The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1923

III.—The Chairman of the Tramping Club

III.—The Chairman of the Tramping Club.

Modesty is his prime characteristic. I had great difficulty in getting an interview with him at all. He was exceedingly unwilling to talk of himself, and deprecated my leading questions with a gentle and unassuming wave of his hand. I fell rather in the position of a castaway on a desolate island, face to face with an exceedingly polite and perfectly courteous, but impregnably ungetattable oyster. Not that he would not speak. In that respect, indeed, he was an improvement on the oyster. If modesty is the main, affability is the second factor in his make-up. I have seldom met a man whose frank and disarming smile sooner won a way into the calloused—shall I say, somewhat cynical?—heart of the hardened journalist. Not even the jovial laugh of P.M.-S.—but more of him hereafter. He was exquisitely attired when I met him—indeed, I understand his appearance is the pride of the Club of which he is Chairman, when returning from a long and arduous, not to say muddy, trip over the week-end; and, in contrast, I myself gazed with a shiver of repulsion at the eccentric crease—one of many—which wandered its drunken way down the leg of my trousers. I felt, with a touch of what Freud so felicitously defines as the inferiority-complex, that I was in the presence of One of Nature's Gentlemen. Summoning all my courage, however, and endeavouring to adjust my clothes to folds of a more Roman simplicity, I managed to draw him out upon one or two subjects of some importance.

"I do not wish to labour the point unduly," I said, "and I think I am authorised to state that humour on this subject, as on the Library, will for some years to come be excluded from the pages of 'The spike,' but I understand that there are various strange rumours in circulation, and (I believe) jokes (I do not know of what calibre) are frequently cracked about the Club which you adorn with so much grace as Chairman. Is there any substance in or foundation for these remarks, this ribald mirth?

"None," he answered, "and I do not know personally to what you refer. It has certainly been remarked that when a man falls into a creek with a girl, that is the inevitable prelude to an engagement. This, however, is a principle of undoubted validity, and can hardly be described as a rumour or a mere joke. I will give you instances—"

"It is unnecessary," I replied. "I believe you. I have observed many such cases myself. I am glad to have the point cleared up. And now can you tell me anything about your hobbies? Tramping, I understand, is almost a business in itself. Golf, the theatre, books, music—?"

His face shone. Here, at last, I felt, I had touched a sympathetic chord. "Ah!" he said, enthusiastically, "now you are talking. What more enjoyable after a long grinding day at the office" (I could not help thinking of the words of the Junior Partner—what workers these lawyers are!) "than a visit to the theatre—what more fascinating than to lose oneself in a dreamland of fairy creation, or to gaze enthralled at the working-out of some mighty problem-drama of the present age? Yes, I have spent many happy hours at Fuller's."

"Books?"

"Well, I have studied the poets somewhat. What are those noble lines of Swinburne's—or is it Wordsworth?—

'Life is earnest, life is real,
And the grave is not its goal'—

'Let us then be up and doing!' does it not go on? 'Footprints in the sands of time'—it always reminds me of Robinson Crusoe, somehow. And then music! You must hear me play the pianola sometime. I have also been practising hard at my mouth organ lately, not entirely, I hope, without success. And Saturday afternoon often finds me on the links at Berhampore."

And here I made a blunder. I forgot that even the most cultured of golfers are particular about how one speaks of their religion. Even as I spoke the thud of my faux pas rose up and filled the air with its noisy horror.

"And what," I asked, "do you find the best—a mixed foursome or a mashie ?"

He threw me out of the room.