Now things were different. I stood alone,
ironical, ambitionless, still questioning the utility of human effort,
yet determined to play the game of life to its bitter end. What could I
do?
It is true that I had been called to the Bar in my tentative youth,
while I drafted documents for my betters to pull to pieces and rewrite
at the Foreign Office; but I had never seen a brief, and my memories
of Gaius, Justinian, Williams's "Real Property," and Austin's
"Jurisprudence," were as nebulous as those of the Differential Calculus
over whose facetiae I had pondered during my schooldays. The law was as
closed to me as medicine. I had no profession. I therefore drifted
into the one pursuit for which my training had qualified me, namely,
political journalism. I had written much, in my amateur way, during my
ten years' membership of Parliament; why, I hardly know--not because I
needed money, not because I had thoughts which I burned to express, and
certainly not through vain desire of notoriety. Perhaps the motive was
twofold, an ingrained Puckish delight in the incongruous--it seemed
incongruous for an airy epicurean like myself to spend stodgy
hours writing stodgier articles on Pauper Lunacy and Poor Law
Administration--and the same inherited sense of gentlemanly obligation
to do something for one's king and country as made my ancestors, whether
they liked it or not, clothe themselves in uncomfortable iron garments
and go about fighting other gentlemen similarly clad, to their own great
personal danger.
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