LITMIR.BIZ

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toll! … Rhetorical gusto! Was I drunk last night?”

      His eyebrows puckered. He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow rested thereon and his chin on his fist. The deep-set gray eyes beneath his thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things. “My God!” he murmured, “My God!” with a note of disgust. He made a big brooding figure in the sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical largeness; he made me feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking. I had never met a man of this sort before; I did not know such men existed… .

      It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever that I had before the Change about the personalities of statesmen, but I doubt if ever in those days I thought of them at all as tangible individual human beings, conceivably of some intellectual complexity. I believe that my impression was a straightforward blend of caricature and newspaper leader. I certainly had no respect for them. And now without servility or any insincerity whatever, as if it were a firstfruit of the Change, I found myself in the presence of a human being towards whom I perceived myself inferior and subordinate, before whom I stood without servility or any insincerity whatever, in an attitude of respect and attention. My inflamed, my rancid egotism — or was it after all only the chances of life? — had never once permitted that before the Change.

      He emerged from his thoughts, still with a faint perplexity in his manner. “That speech I made last night,” he said, “was damned mischievous nonsense, you know. Nothing can alter that. Nothing… . No! … Little fat gnomes in evening dress — gobbling oysters. Gulp!”

      It was a most natural part of the wonder of that morning that he should adopt this incredible note of frankness, and that it should abate nothing from my respect for him.

      “Yes,” he said, “you are right. It’s all indisputable fact, and I can’t believe it was anything but a dream.”

      Section 5

      That memory stands out against the dark past of the world with extraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was full of the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curious persuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealing bells, but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, there was something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness of sensation that set bells rejoicing in one’s brain. And that big, fair, pensive man sitting on the ground had beauty even in his clumsy pose, as though indeed some Great Master of strength and humor had made him.

      And — it is so hard now to convey these things — he spoke to me, a stranger, without reservations, carelessly, as men now speak to men. Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what we thought, a thousand shortsighted considerations, dignity, objective discipline, discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of soul, made us muffle before we told it to our fellowmen.

      “It’s all returning now,” he said, and told me half soliloquizingly what was in his mind.

      I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out image after image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragments of speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I should give it you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the little sharp things that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions. Throughout I have to make up again his half-forgotten sentences and speeches, and be content with giving you the general effect. But I can see and hear him now as he said, “The dream got worst at the end. The war — a perfectly horrible business! Horrible! And it was just like a nightmare, you couldn’t do anything to escape from it — every one was driven!”

      His sense of indiscretion was gone.

      He opened the war out to me — as every one sees it now. Only that morning it was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdly forgetful of his bare and swollen foot, treating me as the humblest accessory and as altogether an equal, talking out to himself the great obsessions of his mind. “We could have prevented it! Any of us who chose to speak out could have prevented it. A little decent frankness. What was there to prevent us being frank with one another? Their emperor — his position was a pile of ridiculous assumptions, no doubt, but at bottom — he was a sane man.” He touched off the emperor in a few pithy words, the German press, the German people, and our own. He put it as we should put it all now, but with a certain heat as of a man half guilty and wholly resentful. “Their damned little buttonedup professors!” he cried, incidentally. “Were there ever such men? And ours! Some of us might have taken a firmer line… . If a lot of us had taken a firmer line and squashed that nonsense early… .”

      He lapsed into inaudible whisperings, into silence… .

      I stood regarding him, understanding him, learning marvelously from him. It is a fact that for the best part of the morning of the Change I forgot Nettie and Verrall as completely as though they were no more than characters in some novel that I had put aside to finish at my leisure, in order that I might talk to this man.

      “Eh, well,” he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts. “Here we are awakened! The thing can’t go on now; all this must end. How it ever began — — —! My dear boy, how did all those things ever begin? I feel like a new Adam… . Do you think this has happened — generally? Or shall we find all these gnomes and things? … Who cares?”

      He made as if to rise, and remembered his ankle. He suggested I should help him as far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange to either of us that he should requisition my services or that I should cheerfully obey. I helped him bandage his ankle, and we set out, I his crutch, the two of us making up a sort of limping quadruped, along the winding lane toward the cliffs and the sea.

      Section 6

      His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a quarter from the lane. We went down to the beach margin and along the pallid wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying, hopping, tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and then, as soon as we could, sitting down. His ankle was, in fact, broken, and he could not put it to the ground without exquisite pain. So that it took us nearly two hours to get to the house, and it would have taken longer if his butler-valet had not come out to assist me. They had found motorcar and chauffeur smashed and still at the bend of the road near the house, and had been on that side looking for Melmount, or they would have seen us before.

      For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk boulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with the frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent, without reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashion of contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless, was the rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the most part talked, but at some shape of a question I told him — as plainly as I could tell of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible to me — of my murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the green vapors overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and nodded understandingly, and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating questions about my education, my upbringing, my work. There was a deliberation in his manner, brief full pauses, that had in them no element of delay.

      “Yes,” he said, “yes — of course. What a fool I have been!” and said no more until we had made another of our tripod struggles along the beach. At first I did not see the connection of my story with that self-accusation.

      “Suppose,” he said, panting on the groin, “there had been such a thing as a statesman! …”

      He turned to me. “If one had decided all this muddle shall end! If one had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds takes site and stone, and made — — — ” He flung out his big broad hand at the glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, “something to fit that setting.”

      He added in explanation, “Then there wouldn’t have been such stories as yours at all, you know… .”

      “Tell me more about it,” he said, “tell me all about yourself. I feel all these things have passed away, all these things are to be changed for ever… . You won’t be what you have been from this time forth. All

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