Peter. I have known it all this week-end. I know your leave lasts until
the twenty-first.”
He stared at her in astonishment.
“There was a time.... It’s to think of all this dirt upon you that hurts
most. The lies, the dodges, the shuffling meanness of it. From _you_....
Whom _I love_.”
A gap of silence came. To the old porter twelve yards off they seemed
entirely well-behaved and well-disciplined young people, saying nothing
in particular. The train came in with a sort of wink under the bridge,
and the engine and foremost carriages ran past them up the platform.
“I wish I could explain. I didn’t know—— The fact is I got entangled in
a sort of promise....”
“_Hetty!_” Joan jerked out, and “There’s an empty first for you.”
The train stopped.
Peter put his hand on the handle of the carriage door.
“You go to London—like a puppy that rolls in dirt. You go to beastliness
and vulgarity.... You’d better get in, Peter.”
“But look here, Joan!”
“_Get_ in!” she scolded to his hesitation, and stamped her foot.
He got in mechanically, and she closed the door on him and turned the
handle and stood holding it.
Then still speaking evenly and quietly, she said: “You’re a blind fool,
Peter. What sort of love can that—that—that miscellany give you, that I
couldn’t give? Have I no life? Have I no beauty? Are you afraid of me?
Don’t you see—don’t you _see?_ You go off to _that!_ You trail yourself
in the dirt and you trail my love in the dirt. Before a female hack!...
“_Look_ at me!” she cried, holding her hands apart. “Think of me
tonight.... _Yours!_ Yours for the taking!”
The train was moving.
She walked along the platform to keep pace with him, and her eyes held
his. “Peter,” she said; and then with amazing quiet intensity: “You
_damned_ fool!”
She hesitated on the verge of saying something more. She came towards
the carriage. It wasn’t anything pleasant that she had in mind, to judge
by her expression.
“Stand away please, miss!” said the old porter, hurrying up to
intervene. She abandoned that last remark with an impatient gesture.
Peter sat still. The end of the station ran by like a scene in a
panorama. Her Medusa face had slid away to the edge of the picture that
the window framed, and vanished.
For some seconds he was too amazed to move.
Then he got up heavily and stuck his head out of the window to stare at
Joan.
Joan was standing quite still with her hands in the side pockets of her
khaki overcoat; she was standing straight as a rod, with her heels
together, looking at the receding train. She never moved....
Neither of these two young people made a sign to each other, which was
the first odd thing the old porter noted about them. They just stared.
By all the rules they should have waved handkerchiefs. The next odd
thing was that Joan stared at the bend for half a minute perhaps after
the train had altogether gone, and then tried to walk out to her car by
the little white gate at the end of the platform which had been disused
and nailed up for three years....
§ 22
After Oswald had seen the car whisk through the gates into the road, and
after he had rested on his crutches staring at the gates for a time, he
had hobbled back to his study. He wanted to work, but he found it
difficult to fix his attention. He was thinking of Joan and Peter, and
for the first time in his life he was wondering why they had never
fallen in love with each other. They seemed such good company for each
other....
He was still engaged upon these speculations half an hour or so later,
when he heard the car return and presently saw Joan go past his window.
She was flushed, and she was staring in front of her at nothing in
particular. He had never seen Joan looking so unhappy. In fact, so
strong was his impression that she was unhappy that he doubted it, and
he went to the window and craned out after her.
She was going straight up towards the arbour. With a slight hurry in her
steps. She had her fur collar half turned up on one side, her hands were
deep in her pockets, and something about her dogged walk reminded him of
some long-forgotten moment, years ago it must have been, when Joan, in
hot water for some small offence, had been sent indoors at The
Ingle-Nook.
He limped back to his chair and sat thinking her over.
“I wonder,” he said at last, and turned to his work again....
There was no getting on with it. Half an hour later he accepted defeat.
“Peter has knocked us all crooked,” he said. “There’s no work for
today.”
He would go out and prowl round the place and look at the roses. Perhaps
Joan would come and talk. But at the gates he was amazed to encounter
Peter.
It was Peter, hot and dusty from a walk of three miles, and carrying his
valise with an aching left arm. There was a look of defiance in the eyes
that stared fiercely out from under the perspiration-matted hair upon
his forehead. He seemed to find Oswald’s appearance the complete
confirmation of the most disagreeable anticipations. Thoughts of panic
and desertion flashed upon Oswald’s mind.
