No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [39]
“I can’t see any of our students joining the army.” Beecher spoke just before swallowing the last mouthful of his pastry. “And no matter how heated it gets between Austria and Serbia, it’s a long way from us. It’s not our concern unless we want to make it so. Young men always worry before leaving university and stepping out into the world.” He smiled broadly. “In spite of the competition, there is safety here, and a multitude of distractions. The college is a hotbed of ideas most of them have never even imagined, and of the first temptations of adulthood—but the only real yardstick is your own ability. You may not get a first, but the only person who can prevent you succeeding is yourself. Outside it’s different. It’s a colder world. The best of them know that.” He finished his cider. “Let them worry, Joseph. It’s part of growing up.”
Again Joseph thought of Sebastian’s tortured face as he had stared with such intensity across the burnished water toward the dark outlines of the college. “It wasn’t anxiety for himself. It was for what war in Europe would do to civilization in general.”
Beecher’s face split into a good-natured grin. “Too much poring over dead languages, Joseph. There’s always something ineffably sad about a culture whose people have vanished when an echo of their beauty remains, especially if it is part of the music of our own.”
“He was thinking of our language being overtaken and our way of thought lost,” Joseph told him.
“He?” Beecher’s eyebrows rose. “You have someone particular in mind?”
“Sebastian Allard.” Joseph had barely finished speaking when he saw a shadow in Beecher’s eyes. The still evening light was unchanged. The sound of laughter from a group of young men drifted on the twilight breeze from the green swath of the Backs, but inexplicably the air seemed colder. “He’s more aware than the others,” he explained.
“He’s got a better intellect,” Beecher agreed, but he did not look at Joseph.
“It’s more than intellect.” Joseph felt the need to defend himself, and perhaps Sebastian. “You can have a brilliant brain without delicacy, fire, vision. . . .” He had used the same word again, but there was no other to describe what he knew in Sebastian. In his translations the young man had caught the music and understood not only what the poets and philosophers of the past had written, but the whole regions of passion and dream that lay beyond it. To teach such a mind as his was the wish of all those who wanted to pass on the beauty they themselves had seen. “You know that!” he said with more force than he had intended.
“We’re not in any danger of going the way of Carthage or Etruria.” Beecher smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. “There are no barbarians at the gates. If they exist, then they are here among us.” He looked at his empty glass but did not bother to catch the barman’s eye. “I think we are equal to keeping them at bay, at least most of the time.”
Joseph heard a note of pain in his voice and knew that it was real, the tip of something he had not seen before. “Not all the time?” he asked gently.
Then into his mind burst back the crushed foxgloves on the verge of the road, the scars of the caltrops on the tarmacadam, the screaming of metal in his imagination, and the blood. And he understood violence and rage completely, and fear.
“Of course not all of it,” Beecher replied, his gaze beyond Joseph’s head, unaware of the emotion all but drowning his friend. “They are young minds full of energy and promise, but they are also morally undisciplined now and then. They are on the edge of learning about the world, and about themselves. They have the privilege of education in the best school there is, and of being taught—forgive the immodesty—by some of the best mentors in the English language. They live in one of the most subtle and tolerant cultures in Europe. And they have the intellect and the ambition, the drive and the fire to make something of it. At least most of them have.”
He turned to meet Joseph’s eyes. “It’s our job to civilize them as well, Joseph. Teach