Joan and Peter — Joan and Peter Graduate Part 3
§ 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....
§ 13 He flew to France the next day, above the grey and shining stretches of water and two little anxious ships, and he sent Joan a cheerful message on a picture-postcard of a shell-smashed church to tell of his safe arrival.
Joan was dismayed.
In war time we must not brood on death, one does not think of death if one can help it; it is the chance that wrecks all calculations; but the fear of death had fallen suddenly upon all her plans.
And what was there left now of all her plans?
She might write him letters.
Death is more terrible to a girl in love than to any other living thing.
“If he dies,” said Joan, “I am killed.
I shall be worse than a widow—an Indian girl widow.
Suttee; what will be left of me but ashes?...
Some poor dregs of Joan carrying on a bankrupt life....
No me....
” There was nothing for it but to write him letters.
And Joan found those letters incredibly difficult to write.
All lightness had gone from her touch.
After long and tiring days with her car she sat writing and tearing up and beginning again.
It was so difficult now to write to him, to be easy in manner and yet insidious.
She wanted still to seem his old companion, and yet to hint subtly at the new state of things.
“There’s a dull feeling now you’ve gone out of England, Peter,” she wrote.
“I’ve never had company I cared for in all the world as I care for yours.
” And, “I shall count the days to your leave, Peter, as soon as I know how many to count.
I didn’t guess before that you were a sort of necessity to me.
” Over such sentences, sentences that must have an edge and yet not be too bold, sentences full of tenderness and above all suspicion of “soppiness,” Joan pondered like a poet writing a sonnet....
But letters went slowly, and life and death hustled along together very swiftly in the days of the great war....
§ 14 Joan’s mind was full of love and life and the fear of losing them, but Peter was thinking but little of love and life; he was secretly preoccupied with the thought, the forbidden thought, of death, and with the strangeness of war and of this earth seen from an aeroplane ten thousand feet or so above the old battlefields of mankind.
He was seeing the world in plan, and realizing what a flat and shallow thing it was.
On clear days the circuit of the world he saw had a circumference of hundreds of miles, night flying was a journey amidst the stars with the little black planet far away; there was no former achievement of the race that did not seem to him now like a miniature toy set out upon the floor of an untidy nursery.
He had beaten up towards the very limits of life and air, to the clear thin air of twenty-two or twenty-three thousand feet; he had been in the blinding sunlight when everything below was still asleep in the blue of dawn.
And the world of history and romance, the world in which he and all his ancestors had believed, a world seen in elevation, of towering frontages, high portals, inaccessible dignities, giddy pinnacles and frowning reputations, had now fallen as flat, it seemed, as the façade of the Cloth Hall at Ypres.
(He had seen that one day from above, spread out upon the ground.
) He was convinced that high above the things of the past he droned his liquid way towards a new sort of life altogether, towards a greater civilization, a world-wide life for men with no boundaries in it at all except the emptiness of outer space, a life of freedom and exaltation and tremendous achievement.
But meanwhile the old things of the world were trying most desperately to kill him.
Every day the enemy’s anti-aircraft guns seemed to grow more accurate; and high above the little fleecy clouds lurked the braggart Markheimer and the gallant von Papen and suchlike German champions, with their decoys below, ready to swoop and strike.
Never before had the world promised Peter so tremendous a spectacle as it seemed to promise now, and never before had his hope of living to see it been so insecure.
When he had enlisted, and even after he had been transferred to the Flying Corps, Peter had thought very little of death.
The thought of death only became prevalent in English minds towards the second year of the war.
It is a hateful and unnatural thought in youth, easily dismissed altogether unless circumstances press it incessantly upon the attention.
But even before Peter went to France two of his set had been killed under his eyes in a collision as they came down into the aerodrome, and a third he had seen two miles away get into a spiral nose dive, struggle out of it again, and then go down to be utterly smashed to pieces.
In one day on Salisbury Plain he had seen three accidents, and two, he knew, had been fatal and one had left a legless thing to crawl through life.
The messes in France seemed populous with young ghosts; reminiscences of sprees, talk of flying adventures were laced with, “dear old boy!
he went west last May.
” “Went west” was the common phrase.
They never said “killed.
” They hated the very name of death.