“Good God, Peter!” he cried. “What brings you back?”
“I’ve come back for another week,” said Peter.
“But your leave’s up!”
“I told a lie, sir. I’ve got another week.”
Oswald stared at his ward.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Peter. “I’ve been making a fool of myself. I
thought better of it. I got out of the train at Standon and walked back
here.”
“What does it mean, Peter?” said Oswald.
Peter’s eyes were the most distressed eyes he had ever seen. “If you’d
just not ask, sir, now——”
It is a good thing to deal with one’s own blood in a crisis. Oswald,
resting thoughtfully on his crutches, leapt to a kind of understanding.
“I’m going to hop down towards the village, Peter,” said Oswald,
becoming casual in his manner. “I want some exercise.... If you’ll tell
every one you’re back.”
He indicated the house behind him by a movement of his head.
Peter was badly blown with haste and emotion. “Thank you, sir,” he said
shortly.
Oswald stepped past him and stared down the road.
“Mrs. Moxton’s in the house,” he said without looking at Peter again.
“Joan’s up the garden. See you when I get back, Peter.... Glad you’ve
got another week, anyhow.... So long....”
He left Peter standing in the gateway.
Fear came upon Peter. He stood quite still for some moments, looking at
the house and the cedars. He dropped his valise at the front door and
mopped his face. Then he walked slowly across the lawn towards the
terraces. He wanted to shout, and found himself hoarse. Then on the
first terrace he got out: “Jo-un!” in a flat croak. He had to cry again:
“Jo-un!” before it sounded at all like the old style.
Joan became visible. She had come out of the arbour at the top of the
garden, and she was standing motionless, regarding him down the vista of
the central path. She was white and rather dishevelled, and she stood
quite still.
Peter walked up the steps towards her.
“I’ve come back, Joan,” he said, as he drew near. “I want to talk to
you.... Come into the arbour.”
He took her arm clumsily and led her back into the arbour out of sight
of the house. Then he dropped her arm.
“Joan,” he said, “I’ve been the damndest of fools ... as you said.... I
don’t know why.”...
He stood before her awkwardly. He was trembling violently. He thought he
was going to weep.
He could not touch her again. He did not dare to touch her.
Then Joan spread out her arms straight and stood like a crucifix. Her
face, which had been a dark stare, softened swiftly, became radiant,
dissolved into a dusky glow of tears and triumph. “Oh! Petah my
_darling_,” she sobbed, and seized him and kissed him with tear-salt
lips and hugged him to herself.
The magic barrier was smashed at last. Peter held her close to him and
kissed her....
It was the second time they had kissed since those black days at High
Cross school....
§ 23
Those were years of swift marryings, and Peter was a young married man
when presently he was added to the number of that select company
attached to sausage-shaped observation balloons who were sent up in the
mornings and pulled down at nights along the British front. He had had
only momentary snatches of matrimony before the front had called him
back to its own destructive interests, but his experiences had banished
any lingering vestiges of his theory that there is one sort of woman you
respect and another sort you make love to. There was only one sort of
woman to love or respect, and that was Joan. He was altogether in love
with Joan, he was sure he had never been in love before, and he was now
also extravagantly in love with life. He wanted to go on with it, with a
passionate intensity. It seemed to him that it was not only beginning
for him, but for every one. Hitherto Man had been living _down there_,
down on those flats—for all the world is flat from the air. Now, at
last, men were beginning to feel how they might soar over all ancient
limitations.
Occasionally he thought of such things up in his basket, sitting like a
spectator in a box at a theatre, with the slow vast drama of the western
front spread out like a map beneath his eyes, with half Belgium and a
great circle of France in sight, the brown, ruined country on either
side of No Man’s Land, apparently lifeless, with its insane tangle of
trenches and communicating ways below, with the crumbling heaps of
ruined towns and villages scattered among canals and lakes of flood
water, and passing insensibly into a green and normal-looking landscape
to the west and east, where churches still had towers and houses roofs,
and woods were lumps and blocks of dark green, fields manifestly
cultivated patches, and roads white ribbons barred by the purple poplar
shadows. But these spectacular and speculative phases were rare. They
came only when a thin veil of haze made the whole spacious prospect
faint, so that beyond his more immediate circle Peter could see only the
broad outlines of the land. Given worse conditions of the weather and he
would be too uncomfortable for philosophy; given better and he would be
too busy.
