Other Sundays followed, and other week-days, and more delightful lunches, and many concerts and theatres, and expeditions into the country, and rambles about the town, and musical evenings in St. Gregory’s parish, and, in general, a jolly life. Eddy loved the whole of life, including his work in St. Gregory’s, which he was quite as much interested in as if it had been his exclusive occupation. Ingenuously, he would try to draw his friends into pleasures which they were by temperament and training little fitted to enjoy. For instance, he said to Datcherd and Mrs. Le Moine one day, “We’ve got a mission on now in the parish. There’s an eight o’clock service on Monday night, so there’ll be no club. I wish you’d come to the service instead; it’s really good, the mission. Father Dempsey, of St. Austin’s, is taking it. Have you ever heard him?”
Datcherd, in his grave, melancholy way, shook his head. Eileen smiled at Eddy, and patted his arm in the motherly manner she had for him.
“Now what do you think? No, we never have. Would we understand him if we did? I expect not, do you know. Tell us when the mission (is that what you call it? But I thought they were for blacks and Jews) is over, and I’ll come again and play to the clubs. Till then, oughtn’t you to be going to services every night, and I wonder ought you to be dining and theatreing with us on Thursday?”
“Oh, I can fit it in easily,” said Eddy, cheerfully. “But, seriously, I do wish you’d come one night. You’d like Father Dempsey. He’s an extraordinarily alive and stimulating person. Hillier thinks him flippant; but that’s rubbish. He’s the best man in the Church.”
All the same, they didn’t come. How difficult it is to make people do what they are not used to! How good it would be for them if they would; if Hillier would but sometimes spend an evening at Datcherd’s settlement; if James Peters would but come, at Eddy’s request, to shop at the Poetry Bookshop; if Datcherd would but sit under Father Dempsey, the best man in the Church! It sometimes seemed to Eddy that it was he alone, in a strange, uneclectic world, who did all these things with impartial assiduity and fervour.
And he found, which was sad and bewildering, that those with less impartiality of taste got annoyed with him. The vicar thought, not unnaturally, that during the mission he ought to have given up other engagements, and devoted himself exclusively to the parish, getting them to come. All the curates thought so too. Meanwhile Arnold Denison thought that he ought to have stayed to the end of the debate on Impressionism in Poetry at the Wednesday Club that met in Billy Raymond’s rooms, instead of going away in the middle to be in time for the late service at St. Gregory’s. Arnold thought so particularly because he hadn’t yet spoken himself, and it would obviously have been more becoming in Eddy to wait and hear him. Eddy grew to have an uncomfortable feeling of being a little wrong with everyone; he felt aggrieved under it.
At last, a fortnight before Christmas, the vicar spoke to him. It was on a Sunday evening. Eddy had had supper with Cecil Le Moine, as it was Cecil’s turn to have the Sunday Games Club, a childish institution that flourished just then among them, meet at his house. Eddy returned to St. Gregory’s late.
The vicar said, at bedtime, “I want to speak to you, Oliver, if you can spare a minute or two,” and they went into his study. Eddy felt rather like a schoolboy awaiting a jawing. He watched the vicar’s square, sensible, kind face, through a cloud of smoke, and saw his point of view precisely. He wanted certain work done. He didn’t think the work was so well done if a hundred other things were done also. He believed in certain things. He didn’t think belief in those things could be quite thorough if those who held it had constant and unnecessary traffic with those who quite definitely didn’t. Well, it was of course a point of view; Eddy realised that.
The vicar said, “I don’t want to be interfering, Oliver. But, frankly, are you as keen on this job as you were two months ago?”
“Yes, rather,” said Eddy. “Keener, I think. One gets into it, you see.”