Parfitts’ Galleries

I have already indicated that the machine was somewhat out of the ordinary.  It was, as a fact, exceedingly out of the ordinary.  It was much larger than electric carriages usually are.  It had what the writers of ‘motoring notes’ in papers written by the wealthy for the wealthy love to call a ‘limousine body.’  And outside and in, it was miraculously new and spotless.  On the ivory handles of its doors, on its soft yellow leather upholstery, on its cedar woodwork, on its patent blind apparatus, on its silver fittings, on its lamps, on its footstools, on its silken arm-slings—­not the minutest trace of usage!  Mr. Oxford’s car seemed to show that Mr. Oxford never used a car twice, purchasing a new car every morning, like stockbrokers their silk hats, or the Duke of Selsea his trousers.  There was a table in the ‘body’ for writing, and pockets up and down devised to hold documents, also two arm-chairs, and a suspended contrivance which showed the hour, the temperature, and the fluctuations of the barometer; there was also a speaking-tube.  One felt that if the machine had been connected by wireless telegraphy with the Stock Exchange, the leading studios and the Houses of Parliament, and if a little restaurant had been constructed in the rear, Mr. Oxford might never have been under the necessity of leaving the car; that he might have passed all his days in it from morn to latest eve.

The perfection of the machine and of Mr. Oxford’s attire and complexion caused Priam to look rather shabby.  Indeed, he was rather shabby.  Shabbiness had slightly overtaken him in Putney.  Once he had been a dandy; but that was in the lamented Leek’s time.  And as the car glided, without smell and without noise, through the encumbered avenues of London towards the centre, now shooting forward like a star, now stopping with gentle suddenness, now swerving in a swift curve round a vehicle earthy and leaden-wheeled, Priam grew more and more uncomfortable.  He had sunk into a groove at Putney.  He never left Putney, save occasionally to refresh himself at the National Gallery, and thither he invariably went by train and tube, because the tube always filled him with wonder and romance, and always threw him up out of the earth at the corner of Trafalgar Square with such a strange exhilaration in his soul.  So that he had not seen the main avenues of London for a long time.  He had been forgetting riches and luxury, and the oriental cigarette-shops whose proprietors’ names end in ‘opoulos,’ and the haughtiness of the ruling classes, and the still sterner haughtiness of their footmen.  He had now abandoned Alice in Putney.  And a mysterious demon seized him and gripped him, and sought to pull him back in the direction of the simplicity of Putney, and struggled with him fiercely, and made him writhe and shrink before the brilliant phenomena of London’s centre, and indeed almost pitched him out of the car and set him running as hard as legs would carry to Putney.  It was the demon which we call habit.  He would have given a picture to be in Putney, instead of swimming past Hyde Park Corner to the accompaniment of Mr. Oxford’s amiable and deferential and tactful conversation.