Calling up ghosts is a diversion that has its melancholy
side. Sitting a day or two ago in the corner of the smoking-room of the club I have frequented for the last twenty years, and rarely get to now, I joined with one other survivor like myself in re-peopling what was never known as anything but just The Corner. There, we recalled, sat Arnold Bennett at one end of the sofa. H. G. Wells was usually opposite, but sometimes on the sofa too ; I remember, though I didn't hear it myself, his greeting as the pessimistic H. W.
Massingham approached the Corner : " Ah, here's Massingham, afraid
he's just heard a bit of good news." Then there were the other journalists, Alfred Spender and A. G. Gardiner. There was J. A.
Hobson, stalking in, upright and gaunt. There was the veteran T. E. Page, great as housemaster, great as Horatian, in his unforget- table St. Kilda trousers. There was Sir Tudor Walters, Paymaster- General in some long-distant administration. There was Sir John Wallace, once M.P. for Dunfermline, the latest of the Corner to go, for he died only this month. There was Frank Swinnerton (who has catalogued the Corner himself in his memoirs); he, happily, is no ghost—only metaphorically buried in Surrey. There was Sir Percy Alden, killed by a flying bomb in Tottenham Court Road. There were others, a few still surviving, but the Corner has disintegrated. Let it live in its past. Not many club corners have harboured a more notable company day by day.
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