Mr. Fentolin nodded gently.
“Now I come to think of it, I did have a letter from Mr. Brown,” he remarked. “Rather an impertinence for a tutor, I thought it. He devoted three pages towards impressing upon me the necessity of your adopting some sort of a career.”
“He wrote because he thought it was his duty,” the boy said doggedly.
“So you want to be a soldier,” Mr. Fentolin continued musingly. “Well, well, why not? Our picture galleries are full of them. There has been a Fentolin in every great battle for the last five hundred years. Sailors, too—plenty of them—and just a few diplomatists. Brave fellows! Not one, I fancy,” he added, “like me—not one condemned to pass their days in a perambulator. You are a fine fellow, Gerald—a regular Fentolin. Getting on for six feet, aren’t you?”
“Six feet two, sir.”
“A very fine fellow,” Mr. Fentolin repeated. “I am not so sure about the army, Gerald. You see, there are some people who say, like your American friend, that we are even now almost on the brink of war.”
“All the more reason for me to hurry,” the boy begged.
Mr. Fentolin closed his eyes.
“Don’t!” he insisted. “Have you ever stopped to think what war means—the war you speak of so lightly? The suffering, the misery of it! All the pageantry and music and heroism in front; and behind, a blackened world, a trail of writhing corpses, a world of weeping women for whom the sun shall never rise again. Ugh! An ugly thing war, Gerald. I am not sure that you are not better at home here. Why not practise golf a little more assiduously? I see from the local paper that you are still playing at two handicap. Now with your physique, I should have thought you would have been a scratch player long before now.”
“I play cricket, sir,” the boy reminded him, a little impatiently, “and, after all, there are other things in the world besides games.”