Once in a while they tried to put some of their theories into practice. Horatia would find some young man attracted to her and meet him honestly and simply as she would have met any girl. She would talk in her best manner and tell him about the things she was thinking. And inevitably she drove him away, for the young men were not at the age when they looked for straight comradeship from girls. There was another code among them. They liked Horatia well enough, rather admired her, but they left her alone. It worried her a little. She did not want to go through life without love. She had heard and read too much about it. And, transcending her talk about the new spirit of friendship between men and women, of a partnership marriage, came flashes of feeling as she read her Keats or stumbled on a boy and a girl saying a clinging good-night in some dark corner of the campus. She felt left out.
After all it did not matter much, because in the spring of her Sophomore year everything changed. The United States had declared war and all the most interesting young men had melted away, leaving only indistinguishable stars in the University service flag. And it was by the war that Horatia’s last two years at the University were colored. She had not had much of a point of view about the European trouble as she vaguely characterized it when it had been purely European. She had talked once of becoming a nurse and going abroad but it was one of her wildest dreams and not an especially cherished one. But now for a year and a half the University had mobilized itself. Appeals for help, lectures from returned soldiers, classrooms and halls filled with flaring war posters, constant campaigns for funds, a sudden hierarchy springing up among Red Cross workers, blue veils, red veils and white veils shrouding the heads of the earnest bandage makers, and constant efforts on the part of every instructor to relate his or her branch of study to the great war, realizing that only by so doing could he hold any number of his pupils—such things did the war mean to the college. The interest in athletics died down like an untended fire—seriousness came into vogue—and there was even more to it. All these young students, still mentally adolescent, suffered. They suffered because they had been taught that they should understand life, because the supernatural had been left out of their philosophies and blind faith had been discarded. Yet they were face to face with horrors, with facts, philosophies which they could not comprehend and they strained their minds trying to understand. Those who had been mildly Socialist turned with repugnance from Bolshevism. Those who had always had a smug trust in their financial solidity saw fortunes vanish or become useless in the face of misfortune. Individualists realized that their social duty was unescapable. For two years these students who had gone to college to learn facts, as they supposed, found themselves in a chaos of changing ideas, guided only unsurely by instructors as bewildered as they were themselves. No one wanted to stay in college. They stayed only because of parental pressure and because the University authorities introduced as much practical war work as was possible. And the cold-blooded philosophy and psychology Horatia had been absorbing was melted in the heat of the great world emotionality.
Then at the height of all this enthusiasm came the armistice revealing to the world suddenly and fearfully the confusion the world was in—confusion of politics, of sociology, and ethics.
For the first few months after the signing of the armistice the word “reconstruction” flew about the campus. War funds became “reconstruction funds.” And then doubt began to creep about. What did reconstruction mean and what would it lead to? Discontents penetrated the campus grounds. The instructors, their own opinions in a state of flux and bound to wait for further developments before crystallizing, were poor leaders, dealing out generalities and ambiguousness. A certain fixed curriculum dragged its way through the months. They were all conscious that they were holding to outworn forms. Who knew what the University of the future would be? Perhaps those diplomas given out in June, 1919, were the least valuable of any ever given. Students went out into a life which the instructors could not forecast. In wartime it was possible to preach courage and sacrifice. In these strange new peace times who knew whether courage and sacrifice were cardinal virtues?
This of course was all under the surface, hardly felt perhaps by many of both teachers and students. But the unrest, the doubts were there, revealed to the least probing. To some of them, among them Horatia, a strange thing happened. She had been trained at first to believe in a pragmatic philosophy which the war had swept away in its wind of romantic sacrifice and heroism. In her first two years she had felt rather scornful of the silliness of college men. And then they were drawn out of her life into the great struggle and became heroes. Horatia had come to believe in heroism. She had heard of so many young lives offered nobly, read many young loose-hung fighting autobiographies. And she had come out of college as thorough a young romanticist as ever lived in the Middle Ages, but a puzzled young romanticist with neither Church nor king to give her guidance. She brought her strong faith in young men, her growing desire for all the romance life could give, home. Home to West Park and after a taste of the dull routine of Aunt Caroline’s days and the gossiping wedding of Edna, had decided that she could not bear the let-down, the drop from romantic idealism and noble ideas into the actuality of a corner of life. There was more in life which she must have and go after posthaste. And so it was that the morning after the wedding, she had set off adventuring and found the road open and pleasant.
CHAPTER IV
FROM The Journal office the lake looked blue and calm, disdaining the stray gusts of wind that tossed newspapers and rubbish about in the alleys below Main Street. Horatia had moved her typewriter over to the window so typewriting might be accompanied by some compensations. Langley said it increased her mistakes one hundred per cent, but Horatia insisted that it doubled her inspirations.
“Which is necessary,” she added, “when one is trying to be both brilliant and informational. The two things don’t track.”
She hated typewriting. Her fingers, untrained to accuracy, stumbled and missed their aim and wrote absurdities. But typewriting was one of the things which must be done if she was to do journalistic work, they told her, and Horatia had decided that working on a newspaper was worth a good many sacrifices. She had gone through some of them already in the shape of family protests and disapprovals and if another one was to take the shape of a 1913 Oliver typewriter, that too was to be borne. Gladly borne for the sake of the thrilling contact with unprinted, raw news, with information on a hundred subjects that had never interested her before, for the sake of the kaleidoscopic picture of the city’s life and means of life, for the caustic brilliant comments of Jim Langley and Bob Brotherton, sitting with their pipes smoking furiously as they uncoiled the truth about some happening, or wrote editorials of things as they ought to be. Out of the terrific tangle of the philosophies and political economies of the world she saw these men draw threads and wind them neatly on a spool of thought. The tangle remained a tangle but a fascinating instead of a discouraging one. It was more what was said than what was written, though enough out of tune with the current hysteric dread of American Bolshevism was published to account for Harvey’s characterization that Langley had “no policy” which meant the fatal lack of the right one. Horatia knew now why Jim Langley’s paper had never appeared in the Grant household. She had seen the president of the Dry-Goods Association of which Uncle George was a pillar denounced in its pages for crooked political dealing. She knew why the advertisements that The Journal ran were those of obscure stores or coöperative establishments or small firms employing union labor. In two months she had learned more about politics, psychology, philosophy and labor problems than she had known there was to learn. Most of it had come direct from Langley. He had looked a little surprised when she had turned up that Monday morning, whimsically surprised.
“So you came?” he said simply with a thousand implications in his tone.