been sitting for a long time, in the little office of the Lord God of
Heaven and Earth. And the Lord God had the likeness of a lean, tired,
intelligent-looking oldish man, with an air of futile friendliness
masking a fundamental indifference.
“My dear sir,” the Lord God was saying, “do please put that cushion
behind your poor shoulder. I can’t bear to see you so uncomfortable. And
tell me everything. Everything....”
The office was the dingiest and untidiest little office it was possible
to imagine. The desk at which God sat was in a terrible litter. On a
side table were some grubby test tubes and bottles at which the Lord God
had apparently been trying over a new element. The windows had not been
cleaned for ages, they were dark with spiders’ webs, they crawled with a
buzzing nightmare of horrible and unmeaning life. It was a most
unbusinesslike office. There were no proper files, no card indexes;
bundles of dusty papers were thrust into open fixtures, papers littered
the floors, and there were brass-handled drawers—. Peter looked again,
and blood was oozing from these drawers and little cries came out of
them. He glanced quickly at God, and God was looking at him. “But did
you really make this world?” he asked.
“I _thought_ I did,” said God.
“But why did you do it? _Why?_”
“Ah, _there_ you have me!” said the Lord God with bonhomie.
“But why don’t you exert yourself?” said Peter, hammering at the desk
with his sound hand. “Why don’t you exert yourself?”
Could delirium have ever invented a more monstrous conception than this
of Peter hammering on an untidy desk amidst old pen nibs, bits of
sealing-wax, half-sheets of notepaper, returns of nature’s waste, sample
bones of projected animals, mineral samples, dirty little test tubes,
and the like, and lecturing the Almighty upon the dreadful confusion
into which the world had fallen? “Here was I, sir, and millions like me,
with a clear promise of life and freedom! And what are we now? Bruises,
red bones, dead bodies! This German Kaiser fellow—an ass, sir, a perfect
ass, gnawing a great hole in my shoulder! He and his son, stuffing
themselves with a Blut-Wurst made out of all our lives and happiness!
What does it mean, sir? Has it gone entirely out of your control? And it
isn’t as if the whole thing was ridiculous, sir. It isn’t. In some ways
it’s an extraordinarily fine world—one has to admit that. That is why it
is all so distressing, so unendurably distressing. I don’t in the least
want to leave it.”
“You admit that it’s fine—in places,” said the Lord God, as if he valued
the admission.
“But the management, sir! the management! Yours—ultimately. Don’t you
realize, sir——? I had the greatest trouble in finding you. Half the
messengers don’t know where this den of yours is. It’s _forgotten_.
Practically forgotten. The Head Office! And now I’m here I can tell you
everything is going to rack and ruin, driving straight to an absolute
and final smash and break-up.”
“As bad as that?” said the Lord God.
“It’s the appalling waste,” Peter continued. “The waste of material, the
waste of us, the waste of everything. A sort of splendour in it, there
is; touches of real genius about it, that I would be the last to deny;
but that only increases the bitterness of the disorder. It’s a good
enough world to lament. It’s a good enough life to resent having to lose
it. There’s some lovely things in it, sir; courage, endurance, and oh!
many beautiful things. But when one gets here, when one begins to ask
for you and hunt about for you, and finds this, this muddle, sir, then
one begins to understand. _Look_ at this room, consider it—as a general
manager’s room. No decency. No order. Everywhere the dust of ages, muck
indescribable, bacteria! And that!”
That was a cobweb across the grimy window pane, in which a freshly
entangled bluebottle fly was buzzing fussily. “That ought not to be here
at all,” said Peter. “It really ought not to exist at all. Why does it?
Look at that beastly spider in the corner! Why do you suffer all these
cruel and unclean things?”
“You don’t like it?” said the Lord God, without any sign either of
apology or explanation.
“No,” said Peter.
“Then _change_ it,” said the Lord God, nodding his head as who should
say “got you there.”
“But how are we to change it?”
“If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it,”
said the Lord God, leaning back with the weariness of one who has had to
argue with each generation from Job onward, precisely the same
objections and precisely the same arguments.
“After all,” said the Lord God, giving Peter no time to speak further;
“after all, you are three-and-twenty, Mr. Peter Stubland, and you’ve
been pretty busy complaining of me and everything between me and you,
your masters, pastors, teachers, and so forth, for the last half-dozen
years. Meanwhile, is your own record good? Positive achievements,
forgive me, are still to seek. You’ve been nearly drunk several times,
you’ve soiled yourself with a lot of very cheap and greedy love-making—I
gave you something beautiful there anyhow, and you knew that while you
spoilt it—you’ve been a vigorous member of the consuming class, and
really, you’ve got nothing clear and planned, nothing at all. You
complain of my lack of order; where’s the order in your own mind? If I
was the hot-tempered old autocrat some of you people pretend I am, I
should have been tickling you up with a thunderbolt long ago. But I
happen to have this democratic fad as badly as any one—Free Will is what
they used to call it—and so I leave you to work out your own salvation.
And if I leave you alone then I have to leave that other—that other Mr.
Toad at Potsdam alone. He tries me, I admit, almost to the miracle pitch
at times with the tone of his everlasting prepaid telegrams—but one has
to be fair. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the Kaiser. I’ve
got to leave you all alone if I leave one alone. Don’t you see that? In
spite of the mess you are in. So don’t blame me. Don’t blame me. There
isn’t a thing in the whole of this concern of mine that Man can’t
control if only he chooses to control it. It’s arranged like that.
There’s a lot more system here than you suspect, only it’s too ingenious
for you to see. It’s yours to command. If you want a card index for the
world—well, get a card index. I won’t prevent you. If you don’t like my
spiders, kill my spiders. I’m not conceited about them. If you don’t
like the Kaiser, hang him, assassinate him. Why don’t you abolish Kings?
You could. But it was your sort, with your cheap and quick efficiency
schemes, who set up Saul—in spite of my protests—ages ago.... Humanity
either makes or breeds or tolerates all its own afflictions, great and
small. Not my doing. Take Kings and Courts. Take dungheaps and flies.
It’s astonishing you people haven’t killed off all the flies in the
world long ago. They do no end of mischief, and it would be perfectly
easy to do. They’re purely educational. Purely. Even as you lie in
hospital, there they are buzzing within an inch of your nose and landing
on your poor forehead to remind you of what a properly organized
humanity could do for its own comfort. But there’s men in this world who
want me to act as a fly-paper, simply because they are too lazy to get
one for themselves. My dear Mr. Peter! if people haven’t taught you
properly, teach yourself. If they don’t know enough, find out. It’s all
here. All here.” He made a comprehensive gesture. “I’m not mocking you.”
“You’re not mocking me?” said Peter keenly....
“It depends upon you,” said the Lord God with an enigmatic smile. “You
asked me why I didn’t exert myself. Well—why don’t _you_ exert yourself?
“Why don’t _you_ exert yourself?” the Lord God repeated almost rudely,
driving it home.
“That pillow under your shoulder still isn’t comfortable,” said the Lord
God, breaking off....
The buzzing of the entangled fly changed to the drone of a passing
aeroplane, and the dingy office expanded into a hospital ward. Some one
was adjusting Peter’s pillows....
§ 16
If his shoulder-blade was to mend, Peter could not be moved; and for a
time he remained in the French hospital in a long, airy room that was
full mostly with flying men like himself. At first he could not talk
very much, but later he made some friends. He was himself very immobile,
but other men came and sat by him to talk.
He talked chiefly to two Americans, who were serving at that time in the
French flying corps. He found it much easier to talk English than French
in his exhausted state, for though both he and Joan spoke French far
above the average public school level, he found that now it came with an
effort. It was as if his mind had for a time been pared down to its
essentials.
These Americans amused and interested him tremendously. He had met
hardly any Americans before so as to talk to them at all intimately, but
they suffered from an inhibition of French perhaps more permanent than
his own, and so the three were thrown into an unlimited intimacy of
conversation. At first he found these Americans rather fatiguing, and
then he found them very refreshing because of their explicitness of
mind. Except when they broke into frothy rapids of slang they were never
allusive; in serious talk they said everything. They laid a firm
foundation for all their assertions. That is the last thing an
Englishman does. They talked of the war and of the prospect of America
coming into the war, and of England and America and again of the war,
and of the French and of the French and Americans and of the war, and of
Taft’s League to Enforce Peace and the true character of Wilson and
Teddy and of the war, and of Sam Hughes and Hughes the Australian, and
whether every country has the Hughes it deserves and of the war, and of
going to England after the war, and of Stratford-on-Avon and Chester and
Windsor, and of the peculiarities of English people. Their ideas of
England Peter discovered were strange and picturesque. They believed all
Englishmen lived in a glow of personal loyalty to the Monarch, and were
amazed to learn that Peter’s sentiments were republican; and they
thought that every Englishman dearly loved a lord. “We think that of
Americans,” said Peter. “That’s our politeness,” said they in a chorus,
and started a train of profound discoveries in international
relationships in Peter’s mind.
“The ideas of every country about every country are necessarily a little
stale. What England is, what England thinks, and what England is
becoming, isn’t on record. What is on record is the England of the
’eighties and ’nineties.”
“Now, that’s very true,” said the nearer American. “And you can apply it
right away, with a hundred per cent. or so added, to all your ideas of
America.”
As a consequence both sides in this leisurely discussion found how
widely they had been out in their ideas about each other. Peter
discovered America as not nearly so commercial and individualistic as he
had supposed; he had been altogether ignorant of the increasing part the
universities were playing in her affairs; the Americans were equally
edified to find that the rampant imperialism of Cecil Rhodes and his
group no longer ruled the British imagination. “If things are so,” said
the diplomatist in the nearer bed, “then I seem to see a lot more coming
together between us than I’ve ever been disposed to think possible
before. If you British aren’t so keen over this king business——”
“_Keen!_” said Peter.
“If you don’t hold you are IT and unapproachable—in the way of Empires.”
“The Empire is yours for the asking,” said Peter.
“Then all there is between us is the Atlantic—and that grows narrower
every year. We’re the same people.”
“So long as we have the same languages and literature,” said Peter....
From these talks onward Peter may be regarded as having a Foreign Policy
of his own.
§ 17
And it was in this hospital that Peter first clearly decided to become
personally responsible for the reconstruction of the British Empire.
This decision was precipitated by the sudden reappearance in his world
of Mir Jelalludin, the Indian whom he had once thought unsuitable
company for Joan.
Peter had been dozing when Jelalludin appeared. He found him sitting
beside the bed, and stared at the neat and smiling brown face, unable to
place him, and still less able to account for the uniform he was
wearing. For Jelalludin was wearing the uniform of the French aviator,
and across his breast he wore four palms.
“I had the pleasure of knowing you at Cambridge,” said Mir Jelalludin in
his Indian staccato. “Cha’med I was of use to you.”
An explanatory Frenchman standing beside the Indian dabbed his finger on
the last of Jelalludin’s decorations. “He killed von Papen after your
crash,” said the Frenchman.
“You were that Frenchman——?” said Peter.
“In your fight,” said Mir Jelalludin.
“He’d have finished me,” said Peter.
“I finished _him_,” said the Indian, laughing with sheer happiness, and
showing his beautiful teeth.
Peter contemplated the situation. He made a movement and was reminded of
his bandages.
“I wish I could shake hands,” he said.
The Indian smiled with a phantom malice in his smile.
Peter went bluntly to a question that had arisen in his mind. “Why
aren’t you in khaki?” he asked.
“The Brish’ Gu’ment objects to Indian flyers,” said Mir Jelalludin. “I
tried. But Brish’ Gu’ment thinks flying beyond us. And bad for Prestige.
Prestige very important thing to Brish’ Gu’ment. So I came to France.”
Peter continued to digest the situation.
“Of course,” said Jelalludin, “no commissions given in regular army to
Indians. Brish’ soldiers not allowed to s’lute Indian officers. Not part
of the Great White Race. Otherwise hundreds of flyers could come from
India, hundreds and hundreds. We play cricket—good horsemen. Many Indian
gentlemen must be first-rate flying stuff. But Gu’ment says ’No.’”
He continued to smile more cheerfully than ever.
“Hundreds of juvenile Indians ready and willing to be killed for your
Empire”—he rubbed it in—“but—No, Thank You. Indo-European people we are,
Aryans, more consanguineous than Jews or Japanese. Ready to take our
places beside you.... Well, anyhow, I rejoice to see that you are
recovering to entire satisfaction. It was only when I descended after
the fight that I perceived that it was you, and it seemed to me then
that you were very seriously injured. I was anxious. And mem’ries of
otha days. I felt I must see you.”
