AN UNHAPPY HERO.
Poor Clayton-Vane's case is one of the most poignant peace tragedies that have come to my notice. He had just acquired an inexplicable but genuine enthusiasm for stockbroking when the War gave him the opportunity of developing into a remarkably brilliant officer. Not only did he attain his majority, but gathered a perfect chestful of decorations, including all the common varieties and several which leave civilians guessing.
Yet strange to say the man who has won these honours in war detests soldiering with all his heart. He fought as a duty, and did his share with furious energy in the hope of so shortening the War. His hatred of the military profession is indeed equalled only by his love of stockbroking and by his natural pride in having scrapped right on from the word "Go!" till November 10th, 1918, when he was sent home slightly wounded.
Now the tragedy of which he is the pathetic central figure is the result of his remarkably youthful appearance. Every time his portrait figures in The Daily Scratch, people say, "Why, he looks a mere child! But then these Press photographs always do distort one so." Yet in this instance people are unjust. Clayton-Vane, after a four years' flirtation with death, has the face and figure of a careless chubby schoolboy. When he is in uniform this youthfulness only adds lustre to his blushing honours.
Now my unhappy friend is on the horns of a dilemma. He pines to go back to broking as sincerely as some men pine to travel or to write poetry, but every time he ventures out in mufti some painful incident warns him what he will have to suffer as a civilian, with his round rosy face, innocent blue eyes, curly hair and bright smile. He hears himself referred to as a chip of the old block. Chance acquaintances ask him if his father or big brothers were at the Front. To-day, he told me very bitterly, he was asked if he did not wish the War had lasted a little longer so that he might have been old enough to go out and fight!
"I can't bear it, old man," he said. "There's something about me that draws out their sentimentality, and they've all got to say something about my youth, and the heritage of peace that the 1917 conscripts won for me. They talk as if I had been busy with a feeding-bottle instead of compressing my silly face in a box-respirator."
His dilemma is a very painful one for a man so sensitive and at the same time so enamoured of stockbroking. Hard as the renunciation will be, I really believe he will end by turning his back on the Exchange for ever and taking a regular commission, though I try to persuade him that if he will only brave the horrors of peace as he braved the horrors of war he will win through in the end and grow out of his face.