thwarted femininity. She saw Peter without delusions. He was a bigger
and cleverer creature than herself; he compelled her respect. He had
more strength, more invention, more initiative, and a relatively
tremendous power of decision. And at the same time he was weak and blind
and stupid. His flickering, unstable sensuousness, his light
adventurousness and a certain dishonesty about women, filled her with a
comprehensive pity and contempt. There was a real difference not merely
in scale but in nature between them. It was clear to her now that the
passionate and essential realities of a woman’s life are only incidental
to a man. But on the other hand there were passionate and essential
realities for Peter that made her own seem narrow and self-centred. She
knew far more of his mental life than Oswald did. She knew that he had
an intense passion for clear statement, he held to scientific and
political judgments with a power altogether deeper and greater than she
did; he cared for them and criticized them and polished them, like
weapons that had been entrusted to him. Beneath his debonair mask he was
growing into a strong and purposeful social and mental personality. She
perceived that he was only in the beginning of his growth—if he came on
no misadventure, if he did not waste himself. And she did not believe
that she herself had any great power of further growth except through
him. But linked to him she could keep pace with him. She could capture
his senses, keep his conscience, uphold him....
She had convinced herself now that that was her chief business in life.
Her mind was remarkably free from doubts about the future if once she
could get at her Peter. Mountains and forests of use and wont separated
them, she knew. Peter had acquired a habit of not making love to her and
of separating her from the thought of love. But if ever Peter came over
these mountains, if ever he came through the forest to her—— In the
heart of the forest, she would keep him. She wasn’t afraid that Peter
would leave her again. Wilmington had been wrong there. That he had
suggested in the bitterness of his heart. Men like Huntley and
Winterbaum were always astray, but Peter was not “looking for women.” He
was just a lost man, distracted by desire, desire that was strong
because he was energetic, desire that was mischievous and unmeaning
because he had lost his way in these things.
“I don’t care so very much how long it takes, Peter; I don’t care what
it costs me,” said Joan, getting her rôle clear at last. “I don’t even
care—not vitally anyhow—how you wander by the way. No. Because you’re my
man, Peter, and I am your woman. Because so it was written in the
beginning. But you are coming over those mountains, my Peter, though
they go up to the sky; you are coming through the forests though I have
to make a path for you. You are coming to my arms, Peter ... coming to
me....”
So Joan framed her schemes, regardless of the swift approach of the day
of battle for Peter. She was resolved to lose nothing by neglect or
delay, but also she meant to do nothing precipitate. To begin with she
braced herself to the disagreeable task of really thinking—instead of
just feeling—about Hetty. She compared herself deliberately point by
point with Hetty. Long ago at Pelham Ford she had challenged Hetty—and
Peter had come out of the old library in spite of Hetty to watch her
dancing. She was younger, she was fresher and cleaner, she was a ray of
sunlight to Hetty’s flames. Hetty was good company—perhaps. But Peter
and Joan had always been good company for each other, interested in a
score of common subjects, able to play the same games and run abreast.
But Hetty was “easy.” There was her strength. Between her and Peter
there were no barriers, and between Joan and Peter was a blank wall, a
stern taboo upon the primary among youthful interests, a long habit of
aloofness, dating from the days when “soppy” was the ultimate word in
the gamut of human scorn.
“It’s just like that,” said Joan.
Those barriers had to be broken down, without a shock. And before that
problem Joan maintained a frowning, unsuccessful siege. She couldn’t
begin to flirt with Peter. She couldn’t make eyes at him. Such things
would be intolerable. She couldn’t devise any sort of signal. And so how
the devil was this business ever to begin? And while she wrestled vainly
with this perplexity she remained more boyish, more good-fellow and
companion with Peter than ever....
And while she was still meditating quite fruitlessly on this riddle of
changing her relationship to Peter, he was snatched away from her to
France.
The thing happened quite unexpectedly. He came up to see her at
Hampstead late in the afternoon—it was by a mere chance she was back
early. He was full of pride at being chosen to go so soon. He seemed
brightly excited at going, keen for the great adventure, the most
lovable and animated of Peters—and he might be going to his death. But
it was the convention of the time never to think of death, and anyhow
never to speak of it. Some engagement held him for the evening, some
final farewell spree; she did not ask too particularly what that was.
