“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.
But it is not only nor indeed even chiefly through meeting new types of people that we can arrive at that angle of detachment. We need an entire change of setting. It would be hard to overrate the subconscious influence on us of our surroundings. A sudden sensation of taste and smell will recall to us a cycle of associated memoirs. The glimpse through a railway-carriage window of a gabled roof, a square church tower, a particular shade of sunlight on red brick will open the pages of a chapter whose existence we had almost forgotten; will reveal in relief, in perspective--with an objective reality that at the time it did not hold for us--a facet of the past. The obvious, the superficial reflection on such occurrences would be an expression of surprise that so trivial an affair as the taste of cocoa, the smell of wet stone, the glimpse of a square-towered church, should become a window opening on childhood. But probably nearer to the truth would be the assumption that these moments of sight and taste of which, at the time, we hardly more than recognised the existence, and to which we attached no value, were an essential part of the framework of our thoughts, and our hopes, and our actions, and that it was from them that what we have come to regard in our lives as personal and important drew its nourishment, its colour, and its direction.