Joan and Peter — The World on the Eve of the War Part 2

§ 3 Twenty years before Oswald would not have talked in this fashion of the Will.

Twenty years before, the social and political order of the world had seemed so stable to an English mind that the thought of a sustaining will was superfluous.

Queen Victoria and the whole system had an air of immortal inertia.

The scientific and economic teachings under which Oswald’s ideas had been shaped recognized no need for wilfully co-ordinated efforts.

The end of education, they indicated, was the Diffusion of Knowledge.

Victorian thought in England took good motives for granted, seemed indeed disposed to regard almost any motive as equally good for the common weal.

Herbert Spencer, that philosopher who could not read Kant, most typical of all English intelligences in those days, taught that if only there were no regulation, no common direction, if every one were to pursue his own individual ends unrestrained, then by a sort of magic, chaos, freed from the interference of any collective direction, would produce order.

His supreme gift to a generation of hasty profiteers was the discovery that the blind scuffle of fate could be called “Evolution,” and so given an air of intention altogether superior to our poor struggles to make a decent order out of a greedy scramble.

For some decades, whatever sections of British life had ceased to leave things to Providence and not bother—not bother—were leaving them to Evolution—and still not bothering....

It was because of Oswald’s discovery of the confused and distressed motives of Joan and Peter and under the suggestions of the more kinetic German philosophy that was slowly percolating into English thought, that his ideas were now changing their direction.

Formerly he had thought of nations and empires as if they were things in themselves, loose shapes which had little or nothing to do with the individual lives they contained; now he began to think that all human organizations, large and small alike, exist for an end; they are will forms; they present a purpose that claims the subordination of individual aims.

He began to see states and nations as things of education, beings in the minds of men.

The parallelism of Russia and Britain which Peter had made, struck Oswald as singularly acute.

They had a closer parallelism with each other than with France or Italy or the United States or Germany or any of the great political systems of the world.

Russia was Britain on land.

Britain was Russia in an island and upon all the seas of the globe.

One had the dreamy lassitude of an endless land horizon, the other the hardbitten practicality of the salt seas.

One was deep-feeling, gross, and massively illiterate, the other was pervaded by a cockney brightness.

But each was trying to express and hold on to some general purpose by means of forms and symbols that were daily becoming more conspicuously inadequate.

And each appeared to be moving inevitably towards failure and confusion.

One afternoon during their stay in Petrograd, Bailey took Oswald and Peter to see a session of the Duma.

They drove in a sledge down the Nevski Prospekt and by streets of ploughed-up and tumbled snow, through which struggled an interminable multitude of sledges bringing firewood into the city, to the old palace of the favourite Potemkin, into which the Duma had in those days been thrust.

The Duma was sitting in a big adapted conservatory, and the three visitors watched the proceedings from a little low gallery wherein the speakers were almost inaudible.

Bailey pointed out the large proportion of priests in the centre and explained the various party groups; he himself was very sympathetic with the Cadets.

They were Anglo-maniac; they idealized the British constitution and thought of a limited monarchy—in the land of extremes....

Oswald listened to Bailey’s exposition, but the thing that most gripped his attention was the huge portrait of the Tsar that hung over the gathering.

He could not keep his eyes off it.

There the figure of the autocrat stood, with its sidelong, unintelligent visage, four times as large as life, dressed up in military guise and with its big cavalry boots right over the head of the president of the Duma.

That portrait was as obvious an insult, as outrageous a challenge to the self-respect of Russian men, as a gross noise or a foul gesture would have been.

“You and all the empire exist for _ME_,” said that foolish-faced portrait, with its busby a little on one side and its weak hand on its sword hilt....

It was to that figure they asked young Russia to be loyal.

That dull-faced Tsar and the golden crosses of Moscow presented themselves as Russia to the young.

A heavy-handed and very corrupt system of repression sustained their absurd pretensions.

They had no sanction at all but that they existed—through the acquiescences of less intelligent generations.

The aged, the prosperous, the indolent, the dishonest, the mean and the dull supported them in a vast tacit conspiracy.

Beneath such symbols could a land under the sting of modern suggestions ever be anything but a will welter, a confusion of sentiments and instincts and wilfulness?

Was it so wonderful that the world was given the stories of Artzibachev as pictures of the will forms of the Russian young?

§ 4 Through all that journey Oswald was constantly comparing Peter with the young people he saw.

On two occasions he and Peter went to the Moscow Art Theatre.

Once they saw _Hamlet_ in Russian, and once Tchekhov’s _Three Sisters_; and each was produced with a completeness of ensemble, an excellence of mechanism and a dramatic vigour far beyond the range of any London theatre.

Here in untidy, sprawling, slushy Moscow shone this diamond of co-operative effort and efficient organization.

It set Oswald revising certain hasty generalizations about the Russian character....

