“You may very well be right,” he said. “But I’m in no position to
judge. I don’t know anything about Public Schools.”
“But surely----”
“No; I never went to one, and, though I’ve met a good many Public School
men in my run of life, I’ve had few opportunities of contrasting their
standard of intelligence with that of the French and German. Your
criticism would not apply to the men I know, because we are all more or
less specialists in the army.”
A soldier! And to be reading Einstein. I should have been hardly more
astonished if I had discovered a parish priest reading Casanova.
“You are surprised?” he said.
“Well, a little; I hadn’t thought of you as a soldier.”
“So I would suppose; one wouldn’t, but I am, though. A Major in the
Inniskillings.”
And, in order to cover my surprise, I began to ask him about the war;
which had been his division; where had he been at Cambrai; had he been
to Ypres?
But, after dinner in the smoking-room, I drew the conversation round to
philosophy and science. I forgot how I managed it, probably through
Plato. The theory of platonic love provides an easy bridge for a
discussion of army life to cross over into the fields of speculation.
And the Major proceeded to define with real enthusiasm the difference
between the Socratic and the Aristotelian view of knowledge. His eyes
glowed as he spoke. But there was no originality in anything he said.
His conversation was a précis of the preface to the Socratic Dialogues
in the Everyman Edition. On no subject was he capable of independent
thought.
“You must have made a considerable study of philosophy,” I said.
“Yes. It’s the one thing I really care for. I have not done badly in the
army, and, on the whole, I suppose that I have been happy there. But I
have always thought that my mind’s natural bent is towards speculation,
rather than towards action. It has always been an effort to me to
concentrate my attention on my army work. I should have preferred a life
of quiet study.”
A look of wistful resignation crossed his face, and I waited for him to
continue. He was in the mood when confidence comes easily, and it is
less difficult to reveal even the most intimate secrets of one’s life to
a stranger, a person whom one has never met before, and will, in all
probability, never meet again, than to an acquaintance with whom one is
brought in contact every day.
“Yes,” he said, “I should have preferred a life of study. I never wanted
to go into the army. It was a question of money. I was an only child. My
father, a civil servant, died when I was three years old, and I was
brought up by my mother. I never went to school. I had few friends. I
used to sit and read for hours together; there was an idea of my going
into the Church. But my mother died when I was fifteen years old, and I
went to live with an uncle of mine--my father’s eldest brother. He was
not well off. I doubt very much whether, even if he had wanted to, it
would have been possible for him to send me to the University. But he
never entertained the project. He did not regard the Church as a
suitable career for a man--at any rate, not for his brother’s son. For
a month or so after my mother’s death he was patient with me and
sympathetic. But, when he thought the first grief had passed, he
reassumed his usual business manner. One morning after breakfast he
asked me to come into his study.
“‘Ah, come along, John,’ he said. ‘Now come, bring your chair up in
front of the fire and let’s have a chat about what’s going to happen to
you!’
“I am sure that he did his best to understand me. He regarded me then, I
know--for he has told me so since--as an absurd molly-coddle.
“‘You would not be the man you are now, John, if I hadn’t sent you into
the army.’
“He said that to me only a few months ago. And I daresay that he was
right. I was not at all the type of boy that he admired. I must have
been a great worry to him.”
“And he gave you no choice?” I said.
“Practically none, and I was too miserable at that time to care greatly
what happened to me. I sat in the armchair and said ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ and
‘Yes.’ In twenty minutes the course of my whole life was settled. It is
rather strange when you come to think of it. We live for seventy years.
But everything that happens to us during those seventy years may be
dependent on the course of a conversation that lasts twenty minutes, and
takes place before we have lived a quarter of our lives, when we have no
experience of the world at all.
“I had a bad time at the beginning. It was, as my uncle called it, ‘a
licking into shape.’ Sandhurst is no fun for a man who has never been to
school. They gave me an ink-bath because I sat on the wrong side of the
ante-room. I was no good at games, and I could see how the
staff-sergeants and officers despised me. But at last I managed to fit
into my box.”
“I think you’ve done a bigger thing in winning through against so many
odds,” I said, “than anything you would have done sitting in your study.
