It was too late to withdraw without shattering his own self respect and self confidence. The cold bath was before him, and there was no use putting a toe in.
He opened the door and entered, walking between the tables and looking the luncheon parties in the face.
The man seated has a tremendous advantage over the man standing in this sort of game. One or two of the members met by the newcomer’s glance, bowed in the curious manner of the seated Briton, the eyes of others fell away, others nodded frigidly, it seemed to Jones. Then, like a pilot fish before a shark leading him to his food, a club waiter developed and piloted him to a small unoccupied table, where he took a seat and looked at a menu handed to him by the pilot.
He ordered fillet of sole, roast chicken, salad, and strawberry ice. They were the easiest things to order. He would have ordered roast elephant’s trunk had it been easier and on the menu.
A man after the storming of Hell Gate, or just dismounted after the Charge of the Light Brigade, would have possessed as little instinct for menu hunting as Jones.
He had pierced the ranks of the British Aristocracy; that was nothing—he was seated at their camp fire, sharing their food, and they were all inimical towards him; that was everything.
He felt the draught. He felt that these men had a down on him; felt it by all sorts of senses that seemed newly developed. Not a down on him, Jones, but a down on him, Rochester, Arthur Coningsby Delamere, 21st Earl of.
And the extraordinary thing was that he felt it. What on earth did it matter to him if these men looked coldly upon another man? It did. It mattered quite a lot, more than perhaps it ever mattered to the other man. Is the soul such a shallow and blind thing that it cannot sort the true from the false, the material from the immaterial, cannot see that an insult levelled at a likeness is not an insult levelled at it?
Surely not, and yet the soul of Victor Jones resented the coolness of others towards the supposed body of Rochester, as though it were a personal insult.
It was the first intimation to Jones that when the actor puts on his part he puts on more than a cloak or trunk hose, that the personality he had put on had nerves curiously associated with his own nerves, and that, though he might say to himself a hundred times with respect to the attitudes of other people, “Pah! they don’t mean me,” that formula was no charm against disdain.