Waldo is a nice cabbage, with a vanishing odour of cigarettes,
Salter is made of sand and fire and an university extension ticket.
But the strongest element in all can not be expressed; I think it is a sort of star.*
[* From The Notebook.]
There are fragments of a Morality Play entitled "The Junior Debating Club," of a modern novel in which everyone of the Debaters makes his appearance, of a mediaeval story called "The Legend of Sir Edmund of the Brotherhood of the Jongleurs de Dieu." Notes, fragments, letters, all show an intense individual interest that covered the life of each of his friends. If one of them is worried, he worries too; if one rejoices, he rejoices exceedingly. They write to him about their ideas and views, their relations with one another, their reactions in the world of Oxford life, their love affairs. "I am in need of some literary tonic or blood-letting," says Vernède, "which you alone can supply."
"I only hope," writes Bertram, "you may be as much use in the world in future as you have been in the past to your friends."
"Most of the absent Club," writes Salter separated from the others, "lie together in my pocket at this moment." And Gilbert writes in The Notebook:
AN IDYLL
Tea is made; the red fogs shut round the house but the gas burns.
I wish I had at this moment round the table
A company of fine people.
Two of them are at Oxford and one in Scotland and two at other
places.
But I wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made.
Gilbert was devoted to them all. But as we have seen, Bentley's was the supreme friendship of his youth. It was a friendship in foolery as we are told by the dedication of Greybeards at Play: