The White Monkey [antikvár]

PART I CHAPTER I Promenade Coming down the steps of Snooks' Club, so well worn by the apostles of things as they were, on that momentous mid-October afternoon of 1922, Sir Lawrence Mont, ninth baronet, set his fine nose towards the east wind, and moved his thin legs with speed. Political by birth rather than by nature, he reviewed the revolution which had restored his Party to power with a detachment not devoid of humour. Passing the Remove Club, he thought : ' Some sweating* into shoes, there ! No more confectioned dishes. A woodcock—without trimmings, for a change ! ' The captains and the kings had departed from Snooks' before he entered it, for he was not of " that catch-penny crew, now paid off, no, sir ; fellows who turned their tails on the land the moment the war was over. Pah ! " But for an hour he had listened to echoes, and his lively twisting mind, embedded in deposits of the past, sceptical of the present, and of all political protestations and pronouncements, had recorded with amusement the confusion of patriotism and personalities left behind by the fateful gathering. Like most landowners, he distrusted doctrine. If he had a political belief, it was a tax on wheat ; and so far as he could see, he was now alone in it—but then he was not seeking election ; in other words, his principle was not in W.M.