"No--he hasn't; that's it."
Brougham managed to tell his story very satisfactorily, for Granby had
the power, rarer than is supposed, of extracting an idea from spoken
words.
"He has no enthusiasm--no emotion. I can't understand him. At his age,
I venture to say, I would-- Well, I've come to you. You've had thirty
years' experience of boys."
"Yes," said Granby with his reserved, pedagogic manner. "I've been at
it thirty years." He stared at the floor and then, looking up, added:
"But I've only had four years of boys as they are now."
This was a new idea to Brougham.
"You mean boys are different?"
"Of course, they're different!" said Granby. "Even we are different,
and they-- Boys I was giving demerits to and scolding about Latin prose
last winter are fighting the war for us to-day. Roberts--I used to make
Roberts' life a burden to him about the dative of reference--he was
killed last month rescuing his machine gun; and here I am doing the
same safe task-- Well, I never felt like that about my work before.
Different? Of course they're different! They are not boys any more.
They are men; and we are old men."
There was, naturally enough, a pause, for this was by no means a
conception of life which Mr. Brougham could accept offhand; and in the
silence the door opened and David himself strode in--and stopped with
every appearance of disappointment on seeing his father.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I'm afraid I'm interrupting you. I'll
come back."
"What did you want?" said Mr. Granby.
David paused, looking less like a man and more like a boy in his
indecision. Then his jaw set as he took his determination.
"I wanted you to tell my father something, but as long as he's here
I'd better tell him myself. I took the examinations last month for an
aviation camp, and I've just heard that I'm accepted."
Relief and horror struggling in Mr. Brougham like opposing waves
resulted in calm.
"But, my son," he said, "why have you concealed it? You did not think
I'd oppose you?"
David moved restlessly.
"Oh, no," he answered. "It wasn't that." He looked at Mr. Granby and
smiled. "Father's awfully tyrannical about this war," he said. "He
wants everyone to feel just as he does."
"But don't you feel as I do?" asked his father. "Why, you've just
proved that you do!"
"Not a bit!" said David, and he spoke with a force neither of the men
had ever heard from him before. "I don't feel a bit as you do, sir, and
what's more, I don't want to!" He stopped. "But we needn't go into
that," he added, and seemed about to leave the room.
Granby looked at Brougham. "It must be right here if we could get at
it," he said. "Tell us, David, what is it in your father's attitude
that you don't sympathize with?"
"And my mother's too."
"And mine?" asked Granby.
David hesitated an instant.
"You don't seem to care so much about having us all feel the way you do
if what we do is right. But my father and mother don't care what I do
unless I get excited about it."
"A healthy emotion is not excitement," said Mr. Brougham. "But you have
been cold, absolutely cold to the horror of the world's bleeding to
death, to all this unnatural disaster that has come upon us."
"It doesn't seem exactly unnatural to me," answered the boy slowly.
"At least I've got used to it. You see, sir, ever since I knew
anything--ever since I was Lawrence's age--war has been about the most
natural thing going. I suppose it's very different for all of you.
Coming at the end of a perfectly peaceful life, it must seem like a
sort of dirty accident; but even so, it's awfully queer to me the way
you and mother have to lash yourselves up to doing anything--"
"Lash ourselves up?" exclaimed Mr. Brougham.
"Yes, with the idea of patriotism and self-sacrifice, when it's so
perfectly clear what we all have to do. Why, father, I feel just
as if I were a policeman, or, no, a fireman--I feel as if I were a
fireman and you expected me to get off something about patriotism and
self-sacrifice every time I went to put out a fire. A fireman goes, all
right--it's his job; but I dare say he often wishes he could stay in
bed. No one says his heart is cold, and no more it is, to my mind. It
must be fun to go off in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm. I know, for
I've often felt like that about football. But this is different. This
isn't a sport--it's a long disagreeable job. And I must say, father, it
makes me pretty tired to have you think me a slacker because I don't
get, and don't want to get, excited about it."
"You misunderstand me," said his father. "I don't think any man
a slacker who waits to think it over before he makes the supreme
sacrifice and offers"--Mr. Brougham's voice took a deeper note--"his
life."
David turned sharply to Granby.
"There," he said, "that's what I hate! I hate that attitude toward
death--as if it were something you couldn't speak of in the
drawing-room. Death isn't so bad," he added, as if saying what he could
for an absent friend.
With this Mr. Brougham couldn't even pretend to agree; death seemed to
him very bad indeed--about the worst possible, though not to be evaded
by brave men on that account.
"Ah," he said to Granby, "that's the beauty of youth--it doesn't think
about death at all."
"Nonsense," said David. "I beg your pardon, sir, but isn't it nonsense?
Of course, we think of it--a lot more than you do. The chances are
about one in twenty that I'll be killed. When you were my age you
were planning your career, and college, and you thought you'd be
married sometime, and you were getting your name put up at clubs you
couldn't get into for years. But fellows of my age aren't making any
plans--it would be pretty foolish if we did. We haven't got any future,
as you had it. I don't know if you call that thinking about death. I
do--thinking about it as a fact, not a horror. We've been up against
it for the last four years, and we've got used to it. That's what none
of you older people seem to be able to get into your heads. We don't
particularly mind the idea of dying. And now I think I'll run home and
tell my mother."
Neither of the men spoke for a few minutes after he had gone. Mr.
Brougham was shocked. He had just caught himself back from telling
David that he ought to be afraid of dying--which of course was not at
all what he meant. He himself had always feared death--most of the
men he knew feared it--only hadn't allowed that fear to influence
their actions. He had always regarded this fear as a great universal
limitation. He felt as if a great gulf had suddenly opened between him
and his son. More than that, he felt that to live free from the terror
was too great an emancipation for one so young.
"If they're not afraid of death, what are they afraid of?" he found
himself thinking.
He himself in his youth had never thought about dying--except sometimes
in church in connection with music and crowns and glassy seas. Then
once, when he was only a little younger than David, he had been very
ill in the school infirmary; another boy had died, and then, he
remembered, he did for the first time consider the possibility of his,
Walter Brougham's, coming to an end, stopping, going out perhaps like
a candle. It had been an uncomfortable experience, and when his mother
had come to take care of him he had distinctly clung to her--as if she
could have done any good. Had these boys gone through that and come out
on the other side? He found it alarmed him to think that David wasn't
afraid.
Good heavens, what would they do--this new generation, young and
healthy and unafraid of death, not because they had never thought about
it but because they had been familiar with it since they went into long
trousers?
Mr. Granby broke the silence. He said: "To order ourselves lowly and
reverently to all our betters?"
Brougham was puzzled by these words, and he felt that it was no time
for puzzling him.
"Did you think David was impertinent to me, Mr. Granby?" he asked. "Is
that what you meant?"
"No, that isn't what I meant, Mr. Brougham."
Brougham didn't inquire any further. He shook his head and went home.
He found his wife and David sitting hand in hand on the piazza looking
out to sea, with the same blank grave look on both their faces. Yet
they were thinking very different thoughts.
Mrs. Brougham was thinking that she had been strangely stupid not
to know that this was just exactly the way David would do it; but
she added to herself she had allowed her vision to be clouded by her
husband.
David was carefully reviewing the small stock of his technical
knowledge of aëroplanes.