Peter and the young Indian looked at one another.
“Look here, Jelalludin,” he said, “I must apologize.”
“But why?”
“As part of the British Empire. No! don’t interrupt. I do. But, I say,
do they—do we really bar you—absolutely?”
“Absolutely. Not only from the air force, but from any commission at
all. The lowest little bazaar clerk from Clapham, who has got a
commission, is over our Indian officers—over our princes. It is an
everlasting humiliation. Necessary for Prestige.”
“The French have more sense, anyhow.”
“They take us on our merits.
“If I _had_ a British commission,” said Jelalludin, “I should be made
very uncomfortable. It is the way with British officers and gentlemen.
The French are not so—particular.”
“At present,” said Peter, “I can’t be moved.”
“You improve.”
“But when I get up this is one of the things I have to see to. You see,
Jelalludin, this Empire of ours—yours and mine—has got into the hands of
a gang of gory Old Fools. Partly my negligence—as God said.”
“God?” said Jelalludin.
“Oh, nothing! I mean we young men haven’t been given a proper grasp of
the Indian situation. Or any situation. No. This business of the
commissions——! after all that you fellows have done here in France! It’s
disgraceful. You see, we don’t see or learn anything about India. Even
at Cambridge——”
“You didn’t see much of us there,” smiled the Indian.
“I’m sorry,” said Peter.
“I didn’t come to talk about this,” said Jelalludin, “it came out.”
“I’m glad it came out,” said Peter.
A pause.
“I mustn’t tire you,” said Mir Jelalludin, and rose to go.
Peter thanked him for coming.
“And your cha’ming sister?” asked the Indian, as if by an afterthought.
“Foster sister. She drives a big car about London,” said Peter....
Peter meditated profoundly upon that interview for some days.
Then he tried over the opinions of the Americans about India. But
Americans are of little help to the British about India. Their simple
uncriticized colour prejudice covers all “Asiatics” except the
inhabitants of Siberia. They had a more than English ignorance of
ethnology, and Oswald had at least imparted some fragments of that
important science to his ward. Their working classification of mankind
was into Anglo-Saxons, Frenchmen, Sheenies, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Dagoes,
Chinks, Coloured People, and black Niggers. They esteemed Mir Jelalludin
a Coloured Person. Peter had to fall back upon himself again.
§ 18
It contributed to the thoroughness of Peter’s thinking that it was some
time before he could be put into a position to read comfortably. And it
has to be recorded in the teeth of the dictates of sentiments and the
most sacred traditions of romance that the rôle played by both Joan and
Hetty in these meditations was secondary and incidental. It was an
attenuated and abstract Peter who lay in the French hospital, his chief
link of sense with life was a growing hunger; he thought very much about
fate, pain, the nature of things, and God, and very little about persons
and personal incidents—and so strong an effect had his dream that God
remained fixed steadfastly in his mind as that same intellectual
non-interventionist whom he had visited in the fly-blown office. But
about God’s rankling repartee, “Why don’t _you_ exert yourself?” there
was accumulating a new conception, the conception of Man taking hold of
the world, unassisted by God but with the acquiescence of God, and in
fulfilment of some remote, incomprehensible planning on the part of God.
Probably Peter in thinking this was following one of the most ancient
and well-beaten of speculative paths, but it seemed to him that it was a
new way of thinking. And he was Man. It was he who had to establish
justice in the earth, achieve unity, and rule first the world and then
the stars.
He lay staring at the ceiling, and quite happy now that healing and
habituation had freed him from positive pain, thinking out how he was to
release and co-operate with his India, which had invariably the face of
Mir Jelalludin, how he was to reunite himself with his brothers in
America, and how the walls and divisions of mankind, which look so high
and invincible upon the ground and so trivial from twelve thousand feet
above, were to be subdued to such greater ends.
