* * * * *

After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to have wiped Jimmy out.

Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy’s agony, of his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring.  He knew that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use for his sort, the men who only wrote things.  There was an end of his writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he didn’t look out and do something there would be an end of him.  And he couldn’t bear it.  He couldn’t bear to be reduced to inactivity and insignificance—­to be wiped out.  He wasn’t going to be made an end of if he could help it.  These were the things we said about him.  What we saw, or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism.  It didn’t look quite sane.

He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn’t buy a commission.  He didn’t seem to realize that there were things he couldn’t buy.  He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers wouldn’t help him.  They could help him, he declared, if they liked.  Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.

Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny, and we had laughed at him.  But when he found that he couldn’t enlist, that they wouldn’t have him, that he wasn’t strong enough—­they’d discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something—­and that in any case he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn’t funny at all.  He’d been to every recruiting station in London and his own county, and they all said the same thing.  He was too old.

This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him.  He could very easily have lied about his age (he didn’t look it), in fact, he had lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft.  And he couldn’t lie about his heart, he didn’t know it had a valve that leaked.  He didn’t believe it.  He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel) contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he wasn’t the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled.  He said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement.  He mustn’t dream of going to the front.  I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve his country.  He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to “use his wonderful pen.”  And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.

And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private room he had at his club, and saying, “Damn my powerful pen, Furny!  Damn my powerful pen!” The whole system, he said, was rotten.  He’d a good mind to expose it.  He’d expose it in the papers. That was the use he’d make of his powerful pen.  See how they’d like that.