§ 16
if his shoulder-blade was to mend, peter could not be moved; and for a time he remained in the french hospital 511in a long, airy room that was full mostly with flying men like himself. at first he could not talk very much, but later he made some friends. he was himself very immobile, but other men came and sat by him to talk.
he talked chiefly to two americans, who were serving at that time in the french flying corps. he found it much easier to talk english than french in his exhausted state, for though both he and joan spoke french far above the average public school level, he found that now it came with an effort. it was as if his mind had for a time been pared down to its essentials.
these americans amused and interested him tremendously. he had met hardly any americans before so as to talk to them at all intimately, but they suffered from an inhibition of french perhaps more permanent than his own, and so the three were thrown into an unlimited intimacy of conversation. at first he found these americans rather fatiguing, and then he found them very refreshing because of their explicitness of mind. except when they broke into frothy rapids of slang they were never allusive; in serious talk they said everything. they laid a firm foundation for all their assertions. that is the last thing an englishman does. they talked of the war and of the prospect of america coming into the war, and of england and america and again of the war, and of the french and of the french and americans and of the war, and of taft’s league to enforce peace and the true character of wilson and teddy and of the war, and of sam hughes and hughes the australian, and whether every country has the hughes it deserves and of the war, and of going to england after the war, and of stratford-on-avon and chester and windsor, and of the peculiarities of english people. their ideas of england peter discovered were strange and picturesque. they believed all englishmen lived in a glow of personal loyalty to the monarch, and were amazed to learn that peter’s sentiments were republican; and they thought that every englishman dearly loved a lord. “we think that of americans,” said peter. “that’s our politeness,” said they in a chorus, and started a train of profound discoveries in international relationships in peter’s mind.
512“the ideas of every country about every country are necessarily a little stale. what england is, what england thinks, and what england is becoming, isn’t on record. what is on record is the england of the ’eighties and ’nineties.”
“now, that’s very true,” said the nearer american. “and you can apply it right away, with a hundred per cent. or so added, to all your ideas of america.”
as a consequence both sides in this leisurely discussion found how widely they had been out in their ideas about each other. peter discovered america as not nearly so commercial and individualistic as he had supposed; he had been altogether ignorant of the increasing part the universities were playing in her affairs; the americans were equally edified to find that the rampant imperialism of cecil rhodes and his group no longer ruled the british imagination. “if things are so,” said the diplomatist in the nearer bed, “then i seem to see a lot more coming together between us than i’ve ever been disposed to think possible before. if you british aren’t so keen over this king business——”
“keen!” said peter.
“if you don’t hold you are it and unapproachable—in the way of empires.”
“the empire is yours for the asking,” said peter.
“then all there is between us is the atlantic—and that grows narrower every year. we’re the same people.”
“so long as we have the same languages and literature,” said peter....
from these talks onward peter may be regarded as having a foreign policy of his own.