She could guess only too well. Altogether they were about
five-and-twenty minutes together, with Miss Jepson always in the room
with them; for the most part they talked air shop; and then he prepared
to leave with all her scheming still at loose ends in the air. “Well,”
he said, “good-bye, old Joan,” and held out his hand.
“No,” said Joan, with a sudden resolution in her eyes. “This time we
kiss, Peter.”
“Well,” said Peter, astonished.
She had surprised him. He stared at her for an instant with a
half-framed question in his eyes. And then they kissed very gravely and
carefully. But she kissed him on the mouth.
For some seconds solemnity hung about them. Then Peter turned upon Miss
Jepson. “Do _you_ want a kiss?” said Peter....
Miss Jepson was all for kissing, and then with a laugh and an effect of
escape Peter had gone ... into the outer world ... into the outer
air....
§ 13
He flew to France the next day, above the grey and shining stretches of
water and two little anxious ships, and he sent Joan a cheerful message
on a picture-postcard of a shell-smashed church to tell of his safe
arrival.
Joan was dismayed. In war time we must not brood on death, one does not
think of death if one can help it; it is the chance that wrecks all
calculations; but the fear of death had fallen suddenly upon all her
plans. And what was there left now of all her plans? She might write him
letters.
Death is more terrible to a girl in love than to any other living thing.
“If he dies,” said Joan, “I am killed. I shall be worse than a widow—an
Indian girl widow. Suttee; what will be left of me but ashes?... Some
poor dregs of Joan carrying on a bankrupt life.... No me....”
There was nothing for it but to write him letters. And Joan found those
letters incredibly difficult to write. All lightness had gone from her
touch. After long and tiring days with her car she sat writing and
tearing up and beginning again. It was so difficult now to write to him,
to be easy in manner and yet insidious. She wanted still to seem his old
companion, and yet to hint subtly at the new state of things. “There’s a
dull feeling now you’ve gone out of England, Peter,” she wrote. “I’ve
never had company I cared for in all the world as I care for yours.”
And, “I shall count the days to your leave, Peter, as soon as I know how
many to count. I didn’t guess before that you were a sort of necessity
to me.” Over such sentences, sentences that must have an edge and yet
not be too bold, sentences full of tenderness and above all suspicion of
“soppiness,” Joan pondered like a poet writing a sonnet....
But letters went slowly, and life and death hustled along together very
swiftly in the days of the great war....
§ 14
Joan’s mind was full of love and life and the fear of losing them, but
Peter was thinking but little of love and life; he was secretly
preoccupied with the thought, the forbidden thought, of death, and with
the strangeness of war and of this earth seen from an aeroplane ten
thousand feet or so above the old battlefields of mankind. He was seeing
the world in plan, and realizing what a flat and shallow thing it was.
On clear days the circuit of the world he saw had a circumference of
hundreds of miles, night flying was a journey amidst the stars with the
little black planet far away; there was no former achievement of the
race that did not seem to him now like a miniature toy set out upon the
floor of an untidy nursery. He had beaten up towards the very limits of
life and air, to the clear thin air of twenty-two or twenty-three
thousand feet; he had been in the blinding sunlight when everything
below was still asleep in the blue of dawn.
And the world of history and romance, the world in which he and all his
ancestors had believed, a world seen in elevation, of towering
frontages, high portals, inaccessible dignities, giddy pinnacles and
frowning reputations, had now fallen as flat, it seemed, as the façade
of the Cloth Hall at Ypres. (He had seen that one day from above, spread
out upon the ground.) He was convinced that high above the things of the
past he droned his liquid way towards a new sort of life altogether,
towards a greater civilization, a world-wide life for men with no
boundaries in it at all except the emptiness of outer space, a life of
freedom and exaltation and tremendous achievement. But meanwhile the old
things of the world were trying most desperately to kill him. Every day
the enemy’s anti-aircraft guns seemed to grow more accurate; and high
above the little fleecy clouds lurked the braggart Markheimer and the
gallant von Papen and suchlike German champions, with their decoys
below, ready to swoop and strike. Never before had the world promised
Peter so tremendous a spectacle as it seemed to promise now, and never
before had his hope of living to see it been so insecure.
