Section 5
That memory stands out against the dark past of the world withextraordinary clearness and brightness. The air, I remember, was fullof the calling and piping and singing of birds. I have a curiouspersuasion too that there was a distant happy clamor of pealingbells, but that I am half convinced is a mistake. Nevertheless, therewas something in the fresh bite of things, in the dewy newness ofsensation that set bells rejoicing in one's brain. And that big,fair, pensive man sitting on the ground had beauty even in hisclumsy pose, as though indeed some Great Master of strength andhumor 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 tomen. Before those days, not only did we think badly, but what wethought, a thousand short-sighted considerations, dignity, objectivediscipline, discretion, a hundred kindred aspects of shabbiness ofsoul, made us muffle before we told it to our fellow-men.
"It's all returning now," he said, and told me half soliloquizinglywhat was in his mind.
I wish I could give every word he said to me; he struck out imageafter image to my nascent intelligence, with swift broken fragmentsof speech. If I had a precise full memory of that morning I shouldgive it you, verbatim, minutely. But here, save for the littlesharp things that stand out, I find only blurred general impressions.Throughout I have to make up again his half-forgotten sentencesand 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 atthe end. The war--a perfectly horrible business! Horrible! And itwas just like a nightmare, you couldn't do anything to escape fromit--every one was driven!"
His sense of indiscretion was gone.
He opened the war out to me--as every one sees it now. Only thatmorning it was astonishing. He sat there on the ground, absurdlyforgetful of his bare and swollen foot, treating me as the humblestaccessory and as altogether an equal, talking out to himself thegreat obsessions of his mind. "We could have prevented it! Any ofus who chose to speak out could have prevented it. A little decentfrankness. 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 theemperor 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 acertain heat as of a man half guilty and wholly resentful. "Theirdamned little buttoned-up professors!" he cried, incidentally."Were there ever such men? And ours! Some of us might have takena firmer line. . . . If a lot of us had taken a firmer line andsquashed that nonsense early. . . ."
He lapsed into inaudible whisperings, into silence. . . .
I stood regarding him, understanding him, learning marvelouslyfrom him. It is a fact that for the best part of the morning ofthe Change I forgot Nettie and Verrall as completely as though theywere no more than characters in some novel that I had put aside tofinish at my leisure, in order that I might talk to this man.
"Eh, well," he said, waking startlingly from his thoughts. "Here weare awakened! The thing can't go on now; all this must end. How itever 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 shouldhelp him as far as his bungalow. There seemed nothing strange toeither of us that he should requisition my services or that I shouldcheerfully 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.