§ 18
it contributed to the thoroughness of peter’s thinking that it was some time before he could be put into a position to read comfortably. and it has to be recorded in the teeth of the dictates of sentiments and the most sacred traditions of romance that the rôle played by both joan and hetty in these meditations was secondary and incidental. it was an attenuated and abstract peter who lay in the french hospital, his chief link of sense with life was a growing hunger; he thought very much about fate, pain, the nature of things, and god, and very little about persons and personal incidents—and so strong an effect had his dream that god remained fixed steadfastly in his mind as that same intellectual non-interventionist whom he had visited in the fly-blown office. but about god’s rankling repartee, “why don’t you exert yourself?” there was accumulating a new conception, 516the conception of man taking hold of the world, unassisted by god but with the acquiescence of god, and in fulfilment of some remote, incomprehensible planning on the part of god. probably peter in thinking this was following one of the most ancient and well-beaten of speculative paths, but it seemed to him that it was a new way of thinking. and he was man. it was he who had to establish justice in the earth, achieve unity, and rule first the world and then the stars.
he lay staring at the ceiling, and quite happy now that healing and habituation had freed him from positive pain, thinking out how he was to release and co-operate with his india, which had invariably the face of mir jelalludin, how he was to reunite himself with his brothers in america, and how the walls and divisions of mankind, which look so high and invincible upon the ground and so trivial from twelve thousand feet above, were to be subdued to such greater ends.
it was only as the blood corpuscles multiplied inside him that peter ceased to be constantly man contemplating his destiny and races and empires, and for more and more hours in the day shrank to the dimensions and natural warmth of mr. peter stubland contemplating convalescence in blighty. he became eager first for the dear old indulgent and welcoming house at pelham ford, and then for prowls and walks and gossip with joan and oswald, and then, then for london and a little “fun.” life was ebbing back into what is understood to be the lower nature, and was certainly the most intimate and distinctive substance of mr. peter stubland. his correspondence became of very great interest to him. certain letters from joan, faint but pursuing, had reached him, those letters over which joan had sat like a sonneteer. he read them and warmed to them. he thought what luck it was that he had a joan to be the best of sisters to him, to be even more than a sister. she was the best friend he had, and it was jolly to read so plainly that he was her best friend. he would like to do work with joan better than with any man he knew. driving a car wasn’t half good enough for her. some day he’d be able to show her how to fly, and he would. it would be great fun going up with joan on a double control and letting her take over. 517there must be girls in the world who would fly as well as any man, or better.
he scribbled these ideas in his first letter to joan, and they pleased her mightily. to fly with peter would be surely to fly straight into heaven.
and mixed up with joan’s letters were others that he presently sorted out from hers and put apart, as though even letters might hold inconvenient communion. for the most part they came from hetty reinhart, and displayed the emotions of a consciously delicious female enamoured and enslaved by one of the heroes of the air. she had dreamt of him coming in through the skylight of her studio, lord cupid visiting his poor little psyche—“but it was only the moonlight,” and she thought of him now always with great overshadowing wings. sometimes they were great white wings that beat above her, and sometimes they were thrillingly soft and exquisite wings, like the wings of the people in peter wilkins. she sent him a copy of peter wilkins, book beloved by poe and all readers of the fantastic. then came the news of his smash. she had been clever enough to link it with the death of von papen, the hun matador. “was that your fight, dear peterkins? did you begin on goliath?” as the cordials of recovery raced through peter’s veins there were phases when the thought of visiting the yielding fair, jovelike and triumphant in winged glory, became not simply attractive but insistent. but he wrote to hetty modestly, “they’ve clipped one wing for ever.”
and so in a quite artless and inevitable way peter found his first leave, when the british hospital had done with him, mortgaged up to hilt almost equally to dear friend joan and to cleopatra hetty.
the young man only realized the duplicity of his nature and the complications of his position as the hospital boat beat its homeward way across the channel. the night was smooth and fine, with a high full moon which somehow suggested hetty, and with a cloud scheme of great beauty and distinction that had about it a flavour of joan. and as he meditated upon these complications that had been happening in his more personal life while his attention had been still largely occupied with divinity and politics, he was 518hailed by an unfamiliar voice and addressed as “simon peter.” “excuse me,” said the stout young officer tucked up warmly upon the next deck chair between a pair of crutches, “but aren’t you simon peter?”
peter had heard that name somewhere before. “my name’s stubland,” he said.
“ah! stubland! i forgot your surname. of high cross school?”
peter peered and saw a round fair face that slowly recalled memories. “wait a moment!” said peter.... “ames!”
“guessed it in one. probyn and i were chums.”
“what have you got?” said peter.
“leg below the knee off, damn it!” said ames. “one month at the front. not much of a career. but they say they do you a leg now better than reality. but i’d have liked to have batted the pants of the unspeakable hun a bit more before i retired. what have you got?”
“wrist chiefly and shoulder-blade. air fight. after six weeks.”
“does you out?”
“for flying, i’m afraid. but there’s lots of ground jobs. and anyhow—home’s pleasant.”
“yes,” said ames. “home’s pleasant. but i’d like to have got a scalp of some sort. doubt if i killed a single hun. d’you remember probyn at school?—a dark chap.”
peter found he still hated probyn. “i remember him,” he said.
“he’s killed. he got the m.m. and the v.c. he wouldn’t take a commission. he was sergeant-major in my battalion. i just saw him, but i’ve heard about him since. his men worshipped him. queer how men come out in a new light in this war.”
“how was he killed?” asked peter.
“in a raid. he was with a bombing party, and three men straggled up a 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 519came 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 520were 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.
521“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 522art, 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?”
