The making of a bigot

CAMBRIDGE.

It was Trinity Sunday, full of buttercups and cuckoos and the sun. In Cambridge it was a Scarlet Day. In colleges, people struggling through a desert of Tripos papers or Mays rested their souls for a brief space in a green oasis, and took their lunch up the river. In Sunday schools, teachers were telling of the shamrock, that ill-considered and peculiarly inappropriate image conceived by a hard-pressed saint. Everywhere people were being ordained.

Miss Jamison met Eddy Oliver in Petty Cury, while she was doing some house-to-house visiting with a bundle of leaflets that looked like tracts. She looked at him vaguely, then suddenly began to take an interest in him.

“Of course,” she said, with decision, “you’ve got to join, too.”

“Rather,” he said. “Tell me what it is. I’m sure it’s full of truth.”

“It’s the National Service League. I’m a working associate, and I’m persuading people to join. It’s a good thing, really. Were you at the meeting yesterday?”

“No, I missed that. I was at another meeting, in point of fact. I often am, you know.” He said it with a touch of mild perplexity. It was so true.

She was turning over the sheaf of tracts.

“Let me see: which will meet your case? Leaflet M, the Modern Sisyphus--that’s a picture one, and more for the poor; so simple and graphic. P is better for you. HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT what war is, and what it would be like to have it raging round your own home? HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT what your feelings would be if you heard that an enemy had landed on these shores, and you knew that you were ignorant of the means by which you could help to defend your country and your home? YOU PROBABLY THINK that if you are a member of a rifle club, and know how to shoot, you have done all that is needed. But--well, you haven’t, and so on, you know. You’d better take P. And Q. Q says ‘Are you a Liberal? Then join the League, because, etc. Are you a Democrat? Are you a Socialist? Are you a Conservative? Are you----’ ”

“Yes,” said Eddy, “I’m everything of that sort. It won’t be able to think of anything I’m not.”

She thought he was being funny, though he wasn’t; he was speaking the simple truth.

“Anyhow,” she said, “you’ll find good reasons there why you should join, whatever you are. Just think, you know, suppose the Germans landed.” She supposed that for a little, then got on to physical training and military discipline, how important they are.

Eddy said when she paused, “Quite. I think you are utterly right.” He always did, when anyone explained anything to him; he was like that; he had a receptive mind.

“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.

Rather soon the East went, and the West became happier.

Miss Denison said, “Dorothy Jamison came round this afternoon, wanting us to join the National Service League or something.”

Mrs. Denison said, snippily, “Dorothy ought to know better,” at the same moment that Eddy said, “It’s a jolly little League, apparently. Quite full of truth.”

The Hall man said that his governor was a secretary or something at home, and kept having people down to speak at meetings. So he and the Denisons argued about it, till Margery said, “Oh, well, of course, you’re hopeless. But I don’t know what Eddy means by it. You don’t want to encourage militarism, surely, Eddy.”

Eddy said surely yes, shouldn’t one encourage everything? But really, and no ragging, Margery persisted, he didn’t belong to a thing like that?

Eddy showed his blue button.

“Rather, I do. HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT what war is, and what it would be like to have it raging round your own home? Are you a democrat? Then join the League.”

“Idiot,” said Margery, who knew him well enough to call him so.

“He believes in everything. I believe in nothing,” Arnold explained. “He accepts; I refuse. He likes three lumps of sugar in his tea; I like none. He had better be a journalist, and write for the Daily Mail, the Clarion, and the Spectator.”

“What are you going to do when you go down?” Margery asked Eddy, suspiciously.

Eddy blushed, because he was going for a time to work in a Church settlement. A man he knew was a clergyman there, and had convinced him that it was his duty and he must. The Denisons did not care about Church settlements, only secular ones; that, and because he had a clear, pale skin that showed everything, was why he blushed.

“I’m going to work with some men in Southwark,” he said, embarrassed. “Anyhow, for a time. Help with boys’ clubs, you know, and so on.”

“Parsons?” inquired Arnold, and Eddy admitted it, where upon Arnold changed the subject; he had no concern with Parsons.

The Denisons were so shocked at Eddy, that they let the Hall man talk about the South African match for quite two minutes. They were probably afraid that if they didn’t Eddy might talk about the C.I.C.C.U., which would be infinitely worse. Eddy was perhaps the only man at the moment in Cambridge who belonged simultaneously to the C.I.C.C.U., the Church Society, and the Heretics. (It may be explained for the benefit of the uninitiated that the C.I.C.C.U. is Low Church, and the Church Society is High Church, and the Heretics is no church at all. They are all admirable societies).

Arnold said presently, interrupting the match, “If I keep a second-hand bookshop in Soho, will you help me, Eddy?”

Eddy said he would like to.

“It will be awfully good training for both of us,” said Arnold. “You’ll see much more life that way, you know, than at your job in Southwark.”