The Pilgrim of a Smile

Excerpt from The Pilgrim of a Smile The Curio Club, as all the world knows, overlooks the Thames. From its upper windows one may look down upon the swirl of discoloured water hurrying to the sea. To the right, spanning the river like a rusty iron bar thrown across a ditch, loom the girders of the railway bridge of Charing Cross. Opposite, across the river, a factory chimney climbs into the upper air from out of the disorder of wharves and cranes, merchandise and mean houses, which (lank the mud-banks on the Surrey side. Immediately below, where once the gardens of the Adelphi fell away to the watermen's steps, lies the Embankment, bearing in its broad sweep a myriad vehicles, and noisy, even at the end of night, with the clangour of County Council trams. The Embankment itself, with its burden of traffic, is hidden from view by the green tops of trees, but above these, to the left, rises a slender needle or obelisk of grey stone, known to all Londoners under the name of her, whom age could not wither: whose infinite variety custom could not stale. At the foot of this column, one may see - if one is curious enough to leave the comfort and good company of the club for the common street - two figures, half woman and half beast, patient and immobile, asleep and dreaming for all time, it may be supposed, upon the beauty of Cleopatra. It is not, however, to its position alone - nor even to the decorative skill of the Adam brothers - that the Curio club owes its peculiar reputation. It is in the quality of its membership, in the character of its members and in the temper of its society that the Curio club is so renowned: it is in this constitution that its guests are so admirably entertained: it is of this cause that its waiting list is so long. To be a Curio - to use the quaint phraseology of the club - one must be curious: one must be eccentric: distinguishable, if not distinguished: egregious: out of the common herd.