A.V. Laider | Page 5

a charlatan. But it is foolish to be guided by an accident of color. I
had soon rejected my first impression of my fellow-diner. I found him
very sympathetic.
Anywhere but in England it would be impossible for two solitary men,
howsoever much reduced by influenza, to spend five or six days in the
same hostel and not exchange a single word. That is one of the charms
of England. Had Laider and I been born and bred in any other land than
Eng we should have become acquainted before the end of our first
evening in the small smoking-room, and have found ourselves
irrevocably committed to go on talking to each other throughout the
rest of our visit. We might, it is true, have happened to like each other
more than any one we had ever met. This off chance may have
occurred to us both. But it counted for nothing against the certain
surrender of quietude and liberty. We slightly bowed to each other as
we entered or left the dining-room or smoking-room, and as we met on
the wide-spread sands or in the shop that had a small and faded
circulating library. That was all. Our mutual aloofness was a positive
bond between us.
Had he been much older than I, the responsibility for our silence would
of course have been his alone. But he was not, I judged, more than five
or six years ahead of me, and thus I might without impropriety have
taken it on myself to perform that hard and perilous feat which English
people call, with a shiver, "breaking the ice." He had reason, therefore,
to be as grateful to me as I to him. Each of us, not the less frankly
because silently, recognized his obligation to the other. And when, on

the last evening of my stay, the ice actually was broken there was no
ill-will between us: neither of us was to blame.
It was a Sunday evening. I had been out for a long last walk and had
come in very late to dinner. Laider had left his table almost directly
after I sat down to mine. When I entered the smoking-room I found him
reading a weekly review which I had bought the day before. It was a
crisis. He could not silently offer nor could I have silently accepted,
six-pence. It was a crisis. We faced it like men. He made, by word of
mouth, a graceful apology. Verbally, not by signs, I besought him to go
on reading. But this, of course, was a vain counsel of perfection. The
social code forced us to talk now. We obeyed it like men. To reassure
him that our position was not so desperate as it might seem, I took the
earliest opportunity to mention that I was going away early next
morning. In the tone of his "Oh, are you?" he tried bravely to imply that
he was sorry, even now, to hear that. In a way, perhaps, he really was
sorry. We had got on so well together, he and I. Nothing could efface
the memory of that. Nay, we seemed to be hitting it off even now.
Influenza was not our sole theme. We passed from that to the aforesaid
weekly review, and to a correspondence that was raging therein on faith
and reason.
This correspondence had now reached its fourth and penultimate
stage--its Australian stage. It is hard to see why these correspondences
spring up; one only knows that they do spring up, suddenly, like street
crowds. There comes, it would seem, a moment when the whole
English-speaking race is unconsciously bursting to have its say about
some one thing--the split infinitive, or the habits of migratory birds, or
faith and reason, or what-not. Whatever weekly review happens at such
a moment to contain a reference, however remote, to the theme in
question reaps the storm. Gusts of letters come in from all corners of
the British Isles. These are presently reinforced by Canada in full blast.
A few weeks later the Anglo-Indians weigh in. In due course we have
the help of our Australian cousins. By that time, however, we of the
mother country have got our second wind, and so determined are we to
make the most of it that at last even the editor suddenly loses patience
and says, "This correspondence must now cease.--Ed." and wonders

why on earth he ever allowed anything so tedious and idiotic to begin.
I pointed out to Laider one of the Australian letters that had especially
pleased me in the current issue. It was from "A Melbourne Man," and
was of the abrupt kind which declares that "all your correspondents
have been groping in the dark" and then settles the whole matter in one
short sharp flash.