I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem.  The Daily Post had asked me if I’d go out as its War-Correspondent.  I was to wire “Yes” or “No” in the next half-hour, and if I went I should have to start to-night.

I said I didn’t know what to do about it.

He stared.  “You don’t know what to do?”

I said:  No.  It wasn’t so simple when you had a wife and child dependent on you.  I didn’t know whether I ought to take the risk.

And then he said his memorable thing:  “If you can take the risk of living—­My God,” he said, “if I only had your luck!”

His luck, I told him, was a dead certainty.  There wasn’t a paper that would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent.  He’d only got to volunteer.  Why on earth, I asked him, didn’t he?

He became very grave.  He seemed to be considering it.

“No,” he said, “no.  That isn’t quite good enough for me.  I don’t want to go out to the war to write about it.  I want to do things.

“Perhaps—­if there’s no other way—­I may be driven to it.”

For a moment, then, I suspected him.  I doubted his sincerity.  He was making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice.  He must have known all the time they wouldn’t take him.  He was safe.  But put before him a thing he could do—­do better than anybody else—­a thing that would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn’t killed, and he said, No, thank you.  That wasn’t quite good enough for him.

I didn’t believe in his “Perhaps—­if there was no other way—­he might be driven to it.”  I saw him driven to do anything he didn’t mean to do!

Meanwhile he drove me.  Before I had seen him I hadn’t really meant to take that job.  He did something to me that changed my mind.

That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.

* * * * *

I was out for a month.  Then—­I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the Place d’Armes—­I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the Daily Post sent another man out instead of me.

That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second war-phase.  He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic, than his enlisting.  I don’t know what Viola thought of his war-phases; to Norah they were just that—­funny and pathetic.  To the other Thesigers he was purely offensive.  They resented Jevons’s trying to have anything to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent interference with their prerogative.  His mother-in-law, I know, had no patience with him.  His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing, she declared, but a form of war-panic.  It took some people like that.  She said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him.  She said he looked panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time, and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well—­if it wasn’t panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement, and if I’d any regard for him or any influence with him I’d stop it.  The little man was simply making himself ridiculous.