Chapter THE TENTH: A Searching of Schoolmasters (8)

Other books have told, innumerable books that have yet to come will tell, of the rushing together of events that culminated in the breach of the Belgian frontier by the German hosts. Our story has to tell only of how that crisis took to itself and finished and crowned the education of these three people with whom we are concerned. Of the three, Oswald and Joan spent nearly the whole of July at Pelham Ford. Peter came down from Cambridge for a day or so and then, after two or three days in London for which he did not clearly account, he went off to the Bernese Oberland to climb with a party of three other Trinity men. There was a vague but attractive project at the back of his mind, which he did not confide to Oswald or Joan, of going on afterwards into north Italy to a little party of four or five choice spirits which Hetty was to organize. They could meet on the other side of the Simplon. Perhaps they would push on into Venezia. They would go for long tramps amidst sweet chestnut trees and ripening grapes, they would stay in the vast, roomy, forgotten inns of sleepy towns whose very stables are triumphs of architecture, they would bathe amidst the sunlit rocks of quiet lakes. Wherever they went in that land the snow and blue of the distant Alps would sustain the sweet landscape as music sustains a song.

Hetty had made it all fantastically desirable. She had invented it and woven details about it one afternoon in her studio. She knew north Italy very well; it was not the first amusing journey in that soft, delicious land that she had contrived. Peter was tremendously excited to think of the bright possibilities of such an adventure, and yet withal there was a queer countervailing feeling gnawing amidst his lusty anticipations. Great fun it would be, tremendous fun, with a little spice of sin in it, and why not? Only somehow he had a queer unreasonable feeling that Joan ought to share his holidays. Old Joan who looked at him with eyes that held a shadow of sorrow; who made him feel that she knew more than she could possibly know. He wished Joan, too, had some spree in contemplation—not of course quite the same sort of spree. A decent girl’s sort of spree. Just the tramp part. He wished he could tell Joan of what was in hand, that there wasn’t this queer embarrassment between them. Joan had her car of course....

Oswald had recently bought Joan a pretty little ten-horsepower Singer car, a two-seater, in which she was to run about the country at her own free will. It was one of several attempts he had recently made to brighten life for Joan. He was beginning to watch her very closely; he did not clearly understand the thoughts and imaginations that made her so grave and feverish at times, but he knew that she was troubled. The girl’s family resemblance to his Dolly had caught his mind. He thought she was more like Dolly than she was because her image constantly before him was steadily replacing Dolly’s in his mind. And he liked very much to sit beside her and watch her drive. At five-and-forty miles an hour her serene profile was divine. She had a good mechanical intelligence and her nerve was perfect; the little car lived in her hands and had the precision of movement of an animal.

They ran across country to Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon, and slept the night in Warwick; they went to Newmarket and round to Chelmsford and Dovercourt, which was also an overnight excursion. These were their longer expeditions. They made afternoon runs to St. Albans, Hitchin, Baldock, Bedford, Stevenage and Royston. Almost every fine day they made some trip. While she drove or while they walked about some unfamiliar town the cloud seemed to lift from Joan’s mind, she became as fresh and bright as a child. And she talked more and more freely to Oswald. She talked more abundantly than Peter and much less about ideas. She talked rather of scenery and customs and atmospheres. She seemed to have a far more concrete imagination than Peter, to accept the thing that was with none of his reluctance. She would get books about Spain, about the South Sea Islands, about China, big books of travel and description, from the London Library, and so assimilate them that she seemed to be living imaginatively for days together in these alien atmospheres. She wanted to know about Uganda. She was curious about the native King. There were times when Oswald was reminded of some hungry and impatient guest in a restaurant reading over an over-crowded and perplexing menu.

She did not read many plays or novels nor any poetry. She mentioned casually one day to Oswald that such reading either bored her or disturbed her. She read a certain amount of philosophy, but manifestly now as a task. And she was incessantly restless. She had no mother nor sisters, no feminine social world about her; she suffered from a complete lack of all those distracting and pacifying routines and all those restraints of habit and association that control the lives of more normally placed girls. Her thoughts, stimulated by her uncontrolled reading, ran wild. One morning she was up an hour before dawn, and let herself out of the house and walked over the hills nearly to Newport before breakfast, coming back with skirts and shoes wet with dew and speckled with grass seeds and little burrs. She spent that afternoon asleep in the hammock. And she would play fitfully at the piano or the pianola after dinner and then wander out, a restless white sprite, into the garden. One night early in the month she persuaded Oswald to go for a long moonlight walk with her along the road to Ware.

