II
Remained also, blowing about the streets, in the newspapers and at meetings, in the mouths of many, and in the eyes of most, the new popular question, "Why aren't you in khaki?" The subject of age, always shrouded in a seemly and decorous modesty in England, and especially since, a few years previously, an eminent professor of medicine had unloosed the alarming theory of "Too old at forty", was suddenly ripped out of its prudish coverings. One generation of men began to talk with thoroughly engaging frankness and largeness about their age. They would even announce it in a loud voice in crowded public conveyances. It was nothing, in those days, to hear a man suddenly declare in an omnibus or tramway car, "Well, I'm thirty-eight and I only wish to heaven I was a few years younger." Other men would heartfully chime in, "Ah, same thing with me. It's hard." And all these men, thus cruelly burdened with a few more years than the age limit, would look with great intensity at other men, apparently not thus burdened, who for their part would assume attitudes of physical unfitness or gaze very sternly out of the window.
Several of the younger employees of Fortune, East and Sabre's joined up (as the current phrase had it) in the first weeks of the war. In the third month Mr. Fortune assembled the hands and from across the whale-like front indicated the path of duty and announced that the places of all those who followed it would be kept open for them. "Hear, hear!" said Twyning. "Hear, hear!" and as the men were filing out he took Sabre affectionately by the arm and explained to him that young Harold was dying to go. "But I feel a certain duty is due to the firm, old man. What I mean is, that the boy's only just come here and I feel that in my position as a partner it wouldn't look well for me practically with my own hand to be paying out unearned salary to a chap who'd not been four months in the place. Don't you agree, old man?"
Sabre said, "But we wouldn't be paying him, would we? Fortune said salaries of married men."
"Ah, yes, old man, but between you and me he's going to do it for unmarried men as well, as the cases come up."
"Why didn't he tell them so?"
Twyning's genial expression hardened under these questions, but he said, still on his first note of confidential affection, "Ah, because he thinks they ought to do their duty without being bribed. Quite right, too. No, it's a difficult position for me. My idea is not to give way to the boy's wishes for a few months while he establishes his position here, and then, if men are still wanted, why of course he'll go. Sound, don't you think, old man?"
Sabre disengaged his arm and turned into his own room. "Well, I think this is a business in which you can't judge any one. I think every man is his own judge."
An astonishing rasp came into Twyning's voice. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-six. Why?"