Our dinner finished and all the questions that I could think of asked and answered, my host took me out on to the terrace to drink our coffee. All the light of the sunset had died out, and the long lines of lamps on the Embankment across the river were shining brilliantly. Across Westminster Bridge the tramcars, all blazing with light, were passing and repassing each other, an effect I commend to Mr Arthur Collins for use in some future Drury Lane production. The terrace itself is dimly lighted by gas lamps, but this half light, pleasant and in keeping with the solemn mystery of the great, dark river that flows past, seems to frame fittingly the brilliance of the wonderful night scene. Little groups of ladies were about the tables in that centre space where members may dispense hospitality. The talk of the men who came to speak to my host was all of what was in progress in the chamber of debate upstairs, of the pity of it that no agreement had been come to and that a division was necessary, of the admirable speech that Mr Balfour had made in the afternoon, and such-like matters.
I felt that I had kept my host too long from his place and wished to bid him good-night there and then, but he said that though he had failed to obtain a ticket for me in the afternoon to hear the debate, he would try again; so upstairs we went, and he left me in charge, in the Members' Lobby, of a benign old gentleman with a pointed white beard and wearing knee-breeches, while he went inside to see what he could do. He returned waving a card, the white-bearded gentleman looked even more benign, and took my hat and coat, and I was sent with the card up a little flight of stairs. In perfect comfort I listened to Mr Bonar Law making his points on the Unionist side, rapping with his finger-nails on the big box on the table as he did so, and then heard Sir Edward Grey, tucking his right hand under his frock-coat as though that garment pinched him below the arm, reply for the Government; watched the members stream out for the division, heard the numbers read out, and saw the end of an historic debate.
A most pleasant and interesting evening.
[XIX]
A REGIMENTAL DINNER
AT THE TROCADERO
The Commissionaire at the centre entrance to the Trocadero greets me with "Regimental dinner, sir? First floor, leave your coat and hat to the right." A very intelligent man this commissionaire, an old soldier who knows another old soldier when he sees him. I leave my coat and hat as directed, ascend in the lift, and am disgorged into a corridor, the walls of which are covered with an inlay of gold Venetian glass tesseræ, pay the very small sum that subscribers to the Regimental Dinner Club are mulcted, and go into a screened-off space of the large banqueting-room in which the feast is to be held. Here two score gentlemen, old and young, most of them with a bar of miniature medals on the lapels of their evening coats, are talking, laughing, moving to and fro, and shaking hands with great heartiness. It is by no means a mauvais quart d'heure these minutes of assembling before a regimental dinner, for old friends who see each other only once a year meet then, and the inquiries as to each other's health and prosperity and happiness are no formal compliments, but a real desire to know how the world wags with old comrades in arms.
The screens that divide the room in two are withdrawn and the company take their places at the table in no set order, though the veterans all try to sit next to some old friend of their soldiering days and the subalterns cling together in little swarms at the far ends of the table. The room in which we are dining, the Alexandra, is panelled to a man's height with dark marbles, with central squares of light marble, and there are at one end pillars of black wood fluted with gold. It is a room with a dignity of its own. Through the lace-curtained windows can be seen the electric advertisements on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue, advertisements which set forth in a blaze of alternating red and green and white light the virtues of somebody's whisky and somebody else's cigarettes, and through the open windows come the roar of the traffic and the hoots of the motor horns. We are dining on the very hub of London. The table for the dinner is of horseshoe shape, with another length of table running up the centre. There are candles with pink shades, and pink flowers in vases and strewn on the table in garlands. The Major-General, who is the full Colonel of the regiment, who served in it for many long years, and was at one time the Adjutant of one of the battalions, sits at the top of the bend of the horseshoe, and chance, not precedence, has put me on one side of him. The two Brigadier-Generals who are amongst the diners, each of whom wears, as our chairman does, his C.B. cross at one end of his long bars of miniature medals and decorations, are somewhere farther down the curve of the horseshoe, and brevet colonels and subalterns and captains and lieutenant-colonels and majors all sit where fancy leads them, some of the seniors to talk to the son of an old friend, a boy who has just joined, some to talk polo, or fishing, or gardening, or shooting, or the iniquities of the Land Tax with friends of like tastes.