You’ve made a success out of a career that was uncongenial to you.
That’s a big thing.”
He seemed pleased with me for saying that.
“Yes. I suppose I have made a success of it,” he said, “and it hasn’t
been easy. It’s been against the grain, and I have had temptations--one
big temptation.”
“Yes?”
“At least I suppose it was a big temptation, and I suppose I did right
in resisting it; I don’t know. I’ve never been able to decide. I should
rather like----”
He paused, a little uncertainly, and looked at me hard from beneath his
great, heavy eyebrows.
“I should be very interested, and, of course, I should regard anything
you might tell me as a confidence,” I said.
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said. “But, oh well, it does not matter
very much either way, now. I might as well tell you.”
And I sat back in my chair and prepared myself for the usual story--a
clash between love and duty; that was what I expected. The wife of a
brother officer; a scene of passion and resignation; and then the long
regret, deepening with the years. It is a story frequent enough, though
everyone regards his own version of it as peculiar to himself. But the
story of the major’s temptation was quite different, or perhaps it would
be truer to say that it was the same story seen from another side. It
was a clash between honour and the thing that he valued most highly in
the world. For he was the sort of man in whose life women play only a
casual part. At any rate, this was his story as he told it me.
“It was out East,” he said, “but I won’t tell you where; and there was
trouble, I won’t tell you what. It never got into the papers, and it has
nothing to do with the story. I was a fairly senior subaltern at that
time, and with half a company I was guarding the mouth of a small river.
Our chief job was to see that no boats passed up it unsearched. It was a
fairly lazy job; not very much anxiety, and there was a jolly little
town three miles down the river, where I used to go in the evenings for
a drink and a smoke. It was here that I met one evening one of those
Europeans who have lived so long in the East as to have lost their
nationality. His face and hands were brown, and he had not shaved for at
least thirty-six hours. He looked dirty, and was without self-respect.
“We talked for a little while about indifferent things, and all the time
I felt him watching me closely with his crafty eyes. Then suddenly he
made a masonic sign. I replied. And he gave a sigh of relief.
“‘I had hoped so,’ he said, ‘but I was not certain; that makes
everything so very much more simple. Now I can say what I like, and it
will be a secret between us. You will not break your faith.’
“I nodded.
“He leant forward across the table, his face framed in his hands.
“‘You have seen a ship out to sea this morning?’
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘I am on that ship. I have some very important material that I wish to
get through to this village, and I cannot because of your outposts.’
“‘But we let all merchandise pass through after we have searched it.’
“‘You will not allow passage to what I bring?’
“‘Rifles?’
“‘Opium. I have many thousand pounds’ worth of opium upon that ship, and
I cannot get it through to the interior.’
“He expected me to show surprise, but I have played poker a good deal in
the mess, and have learnt not to let my face express emotion.
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘and what’s it got to do with me?’
“‘You can help me get it through.’
“‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ and I prepared to rise.
“‘No, no,’ he said; ‘sit down. Don’t be a fool. Hear me out.’
“I looked straight at him for a moment.
“‘I shan’t do what you want me to.’
“‘If you will only listen.’
“‘I don’t know what’s to prevent me walking across the room to that
policeman, and having you arrested.’
“‘Your oath.’ And a smile glinted in his shifty eyes. ‘You would never
break your oath as a mason. I would not, and I should not call myself a
man of honour. I know I am safe where a mason is concerned.’ And,
leaning across the table he touched my sleeve, tugging it a little. ‘It
will be so simple,’ he said softly. ‘There is only one sentry on the
river. At five minutes to ten you go on your rounds. At ten o’clock the
cook brings round a dixie full of cocoa. I could give you a little
powder that you could drop in the sentry’s cup. He would faint. For an
hour he would know nothing. In that time a boat could be brought up the
river and taken away again. The sentry would recover. He would shake
himself, would stand at his post again, and would say nothing. It is
quite safe.’
“‘It’s no good your talking,’ I said; ‘I shan’t do it.’
