“Did ye see that red-haired fella I got in the square, boys?... Ah, ye should have seen that fella I got in the square.”
§ 7
But not all the world of Joan was at war. The Sheldrick circle, for example, after some wide fluctuations during which Sydney almost became a nurse and Babs nearly enlisted into the Women’s Legion, took a marked list under the influence of one of the sons-in-law towards pacifism. Antonia, who had taken two German prizes at school, was speedily provoked by the general denunciation of “Kultur” into a distinctly pro-German attitude. The Sheldrick circle settled down on the whole as a pro-German circle, with a poor opinion of President Wilson, a marked hostility to Belgians, and a disposition to think the hardships of drowning by U-boats much exaggerated.
The Sheldricks were like seedlings that begin flourishing and then damp off. From amusing schoolfellows they had changed into irritating and disappointing friends. Energy leaked out of them at adolescence. They seemed to possess the vitality for positive convictions no longer, they displayed an instinctive hostility to any wave of popular feeling that threatened to swamp their weak but still obstinate individualities. Their general attitude towards life was one of protesting refractoriness. Whatever it was that people believed or did, you were given to understand by undertones and abstinences that the Sheldricks knew better, and for the most exquisite reasons didn’t. All their friends were protesters and rebels and seceders, or incomprehensible poets, or inexplicable artists. And from the first the war was altogether too big and strong for them. Confronted by such questions as whether fifty years of belligerent preparation, culminating in the most cruel and wanton invasion of a peaceful country it is possible to imagine, was to be resisted by mankind or condoned, the Sheldricks fell back upon the counter statement that Sir Edward Grey, being a landowner, was necessarily just as bad as a German Junker, or that the Government of Russia was an unsatisfactory one.
In a few months it was perfectly clear to the Sheldricks that they would have nothing to do with the war at all. They were going to ignore it. Sydney just went on quietly doing her little statuettes that nobody would buy, little portrait busts of her sisters and suchlike things; now and then her mother contrived to get her a commission. Babs kept on trying to get a part in somebody’s play; Antonia continued to produce djibbahs in chocolate and grocer’s blue and similar tints. One saw the sisters drifting about London in costumes still trailingly Pre-Raphaelite when all the rest of womankind was cutting its skirts shorter and shorter, their faces rather pained in expression and deliberately serene, ignoring the hopes and fears about them, the stir, the huge effort, the universal participation. It was not their affair, thank you. They were not going to wade through this horrid war; they were going round.
Every time Joan went to see them, either they had become more phantomlike and incredible, or she had become coarser and more real. Would they ever get round? she asked herself; and what would they be like when at last they attempted, if ever they attempted, to rejoin the main stream of human interests again?
They kept up their Saturday evenings, but their gatherings became thinner and less and less credible as the war went on. The first wave of military excitement carried off most of the sightly young men, and presently the more capable and enterprising of the women vanished one after another to nurse, to join the Women’s Legion, to become substitute clerks and release men to volunteer, to work in canteens and so forth. There was, however, a certain coming and going of ambiguous adventurers, who in those early days went almost unchallenged between London and Belgium on ambulance work, on mysterious missions and with no missions at all. Belgian refugees drifted in and, when they found a lack of sympathy for their simple thirst for the destruction of Germans under all possible circumstances, out again. Then Ireland called her own, and Patrick Lynch went off to die a martyr’s death with arms in his hands after three days of the most exhilarating mixed shooting in the streets of Dublin. Antonia discovered passionate memories as soon as he was dead, and nobody was allowed to mention the name of Bunny in the Sheldrick circle for fear of spoiling the emotional atmosphere. Hetty Reinhart, after some fluctuations, went khaki, flitted from one ministry to another in various sorts of clerical capacities, took such opportunities as offered of entertaining young officers lonely in our great capital, and was no more seen in Hampstead. What was left of this little group in the Hampstead Quartier Latin drew together into a band of resistance to the creeping approach of compulsory service.
