The 10th of November came, and they sailed.
The week in the steamer was intolerable, not only because they were
packed like herrings, and Troy (who had never known discomfort before)
had to share his narrow cabin with two young German-Americans full of
open brag about the Fatherland; but also because of the same eternally
renewed anecdotes among the genuine Americans about the perils and
discomforts they had undergone, and the general disturbance of their
plans.
Most of the passengers were in ardent sympathy with the Allies, and hung
anxiously on the meagre wirelesses; but a flat-faced professor with
lank hair, having announced that "there were two sides to every case,"
immediately raised up a following of unnoticed ladies, who "couldn't
believe all that was said of the Germans" and hoped that America would
never be "drawn in"; while, even among the right-minded, there subsisted
a vague feeling that war was an avoidable thing, which one had only to
reprobate enough to prevent its recurrence.
They found New York--Mrs. Belknap's New York--buzzing with
war-charities, yet apparently unaware of the war. That at least was
Troy's impression during the twenty-four hours before he was packed off
to school to catch up with his interrupted studies.
At school he heard the same incessant war-talk, and found the same
fundamental unawareness of the meaning of the war. At first the boys
were very keen to hear his story, but he described what he had seen so
often--and especially his haunting impressions of the Marne--that they
named him "Marny Belknap," and finally asked him to cut it out.
The masters were mostly frankly for the Allies, but the Rector had given
out that neutrality was the attitude approved by the Government, and
therefore a patriotic duty; and one Sunday after chapel he gave a little
talk to explain why the President thought it right to try to keep his
people out of the dreadful struggle. The words duty and responsibility
and fortunate privilege recurred often in this address, and it struck
Troy as odd that the lesson of the day happened to be the story of the
Good Samaritan.
When he went home for the Christmas holidays everybody was sending toys
and sugar-plums to the Belgian war-orphans, with little notes from
"Happy American children" requesting to have their gifts acknowledged.
"It makes us so _happy_ to help," beaming young women declared with a
kind of ghoulish glee, doing up parcels, planning war-tableaux and
charity dances, rushing to "propaganda" lectures given by handsome
French officers, and keeping up a kind of continuous picnic on the ruins
of civilization.
Mr. and Mrs. Belknap had inevitably been affected by the surrounding
atmosphere.
"The tragedy of it--the _tragedy_--no one can tell who hasn't seen it
and been through it," Mrs. Belknap would begin, looking down her long
dinner-table between the orchids and the candelabra; and the pretty
women and prosperous men would interrupt their talk, and listen for a
moment, half absently, with spurts of easy indignation that faded out
again as they heard the story oftener.
After all, Mrs. Belknap wasn't the _only_ person who had seen a
battlefield! Lots and lots more were pouring home all the time with
fresh tales of tragedy: the Marne had become--in a way--an old story.
People wanted something newer ... different....
And then, why hadn't Joffre followed up the offensive? The Germans were
wonderful soldiers after all.... Yes, but such beasts ... sheer
devils.... Here was Mr. So-and-so, just back from Belgium--such horrible
stories--really unrepeatable! "Don't you want to come and hear them, my
dear? Dine with us to-morrow; he's promised to come unless he's summoned
to Washington. But do come anyhow; the Jim Cottages are going to dance
after dinner...."
In time Mrs. Belknap, finding herself hopelessly out-storied,
out-charitied, out-adventured, began insensibly to take a calmer and
more distant view of the war. What was the use of trying to keep up her
own enthusiasm when that of her audience had flagged? Wherever she went
she was sure to meet other ladies who had arrived from France much more
recently, and had done and seen much more than she had. One after
another she saw them received with the same eagerness--"Of course we all
know about the marvellous things you've been doing in France--your
wonderful war-work"--then, like herself, they were superseded by some
later arrival, who had been nearer the front, or had raised more money,
or had had an audience of the Queen of the Belgians, or an autograph
letter from Lord Kitchener. No one was listened to for long, and the
most eagerly-sought-for were like the figures in a movy-show, forever
breathlessly whisking past to make way for others.
Mr. Belknap had always been less eloquent about the war than his wife;
but somehow Troy had fancied he felt it more deeply. Gradually, however,
he too seemed to accept the situation as a matter of course, and Troy,
coming home for the Easter holidays, found at the family table a large
sonorous personage--a Senator, just back from Europe--who, after rolling
out vague praises of France and England, began insidiously to hint that
it was a pity to see such wasted heroism, such suicidal determination on
the part of the Allies to resist all offers of peace from an enemy so
obviously their superior.
