“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.