Huntley’s lofty scorn of the war had intensified steadily; the harsh disappointment of Joan’s patriotism had stung him to great efforts of self-justification, and he became one of the most strenuous writers in the extreme Pacifist press. Not an act or effort of the Allies, he insisted, that was not utterly vile in purpose and doomed to accelerate our defeat. Not an act of the enemy’s that was not completely thought out, wisely calculated, and planned to give the world peace and freedom on the most reasonable terms. He was particularly active in preparing handbills and pamphlets of instruction for lifelong Conscientious Objectors to war service who had not hitherto thought about the subject. Community of view brought him very close in feeling to both Babs and Sydney Sheldrick. There was much talk of a play he was to write which was to demonstrate the absurdity of Englishmen fighting Germans just because Germans insisted upon fighting Englishmen, and which was also to bring out the peculiarly charming Babsiness of Babs. He studied her thoroughly and psychologically and physiologically and intensively and extensively.
By a great effort of self-control he abstained from sending his writings to Joan. Once however they were near meeting. On one of Joan’s rare calls Babs told her that he was coming to discuss the question whether he should go to prison and hunger-strike, or consent to take up work of national importance. Babs was very full of the case for each alternative. She was doubtful which course involved the greatest moral courage. Moral courage, it was evident, was being carried to giddy heights by Huntley. It would be pure hypocrisy, he felt, to ignore the vital value of his writings, and while he could go on with these quite comfortably while working as a farm hand, with a little judicious payment to the farmer, their production would become impossible in prison. He must crucify himself upon the cross of harsh judgments, he felt, and take the former course. He wanted to make his views exactly clear to every one to avoid misunderstanding.
Joan hesitated whether she should stay and insult him or go, and chose the seemlier course.
§ 8
Joan was already driving a car for the Ministry of Munitions before Peter got himself transferred from the ranks of the infantry to the Royal Flying Corps. Peter’s career as an infantryman never took him nearer to the western front than Liss Forest. Then he perceived the error of his ways and decided to get a commission in the Royal Flying Corps. In those days the Flying Corps was still a limited and inaccessible force with a huge waiting list, and it needed a considerable exertion of influence to secure a footing in that select band.... But at last a day came when Peter, rather self-conscious in his new leather coat and cap, walked out from the mess past a group of chatting young pilots towards the aeroplane in which he was to have his first experience of flight.
He had a sense of being scrutinized, but indeed hardly any one upon the aerodrome noted him. This sense of an audience made him deliberately casual in his bearing. He saluted his pilot in a manner decidedly offhand. He clambered up through struts and wire to the front seat as if he was a clerk ascending the morning omnibus, and strapped himself in as if it hardly mattered whether he was strapped in or not.
“Contact, sir,” said the mechanic. “Contact,” came the pilot’s voice from behind. The engine roared, a gale swept backwards, and Peter vibrated like an aspen leaf.
The wheels were cleared, the mechanics jumped aside, and Peter was careering across the grass in a series of light leaps, and then his progress became smoother. He did not perceive at first the reason for this sudden steadying of the machine. He found himself tilting upward. He was off the ground. He had been off the ground for some seconds. He looked over the side and saw the grass fifty feet below, and the black shadow of the aeroplane, as if it fled before them, rushing at a hedge, doubling up at the hedge, and starting again in the next field. And up he went.
Peter stared at fields, hedges, trees, sheds and roadways growing small below him. He noted cows in plan and an automobile in plan, in a lane, going it seemed very slowly indeed. It was a stagnant world below in comparison with his own forward sweep. His initial nervousness and self-consciousness had passed away. He was enormously interested and delighted. He was trying to remember when it was that Nobby had said: “I doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime—or yours.” It was somewhen long ago at Limpsfield. Quite early....
And then abruptly Peter was clutching the side with his thick-gloved hand; the aeroplane was coming round in a close curve and banking steeply, very steeply. For a moment it seemed as though there was nothing at all between him and England below. If he fell out——!
He looked over his shoulder and met the hard regard of a pair of steel-blue eyes.
He remembered that after all he was under observation. This was no mere civilian’s joy ride. He affected a concentration upon the scenery. The aeroplane swung slowly back again to the level, and his hand left the side....
