The chicken was as admirable as Madame had said it would be, and a great bowl of salad accompanied it; and then there came a sweet of some kind and cheese and excellent coffee—"all this we get for two shillings," the Italian artist told me—and eventually when, after much hand-shaking, the greater portion of the guests had left, the fumiste came down to my end of the table and talked soldier's talk, for he had been through the Great War, calling me "Mon vieux colon," while my host played the piano softly, and the lady who had sacrificed fame for the wedding-ring sang gently an old-fashioned French berceuse.
14th June.
[CHAPTER XXI]
A REGIMENTAL DINNER (HOTEL VICTORIA, NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE)
The honorary secretary of the Regimental Dinner Club, who is the gentleman who, in one of the little rooms, somewhat resembling loose boxes, of Cox and Co., the military bankers, presides over the ledgers containing the accounts of Ours, had sent six weeks ago to every member of the club, and that means nearly every officer past and present, a notice that the annual dinner of the regiment would take place at the Hôtel Victoria, on a certain day in Ascot week, at 8 p.m.
"Regimental dinner, sir? Yes, sir. Cloakroom third door to the right," said the impressive porter who, in gold-banded hat and with gold buttons to his blue coat, stands at the front door; and farther on, at the corner where the long corridor joins the passage, a waiter with a cherubic face waved a cotton-gloved hand in the direction one was to go.
Hat and cloak left, an oval piece of pasteboard taken in exchange, and a monetary transaction concluded with a gentleman at a little table, another white-gloved hand was waved towards the drawing-rooms, and there in the farthest room of the long suite was assembled a collection of gentlemen in dress clothes, of all ages, most of them bronzed and clean-shaved, though a beard here and there belonged to some one who had left the colours. There was a glint of silver from miniature medals and the sparkle of a couple of orders. It was not the ordinary assemblage that waits patiently with legs apart and hands under the coat-tails for dinner to be announced; it was an assemblage in which much shaking of hands was going on, and intermingled with greetings were such scraps of conversation as, "Haven't seen you for years"; "Yes, a fortnight's leave from Ireland to do Ascot"; "Home on sick leave, but feel fit enough now"; "A big dinner to-night: thirty-three dining."
There was so much talk that dinner was announced three times before any one took any notice, and then there was a little block at the door, for the Generals hung back for a moment from leading the way, and the subalterns were not, before dinner, sufficiently assertive to take precedence.