one child, a flaxen-haired little girl with
incredibly thin limbs. And he was typical, too--as he thought of them
and their setting at Ealing--the modern Englishman who has given
intellectual hostages to fortune.

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Spokesly once said in so many words that he disbelieved utterly in
premonition. There was, he said, nothing in it. If there were, he
remarked, we should be different. When pressed, he admitted freely that
if we could read the signs we might get adequate warning of impending
events; but by the time we have gotten the experience we are too old to
bother about the future at all. This, of course, was when the war was
finished and Mr. Spokesly, with the rest of the Merchant Service, had
slipped back into that obscure neglect from which they had temporarily
emerged. The gist of his remarks, therefore, seems to bear out the view
that he had not the faintest notion, when he went ashore that evening in
Saloniki with the gifted and amusing Mr. Bates, that he was on the brink
of a fundamental change in his life. Looking back, he was almost induced
to imagine that it was someone else who came ashore with Mr. Bates, a
sort of distant relation, say, who had borrowed his body for the
evening. And he was inclined to admit that, assuming what the
philosophers say is true--that the only use of knowledge is for the
purpose of action--it would preserve our idealism if our subconscious
adumbrations could only be induced to function in a more emphatic
manner.

The reason for interjecting this sample of Mr. Spokesly's later
mentality is to be rid of any possible ambiguity. If Mr. Spokesly had
been nothing more than Mr. Bates's boon companion his story would not be
worth telling, there being obviously so many other more interesting
people in the world. We have seen that Mr. Spokesly himself was aware of
his real value, and had appealed to the London School of Mnemonics to
elucidate his latent self from the commonplace shell in which he strove.
The London School of Mnemonics responded nobly according to its
doctrines. It supplied him with an astonishing quantity of intellectual
fuel, so to say, but omitted to indicate how it was to be ignited.
Indeed, it is very singular how public and commercial organizations
continually lose sight of the fact that in the spiritual world
spontaneous combustion does not exist. And it is also true that the
stark and secular desires of a man's soul, however powerful they may b