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 simpl