then a day of glory and disobedience when, three thousand feet above the
chimneys of a decent farmhouse, Peter looped the loop twice. He had
learnt by that time what it was to side-slip, and what air pockets can
do to the unwary. He had learnt the bitter consequences of coming down
with the engine going strong. He had had a smash through that all too
common mistake, but not a bad smash; a few struts and wires of the left
wing were all that had gone. A hedge and a willow tree had stopped him.
He had had a forced landing in a field of cabbages through engine
stoppage, and half an hour in a snowstorm when he had had doubts in an
upward eddy whether he might not be flying upside down. That had been a
nasty experience—his worst. He had several times taken his hands off the
controls and let the old bus look after herself, so badly were the
snowflakes spinning about in his mind. He dreamt a lot about flying, and
few of his dreams were pleasant dreams. And then this fantastic old
world of ours, which had so suddenly diverted his education to these
things, and taught him to fly with a haste and intensity it had never
put into any teaching before, decided that he was ripe for the air war,
and packed him off to France....
§ 10
Now, seeing that Joan had at last discovered that she was in love with
Peter, it would be pleasantly symmetrical to record that Peter had also
discovered by this time that he was in love with Joan.
But as a matter of fact he had discovered nothing of the sort. He had
been amazed and humiliated by his three days of hesitation and
procrastination at Orta; the delay was altogether out of keeping with
his private picture of himself; and he discovered that he was not in
love with any one and that he did not intend again to be lured into any
dangerous pretence that he was. He had done with Hetty, he was
convinced; he did not mean to see her any more, and he led a life of
exasperated Puritanism for some months, refusing to answer the
occasionally very skilful and perplexing letters, with amusing and
provocative illustrations, that she wrote him.
The idea of “relaxing moral fibre” obsessed him, and our genial Peter
for a time abandoned both smoking and alcohol, and was only deterred
from further abstinences by their impracticability. The ordinary
infantry mess, for example, caters ill and resentfully for
vegetarians.... Peter’s days in the ranks were days of strained
austerity. He was a terribly efficient recruit, a fierce soldier, a
wonderful influence on slackers, stripes gravitated towards him, and a
prophetic corporal saw sergeant-major written on his forehead.
Occasionally, when his imagination got loose or after a letter from
Hetty, he would indulge privately in fits of violent rage, finding great
relief in the smashing of light objects and foul and outrageous
language. He found what he considered a convenient privacy for this
idiosyncrasy in a disused cowshed near the camp, and only realized that
he had an audience when a fellow recruit asked anxiously, “And how’s
Miss Blurry ’Etty?” Whereupon Peter discovered a better outlet for
pentup nervous energy in a square fight.
Joan saw hardly anything of him during those early and brutal days, but
she thought about him mightily. She shared Oswald’s opinion that he
wasn’t in his right place, and she wrote to him frequently. He answered
perhaps half her letters. His answers struck her as being rather posed.
The strain showed through them. Peter was trying very hard not to be
Peter. “I’m getting down to elementals,” was one of his experiments in
the statement of his moral struggle.
Then quite abruptly came his decision to get into the Royal Flying
Corps.
Neither Oswald nor Joan ventured any comment on this, because both of
them had a feeling that Peter had, in a sense, climbed down by this
decision to go up....
In the Royal Flying Corps Peter’s rather hastily conceived theories of
moral fibre came into an uncongenial atmosphere. The Royal Flying Corps
was amazingly young, swift, and confident, and “moral fibre” based on
abstinence and cold self-control was not at all what it was after. The
Royal Flying Corps was much more inclined to scrap with soda-water
syphons and rag to the tunes of a gramophone. It was a body that had had
to improvise a tradition of conduct in three or four swift years, and
its tradition was still unstable. Mainly it was the tradition of the
games and sports side of a public school, roughly adapted to the new
needs of the service; it was an essentially boyish tradition, even men
old enough to have gone through the universities were in a minority in
it, and Peter at one-and-twenty was one of the more elderly class of
recruits. And necessarily the tradition of the corps still varied widely
with the dominant personalities and favourite heroes of each aerodrome
and mess and squadron. It was a crowd of plastic boys, left amazingly to
chance leads. Their seniors had no light for them, and they picked up
such hints as they could from Kipling and the music-halls, from
overheard conversations, and one another.
