hich is for me the Liberal note. The pensive
member sits and hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreign
speech, and among the clustering masses of less insistent whites his
roving eye catches profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to
Calcutta or Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape....

I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the Club to
doubt about Liberalism.

About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in
circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great
narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of the groups
are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some are duologues,
and there is always a sprinkling of lonely, dissociated men. At first
one gets an impression of men going from group to group and as it were
linking them, but as one watches closely one finds that these men just
visit three or four groups at the outside, and know nothing of the
others. One begins to perceive more and more distinctly that one is
dealing with a sort of human mosaic; that each patch in that great place
is of a different quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed
with it. Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in
the Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores
are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a clump
of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island of
South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant from
Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a group of
Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or so, here
a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of eminent
Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE. Next them are
a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised chess-players,
and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging with documents and
intent upon extraordinary business transactions over long cigars....

I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract some
constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of politics.
It was clear they were against the Lords--against plutocrats--against
Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers.... It was tremendously
clear what they were against. The trouble was to find out what on earth
th