ADVENTURES IN FRIENDSHIP

David Grayson

I

AN ADVENTURE IN FRATERNITY

This, I am firmly convinced, is a strange world, as strange a one as Iwas ever in. Looking about me I perceive that the simplest things arethe most difficult, the plainest things, the darkest, the commonestthings, the rarest.

I have had an amusing adventure—and made a friend.

This morning when I went to town for my marketing I met a man who was aMason, an Oddfellow and an Elk, and who wore the evidences of hisvarious memberships upon his coat. He asked me what lodge I belongedto, and he slapped me on the back in the heartiest manner, as though hehad known me intimately for a long time. (I may say, in passing, that hewas trying to sell me a new kind of corn-planter.) I could not helpfeeling complimented—both complimented and abashed. For I am not aMason, or an Oddfellow, or an Elk. When I told him so he seemed muchsurprised and disappointed.

"You ought to belong to one of our lodges," he said. "You'd be sure ofhaving loyal friends wherever you go."

He told me all about his grips and passes and benefits; he told me howmuch it would cost me to get in and how much more to stay in and howmuch for a uniform (which was not compulsory). He told me about the finefuneral the Masons would give me; he said that the Elks would care formy widow and children.

"You're just the sort of a man," he said, "that we'd like to have in ourlodge. I'd enjoy giving you the grip of fellowship."

He was a rotund, good-humoured man with a shining red nose and a huskyvoice. He grew so much interested in telling me about his lodges that Ithink (I think) he forgot momentarily that he was sellingcorn-planters, which was certainly to his credit.

As I drove homeward this afternoon I could not help thinking of theMasons, the Oddfellows and the Elks—and curiously not without a senseof depression. I wondered if my friend of the corn-planters had foundthe pearl of great price that I have been looking for so long. For isnot friendliness the thing of all things that is most pleasant in thisworld? Sometimes it has seemed to me that the faculty of reaching outand touching one's neighbour where he really lives is the greatest ofhuman achievements. And it was with an indescribable depression that Iwondered if these Masons and Oddfellows and Elks had in reality caughtthe Elusive Secret and confined it within the insurmountable andimpenetrable walls of their mysteries, secrets, grips, passes, benefits.

"It must, indeed," I said to myself, "be a precious sort of fraternitythat they choose to protect so sedulously."

I felt as though life contained something that I was not permitted tolive. I recalled how my friend of the corn-planters had wished to giveme the grip of the fellowship—only he could not. I was not entitled toit. I knew no grips or passes. I wore no uniform.

"It is a complicated matter, this fellowship," I said to myself.

So I jogged along feeling rather blue, marveling that those things whichoft

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