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.