I had finished my hundred up--or rather he had--with the Colonel and
we strolled into the smoking room for a smoke and a drink rotund the
fire before turning in. There were three other men already round the
fire and they widened their circle to take us in. I didn't know them,
hadn't spoken to them or indeed to anyone except the Colonel in the
large gaudy uncomfortably comfortable hotel. I was run down, out of
sorts generally, and--like a fool, I thought now--had taken a week
off to eat, or rather to read the menus of interminable table d'hôte
dinners, to play golf and to walk on the "front" at Torquay.
I had only arrived the day before, but the Colonel (retired) a
jolly tubby little man--with white moustaches like two S's lying
side by side on the top of his stupid red lips and his kind choleric
eyes bulging out on a life which he was quite content never for a
moment to understand--made it a point, my dear Sir, to know every
new arrival within one hour after he arrived.
We got our drinks and as, rather forgetting that I was in England,
I murmured the Eastern formula, I noticed vaguely one of the other
three glance at me over his shoulder for a moment. The Colonel stuck
out his fat little legs in front of him, turning up his neatly shoed
toes before the blaze. Two of the others were talking, talking as men
so often do in the comfortable chairs of smoking rooms between ten
and eleven at night, earnestly, seriously, of what they call affairs,
or politics, or questions. I listened to their fat, full-fed, assured
voices in that heavy room which smelt of solidity, safety, horsehair
furniture, tobacco smoke, and the faint civilized aroma of whisky and
soda. It came as a shock to me in that atmosphere that they were
discussing India and the East: it does you know every now and again.
Sentimental? Well, I expect one is sentimental about it, having lived
there. It doesn't seem to go with solidity and horsehair furniture:
the fifteen years come back to one in one moment all in a heap.
How one hated it and how one loved it!
I suppose they had started on the Durbar and the King's visit. They
had got on to Indian unrest, to our position in India, its duties,
responsibilities, to the problem of East and West. They hadn't been
there of course, they hadn't even seen the brothel and café chantant
at Port Said suddenly open out into that pink and blue desert that
leads you through Africa and Asia into the heart of the East. But they
knew all about it, they had solved, with their fat voices and in their
fat heads, riddles, older than the Sphinx, of peoples remote and
ancient and mysterious whom they had never seen and could never
understand. One was, I imagine, a stockjobber, plump and comfortable
with a greasy forehead and a high colour in his cheeks, smooth shiny
brown hair and a carefully grown small moustache: a good dealer in the
market; sharp and confident, with a loud voice and shifty eyes. The
other was a clergyman: need I say more? Except that he was more of a
clergyman even than most clergymen, I mean that he wore tight
things--leggings don't they call them? or breeches?--round his calves.
I never know what it means: whether they are bishops or rural deans or
archdeacons or archimandrites. In any case I mistrust them even more
than the black trousers: they seem to close the last door for anything
human to get in through the black clothes. The dog collar closes up the
armour above, and below, as long as they _were_ trousers, at any rate
some whiff of humanity might have eddied up the legs of them and touched
bare flesh. But the gaiters button them up finally, irremediably, for
ever.