Chapter THE TENTH: A Searching of Schoolmasters (12)

“Ends on Monday,” lied Peter.

For some moments it looked as though Joan meant to make that last week-end a black one. “That doesn’t give us much time together,” said Joan, and her voice which had soared now crawled the earth.... “I’m sorry.”

Just for a moment she hung, a dark and wounded Joan, downcast and thoughtful; and then turned and put her arms akimbo, and looked at him and smiled awry. “Well, old Peter, then we’ve got to make the best use of our time. It’s your Birf Day, sort of; it’s your Bank Holiday, dear; it’s every blessed thing for you—such time as we have together. Before they take you off again. I think they’re greedy, but it can’t be helped. Can it, Peter?”

“It can’t be helped,” said Peter. “No.”

They paused.

“What shall we do?” said Joan. “The program’s got to be cut down. Shall we still try tennis?”

“I want to. I don’t see why this wrist——” He held it out and rotated it.

“Good old arm!” said Joan, and ran a hand along it.

“I’ll go and change these breeches and things,” said Joan. “And get myself female. Gods, Peter! the craving to get into clothes that are really flexible and translucent!”

She went to the staircase and then turned on Peter.

“Peter,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Go out and stand on the lawn and tighten up the net. Now.”

“Why?”

“Then I can see you from my window while I’m changing. I don’t want to waste a bit of you.”

She went up four steps and stopped and looked at him over her shoulder.

“I want as much as I can get of you, Petah,” she said.

“I wish I’d known about that week,” said Peter stupidly.

“_Exactly!_” said Joan to herself, and flitted up the staircase.

§ 20

Joan, Mrs. Moxton perceived that afternoon, had a swift and angry fight with her summer wardrobe. Both the pink gingham and the white drill had been tried on and flung aside, and she had decided at last upon a rather jolly warm blue figured voile with a belt of cherry-coloured ribbon that suited her brown skin and black hair better than those weaker supports. She had evidently opened every drawer in her room in a hasty search for white silk stockings.

When she came out into the sunshine of the garden Peter’s eyes told her she had guessed the right costume.

Oswald was standing up on his crutches and smiling, and Peter was throwing up a racquet and catching it again with one hand.

“Thank God for a left-handed childhood!” said Peter. “I’m going to smash you, Joan.”

“I forgot about that,” said Joan. “But you aren’t going to smash me, old Petah.”

When tea-time came they were still fighting the seventh vantage game, and Joan was up.

They came and sat at the tea-table, and Joan as she poured the tea reflected that a young man in white flannels, flushed and a little out of breath, with his white silk shirt wide open at the neck, was a more beautiful thing than the most beautiful woman alive. And her dark eyes looked at the careless and exhausted Peter, that urgent and insoluble problem, while she counted, “Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-one—about forty-one hours. How the devil shall I do it?”

It wasn’t to be done at tennis anyhow, and she lost the next three games running without apparent effort, and took Peter by the arm and walked him about the garden, discoursing on flying. “I must teach you to fly,” said Peter. “Often when I’ve been up alone I’ve thought, ’Some day I’ll teach old Joan.’”

“That’s a promise, Petah.”

“Sure,” said Peter, who had not suffered next to two Americans for nothing.

“I’ve got it in writing,” said Joan.

“I’d rather learn from you than any one,” said she.

Peter discoursed of stunts....

They spent a long golden time revisiting odd corners in which they had played together. They went down the village and up to the church and round the edge of the wood, and there they came upon and devoured a lot of blackberries, and then they went down to the mill pond and sat for a time in Baker’s boat. Then they got at cross purposes about dressing for dinner. Joan wanted to dress very much. She wanted to remind Peter that there were prettier arms in the world than Hetty Reinhart’s, and a better modelled neck and shoulders. She had a new dress of ivory silk with a broad belt of velvet that echoed the bright softness of her eyes and hair. But Peter would not let her dress. He did not want to dress himself. “And you couldn’t look prettier, Joan, than you do in that blue thing. It’s so _like_ you.”