There was a touch of dream quality in that walk for both of them. They had never been together in moonlight before. She ceased to be Joan and became at once something very strange and wonderful and very intimate, a magic phantom of womanhood, a creature no longer of flesh and blood but of pallor and shadow, whose hair was part of the universal dusk and her eyes two stars. And he, too, walking along and sometimes talking as if he talked to the lonely sky, and sometimes looking down out of the dimness closely at her, he had lost his age and his scars and become the utmost dignity of a man. They walked sometimes on a road of misty brightness and sometimes through deep pools of shadow and sometimes amidst the black bars and lace cast by tree stems and tree branches, and she made him talk of the vast spaces of Africa and the long trails through reed and forest, and of great animals standing still and invisible close at hand, hidden by the trickery of their colourings, and how he had gone all alone into the villages of savage people who had never before set eyes on a European. And she talked with a whisper and sigh in her voice of how she, too, would like to go into wild and remote lands—“if I could go off with a man like you.” And it seemed to him for a time that this sweet voice beside him was not truly Joan’s but another’s, and that he walked once more with the dearest wish he had ever wished in his life.

He talked to her of moonlight and starlight in the tropics, of a wonderful pale incandescence that shines out above the grave of the sunset when the day has gone, of fireflies and of phosphorescent seas, and of the distant sounds of drumming and chanting and the remote blaze of native bonfires seen through black tree stems in the night. He talked, too, of the howling of beasts at night, and of the sudden roaring of lions, and at that she drew closer to him.

When at last it was time for her to turn she did not want to turn. “I have been happy,” she said. “I have been happy. Let us go on. Why should we go back?”

As if she was not always happy. She pulled at his arm like a child....

And as they came home she came close to him, and for long spaces they said not a word to one another.

But at the water splash in the village she had a queer impulse. The water splash appeared ahead of them, an incessant tumult of silver in which were set jewels of utter blackness and shining diamonds. She looked and tugged him by the arm.

“Let us walk through the water, dear Nobby!” she said. “I want to feel it about my feet. Do! Do! Do! It will hardly cover our shoes....”

A queer impulse that was of hers but, what was queerer, it found the completest response in him. “All right,” he said, as though this was the most commonplace suggestion possible; and very gravely, and as if it was some sort of rite, he let her lead him through the water. They were indeed both very grave....

They walked up to the house in silence....

“Good night, Nobby dear,” said Joan, leaning suddenly over by the newel of the stairs, and kissed him, as the moonlight kisses, a kiss as soft and cool as ever awakened Endymion....

Life was at high tide in Joan that July, and everything in her was straining at its anchors. All her being was flooded with the emotional intimations that she was a woman, that she had to be beautiful and hasten to meet exquisite and profoundly significant experiences; none of her instincts told her that the affairs of the world drew to an issue that would maim and kill half the youths she knew and torment and alter her own and every life about her. She was haunted and distressed day and night—for the trouble got into her dreams—by Peter’s evident love-making with Hetty and Huntley’s watchful eyes, and she saw nothing of the red eyes of war and the blood-lust that craved for all her generation. Peter was making love—making love to Hetty. Peter was making love to Hetty. And Joan was left at home in a fever of desertion. Her brotherhood with Peter which had been perhaps the greatest fact of her girlhood was breaking down under the exasperation of their separation and her jealousy, and Huntley was steadily and persistently invading her imagination....

Women and men alike are love-hungry creatures; women even more so than men. It is not beauty nor strength nor goodness that hearts go to so much as attention. To know that another human being thinks of us, esteems us above all our secret estimates, has a steadfast and consuming need of us, is the supreme reassurance of life. And when women’s hearts are distressed by vague passions and a friendless insecurity they will go out very readily even to a cripple who watches and waits.

Huntley was one of those men for whom women are the sole interest in life. If he had been obliged to master a mathematical problem he would have thought he struggled with a Muse and so achieved it. He watched them and waylaid them for small and great occasions. He understood completely these states of wild impatience that possess the feminine mind. He had no brotherliness nor fatherliness in his composition: his sole conception of this trouble of the unmated was of an opportunity for himself. A little patience, a little thought—and it was very delightful thought, a little pleasant skill, and all this vague urgency would become a gift for him.

But never before had Huntley met any one so fresh and youthfully beautiful as Joan. There were times when he could doubt whether he was the magnetizer or the magnetized. He had kissed her but he was not sure that she had kissed him. Some day she should kiss him of her own free will. He thought now almost continuously of Joan. The only work he could get on with was a novel into which he put things he had imagined about Joan. He wrote her long letters and planned for days to get an hour’s conversation with her. And he would go for long walks and spend all the time composing letters or scheming dramatic conversations that never would happen in reality because Joan missed all her cues.

It was rather by instinct than by any set scheme that he did his utmost to convert her vague unrest into a discontent with all her circumstances, to shape her thoughts to the idea that her present life was a prison-house of which he held the key of escape. He suggested in a score of different ways to her mind that outside her present prison was a wonderland of beauty and excitement. He was clever enough to catch from her talk her love of the open, of fresh air and sunlight. He had more than a suspicion of Hetty Reinhart’s plans; he conveyed them by shadowy hints. Why should not Joan too defy convention? She could tell Oswald a story of a projected walk with some other girl at Cambridge, and slip away to Huntley. They had always been the best of companions. Why shouldn’t they take a holiday together?

And why not?

What was there to fear? Couldn’t she trust Huntley? Couldn’t she trust herself?

