“By the way, Luney, my son,” it said, “I forgot to tell you to wear a white muffler in the train to keep the smuts off your shirt front.”
With this final injunction in his ears, Mr. William Jordan, Junior, took his fearful way to 43, Milton Street, E.C., while Mr. James Dodson “looked round” into the annexe of the Brontë Hotel to inquire of his fiancée for the third time that day, “what sort of fettle she was in?”
It is not the business of this biography to estimate the precise quantity of blood and tears that it cost William Jordan, Junior, to clothe himself in his evening suit and to embellish the same with a necktie which had to be arranged by his own very inefficient fingers, and also with a pair of new and excruciatingly tight shoes. It must suffice to say that when at last, in a state bordering on mental derangement, he had by some means contrived to array himself in these articles of civilized attire, to reap as the immediate reward of a somewhat frantic perseverance a measure of sheer physical discomfort that he had never before experienced, he utilized the few minutes that remained to him before he obeyed the decree that sent him forth to Midlothian Avenue, Peckham, S.E., upon his knees in the little room by the side of the white-haired man his father.
XXVI
Upon the wind-swept platform of St. Paul’s Station in the City, while awaiting the arrival of the 7.7 to Peckham, he was accosted by the erect and immaculate form of Mr. G. Eliot Davis. The nonchalance of bearing and air of supreme self-possession of this gentleman were hardly inferior to those of Mr. Dodson himself.
“Hullo, Luney,” said Mr. Davis, looking up from the precincts of an inordinately high collar to the face of a gaunt figure which, somewhat to the annoyance of Mr. Davis, was considerably taller than his own; “arrayed, I see, like Solomon in all his glory. Feeling pretty cheery, eh, and full of parlour tricks? I must say these functions don’t amuse me at all. Music and progressive games!—I like more knife and fork work myself. Come on and have a sherry and bitters before we start.”
Mr. William Jordan had already acquired that rudimentary wisdom of the “out-of-doors” world, that “when you are in Rome you must do like the Romans.” He had also on his way in the omnibus determined to follow out this fundamental truth, as far as in him lay, to the letter. Therefore, with great docility he accompanied Mr. Davis to the buffet to have a sherry and bitters. It is not necessary to state that even in the act of swallowing that mysterious compound he had ample cause to rue his superhuman resolve.
It was with a sensation of being poisoned that in the wake of his mentor for the time being he invaded a second-class smoking compartment, already overcrowded with emphatic street-persons, smoking equally emphatic tobacco.
Upon their arrival at Peckham, the young man recalled Mr. Dodson’s injunctions and very timorously advanced the suggestion that they should take a hansom to Midlothian Avenue. Mr. Davis received the suggestion with loud-voiced derision.
“Not likely,” said that gentleman. “I am not a bloated plutocrat. You should have sported a pair of goloshes the same as me.”