I wondered whether she would be at the Loyalty. She might. I wondered whether she could have accepted the sacrifice of herself “for purity” without question, without bitterness. She would—that “Chislehurst mind!” Oh, yes, she would have agreed with that idealist’s harshest judgment—indeed, she had agreed with it so completely that she had plucked two words from her heart and given them to the world to whip her with. Boy Fenwick, you could see, had impressed himself like an anchorite’s scourge on the souls of the twins. What was it she had said? “It would be nice to die for purity.” Heavens, but wasn’t she sickened of purity! That pitiful, pitiless moment in the bedroom of the Hôtel Vendôme! The messy kindergarten that men make of love, and call it “romance,” “idealism”! Perhaps Judas was the first idealist—that desperate, exalted betrayal of the body to the soul. They are so certain about their souls, your carnal idealists! Soul, soul, soul! May their punishment be to meet their souls face to face in the afterworld! One could see that boy, a slim pyjama’d figure by the window, a silhouette of cold fire with the ruin of all mankind in his clean eyes, staring through the meretricious dawn of Deauville towards the goal to which he was exalted beyond reason by his disenchantment. He had loved Iris madly. … But they do not love, those men! They torture, and are tortured. They take love as they might take a flower out of a garden, and they torture it because it does not thrive so well in the water of their tears as in the water of God’s good sense. They do not love, those men, they stand in wonder before the power to love that is in them. And theirs the pleasure of a spurious conceit; theirs the pain of a spurious disenchantment. If that boy had loved, he would have turned towards the bed on which she lay, beaten, silenced, a child groping for sense, for pity, for any reasonable thing, and he would have tried to understand, and maybe he would have found the grace to understand, that in her, despite and because of the hungers of the body, there was that frightful humility to an unknown purpose which makes the limitless beauty of some women. But the boy had lit a cigarette. …
“Don’t we cross?” muttered Hilary, and we crossed towards Jermyn Street, for the Loyalty Club lies in Pall Mall, to the end that, in immediate contact with the Royal Automobile Club, it may at least boast, as might occur to a student of Ruskin, a degree of eminence in the abyss.
One is, one can’t help being, impelled by a sense of decorum to disavow at once any connection which may be fancied by worldly readers between the Loyalty Club and the Embassy Club. Such connection could not, of course, be fancied if the Loyalty were so well known as the Embassy; but the Loyalty is, or was—yes, was—the daughter of the Embassy, and although it is not yet so well known to the people of the town, who shall say that a daughter is not more of the mode than her mother? Even, life being what it is, in spite of the mother.
The Loyalty sprang from the Embassy, and it sprang in a polite direction, from Bond Street down the hill of Saint James’s to Pall Mall, where it might lie over against Carlton House Terrace. It sprang because certain persons of ton had found that the Mother Society, while never ordered but with the most polite amenities, was growing perhaps just a little crowded with what-nots; had, by banding themselves in a body financial and social, founded the Loyalty; and were there assured of more freedom for the exercise of a reasonable exclusiveness since, the floor-space of the Loyalty being large enough to accommodate only one hundred and fifty dancers, the membership was strictly limited to one thousand and five hundred. Below were a swimming-bath and squash-courts, besides the more orthodox facilities; and while the whole place was appointed with the severest economy, if not with downright meanness, it is well known that those who spend more than a certain amount of money for supper, and see other people spending as much, will need no other assurance of being in surroundings of the first quality. That is a well-known French invention, of which England has only recently acquired the recipe.
The Loyalty Club can, however, claim no historical notice but in the person of the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, its directeur du restaurant. We need not interrupt ourselves here to envy the salary at which the Chevalier was with difficulty persuaded to leave his retreat at Rapallo; but that he was worth it nobody can gainsay, for wheresoever Risotto went he took with him his invention. His invention he called l’aristocracie internationale; his name, you understand, for his people; they loved it.
A study of the lives of philosophers and statesmen will inform and ennoble the mind; but a sideways glance at such a phenomenon as the twentieth-century Risotto cannot help but make it supple. One of the menials of all time, he is one of the successes of ours; and a portent of the doom of aristocracy in England. Born of Machiavelli by Demoiselle Demimonde, crafty, thin, pale, dry-shiny as shagreen, he had walked to fortune about every great restaurant in Europe, adding always, but with discrimination, to his order of l’aristocracie internationale; and to bankruptcy twice, of truly patrician magnificence, about the baccarat tables of his less inspired but more cautious colleague, M. Cornuché of Cannes and Deauville. The “creation” of the Loyalty Club must serve his biographers as the pinnacle of Risotto’s career. L’aristocracie internationale was ultimately served at last. Not an American was left on Fifth
