"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next four months—or the next four years. I know that I jolly well shan't be here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the country—just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you can have—as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be much the best place for them, and the safest—if you aren't here."
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.