His forecast of my reception was accurate enough. There were seats to fight in borough and county, north and south, east and west. I could have my choice, and with a year-book open on my knee I made comparative tables of the majorities against me. In the course of the interview there was diplomatic skirmishing on both sides as the Central Office reconnoitered to find out how much I was prepared to put down, and I tried to ascertain how far the Party Funds would help me. In consideration of a sum I was not willing to furnish, I could have the reversion of a safe seat in a mining area; at the other end of the scale, the Whips would pay all expenses if I would consent to break my shins on the five thousand Unionist majority in South St. Vincent's. Eventually, I undertook to pay my own expenses and fight the Cranborne division of Wiltshire, where there was a hostile majority of one thousand eight hundred. Then I jumped into a hansom and joined my uncle for luncheon at the Eclectic Club.
"The charm of this place," exclaimed Bertrand as he led me up the great staircase, "is that once you're a member you can be sure of meeting most of the men you want to and all the ones you don't. It's not political, so you find scallywags of all types. That's why it's called the Eclectic."
The great, grimy, eighteenth-century building—Hamilton's finest work, I always think—is too well known to need description, and anyone who has driven down Pall Mall or up St. James's Street is familiar with the line of bow-windows overlooking Marlborough House, and the row of choleric members who stare disgustedly at the street on wet days and revile the English climate. Within a few months I was privileged to take my place among them, and Bertrand spent an industrious week introducing me to the rules, conventions and personalities of the Club.
It was a rare opportunity for his favorite pastime of drawing indictments against professions. At one end of the dining-room he showed me a disillusioned close corporation of invertebrate Civil Servants, counting the days till they could abandon their judicious sterility and retire on a pension; at another, the corner where members of the Bar lunched hurriedly and discussed appointments. There was an embrasure traditionally reserved for peers and invariably raided by shy new members, and an elastic table by the fireplace where parliamentarians gathered to refight the battles of the House. The sharp division and mutual jealousy of the coteries reminded me strongly of Oxford, and, as election was in the hands of the whole Club, every ballot had the gambling excitement of a snap-division. If the Civil Servants supported a candidate too warmly, the Bar would rally, blackball in hand; the parliamentarians, on the other hand, held that a club was one thing and an almshouse for permanent officials quite another. And they voted in accordance with this reasoned conviction.
The ideal candidate was, of course, the unknown man with the unplaced backers; he might, indeed, be attacked on the rustic principle that the function of strangers is to have half-bricks heaved at them; or he might creep in unscathed, to the lasting mortification of men who would afterwards have liked to blackball him. Not once or twice have I heard the question, "How did he get in? I suppose I didn't know about him at the time, or I'd have pilled him like a shot."
"Is Adolf Erckmann a member?" I asked my uncle in a surprised whisper as we came upon a stumpy, bearded, scarlet-faced man breathing stertorously through thick lips and resting on the end of a sofa the reddest and most naked head it has ever been my fate to see.
"I don't think any Club is really complete without him," was Bertrand's guarded answer. "He represents so much."
In the last ten years Erckmann has come to represent considerably more than in 1905: his social development in those days had hardly begun, and outside the City his name was still comparatively unfamiliar. There, if you were a banker, you knew Erckmann Brothers of Frankfort, London and New York; in the Rubber Market you met Erckmann Irmaos of Para; and if you touched the South American chemical trade, it was long odds you bought from Erckmann Hermanos of Valparaiso. Moreover, it was difficult to deal in English real estate, South African diamonds, Norwegian timber or Alaskan furs without rubbing shoulders with Erckmann or the retinue of younger sons who picked up the tips and aspirates he let fall and in return allowed themselves to be seen dining with him or yawning through the exquisite musical parties he gave in Westbourne Terrace.
With his ceaseless activity and Midas touch he must have been worth a cool million even in 1905 when he was no more than forty and had been divorced but once. His wealth thereafter increased by geometrical progression, and slackening his attendance on business he turned his talents to society. The knighthood came in the Coronation Honours of 1911, the baronetcy two years later. There he stuck, for the second divorce brought him more notoriety than credit: the freeborn electors of Grindlesham, perhaps through inability to understand his speech, accepted his largess but rejected his candidature—twice in 1910 and once in the by-election of 1913; and just when the opening of the Cripples' Institute brought his name high again in the list of Government creditors the war broke out, and Sir Adolf—with all his raffish, lesser theatrical entourage—stumbled helplessly backward into his social underworld. He will, of course, re-emerge after the war, for his type is old as Ninevah or Tyre: Petronius wrote of the feast he gave under Nero, and Alcibiades probably dined with him before mutilating the Hermæ.
For want of a better landmark, Loring used sometimes to refer to our early years in London as "the days before one met Erckmann," and anyone who saw how he and his rowdy little circle dominated such houses as they entered will be grateful for the definition.