I paused, waiting to be contradicted.
“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.