They were going up very rapidly now. The world seemed to be rolling in at the edges of a great circle that grew constantly larger. Away to the left were broad spaces of brown sand, and grey rippled and smooth shining water channels, and beyond, the sapphire sea; beneath and to the right were fields, houses, villages, woods, and a distant range of hills that seemed to be coming nearer. The scale was changing and everything was becoming maplike. Cows were little dots now and men scarcely visible.... And then suddenly all the scenery seemed to be rushing upward before Peter’s eyes and he had a feeling like the feeling one has in a lift when it starts—a down-borne feeling. He affected indifference, and gave the pilot his whistling profile. Down they swept, faster than a luge on the swiftest ice run, until one could see the ditches in the shadows beneath the hedges and cows were plainly cows again, and then once more they were heeling over and curving round. But Peter had been ready for that this time; he had been telling himself over and over again that he was strapped in. He betrayed no surprise. He was getting more and more exhilarated.
And then they were climbing again and soaring straight out towards the sea. Up went this roaring dragonfly in which Peter was sitting, at a hundred and twenty miles or so per hour, leaving the dwindling land behind.
Up they went and up, until the world seemed nearly all sea and the coast was far away; they mounted at last above a little white cloud puff and then above a haze of clouds, and when Peter looked down he saw at a vast distance below, through a clear gap in that filmy cloud fabric, three ships smaller than any toys. Of the men he could distinguish nothing. How sweet the cold clear air had become!
And high above the world, in the lonely sky above the cloud fleece, the pilot saw fit to spring a surprise upon Peter.
He was not of the genial and considerate order of teachers; he believed in weeding out duds as swiftly as possible. He had an open mind as to whether this rather over-intelligent-looking beginner might not, under certain circumstances, squeal. So he just tried him and, without a note of preparation, looped the loop with him.
The propeller that span before the eyes of Peter dipped. Peter bowed in accord with it. It dipped more and more steeply, until the machine was almost nose down, until Peter was looking at the sea and the land as one sits and looks at a wall. He was tilted down and down until he was face downward. And then as abruptly he was tilted up; it was like being in a swing; the note of the engine altered as if a hand swept up a scale of notes; the sea and the land seemed to fall away below him as though he left them for ever, and the blue sky swept down across his field of vision like a curtain: he was, so to speak, on his back now with his legs in the air, looking straight at the sky, at nothing but sky, and expecting to recover. For a vast second he waited for the swing to end. This was surely the end of the swing....
Only—most amazingly—he didn’t recover! He wanted to say, “Ouch!” He was immensely surprised—too surprised to be frightened. He went over backwards—in an instant—and the sea and the land reappeared above the sky and also came down like curtains, too, and then behold! the aeroplane was driving down and the world was in its place again far below.
“The Loop!” whispered Peter, a little dazed, and glanced back at his pilot and smiled. This was no perambulator excursion. “The Loop—first trip!”
The blue eyes seemed a little less hard, the weather-red face was smiling faintly.
Then gripped by an irresistible power, Peter found himself going down, down, down almost vertically. The pilot had apparently stopped the engine....
Peter watched the majestic expansion of the landscape as they fell. They had come back over the land. Far away he could see the aerodrome like a scattered collection of little toy huts, and growing bigger and bigger every instant. He sat quite still, for it was all right—it must be all right. But now they were getting very near the ground, and it was still rushing up to meet them, and pouring outwardly as it rose. A cat now would be visible....
It was all right. The engine picked up with a roar like a score of lions, and the pilot levelled out a hundred feet above the trees....
Then presently they were dropping to the aerodrome again; down until the hedges were plain and the grazing cattle close and distinct; and then, with a sense of infinite regret, Peter perceived that they were back on the turf again and that the flight was over. They danced lightly over the turf. Their rush slowed down. They taxied gently up to the hangar and the engine shuddered and, with a pathetic drop to silence, stopped....
A little stiffly, Peter unbuckled himself and stretched and set himself to clamber to the ground.
His weather-bitten senior nodded to him and smiled faintly....
Peter walked towards the mess. It was wonderful—and intensely disappointing in that it was so soon over. There were still great pieces of the afternoon left....
§ 9
The aerodrome was short of machines and instructors, and he had to wait a couple of weeks before he could get into the air a second time.
He worked sedulously to gather knowledge during that waiting interval, and his first real lesson found him a very alert and ready pupil. This time the dual control was at his disposal, and for a straight or so the pilot left things to him altogether. Came half a dozen other lessons, and then Peter found himself sitting alone in a machine outside the great sheds, watched closely by a knot of friendly rivals, and, for the first time on his own account, conducting that duologue he had heard now so often on other lips. “Switch off.”... “Suck in.” “Contact!”
