The Man Who Lived For Others

The first time we met, to speak, he was sitting with his back against a pollard willow, smoking a clay pipe. He smoked it very slowly, but very conscientiously. After each whiff he removed the pipe from his mouth and fanned away the smoke with his cap.

“Feeling bad?” I asked from behind a tree, at the same time making ready for a run, big boys’ answers to small boys’ impertinences being usually of the nature of things best avoided.

To my surprise and relief — for at second glance I perceived I had under-estimated the length of his legs — he appeared to regard the question as a natural and proper one, replying with unaffected candour, “Not yet.”

My desire became to comfort him — a sentiment I think he understood and was grateful for. Advancing into the open, I sat down over against him, and watched him for a while in silence. Presently he said: —

“Have you ever tried drinking beer?”

I admitted I had not.

“Oh, it is beastly stuff,” he rejoined with an involuntary shudder.

Rendered forgetful of present trouble by bitter recollection of the past, he puffed away at his pipe carelessly and without judgment.

“Do you often drink it?” I inquired.

“Yes,” he replied gloomily; “all we fellows in the fifth form drink beer and smoke pipes.”

A deeper tinge of green spread itself over his face.

He rose suddenly and made towards the hedge. Before he reached it, however, he stopped and addressed me, but without turning round.

“If you follow me, young ’un, or look, I’ll punch your head,” he said swiftly, and disappeared with a gurgle.

He left at the end of the terms and I did not see him again until we were both young men. Then one day I ran against him in Oxford Street, and he asked me to come and spend a few days with his people in Surrey.

I found him wan-looking and depressed, and every now and then he sighed. During a walk across the common he cheered up considerably, but the moment we got back to the house door he seemed to recollect himself, and began to sigh again. He ate no dinner whatever, merely sipping a glass of wine and crumbling a piece of bread. I was troubled at noticing this, but his relatives — a maiden aunt, who kept house, two elder sisters, and a weak-eyed female cousin who had left her husband behind her in India — were evidently charmed. They glanced at each other, and nodded and smiled. Once in a fit of abstraction he swallowed a bit of crust, and immediately they all looked pained and surprised.