To which something deep in Joan’s composition replied that this was but playing with passion and romance, and she wanted passion and romance. She wanted a reality—unendurably. And it was clear as day to her that she did not want passion and romance with Huntley. He was a strange being to her really, not differing as man does from woman but as dog does from cat; hidden deep down perhaps was some mysterious difference of race; he could amuse her and interest her because he was queer and unexpected, but he was not of her kind. Like to like was the way of the Sydenham blood. He offered and pointed to all that seemed to her necessary to make life right and to end this aching suspense—except that he was a stranger....

The long sunny days of June dragged by. Suppose after all she were to slip away to Huntley. It would be a spree, it would be an excitement. Did he matter so much after all?...

Peter sent a postcard and said he thought he would go on “with some people into Italy.”

She had known—all along—that that was coming.

She went out the night after that postcard came into the garden alone. It was a still and sultry evening, and she stifled even in the open air. She wanted to go up into the arbour and to sit there and think. She could not understand the quiver of anger that ran through her being like the shiver of the current on the surface of a stream. All the trees and bushes about her were dark and shapeless lumps of blackness and as she went up the path she trod on two snails.

“Damn them!” she said at the second scrunch. “Phew! What a night. Full of things that crawl about in the darkness. Full of _beastly_ things....”

A little owl mewed and mocked wickedly among the trees.

There was no view out of the black arbour, only the sense of a darkened world. A thin ineffectual moon crescent was sinking westward, and here and there were spiritless stars. A strange, huge shape of clouds, a hooded figure of the profoundest blue, brooded in a sky of luminous pale yellow over the land to the south and east, and along the under fringe of its skirts ever and again there ran a flicker of summer lightning. “And I am to live here! I am to live here while life runs by me,” she said.

She would go to Huntley. No brother and sister business though! She would go to Huntley and end all this torment.

But she couldn’t!...

“Why have I no will?” she cried harshly.

She did not love Huntley. That did not matter. She would _make_ herself love Huntley....

She went out upon the terrace and stood very still, looking down upon the house and thinking hard.

Could she love no one? If so, then it might as well be Huntley she went to as any one? All these boys, Troop, Winterbaum, Wilmington—they were nothing to her. But she wanted to live. Was it perhaps that she did love some one—who stood, invisible and unregarded, possessing her heart?

Her mind halted on that for a time and then seemed to force itself along a certain line that lay before it. Did she love Oswald? She did. More than any of them—far more. The other night most certainly she had been in love with him. When he walked through the water with her—absurdly grave——! She could have flung her arms about him then. She could have clung to him and kissed him. Of course she must be in love with him.... But he was not in love with her!... And yet that moonlit evening it seemed——?

Suppose it were Oswald and not Huntley who beckoned.

Love for Huntley—love him where you would—though you loved him in the most beautiful scenery in the world—would still be something vulgar, still be this dirty love of the studios, still a trite disobedience, a stolen satisfaction, after the fashion of the Reinhart affair. But Oswald was a great man, a kind and noble giant, who told no lies, who played no tricks....

If he were to love one——!...

She stood upon the terrace looking down upon the lit house, trembling with this thought that she loved Oswald and holding fast to it—for fear of another thought that she dared not think, that lay dark and waiting outside her consciousness, a poor exile thought, utterly forbidden.

§ 11

Joan stood in the darkness on the turf outside Oswald’s open window, and watched him.

He was so deep in thought that he had not noted the soft sounds of her approach. The only light in the room was his study lamp, and his face was in shadow while his hands rested on the open Atlas in front of him and were brightly lit. They were rather sturdy white hands with broad thumbs, exactly like Peter’s. Presently he stirred and pulled the Atlas towards him, and turned the page over to another map. The fingers of his left hand drummed on the desk.

He looked up abruptly, and she came to the window and leant forward into the room, with her arms folded on the sill.

“You’re as still as the night, Joan,” he said.

“There’s thunder brewing.”

“There’s war brewing, Joan.”

“Why do you sit poring over that map?”

“Because there are various people called Croats and Slovenes and Serbs and they are beginning to think they are one people and ought to behave as one people, and some of them are independent and some are under the Austrians and some are under the Italians.”

“What has that got to do with us?” said Joan.

She followed her question up with another. “Is it a fresh Balkan war?”

“Something bigger than that,” said Oswald. “Something very much bigger—unless we are careful.”

His tone was so grave that Joan caught something of his gravity. She stepped in through the window. “Where are all these people?” she said. She thought it was characteristic of him to trouble about these distant races and their entanglements. But she wished he could have a keener sense of the perplexities that came nearer him. She came and leant over him while he explained the political riddle of Austria and Eastern Europe to her....

“We are too busy with the Irish trouble,” he said. “I am afraid of Germany. If that fool Carson and these Pankhurst people had been paid to distract our minds from what is happening, they could not do the work better. Big things are happening—oh! big things.”

