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So is Kit. She'll be down soon." "Good," said Julian; "may Jimmy and I have supper at your table?" "Do," said Malim. "Plenty of room. We'd better order our food and not wait for her." We took our places, and looked round us. The hum of conversation was persistent. It rose above the clatter of the supper tables and the sudden bursts of laughter. It was now five minutes to twelve.
He exhibited the Oxford manner at times rather noticeably. Kit loved it. Till I saw them together I had thought Kit's accent and her incessant mangling of the King's English would have jarred upon Malim. But I soon found that I was wrong. He did not appear to notice.
She was laughing like a child. She leaned across the table, put her arms round Malim's neck, and kissed him. She glanced at us. Malim smiled quietly, but said nothing. She kissed Julian, and she kissed me. "Now we're all friends," she said, sitting down. "Better know each other's names," said Malim. "Kit, this is Mr. Cloyster. Mr. Cloyster, may I introduce you to my wife?"
Presently, however, we saw one, laid for four, at which only one man was sitting. "Hullo!" said Julian, "there's Malim. Let's go and see if we can push into his table. Well, Malim, how are you? Do you know Cloyster?" Mr. Malim had a lofty expression. I should have put him down as a scholarly recluse. His first words upset this view somewhat. "Coming to Covent Garden?" he said, genially. "I am.
Accordingly I sat on the barrel, and through a murmur of applause I could hear Michael telling someone that he'd first seen that barrel five years before his operetta came out at the Court. At that moment a venerable figure strode with dignity into the bar. "Maundrell," said Malim to me. "The last of the old Bohemians. An old actor. Always wears the steeple hat and a long coat with skirts."
I saw a great deal of Malim after that. He and Julian became my two chief mainstays when I felt in need of society. Malim was a man of delicate literary skill, a genuine lover of books, a severe critic of modern fiction. Our tastes were in the main identical, though it was always a blow to me that he could see nothing humorous in Mr. George Ade, whose Fables I knew nearly by heart.
Fleet Street reproduces for this one hour the Sahara. "When I knock at the Temple gate late at night," said Malim, "and am admitted by the night porter, I always feel a pleasantly archaic touch." I agreed with him. The process seemed a quaint admixture of an Oxford or Cambridge college, Gottingen, and a feudal keep.
I noticed, however, that they wore an expression of relief at the enthusiastic reception my play had received. But an encounter with Kit and Malim was altogether charming. They had had some slight quarrel on the way to the theatre, and had found a means of reconciliation in their mutual emotion at the pathos of the first act's finale.
The man whom I am discussing, and of whom Malim is a type, is, as I have already proved, intellectual. He has, therefore, ambitions. The more intellectual he is the more he loathes the stupid routine of his daily task. Thus his leisure is his most valuable possession.
Their inane anecdotes, their pointless observations are positively courted. It is Jane, the stumpy, the flat-footed Jane, who wears glasses and has all the virtues which are supposed to go with indigestion: big hands and an enormous waist Jane, I repeat, who is told off to talk to a man like Malim.
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