"Give it up! ... No, I don't! The answer is—I'm one of those fellows—and the Services are simply stiff with 'em, who are absolute asses till it's necessary for 'em to be something else."
CHAPTER XXIII
A MODERN CLUB
Perhaps in those prehistoric days before the War, you knew the big, cool, ground-floor dining-room of the "Ladies' Social" Club. They lunched excellently at Margot's pet table in the corner near the conservatory, between whose rows of well-tended pot-plants you pass to the smoke-room, celebrated for its Persian divan, and green-and-rose-coloured glass dome.
Soon the Club would be abandoned to sweeps, painters, charwomen, and window-cleaners. Just now everything was in full swing. As the little tables became vacant, the drawing-rooms and lounges filled up. The smoke-room was a crush of well got-up men and extravagantly-caparisoned women, chattering nineteen to the dozen under a thick blue canopy of Turkish, Egyptian, and Virginian. The tang of Kümmel and Benedictine and Crème de Menthe came to you with the fragrance of the Club's especial coffee and the reek of innumerable illusion perfumes.
People were having a cigarette and a gossip before going on to Lord's to see the tennis-singles between Oxford and Cambridge; or the Inter-Regimental Polo Finals at Hurlingham. Others had just motored back from witnessing the rowing-matches at Henley, between Eton and Darley, and the Eton second Eight and Montbeau College, and were recuperating before dropping in for a whiff of the new comedy at the Ambassador's, or the latest revue at the Fleur de Lis. To be followed by Tango Tea at the Rocroy, or Unlimited Bridge at the house of an accommodating friend.
Perhaps you can recall them—those men and women of the best and bluest blood in Britain, strenuously spending their days in doing nothing as expensively as ever it could be done. Light, frivolous, shallow, dry-hearted; restlessly seeking new things on which to waste their barren energies, they seemed, and bore out their seeming in all thoroughness; the degenerate sons and daughters of a once great and splendid race.
Save Vanity and the Pride of Life there seemed but little in Eve or Adam. Not overmuch grey brain-matter appeared to be contained within their small neat skulls. Though in comparison with the modern Eve, slangy, loud, extravagantly attired in every tint of the Teutonic dye-chemist's chromatic register, topped with feathers that missed the ceiling by a bare half-foot, Adam in his neutral greys, and buffs and browns, and umbers, struck you as a being of mild demeanour and uncostly apparel, until looking closer, you found him out.
His nice hair was gummed about his head as sleekly as a golliwog's. He sported stays, for the preservation of his silhouette. His gossamer cambric exhaled perfumes like a Georgian dandy's. Fashionable complexion-creams lent his tanned and well-shaved cheek a tempting peachiness. His socks were all too lovely for description by this feeble pen of mine. The uppers of his boots were of every imaginable material and substance, ranging from silk brocade, green lizard, and ivory-white shark skin, to sandy-pink armadillo-belly, or the tender grey of the African gazelle.
The results of the Olympic Games of 1912 must have made dour reading for the fathers of these youthful Britons, remembering their own triumphs in the early eighties. A bitter pill for those stark old men, their grandfathers, makers of 'Varsity records in '61 and '67, whose faith in the superiority of British lungs and muscles had been bequeathed them by their own sires. Yet their juniors took it calmly. They carried the stigma of inferiority with cheerful indifference. Even while holding it the thing best worth living for—they placidly submitted to be outclassed in sport.