She tried to feel their bigness. But to her all such political talk was still as unreal as things one reads about in histories, something to do with maps and dates, something you can “get up” and pass examinations in, but nothing that touches the warm realities of personal life and beauty. Yet it pleased her to think that this Oswald she loved could reach up to these things, so that he partook of the nature of the great beings who cared for them like Gladstone or Lincoln, and was not simply a limited real person like Troop or Wilmington or Peter. (He was really like a great Peter, like what Peter ought to be.) He seemed preoccupied as if he did not feel how close she was about him, how close her beauty came to him. She sat now on the arm of his chair behind him, with her face over his shoulder. Her body touched his shoulders, by imperceptible degrees she brought her cheek against his crisp hair, where it pressed no heavier than a shadow.

She had no suspicion how vividly he was aware of her nearness.

As he discoursed to her upon the text of the maps before them, a deep undercurrent of memories and feelings of quite a different quality ran contrariwise through his mind. “We are getting nearer than we have ever been to a big European war, a big break-up! People do not understand, do not begin to dream of the smash-up that that would be. There is scarcely a country that may not be drawn in.”

So he spoke. And below that level of thought he was irritated to feel that such thought could not wholly possess him. Far more real to him were the vague suggestions of love and the summer night and the dusky nearness of this Joan, this phantom of Dolly, for more and more were Joan and Dolly blending together in his emotional life, this dearness and sweetness that defied all reasoning and explanation. And cutting across both these streams of thought and feeling came a third stream of thought. Joan’s intonations in every word she spoke betrayed her indifference to the great net of political forces in which the world struggled. She was no more deeply interested than if he had been discussing some problem at chess or some mathematical point. She was not deeply interested and he was not completely interested, and yet this question that was slipping its hold on their attention might involve the lives and welfare of millions....

He struggled with his conception of a world being hauled to its destruction in a net of vaguely apprehended ideas, of ordinary life being shattered not by the strength but by the unattractive feebleness of its political imaginings. “People do not understand,” he repeated, trying to make this thing real to himself. “All Europe is in danger.”

He turned upon her with a betrayal of irritation in his voice. “You think all this matters nothing to us,” he said. “But it does. If Austria makes war in Serbia, Russia will come in. If Russia comes in, France comes in. That brings in Germany. We can’t see France beaten again. We can’t have that.”

But Joan had still the child’s belief that somewhere, somehow, behind all the ostensible things of the world, wise adults in its interests have the affairs of mankind under control. “They won’t let things go as far as that,” she said.

Oswald reflected upon that. How sure this creature was of her world!

“Until Death and Judgment come, Joan,” he said, “there is neither Death nor Judgment.”

That saying and his manner of saying it struck hard on her mind. Before she went to sleep that night she found herself trying to imagine what war was really like....

And next day she was thinking of war. Would Peter perhaps have to be a soldier if there was a real great war? Would all her young men go soldiering? Would Oswald go? And what was there for a girl to do in war-time? She hated the idea of nursing, but she supposed she would have to nurse. Far rather would she go under fire and rescue wounded men. Had modern war no use for a Joan of Arc?... She sank to puerile visions of a girl in a sort of Vivandière uniform upholding a tattered flag under a heavy fire.... It couldn’t last very long.... It would be exciting.... But all this was nonsense; there would be no war. There would be a conference or an arbitration or something dull of that sort, and all this stir and unrest would subside and leave things again—as they had been....

Swiftly and steadfastly now the world was setting itself to tear up all the scenery of Joan’s world and to smash and burn its every property. If it had not been for the suggestion of Oswald’s deepening preoccupation one may doubt whether Joan would have heeded the huge rush of events in Europe until the moment of the crash. But because of him she was drawn into the excitement. From the twenty-fifth of July, which was the day when the news of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia appeared in the English newspapers, through the swift rush of events that followed, the failure of the Irish Conference at Buckingham Palace to arrive at any settlement upon the Irish question, the attempts of Sir Edward Grey to arrest the march of events in Eastern Europe, the unchallenged march of five thousand men with machine-guns through Belfast, the shooting upon the crowd in Dublin after the Howth gun-running, the consequent encouragement of Germany and Austria to persist in a stiff course with Russia because of the apparent inevitability of civil war in Ireland, right up to the march of the Germans into Luxembourg on the first of August, Joan followed with an interest that had presently swamped her egotistical eroticism altogether.

The second of August was a Sunday and brought no papers to Pelham Ford, but Joan motored to Bishop’s Stortford to get an _Observer_. Monday was Bank Holiday; the belated morning paper brought the news of the massacre of Belgian peasants by the Germans at Visé. The Germans were pouring into Belgium, an incredible host of splendidly armed men. Tuesday was an immense suspense for Oswald and Joan. They were full of an uncontrollable indignation against Germany. They thought the assault on Belgium the most evil thing that had ever happened in history. But it seemed as though the Government and the country hesitated. _The Daily News_ came to hand with a whole page advertisement in great letters exhorting England not to go to war for Belgium.

“But this is Shame!” cried Oswald. “If once the Germans get Paris——! It is Shame and Disaster!”

