His reading was haphazard, but perhaps, for that reason, all the more informative and illuminating. So far he had acquired such small learning as he possessed on a definite and narrow plan, assimilating only such facts as squared with his theories and rejecting all the others; where his new studies were concerned the very blankness of his ignorance was a guarantee of freedom from prejudice. He stumbled amongst facts and opinions, making little of them and yet making much—since for the first time in his life there was no glib mentor to guide him and he was thrown on his own resources. With his theories demolished and his mind blank as a child’s, he became aware of phases of human idea and striving of which he had known nothing in the past, and the resulting comprehension of the existence of spheres outside his own increased his sense of the impossibility of his previous classification of mankind into the well-intentioned and the evil. His own experience had shown him that there might be at least a third class—the ignorant, the mistaken, to which he, William Tully, belonged—and his reading, by its very vagueness, confirmed that personal experience. As he floundered through histories, bewildered and at random, he realized dizzily, but none the less surely, something of the vast and terrifying complexity of these human problems upon which he had once pronounced himself with the certainty of absolute ignorance.
The Free Library, though he knew it not, was a salve to his wounded heart; all unconsciously he had done the best for himself in applying his mind to matters of which his little wife had known nothing. Bismarckian policy and the Napoleonic Wars were topics he had not discussed and interests he had not shared with her; hence they tended to come between him and her memory and distract him from lonely brooding. Without his new studies he might have drifted into sheer melancholia and helplessness; as it was, he burned midnight gas over his books and kept his brain alive. In a measure his interest in his new studies was personal; the craving to strike back was always with him and his reading fed and fanned it; beginning without system he was naturally enough attracted by the drama and movement of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic epoch, read avidly all that the librarian could give him on the subject and moulded his ideas of a soldier’s life and military science on the doings of men of those days. The seed of hope that Faraday had implanted did not die, and he thought of himself as a soldier to be, while queer little ambitions flamed up in his barren heart. He read of Ney and Murat, who had carried marshals’ batons in their knapsacks—until, the fervour of his obsession growing, he dreamed of himself as an avenging leader, and, with a half-confessed idea of fitting himself for the office, applied hours to the study of the art of war through the medium of an obsolete volume on military lore picked up from a secondhand bookstall in the Charing Cross Road. By its aid—it had been published in the early fifties—he attempted to work out the strategy of Kluck and Joffre, and spent long evenings poring over diagrams explanatory of the tactics of Napoleon at Montereau or the Archduke Charles at Essling.
For a time his only real human intercourse, and that by letter, was with Edith Haynes; he had written to her telling of his rejection for the Army and she wrote to him more than occasionally. She was fixed busily in her Somersetshire home, looking after the property of a brother fighting in Flanders, acting as bailiff and herself taking a hand in farm-work. For the first few weeks after Griselda’s death she remained William’s only friend in the new world of war, and it was not until he had been settled for nearly two months in his Camden Town lodging that he discovered that some at least of his former associates had seen fit, like himself, to reconsider their views and take up arms for their country. He ran against one of them—Watson, in the old days a fiery committee-member of his branch—in the garb of the London Scottish; and he did not know how lonely he had been until he spent an evening in the convert’s company, talking his heart out, talking of the war and himself.
With the first announcement of the reduction in the standard of height for recruits he tried to enlist again and was again refused—this time by the doctor who seemingly had doubts about his heart. On the way home a fool woman, arrogating to herself the right to make men die for her, offered him a white feather as he stood waiting for his bus—whereupon he turned and swore at her using filthy words that were strange to his lips till her vapid little face grew scarlet. That day, for the first time, his books were no comfort to his soul and he thrust them away and sat brooding—understanding perhaps how personal and revengeful had been his interest in the lore of the past, understanding how strong had been the dreams and ambitions he had cherished in his empty heart. Watson, dropping in for a final chat before starting on foreign service, found him sullen
