LUNCHEON
He had lunched at the Constitutional 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 glass 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 passage way, indicated the cloak room to him.
Here he washed his hands and brushed his hair, and looking at himself in a glass 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 attitude of the workers and the drones.
Arrived at the glass swing doors before mentioned, he looked in.
The place was crowded.
It looked to him as though for the space 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.