Is it not an incredible world in which old men make wars and untutored
young men have to find out how to fight them; in which tradition and the
past are mere entanglements about the feet of the young? The flying
services took the very flower of the youth of the belligerent nations;
they took the young men who were most manifestly fitted to be
politicians, statesmen, leaders of men, masters in industry, and makers
of the new age; the boys of nerve, pluck, imagination, invention, and
decision. And there is not a sign of any realization on the part of any
one of the belligerent states of the fact that a large proportion of
this most select and valuable mass of youth was destined to go on living
after the war and was going to matter tremendously and be the backbone
of the race after the war. They let all these boys specialize as jockeys
specialize. The old men and rulers wanted these youngsters to fight and
die for them; that any future lay beyond the war was too much for these
scared and unteachable ancients to apprehend. The short way to immediate
efficiency was to back the tradition of recklessness and gallantry, and
so the short way was taken; if the brave lads were kept bold and
reckless by women, wine and song, then by all means, said their elders,
let them have these helps. “A short life and a merry one,” said the
British Empire to these lads of eighteen and nineteen encouragingly. “A
short life and a merry one,” said the Empire to its future.
If the story of the air forces is a glorious and not a shameful thing it
is because of the enduring hope of the world—the incessant gallantry of
youth. These boys took up their great and cardinal task with the
unquenchable hopefulness of boyhood and with the impudence and humour of
their race. They brought in the irreverence and the Spartanism of their
years. They made a language for themselves, an atrocious slang of
facetious misnomers; everything one did was a “stunt”; everything one
used was a “gadget”; the machines were “’buses” and “camels” and “pups”;
the older men were perpetually pleading in vain for more dignity in the
official reports. And these youngsters worked out their moral problems
according to their own generous and yet puerile ideas. They argued the
question of drink. Could a man fly better or worse if he was “squiffy”?
Does funk come to the thoughtful? And was ever a man gallant without
gallantries? After the death of Lord Kitchener there survived no man in
Britain of the quality to speak plainly and authoritatively and honestly
about chastity and drink to the young soldier. The State had no mind in
these matters. In most matters indeed the State had no mind; it was a
little old silly State. And the light side of the feminine temperament
flamed up into shameless acquiescences in the heroic presence of the
flying man. Youth instinctively sets towards romantic adventures, and
the scales of chance for a considerable number of the flying men swung
between mésalliance and Messalina.
The code and the atmosphere varied from mess to mess and from squadron
to squadron; young men are by nature and necessity hero-worshippers and
imitative. Peter’s lines fell among pleasant men of the “irresponsible”
school. The two best flyers he knew, including him of the hard blue eyes
who had first instructed him, were men of a physique that defied drink
and dissipation. Vigours could smoke, drink, and dance in London, catch
the last train back with three seconds to spare, and be flying with an
unshaken nerve by half-past six in the morning; Vincent would only
perform stunts when he was “tight,” and then he seemed capable of taking
any risk with impunity. He could be funny with an aeroplane then a
thousand feet up in the air. He could make it behave as though it was
drunk, as though it was artful; he could make it mope or wag its tail.
Men went out to watch him. The mess was decorated with pictures from _La
Vie Parisienne_, and the art and literature of the group was Revue. Now
seeing that Peter’s sole reason for his puritanism was the preservation
of efficiency, this combination of a fast life and a fine record in the
air was very disconcerting to him.
If he had been naturally and easily a first-class flying man he might
have stuck to his line of high austerity, but he was not. He flew well,
but he had to fly with care; like many other airmen, he always felt a
shadow of funk before going up, on two or three bad mornings it was on
his conscience that he had delayed for ten minutes or so, and he was
more and more inclined to think that he would fly better if he flew with
a less acute sense of possibilities. It was the start and the uneventful
flying that irked him most; hitherto every crisis had found him cool and
able. But the slap-dash style, combined with the exquisite accuracy of
these rakes, Vigours and Vincent, filled him with envious admiration.
