We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known it; it was the sort of thing he would do.
No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It had bothered him most damnably.
I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest of it. And I said it was pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game—by himself—was more in his line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.
Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted after six weeks.
At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as he looked at me.
I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"
"Oh yes, I've said it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I didn't want to do this. I had to."
"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view this isn't better."
"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."
"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what you wanted?"