He sat on a canvas seat inside the square basket with his instruments
about him, or leant over the side scrutinizing the details of the
eastward landscape. Upon his head, over his ears, he wore a telephone
receiver, and about his body was a rope harness that linked him by a
rope to the silk parachute that was packed neatly in a little swinging
bucket over the side of his basket. Under his hand was his map board,
repeating the shapes of wood and water and road below. The telephone
wire that ran down his mooring rope abolished any effect of isolation;
it linked him directly to his winch on a lorry below, to a number of
battery commanders, to an ascending series of headquarters; he could
always start a conversation if he had anything practical to say. He was,
in fact, an eye at the end of a tentacle thread, by means of which the
British army watched its enemies. Sometimes he had an illusion that he
was also a kind of brain. When distant visibility was good he would find
himself hovering over the war as a player hangs over a chessboard,
directing fire upon road movements or train movements, suspecting and
watching for undisclosed enemy batteries, or directing counter-battery
fire. Above him, green and voluminous, hung the great translucent lobes
of his gas bag, and the loose ropes by which it was towed and held upon
the ground swayed and trailed about his basket.
It was on one of his more slack afternoons that Peter fell thinking of
how acutely he now desired to live. The wide world was full of sunshine,
but a ground haze made even the country immediately below him
indistinct. The enemy gunners were inactive, there came no elfin voices
through the telephone, only far away to the south guns butted and
shivered the tranquil air. There was a faint drift in the air rather
than a breeze, and the gas bag had fallen into a long, lazy rhythmic
movement, so that sometimes he faced due south and sometimes south by
east and so back. A great patch of flooded country to the north-east, a
bright mirror with a kind of bloom upon it, seemed trying with an
aimless persistency to work its way towards the centre of his field of
vision and never succeeding.
For a time Peter had been preoccupied with a distant ridge far away to
the east, from which a long-range gun had recently taken to shelling the
kite balloons towards evening as they became clear against the bright
western sky. Four times lately this new gun had got on to him, and this
clear and tranquil afternoon promised just the luminous and tranquil
sunset that favoured these unpleasant activities. It was five hours to
sunset yet, but Peter could not keep his mind off that gun. It was a big
gun; perhaps a 42 centimetre; it was beyond any counter-battery
possibility, and it had got a new kind of shell that the Germans seemed
to have invented for the particular discomfort of Peter and his kind. It
had a distinctive report, a loud _crack_, and then the “_whuff_” of high
explosive, and at every explosion it got nearer and nearer to its
target, with a quite uncanny certainty. It seemed to learn more than any
gun should learn from each shot. It was this steadfast approach to a hit
that Peter disliked. That and the long pause after the shell had
started. Far away he would see the flash of the gun amidst the ridges in
the darkling east. Then would come a long, blank pause of expectation.
For all he could tell this might get him. Then the whine of the shell
would become audible, growing louder and louder and lower and lower in
note; Phee-whoo! _Crack!_ _WHOOF!_ Then Peter would get quite voluble to
the men at the winch below. He could let himself up, or go down a few
hundred feet, or they could shift his lorry along the road. Until it was
dark he could not come down, for a kite balloon is a terribly visible
and helpless thing on the ground until it has been very carefully put to
bed. To come down in the daylight meant too good a chance for the nearer
German guns. So Peter, by instructing his winch to lower him or let him
up or shift, had to dodge about in a most undignified way, up and down
and backwards and sideways, while the big gun marked him and guessed at
his next position. Flash! “Oh, damn!” said Peter. “Another already!”
Silence. Anticipations. Then: Phee—eee—eee—_whoo_. _Crack!_ _WHOOF!_ A
rush of air would set the gas bag swinging. That was a near one!
“Where _am_ I?” said Peter.
