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 short-sighted considerations, dignity, objective
discipline, discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness of
soul, made us muffle before we told it to our fellow-men.
"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 buttoned-up 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 startingly 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.
