“Here?” echoed Matt, interrogatively. They had been walking automatically as they conversed, and had come to a stand-still before a blank, cheerless building in Golden Square.
“Yes, this is the shanty. Not my club, you duffer. This is only the students’ little ken. I told my people the truth, you know. It would be snobbish not to drop in to-night. They make rather a night of it, though I hadn’t intended to go otherwise. Hang it all, I had an appointment to sup with a girl at half-past ten! I forgot all about her—she’ll be mad.” He took out his watch. “Ten past eleven. Why, Ecclesiastical Art must have evolved till close on eleven! It isn’t my fault, anyhow. Do you mind trotting round to the Imperial? She’s in the first ballet. We’d better have a hansom.”
The young men drove round to the stage door, but the fair one had departed after a few impatient instants. “I think I heard her tell the cabby ‘Rule’s,’ ” was the sixpenny worth of information obtained from the janitor.
“Let’s go there,” said Matt, who was now quite faint with hunger, and who had a lurking wish that Herbert would stand a supper—one of the olden heroic suppers that he had not tasted for half a year—a wild riot of a supper, with real meat and wholesome vegetables and goodly sauces—nay, even red wine, and a crowning cup of coffee made of real beans, not the charred crust of over-baked loaves, out of which he had been making his own lately; getting the burned bread cheaper with a double economy; a supper fit for well-fed gods, which a starving man having eaten might be well content to die. But Herbert, unaware of what was going on in Matt’s inner man, replied, cruelly, “No, it’s too late to look for her at the restaurant. I know her address, but she won’t be there yet. Besides, I ought to show up at the club.”
So they strolled back to the bleak building (Matt suddenly bethinking himself that even here supper might lie in wait), and passing through a dark hall, mounted a stone corkscrew staircase that led to a hubbub of voices and a piano jingling music-hall tunes. The doorway of the first room was congested by black backs over-circled with clouds of smoke. Herbert and Matt peered in unseen for a few moments. The little room, decorated only by a few sketches from the hands of members, and separated from the second room by the primitive partition of a screen, was crowded with young men in evening dress sitting round on chairs or knees or coal-scuttles, with glasses in their hands and cigars in their mouths, and new men were squeezing in from the inner room, the advent of each being greeted by facetious cheers. Plaudits more genuine in their ring welcomed Flinders, who, it was understood, had been in the final running. He came in, trying to make his naturally long face look short, and exclaiming with punctilious carelessness, “Where’s my whiskey?” Rands, who, it was whispered, had lost by only a few votes, was not present; he had, apparently, gone home to the heart-broken gentility at Dalston. Matt caught sight of Cornpepper on the right of the doorway, and his heart rejoiced as at the sight of a laid supper. The little painter was clutching the middle of his chair with his most owl-like expression. His single eye-glass glittered in the gaslight.
“Why, there’s Cornpepper!” Matt whispered, in awed accents.
“Oh, has he come in?” yawned Herbert. “I saw him marching Greme about among the Daniels, and giving them hell in emulation of Clinch—looking round after every swear, as if half hoping the ladies hadn’t heard him, and half hoping they had.” But Matt had only half heard Herbert. He was listening to the oracles of Cornpepper. But listeners rarely hear any good of themselves.
“Strang’s not in it with you,” Cornpepper was saying to Flinders. “There’s no blooming style in his technique. It might have been done by an R.A.”
“They do say the result would have been very different if more R.A.’s had come down,” said the semi-consoled Flinders, somewhat illogically. “But Barbauld had the gout, and Platt is in Morocco, and—”
At this point shouts of “Strang!” made the cousins start, but it was only the playfulness of the room greeting a new-comer as the victor. The youth acquiesced humorously in the make-believe, slouching round the room with a comical shuffle and a bow to each chair. Then a man got up and began a burlesque lecture on Ecclesiastical Art “to my young architectural friends.” Every reference to apses, groins, or gargoyles was received with yells of delight, a demoniac shriek being reserved for Albrecht Dürer.