And as Joan couldn’t explain that the frock kept her a jolly girl he knew while the dress would have shown him the beautiful woman he had to discover, she lost that point in the game. And tomorrow was Sunday, when Pelham Ford after the good custom of England never dressed for dinner.

Afterwards she thought how easily she might have overruled him.

Joan’s plans for the evening were dashed by this costume failure. She had relied altogether on the change of personality into something rich and strange, that the ivory dress was to have wrought. She could do nothing to develop the situation. Everything seemed to be helping to intensify her sisterliness. Oswald was rather seedy, and the three of them played Auction Bridge with a dummy. She had meant to sit up with Peter, but it didn’t work out like that.

“Good night, Petah dear,” she said outside her bedroom door with the candlelight shining red between the fingers of her hand.

“Good night, old Joan,” he said from his door-mat, with an infinite friendliness in his voice.

You cannot kiss a man good night suddenly when he is fifteen yards away....

She closed the door behind her softly, put down her candle, and began to walk about her room and swear in an entirely unladylike fashion. Then she went over to the open window, wringing her hands. “How am I to _do_ it?” she said. “How am I to _do_ it? The situation’s preposterous. He’s mine. And I might be his sister!”

“Shall I make a declaration?”

“I suppose Hetty did.”

But all the cunning of Joan was unavailing against the invisible barriers to passion between herself and Peter. They spent a long Sunday of comradeship, and courage and opportunity alike failed. The dawn on Monday morning found a white and haggard Joan pacing her floor, half minded to attempt a desperate explanation forthwith in Peter’s bedroom with a suddenly awakened Peter. Only her fear of shocking him and failing restrained her. She raved. She indulged in absurd soliloquies and still absurder prayers. “Oh, God, give me my Peter,” she prayed. “__Give me my Peter!__”

§ 21

Monday broke clear and fine, with a September freshness in the sunshine. Breakfast was an awkward meal; Peter was constrained, Oswald was worried by a sense of advice and counsels not given; Joan felt the situation slipping from her helpless grasp. It was with a sense of relief that at last she put on her khaki overcoat to drive Peter to the station. “This is the end,” sang in Joan’s mind. “This is the end.” She glanced at the mirror in the hall and saw that the fur collar was not unfriendly to her white neck and throat. She was in despair, but she did not mean to let it become an unbecoming despair—at least until Peter had departed. The end was still incomplete. She had something stern and unpleasant to say to Peter before they parted, but she did not mean to look stern or unpleasant while she said it. Peter, she noted with a gleam of satisfaction, was in low spirits. He was sorry to go. He was ashamed of himself, but also he was sorry. That was something, at any rate, to have achieved. But he was going—nevertheless.

She brought round the little Singer to the door. She started the engine with a competent swing and got in. The maids came with Peter’s portmanteau and belongings. “This is the end,” said Joan to herself, touching her accelerator and with her hand ready to release the brake. “All aboard?” said Joan aloud.

Peter shook hands with Oswald over the side of the car, and glanced from him to the house and back at him. “I wish I could stay longer, sir,” said Peter.

“There’s many days to come yet,” said Oswald. For we never mention death before death in war time; we never let ourselves think of it before it comes or after it has come.

“So long, Nobby!”

“Good luck, Peter!”

Joan put the car into gear, and steered out into the road.

“The water-splash is lower than ever I’ve seen it,” said Peter.

They ran down the road to the station almost in silence. “These poplars have got a touch of autumn in them already,” said Peter.

“It’s an early year,” said Joan.

“The end, the end!” sang the song in Joan’s brain. “But I’ll tell him all the same.”...

But she did not tell him until they could hear the sound of the approaching train that was to cut the thread of everything for Joan. They walked together up the little platform to the end.

“I’m sorry you’re going,” said Joan.

“I’m infernally sorry. If I’d known you’d get this week——”

“Would that have altered it?” she said sharply.

“No. I suppose it wouldn’t,” he fenced, just in time to save himself.

The rattle of the approaching train grew suddenly loud. It was round the bend.

