“I went once,” said the Babe. “We ate what is described as a cold collation. Then we all sat round, and somebody made jokes and we all laughed. I made jokes too, but nobody sat round me. There was a delightful, decorous gaiety about the proceedings. I think we sang hymns afterwards, or else we looked at photographs of cathedrals, I forget which. Hymns and photographs are so much alike.”
“O Lord, what do you mean?” asked Reggie.
“They are both like Sunday evening, and things which are like the same thing are like one another. At eleven we parted.”
“The wicked old Babe doesn’t care for simple pleasures,” said Ealing. “Oh, he knows a thing or two.”
“It’s always absurd for a lot of people to meet like that,” continued the Babe. “The whole point of dining clubs ought to be to have a lot of members with utterly different tastes. Then you see they can’t all talk about their tastes, they can’t all sit round and do one thing, and consequently they all talk rot, which is the only rational form of conversation. If there is one thing I detest more than another it is cliques. Individually I love most of the members of the Sunday Club, collectively I cannot even like them. And the same thing applies to the Athenæum.”
“Then why do you belong?”
“In order to go to Chapel in a pink and white tie, and also because I love the members individually. I must go. Where’s Bill? Come along under my ulster. Good-bye, you people.”
V.—The Work-club.
For men must work.
Kingsley.
Reggie and Ealing were working together. They had formed a work club consisting only of themselves, and it was to meet for the first time this morning. In order to ensure the success of the first meeting they had had a heavy breakfast at a quarter to nine, because, as Reggie said, brain work is more exhausting than anything else, after which they had played a little snob-cricket in the archway between the two halves of Fellows’ Buildings, in order to clear the brain, until their names were taken by the porter and entered in the report book. So they adjourned to the bridge for a little to finish their pipes, and about a quarter to eleven sat down one at each side of Reggie’s larger table, with a box of cigarettes and a tobacco jar between them, Reggie’s alarum clock, which had been induced to go, two copies of Professor Jebb’s Œdipus Tyrannus, at which they were both working, one small Liddell & Scott, and a translation of the play as edited in Mr. Bohn’s helpful series of classical authors, in case Professor Jebb proved too free in his translation, “for the difficulties,” as Reggie acutely observed, “of rendering Greek both literally and elegantly cannot be over-stated: indeed, it is to be feared that some of our best English scholars sacrifice literal rendering to the latter.”