Knight Without Armour

“I don’t mean real niggers—just Chinks and Malays, you know. Queer fellers—all right as long as they’ve got someone to keep a strict eye on ’em. If you can do that, you’ll be worth your weight in gold on any rubber plantation.”

Captain Fothergill’s demobilisation papers arrived before the end of the month, and the two brothers caught a boat for Singapore, by way of Colombo, at the beginning of October.

PART V

From the “Golden Arrow” at Victoria there stepped a man whom the porters, even on that plutocratic platform, singled out, attracted not so much by a leather handbag plastered with foreign hotel-labels as by a certain unanalysable but highly significant quietness of manner. And the voice was equally quiet. “Taxi—yes, and there are a trunk and two large suit-cases in the van. The name is Fothergill.” To the driver a few moments later he said merely: “The Cecil.” It was the only hotel he could remember from the London of his youth.

They gave him a lofty bedroom overlooking the dazzling semicircle of the Embankment, and he spent the first few minutes gazing down at the trams and the electric advertisements across the river. He was a little tired after the journey, and a little thrilled by the sensation of being in London again. He changed, though not into evening clothes, and dined in the grill-room, chatting desultorily with the waiter. Then he smoked a cigar in the lounge and went up to his room rather early. In bed with a novel, he heard Big Ben chime several successive quarters; then he switched off the light and tried to believe that this small, comfortable, well-carpeted, and entirely characterless hotel bedroom was somehow different from all the dozens of similar ones he had occupied in other cities.

In the morning he breakfasted in bed, enjoyed a long hot bath, made himself affable with the hotel-porter, and strode out into the cheerful, sunny streets. There were so many little odd jobs to do—some of which he had been saving up for a long time. He saw his lawyer, and made an appointment to see a Harley Street doctor later on in the week. He called at a firm of publishers and heard that his book Rubber and the Rubber Industry had crept into a second edition. The publisher asked him to dinner the following evening; he accepted. Then he bought some tics and handkerchiefs and a hat of rather more English style than the one he was wearing. By that time, as it was noon and he was in the Strand, he stepped down to Romano’s Bar for a glass of sherry and exchanged a few words with the dark-haired girl who served him. He liked, when he could, to obtain the intimacy of talking to people without the bother of knowing them, and that, of course, was always more easily accomplished with one’s so-called inferiors. The barmaid at Romano’s was a type he liked—pretty, alert, friendly, and fundamentally virtuous. He asked her what were the best shows to see, and she gave him the names of several which he imagined he would be sure to detest exceedingly. Then she asked if this were his first visit to London, and he rather enjoyed answering: “My first for twenty-three years. I used to live here.” Afterwards he lunched at Rule’s in Maiden Lane—the first place he found that seemed to him very little changed since the old days. In the afternoon he took a ’bus to the Marble Arch and walked through the September sunshine to Hyde Park Corner and the Green Park, just in time for tea at Rumpelmayer’s. And after that there was nothing to do but return to the Cecil, change into dinner clothes, and begin the journey out to Surbiton.

“There is a good electric service from Waterloo,” she had written in her letter to him, and the sentence echoed in his mind with fatuous profundity all the time he was fixing his collar and tie in front of the bedroom mirror. It was strange to be visiting a person whom you had not seen for twenty-three years. It had been on impulse that he had written to her, and he was not sure, even now, that the impulse had been wise. She had married, of course, a second time—that was something. She had even a nineteen- year-old daughter. And, if one chanced to think of it, she had the vote—that vote for which in the past she had clamoured so much. She would be forty-eight—his own age. Her letter had really told him very little except that her name was now Newburn, that she would be delighted to see him, and that there was that good electric service from Waterloo.