In the mess Peter met chiefly youths of his own age or a year or so
younger; he soon became a master of slang; his style of wit won its way
among them. He ceased to write of “getting down to elementals” to Joan,
and he ceased to think of all other girls and women as inventions of the
devil. Only they must be kept in their places. As Vigours and Vincent
kept them. Just as one kept drink in its place. One must not, for
example, lose trains on account of them....
Through these months Joan maintained a strained watch upon the
development and fluctuations of Peter. He wrote—variously; sometimes
offhand duty notes and sometimes long and brotherly letters—incurably
brotherly. Every now and then she had glimpses of him when he came to
London on leave. Manifestly he liked her company and trusted her—as
though she was a man. It was exasperating. She dressed for Peter as she
had never dressed for any one, and he would take her out to dine at the
_Rendezvous_ or the _Petit Riche_ and sit beside her and glance at
common scraps of feminine humanity, at dirty little ogling bare-throated
girls in patched-up raiment and with harsh and screaming voices, as
though they were the most delicious of forbidden fruits. And he seemed
to dislike being alone with her. If she dropped her hand to touch his on
the table, he would draw his away.
Was the invisible barrier between them invincible?
For a time during his infantry phase he had shown a warm affection. In
his early days in the flying corps it seemed that he drew still closer
to her. Then her quick, close watch upon him detected a difference. Joan
was getting to be a very shrewd observer nowadays, and she felt a subtle
change that suddenly made him a little shame-faced in her presence.
There had been some sort of spree in London with two or three other wild
spirits, and there had been “girls” in the party. Such girls! He never
told her this, but something told her. I am inclined to think it was her
acute sense of smell detected a flavour of face powder or cheap scent
about Peter when he came along one day, half an hour late, to take her
to the Ambassadors. She was bad company that night for him.
For a time Joan was bad company for any one.
She was worse when she realized that Hetty was somehow reinstated in
Peter’s world. That, too, she knew by an almost incredible flash of
intuition. Miss Jepson was talking one evening to Peter, and Peter
suddenly displayed a knowledge of the work of the London Group that
savoured of studio. This was the first art criticism he had talked since
the war began. It was clear he had been to a couple of shows. Not with
Joan. Not alone. As he spoke, he glanced at Joan and met her eye.
It was astonishing that Miss Jepson never heard the loud shout of
“Hetty” that seemed to fill the room.
It was just after this realization that an elderly but still gallant
colonel, going on an expedition for the War Office with various other
technical authorities to suppress some disturbing invention that the
Ministry of Munitions was pressing in a troublesome manner, decided to
come back from Longmore to London on the front seat beside Joan. His
conversational intentions were honourable and agreeable, but he shared a
common error that a girl who wears khaki and drives a car demands less
respect from old gentlemen and is altogether more playful than the
Victorian good woman. Possibly he was lured on to his own destruction.
When he descended at the Ministry, he looked pinched and aged. He was
shaken to the pitch of confidences. “My word,” he whispered. “That girl
drives like the devil. But she’s a vixen ... snaps your head off....
Don’t know whether this sort of thing is good for women in the long run.
“Robs ’em of Charm,” he said.
§ 11
It was just in this phase of wrath and darkness that Wilmington came
over to London for his last leave before he was killed, and begged Joan
for all the hours she had to spare. She was quite willing to treat him
generously. They dined together and went to various theatres and
music-halls and had a walk over Hampstead Heath on Sunday. He was a
silent, persistent companion for most of the time. He bored her, and the
more he bored her the greater her compunction and the more she hid it
from him. But Wilmington, if he had a slow tongue, had a penetrating
eye.
The last evening they had together was at the Criterion. They dined in
the grill room, a dinner that was interspersed with brooding silences.
And then Wilmington decided to make himself interesting at any cost upon
this last occasion.
“Joan,” he said, knocking out a half-consumed cigarette upon the edge of
his plate.
“Billy?” said Joan, waking up.
“Queer, Joan, that you don’t love me when I love you so much.”
“I’d trust you to the end of the earth, Billy.”
“I know. But you don’t love me.”
“I think of you as much as I do of any one.”
“No. Except—_one_.”
