The Druids ended their song abruptly, and made a dash at the occupant of the chair. The audience stood up. “A victim for our ancient rites!” screamed the Druids, falling upon the man and dragging him towards the property altar.
The victim showed every sign of objection to early English rites; but he was dislodged, and after being dragged, struggling, across the table, subsided quickly on the floor. The mob surged about and around him. He was hidden from view. His position, however, could be located by a series of piercing shrieks.
The door again opened. Mr. Maundrell, the real chairman of the evening, stood on the threshold. “Chair!” was now the word that arose on every side, and at this signal the Druids disappeared at a trot past the long-bearded, impassive Mr. Maundrell. Their victim followed them, but before he did so he picked up his trousers which were lying on the carpet.
All the time this scene had been going on, I fancied I recognised the man in the chair. In a flash I remembered. It was Dawkins who had coached First Trinity, and whom I, as a visitor once at the crew’s training dinner, had last seen going through the ancient and honourable process of de-bagging at the hands of his light-hearted boat.
“Come on,” said Malim. “Godfrey Lane’s going to sing a patriotic song. They will let him do it. We’ll go down to the Temple and find John Hatton.”
We left the Barrel at about one o’clock. It was a typical London late autumn night. Quiet with the peace of a humming top; warm with the heat generated from mellow asphalt and resinous wood-paving.
We turned from Bedford Street eastwards along the Strand.
Between one and two the Strand is as empty as it ever is. It is given over to lurchers and policemen. Fleet Street reproduces for this one hour the Sahara.
“When I knock at the Temple gate late at night,” said Malim, “and am admitted by the night porter, I always feel a pleasantly archaic touch.”
I agreed with him. The process seemed a quaint admixture of an Oxford or Cambridge college, Gottingen, and a feudal keep. And after the gate had been closed behind one, it was difficult to realise that within a few yards of an academic system of lawns and buildings full of living traditions and associations which wainscoting and winding stairs engender, lay the modern world, its American invaders, its new humour, its women’s clubs, its long firms, its musical comedies, its Park Lane, and its Strand with the hub of the universe projecting from the roadway at Charing Cross, plain for Englishmen to gloat over and for foreigners to envy.