“‘But why not? If you do not let me through, someone else will, farther
up the coast. It is a question of waiting, and I would prefer not to
wait, but sooner or later I shall find my friend. One can do anything
with two thousand pounds.’
“‘Two thousand pounds!’
“‘That is what I am offering. Big profits can be made in opium.’
“‘But you won’t be able to bribe a British officer.’
“He laughed at that.
“‘Every man has his price, and it was the Prime Minister of Great
Britain who said it. Even British officers are glad of a little pocket
money. Well?’
“I said nothing. I picked up my hat and stick, and rose.
“‘All right,’ he said, ‘but don’t be in such a hurry, and remember, if
you don’t, someone else will. Why should he have the money rather than
you?’
“I walked quickly out of the restaurant, but I had hardly gone a hundred
yards when, putting my hand into my pocket for a box of matches, I felt
my fingers touch a smooth leather purse. I took it out, opened it, and
saw inside a small grey envelope. Inside the envelope was a reddish
powder.
“I shall never forget what I endured during the next few hours. I
brought forward all the arguments that I could summon--duty, patriotism,
my name, but there remained always at the back of my mind this thought:
‘Two thousand pounds means an income of a hundred pounds a year. I can
resign my commission, and spend the rest of my life in quiet study.’ I
began to picture the long evenings before a fire, with a lamp shedding a
mild light upon my book, and I contrasted it with the smoky atmosphere
of the mess and the Colonel’s interminable anecdotes. And there was no
real reason why I should refuse this opportunity. Someone else would
accept it. The opium was certain to be got through. This was the chance
for which I had waited all my life: it would never come again.”
“But you did refuse?” I said.
“Yes. I did, and I do not know whether or not I did wisely. I went
through agonies of mind, and when my orderly came at half-past nine to
tell me that it was time for me to be starting on my rounds I knew that
if I once got out there I should be unable to resist. So I took out a
bottle of whisky, filled up my glass, spilt the powder into it, and
before the red powder had had time to reach the bottom I had raised the
glass to my mouth and emptied it.
“It was a good drug for the purpose for which it was required. I sat
down in my chair. I did not feel ill, or sick, or dizzy. I just went
off, and when I came round it was after half-past ten, and I was safe. I
felt no ill effects.”
“And that was the end of it?” I said.
“As far as I was concerned. But I suppose that the story does not end
there really. I met the same man a couple of months later in another
café a few miles farther up the coast. He looked cleaner and smarter
than when I had seen him before, and he greeted me effusively and stood
me drinks. After a while he took me aside.
“‘You were a fool,’ he said.
“I shrugged my shoulders.
“‘I’m glad I was, then.’
“‘You were a fool,’ he repeated, ‘and what has happened? You fling away
two thousand pounds--someone else picks them up.’
“‘So you got it through?’
“‘Of course. What did I tell you? The world is not full of Josephs.’
“And two weeks later one of the officers in my company applied for leave
to go home to be married. We were all surprised, as he hadn’t much
money--only his pay--and had often been heard to lament the length of
his engagement. When someone asked if his grandmother had died and left
him a fortune, he blushed awkwardly, and said something about a bit of
luck on horses.
“He never rejoined us after his marriage.”
He stopped, and we looked at each other for a moment.
“And you wonder whether what you did was right, or not?”
“Yes; I’ve been wondering that for twelve years, and I shall go on
wondering it to the end. If I had given the powder to the sentry instead
of to myself I could have spent the end of my life as I should like to
spend it. And I don’t know that it would have been wrong. I am inclined
to think that the end justifies the means, and, anyhow, the stuff was
bound to be got through.”
“But, after all,” I said, “you’ve been happy in the army on the whole?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve been happy enough, but it’s not the sort of
life for which I was intended. It’s not easy to explain, but I feel that
it could have so easily been so much more happy--if the rough edges had
only been ever so slightly trimmed.”
And for a long while he sat in silence. He was thinking no doubt of the
quiet tragedy of a life lived happily but not intensely. But I thought
of the kindly Providence that takes the handling of our destinies out of
our control, and had saved this curious old soldier from a career of
speculation that could have ended only in pathetic failure.