sap and got cornered. He’d taken two machine-guns and they’d used most
of the bombs, and his officer was knocked out, so he sent the rest of
his party back with the stuff and went to fetch his other men. One had
been hit and the other two were thinking of surrendering when he came
back to them. He stood right up on the parados, they say, and slung
bombs at the Germans, a whole crowd of them, until they went back. His
two chaps got the wounded man out and carried him back, and left him
still slinging bombs. He’d do that. He’d stand right up and bung bombs
at them until they seemed to lose their heads. Then he seems to have
spotted that this particular bunch of Germans had gone back into a sort
of blind alley. He was very quick at spotting a situation, and he
followed them up, and the sheer blank recklessness of it seems to have
put their wind up absolutely. They’d got bombs and there was an officer
with them. But they held up their hands—nine of them. Panic. He got them
right across to our trenches before the searchlights found him, and the
Germans got him and two of their own chaps with a machine-gun. That was
just the last thing he did. He’d been going about for months doing
stunts like that—sort of charmed life business. The way he slung bombs,
they say, amounted to genius.
“They say he’d let his hair grow long—perfect golliwog. When I saw him
it certainly _was_ long, but he’d got it plastered down. And there’s a
story that he used to put white on his face like a clown with a great
red mouth reaching from ear to ear—— Yes, painted on. It’s put the Huns’
wind up something frightful. Coming suddenly on a chap like that in the
glare of a searchlight or a flare.”
“Queer end,” said Peter.
“Queer chap altogether,” said Ames....
He thought for a time, and then went on to philosophize about Probyn.
“Clever chap he was,” said Ames, “but an absolute failure. Of course old
High Cross wasn’t anything very much in the way of a school, but
whatever there was to be learnt there he learnt. He was the only one of
us who ever got hold of speaking French. I heard him over there—regular
fluent. And he’d got a memory like an encyclopædia. I always said he’d
do wonders....”
Ames paused. “Sex was his downfall,” said Ames.
“I saw a lot of him altogether, off and on, right up to the time of the
war,” said Ames. “My people are furniture people, you know, in Tottenham
Court Road, and his were in the public-house fitting line—in Highbury.
We went about together. I saw him make three or four good starts, but
there was always some trouble. I suppose most of us were a bit—well,
_keen_ on sex; most of us young men. But he was ravenous. Even at
school. Always on it. Always thinking about it. I could tell you stories
of him.... Rum place that old school was, come to think of it. They left
us about too much. I don’t know how far you——.... Of course you were
about the most innocent thing that ever came to High Cross School,” said
Ames.
“Yes,” said Peter. “I suppose I was.”
“Curious how it gnaws at you once it’s set going,” said Ames....
Peter made a noise that might have been assent.
Ames remained thinking for a time, watching the swish and surge of the
black Channel waters. Peter pursued their common topic in silence.
“What’s the sense of it?” said Ames, plunging towards philosophy.
“It’s the system on which life goes—on this planet,” Peter contributed,
but Ames had not had a biological training, and was unprepared to take
that up.
“Too much of it,” said Ames.
“Over-sexed,” said Peter.
“Whether one ought to hold oneself in or let oneself go,” said Ames.
“But perhaps these things don’t bother you?”
Peter wasn’t disposed towards confidences with Ames. “I’m moderate in
all things,” he said.
“Lucky chap! I’ve worried about this business no end. One doesn’t want
to use up all one’s life like a blessed monkey. There’s other things in
life—if only this everlasting want-a-girl want-a-woman would let one get
at them.”
His voice at Peter’s shoulder ceased for a while, and then resumed.
“It’s the best chaps, seems to me, who get it worst. Chaps with
imaginations, I mean, men of vitality. Take old Probyn. He could have
done anything—anything. And he was eaten up. Like a fever....”
Ames went down into a black silence for a couple of minutes or more, and
came up again with an astonishing resolution. “I shall marry,” he said.
“Got the lady?” asked Peter.
“Near enough,” said Ames darkly.
“St. Paul’s method,” said Peter.
“I was talking to a fellow the other day,” said Ames. “He’d got a
curious idea. Something in it perhaps. He said that every one was
clean-minded and romantic, that’s how he put it, about sixteen or
seventeen. Even if you’ve been a bit dirty as a schoolboy you sort of
clean up then. Adolescence, in fact. And he said you ought to fall in
love and pair off then. Kind of Romeo and Juliet business. First love
and all that.”
“Juliet wasn’t exactly Romeo’s first love,” said Peter.
“Young beggar!” said Ames. “But, anyhow, that was only by way of
illustration. His idea was that we’d sort of put off marriage and all
that sort of thing later and later. Twenty-eight. Thirty. Thirty-five
even. And that put us wrong. We kind of curdled and fermented. Spoilt
with keeping. Larked about with girls we didn’t care for. Demi-vierge
stunts and all that. Got promiscuous. Let anything do. His idea was
you’d got to pair off with a girl and look after her, and she look after
you. And keep faith. And stop all stray mucking about. ’Settle down to a
healthy sexual peace,’ he said.”
Ames paused. “Something in it?”
“Ever read the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury?” asked Peter.
“Never.”
“He worked out that theory quite successfully. Married before he went up
to Oxford. There’s a lot in it. Sex. Delayed. Fretting. Overflowing.
Getting experimental and nasty.... But that doesn’t exhaust the
question. The Old Experimenter sits there——”
“_What_ experimenter?”
“The chap who started it all. There’s no way yet of fitting it up
perfectly. We’ve got to make it fit.”
Peter was so interested that he forgot his aversion from confiding in
Ames. The subject carried him on.
“Any healthy young man,” Peter generalized, “could be happy and
contented with any pretty girl, so far as love-making goes. It doesn’t
strike you—as a particularly recondite art, eh? But you’ve got to be in
love with each other generally. That’s more difficult. You’ve got to
talk together and go about together. In a complicated artificial world.
The sort of woman it’s easy and pleasant to make love to, may not be the
sort of woman you really think splendid. It’s easier to make love to a
woman you don’t particularly respect, who’s good fun, and all that.
Which is just the reason why you wouldn’t be tied up with her for ever.
No.”
“So we worship the angels and marry the flappers,” said Ames.... “I
shan’t do that, anyhow. The fact is, one needs a kind of motherliness in
a woman.”
“By making love too serious, we’ve made it not serious enough,” said
Peter with oracular profundity, and then in reaction, “Oh! _I_ don’t
know.”
“_I_ don’t know,” said Ames.
“Which doesn’t in the least absolve us from the necessity of going on
living right away.”
“I shall marry,” said Ames, in a tone of unalterable resolve.
They lapsed into self-centred meditations....
“Why! there’s the coast,” said Ames suddenly. “Quite close, too. _Dark._
Do you remember, before the war, how the lights of Folkestone used to
run along the top there like a necklace of fire?”
§ 19
The powers that were set over Peter’s life played fast and loose with
him in the matter of leave. They treated him at first as though he was a
rare and precious hero—who had to be saved from his friends. They put
him to mend at Broadstairs, and while he was at Broadstairs he had three
visits from Hetty, whose days were free, and only one hasty Sunday
glimpse of Joan, who was much in demand at the Ministry of Munitions.
And Oswald could not come to see him because Oswald himself was a
casualty mending slowly at Pelham Ford. Hetty and Joan and returning
health fired the mind of Peter with great expectations of the leave that
was to come. These expectations were, so to speak, painted in panels.
Forgetful of the plain fact that a Joan who was not available at
Broadstairs would also not be available at Pelham Ford, the panels
devoted to the latter place invariably included Joan as a principal
figure, they represented leave as a glorious escape from war to the
space, the sunshine, the endlessness of such a summer vacation as only
schoolboys know. He would be climbing trees with Joan, “mucking about”
in the boats with Joan, lying on the lawn just on the edge of the
cedar’s shadow with Joan, nibbling stems of grass. The London scenes
were narrower and more intense. He wanted the glitter and fun of
lunching in the Carlton grill-room or dining at the Criterion, in the
company of a tremendous hat and transparent lace, and there were scenes
in Hetty’s studio, quite a lot of fantastic and elemental scenes in
Hetty’s studio.
But the Germans have wiped those days of limitless leisure out of the
life of mankind. Even our schoolboys stay up in their holidays now to
make munitions. Peter had scarcely clambered past the approval of a
medical board before active service snatched him again. He was wanted
urgently. Peter was no good as a pilot any more, it was true; his right
wrist was doomed to be stiff and weak henceforth, and there were queer
little limitations upon the swing of his arm, but the powers had
suddenly discovered other uses for him. There was more of Peter still
left than they had assumed at first. For one particular job, indeed, he
was just the man they needed. They docked him a wing—it seemed in
mockery of the state of his arm—and replaced the two wings that had
adorned him by one attached to the letter O, and they marked him down to
join “balloons” at the earliest possible moment, for just then they were
developing kite balloons very fast for artillery observation, and were
eager for any available men. Peter was slung out into freedom for
one-and-twenty days, and then told to report himself for special
instruction in the new work at Richmond Park.
One-and-twenty days! He had never been so inordinately greedy for life,
free to live and go as you please, in all his days before. Something
must happen, he was resolved, something bright and intense, on every one
of those days. He snatched at both sides of life. He went down to Pelham
Ford, but he had a little list of engagements in town in his pocket.
Joan was not down there, and never before had he realized how
tremendously absent Joan could be. And then at the week-end she couldn’t
come. There were French and British G.H.Q. bigwigs to take down to some
experiments in Sussex, but she couldn’t even explain that, she had to
send a telegram at the eleventh hour: “_Week-end impossible._” To Peter
that seemed the most brutally offhand evasion in the world. Peter was
disappointed in Pelham Ford. It was altogether different from those
hospital dreams; even the weather, to begin with, was chilly and
unsettled. Oswald had had a set-back with his knee, and had to keep his
leg up on a deck chair; he could only limp about on crutches. He seemed
older and more distant from Peter than he had ever been before; Peter
was obsessed by the idea that he ought to be treated with solicitude,
and a further gap was opened between them by Peter’s subaltern habit of
saying “Sir” instead of the old familiar “Nobby.” Peter sat beside the
deck chair through long and friendly, but very impatient hours; and he
talked all the flying shop he could, and Oswald talked of his Africans,
and they went over the war and newspapers again and again, and they
reverted to Africa and flying shop, and presently they sat through
several silences, and at the end of one of them Oswald inquired: “Have
you ever played chess, Peter—or piquet?”
Now chess and piquet are very good pastimes in their way, but not good
enough for the precious afternoons of a very animated and greedy young
man keenly aware that they are probably his last holiday afternoons on
earth.
Sentiment requires that Peter should have gone to London and devoted
himself to adorning the marginal freedom of Joan’s days. He did do this
once. He took her out to dinner to Jules’, in Jermyn Street; he did her
well there; but she was a very tired Joan that day; she had driven a
good hundred and fifty miles, and, truth to tell, in those days Peter
did not like Joan and she did not like herself in London, and more
especially in smart London restaurants. They sat a little aloof from one
another, and about them all the young couples warmed to another and
smiled. She jarred with this atmosphere of meretricious ease and
indulgence. She had had no time to get back to Hampstead and change; she
was at a disadvantage in her uniform. It became a hair shirt, a Nessus
shirt as the evening proceeded. It emphasized the barrier of seriousness
between them cruelly. She was a policeman, a prig, the harshest thing in
life; all those pretty little cocottes and flirts, with their little
soft brightnesses and adornments, must be glancing at her coarse,
unrevealing garments and noting her for the fool she was. She felt ugly
and ungainly; she was far too much tormented by love to handle herself
well. She could get no swing and forgetfulness into the talk. And about
Peter, too, was a reproach for her. He talked of work and the war—as if
in irony. And his eyes wandered. Naturally, his eyes wandered.
“Good-night, old Peter,” she said when they parted.
She lay awake for two hours, exasperated, miserable beyond tears,
because she had not said: “Good night, old Peter _dear_.” She had
intended to say it. It was one of her prepared effects. But she was a
weary and a frozen young woman. Duty had robbed her of the energy for
love. Why had she let things come to this pass? Peter was her business,
and Peter alone. She damned the Woman’s Legion, Woman’s Part in the War,
and all the rest of it, with fluency and sincerity.
And while Joan wasted the hours of sleep in this fashion Peter was also
awake thinking over certain schemes he had discussed with Hetty that
afternoon. They involved some careful and deliberate lying. The idea was
that for the purposes of Pelham Ford he should terminate his leave on
the fourteenth instead of the twenty-first, and so get a clear week
free—for life in the vein of Hetty.
He lay fretting, and the hot greed of youth persuaded him, and the clean
honour of youth reproached him. And though he knew the way the decision
would go, he tossed about and damned as heartily as Joan.
He could not remember if at Pelham Ford he had set a positive date to
his leave, but, anyhow, it would not be difficult to make out that there
had been some sort of urgent call.... It could be done.... The
alternative was Piquet.
Peter returned to Pelham Ford and put his little fabric of lies upon
Oswald without much difficulty. Then at the week-end came Joan,
rejoicing. She came into the house tumultuously; she had caught a train
earlier than the one they had expected her to come by. “I’ve got all
next week. Seven days, Petah! Never mind how, but I’ve got it. I’ve got
it!”