The postman was a reservist and had been called up. All over the country the posts were much disorganized. It was past eleven on the sunniest of Wednesdays when Joan, standing restless at the gates, called to Oswald, who was fretfully pacing the lawn, that the papers were coming. She ran down the road to intercept the postman, and came back with a handful of letters and parcels. Newspapers were far more important than any personal letters that morning. She gave Oswald the newspaper package to tear open, and snatched up _The Daily News_ as it fell out of the enveloping _Times_.

There was a crisp rustling of the two papers.

Oswald’s fear of his country’s mental apathy, muddle-headedness, levity, and absolute incapacity to grasp any great situation at all, had become monstrous under the stresses of these anxious days. Up to the end he feared some politicians’ procrastination, some idiot dishonesty and betrayal, weak palterings with a challenge as high as heaven, with dangers as plain as daylight....

“Thank God!” he cried. “It is War!”

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH
JOAN AND PETER GRADUATE

§ 1

So it was, with a shock like the shock of an unsuspected big gun fired suddenly within a hundred yards of her, that the education of Joan and her generation turned about and entered upon a new and tragic phase. Necessity had grown impatient with the inertia of the Universities and the evasions of politicians. Mankind must learn the duties of human brotherhood and respect for the human adventure, or waste and perish; so our stern teacher has decreed. If in peace time we cannot learn and choose between those alternatives, then through war we must. And if we will in no manner learn our lesson, then——. The rocks are rich with the traces of ineffective creatures that the Great Experimenter has tried and thrown aside....

All these young people who had grown up without any clear aims or any definite sense of obligations, found themselves confronted, without notice, without any preparation, by a world crisis that was also a crisis of life or death, of honour or dishonour for each one of them. They had most of them acquired the habit of regarding the teachers and statesmen and authorities set up over their lives as people rather on the dull side of things, as people addicted to muddling and disingenuousness in matters of detail; but they had never yet suspected the terrific insecurity of the whole system—until this first thunderous crash of the downfall. Even then they did not fully realize themselves as a generation betrayed to violence and struggle and death. All human beings, all young things, are born with a conviction that all is right with the world. There is mother to go to and father to go to, and behind them the Law; for most of the generation that came before Joan and Peter the delusion of a great safety lasted on far into adult life; only slowly, with maturity, came the knowledge of the flimsiness of all these protections and the essential dangerousness of the world. But for this particular generation the disillusionment came like an unexpected blow in the face. They were preparing themselves in a leisurely and critical fashion for the large, loose prospect of unlimited life, and then abruptly the world dropped its mask. That pampered and undisciplined generation was abruptly challenged to be heroic beyond all the precedents of mankind. Their safety, their freedom ended, their leisure ended. The first few days of August, 1914, in Europe, was a spectacle of old men planning and evading, lying and cheating, most of them so scared by what they were doing as completely to have lost their heads, and of youth and young men everywhere being swept from a million various employments, from a million divergent interests and purposes, which they had been led to suppose were the proper interests and purposes of life, towards the great military machines that were destined to convert, swiftly and ruthlessly, all their fresh young life into rags and blood and rotting flesh....

But at first the young had no clear sense of the witless futility of the machine that was to crush their lives. They did not understand that there was as yet no conception of a world order anywhere in the world. They had taken it for granted that there was an informal, tacitly understood world order, at which these Germans—confound them!—had suddenly struck.

Peter and his friends were so accustomed to jeer at the dignitaries of church and state and at kings and politicians that they could not realize that such dwarfish and comic characters could launch disaster upon a whole world. They sat about a little table in a twilit arbour on the way down from Bel-Alp—Peter was to leave the climbers and join the Italian party at Brigue—and devoured omelette and veal and drank Yvorne, and mocked over the Swiss newspapers.

“Another ultimatum!” said one cheerful youth. “Holland will get it next.”

“He’s squirting ultimatums. Like a hedgehog throwing quills.”

“I saw him in Berlin,” said Peter. “He rushed by in an automobile. He isn’t a human being. He’s more like Mr. Toad in _The Wind in the Willows_....”

“All the French have gone home; all the Germans,” said Troop. “I suppose we ought to go.”

“I’ve promised to go to Italy,” said Peter.

“War is war,” said Troop, and stiffened Peter’s resolution.

“I’m not going to have my holidays upset by a theatrical ass in a gilt helmet,” said Peter.

He got down to Brigue next day, and the little town was bright with uniforms, for the Swiss were mobilizing. He saw off his mountaineering friends in the evening train for Paris. “You’d better come,” said Troop gravely, hanging out of the train.

Peter shook his head. His was none of your conscript nations. No....

He dined alone; Hetty and her two friends were coming up from Lausanne next day. In the reading-room he found the _Times_ with the first news of the invasion of Belgium. Several of the villagers of Visé had turned out with shot guns, and the Germans had performed an exemplary massacre for the discouragement of franc-tireurs. Indignation had been gathering in Peter during the day. He swore aloud and flung down the paper. “Is there no one sane enough to assassinate a scoundrel who sets things loose like this?” he said. He prowled about the little old town in the moonlight, full of black rage against the Kaiser. He felt he must go back. But it seemed to him a terrible indignity that he should have to interrupt his holiday because of the ambition of a monarch. “Why the devil can’t the Germans keep him on his chain?” he said, and then, “Shooting the poor devils—like rabbits!”

