ed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist,
that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough--they'd
discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something--and that in any case
he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't
funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own
county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.

This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He
could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact,
he _had_ lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was
recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie
about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't
believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone
to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel)
contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he
wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He
said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going
to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for
he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve
his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being
mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful
pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.

And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private
room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn
my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind
to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. _That_ was the use he'd make
of his powerful pen. See how they'd like _that_.

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