There was a suggestion as of some desperate battle away there in London
from which Joan had snatched these fruits of victory. She was so
radiantly glad to have them that Peter recoiled from an immediate reply.
“I didn’t seem to see you in London somehow,” said Joan. “I don’t think
you were really there. Let’s have a look at you, old Petah. Tenshun!...
Lift the arm.... Rotate the arm.... It isn’t so bad, Petah, after all.
Is tennis possible?”
“I’d like to try.”
“Boats certainly. No reason why we shouldn’t have two or three long
walks. A week’s a long time nowadays.”
“But I have to go back on Monday,” said Peter.
Joan stood stock still.
“Pity, isn’t it?” said Peter weakly.
“But why?” she asked at last in a little flat voice.
“I have to go back.”
“But your leave——?”
“Ends on Monday,” lied Peter.
For some moments it looked as though Joan meant to make that last
week-end a black one. “That doesn’t give us much time together,” said
Joan, and her voice which had soared now crawled the earth.... “I’m
sorry.”
Just for a moment she hung, a dark and wounded Joan, downcast and
thoughtful; and then turned and put her arms akimbo, and looked at him
and smiled awry. “Well, old Peter, then we’ve got to make the best use
of our time. It’s your Birf Day, sort of; it’s your Bank Holiday, dear;
it’s every blessed thing for you—such time as we have together. Before
they take you off again. I think they’re greedy, but it can’t be helped.
Can it, Peter?”
“It can’t be helped,” said Peter. “No.”
They paused.
“What shall we do?” said Joan. “The program’s got to be cut down. Shall
we still try tennis?”
“I want to. I don’t see why this wrist——” He held it out and rotated it.
“Good old arm!” said Joan, and ran a hand along it.
“I’ll go and change these breeches and things,” said Joan. “And get
myself female. Gods, Peter! the craving to get into clothes that are
really flexible and translucent!”
She went to the staircase and then turned on Peter.
“Peter,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Go out and stand on the lawn and tighten up the net. Now.”
“Why?”
“Then I can see you from my window while I’m changing. I don’t want to
waste a bit of you.”
She went up four steps and stopped and looked at him over her shoulder.
“I want as much as I can get of you, Petah,” she said.
“I wish I’d known about that week,” said Peter stupidly.
“_Exactly!_” said Joan to herself, and flitted up the staircase.
§ 20
Joan, Mrs. Moxton perceived that afternoon, had a swift and angry fight
with her summer wardrobe. Both the pink gingham and the white drill had
been tried on and flung aside, and she had decided at last upon a rather
jolly warm blue figured voile with a belt of cherry-coloured ribbon that
suited her brown skin and black hair better than those weaker supports.
She had evidently opened every drawer in her room in a hasty search for
white silk stockings.
When she came out into the sunshine of the garden Peter’s eyes told her
she had guessed the right costume.
Oswald was standing up on his crutches and smiling, and Peter was
throwing up a racquet and catching it again with one hand.
“Thank God for a left-handed childhood!” said Peter. “I’m going to smash
you, Joan.”
“I forgot about that,” said Joan. “But you aren’t going to smash me, old
Petah.”
When tea-time came they were still fighting the seventh vantage game,
and Joan was up.
They came and sat at the tea-table, and Joan as she poured the tea
reflected that a young man in white flannels, flushed and a little out
of breath, with his white silk shirt wide open at the neck, was a more
beautiful thing than the most beautiful woman alive. And her dark eyes
looked at the careless and exhausted Peter, that urgent and insoluble
problem, while she counted, “Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-one—about
forty-one hours. How the devil shall I do it?”
It wasn’t to be done at tennis anyhow, and she lost the next three games
running without apparent effort, and took Peter by the arm and walked
him about the garden, discoursing on flying. “I must teach you to fly,”
said Peter. “Often when I’ve been up alone I’ve thought, ’Some day I’ll
teach old Joan.’”
“That’s a promise, Petah.”
“Sure,” said Peter, who had not suffered next to two Americans for
nothing.
“I’ve got it in writing,” said Joan.
“I’d rather learn from you than any one,” said she.
Peter discoursed of stunts....