Hetty and her friends arrived in the early train next morning, all agog about the war. They thought it a tremendous lark. They were not to get out at Brigue, it was arranged; Peter was to be on the platform with his rucksack and join them. He kept the appointment, but he was a very scowling Peter in spite of the fact that Hetty was gentle and tremulous at the sight of him in her best style. “This train is an hour late,” said Peter, sitting down beside her. “That accursed fool at Potsdam is putting all our Europe out of gear.”...

For three days he was dark, preoccupied company. “Somebody ought to assassinate him,” he said, harping on that idea. “Have men no self-respect at all?”

He felt he ought to go back to England, and the feeling produced a bleak clearness in his mind. It was soft sunshine on the lake of Orta, but east wind in Peter’s soul. He disliked Hetty’s friends extremely; he had never met them before; they were a vulgar brace of sinners he thought, and they reflected their quality upon her. The war they considered was no concern of theirs; they had studio minds. The man was some sort of painter, middle-aged, contemptuous, and with far too much hair. He ought to have been past this sort of spree. The girl was a model and had never been in Italy before. She kept saying, “O, the _sky_!” until it jarred intolerably. The days are notoriously longer on the lake of Orta than anywhere else in the world; from ten o’clock in the morning to lunch time is about as long as a week’s imprisonment; from two to five is twice that length; from five onward the course of time at Orta is more normal. Hetty was Hetty, in the tradition of Cleopatra, but could Cleopatra hold a young man whose mind was possessed by one unquenchable thought that he had been grossly insulted and deranged by an exasperating potentate at Potsdam who was making hay of his entire world, and that he had to go at once and set things right, and that it was disgraceful not to go?

He broached these ideas to Hetty about eleven o’clock on their first morning upon the lake. They were adrift in a big tilted boat in the midst of a still, glassy symmetry of mountain-backed scenery and mountain-backed reflections, and the other couple was far away, a little white dot at the head of a V of wake, rowing ambitiously to the end of the lake.

“You can’t go,” said Hetty promptly....

“But I have come all the way to Italy for you!” cried Hetty....

This was a perplexing problem for the honour of a young man of one-and-twenty. He argued the case—weakly. He had an audience of one, a very compelling one. He decided to remain. In the night he woke up and thought of Troop. Old Troop must be in England by now. Perhaps he had already enlisted. Ever since their school days he and Troop had had a standing dispute upon questions of morals and duty. There was something dull and stiff about old Troop that drove a bright antagonist to laxity, but after all——? Troop had cut off clean and straight to his duty.... Because Troop wasn’t entangled. He had kept clear of all this love-making business.... There was something to be said for Troop’s point of view after all....

The second day Peter reopened the question of going as they sat on a stone seat under the big, dark trees on the Sacro Monte, and looked out under the drooping boughs upon the lake, and Hetty had far more trouble with him. He decided he could not leave her. But he spent the hours between tea and dinner in reading all the war news he could find—translating the Italian with the aid of a small conversation dictionary. Something had happened in the North Sea, he could not make out exactly what it was, but the Germans had lost a ship called the _Königin Luise_, and the British a battleship—was it a battleship?—the _Amphion_. Beastly serious that!—a battleship. There was something vague, too, about a fleet encounter, but no particulars. It was a bore getting no particulars. Here close at hand in the Mediterranean there had been, it was said, a naval battle in the Straits of Messina also; the _Panther_ was sunk; and the Germans had had a great defeat at Liége. The British army was already landing in France....

Upon his second decision to remain Peter reflected profoundly that night.

The standing dispute between him and Troop upon the lightness or seriousness of things sexual returned to his mind. Troop, Peter held, regarded all these things with a portentous solemnity, a monstrous sentimentality. Peter, Troop maintained, regarded them with a dangerous levity. Troop declared that love, “true love,” was, next to “honour,” the most tremendous thing in life; he was emphatic upon “purity.” Peter held that love was as light and pleasant and incidental a thing as sunshine. You said, “Here’s a jolly person!” just as you said, “Here’s a pretty flower!” There had been, he argued, a lot of barbaric “Taboos” in these matters, but the new age was dropping all that. He called Troop’s idea of purity “ceremonial obsession.” Both talked very freely of “cleanness” and meant very different things: Troop chiefly abstinence and Peter baths. Peter had had the courage of his opinions; but once or twice he had doubted secretly whether, after all, there weren’t defilements beyond the reach of mere physical cleansing. One dismissed that sort of thing as “reaction.” All these disputes were revived now in his memory in the light of this one plain, disconcerting fact: Troop had gone straight home to enlist and he himself was still in Italy. Weakening of moral fibre? Loss of moral fibre?

The next day, in the boat, Peter reopened the question of his departure.

“You see, Hetty,” he said, “if there was conscription in England—I shouldn’t feel so bound to go.”

“But then you would be bound to go.”

“Well, then I could be a decent deserter—for love’s sake. But when your country leaves it to you to come back or not as you think fit—then, you know, you’re bound—in honour.”

