“‘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.”
“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.”
“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.