When he had enlisted, and even after he had been transferred to the
Flying Corps, Peter had thought very little of death. The thought of
death only became prevalent in English minds towards the second year of
the war. It is a hateful and unnatural thought in youth, easily
dismissed altogether unless circumstances press it incessantly upon the
attention. But even before Peter went to France two of his set had been
killed under his eyes in a collision as they came down into the
aerodrome, and a third he had seen two miles away get into a spiral nose
dive, struggle out of it again, and then go down to be utterly smashed
to pieces. In one day on Salisbury Plain he had seen three accidents,
and two, he knew, had been fatal and one had left a legless thing to
crawl through life. The messes in France seemed populous with young
ghosts; reminiscences of sprees, talk of flying adventures were laced
with, “dear old boy! he went west last May.” “Went west” was the common
phrase. They never said “killed.” They hated the very name of death.
They did their best, these dear gallant boys, to make the end seem an
easy and familiar part of life, of life with which they were so joyously
in love. They all knew that the dice was loaded against them, and that
as the war went on the chances against them grew. The first day Peter
was out in France he saw a man hit and brought down by a German Archie.
Two days after, he found himself the centre of a sudden constellation of
whoofing shells that left inky cloudbursts over him and under him and
round about him; he saw the fabric of his wing jump and quiver, and
dropped six hundred feet or so to shake the gunner off. But _whuff_ ...
_whuff_ ... _whuff_, like the bark of a monstrous dog ... the beast was
on him again within a minute, and Peter did two or three loops and came
about and got away with almost indecent haste. He was trembling; he
hated it. And he hated to tremble.
In the mess that evening the talk ran on the “Pigeon shooter.” It seemed
that there was this one German gunner far quicker and more deadly than
any of his fellows. He had a knack of divining what an airman was going
to do. Peter admitted his near escape and sought counsel.
Peter’s colleagues watched him narrowly and unostentatiously when they
advised him. Their faces were masks and his face was a mask, and they
were keen for the faintest intonation of what was behind it. They all
hated death, they all tried not to think of death; they all believed
that there were Paladins, other fellows, who never thought of death at
all. When the tension got too great they ragged; they smashed great
quantities of furniture and made incredible volumes of noise. Twice
Peter got away from the aerodrome to let things rip in Amiens. But such
outbreaks were usually followed by a deep depression of spirit. In the
night Peter would wake up and find the thought of death sitting by his
bedside.
So far Peter had never had a fight. He had gone over the enemy lines
five times, he had bombed a troop train in a station and a regiment
resting in a village, he believed he had killed a score or more of
Germans on each occasion and he felt not the slightest compunction, but
he had not yet come across a fighting Hun plane. He had very grave
doubts about the issue of such a fight, a fight that was bound to come
sooner or later. He knew he was not such a quick pilot as he would like
to be. He thought quickly, but he thought rather too much for rapid,
steady decisions. He had the balancing, scientific mind. He knew that
none of his flights were perfect. Always there was a conflict of
intention at some point, a hesitation. He believed he might last for
weeks or months, but he knew that somewhen he would be found
wanting—just for a second perhaps, just in the turn of the fight. Then
he would be killed. He hid quite successfully from all his companions,
and particularly from his squadron commander, this conviction, just as
he had previously hidden the vague funk that had invariably invaded his
being whenever he walked across the grounds towards the machine during
his days of instruction, but at the back of his mind the thought that
his time was limited was always present. He believed that he had to die;
it might be tomorrow or next week or next month, but somewhen within the
year.
When these convictions became uppermost in Peter’s mind a black
discontent possessed him. There are no such bitter critics of life as
the young; theirs is a magnificent greed for the splendour of life. They
have no patience with delays; their blunders and failures are
intolerable. Peter reviewed his two-and-twenty years—it was now nearly
three-and-twenty—with an intense dissatisfaction. He had wasted his
time, and now he had got into a narrow way that led down and down
pitilessly to where there would be no more time to waste. He had been
aimless and the world had been aimless, and then it had suddenly turned
upon him and caught him in this lobster-trap. He had wasted all his
chances of great experience. He had never loved a woman or had been well
loved because he had frittered away that possibility in a hateful sex
excitement with Hetty—who did not even pretend to be faithful to him.
And now things had got into this spin to death. It was exactly like a
spin—like a spinning nose dive—the whole affair, his life, this war....