They did their best, these dear gallant boys, to make the end seem an easy and familiar part of life, of life with which they were so joyously in love.
They all knew that the dice was loaded against them, and that as the war went on the chances against them grew.
The first day Peter was out in France he saw a man hit and brought down by a German Archie.
Two days after, he found himself the centre of a sudden constellation of whoofing shells that left inky cloudbursts over him and under him and round about him; he saw the fabric of his wing jump and quiver, and dropped six hundred feet or so to shake the gunner off.
But _whuff_ ...
_whuff_ ...
_whuff_, like the bark of a monstrous dog ...
the beast was on him again within a minute, and Peter did two or three loops and came about and got away with almost indecent haste.
He was trembling; he hated it.
And he hated to tremble.
In the mess that evening the talk ran on the “Pigeon shooter.
” It seemed that there was this one German gunner far quicker and more deadly than any of his fellows.
He had a knack of divining what an airman was going to do.
Peter admitted his near escape and sought counsel.
Peter’s colleagues watched him narrowly and unostentatiously when they advised him.
Their faces were masks and his face was a mask, and they were keen for the faintest intonation of what was behind it.
They all hated death, they all tried not to think of death; they all believed that there were Paladins, other fellows, who never thought of death at all.
When the tension got too great they ragged; they smashed great quantities of furniture and made incredible volumes of noise.
Twice Peter got away from the aerodrome to let things rip in Amiens.
But such outbreaks were usually followed by a deep depression of spirit.
In the night Peter would wake up and find the thought of death sitting by his bedside.
So far Peter had never had a fight.
He had gone over the enemy lines five times, he had bombed a troop train in a station and a regiment resting in a village, he believed he had killed a score or more of Germans on each occasion and he felt not the slightest compunction, but he had not yet come across a fighting Hun plane.
He had very grave doubts about the issue of such a fight, a fight that was bound to come sooner or later.
He knew he was not such a quick pilot as he would like to be.
He thought quickly, but he thought rather too much for rapid, steady decisions.
He had the balancing, scientific mind.
He knew that none of his flights were perfect.
Always there was a conflict of intention at some point, a hesitation.
He believed he might last for weeks or months, but he knew that somewhen he would be found wanting—just for a second perhaps, just in the turn of the fight.
Then he would be killed.
He hid quite successfully from all his companions, and particularly from his squadron commander, this conviction, just as he had previously hidden the vague funk that had invariably invaded his being whenever he walked across the grounds towards the machine during his days of instruction, but at the back of his mind the thought that his time was limited was always present.
He believed that he had to die;
it might be tomorrow or next week or next month, but somewhen within the year.
When these convictions became uppermost in Peter’s mind a black discontent possessed him.
There are no such bitter critics of life as the young; theirs is a magnificent greed for the splendour of life.
They have no patience with delays; their blunders and failures are intolerable.
Peter reviewed his two-and-twenty years—it was now nearly three-and-twenty—with an intense dissatisfaction.
He had wasted his time, and now he had got into a narrow way that led down and down pitilessly to where there would be no more time to waste.
He had been aimless and the world had been aimless, and then it had suddenly turned upon him and caught him in this lobster-trap.
He had wasted all his chances of great experience.
He had never loved a woman or had been well loved because he had frittered away that possibility in a hateful sex excitement with Hetty—who did not even pretend to be faithful to him.
And now things had got into this spin to death.
It was exactly like a spin—like a spinning nose dive—the whole affair, his life, this war....
He would lie and fret in his bed, and fret all the more because he knew his wakefulness wasted the precious nervous vigour that might save his life next day.
After a black draught of such thoughts Peter would become excessively noisy and facetious in the mess tent.
He was recognized and applauded as a wit and as a devil.
He was really very good at Limericks, delicately indelicate, upon the names of his fellow officers and of the villages along the front—that was no doubt heredity, the gift of his Aunt Phyllis—and his caricatures adorned the mess.
It was also understood that he was a rake....
Peter’s evil anticipations were only too well justified.
He was put down in his very first fight, which happened over Dompierre.
He had bad luck;
he was struck by von Papen, one of the crack German fliers on that part of the front.
