The first time he saw a dynamo in motion he was spellbound.  This was even more fascinating than the drill that the family dentist worked with his foot.  His tutor found him inclined to estimate a Caesar, self-characterized in his commentaries, as less humanly appealing than his first love, the engine-driver, with whom he kept up a correspondence after his father had been transferred to another post.  He was given to magic lanterns, private telegraph and telephone lines, trying to walk a tight rope, and parachute acts and experiments in chemistry.  When the family were not worried lest he should break his neck or blow his head off investigating, they were irritated by a certain plebeian strain in him which kept all kinds of company.  His mother disapproved of his picking an acquaintance with a group of acrobats in order to improve his skill on the trapeze.  His excuse for his supple friends was that they were all “experts” in something, just as his tutor was in Greek verbs.

Very light-hearted he was, busy, vital, reckless, with an earnest smile that could win the post telegrapher to teach him the code alphabet or persuade his father not to destroy his laboratory after he had singed off his eyebrows.  This may explain why he had to cram hard in the dead languages at times, with a towel tied around his head.  He complained that they were out of date; and he wanted to hear the Gauls’ story, too, before he fully made up his mind about Caesar.  But for the living languages he had a natural gift which his father’s service abroad as military attache for a while enabled him to cultivate.

Upon being told one day that he was to go to the military school the following autumn, he broke out in open rebellion.  He had just decided, after having passed through the stages of engine-driver, telegraph operator, railroad-signal watchman, automobile manufacturer, and superintendent of the city’s waterworks, to build bridges over tropical torrents that always rose in floods to try all his skill in saving his construction work.

“I don’t want to go into the army!” he said.

“Why?” asked his father, thinking that when the boy had to give his reasons he would soon be argued out of the heresy.

“It’s drilling a few hours a day, then nothing to do,” Arthur replied.  “All your work waits on war and you don’t know that there will ever be any war.  It waits on something nobody wants to happen.  Now, if you manufacture something, why, you see wool come out cloth, steel come out an automobile.  If you build a bridge you see it rising little by little.  You’re getting your results every day; you see your mistakes and your successes.  You’re making something, creating something; there’s something going on all the while that isn’t guesswork.  I think that’s what I want to say.  You won’t order me to be a soldier will you?”

The father, loath to do this, called in the assistance of an able pleader then, Eugene Partow, lately become chief of staff of the Browns, who was an old friend of the Lanstron family.  It was not in Partow’s mind to lose such a recruit in a time when the heads of the army were trying, in answer to the demands of a new age, to counteract the old idea that made an officer’s the conventional avocation of a gentleman of leisurely habits.