“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 had 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 jolly 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.”