Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

His tone was so grave that Joan caught something of his gravity. She stepped in through the window. “Where are all these people?” she said. She thought it was characteristic of him to trouble about these distant races and their entanglements. But she wished he could have a keener sense of the perplexities that came nearer him. She came and leant over him while he explained the political riddle of Austria and Eastern Europe to her....

“We are too busy with the Irish trouble,” he said. “I am afraid of Germany. If that fool Carson and these Pankhurst people had been paid to distract our minds from what is happening, they could not do the work better. Big things are happening—oh! big things.”

She tried to feel their bigness. But to her all such political talk was still as unreal as things one reads about in histories, something to do with maps and dates, something you can “get up” and pass examinations in, but nothing that touches the warm realities of personal life and beauty. Yet it pleased her to think that this Oswald she loved could reach up to these things, so that he partook of the nature of the great beings who cared for them like Gladstone or Lincoln, and was not simply a limited real person like Troop or Wilmington or Peter. (He was really like a great Peter, like what Peter ought to be.) He seemed preoccupied as if he did not feel how close she was about him, how close her beauty came to him. She sat now on the arm of his chair behind him, with her face over his shoulder. Her body touched his shoulders, by imperceptible degrees she brought her cheek against his crisp hair, where it pressed no heavier than a shadow.

She had no suspicion how vividly he was aware of her nearness.

As he discoursed to her upon the text of the maps before them, a deep undercurrent of memories and feelings of quite a different quality ran contrariwise through his mind. “We are getting nearer than we have ever been to a big European war, a big break-up! People do not understand, do not begin to dream of the smash-up that that would be. There is scarcely a country that may not be drawn in.”

So he spoke. And below that level of thought he was irritated to feel that such thought could not wholly possess him. Far more real to him were the vague suggestions of love and the summer night and the dusky nearness of this Joan, this phantom of Dolly, for more and more were Joan and Dolly blending together in his emotional life, this dearness and sweetness that defied all reasoning and explanation. And cutting across both these streams of thought and feeling came a third stream of thought. Joan’s intonations in every word she spoke betrayed her indifference to the great net of political forces in which the world struggled. She was no more deeply interested than if he had been discussing some problem at chess or some mathematical point. She was not deeply interested and he was not completely interested, and yet this question that was slipping its hold on their attention might involve the lives and welfare of millions....

He struggled with his conception of a world being hauled to its destruction in a net of vaguely apprehended ideas, of ordinary life being shattered not by the strength but by the unattractive feebleness of its political imaginings. “People do not understand,” he repeated, trying to make this thing real to himself. “All Europe is in danger.”

He turned upon her with a betrayal of irritation in his voice. “You think all this matters nothing to us,” he said. “But it does. If Austria makes war in Serbia, Russia will come in. If Russia comes in, France comes in. That brings in Germany. We can’t see France beaten again. We can’t have that.”

But Joan had still the child’s belief that somewhere, somehow, behind all the ostensible things of the world, wise adults in its interests have the affairs of mankind under control. “They won’t let things go as far as that,” she said.

Oswald reflected upon that. How sure this creature was of her world!