He started across the ground. His first sensations bordered on panic. Hitherto the machines he had flown in had been just machines; now this one, this one was an animal; it started out across the aerodrome like a demented ostrich, swerving wildly and trying to turn round. Always before this, the other man had done the taxi business on the ground. It had never occurred to Peter that it involved any difficulty. Peter’s heart nearly failed him in that opening twenty seconds; he was convinced he was going to be killed; and then he determined to get up at any cost. At any rate he wouldn’t smash on the ground. He let out the accelerator, touched his controls, and behold he was up—he was up! Instantly the machine ceased to resemble a floundering ostrich, and became a steady and dignified carinate, swaying only slightly from wing to wing. Up he went over the hedges, over the trees, beyond, above the familiar field of cows. The moment of panic passed, and Peter was himself again.
He had got right outside the aerodrome and he had to bank and bring her round. Already he had done that successfully a number of times with an instructor to take care of him. He did it successfully now. His confidence grew. Back he buzzed and droned, a hundred feet over the aerodrome. He made three complete circuits, rose outside the aerodrome and came down, making a good landing. He was instantly smitten with the intensest regret that he had not made eight or nine circuits. It was a mere hop. Any man of spirit would have gone on. There were four hours of daylight yet. He might have gone up; he might have tried a spiral.... Damn!
But the blue eyes of the master approved him.
“Couldn’t have made a better landing, Stubland,” said the master. “Try again tomorrow. Follow it up close. Short and frequent doses. That’s the way.”
Peter had made another stage on his way to France.
Came other solo flights, and flights on different types of machines, and then a day of glory and disobedience when, three thousand feet above the chimneys of a decent farmhouse, Peter looped the loop twice. He had learnt by that time what it was to side-slip, and what air pockets can do to the unwary. He had learnt the bitter consequences of coming down with the engine going strong. He had had a smash through that all too common mistake, but not a bad smash; a few struts and wires of the left wing were all that had gone. A hedge and a willow tree had stopped him. He had had a forced landing in a field of cabbages through engine stoppage, and half an hour in a snowstorm when he had had doubts in an upward eddy whether he might not be flying upside down. That had been a nasty experience—his worst. He had several times taken his hands off the controls and let the old bus look after herself, so badly were the snowflakes spinning about in his mind. He dreamt a lot about flying, and few of his dreams were pleasant dreams. And then this fantastic old world of ours, which had so suddenly diverted his education to these things, and taught him to fly with a haste and intensity it had never put into any teaching before, decided that he was ripe for the air war, and packed him off to France....
§ 10
Now, seeing that Joan had at last discovered that she was in love with Peter, it would be pleasantly symmetrical to record that Peter had also discovered by this time that he was in love with Joan.
But as a matter of fact he had discovered nothing of the sort. He had been amazed and humiliated by his three days of hesitation and procrastination at Orta; the delay was altogether out of keeping with his private picture of himself; and he discovered that he was not in love with any one and that he did not intend again to be lured into any dangerous pretence that he was. He had done with Hetty, he was convinced; he did not mean to see her any more, and he led a life of exasperated Puritanism for some months, refusing to answer the occasionally very skilful and perplexing letters, with amusing and provocative illustrations, that she wrote him.
The idea of “relaxing moral fibre” obsessed him, and our genial Peter for a time abandoned both smoking and alcohol, and was only deterred from further abstinences by their impracticability. The ordinary infantry mess, for example, caters ill and resentfully for vegetarians.... Peter’s days in the ranks were days of strained austerity. He was a terribly efficient recruit, a fierce soldier, a wonderful influence on slackers, stripes gravitated towards him, and a prophetic corporal saw sergeant-major written on his forehead. Occasionally, when his imagination got loose or after a letter from Hetty, he would indulge privately in fits of violent rage, finding great relief in the smashing of light objects and foul and outrageous language. He found what he considered a convenient privacy for this idiosyncrasy in a disused cowshed near the camp, and only realized that he had an audience when a fellow recruit asked anxiously, “And how’s Miss Blurry ’Etty?” Whereupon Peter discovered a better outlet for pentup nervous energy in a square fight.
Joan saw hardly anything of him during those early and brutal days, but she thought about him mightily. She shared Oswald’s opinion that he wasn’t in his right place, and she wrote to him frequently. He answered perhaps half her letters. His answers struck her as being rather posed. The strain showed through them. Peter was trying very hard not to be Peter. “I’m getting down to elementals,” was one of his experiments in the statement of his moral struggle.
