II
Two days later Geppe received the order to rejoin his regiment at once. He sat staring helplessly down at the paper where it lay on the breakfast-table. Through his poor, shrinking mind surged a chaos of ideas. He would tell them all that he dared not go; he would rush to the docks and get aboard a ship bound for some neutral port; he would fling himself on his grandfather’s mercy and beg and implore him to hide him; he would cling to his mother and surely she would help him, perhaps if he cried she would find a way to help him as she had done when he was little; he would go to the chemist and buy enough strychnine; he could say that it was needed to kill a wounded cat—anything, anything, anything but war! He had heard of the sort of things that happened in war on his journey home through France. That little, innocent bit of paper, how could it mean so much? If he tore it to pieces that would not help him, for the thing was possessed of life everlasting; destroy it and there was its damnable spirit waiting to drive and hound him. No good, no good, he must make a clean breast, he must speak now, revealing his shame, he must say to them all: “For Christ’s sake, help me! I am sick with the fear of going.”
He looked up, his mouth was already half open; then he met all those terrible eyes. Six terrible eyes in three terrible faces—terrible because so trustful, so gentle; so intolerably, pathetically proud. Nerone’s old eyes almost patient and loving, because his grandson was a soldier; Mario’s eyes very big, very round, and full to the brim with the pride of his manhood, because he had made a man; Rosa’s eyes all swimming in tears, but with something like sunlight behind them—Rosa’s motherhood looking out through the storm, making the beauty of a rainbow round her—a rainbow, the emblem of promise.
Geppe’s own eyes dropped again to the paper which he folded and put in his pocket; and something of Rosa’s glory reached him, so that when next he looked up at them all his trembling mouth was smiling. He nodded and managed to throw back his shoulders, managed to light a cigarette; not knowing in the least why he did these things, but suddenly feeling that they had to be done.
So that was how Geppe went to the war. In less than a week he was gone. Nerone could brag to Rocca of his grandson, and Mario could hold his head high at the Capo. Per Bacco! Why not? Was he not a proud father? Had he not every reason to be proud?
Only Rosa, bombarding the saints with her prayers, knew that her son was afraid. She did not implore them to give Geppe life, but courage in the face of death.