He was up at ten thousand feet or so, more or less covering a low-flying photographer, when he saw a German machine coming over half a mile perhaps or more away as though it was looking for trouble.
Peter knew he might funk a fight, and to escape that moral disaster, headed straight down for the German, who dropped and made off southward.
Peter rejoicing at this flight, pursued, his eyes upon the quarry.
Then from out of the sun came von Papen, swiftly and unsuspected, upon Peter’s tail, and announced his presence by a whiff of bullets.
Peter glanced over his shoulder to discover that he was caught.
“Oh damn!
” cried Peter, and ducked his head, and felt himself stung at the shoulder and wrist.
Splinters were flying about him.
He tried a side-slip, and as he did so he had an instant’s vision of yet another machine, a Frenchman this time, falling like a bolt out of the blue upon his assailant.
The biter was bit.
Peter tried to come round and help, but he turned right over sideways and dropped, and suddenly found himself with the second Hun plane coming up right ahead of him.
Peter blazed away, but God!
how his wrist hurt him!
He cursed life and death.
He blazed away with his machine going over more and more, and the landscape rushing up over his head and then getting in front of him and circling round.
For some seconds he did not know what was up and what was down.
He continued to fire, firing earthward for a long second or so after his second enemy had disappeared from his vision.
The world was spinning round faster and faster, and everything was moving away outward, faster and faster, as if it was all hastening to get out of his way....
This surely was a spinning nose dive, the spinning nose dive—from within.
Round and round.
Confusing and giddy!
Just as he had seen poor old Gordon go down....
But one didn’t feel at all—as Peter had supposed one must feel—like an egg in an egg-whisk!...
Down spun the aeroplane, as a maple fruit in autumn spins to the ground.
Then this still living thing that had been Peter, all bloody and broken, made a last supreme effort.
And his luck seconded his effort.
The spin grew slower and flatter.
Control of this lurching, eddying aeroplane seemed to come back, escaped again, mocked him.
The ground was very near.
_Now!
_ The sky swung up over the whirling propeller again and stayed above it, and again the machine obeyed a reasonable soul.
He was out of it!
Out of a nose dive!
Yes.
Steady!
It is so easy when one’s head is whirling to get back into a spin again.
Steady!...
He talked to himself.
“Oh!
good Peter!
_Good_ Peter!
_Clever_ Peter.
Wonderful Mr. Toad!
Stick it!
Stick it!
” But what a queer right hand it was!
It was covered with blood.
And it crumpled up in the middle when he clenched it!
Never mind!
He was in the lowest storey of the air.
The Hun and the Frenchman up there were in another world.
Down below, quite close—not five hundred feet now—were field-greys running and shooting at him.
They were counting their chicken before he was hatched—no, smashed....
He wasn’t done yet!
Not by any manner of means!
A wave of great cheerfulness and confidence buoyed up Peter.
He felt equal to any enterprise.
Should he drop and let the bawling Boche have a round or so?
And there was a Hun machine smashed upside down on the ground.
Was that the second fellow?
Flick!
a bullet!
Wiser counsels came to Peter.
This was no place for a sick and giddy man with a smashed and bleeding wrist.
He must get away.
Up!
Which way was west?
West?
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
But where had the sun got to?
It was hidden by his wing.
Shadows!
The shadows would be pointing north-east, that was the tip....
Up!
There were the Boche trenches.
No, Boche reserve trenches....
Going west, going west....
Rip!
Snap!
Bullet through the wing, and a wire flickering about.
He ducked his head....
He put the machine up steeply to perhaps a thousand feet....
He had an extraordinary feeling that he and the machine were growing and swelling, that they were getting bigger and bigger, and the sky and the world and everything else smaller.
At last he was a monstrous man in a vast aeroplane in the tiniest of universes.
He was as great as God.
That wrist!
And this blood!
Blood!
And great, glowing spots of blood that made one’s sight indistinct....
He coughed, and felt his mouth full of blood, and spat it out and retched....
Then in an instant he was a little thing again, and the sky and the world were immense.
He had a lucid interval.
One ought to go up and help that Frenchman.
Where were they fighting?...
_Up_, anyhow!
This must be No Man’s Land.
That crumpled little thing was a dead body surely.
Barbed wire.