Then quite abruptly came his decision to get into the Royal Flying Corps.
Neither Oswald nor Joan ventured any comment on this, because both of them had a feeling that Peter had, in a sense, climbed down by this decision to go up....
In the Royal Flying Corps Peter’s rather hastily conceived theories of moral fibre came into an uncongenial atmosphere. The Royal Flying Corps was amazingly young, swift, and confident, and “moral fibre” based on abstinence and cold self-control was not at all what it was after. The Royal Flying Corps was much more inclined to scrap with soda-water syphons and rag to the tunes of a gramophone. It was a body that had had to improvise a tradition of conduct in three or four swift years, and its tradition was still unstable. Mainly it was the tradition of the games and sports side of a public school, roughly adapted to the new needs of the service; it was an essentially boyish tradition, even men old enough to have gone through the universities were in a minority in it, and Peter at one-and-twenty was one of the more elderly class of recruits. And necessarily the tradition of the corps still varied widely with the dominant personalities and favourite heroes of each aerodrome and mess and squadron. It was a crowd of plastic boys, left amazingly to chance leads. Their seniors had no light for them, and they picked up such hints as they could from Kipling and the music-halls, from overheard conversations, and one another.
Is it not an incredible world in which old men make wars and untutored young men have to find out how to fight them; in which tradition and the past are mere entanglements about the feet of the young? The flying services took the very flower of the youth of the belligerent nations; they took the young men who were most manifestly fitted to be politicians, statesmen, leaders of men, masters in industry, and makers of the new age; the boys of nerve, pluck, imagination, invention, and decision. And there is not a sign of any realization on the part of any one of the belligerent states of the fact that a large proportion of this most select and valuable mass of youth was destined to go on living after the war and was going to matter tremendously and be the backbone of the race after the war. They let all these boys specialize as jockeys specialize. The old men and rulers wanted these youngsters to fight and die for them; that any future lay beyond the war was too much for these scared and unteachable ancients to apprehend. The short way to immediate efficiency was to back the tradition of recklessness and gallantry, and so the short way was taken; if the brave lads were kept bold and reckless by women, wine and song, then by all means, said their elders, let them have these helps. “A short life and a merry one,” said the British Empire to these lads of eighteen and nineteen encouragingly. “A short life and a merry one,” said the Empire to its future.
If the story of the air forces is a glorious and not a shameful thing it is because of the enduring hope of the world—the incessant gallantry of youth. These boys took up their great and cardinal task with the unquenchable hopefulness of boyhood and with the impudence and humour of their race. They brought in the irreverence and the Spartanism of their years. They made a language for themselves, an atrocious slang of facetious misnomers; everything one did was a “stunt”; everything one used was a “gadget”; the machines were “’buses” and “camels” and “pups”; the older men were perpetually pleading in vain for more dignity in the official reports. And these youngsters worked out their moral problems according to their own generous and yet puerile ideas. They argued the question of drink. Could a man fly better or worse if he was “squiffy”? Does funk come to the thoughtful? And was ever a man gallant without gallantries? After the death of Lord Kitchener there survived no man in Britain of the quality to speak plainly and authoritatively and honestly about chastity and drink to the young soldier. The State had no mind in these matters. In most matters indeed the State had no mind; it was a little old silly State. And the light side of the feminine temperament flamed up into shameless acquiescences in the heroic presence of the flying man. Youth instinctively sets towards romantic adventures, and the scales of chance for a considerable number of the flying men swung between mésalliance and Messalina.
The code and the atmosphere varied from mess to mess and from squadron to squadron; young men are by nature and necessity hero-worshippers and imitative. Peter’s lines fell among pleasant men of the “irresponsible” school. The two best flyers he knew, including him of the hard blue eyes who had first instructed him, were men of a physique that defied drink and dissipation. Vigours could smoke, drink, and dance in London, catch the last train back with three seconds to spare, and be flying with an unshaken nerve by half-past six in the morning; Vincent would only perform stunts when he was “tight,” and then he seemed capable of taking any risk with impunity. He could be funny with an aeroplane then a thousand feet up in the air. He could make it behave as though it was drunk, as though it was artful; he could make it mope or wag its tail. Men went out to watch him. The mess was decorated with pictures from La Vie Parisienne, and the art and literature of the group was Revue. Now seeing that Peter’s sole reason for his puritanism was the preservation of efficiency, this combination of a fast life and a fine record in the air was very disconcerting to him.
