Life was a
condition of savage 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
curious 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 everywhere, 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 reform. 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 destructive 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 interested him.
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