After all there was a will for good in men; even this weary Irish business had not been merely a conflict of fixed ideas, there had been, too, real efforts on the part of countless people to get the tangle straightened out. There were creative forces at work in men—even in Ireland. And also there was youth.
His thoughts came back to the figure of Peter, standing on the head of Howth and calling for a new world.
“I’ll pit my Peter,” he said, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in creation.... In the long run, that is.”
He was blind—was not all Europe blind?—to the vast disaster that hung over him and his and the whole world, to the accumulated instability of the outworn social and political façade that now tottered to a crash. Massacre, famine, social confusion, world-wide destruction, long years of death and torment were close at hand; the thinnest curtain of time, a mere month of blue days now, hung between him and the thunderous overture of the world disaster.
“I pit my Peter,” he repeated, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in creation.”
§ 10
All novels that run through the years of the great war must needs be political novels and fragments of history. In August, 1914, that detachment of human lives from history, that pretty picaresque disorder of experiences, that existence like a fair with ten thousand different booths, which had gone on for thousands of years, came to an end. We were all brought into a common drama. Something had happened so loud and insistent that all lives were focused upon it; it became a leading factor in every life, the plot of every story, the form of all our thoughts. It so thrust itself upon mankind that the very children in the schools about the world asked “why has this thing happened?” and could not live on without some answer. The Great War summoned all human beings to become political animals, time would brook no further evasion. August, 1914, was the end of adventure and mental fragmentation for the species; it was the polarization of mankind.
Other books have told, innumerable books that have yet to come will tell, of the rushing together of events that culminated in the breach of the Belgian frontier by the German hosts. Our story has to tell only of how that crisis took to itself and finished and crowned the education of these three people with whom we are concerned. Of the three, Oswald and Joan spent nearly the whole of July at Pelham Ford. Peter came down from Cambridge for a day or so and then, after two or three days in London for which he did not clearly account, he went off to the Bernese Oberland to climb with a party of three other Trinity men. There was a vague but attractive project at the back of his mind, which he did not confide to Oswald or Joan, of going on afterwards into north Italy to a little party of four or five choice spirits which Hetty was to organize. They could meet on the other side of the Simplon. Perhaps they would push on into Venezia. They would go for long tramps amidst sweet chestnut trees and ripening grapes, they would stay in the vast, roomy, forgotten inns of sleepy towns whose very stables are triumphs of architecture, they would bathe amidst the sunlit rocks of quiet lakes. Wherever they went in that land the snow and blue of the distant Alps would sustain the sweet landscape as music sustains a song.
Hetty had made it all fantastically desirable. She had invented it and woven details about it one afternoon in her studio. She knew north Italy very well; it was not the first amusing journey in that soft, delicious land that she had contrived. Peter was tremendously excited to think of the bright possibilities of such an adventure, and yet withal there was a queer countervailing feeling gnawing amidst his lusty anticipations. Great fun it would be, tremendous fun, with a little spice of sin in it, and why not? Only somehow he had a queer unreasonable feeling that Joan ought to share his holidays. Old Joan who looked at him with eyes that held a shadow of sorrow; who made him feel that she knew more than she could possibly know. He wished Joan, too, had some spree in contemplation—not of course quite the same sort of spree. A decent girl’s sort of spree. Just the tramp part. He wished he could tell Joan of what was in hand, that there wasn’t this queer embarrassment between them. Joan had her car of course....
Oswald had recently bought Joan a pretty little ten-horsepower Singer car, a two-seater, in which she was to run about the country at her own free will. It was one of several attempts he had recently made to brighten life for Joan. He was beginning to watch her very closely; he did not clearly understand the thoughts and imaginations that made her so grave and feverish at times, but he knew that she was troubled. The girl’s family resemblance to his Dolly had caught his mind. He thought she was more like Dolly than she was because her image constantly before him was steadily replacing Dolly’s in his mind. And he liked very much to sit beside her and watch her drive. At five-and-forty miles an hour her serene profile was divine. She had a good mechanical intelligence and her nerve was perfect; the little car lived in her hands and had the precision of movement of an animal.