In the Days of the Comet

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 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.