futile attempt to regain the place I had lost in his esteem.
He evidently regarded the Pyramids as bad form. I think he suspected Cheops and the other potentates who built them of having done so with a view to attracting the undesirable tourists of a dim future. He might have dined with Cheops himself, had that been possible, but he was not one of those who could be expected to be amused by the remains of a pyramid. Was he not high in the Ministry of Finance, and decorated by a grateful Sovereign with the Order of the Bath as a reward for that magnificent inaccessibility to ideas which makes the British Official so universally loved and respected.
“No, sir,” he puffed, “no Pyramids for me, thank you.”
I did not think highly of this particular person, but the rest were very pleasant fellows, and Brogden was one of them. I was an outsider to them, and I was careful and troubled about many things at the moment. I could not enjoy their society as I would have done had they been my guests in my own vicarage. I desired very ardently to get away from them.
From the instinct of ordinary politeness, I tried to conceal this desire, but I fear that I failed. Anyhow, Brogden got up and said we must go and see his banker and the shipping agents.
I know I left that club with the reputation of a bore and a bit of a nuisance, but I console myself by reflecting that I was quite forgotten in five minutes. All the same I felt I had inflicted a further injury on the much-wronged Brogden. He had paid me the compliment of introducing me to his own little coterie in his favourite club. When one does that for a friend, one likes that friend to be a success. Among middle-aged men this is rarely possible. No doubt this is why our clubs at home debar the introduction of strange guests into the rooms frequented by members. I had not been a success, and as we went down in the lift I appreciated for the first time the profound knowledge of human nature that would prevent my taking Brogden into any room in my own club except one that suggests the waiting-room of a long-deceased dentist.
The fact is that an old friend, however valued, is apt to be a nuisance when he suddenly emerges from the Past and bursts in on the routine of the Present. In spite of his cordiality, I could not help knowing that Brogden wanted to be back among his friends of to-day, and at his usual rubber of auction.
Accordingly when our business was finished, I made excuses for getting away, and he let me go with shame-faced willingness.
I found Edmund busy with a block and tackle arrangement he had slung to one of the bedposts, and watched him in some surprise.