“Billy,” said Joan weakly, “you’re the straightest man on earth.”
Wilmington’s tongue ran along his white lips. He spoke with an effort.
“You’ve loved Peter since you were six years old. It isn’t as
though—you’d treated me badly. I can’t grumble that you’ve had no room
for me. He’s always been there.”
Joan, after an interval, decided to be frank.
“It’s not much good, Billy, is it, if I do?”
Wilmington said nothing for quite a long time. He sat thinking hard.
“It’s not much good pretending I don’t hate Peter. I do. If I could kill
him—and in your memory too.... He bars you from me. He makes you
unhappy....”
His face was a white misery. Joan glanced round at the tables about her,
but no one seemed to be watching them. She looked at him again. Pity, so
great that it came near to love, wrung her....
“Joan,” he said at last.
“Yes?”
“It’s queer.... I feel mean.... As though it wasn’t right.... But look
here, Joan.” He tapped her arm. “Something—something that I suppose I
may as well point out to you. Because in certain matters—in certain
matters you are being a fool. It’s astonishing—— But absolutely—a fool.”
Joan perceived he had something very important to say. She sat watching
him, as with immense deliberation he got out another cigarette and lit
it.
“You don’t understand this Peter business, Joan. I—I do. Mostly when I’m
not actually planning out or carrying out the destruction of Germans, I
think of you—and Peter. And all the rest of it. I’ve got nothing else
much to think about. And I think I see things you don’t see. I know I
do.... Oh damn it! Go to hell!”
This last was to the waiter, who was making the customary warning about
liqueurs on the stroke of half-past nine.
“Sorry,” said Wilmington to Joan, and leant forward over his folded arms
and collected his thoughts with his eyes on the flowers before them.
“It’s like this, Joan. Peter isn’t where we are. I—I’m very definite and
clear about my love-making. I fell in love with you, and I’ve never met
any other woman I’d give three minutes of my life to. You’ve just got
me. As if I were the palm of your hand. I wish I were. And—oh! what’s
the good of shutting my eyes?—Peter has you. You’ve been thinking of
Peter half the time we’ve been together. It’s true, Joan. You’ve grown
up in love. Buh! But Peter, you’ve got to understand, isn’t in love. He
doesn’t know what love means. Perhaps he never will. Love with you and
me is a thing of flesh and bone. He takes it like some skin disease.
He’s been spoilt. He’s so damned easy and good-looking. He was got hold
of. I——”
Wilmington flushed for a moment. “I’m a chaste man, Joan. It’s a rare
thing. Among our sort. But Peter—— Loving a woman body and soul means
nothing to him. He thinks love-making is a kind of amusement—— Casual
amusement. Any woman who isn’t repulsive. You know, Joan, that’s not the
natural way. The natural way is love of soul and body. He’s been
perverted. But in this crowded world—like a monkey’s cage ...
artificially heated ... the young men get made miscellaneous.... Lots of
the girls even are miscellaneous....”
He considered the word. “Miscellaneous? Promiscuous, I mean.... It
hasn’t happened to us. To you and me, I mean. I’m unattractive somehow.
You’re fastidious. He’s neither. He takes the thing that offers. To
grave people sex is a sacrament, something—so solemn and beautiful——”
The tears stood in his eyes. “If I go on,” he said.... “I can’t go
on....”
For a time he said no more, and pulled his unconsumed cigarette to
pieces over the ash-tray with trembling fingers. “That’s all,” he said
at last.
“All this is—rather true,” said Joan. “But——!”
“What does it lead up to?”
“Yes.”
“It means Peter’s the ordinary male animal. Under modern conditions.
Lazy. Affectionate and all that, but not a scrap of emotion or love—yet
anyhow. Not what you and I know as love. You may dress it up as you
like, but the fact is that the woman has to make love to him. That’s
all. Hetty has made love to him. He has never made love to
anybody—except as a sort of cheerful way of talking, and perhaps he
never, never will.... He respects you too much to make love to you....
But he’d hate the idea of any one else—making love to you.... It’s an
idea—— It’s outside of his conception of you.... He’ll never think of it
for himself.”
Joan sat quite still. After what seemed a long silence she looked up at
him.
