“You can become,” said Miss Jamison, getting to the gist of the matter, “a guinea member, or a penny adherent, or a shilling associate, or a more classy sort of associate, that pays five shillings and gets all kinds of literature.”
“I’ll be that,” said Eddy Oliver, who liked nearly all kinds of literature.
So Miss Jamison got out her book of vouchers on the spot, and enrolled him, receiving five shillings and presenting a blue button on which was inscribed the remark, “The Path of Duty is the Path of Safety.”
“So true,” said Eddy. “A jolly good motto. A jolly good League. I’ll tell everyone I meet to join.”
“There’ll be another meeting,” said Miss Jamison, “next Thursday. Of course you’ll come. We want a good audience this time, if possible. We never have one, you know. There’ll be lantern slides, illustrating invasion as it would be now, and invasion as it would be were the National Service League Bill passed. Tremendously exciting.”
Eddy made a note of it in his Cambridge Pocket Diary, a small and profusely inscribed volume without which he never moved, as his engagements were numerous, and his head not strong.
He wrote below June 8th, “N.S.L., 8 p.m., Guildhall, small room.” For the same date he had previously inscribed, “Fabians, 7.15, Victoria Assembly Rooms,” “E.C.U. Protest Meeting, Guildhall, large room, 2.15,” and “Primrose League Fête, Great Shelford Manor, 3 p.m.” He belonged to all these societies (they are all so utterly right) and many others more esoteric, and led a complex and varied life, full of faith and hope. With so many right points of view in the world, so many admirable, if differing, faiths, whither, he demanded, might not humanity rise? Himself, he joined everything that came his way, from Vegetarian Societies to Heretic Clubs and Ritualist Guilds; all, for him, were full of truth. This attitude of omni-acceptance sometimes puzzled and worried less receptive and more single-minded persons; they were known at times even to accuse him, with tragic injustice, of insincerity. When they did so, he saw how right they were; he entirely sympathised with their point of view.
At this time he was nearly twenty-three, and nearly at the end of his Cambridge career. In person he was a slight youth, with intelligent hazel eyes under sympathetic brows, and easily ruffled brown hair, and a general air of receptive impressionability. Clad not unsuitably in grey flannels and the soft hat of the year (soft hats vary importantly from age to age), he strolled down King’s Parade. There he met a man of his own college; this was liable to occur in King’s Parade. The man said he was going to tea with his people, and Eddy was to come too. Eddy did so. He liked the Denisons; they were full of generous enthusiasm for certain things—(not, like Eddy himself, for everything). They wanted Votes for Women, and Liberty for Distressed Russians, and spinning-looms for everyone. They had inspired Eddy to want these things, too; he belonged, indeed, to societies for promoting each of them. On the other hand, they did not want Tariff Reform, or Conscription, or Prayer Book Revision (for they seldom read the Prayer Book), and if they had known that Eddy belonged also to societies for promoting these objects, they would have remonstrated with him.
Professor Denison was a quiet person, who said little, but listened to his wife and children. He had much sense of humour, and some imagination. He was fifty-five. Mrs. Denison was a small and engaging lady, a tremendous worker in good causes; she had little sense of humour, and a vivid, if often misapplied, imagination. She was forty-six. Her son Arnold was tall, lean, cynical, intelligent, edited a university magazine (the most interesting of them), was president of a Conversation Society, and was just going into his uncle’s publishing house. He had plenty of sense of humour (if he had had less, he would have bored himself to death), and an imagination kept within due bounds. He was twenty-three. His sister Margery was also intelligent, but, notwithstanding this, had recently published a book of verse; some of it was not so bad as a great many people’s verse. She also designed wall-papers, which on the whole she did better. She had an unequal sense of humour, keen in certain directions, blunt in others, like most people’s; the same description applies to her imagination. She was twenty-two.
Eddy and Arnold found them having tea in the garden, with two brown undergraduates and a white one. The Denisons belonged to the East and West Society, which tries to effect a union between the natives of these two quarters of the globe. It has conversazioni, at which the brown men congregate at one end of the room and the white men at the other, and both, one hopes, are happy. This afternoon Mrs. Denison and her daughter were each talking to a brown young man (Downing and Christ’s), and the white young man (Trinity Hall) was being silent with Professor Denison, because East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, and really, you can’t talk to blacks. Arnold joined the West; Eddy, who belonged to the above-mentioned society, helped Miss Denison to talk to her black.