He paused, deep in thought for a few seconds; then, as though waking suddenly to life again, offered me a cigar and took one himself. When he spoke again, it was in a different tone.
“Perhaps you wonder why I picked you out—of course it was I who got you invited to that meeting; I wanted to look you over there before making up my mind about you. Well, I have means of knowing about people; and you struck me as the man I needed in this work. I’ve been watching you for some years, Flint; ever since you made your mark, in fact. You aren’t one of my young men—the ones they call ‘Nordenholt’s gang,’ I believe—but you are of my kind; and I knew that I could get you if I wanted you for something big.”
In any other man this would have struck me as insolence; but Nordenholt had already established such an influence over me that I felt flattered rather than ruffled by this calm assumption on his part.
“But in some ways it’s a disadvantage now that we didn’t come together earlier,” he continued. “You remember Nelson and his captains—the band of brothers? Nothing can be accomplished on a grand scale without that feeling; and possibly I have left it until too late to get into touch with you. It depends on yourself, Flint. I know you, possibly as well as you know yourself; but you know nothing of me. With my young men,” and a tinge of pride came into his voice, “with my young men, that difficulty doesn’t arise. They know me as well as anyone can—well enough, at any rate, for us to work together for a common object, no matter how big the stake may be. But you, Flint, represent a foreign mind in the machine. I want you to understand some things; in fact, it’s essential that you should see the lines on which I work; for otherwise we shall be at cross-purposes. I wonder how it can be done?”
He leaned back in his chair and smoked silently for a few minutes. I said nothing; for I was quite content to await whatever he had to put into words. I only wondered what form it would take. When he broke the silence, it was on quite unexpected lines. He looked at his watch.
“Three hours yet before we can do anything further. I might as well spend part of it on this; and possibly I can give you an idea of my outlook on things which will help you when we are working together up North.
“When I was quite a child, Flint, I used to take a certain delight in doing things which had an element of risk in them—physical risk, I mean. I liked to climb difficult trees, to work my way out on to dangerous bits of roof, to walk across tree-trunks spanning streams, and so forth. There’s that element of risk at the back of all real enjoyment, to my mind. It needn’t be physical risk necessarily, though there you have it in perhaps its most acute aspect; but at the root of a gamble of any sort where the stakes are high you find this factor lying, whether it is noticeable or not.
“One of my earliest experiences in that direction took the form of walking along a slippery wall which was high enough to make a fall from it a serious matter. I mastered the art of keeping on the wall to perfection; and then, finding that pall upon me, I endeavoured to complicate it by jumping across the gap made by a gateway. It was an easy distance: I proved that to myself by practising on the ground from a standing take-off. And the nature of the wall offered no particular difficulty, for I tested myself in jumping a similar gap between two slippery tree-trunks laid end to end. Yet when I came to the actual gap in the wall, my muscles simply refused to obey me; and time after time I drew back involuntarily from the spring.
“I was an introspective child; and this puzzled me. I knew that I could accomplish the feat with ease; and yet something prevented my attempting it. I fell to analysing my sensations and tracing down the various factors in the case; and, of course, it was not long until I came to the crucial point. Does this bore you? I am sorry if it does, but you’ll see the point of it by-and-by.”
While he had been speaking, I had had a most curious impression. His argument, whatever it might be, was evidently addressed to me; and yet all through it I had the feeling that it was not altogether to me that he was talking. In some way I gathered the idea that while he spoke to me his mind was working upon another line, testing and re-testing some chain of reasoning which was illustrated by his anecdote; so that while I looked upon one aspect of it he was scanning the same facts from a totally different point of view and reading into them something which I was not intended to grasp.