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 444of 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.”
445“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 446accursed 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 447had 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 448jolly 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.”
449presently 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.