Joan spoke in a perfectly even voice. “I know you have been lying, 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

It was the third of April in 1918, the Wednesday after Easter, and the war had now lasted three years and eight months. It had become the aching habit of the whole world. Throughout the winter it had been for the most part a great and terrible boredom, but now a phase of acute anxiety was beginning. The “Kaiser’s Battle” was raging in France; news came through sparingly; but it was known that General Gough had lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns, and vast stores of ammunition and railway material. It was rumoured that he had committed suicide. But the standards of Tory England differ from those of Japan. Through ten sanguinary days, in a vaster Inkerman, the common men of Britain, reinforced by the French, had fought and died to restore the imperilled line. It was by no means certain yet that they had succeeded. It seemed possible that the French and British armies would be broken apart, and Amiens and Paris lost. Oswald’s mind was still dark with apprehension.

The particular anxieties of this crisis accentuated the general worry and inconveniences of the time, and deepened Oswald’s conviction of an incredible incompetence in both the political and military leadership of his country. In spite of every reason he had to the contrary, he had continued hitherto to hope for some bright dramatic change in the course of events; he had experienced a continually recurring disappointment with each morning’s paper. His intelligence told him that all the inefficiency, the confusion, the cheap and bad government by press and intrigue, were the necessary and inevitable consequences of a neglect of higher education for the past fifty years; these defects were now in the nature of things, almost as much as the bleakness of an English February or the fogs of a London November, but his English temperament had refused hitherto to accept the decision of his intelligence. Now for the first time he could see the possibility of an ultimate failure in the war. To this low level of achievement, he perceived, a steadfast contempt for thought and science and organization had brought Britain; at this low level Britain had now to struggle through the war, blundering, talking, and thinking confusedly, suffering enormously—albeit so sound at heart. It was a humiliating realization. At any rate she could still hope to struggle through; the hard-won elementary education of the common people, the stout heart and sense of the common people, saved her gentlefolk from the fate of their brother inefficients in Russia. But every day he fretted afresh at the costly and toilsome continuance of an effort that a little more courage and wisdom in high places on the allied side, a little more knowledge and clear thinking, might have brought to an entirely satisfactory close in 1917.

For a man of his age, wounded, disappointed, and a chronic invalid, there was considerable affliction in the steadily increasing hardships of the Fourth Year. A number of petty deprivations at which a healthy man might have scoffed, intensified his physical discomfort. There had been a complete restriction of his supply of petrol, the automobile now hung in its shed with its tyres removed, and the railway service to London had been greatly reduced. He could not get up to London now to consult books or vary his moods without a slow and crowded and fatiguing journey; he was more and more confined to Pelham Ford. He had been used to read and work late into the night, but now his home was darkened in the evening and very cheerless; there was no carbide for the acetylene installation, and a need for economy in paraffin. For a time he had been out of coal, and unable to get much wood because of local difficulties about cartage, and for some weeks he had had to sit in his overcoat and read and write by candlelight. Now, however, that distress had been relieved by the belated delivery of a truckload of coal. And another matter that may seem trivial in history, was by no means trivial in relation to his moods. In the spring of 1918 the food supply of Great Britain was at its lowest point. Lord Rhondda was saving the situation at the eleventh hour. The rationing of meat had affected Oswald’s health disagreeably. He had long ago acquired the habit of living upon chops and cutlets and suchlike concentrated nourishment, and he found it difficult to adapt himself now to the bulky insipidity of a diet that was, for a time, almost entirely vegetarian. For even fish travels by long routes to Hertfordshire villages. The frequent air raids of that winter were also an added nervous irritation. In the preceding years of the war there had been occasional Zeppelin raids, the Zeppelins had been audible at Pelham Ford on several occasions and once Hertford had suffered from their bombs; but those expeditions had ended at last in a series of disasters to the invaders, and they had never involved the uproar and tension of the Gotha raids that began in the latter half of 1917. These latter raids had to be met by an immense barrage of anti-aircraft guns round London, a barrage which rattled every window at Pelham Ford, lit the sky with star shells, and continued intermittently sometimes for four or five hours. Oswald would lie awake throughout that thudding conflict, watching the distant star shells and searchlights through the black tree boughs outside his open window, and meditating drearily upon the manifest insanity of mankind....