They spent a long golden time revisiting odd corners in which they had
played together. They went down the village and up to the church and
round the edge of the wood, and there they came upon and devoured a lot
of blackberries, and then they went down to the mill pond and sat for a
time in Baker’s boat. Then they got at cross purposes about dressing for
dinner. Joan wanted to dress very much. She wanted to remind Peter that
there were prettier arms in the world than Hetty Reinhart’s, and a
better modelled neck and shoulders. She had a new dress of ivory silk
with a broad belt of velvet that echoed the bright softness of her eyes
and hair. But Peter would not let her dress. He did not want to dress
himself. “And you couldn’t look prettier, Joan, than you do in that blue
thing. It’s so _like_ you.”
And as Joan couldn’t explain that the frock kept her a jolly girl he
knew while the dress would have shown him the beautiful woman he had to
discover, she lost that point in the game. And tomorrow was Sunday, when
Pelham Ford after the good custom of England never dressed for dinner.
Afterwards she thought how easily she might have overruled him.
Joan’s plans for the evening were dashed by this costume failure. She
had relied altogether on the change of personality into something rich
and strange, that the ivory dress was to have wrought. She could do
nothing to develop the situation. Everything seemed to be helping to
intensify her sisterliness. Oswald was rather seedy, and the three of
them played Auction Bridge with a dummy. She had meant to sit up with
Peter, but it didn’t work out like that.
“Good night, Petah dear,” she said outside her bedroom door with the
candlelight shining red between the fingers of her hand.
“Good night, old Joan,” he said from his door-mat, with an infinite
friendliness in his voice.
You cannot kiss a man good night suddenly when he is fifteen yards
away....
She closed the door behind her softly, put down her candle, and began to
walk about her room and swear in an entirely unladylike fashion. Then
she went over to the open window, wringing her hands. “How am I to _do_
it?” she said. “How am I to _do_ it? The situation’s preposterous. He’s
mine. And I might be his sister!”
“Shall I make a declaration?”
“I suppose Hetty did.”
But all the cunning of Joan was unavailing against the invisible
barriers to passion between herself and Peter. They spent a long Sunday
of comradeship, and courage and opportunity alike failed. The dawn on
Monday morning found a white and haggard Joan pacing her floor, half
minded to attempt a desperate explanation forthwith in Peter’s bedroom
with a suddenly awakened Peter. Only her fear of shocking him and
failing restrained her. She raved. She indulged in absurd soliloquies
and still absurder prayers. “Oh, God, give me my Peter,” she prayed.
“__Give me my Peter!__”
§ 21
Monday broke clear and fine, with a September freshness in the sunshine.
Breakfast was an awkward meal; Peter was constrained, Oswald was worried
by a sense of advice and counsels not given; Joan felt the situation
slipping from her helpless grasp. It was with a sense of relief that at
last she put on her khaki overcoat to drive Peter to the station. “This
is the end,” sang in Joan’s mind. “This is the end.” She glanced at the
mirror in the hall and saw that the fur collar was not unfriendly to her
white neck and throat. She was in despair, but she did not mean to let
it become an unbecoming despair—at least until Peter had departed. The
end was still incomplete. She had something stern and unpleasant to say
to Peter before they parted, but she did not mean to look stern or
unpleasant while she said it. Peter, she noted with a gleam of
satisfaction, was in low spirits. He was sorry to go. He was ashamed of
himself, but also he was sorry. That was something, at any rate, to have
achieved. But he was going—nevertheless.
She brought round the little Singer to the door. She started the engine
with a competent swing and got in. The maids came with Peter’s
portmanteau and belongings. “This is the end,” said Joan to herself,
touching her accelerator and with her hand ready to release the brake.
“All aboard?” said Joan aloud.
Peter shook hands with Oswald over the side of the car, and glanced from
him to the house and back at him. “I wish I could stay longer, sir,”
said Peter.
“There’s many days to come yet,” said Oswald. For we never mention death
before death in war time; we never let ourselves think of it before it
comes or after it has come.
“So long, Nobby!”
“Good luck, Peter!”
Joan put the car into gear, and steered out into the road.
“The water-splash is lower than ever I’ve seen it,” said Peter.
They ran down the road to the station almost in silence. “These poplars
have got a touch of autumn in them already,” said Peter.
“It’s an early year,” said Joan.
“The end, the end!” sang the song in Joan’s brain. “But I’ll tell him
all the same.”...
But she did not tell him until they could hear the sound of the
approaching train that was to cut the thread of everything for Joan.
They walked together up the little platform to the end.
“I’m sorry you’re going,” said Joan.
“I’m infernally sorry. If I’d known you’d get this week——”
“Would that have altered it?” she said sharply.
“No. I suppose it wouldn’t,” he fenced, just in time to save himself.
The rattle of the approaching train grew suddenly loud. It was round the
bend.