He would lie and fret in his bed, and fret all the more because he knew
his wakefulness wasted the precious nervous vigour that might save his
life next day.
After a black draught of such thoughts Peter would become excessively
noisy and facetious in the mess tent. He was recognized and applauded as
a wit and as a devil. He was really very good at Limericks, delicately
indelicate, upon the names of his fellow officers and of the villages
along the front—that was no doubt heredity, the gift of his Aunt
Phyllis—and his caricatures adorned the mess. It was also understood
that he was a rake....
Peter’s evil anticipations were only too well justified. He was put down
in his very first fight, which happened over Dompierre. He had bad luck;
he was struck by von Papen, one of the crack German fliers on that part
of the front. He was up at ten thousand feet or so, more or less
covering a low-flying photographer, when he saw a German machine coming
over half a mile perhaps or more away as though it was looking for
trouble. Peter knew he might funk a fight, and to escape that moral
disaster, headed straight down for the German, who dropped and made off
southward. Peter rejoicing at this flight, pursued, his eyes upon the
quarry. Then from out of the sun came von Papen, swiftly and
unsuspected, upon Peter’s tail, and announced his presence by a whiff of
bullets. Peter glanced over his shoulder to discover that he was caught.
“Oh damn!” cried Peter, and ducked his head, and felt himself stung at
the shoulder and wrist. Splinters were flying about him.
He tried a side-slip, and as he did so he had an instant’s vision of yet
another machine, a Frenchman this time, falling like a bolt out of the
blue upon his assailant. The biter was bit.
Peter tried to come round and help, but he turned right over sideways
and dropped, and suddenly found himself with the second Hun plane coming
up right ahead of him. Peter blazed away, but God! how his wrist hurt
him! He cursed life and death. He blazed away with his machine going
over more and more, and the landscape rushing up over his head and then
getting in front of him and circling round. For some seconds he did not
know what was up and what was down. He continued to fire, firing
earthward for a long second or so after his second enemy had disappeared
from his vision.
The world was spinning round faster and faster, and everything was
moving away outward, faster and faster, as if it was all hastening to
get out of his way....
This surely was a spinning nose dive, the spinning nose dive—from
within. Round and round. Confusing and giddy! Just as he had seen poor
old Gordon go down.... But one didn’t feel at all—as Peter had supposed
one must feel—like an egg in an egg-whisk!...
Down spun the aeroplane, as a maple fruit in autumn spins to the ground.
Then this still living thing that had been Peter, all bloody and broken,
made a last supreme effort. And his luck seconded his effort. The spin
grew slower and flatter. Control of this lurching, eddying aeroplane
seemed to come back, escaped again, mocked him. The ground was very
near. _Now!_ The sky swung up over the whirling propeller again and
stayed above it, and again the machine obeyed a reasonable soul.
He was out of it! Out of a nose dive! Yes. Steady! It is so easy when
one’s head is whirling to get back into a spin again. Steady!...
He talked to himself. “Oh! good Peter! _Good_ Peter! _Clever_ Peter.
Wonderful Mr. Toad! Stick it! Stick it!” But what a queer right hand it
was! It was covered with blood. And it crumpled up in the middle when he
clenched it! Never mind!
He was in the lowest storey of the air. The Hun and the Frenchman up
there were in another world.
Down below, quite close—not five hundred feet now—were field-greys
running and shooting at him. They were counting their chicken before he
was hatched—no, smashed.... He wasn’t done yet! Not by any manner of
means! A wave of great cheerfulness and confidence buoyed up Peter. He
felt equal to any enterprise. Should he drop and let the bawling Boche
have a round or so?
And there was a Hun machine smashed upside down on the ground. Was that
the second fellow?
Flick! a bullet!
Wiser counsels came to Peter. This was no place for a sick and giddy man
with a smashed and bleeding wrist. He must get away.
Up! Which way was west? West? The sun rises in the east and sets in the
west. But where had the sun got to? It was hidden by his wing. Shadows!
The shadows would be pointing north-east, that was the tip.... Up! There
were the Boche trenches. No, Boche reserve trenches.... Going west,
going west.... Rip! Snap! Bullet through the wing, and a wire flickering
about. He ducked his head.... He put the machine up steeply to perhaps a
thousand feet....
