The perfection of the machine and of Mr. Oxford's attire and complexion caused Priam to look rather shabby. Indeed, he was rather shabby. Shabbiness had slightly overtaken him in Putney. Once he had been a dandy; but that was in the lamented Leek's time. And as the car glided, without smell and without noise, through the encumbered avenues of London towards the centre, now shooting forward like a star, now stopping with gentle suddenness, now swerving in a swift curve round a vehicle earthy and leaden-wheeled, Priam grew more and more uncomfortable. He had sunk into a groove at Putney. He never left Putney, save occasionally to refresh himself at the National Gallery, and thither he invariably went by train and tube, because the tube always filled him with wonder and romance, and always threw him up out of the earth at the corner of Trafalgar Square with such a strange exhilaration in his soul. So that he had not seen the main avenues of London for a long time. He had been forgetting riches and luxury, and the oriental cigarette-shops whose proprietors' names end in 'opoulos,' and the haughtiness of the ruling classes, and the still sterner haughtiness of their footmen. He had now abandoned Alice in Putney. And a mysterious demon seized him and gripped him, and sought to pull him back in the direction of the simplicity of Putney, and struggled with him fiercely, and made him writhe and shrink before the brilliant phenomena of London's centre, and indeed almost pitched him out of the car and set him running as hard as legs would carry to Putney. It was the demon which we call habit. He would have given a picture to be in Putney, instead of swimming past Hyde Park Corner to the accompaniment of Mr. Oxford's amiable and deferential and tactful conversation.
However, his other demon, shyness, kept him from imperiously stopping the car.
The car stopped itself in Bond Street, in front of a building with a wide archway, and the symbol of empire floating largely over its roof. Placards said that admission through the archway was a shilling; but Mr. Oxford, bearing Priam's latest picture as though it had cost fifty thousand instead of five hundred pounds, went straight into the place without paying, and Priam accepted his impressive invitation to follow. Aged military veterans whose breasts carried a row of medals saluted Mr. Oxford as he entered, and, within the penetralia, beings in silk hats as faultless as Mr. Oxford's raised those hats to Mr. Oxford, who did not raise his in reply. Merely nodded, Napoleonically! His demeanour had greatly changed. You saw here the man of unbending will, accustomed to use men as pawns in the chess of a complicated career. Presently they reached a private office where Mr. Oxford, with the assistance of a page, removed his gloves, furs, and hat, and sent sharply for a man who at once brought a frame which fitted Priam's picture.
"Do have a cigar," Mr. Oxford urged Priam, with a quick return to his earlier manner, offering a box in which each cigar was separately encased in gold-leaf. The cigar was such as costs a crown in a restaurant, half-a-crown in a shop, and twopence in Amsterdam. It was a princely cigar, with the odour of paradise and an ash as white as snow. But Priam could not appreciate it. No! He had seen on a beaten copper plate under the archway these words: 'Parfitts' Galleries.' He was in the celebrated galleries of his former dealers, whom by the way he had never seen. And he was afraid. He was mortally apprehensive, and had a sickly sensation in the stomach.
After they had scrupulously inspected the picture, through the clouds of incense, Mr. Oxford wrote out a cheque for five hundred pounds, and, cigar in mouth, handed it to Priam, who tried to take it with a casual air and did not succeed. It was signed 'Parfitts'.'
"I dare say you have heard that I'm now the sole proprietor of this place," said Mr. Oxford through his cigar.
"Really!" said Priam, feeling just as nervous as an inexperienced youth.
Then Mr. Oxford led Priam over thick carpets to a saloon where electric light was thrown by means of reflectors on to a small but incomparable band of pictures. Mr. Oxford had not exaggerated. They did give pleasure to Priam. They were not the pictures one sees every day, nor once a year. There was the finest Delacroix of its size that Priam had ever met with; also a Vermeer that made it unnecessary to visit the Ryks Museum. And on the more distant wall, to which Mr. Oxford came last, in a place of marked honour, was an evening landscape of Volterra, a hill-town in Italy. The bolts of Priam's very soul started when he caught sight of that picture. On the lower edge of the rich frame were two words in black lettering: 'Priam Farll.' How well he remembered painting it! And how masterfully beautiful it was!
"Now that," said Mr. Oxford, "is in my humble opinion one of the finest Farlls in existence. What do you think, Mr. Leek?"
Priam paused. "I agree with you," said he.
"Farll," said Mr. Oxford, "is about the only modern painter that can stand the company that that picture has in this room, eh?"
Priam blushed. "Yes," he said.
There is a considerable difference, in various matters, between Putney and Volterra; but the picture of Volterra and the picture of Putney High Street were obviously, strikingly, incontestably, by the same hand; one could not but perceive the same brush-work, the same masses, the same manner of seeing and of grasping, in a word the same dazzling and austere translation of nature. The resemblance jumped at one and shook one by the shoulders. It could not have escaped even an auctioneer. Yet Mr. Oxford did not refer to it. He seemed quite blind to it. All he said was, as they left the room, and Priam finished his rather monosyllabic praise--
"Yes, that's the little collection I've just got together, and I am very proud to have shown it to you. Now I want you to come and lunch with me at my club. Please do. I should be desolated if you refused."
Priam did not care a halfpenny about the desolation of Mr. Oxford; and he most sincerely objected to lunch at Mr. Oxford's club. But he said "Yes" because it was the easiest thing for his shyness to do, Mr. Oxford being a determined man. Priam was afraid to go. He was disturbed, alarmed, affrighted, by the mystery of Mr. Oxford's silence.
They arrived at the club in the car.
The Club
Priam had never been in a club before. The statement may astonish, may even meet with incredulity, but it is true. He had left the land of clubs early in life. As for the English clubs in European towns, he was familiar with their exteriors, and with the amiable babble of their supporters at tables d'hôte, and his desire for further knowledge had not been so hot as to inconvenience him. Hence he knew nothing of clubs.
Mr. Oxford's club alarmed and intimidated him; it was so big and so black. Externally it resembled a town-hall of some great industrial town. As you stood on the pavement at the bottom of the flight of giant steps that led to the first pair of swinging doors, your head was certainly lower than the feet of a being who examined you sternly from the other side of the glass. Your head was also far below the sills of the mighty windows of the ground-floor. There were two storeys above the ground-floor, and above them a projecting eave of carven stone that threatened the uplifted eye like a menace. The tenth part of a slate, the merest chip of a corner, falling from the lofty summit of that pile, would have slain elephants. And all the façade was black, black with ages of carbonic deposit. The notion that the building was a town-hall that had got itself misplaced and perverted gradually left you as you gazed. You perceived its falseness. You perceived that Mr. Oxford's club was a monument, a relic of the days when there were giants on earth,