A trap-door opened in the floor of the shop and a horrible, pallid, weak, cringing man came up out of the earth of St. James’s, and knelt before God far more submissively than even the manager had knelt.  He had brushes and blacking, and he blacked and he brushed and breathed alternately, undoing continually with his breath or his filthy hand what he had done with his brush.  He never looked up, never spoke.  When he had made the boots like mirrors he gathered together his implements and vanished, silent and dutifully bent, through the trap-door back into the earth of St. James’s.  And because the trap-door had not shut properly the manager stamped on it and stamped down the pale man definitely into the darkness underneath.  And then G.J. was wafted out of the shop with smiles and bows.

Chapter 9

THE CLUB

The vast “morning-room” of the Monumental Club (pre-eminent among clubs for its architecture) was on the whole tonically chilly.  But as one of the high windows stood open, and there were two fires fluttering beneath the lovely marble mantelpieces, between the fires and the window every gradation of temperature could be experienced by the curious.  On each wall book-shelves rose to the carved and gilded ceiling.  The furlongs of shelves were fitted with majestic volumes containing all the Statutes, all the Parliamentary Debates, and all the Reports of Royal Commissions ever printed to narcotise the conscience of a nation.  These calf-bound works were not, in fact, read; but the magnificent pretence of their usefulness was completed by carpeted mahogany ladders which leaned here and there against the shelfing, in accord with the theory that some studious member some day might yearn and aspire to some upper shelf.  On reading-stands and on huge mahogany tables were disposed the countless newspapers of Great Britain and Ireland, Europe and America, and also the files of such newspapers.  The apparatus of information was complete.

G.J. entered the splendid apartment like a discoverer.  It was empty.  Not a member; not a servant!  It waited, content to be inhabited, equally content with its own solitude.  This apartment had made an adjunct even of the war; the function of the war in this apartment was to render it more impressive, to increase, if possible, its importance, for nowhere else could the war be studied so minutely day by day.

A strange thing!  G.J.’s sense of duty to himself had been quickened by the defection of his valet.  He felt that he had been failing to comprehend in detail the cause and the evolution of the war, and that even his general ideas as to it were inexcusably vague; and he had determined to go every morning to the club, at whatever inconvenience, for the especial purpose of studying and getting the true hang of the supreme topic.  As he sat down he was aware of the solemnity of the great room, last fastness of the old strict decorum in the club.  You might not smoke in it until after 10 p.m.