The Society met in a small classroom. The secretary, arch ascetic,
arrived at 5:45 and lit the fire which the chapel-keeper (a man with no
enthusiasm whatever for flagellation, the hairshirt, or intellectuality)
had laid but would not get up to light. The chairman of the Society, a
little Welshman named Llewelyn Roberts, aged fifty, but a youth because
a bachelor, sat on a chair at one side of the incipient fire, and some
dozen members sat round the room on forms. A single gas jet flamed from
the ceiling. Everybody wore his overcoat, and within the collars of
overcoats could be seen glimpses of rich neckties; the hats, some
glossy, dotted the hat-rack which ran along two walls. A hymn was sung,
and then all knelt, some spreading handkerchiefs on the dusty floor to
protect fine trousers, and the chairman invoked the blessing of God on
their discussions. The proper mental and emotional atmosphere was now
established. The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, while
the chairman surreptitiously poked the fire with a piece of wood from
the lower works of a chair, and then the chairman, as he signed the
minutes with a pen dipped in an excise ink-bottle that stood on the
narrow mantelpiece, said in his dry voice--
"I call upon our young friend, Mr Edwin Clayhanger, to open the debate,
`Is Bishop Colenso, considered as a Biblical commentator, a force for
good?'"
"I'm a damned fool!" said Edwin to himself savagely, as he stood on his
feet. But to look at his wistful and nervously smiling face, no one
would have guessed that he was thus blasphemously swearing in the
privacy of his own brain.
He had been entrapped into the situation in which he found himself. It
was not until after he had joined the Society that he had learnt of a
rule which made it compulsory for every member to speak at every meeting
attended, and for every member to open a debate at least once in a year.
And this was not all; the use of notes while the orator was `up' was
absolutely forbidden. A drastic Society! It had commended itself to
elders by claiming to be a nursery for ready speakers.
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