Hetty dabbled her hand over the side of the boat. “Oh—_go_!” she said.

“Yes,” said Peter over the oars, and as if ashamed, “I must go—I must. There is a train this afternoon which catches the express at Domo d’Ossola.”

He rowed for a while. Presently he stole a glance at Hetty. She was lying quite still on her cushion under the tilt, staring at the distant mountains, with tears running down her set face. They were real tears. “Three days,” she said choking, and at that rolled over to weep noisily upon her arms.

Peter sat over his oars and stared helplessly at her emotion.

A familiar couplet came into his head, and remained unspoken because of its striking inappropriateness:

“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.”

Presently Hetty lay still. Then she sat up and wiped at a tear-stained face.

“If you must go,” said Hetty, “you must go. But why you didn’t go from Brigue——!”

That problem was to exercise Peter’s mind considerably in the extensive reflections of the next few days and nights.

“And I have to stick in Italy with those two Bores!”...

But the easy flexibility of Hetty’s temperament was a large part of her charm.

“I suppose you ought to go, Peter,” she said, “really. I had no business to try and keep you. But I’ve had so little of you. And I love you.”

She melted. Peter melted in sympathy. But he was much relieved....

She slipped into his bedroom to help him pack his rucksack, and she went with him to the station. “I wish I was a man, too,” she said. “Then I would come with you. But wars don’t last for ever, Peter. We’ll come back here.”

She watched the train disappear along the curve above the station with something like a sense of desolation. Then being a really very stout-hearted young woman, she turned about and went down to the telegraph office to see what could be done to salvage her rent and shattered holiday.

And Peter, because of these things, and because of certain delays at Paris and Havre, for the train and Channel services were getting badly disorganized, got to England six whole days later than Troop.

§ 2

This passion of indignation against Germany in which Peter enlisted was the prevailing mood of England during the opening months of the war. The popular mind had seized upon the idea that Europe had been at peace and might have remained at peace indefinitely if it had not been for the high-handed behaviour, first of Austria with Serbia, and then of Germany with Russia. The belief that on the whole Germany had prepared for and sought this war was no doubt correct, and the spirit of the whole nation rose high and fine to the challenge. But that did not so completely exhaust the moral factors in the case as most English people, including Peter, supposed at that time.

Neither Peter nor Joan, although they were members of the best educated class in the community and had been given the best education available for that class, had any but the vaguest knowledge of what was going on in the political world. They knew practically nothing of what a modern imperial system consisted, had but the vaguest ideas of the rôle of Foreign Office, Press and Parliament in international affairs, were absolutely ignorant of the direction of the army and navy, knew nothing of the history of Germany or Russia during the previous half-century, or the United States since the Declaration of Independence, had no inklings of the elements of European ethnology, and had scarcely ever heard such words, for example, as Slovene, or Slovak, or Ukrainian. The items of foreign intelligence in the newspapers joined on to no living historical conceptions in their minds. Between the latest history they had read and the things that happened about them and in which they were now helplessly involved, was a gap of a hundred years or more; the profound changes in human life and political conditions brought about during that hundred years by railways, telegraphs, steam shipping, steel castings and the like, were all beyond the scope of their ideas. For Joan history meant stories about Joan of Arc, Jane Shore, the wives of Henry the Eighth, James I. and his Steenie, Charles the Second, and suchlike people, winding up with the memoirs of Madame d’Arblay; Peter had ended his historical studies when he went on to the modern side at Caxton—it would have made little difference so far as modern affairs were concerned if he had taken a degree in history—and was chiefly conversant with such things as the pedigree of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the Constitutions of Clarendon, the statute of Mortmain, and the claims of Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth to the crown of France. Neither of them knew anything at all of India except by way of Kipling’s stories and the Coronation Durbar pictures. If the two of them had rather clearer ideas than most of their associates about the recent opening up and partition of Africa it was because Oswald had talked about those things. But the jostling for empire that had been going on for the past fifty years all over the world, and the succession of Imperialist theories from Disraeli to Joseph Chamberlain and from Bismarck to Treitschke, had no place in their thoughts. The _entente cordiale_ was a phrase of no particular significance to them. The State in which they lived had never explained to them in any way its relations to them nor its fears and aims in regard to the world about it. It is doubtful, indeed, if the State in which they lived possessed the mentality to explain as much even to itself.

How far the best education in America or Germany or any other country was better, it is not for us to discuss here, nor how much better education might be. This is the story of the minds of Joan and Peter and of how that vast system of things hidden, things unanalysed and things misrepresented and obscured, the political system of the European “empires” burst out into war about them. The sprawling, clumsy, heedless British State, which had troubled so little about taking Peter into its confidence, displayed now no hesitation whatever in beckoning him home to come and learn as speedily as possible how to die for it.