But that wasn’t going to happen for hours yet. Why meet trouble half
way? Why be tormented by this feeling of apprehension and danger in the
still air? Why trouble because the world was quiet and seemed to be
waiting? Why not think of something else? Banish this war from the
mind.... Was he more afraid nowadays than he used to be? Peter was
inclined to think that now he was more _systematically_ afraid. Formerly
he had funked in streaks and patches, but now he had a steady,
continuous dislike to all these risks and dangers. He was getting more
and more clearly an idea of the sort of life he wanted to lead and of
the things he wanted to do. He was ceasing to think of existence as a
rather aimless series of adventures, and coming to regard it as one
large consecutive undertaking on the part of himself and Joan. This
being hung up in the sky for Germans to shoot at seemed to him to be a
very tiresome irrelevance indeed. He and Joan and everybody with
brains—including the misguided people who had made and were now firing
this big gun at him—ought to be setting to work to get this preposterous
muddle of a world in order. “This sort of thing,” said Peter, addressing
the western front, his gas bag, and so much of the sky as it permitted
him to see, and the universe generally, “is ridiculous. There is no
sense in it at all. None whatever.”
His dream of God, as a detached and aloof personage, had taken a very
strong hold upon his imagination. Or, perhaps, it would be truer to say
that his fevered mind in the hospital had given a caricature personality
to ideas that had grown up in his mind as a natural consequence of his
training. He had gone on with that argument; he went on with it now,
with a feeling that really he was just as much sitting and talking in
that queer, untidy, out-of-the-way office as swaying in a kite balloon,
six thousand feet above Flanders, waiting to be shot at.
“It is all very well to say ’exert yourself,’” said Peter. “But there is
that chap over there exerting himself. And what he is doing with all his
brains is just trying to wipe my brains out of existence. Just that. He
hasn’t an idea else of what he is doing. He has no notion of what he is
up to or what I am up to. And he hasn’t the sense or ability to come
over here and talk about it to me. He’s there—at that—and he can’t help
himself. And I’m here—and I can’t help myself. But if I could only catch
him within counter battery range——!
“There’s no sense in it at all,” summarized Peter, after some moments of
grim reflection. “Sense hasn’t got into it.”
“Is sense ever going to get into it?
“The curious thing about you,” said Peter, addressing himself quite
directly to his Deity at the desk, “is that somehow, without ever
positively promising it or saying anything plain and definite about it,
you yet manage to convey in an almost irresistible manner, that there is
going to be sense in it. You seem to suggest that my poor brain up here
and the brains of those chaps over there, are, in spite of all
appearance to the contrary, up to something jointly that is going to
come together and make good some day. You hint it. And yet I don’t get a
scrap of sound, trustworthy reasoning to help me to accept that; not a
scrap. Why should it be so? I ask, and you just keep on not saying
anything. I suppose it’s a necessary thing, biologically, that one
should have a kind of optimism to keep one alive, so I’m not even
justified in my half conviction that I’m not being absolutely fooled by
life....
“I admit that taking for example Joan, there is something about Joan
that almost persuades me there must be something absolutely _right_
about things—for Joan to happen at all. Yet isn’t that again just
another biologically necessary delusion?... There you sit silent. You
seem to say nothing, and yet you soak me with a kind of answer, a sort
of shapeless courage....”
Peter’s mind rested on that for a time, and then began again at another
point.
“I wonder,” said Peter, “if that chap gets me tonight, what I shall
think—in the moment—after he has got me....”
§ 24
But the German gunner never got Peter, because something else got him
first.
He thought he saw a Hun aeroplane coming over very high indeed to the
south of him, fifteen thousand feet up or more, a mere speck in the blue
blaze, and then the gas bag hid it and he dismissed it from his mind. He
was thinking that the air was growing clearer, and that if this went on
guns would wake up presently and little voices begin to talk to him,
when he became aware of the presence and vibration of an aeroplane quite
close to him. He pulled off his telephone receivers and heard the roar
of an engine close at hand. It was overhead, and the gas bag still hid
it. At the same moment the British anti-aircraft gunners began a belated
fire. “Damn!” said Peter in a brisk perspiration, and hastened to make
sure that his parachute rope was clear.
“Perhaps he’s British,” said Peter, with no real hope.
“_Pap, pap, pap!_” very loud overhead.
The gas bag swayed and billowed, and a wing with a black cross swept
across the sky. “_Pap, pap, pap._”
The gas bag wrinkled and crumpled more and more, and a little streak of
smoke appeared beyond its edge. The German aeroplane was now visible, a
hundred yards away, and banking to come round. He had fired the balloon
with tracer bullets.