If he had been naturally and easily a first-class flying man he might have stuck to his line of high austerity, but he was not. He flew well, but he had to fly with care; like many other airmen, he always felt a shadow of funk before going up, on two or three bad mornings it was on his conscience that he had delayed for ten minutes or so, and he was more and more inclined to think that he would fly better if he flew with a less acute sense of possibilities. It was the start and the uneventful flying that irked him most; hitherto every crisis had found him cool and able. But the slap-dash style, combined with the exquisite accuracy of these rakes, Vigours and Vincent, filled him with envious admiration.
In the mess Peter met chiefly youths of his own age or a year or so younger; he soon became a master of slang; his style of wit won its way among them. He ceased to write of “getting down to elementals” to Joan, and he ceased to think of all other girls and women as inventions of the devil. Only they must be kept in their places. As Vigours and Vincent kept them. Just as one kept drink in its place. One must not, for example, lose trains on account of them....
Through these months Joan maintained a strained watch upon the development and fluctuations of Peter. He wrote—variously; sometimes offhand duty notes and sometimes long and brotherly letters—incurably brotherly. Every now and then she had glimpses of him when he came to London on leave. Manifestly he liked her company and trusted her—as though she was a man. It was exasperating. She dressed for Peter as she had never dressed for any one, and he would take her out to dine at the Rendezvous or the Petit Riche and sit beside her and glance at common scraps of feminine humanity, at dirty little ogling bare-throated girls in patched-up raiment and with harsh and screaming voices, as though they were the most delicious of forbidden fruits. And he seemed to dislike being alone with her. If she dropped her hand to touch his on the table, he would draw his away.
Was the invisible barrier between them invincible?
For a time during his infantry phase he had shown a warm affection. In his early days in the flying corps it seemed that he drew still closer to her. Then her quick, close watch upon him detected a difference. Joan was getting to be a very shrewd observer nowadays, and she felt a subtle change that suddenly made him a little shame-faced in her presence. There had been some sort of spree in London with two or three other wild spirits, and there had been “girls” in the party. Such girls! He never told her this, but something told her. I am inclined to think it was her acute sense of smell detected a flavour of face powder or cheap scent about Peter when he came along one day, half an hour late, to take her to the Ambassadors. She was bad company that night for him.
For a time Joan was bad company for any one.
She was worse when she realized that Hetty was somehow reinstated in Peter’s world. That, too, she knew by an almost incredible flash of intuition. Miss Jepson was talking one evening to Peter, and Peter suddenly displayed a knowledge of the work of the London Group that savoured of studio. This was the first art criticism he had talked since the war began. It was clear he had been to a couple of shows. Not with Joan. Not alone. As he spoke, he glanced at Joan and met her eye.
It was astonishing that Miss Jepson never heard the loud shout of “Hetty” that seemed to fill the room.
It was just after this realization that an elderly but still gallant colonel, going on an expedition for the War Office with various other technical authorities to suppress some disturbing invention that the Ministry of Munitions was pressing in a troublesome manner, decided to come back from Longmore to London on the front seat beside Joan. His conversational intentions were honourable and agreeable, but he shared a common error that a girl who wears khaki and drives a car demands less respect from old gentlemen and is altogether more playful than the Victorian good woman. Possibly he was lured on to his own destruction.
When he descended at the Ministry, he looked pinched and aged. He was shaken to the pitch of confidences. “My word,” he whispered. “That girl drives like the devil. But she’s a vixen ... snaps your head off.... Don’t know whether this sort of thing is good for women in the long run.
“Robs ’em of Charm,” he said.
§ 11
It was just in this phase of wrath and darkness that Wilmington came over to London for his last leave before he was killed, and begged Joan for all the hours she had to spare. She was quite willing to treat him generously. They dined together and went to various theatres and music-halls and had a walk over Hampstead Heath on Sunday. He was a silent, persistent companion for most of the time. He bored her, and the more he bored her the greater her compunction and the more she hid it from him. But Wilmington, if he had a slow tongue, had a penetrating eye.