It was only as the blood corpuscles multiplied inside him that Peter
ceased to be constantly Man contemplating his Destiny and Races and
Empires, and for more and more hours in the day shrank to the dimensions
and natural warmth of Mr. Peter Stubland contemplating convalescence in
Blighty. He became eager first for the dear old indulgent and welcoming
house at Pelham Ford, and then for prowls and walks and gossip with Joan
and Oswald, and then, then for London and a little “fun.” Life was
ebbing back into what is understood to be the lower nature, and was
certainly the most intimate and distinctive substance of Mr. Peter
Stubland. His correspondence became of very great interest to him.
Certain letters from Joan, faint but pursuing, had reached him, those
letters over which Joan had sat like a sonneteer. He read them and
warmed to them. He thought what luck it was that he had a Joan to be the
best of sisters to him, to be even more than a sister. She was the best
friend he had, and it was jolly to read so plainly that he was her best
friend. He would like to do work with Joan better than with any man he
knew. Driving a car wasn’t half good enough for her. Some day he’d be
able to show her how to fly, and he would. It would be great fun going
up with Joan on a double control and letting her take over. There must
be girls in the world who would fly as well as any man, or better.
He scribbled these ideas in his first letter to Joan, and they pleased
her mightily. To fly with Peter would be surely to fly straight into
heaven.
And mixed up with Joan’s letters were others that he presently sorted
out from hers and put apart, as though even letters might hold
inconvenient communion. For the most part they came from Hetty Reinhart,
and displayed the emotions of a consciously delicious female enamoured
and enslaved by one of the heroes of the air. She had dreamt of him
coming in through the skylight of her studio, Lord Cupid visiting his
poor little Psyche—“but it was only the moonlight,” and she thought of
him now always with great overshadowing wings. Sometimes they were great
white wings that beat above her, and sometimes they were thrillingly
soft and exquisite wings, like the wings of the people in _Peter
Wilkins_. She sent him a copy of _Peter Wilkins_, book beloved by Poe
and all readers of the fantastic. Then came the news of his smash. She
had been clever enough to link it with the death of von Papen, the Hun
Matador. “Was that your fight, dear Peterkins? Did you _begin_ on
Goliath?” As the cordials of recovery raced through Peter’s veins there
were phases when the thought of visiting the yielding fair, Jovelike and
triumphant in winged glory, became not simply attractive but insistent.
But he wrote to Hetty modestly, “They’ve clipped one wing for ever.”
And so in a quite artless and inevitable way Peter found his first
leave, when the British hospital had done with him, mortgaged up to hilt
almost equally to dear friend Joan and to Cleopatra Hetty.
The young man only realized the duplicity of his nature and the
complications of his position as the hospital boat beat its homeward way
across the Channel. The night was smooth and fine, with a high full moon
which somehow suggested Hetty, and with a cloud scheme of great beauty
and distinction that had about it a flavour of Joan. And as he meditated
upon these complications that had been happening in his more personal
life while his attention had been still largely occupied with divinity
and politics, he was hailed by an unfamiliar voice and addressed as
“Simon Peter.” “Excuse me,” said the stout young officer tucked up
warmly upon the next deck chair between a pair of crutches, “but aren’t
you Simon Peter?”
Peter had heard that name somewhere before. “My name’s Stubland,” he
said.
“Ah! Stubland! I forgot your surname. Of High Cross School?”
Peter peered and saw a round fair face that slowly recalled memories.
“Wait a moment!” said Peter.... “_Ames!_”
“Guessed it in one. Probyn and I were chums.”
“What have you got?” said Peter.
“Leg below the knee off, damn it!” said Ames. “One month at the front.
Not much of a career. But they say they do you a leg now better than
reality. But I’d have liked to have batted the pants of the unspeakable
Hun a bit more before I retired. What have you got?”
“Wrist chiefly and shoulder-blade. Air fight. After six weeks.”
“Does you out?”
“For flying, I’m afraid. But there’s lots of ground jobs. And
anyhow—home’s pleasant.”
“Yes,” said Ames. “Home’s pleasant. But I’d like to have got a scalp of
some sort. Doubt if I killed a single Hun. D’you remember Probyn at
school?—a dark chap.”
Peter found he still hated Probyn. “I remember him,” he said.
“He’s killed. He got the M.M. and the V.C. He wouldn’t take a
commission. He was sergeant-major in my battalion. I just saw him, but
I’ve heard about him since. His men worshipped him. Queer how men come
out in a new light in this war.”
“How was he killed?” asked Peter.