“What is the matter, Demian? Nothing can have happened to your mother?”
He did not listen to my words. He was very pale, and perspiration ran down both sides of his forehead over his cheeks. His horse was flecked with foam. He tied the reins to the garden fence, then he took my arm and walked with me down the street.
“Have you already heard the news?” I had heard nothing.
Demian pressed my arm and turned his face to me, with a dark, compassionate, singular look.
“Yes, old man, now we’re in for it. You know of the strained relations with Russia—”
“What? Is it war? I had never believed it.”
He spoke in an undertone, although no one was near.
“It is not yet declared. But it’s war. Rely on it. I haven’t worried you lately, but I have seen three new omens since. It will be no foundering of the world, no earthquake, no revolution. It’s war. You will see how that strikes everybody. It will be a joy to people; everyone already rejoices that hostilities are about to commence. So insipid has life become for them. But you will see now, Sinclair, that is only the beginning. This will perhaps be a great war, a very great war. The new dispensation commences and for those who adhere to the old, the new will be terrible. What will you do?”
I was perplexed, everything sounded so strange and improbable.
“I don’t know—and you?”
He shrugged his shoulders.