The last evening they had together was at the Criterion. They dined in the grill room, a dinner that was interspersed with brooding silences. And then Wilmington decided to make himself interesting at any cost upon this last occasion.
“Joan,” he said, knocking out a half-consumed cigarette upon the edge of his plate.
“Billy?” said Joan, waking up.
“Queer, Joan, that you don’t love me when I love you so much.”
“I’d trust you to the end of the earth, Billy.”
“I know. But you don’t love me.”
“I think of you as much as I do of any one.”
“No. Except—one.”
“Billy,” said Joan weakly, “you’re the straightest man on earth.”
Wilmington’s tongue ran along his white lips. He spoke with an effort.
“You’ve loved Peter since you were six years old. It isn’t as though—you’d treated me badly. I can’t grumble that you’ve had no room for me. He’s always been there.”
Joan, after an interval, decided to be frank.
“It’s not much good, Billy, is it, if I do?”
Wilmington said nothing for quite a long time. He sat thinking hard. “It’s not much good pretending I don’t hate Peter. I do. If I could kill him—and in your memory too.... He bars you from me. He makes you unhappy....”
His face was a white misery. Joan glanced round at the tables about her, but no one seemed to be watching them. She looked at him again. Pity, so great that it came near to love, wrung her....
“Joan,” he said at last.
“Yes?”
“It’s queer.... I feel mean.... As though it wasn’t right.... But look here, Joan.” He tapped her arm. “Something—something that I suppose I may as well point out to you. Because in certain matters—in certain matters you are being a fool. It’s astonishing—— But absolutely—a fool.”
Joan perceived he had something very important to say. She sat watching him, as with immense deliberation he got out another cigarette and lit it.
“You don’t understand this Peter business, Joan. I—I do. Mostly when I’m not actually planning out or carrying out the destruction of Germans, I think of you—and Peter. And all the rest of it. I’ve got nothing else much to think about. And I think I see things you don’t see. I know I do.... Oh damn it! Go to hell!”
This last was to the waiter, who was making the customary warning about liqueurs on the stroke of half-past nine.
“Sorry,” said Wilmington to Joan, and leant forward over his folded arms and collected his thoughts with his eyes on the flowers before them.
“It’s like this, Joan. Peter isn’t where we are. I—I’m very definite and clear about my love-making. I fell in love with you, and I’ve never met any other woman I’d give three minutes of my life to. You’ve just got me. As if I were the palm of your hand. I wish I were. And—oh! what’s the good of shutting my eyes?—Peter has you. You’ve been thinking of Peter half the time we’ve been together. It’s true, Joan. You’ve grown up in love. Buh! But Peter, you’ve got to understand, isn’t in love. He doesn’t know what love means. Perhaps he never will. Love with you and me is a thing of flesh and bone. He takes it like some skin disease. He’s been spoilt. He’s so damned easy and good-looking. He was got hold of. I——”
Wilmington flushed for a moment. “I’m a chaste man, Joan. It’s a rare thing. Among our sort. But Peter—— Loving a woman body and soul means nothing to him. He thinks love-making is a kind of amusement—— Casual amusement. Any woman who isn’t repulsive. You know, Joan, that’s not the natural way. The natural way is love of soul and body. He’s been perverted. But in this crowded world—like a monkey’s cage ... artificially heated ... the young men get made miscellaneous.... Lots of the girls even are miscellaneous....”
He considered the word. “Miscellaneous? Promiscuous, I mean.... It hasn’t happened to us. To you and me, I mean. I’m unattractive somehow. You’re fastidious. He’s neither. He takes the thing that offers. To grave people sex is a sacrament, something—so solemn and beautiful——”
The tears stood in his eyes. “If I go on,” he said.... “I can’t go on....”
For a time he said no more, and pulled his unconsumed cigarette to pieces over the ash-tray with trembling fingers. “That’s all,” he said at last.
“All this is—rather true,” said Joan. “But——!”
“What does it lead up to?”
“Yes.”
“It means Peter’s the ordinary male animal. Under modern conditions. Lazy. Affectionate and all that, but not a scrap of emotion or love—yet anyhow. Not what you and I know as love. You may dress it up as you like, but the fact is that the woman has to make love to him. That’s all. Hetty has made love to him. He has never made love to anybody—except as a sort of cheerful way of talking, and perhaps he never, never will.... He respects you too much to make love to you.... But he’d hate the idea of any one else—making love to you.... It’s an idea—— It’s outside of his conception of you.... He’ll never think of it for himself.”
