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.

Section 6

His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a quarter from the lane.  We went down to the beach margin and along the pallid wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying, hopping, tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and then, as soon as we could, sitting down.  His ankle was, in fact, broken, and he could not put it to the ground without exquisite pain.  So that it took us nearly two hours to get to the house, and it would have taken longer if his butler-valet had not come out to assist me.  They had found motor-car and chauffeur smashed and still at the bend of the road near the house, and had been on that side looking for Melmount, or they would have seen us before.