Wilmington was watching her face. He saw she understood his drift.
“You could cut her out like _that_,” said Wilmington, with a gesture
that gained an accidental emphasis by knocking his glass off the table
and smashing it.
The broken glass supplied an incident, a distraction, with the waiters,
to relieve the tension of the situation.
“That’s all I had to say,” said Wilmington when that was all settled.
“There’s no earthly reason why two of us should be unhappy.”
“Billy,” she said, after a long pause, “if I could only love _you_——”
The face of gratitude that looked at him faded to a mask.
“You’re thinking of Peter already,” said Wilmington, watching her face.
It was true. She started, detected.
He speculated cheerlessly.
“You’ll marry me some day perhaps. When Peter’s thrown you over.... It’s
men of my sort who get things like that....”
He stood up and reached for her cloak. She, too, stood up.
Then, as if to reassure her, he said: “I shall get killed, Joan. So we
needn’t worry about that. I shall get killed. I know it. And Peter will
live.... I always have taken everything too seriously. Always.... I
shall kill a lot of Germans yet, but one day they will get me. And Peter
will be up there in the air, like a cheerful midge—with all the Archies
missing him....”
§ 12
This conversation was a cardinal event in Joan’s life. Wilmington’s
suggestions raised out of the grave of forgetfulness and incorporated
with themselves a conversation she had had long ago with Adela—one
Christmas at Pelham Ford when Adela had been in love with Sopwith
Greene. Adela too had maintained that it was the business of a woman to
choose her man and not wait to be chosen, and that it was the woman who
had to make love. “A man’s in love with women in general,” had been
Adela’s idea, “but women fall in love with men in particular.” Adela had
used a queer phrase, “It’s for a woman to find her own man and keep him
and take care of him.” Men had to do their own work; they couldn’t think
about love as women were obliged by nature to think about love. “Love’s
just a trouble to a real man, like a mosquito singing in his ear, until
some woman takes care of him.”
All those ideas came back now to Joan’s mind, and she did her best to
consider them and judge them as generalizations. But indeed she judged
with a packed court, and all her being clamoured warmly for her to “get”
Peter, to “take care”—most admirable phrase—of Peter. Her decision was
made, and still she argued with herself. Was it beneath her dignity to
set out and capture her Peter?—he was her Peter. Only he didn’t know it.
She tried to generalize. Had it ever been dignified for a woman to wait
until a man discovered her possible love? Was that at best anything more
than the dignity of the mannequin?
Three-quarters at least of the art and literature of the world is
concerned with the relations of the sexes, and yet here was Joan, after
thirty centuries or so of human art and literature, still debating the
elementary facts of her being. There is so much excitement in our art
and literature and so little light. The world has still to discover the
scope and vastness of its educational responsibilities. Most of its
teaching in these matters hitherto has been less in the nature of
enlightenment than strategic concealment; we have given the young
neither knowledge nor training, we have restrained and baffled them and
told them lies. And then we have inflamed them. We have abused their
instinctive trust when they were children with stories of old Bogey
designed to save us the bother that unrestrained youthful enterprise
might cause, and with humorous mockery of their natural curiosity.
Jocularities about storks and gooseberry bushes, sham indignations at
any plainness of speech, fierce punishments of imperfectly realized
offences, this against a background of giggles, knowing innuendo, and
careless, exciting glimpses of the mystery, have constituted the
ordinary initiation of the youth of the world. Right up to full age, we
still fail to provide the clear elemental facts. Our young men do not
know for certain whether continence is healthy or unhealthy, possible or
impossible; the sex is still assured with all our power of assurance,
that the only pure and proper life for it is a sexless one. Until at
last the brightest of the young have been obliged to get down to the
bare facts in themselves and begin again at the beginning....
So Joan, co-Heiress of the Ages with Peter, found that because of her
defaulting trustees, because we teachers, divines, writers and the like
have shirked what was disagreeable and difficult and unpopular, she
inherited nothing but debts and dangers. She had not even that touching
faith in Nature which sustained the generation of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
She had to set about her problem with Peter as though he and she were
Eve and Adam in a garden overrun with weeds and thorns into which God
had never come.