He had an extraordinary feeling that he and the machine were growing and
swelling, that they were getting bigger and bigger, and the sky and the
world and everything else smaller. At last he was a monstrous man in a
vast aeroplane in the tiniest of universes. He was as great as God.
That wrist! And this blood! Blood! And great, glowing spots of blood
that made one’s sight indistinct....
He coughed, and felt his mouth full of blood, and spat it out and
retched....
Then in an instant he was a little thing again, and the sky and the
world were immense. He had a lucid interval.
One ought to go up and help that Frenchman. Where were they fighting?...
_Up_, anyhow!
This must be No Man’s Land. That crumpled little thing was a dead body
surely. Barbed wire. More barbed wire.
The engine was missing. Ugh! _That fairly put the lid on!_
Peter was already asleep and dreaming. The great blood spots had
returned and increased, but now they were getting black, they were
black, huge black blotches; they blotted out the world!
Peter, Peter as we have known him, discontinued existence....
It was an automaton, aided by good luck, that dropped his machine half a
mile behind the French trenches....
§ 15
Peter had no memory of coming to again from his faint. For a long time
he must have continued to be purely automatic. His flaming wrist was the
centre of his being. Then for a time consciousness resumed, as abruptly
as the thread of a story one finds upon the torn page of a novel.
He found himself in the midst of a friendly group of pale blue uniforms;
he was standing up and being very lively in spite of the strong taste of
blood in his mouth and a feeling that his wrist was burning as a match
burns, and that the left upper half of his body had been changed into a
lump of raw and bleeding meat. He was talking a sort of French. “_C’est
sacré bon stuff, cet eau-de-vie Française_,” he was saying gaily and
rather loudly.
“Haf some more,” said a friendly voice.
“Not half, old chap,” said Peter, and felt at the time that this was not
really good French.
He tried to slap the man on the shoulder, but he couldn’t.
“_Bon!_” he said, “as we say in England,” and felt that that remark also
failed.
Some one protested softly against his being given more brandy....
Then this clear fragment ended again. There was a kind of dream of
rather rough but efficient surgery upon a shoulder and arm that was
quite probably his own, and some genially amiable conversation. There
was a very nice Frenchman with a black beard and soft eyes, who wore a
long white overall, and seemed to be looking after him as tenderly as a
woman could do.
But with these things mingled the matter of delirium. At one time the
Kaiser prevailed in Peter’s mind, a large, foolish, pompous person with
waxed moustaches and distraught eyes, who crawled up to Peter over
immense piles of white and grey and green rotting corpses, and began
gnawing at his shoulder almost absent-mindedly. Peter struggled and
protested. What business had this beastly German to come interfering
with Peter’s life? He started a vast argument about that, in which all
sorts of people, including the nice-looking Frenchman in the white
overall, took part.
Peter was now making a formal complaint about the conduct of the
universe. “No,” he insisted time after time, “I will not deal with
subordinates. I insist on seeing the Head,” and so at last he found
himself in the presence of the Lord God....
But Peter’s vision of the Lord God was the most delirious thing of all.
He imagined him in an office, a little office in a vast building, and so
out of the way that people had to ask each other which was the passage
and which the staircase. Old men stood and argued at corners with
Peter’s girl-guide whether it was this way or that. People were being
shown over the building by girl-guides; it was very like the London War
Office, only more so; there were great numbers of visitors, and they all
seemed to be in considerable hurry and distress, and most of them were
looking for the Lord God to lodge a complaint and demand an explanation,
just as Peter was. For a time all the visitors became wounded men, and
nurses mixed up with the girl-guides, and Peter was being carried
through fresh air to an ambulance train. His shoulder and wrist were
very painful and singing, as it were, a throbbing duet together.
For a time Peter did seem to see the Lord God; he was in his office, a
little brown, rather tired-looking man in a kepi, and Peter was on a
stretcher, and the Lord God or some one near him was saying: “_Quel
numéro_?” But that passed away, and Peter was again conducting his
exploration of the corridors with a girl-guide who was sometimes like
Joan and sometimes like Hetty—and then there was a queer disposition to
loiter in the passages.... For a time he sat in dishabille while Hetty
tried to explain God.... Dreams cross the scent of dreams.