er
coming up to London without calling on me, when we would dine together in
one of Soho's many dingy, garlic-scented restaurants, and afterwards,
over our bottle of cheap Beaune, discuss the coming of our lives; and
when he entered Guy's I left John Street, and took chambers close to his
in Staple Inn. Those were pleasant days. Childhood is an over-rated
period, fuller of sorrow than of joy. I would not take my childhood
back, were it a gift, but I would give the rest of my life to live the
twenties over again.

To Cyril I was the man of the world, and he looked to me for wisdom, not
seeing always, I fear, that he got it; while from him I gathered
enthusiasm, and learnt the profit that comes to a man from the keeping of
ideals.

Often as we have talked, I have felt as though a visible light came from
him, framing his face as with the halo of some pictured saint. Nature
had wasted him, putting him into this nineteenth century of ours. Her
victories are accomplished. Her army of heroes, the few sung, the many
forgotten, is disbanded. The long peace won by their blood and pain is
settled on the land. She had fashioned Cyril Harjohn for one of her
soldiers. He would have been a martyr, in the days when thought led to
the stake, a fighter for the truth, when to speak one's mind meant death.
To lead some forlorn hope for Civilisation would have been his true work;
Fate had condemned him to sentry duty in a well-ordered barrack.

But there is work to be done in the world, though the labour lies now in
the vineyard, not on the battlefield. A small but sufficient fortune
purchased for him freedom. To most men an assured income is the grave of
ambition; to Cyril it was the foundation of desire. Relieved from the
necessity of working to live, he could afford the luxury of living to
work. His profession was to him a passion; he regarded it, not with the
cold curiosity of the scholar, but with the imaginative devotion of the
disciple. To help to push its frontiers forward, to carry its flag
farther into the untravelled desert that ever lies beyond the moving
boundary of human knowledge, was his dream.

One summer evening, I remember, we were sitting in his rooms, and during
a silence there came to us through the open window the moaning of the
city, as of a tired child. He rose and stretched his arms out towards
the darkening streets, as if he would gather to him all the toiling men
and women and comfort them.