And another advantage is that I can take five weeks
in this way while deluding my conscience into thinking
that I am only taking four. A holiday taken in
a lump is taken and over. Taken in weeks, with
odd days at each end of the weeks, it always leaves
a margin for error. I shall take care that the
error is on the right side. And if anybody grumbles,
“Why, you’re always going away,”
I shall answer with dignity, “Confound it!
I’m always coming back.”
It is the fashion, I understand, to be late for dinner,
but punctual for lunch. What the perfect gentleman
does when he accepts an invitation to breakfast I
do not know. Possibly he has to be early.
But for lunch the guests should arrive at the very
stroke of the appointed hour, even though it leads
to a certain congestion on the mat.
My engagement was for one-thirty, and for a little
while my reputation seemed to be in jeopardy.
Two circumstances contributed to this. The first
one was the ever-present difficulty in these busy days
of synchronizing an arrival. A prudent man allows
himself time for being pushed off the first half-dozen
omnibuses and trusts to surging up with the seventh
wave. I was so unlucky as to cleave my way on
to the first ’bus of all, with the result that
when I descended from it I was a good ten minutes
early. Well, that was bad enough. But, just
as I was approaching the door, I realized that my
calculations had been made for a one o’clock
lunch. It was now ten to one; I had forty minutes
in hand.
It is very difficult to know what to do with forty
minutes in the middle of Piccadilly, particularly
when it is raining. Until a year ago I had had
a club there, and I had actually resigned from it (how
little one foresees the future!) on the plea that I
never had occasion to use it. I felt that I would
cheerfully have paid the subscription for the rest
of my life in order to have had the loan of its roof
at that moment. My new club—like the
National Gallery and the British Museum, those refuges
for the wet Londoner—was too far away.
The Academy had not yet opened.
And then a sudden inspiration drew me into the Burlington
Arcade. They say that the churches of London
are ill-attended nowadays, but at least St. James,
Piccadilly, can have no cause for complaint, for I
suppose that the merchants of the Arcade, and all those
dependent on them, repair thither twice weekly to
pray for wet weather. The Burlington Arcade is
indeed a beautiful place on a wet day. One can
move leisurely from window to window, passing from
silk pyjamas to bead necklaces and from bead necklaces
back to silk pyjamas again; one can look for a break
in the weather from either the north or the south;
and at the south end there is a clock conveniently
placed for those who have a watch waiting its turn
at the repairer’s and a luncheon engagement
in forty minutes.
