He stared. "You don't know what to do?"
I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.
And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of living—My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"
His luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?
He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.
"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.
"Perhaps—if there's no other way—I may be driven to it."
For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put before him a thing he could do—do better than anybody else—a thing that would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed, and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.
I didn't believe in his "Perhaps—if there was no other way—he might be driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!
Meanwhile he drove me. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.