Joan sat quite still. After what seemed a long silence she looked up at him.
Wilmington was watching her face. He saw she understood his drift.
“You could cut her out like that,” said Wilmington, with a gesture that gained an accidental emphasis by knocking his glass off the table and smashing it.
The broken glass supplied an incident, a distraction, with the waiters, to relieve the tension of the situation.
“That’s all I had to say,” said Wilmington when that was all settled. “There’s no earthly reason why two of us should be unhappy.”
“Billy,” she said, after a long pause, “if I could only love you——”
The face of gratitude that looked at him faded to a mask.
“You’re thinking of Peter already,” said Wilmington, watching her face.
It was true. She started, detected.
He speculated cheerlessly.
“You’ll marry me some day perhaps. When Peter’s thrown you over.... It’s men of my sort who get things like that....”
He stood up and reached for her cloak. She, too, stood up.
Then, as if to reassure her, he said: “I shall get killed, Joan. So we needn’t worry about that. I shall get killed. I know it. And Peter will live.... I always have taken everything too seriously. Always.... I shall kill a lot of Germans yet, but one day they will get me. And Peter will be up there in the air, like a cheerful midge—with all the Archies missing him....”
§ 12
This conversation was a cardinal event in Joan’s life. Wilmington’s suggestions raised out of the grave of forgetfulness and incorporated with themselves a conversation she had had long ago with Adela—one Christmas at Pelham Ford when Adela had been in love with Sopwith Greene. Adela too had maintained that it was the business of a woman to choose her man and not wait to be chosen, and that it was the woman who had to make love. “A man’s in love with women in general,” had been Adela’s idea, “but women fall in love with men in particular.” Adela had used a queer phrase, “It’s for a woman to find her own man and keep him and take care of him.” Men had to do their own work; they couldn’t think about love as women were obliged by nature to think about love. “Love’s just a trouble to a real man, like a mosquito singing in his ear, until some woman takes care of him.”
All those ideas came back now to Joan’s mind, and she did her best to consider them and judge them as generalizations. But indeed she judged with a packed court, and all her being clamoured warmly for her to “get” Peter, to “take care”—most admirable phrase—of Peter. Her decision was made, and still she argued with herself. Was it beneath her dignity to set out and capture her Peter?—he was her Peter. Only he didn’t know it. She tried to generalize. Had it ever been dignified for a woman to wait until a man discovered her possible love? Was that at best anything more than the dignity of the mannequin?
Three-quarters at least of the art and literature of the world is concerned with the relations of the sexes, and yet here was Joan, after thirty centuries or so of human art and literature, still debating the elementary facts of her being. There is so much excitement in our art and literature and so little light. The world has still to discover the scope and vastness of its educational responsibilities. Most of its teaching in these matters hitherto has been less in the nature of enlightenment than strategic concealment; we have given the young neither knowledge nor training, we have restrained and baffled them and told them lies. And then we have inflamed them. We have abused their instinctive trust when they were children with stories of old Bogey designed to save us the bother that unrestrained youthful enterprise might cause, and with humorous mockery of their natural curiosity. Jocularities about storks and gooseberry bushes, sham indignations at any plainness of speech, fierce punishments of imperfectly realized offences, this against a background of giggles, knowing innuendo, and careless, exciting glimpses of the mystery, have constituted the ordinary initiation of the youth of the world. Right up to full age, we still fail to provide the clear elemental facts. Our young men do not know for certain whether continence is healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible; the sex is still assured with all our power of assurance, that the only pure and proper life for it is a sexless one. Until at last the brightest of the young have been obliged to get down to the bare facts in themselves and begin again at the beginning....
So Joan, co-Heiress of the Ages with Peter, found that because of her defaulting trustees, because we teachers, divines, writers and the like have shirked what was disagreeable and difficult and unpopular, she inherited nothing but debts and dangers. She had not even that touching faith in Nature which sustained the generation of Jean Jacques Rousseau. She had to set about her problem with Peter as though he and she were Eve and Adam in a garden overrun with weeds and thorns into which God had never come.
Joan was too young yet to have developed the compensating egotism of 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....