But far more interesting than the play to him was the audience.

They were mostly young people, and some of them were very young people;

students in uniform, bright-faced girls, clerks, young officers and soldiers, a sprinkling of intelligent-looking older people of the commercial and professional classes; each evening showed a similar gathering, a very full house, intensely critical and appreciative.

It was rather like the sort of gathering one might see in the London Fabian Society, but there were scarcely any earnest spinsters and many more young men.

The Art Theatre, like a magnet, had drawn its own together out of the vast barbaric medley of western and Asiatic, of peasant, merchant, priest, official and professional, that thronged the Moscow streets.

And they seemed very delightful young people.

His one eye wandered from the brightly-lit stage to the rows and rows of faces in the great dim auditorium about him, rested on Peter, and then went back to those others.

This, then, must be a sample of the Intelligentzia.

These were the youth who figured in so large a proportion of recent Russian literature.

How many bright keen faces were there!

What lay before them?...

A dark premonition crept into his mind of the tragedy of all this eager life, growing up in the clutch of a gigantic political system that now staggered to its end....

This youth he saw here was wonderfully like the new generation that was now dancing its way into his house at Pelham Ford....

It was curious to note how much more this big dim houseful of young Muscovites was like a British or an American audience than it was to a German gathering.

Perhaps there were rather more dark types, perhaps more high cheekbones; it was hard to say....

But all the other north temperate races, it seemed to Oswald, as distinguished from the Germans, had the same suggestion about them of unco-ordinated initiatives.

Their minds moved freely in a great old system that had lost its hold upon them.

But the German youths were co-ordinated.

They were tremendously co-ordinated.

Two Sundays ago he and Peter had been watching the Sunday morning parade along Unter den Linden.

They had gone to see the white-trousered guards kicking their legs out ridiculously in the goose step outside the Guard House that stands opposite the Kaiser’s Palace, they had walked along Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Tor, and then, after inspecting that vainglorious trophy of piled cannon outside the Reichstag, turned down the Sieges Allée, and so came back to the Adlon by way of the Leipziger Platz.

Peter had been alive to many things, but Oswald’s attention had been concentrated almost exclusively on the youngsters they were passing, for the most part plump, pink-faced students in corps caps, very erect in their bearing and very tight in their clothes.

They were an absolutely distinct variety of the young human male.

A puerile militarism possessed them all.

They exchanged salutations with the utmost punctilio.

While England had been taking her children from the hands of God, and not so much making them as letting them develop into notes of interrogation, Germany without halt or hesitation had moulded her gift of youth into stiff, obedient, fresh soldiers.

There had been a moment like a thunderclap while Oswald and Peter had been near the Brandenburger Tor.

A swift wave of expectation had swept through the crowd; there had been a galloping of mounted policemen, a hustling of traffic to the side of the road, a hasty lining up of spectators.

Then with melodious tootlings and amidst guttural plaudits, a big white automobile carrying a glitter of uniforms had gone by, driven at a headlong pace.

“_Der Kaiser!

_” Just for a moment the magnificence hung in the eye—and passed.

What had they seen?

Cloaks, helmets, hard visages, one distinctive pallid face; something melodramatic, something eager and in a great hurry, something that went by like the sound of a trumpet, a figure of vast enterprise in shining armour, with mailed fist.

This was the symbol upon which these young Germans were being concentrated.

This was the ideal that had gripped them.

Something very modern and yet romantic, something stupendously resolute.

Going whither?

At any rate, going magnificently somewhere.

That was the power of it.

It _was_ going somewhere.

For good or bad it was an infinitely more attractive lead than the cowardly and oppressive Tsardom that was failing to hold the refractory minds of these young Russians, or the current edition of the British imperial ideal, twangling its idiotic banjo and exhorting Peter and his generation to “tax the foreigner” as a worthy end and aim in life.

Oswald, with his eye on the dim, preoccupied audience about him, recalled a talk that he and Peter had had with a young fellow-traveller in the train between Hanover and Berlin.

It had been a very typical young German, glasses and all; and his clothes looked twice as hard as Peter’s, and he sat up stiffly while Peter slouched on the seat.

He evidently wanted to air his English, while Peter had not the remotest desire to air his German, and only betrayed a knowledge of German when it was necessary to explain some English phrase the German didn’t quite grasp.

The German wanted to know whether Oswald and Peter had been in Germany before, where they were going, what they thought of it, what they were going to think of Berlin.

Responding to counter questions he said he had been twice to England.

He thought England was a great country.

“Yes—but not systematic.

No!

” “You mean undisciplined?

” Yes, it was perhaps undisciplined he meant.

Oswald said that as a foreigner he was most struck by the tremendous air of order in north Germany.

The Germans were orderly by nature.

The admission proved an attractive gambit.

The young German questioned Oswald’s view that the Germans were naturally orderly.

