uate gauge of a man's calibre. One had
to grow, and that was another name for suffering. In his hand was a
newspaper, and as he turned it idly, his eye caught an urgent message in
heavy type. The London School of Mnemonics pleaded with him to join up
in the armies of Efficiency. They urged him to get out of the rut and
fit himself for executive positions with high salaries attached. His eye
wandered from the paper to the vista of the Mall, where the metallic
products of efficiency were ranged in quadruple lines of ugliness, the
stark witnesses of human ineptitude. He saw the children playing about
those extraordinarily unlovely enemy guns, their muzzles split and
dribbling with rust, their wheels splayed outwards like mechanical
paralytics, and he fell to wondering if he could not find his way out of
his spiritual difficulties sooner if he did what his friend suggested.
He would have to do something. A few hundred pounds was all he had. And
the chances of a sea job were not immediately promising. He recalled his
visit the other day to the office of the owners of the _Tanganyika_, and
the impression he had gained that their enthusiasm had cooled. They had
done a big business with Bremen before the war, and they would be doing
a big business again soon. Their attitude had contrasted oddly with the
roll-of-honour tablet in the office where, printed in gold, he had seen
the names of the officers of the _Tanganyika_ "murdered by the enemy."
All save his own. Somehow that word "murdered," to him who had been
there, did not ring true. It was like the nice schoolboy's "rotten" and
"putrid"; it signified a mood, now gone no one knew where. It was like
Lietherthal's "_Die Freiheit bricht die Ketten_," a gesture which meant
nothing to the millions of Hindoos, Mongolians, Arabs, Africans, and
Latins in the world. "A family squabble," that sharp young man had
called it, a mere curtain-raiser to a gigantic struggle for existence
between the races....

He rose and turned to his friend.

"It's the very thing for me," he said. "I don't feel any particular
fancy for staying on in England."

"As soon as I saw you waiting in that corridor," said his friend, "I
thought of it. Now you go and see him. You know the Colonial Office.
He's a fine old boy and a thorough gentleman. There are prospects, too,
I may tell you. It's a sugar-cane country, and I believe you'll have
some very nice company in the plantations all round. And I believe
ther