Section 8

One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some subtle trick of quality it summarizes the Change for me.  It is the memory of a woman’s very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed face and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt in some secret purpose.  I passed her when in the afternoon of the first day, struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send a telegram to my mother telling her all was well with me.  Whither this woman went I do not know, nor whence she came; I never saw her again, and only her face, glowing with that new and luminous resolve, stands out for me. . . .

But that expression was the world’s.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE CABINET COUNCIL

Section 1

And what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council at which I was present, the council that was held two days later in Melmount’s bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame the constitution of the World State.  I was there because it was convenient for me to stay with Melmount.  I had nowhere to go particularly, and there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle confined him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his share of the enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers of the world.  I wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph available, I went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and sat at his desk to write at his dictation.  It is characteristic of the odd slackness that went with the spasmodic violence of the old epoch, that the secretary could not use shorthand and that there was no telephone whatever in the place.  Every message had to be taken to the village post-office in that grocer’s shop at Menton, half a mile away. . . .  So I sat in the back of Melmount’s room, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such memoranda as were needed.  At that time his room seemed to me the most beautifully furnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid cheerfulness of the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay just in front of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the silver equipage of the desk I used.  I know now that my presence in that room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even the coming and going of Parker the secretary, innovations.  In the old days a cabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtiveness were in the texture of all public life.  In the old days everybody was always keeping something back from somebody, being wary and cunning, prevaricating, misleading—­for the most part for no reason at all.  Almost unnoticed, that secrecy had dropped out of life.

I close my eyes and see those men again, hear their deliberating voices.  First I see them a little diffusely in the cold explicitness of daylight, and then concentrated and drawn together amidst the shadow and mystery about shaded lamps.  Integral to this and very clear is the memory of biscuit crumbs and a drop of spilt water, that at first stood shining upon and then sank into the green table-cloth. . . .