"She wouldn't be if America came in!" Troy blurted out, reddening at the
sound of his voice.
"America?" some one playfully interjected; and the Senator laughed, and
said something about geographical immunity. "They can't touch _us_. This
isn't our war, young man."
"It may be by the time I'm grown up," Troy persisted, burning redder.
"Well," returned the Senator good-humouredly, "you'll have to hurry, for
the economists all say it can't last more than a year longer. Lord
Reading told me----"
"There's been misery enough, in all conscience," sighed a lady, playing
with her pearls; and Mr. Belknap added gravely: "By the time Troy grows
up I hope wars and war-talk will be over for good and all."
"Oh, well--at his age every fellow wants to go out and kill something,"
remarked one of his uncles sympathetically.
Troy shuddered at the well-meant words. _To go out and kill something!_
They thought he regarded the war as a sport, just as they regarded it
as a moving-picture show! As if any one who had had even a glimpse of it
could ever again think with joy of killing! His boy's mind was sorely
exercised to define the urgent emotions with which it laboured. _To save
France_--that was the clear duty of the world, as he saw it. But none of
these kindly careless people about him knew what he meant when he said
"France." Bits of M. Gantier's talk came back to him, embodying that
meaning.
"Whatever happens, keep your mind keen and clear: open as many windows
on the universe as you can...." To Troy, France had been the biggest of
those windows.
The young tutor had never declaimed about his country; he had simply
told her story and embodied her ideals in his own impatient, questioning
and yet ardent spirit. "Le monde est aux enthousiastes," he had once
quoted; and he had shown Troy how France had always been alive in every
fibre, and how her inexhaustible vitality had been perpetually nourished
on criticism, analysis and dissatisfaction. "Self-satisfaction is
death," he had said; "France is the phoenix-country always rising from
the ashes of her recognized mistakes."
Troy felt what a wonderful help it must be to have that long rich past
in one's blood. Every stone that France had carved, every song she had
sung, every new idea she had struck out, every beauty she had created in
her thousand fruitful years, was a tie between her and her children.
These things were more glorious than her battles, for it was because of
them that all civilization was bound up in her, and that nothing that
concerned her could concern her only.
V
"It seems too absurd," said Mrs. Belknap; "but Troy will be eighteen
to-morrow. And that means," she added with a sigh, "that this horrible
war has been going on for three whole years. Do you remember, dearest,
your fifteenth birthday was on the very day that odious Archduke was
assassinated? We had a picnic on the Morterasch."
"Oh, dear," cried Sophy Wicks, flinging her tennis-racket into the air
with a swing that landed it in the middle of the empty court--"perhaps
that's the reason he's never stopped talking about the war for a single
minute since!"
Around the big tea-table under the trees there was a faint hush of
disapproval. A year before, Sophy Wicks's airy indifference to the
events that were agitating the world had amused some people and won the
frank approval of others. She did not exasperate her friends by
professions of pacifism, she simply declared that the war bored her; and
after three years of vain tension, of effort in the void, something in
the baffled American heart whispered that, things being as they were,
she was perhaps right.
But now things were no longer as they had been. Looking back, Troy
surveyed the gradual development of the war-feeling as it entered into a
schoolboy's range of vision. He had begun to notice the change before
the sinking of the _Lusitania_. Even in the early days, when his
school-fellows had laughed at him and called him "Marny," some of them
had listened to him and imitated him. It had become the fashion to have
a collection of war-trophies from the battlefields. The boys' sisters
were "adopting war-orphans" at long distance, and when Troy went home
for the holidays he heard more and more talk of war-charities, and
noticed that the funds collected were no longer raised by dancing and
fancy-balls. People who used the war as an opportunity to have fun were
beginning to be treated almost as coldly as the pacifists.
But the two great factors in the national change of feeling were the
_Lusitania_ and the training-camps.
The _Lusitania_ showed America what the Germans were, Plattsburg tried
to show her the only way of dealing with them.
Both events called forth a great deal of agitated discussion, for if
they focussed the popular feeling for war, they also gave the opponents
of war in general a point of departure for their arguments. For a while
feeling ran high, and Troy, listening to the heated talk at his parents'
table, perceived with disgust and wonder that at the bottom of the
anti-war sentiment, whatever specious impartiality it put on, there was
always the odd belief that life-in-itself--just the mere raw fact of
being alive--was the one thing that mattered, and getting killed the one
thing to be avoided.
