the ruin. 'That?' he gasped. He stared vacantly. I
saw that his face had become pale under its sunburn. He looked from the
ruin to me. 'You're not joking with me?' he said thickly. I assured him
that I was not. I assured him that this was indeed the club to which he
had asked to be directed. 'But,' he stammered, 'but--but--' 'You were a
member?' I suggested. 'I am a member,' he cried. 'And what's more, I'm
going to write to the Committee.' I suggested that there was one fatal
objection to such a course. I spoke to him calmly, soothed him with
words of reason, elicited from him, little by little, his sad story. It
appeared that he had been a member of the club for ten years, but had
never (except once, as a guest) been inside it. He had been elected on
the very day on which (by compulsion of his father) he set sail for
Australia. He was a mere boy at the time. Bitterly he hated leaving old
England; nor did he ever find the life of a squatter congenial. The one
thing which enabled him to endure those ten years of unpleasant exile
was the knowledge that he was a member of a London club. Year by year,
it was a keen pleasure to him to send his annual subscription. It kept
him in touch with civilisation, in touch with Home. He loved to know
that when, at length, he found himself once again in the city of his
birth he would have a firm foothold on sociability. The friends of his
youth might die, or might forget him. But, as member of a club, he
would find substitutes for them in less than no time. Herding bullocks,
all day long, on the arid plains of Central Australia, he used to keep
up his spirits by thinking of that first whisky-and-soda which he would
order from a respectful waiter as he entered his club. All night long,
wrapped in his blanket beneath the stars, he used to dream of that
drink to come, that first symbol of an unlost grip on civilisation...
He had arrived in London this very afternoon. Depositing his luggage at
an hotel, he had come straight to his club. 'And now...' He filled up
his aposiopesis with an uncouth gesture, signifying 'I may as well get
back to Australia.'

I was on the point of offering to take him to my own club and give him
his first whisky-and-soda therein. But I refrained. The sight of an
extant club might have maddened the man. It certainly was very hard for
him, to have belonged to a club for ten years, to have loved it so
passionately from such a distance, and then to find himself destin