Hard necessity had made them so.

They had had to discipline themselves, they had been obliged to develop a Kultur—encircled by enemies.

Now their Kultur was becoming a second nature.

Every nation, he supposed, brought its present to mankind.

Germany’s was Order, System, the lesson of Obedience that would constantly make her more powerful.

The Germans were perforce a thorough people.

Thorough in all they did.

Although they had come late into modern industrialism they had already developed social and economic organization far beyond that of any other people.

Nicht wahr?

Their work was becoming necessary to the rest of mankind.

In Russia, for example, in Turkey, in Italy, in South America, it was more and more the German who organized, developed, led.

“Though we are fenced round,” he said, “still—we break out.

” There was something familiar and yet novel in all this to Oswald.

It was like his first sensation upon reading Shakespeare in German.

It was something very familiar—in an unfamiliar idiom.

Then he recognized it.

This was exactly his own Imperialism—Teutonized.

The same assertion of an educational mission....

“Everywhere we go,” said the young German, “our superior science, our higher education, our better method prevails.

Even in your India——” He smiled and left that sentence unfinished.

“But your militarism, your sabre rule here at home; this Zabern business; isn’t that a little incompatible with this idea of Germany as a great civilizing influence permeating the world?

” “Not at all,” said the young German, with the readiness of a word-perfect actor.

“Behind our missionaries of order we must have ready the good German sword.

” “But isn’t the argument of force apt to be a little—decivilizing?

” The young German did not think so.

“When I was in England I said, there are three things that these English do not properly understand to use, they are the map or index, the school, and—the sword.

Those three things are the triangle of German life....

” That hung most in Oswald’s mind.

He had gone on talking to the young German for a long time about the differences of the British and the German way.

He had made Peter and the youngster compare their school and college work, and what was far more striking, the difference in pressure between the two systems.

“You press too hard,” he said.

“In Alsace you have pressed too hard—in Posen.

” “Perhaps we sometimes press—I do not know,” said the young German.

“It is the strength of our determination.

We are impatient.

We are a young people.

” For a time Oswald had talked of the methods of Germany in the Cameroons and of Britain on the Gold Coast, where the German had been growing cacao by the plantation system, turning the natives into slaves, while the British, with an older experience and a longer view, had left the land in native hands and built up a happy and loyal free cultivation ten times as productive mile for mile as the German.

It seemed to him to be one good instance of his general conception of Germany as the land of undue urgency.

“Your Wissmann in East Africa was a great man—but everywhere else you drive too violently.

You antagonize.

” North Germany everywhere, he said, had the same effect upon him of a country, “going hard.

” “Germany may be in too much of a hurry,” he repeated.

“We came into world-politics late,” said the young German, endorsing Oswald’s idea from his own point of view.

“We have much to overtake yet.

”...

The Germans had come into world-politics late.

That was very true.

They were naïve yet.

They could still feed their natural egotism on the story of a world mission.

The same enthusiasms that had taken Russia to the Pacific—and to Grand Ducal land speculation in Manchuria—and the English to the coolie slavery of the Rand, was taking these Germans now—whither?

Oswald did not ask what route to disillusionment Germany might choose.

But he believed that she would come to disillusionment.

She was only a little later in phase than her neighbours; that was all.

In the end they would see that that white-cloaked heroic figure in the automobile led them to futility as surely as the skulking Tsar.

Not that way must the nations go....

Oswald saw no premonition of a world catastrophe in this German youngster’s devotion to an ideal of militant aggression, nor in the whole broad spectacle of straining preparation across which he and Peter travelled that winter from Aix to Wirballen.

He was as it were magically blind.

He could stand on the Hanover platform and mark the largeness of the station, the broad spreading tracks, the endless sidings, the tremendous transport preparations, that could have no significance in the world but military intention, and still have no more to say than, “These Germans give themselves elbow-room on their railways, Peter.

I

suppose land is cheaper.

” He could see nothing of the finger of fate pointing straight out of all this large tidy preparedness at Peter and their fellow-passengers and all the youth of the world.

He thought imperialistic monarchy was an old dead thing in Russia and in Britain and in Germany alike.

In Berlin indeed in every photographer’s was the touched-up visage of the Kaiser, looking heroic, and endless postcards of him and of his sons and of the Kaiserin and little imperial grandchildren and the like; they were as dull and dreary-looking as any royalties can be, and it was inconceivable to Oswald that such figures could really rule the imagination of a great people.

He did not realize that all the tragedy in the world might lie behind the words of that young German, “we came into world-politics late,” behind the fact that the German imperialist system was just a little less decayed, a little less humorous, a little less indolent and disillusioned than either of its great parallels to the east and west.

He did not reflect that no system is harmless until its hands are taken off the levers of power.