This new standard of human dignity plunged Troy into the lowest depths
of pessimism. And it bewildered him as much as it disgusted him, since
it did away at a stroke with all that gave any interest to the fact of
living. It killed romance, it killed poetry and adventure, it took all
the meaning out of history and conduct and civilization. There had never
been anything worth while in the world that had not had to be died for,
and it was as clear as day that a world which no one would die for could
never be a world worth being alive in.
Luckily most people did not require to reason the matter out in order to
feel as Troy did, and in the long run the _Lusitania_ and Plattsburg won
the day. America tore the gag of neutrality from her lips, and with all
the strength of her liberated lungs claimed her right to a place in the
struggle. The pacifists crept into their holes, and only Sophy Wicks
remained unconverted.
Troy Belknap, tall and shy and awkward, lay at her feet and blushed and
groaned inwardly at her wrong-headedness. All the other girls were
war-mad; with the rupture of diplomatic relations the country had burst
into flame, and with the declaration of war the flame had become a
conflagration. And now, having at last a definite and personal concern
in the affair, every one was not only happier but more sensible than
when a perpetually thwarted indignation had had to expend itself in
vague philanthropy.
It was a peculiar cruelty of fate that made Troy feel Miss Wicks's
indifference more than the zeal of all the other young women gathered
about the Belknap tennis-court. In spite of everything, he found her
more interesting, more inexhaustible, more "his size" (as they said at
school), than any of the gay young war-goddesses who sped their
tennis-balls across the Belknap court.
It was a Long Island Sunday in June. A caressing warmth was in the air,
and a sea-breeze stirred the tops of the lime branches. The smell of
fresh hay-cocks blew across the lawn, and a sparkle of blue water and a
dipping of white sails showed through the trees beyond the hay-fields.
Mrs. Belknap smiled indulgently on the pleasant scene: her judgement of
Sophy Wicks was less severe than that of the young lady's
contemporaries. What did it matter if a chit of eighteen, having taken
up a foolish attitude, was too self-conscious to renounce it?
"Sophy will feel differently when she has nursed some of our own
soldiers in a French base hospital," she said, addressing herself to the
disapproving group.
The young girl raised her merry eyebrows. "Who'll stay and nurse Granny
if I go to a French base hospital? Troy, will _you_?" she suggested.
The other girls about the tea-table laughed. Though they were only
Troy's age, or younger, they did not mind his being teased, for he
seemed only a little boy to them, now that they all had friends or
brothers in the training-camps or on the way to France. Besides, though
they disapproved of Sophy's tone, her argument was unanswerable. They
knew her precocious wisdom and self-confidence had been acquired at the
head of her grandmother's household, and that there was no one else to
look after poor old paralytic Mrs. Wicks and the orphan brothers and
sisters to whom Sophy was mother and guardian.
Two or three of the young men present were in uniform, and one of them,
Mrs. Belknap's nephew, had a captain's double bar on his shoulder. What
did Troy Belknap and Sophy Wicks matter to young women playing a last
tennis-match with heroes on their way to France?
The game began again, with much noise and cheerful wrangling. Mrs.
Belknap walked toward the house to welcome a group of visitors, and Miss
Wicks remained beside the tea-table, alone with Troy. She was leaning
back in a wide basket-chair, her thin ankles in white open-work
stockings thrust out under her short skirt, her arms locked behind her
thrown-back head. Troy lay on the ground and plucked at the tufts of
grass at his elbow. Why was it that, with all the currents of vitality
flowing between this group of animated girls and youths, he could feel
no nearness but hers? The feeling was not particularly agreeable, but
there was no shaking it off: it was like a scent that has got into one's
clothes. He was not sure that he liked her, but he wanted to watch her,
to listen to her, to defend her against the mockery and criticism in the
eyes of the others. At this point his powers of analysis gave out, and
his somewhat extensive vocabulary failed him. After all, he had to fall
back on the stupid old school phrase: she was "his size"--that was all.
"Why do you always say the war bores you?" he asked abruptly, without
looking up.
"Because it does, my boy; and so do you, when you hold forth about it."
He was silent, and she touched his arm with the tip of her swinging
tennis-shoe. "Don't you see, Troy, it's not our job--not just now,
anyhow. So what's the use of always jawing about it?"
She jumped up, recovered her racket, and ran to take her place in a new
set beside Troy's cousin, the captain.