Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

“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 accursed 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.