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freedom.
Then he had been sent away to school, which was so
much death to him. He refused to go to Oxford, choosing
a German university. He had spent a certain time at Bonn,
at Berlin, and at Frankfurt. There, a curiosity had been
aroused in his mind. He wanted to see and to know, in a cu-
rious objective fashion, as if it were an amusement to him.
Then he must try war. Then he must travel into the savage
regions that had so attracted him.
The result was, he found humanity very much alike ev-
erywhere, and to a mind like his, curious and cold, the
savage was duller, less exciting than the European. So he
took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas, and ideas of re-
form. But they never went more than skin-deep, they were
never more than a mental amusement. Their interest lay
chiefly in the reaction against the positive order, the de-
structive reaction.
He discovered at last a real adventure in the coal-mines.
His father asked him to help in the firm. Gerald had been
educated in the science of mining, and it had never inter-
ested him. Now, suddenly, with a sort of exultation, he laid
hold of the world.
There was impressed photographically on his conscious-
ness the great industry. Suddenly, it was real, he was part of
it. Down the valley ran the colliery railway, linking mine
with mine. Down the railway ran the trains, short trains of
heavily laden trucks, long trains of empty wagons, each one
bearing in big white letters the initials:
‘C.B.&Co.’

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