He could still believe that he lived in an immensely stable world, and that these vast forms of kingdom and empire, with their sham reverences and unmeaning ceremonies and obligations, their flags and militancy and their imaginative senility, threatened nothing beyond the negative evil of uninspired lives running to individual waste.

That was the thing that concerned him.

He saw no collective fate hanging over all these intent young faces in the Moscow Art Theatre, as over the strutting innocents of patriotic Berlin; he had as yet no intimation of the gigantic disaster that was now so close at hand, that was to torment and shatter the whole youth of the world, that was to harvest the hope and energy of these bright swathes of life....

He glanced at Peter, intent upon the stage.

Peter lay open to every impulse.

That was Oswald’s supreme grievance then against Tsars, Kings, and Churches.

They had not been good enough for Peter.

That seemed grievance enough.

He did not imagine yet that they could murder the likes of Peter by the hundred thousand, without a tremor.

He loved the fine lines of the boy’s profile, he marked his delicate healthy complexion.

Peter was like some wonderful new instrument in perfect condition.

And all these other youngsters, too, had something of the same clean fire in them....

Was it all to be spent upon love-making and pleasure-seeking and play?

Was this exquisite hope and desire presently to be thrown aside, rusted by base uses, corroded by self-indulgence, bent or broken?

“The generations running to waste—like rapids....

” He still thought in that phrase.

The Niagara of Death so near to them all now to which these rapids were heading, he still did not hear, did not suspect its nearness....

And Joan——.

From Peter his thoughts drifted to Joan.

Joan apparently could find nothing better to do in life than dance....

Suddenly Peter took a deep breath, sat back, and began to clap.

The whole house broke out into a pelting storm of approval.

“Ripping!

” said Peter.

“Oh!

ripping.

” He turned his bright face to Oswald.

“They do it so well,” he said, smiling.

“I had forgotten it was in Russian.

I seemed to understand every word.

” Oswald turned his eye again to _Hamlet_ in Gordon Craig’s fantastic setting—which Moscow in her artistic profusion could produce when London was too poor to do so.

§ 5 Very similar were the thoughts in Oswald’s mind three months later, three months nearer the world catastrophe, as he sat in his summerhouse after Joan had told him of her quarrel with Peter.

Her denunciation of Peter had had the curious effect upon him of making him very anxious about her.

So far as Peter went, what she had told him had but confirmed and made definite what he had known by instinct since the Christmas party.

His mind was used now to the idea of Peter being vicious.

But he was very much shocked indeed at the discovery that Joan was aware of Peter’s vices.

That was a new jolt to his mind.

In many things Joan and Peter had changed his ideas enormously, but so far he had retained not only his wardroom standards with regard to the morals of a youth, but also his romantic ideals of feminine purity with regard to a girl.

He still thought of his own womenkind as of something innocent, immaculate and untouchable, beings in a different world from the girls who “didn’t mind a bit of fun” and the women one made love to boldly.

But now he had to face the fact—Joan had forced it upon him—this new feminine generation wasn’t divided in that obvious way.

The clean had knowledge, the bold were not outcast and apart.

The new world of women was as mixed as the world of men.

He sat in his summerhouse thinking of his Joan’s flushed face, her indignant eyes, her outspoken words.

“It was a _woman’s_ face,” he whispered....

And he was realizing too how much more urgent the ending of adolescence was becoming with a girl than it could ever be with a boy.

Peter might tumble into a scrape or so and scramble out again, not very much the worse for it, as he himself had done.

But Joan, with all the temerity of a youth, might be making experiments that were fatal.

He had not been watching her as he had watched Peter.

Suddenly he woke up to this realization of some decisive issue at hand.

Why was she so whitely angry with Peter?

Why did she complain of having to “stand too much” from Peter?

Her abuse of his friends had the effect of a counter attack.

Was there some mischief afoot from which Peter restrained her?

What men were there about in Joan’s world?

There was something slimy and watchful about this fellow Huntley.

Could there be more in that affair than one liked to think?...

Or was there some one unknown in London or in Cambridge?

She and Peter were quarrelling about the Easter party.

It would apparently be impossible to have any Easter party this year, since both wanted to bar out the other one’s friends.

And anyhow there mustn’t be any more of this Hetty Reinhart business at Pelham Ford.

That must stop.

It ought never to have happened....

He would take Peter over to Dublin.

They could accept an invitation he had had from Graham Powys out beyond Foxrock, and they could motor into Dublin and about the country, and perhaps the Irish situation might touch the boy’s imagination....

Joan could go to her aunts at The Ingle-Nook....

Should he have a talk to Aunt Phyllis about the girl?

It was a pity that Aunt Phyllis always lost her breath and was shaken like an aspen leaf with fine feeling whenever one came to any serious discussion with her.

If it wasn’t for that confounded shimmer in her nerves and feelings, she would be a very wise and helpful woman....