The tragedy of youth in the great war was a universal tragedy, and if the German youths who were now, less freely and more systematically, beating Peter by weeks and months in a universal race into uniform, were more instructed than he, they were also far more thoroughly misinformed. If Peter took hold of the war by the one elemental fact that Belgium had been invaded most abominably and peaceful villagers murdered in their own fields, the young Germans on the other hand had been trained to a whole system of false interpretations. They were assured that they fought to break up a ring of threatening enemies. And that the whole thing was going to be the most magnificent adventure in history. Their minds had been prepared elaborately and persistently for this heroic struggle—in which they were to win easily. They had been made to believe themselves a race of blond aristocrats above all the rest of mankind, entitled by their moral and mental worth to world dominion. They believed that now they did but come to their own. They had been taught all these things from childhood; how could they help but believe them?

Peter arrived, tired and dirty, at Pelham Ford in the early afternoon. Oswald and Joan were out, but he bathed and changed while Mrs. Moxton got him a belated lunch. As he finished this Joan came into the dining-room from a walk.

“Hullo, Petah,” she said, with no display of affection.

“Hullo, Joan.”

“We thought you were never coming.”

“I was in Italy,” said Peter.

“H’m,” said Joan, and seemed to reckon in her mind.

“Nobby is in London,” she said. “He thinks he might help about East Africa. It’s his country practically.... Are you going to enlist?”

“What else?” said Peter, tapping a cigarette on the table. “It’s a beastly bore.”

“Bunny’s gone,” said Joan. “And Wilmington.”

“They’ve written?”

“Willy came to see me.”

“Heard from any of the others?”

“Oh!... Troop.”

“Enlisted?”

“Cadet.”

“Any one else?”

“No,” said Joan, and hovered whistling faintly for a moment and then walked out of the room....

She had been counting the hours for four days, perplexed by his delay; his coming had seemed the greatest event in the world, for she had never doubted he would come back to serve, and now that he had come she met him like this!

§ 3

They dressed for dinner that night because Oswald came back tired and vexed from London and wanted a bath before dining. “They seemed to be sending everybody to East Africa on the principle that any one who’s been there before ought not to go again,” he grumbled. “I can’t see any other principle in it.” He talked at first of the coming East African campaign because he hesitated to ask Peter what he intended to do. Then he went on to the war news. The Germans had got Liége. That was certain now. They had smashed the forts to pieces with enormous cannon. There had been a massacre of civilians at Dinant. Joan did not talk very much, but sat and watched Peter closely with an air of complete indifference.

There was a change in him, and she could not say exactly what this change was. The sunshine and snow glare and wind of the high mountains had tanned his face to a hard bronze and he was perceptibly leaner; that made him look older perhaps; but the difference was more than that. She knew her Peter so well that she could divine a new thought in him.

“And what are you going to do, Peter?” said Oswald, coming to it abruptly.

“I’m going to enlist.”

“In the ranks, you mean?” Oswald had expected that.

“Yes.”

“You ought not to do that.”

“Why not?”

“You have your cadet corps work behind you. You ought to take a commission. We shan’t have too many officers.”

Peter considered that.

“I want to begin in the ranks.... I want discipline.”

(Had some moral miracle happened to Peter? This was quite a new note from our supercilious foster brother.)

“You’ll get discipline enough in the cadet corps.”

“I want to begin right down at the bottom of the ladder.”

“Well, if you get a rotten drill sergeant, I’m told, it’s disagreeable.”

“All the better.”

“They’ll find you out and push you into a commission,” said Oswald. “If not, it’s sheer waste.”

“Well, I want to feel what discipline is like—before I give orders,” said Peter. “I want to be told to do things and asked why the devil I haven’t done ’em smartly. I’ve been going too easy. The ranks will brace me up.”

(Yes, this was a new note. Had that delay of four or five days anything to do with this?... Joan, with a start, discovered that she was holding up the dinner, and touched the electric bell at her side for the course to be changed.)

“I suppose we shall all have to brace up,” said Oswald. “It still seems a little unreal. The French have lost Mulhausen again, they say, but they are going strong for Metz. There’s not a word about our army. It’s just crossed over and vanished....”

(Queer to sit here, dining in the soft candlelight, and to think of the crowded roads and deploying troops, the thudding guns and bursting shells away there behind that veil of secrecy—millions of men in France and Belgium fighting for the world. And Peter would go off tomorrow. Presently he would be in uniform; presently he would be part of a marching column. He would go over—into the turmoil. Beyond that her imagination would not pass.)

“I wish I could enlist,” said Joan.

“They’re getting thousands of men more than they can handle as it is,” said Oswald. “They don’t want you.”

“You’d have thought they’d have had things planned and ready for this,” said Peter.

“Nothing is ready,” said Oswald. “Nothing is planned. This war has caught our war office fast asleep. It isn’t half awake even now.”

“There ought to be something for women to do,” said Joan.

“There ought to be something for every one to do,” said Oswald bitterly, “but there isn’t. This country isn’t a State; it’s a crowd adrift. Did you notice, Peter, as you came through London, the endless multitudes of people just standing about? I’ve never seen London like that before. People not walking about their business, but just standing.”...

Peter told of things he had seen on his way home. “The French are in a scowling state. All France scowls at you, and Havre is packed with bargains in touring cars—just left about—by rich people coming home....”