I couldn’t see it even then.  I said, “My dear chap, why shouldn’t I be here?  I certainly mean to be here.”

And he considered it and said, “I don’t see why not.  It’s different for you.  You’ve got a child and I haven’t.”

I said I couldn’t see what Baby had to do with it.

And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that he was jolly glad he hadn’t got one.  What Baby had to do with it was to keep me out of it.

Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.

He said, “I’m talking about the European conflagration.  What are you?”

He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days.  It was the thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago—­didn’t I remember?  (Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.) Well then, here it was.  And it had come, by God, at the very date he had given it.

I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange.  He was deadly quiet.  Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy.  To say that he enjoyed the European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state of mind.  There was a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw himself—­there’s no doubt that already he did see himself—­figuring.

I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn’t suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.

“Dragged?” he said.  “Dragged?  We shall be in it without dragging—­in the very thick.”

From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg—­and he gave them twenty-four hours—­we should be in it.  We couldn’t keep out with a rag of honour to our names.  France, he declared, would be in to-day.  He gave us, I think—­but I do not like to say positively that he gave us—­three days; he couldn’t have been as dead right as all that.

What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had foreseen the war, and England’s part in it, but that he should have seen himself there, in the thick—­blazing away in the very middle of the conflagration.  What on earth Jimmy conceived that he should have to do with it I couldn’t think.  And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in Viola’s rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he wouldn’t be in it because he was an arrant coward.

And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like that was the sweat that had broken out on it.

Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger.  Thesiger, he said, knew all about it.  He had gone up—­he supposed I knew that?—­to offer his services to the War Office in the event of England’s coming in.