The thing that Peter had to do and what he did was this. He had to step
up on to a little wood step inside his basket. Then he had to put first
one foot and then the other on to another little step outside his
basket. This little step was about four inches wide by nine long. Below
it was six thousand feet of emptiness, above the little trees and houses
below. As he swayed on the step Peter had to make sure that the rope
attached to his body was clear of all entanglements. Then he had to step
off that little shelf, which was now swinging and slanting with the
lurching basket to which it was attached, into the void, six thousand
feet above the earth.
He had not to throw himself or dive headlong, because that might lead to
entanglement with the rope. He had just to step off into pellucid
nothingness, holding his rope clear of himself with one hand. This rope
looped back to the little swinging bucket in which his fine silk
parachute was closely packed. He had seen it packed a week ago, and he
wished now, as he stood on his step holding to his basket with one hand,
that he had watched the process more meticulously. He became aware that
the Hun, having disposed of the balloon, was now shooting at him. He did
not so much step off the little shelf as slip off as it heeled over with
the swing of the basket. The first instants of a leap or fall make no
impression on the mind. For some seconds he was falling swiftly, feet
foremost, through the air. He scarcely noted the faint snatch when the
twine, which held his parachute in its basket, broke. Then his
consciousness began to register again. He kept his feet tightly pressed
together. The air whistled by him, but he thought that dreams and talk
had much exaggerated the sensations of falling. He was too high as yet
to feel the rush of the ground towards him.
He seemed to fall for an interminable time before anything more
happened. He was assailed by doubts—whether the twine that kept the
parachute in its bucket would break, whether it would open. His rope
trailed out above him.
Still falling. Why didn’t the parachute open? In another ten seconds it
would be too late.
The parachute was not opening. It was certainly not opening. Wrong
packing? He tugged and jerked his rope, and tried to shake and swing the
long silken folds that were following his fall. Why? Why the devil——?
The rope seemed to tighten abruptly. The harness tightened upon his
body. Peter gasped, sprawled and had the sensation of being hauled up
back again into the sky....
It was all right, so far. He was now swaying down earthward with a
diminishing velocity beneath an open parachute. He was floating over the
landscape instead of falling straight into it.
But the German had not done with Peter yet. He became visible beneath
the edge of Peter’s parachute, circling downward regardless of
anti-aircraft and machine-guns. “_Pap, pap, pap, pap._” The bullets
burst and banged about Peter.
Something kicked Peter’s knee; something hit his neck; something rapped
the knuckles of his wounded hand; the parachute winced and went
sideways, slashed and pierced. Peter drifted down faster, helpless, his
angry eyes upon his assailant, who vanished again, going out of sight as
he rose up above the edge of the parachute.
A storm of pain and rage broke from Peter.
“Done in!” shouted Peter. “Oh! my leg! my leg!
“I’m shot to bits. I’m shot to bloody bits!”
The tree tops were near at hand. The parachute had acquired a rhythmic
swing and was falling more rapidly.
“And I’ve still got to land,” wailed Peter, beginning to cry like a
child.
He wanted to stop just a moment, just for one _little_ moment, before
the ground rushed up to meet him. He wanted time to think. He didn’t
know what to do with this dangling leg. It became a monstrous, painful
obstacle to landing. How was he to get a spring? He was bleeding. He was
dying. It was cruel. Cruel.
Came the crash. Hot irons, it seemed, assailed his leg and his shoulder
and neck. He crumpled up on the ground in an agony, and the parachute,
with slow and elegant gestures, folded down on the top of his
floundering figure....
The gunners who ran to help him found him, enveloped in silk, bawling
and weeping like a child of four in a passion of rage and fear, and
trying repeatedly to stand up upon a blood-streaked leg that gave way as
repeatedly. “Damn!” cursed Peter in a stifled voice, plunging about like
a kitten in a sack. “Damn you all! I tell you I _will_ use my leg. I
_will_ have my leg. If I bleed to death. Oh! Oh!... You fool—you lying
old _humbug_! You!”
And then he gave a leap upward and forward, and fainted and fell, and
lay still, with his head and body muffled in the silk folds of his
parachute.
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
OSWALD’S VALEDICTION
§ 1