He was now walking up and down his lawn, waiting until it should be time to start for the station with Joan to meet Peter.

For Peter, convalescent again and no longer fit for any form of active service—he was lamed now as well as winged—was to take up a minor administrative post next week at Adastral House, and he was coming down for a few days at Pelham Ford before carrying his wife off for good to a little service flat they had found in an adapted house in the Avenue Road. They had decided not to live at The Ingle-Nook, although Arthur had built it to become Peter’s home, but to continue the tenancy of Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe. They did not want to disturb those two ladies, whose nervous systems, by no means stable at the best of times, were now in a very shaken condition. Aunt Phyllis was kept busy restraining Aunt Phœbe from inflicting lengthy but obscure prophetic messages upon most of the prominent people of the time. To these daily activities Aunt Phœbe added an increasing habit of sleep-walking that broke the nightly peace of Aunt Phyllis. She would wander through the moonlit living rooms gesticulating strangely, and uttering such phrases as “Blood! Blood! Seas of blood! The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; or “Murder most foul!”

She had a fixed idea that it was her business to seek out the Kaiser and either scold him or kill him—or perhaps do both. She held that it was the duty of women to assassinate. Men might fight battles, it was their stupid way; but surely women were capable of directer things. If some woman were to kill any man who declared war directly he declared war, there would be a speedy end to war. She could not, she said, understand the inactivity of German wives and mothers. She would spend hours over her old school German grammar, with a view to writing an “Open Letter to German Womankind.” But her naturally rich and very allusive prose was ill adapted to that sort of translation.

Many over-sensitive people were suffering more or less as Aunt Phœbe was suffering—from a sense of cruelty, wickedness, and disaster that staggered their minds. They had lived securely in a secure world; they could not readjust. Even for so sane a mind as Oswald’s, hampered as it was by the new poison his recent wound had brought into his blood, readjustment was difficult. He suffered greatly from insomnia, and from a haunting apprehension of misfortunes. His damaged knee would give him bouts of acute distress. Sometimes it would seem to be well and he would forget it. Then it would become painfully lame by day and a neuralgic pain at night. His moods seemed always exaggerated now; either he was too angry or too sorrowful or too hopeful. Sometimes he experienced phases of blank stupidity, when his mind became unaccountably sluggish and clumsy....

Joan was indoors now packing up a boxful of books that were to go with her to the new home.

He was feeling acutely—more acutely than he wanted to feel—that his guardianship was at an end. Joan, who had been the mistress of his house, and the voice that sang in it, the pretty plant that grew in it, was going now—to return, perhaps, sometimes as a visitor—but never more to be a part of it; never more to be its habitual presence. Peter, too, was severing the rope, a long rope it had seemed at times during the last three years, that had tethered him to Pelham Ford....

Oswald did not want to think now of his coming loneliness. What he wanted to think about was the necessity of rounding off their relationship properly, of ending his educational task with some sort of account rendered. He felt he owed it to these young people and to himself to tell them of his aims and of what he considered the whole of this business of education amounted to. He had to explain what had helped and what had prevented him. “A Valediction,” he said. “A Valediction.” But he could not plan out what he had to say that morning. He could not arrange his heads, and all the while that he tried to fix his thoughts upon these topics, he was filled with uncontrollable self-pity for the solitude ahead of him.

He was ashamed at these personal distresses that he could not control. He disliked himself for their quality. He did not like to think he was thinking the thoughts in his mind. He walked up and down the lawn for a time like a man who is being pestered by uncongenial solicitations.

In spite of his intense affection for both of them, he was feeling a real jealousy of the happiness of these two young lovers. He hated the thought of losing Joan much more than he hated the loss of Peter. Once upon a time he had loved Peter far more than Joan, but by imperceptible degrees his affection had turned over to her. In these war years he and she had been very much together. For a time he had been—it was grotesque, but true—actually in love with her. He had let himself dream—. It was preposterous to think of it. A moonlight night had made his brain swim.... At any rate, thank Heaven! she had never had a suspicion....

