I repeat, at a first glance he was very like the rest of the young fellows of his day; but I admit there was something about him that grew on you. After watching him for a while I decided that this ascendancy was principally in his eyes. I do not wish to overwork the popular clichÉs of fire and flash and smolder; Smith's eyes certainly had something of this quality; but it was combined with an expression that, until I can define it better, I will risk calling discontent. I don't mean by this the discontent that is common enough among those other flashers and smolderers, the artists and poets and suchlike. That is usually little more than peevishness and incapacity, and, as one of the breed myself, I rather liked Smith's attitude towards us. With perfect sincerity he looked on us as immensely clever fellows, particularly the late Mr. Jack London and the author of The Crimson Specter of Hangman Hollow; but there he had finished with us. We were high and he could not attain to us. Our affairs were so little his affairs that I regret to have to say that, Malvern notwithstanding, I have heard him make use of the expression "between you and I." That is an awful thing for a nice girl to marry.

But the War has taught me, among other things, the overwhelming importance of other men's jobs and the comparative insignificance of my own. If young Smith did not express himself in the terms to which I was accustomed, he expressed himself none the less. Don't ask me how, except in a general way. Here again what he calls a "dreadfully gulf" is fixed, across which I can only gaze at the New Wonder.

For Chummy, for all his Crimson Specters and his "between you and I," his cocktails at Hatchetts' and his stuffed-bird tympani in the Helmsea Mess, was part of that Wonder that to-day a George takes from an Elizabeth's hands. Four hundred years ago I suppose he would have sold a farm and gone to sea; this, briefly, is what he did in our own day:—

Denied admission to the Flying Corps on the grounds that he was not yet seventeen, he had made his way to London, dressed himself as a mechanic or plumber, had forced his way into a foreign Embassy under pretext of repairing the ambassadorial pipes or cisterns or something, and had actually succeeded in presenting himself before the Ambassador, demanding to be taken on in the service of a foreign country. Naturally he had been refused and referred back to his own Government. Then had ensued what Chummy cheerfully described as a hell of a dust-up. General Officers had stormed and had wanted to know "what the devil he meant by it"; the correspondence, I have been told, weighs between eleven and twelve pounds; but in the end he had received his ticket—already endorsed for improper conduct in offering his services to a foreign if friendly Power. You will believe that this endorsement had stood very little in his subsequent way. The story had run like wildfire throughout the whole of the Service. It may have hindered his promotion, but what on earth did promotion matter? Any number of civilian-ingrain business-men, turning their business talents to the Services, have obtained promotion. Few of them have attained to the distinction of such an endorsement as that which made bright young Smith's ticket.

And—to return to what I have called that discontent of his—I for one cannot see that a young man of daring and vision, elementally put down into the midst of our world to-day and asked what he makes of it all, must either write a stuffy book or paint a jazz picture or else be told that the fire of his personality has no expression and his chosen work no value. Very much on the contrary. I think myself that Charles Valentine Smith was a thinker so single of purpose that it never occurred to him that he thought at all. And why not a technique, an artist's technique, of the wrist and eye and nerve and indomitable heart? Is my dictation more a wonder than his zooming? Is my life so full and his so empty? I cannot see it.