She’d come now as a visitor—perhaps quite often. He wasn’t going to lose his Joan altogether. But each time she would come changed, rather less his Joan and rather more a new Joan—Peter’s Joan....

Some day they’d have children, these two. Joan would sit over her child and smile down at it. He knew exactly how she would smile. And at the thought of that smile Joan gave place to Dolly. Out of the past there jumped upon him the memory of Peter bubbling in a cradle on the sunny verandah of The Ingle-Nook, and how he had remarked that the very sunshine seemed made for this fortunate young man.

“It _was_ made for him,” Dolly had said, with that faintly mischievous smile of hers.

How far off that seemed now, and how vivid still! He could remember Dolly’s shadow on the rough-cast wall, and the very things he had said in reply. He had talked like a fool about the wonderful future of Peter—and of the world. How long was that ago? Five-and-twenty years? (Yes, Peter would be five-and-twenty in June.) How safe and secure the European world had seemed then! It seemed to be loitering, lazily and basely indeed, but certainly, towards a sort of materialist’s millennium. And what a vast sham its security had been! He had called Peter the “Heir of the Ages.” And the Heritage of the Ages had been preparing even then to take Peter away from the work he had chosen and from all the sunshine and leisure of his life and to splinter his shoulder-blade, smash his wrist, snap his leg-bones with machine-gun bullets, and fling him aside, a hobbling, stiff, broken young man to limp through the rest of life....

§ 2

That was what his mind had to lay hold of, that was what he had to talk about, this process that had held out such fair hopes for Peter and had in the end crippled him and come near to killing him and wasting him altogether. He had to talk of that, of an enormous collapse and breach of faith with the young. The world which had seemed to be the glowing promise of an unprecedented education and upbringing for Peter and his generation, the world that had been, so to speak, joint guardian with himself, had defaulted. This war was an outrage by the senior things in the world upon all the hope of the future; it was the parent sending his sons through the fires to Moloch, it was the guardian gone mad, it was the lapse of all educational responsibility.

He had to keep his grasp upon that idea. By holding to that he could get away from his morbidly intense wish to be personal and intimate with these two. He loved them and they loved him, but what he wanted to say was something quite beyond that.

What he had to talk about was Education, and Education alone. He had to point out to them that their own education had been truncated, was rough ended and partial. He had to explain why that was so. And he had to show that all this vast disaster to the world was no more and no less than an educational failure. The churches and teachers and political forms had been insufficient and wrong; they had failed to establish ideas strong and complete enough and right enough to hold the wills of men. Necessarily he had to make a dissertation upon the war. To talk of life now was to talk of the war. The war now was human life. It had eaten up all free and independent living.

The war was an educational breakdown, that was his point; and in education lay whatever hope there was for mankind. He had to say that to them, and he had to point out how that idea must determine the form of their lives. He had to show the political and social and moral conclusions involved in it. And he had to say what he wanted to say in a large manner. _He had to keep his temper while he said it._

Oswald, limping slowly up and down his lawn in the April sunshine, with a gnawing pain at his knee, had to underline, as it were, that last proviso in his thoughts. That was the extreme difficulty of these urgent and tragic times. The world was in a phase of intense, but swift, tumultuous, and distracting tragedy. The millions were not suffering and dying in stateliness and splendour but in a vast uproar, amidst mud, confusion, bickering, and incoherence indescribable. While it was manifest that only great thinking, only very clear and deliberate thinking, could give even the forms of action that would arrest the conflagration, it was nevertheless almost impossible for any one anywhere to think clearly and deliberately, so universal and various were the compulsions, confusions, and distresses of the time. And even the effect to see and state the issue largely, fevered Oswald’s brain. He grew angry with the multitudinous things that robbed him of his serenity.

“Education,” he said, as if he called for help; “education.”

And then, collapsing into wrath: “A land of uneducated blockheads!”

No! It was not one of his good mornings. In a little while his steps had quickened and his face had flushed. His hands clenched in his pockets. “A universal dulness of mind,” he whispered. “Obstinacy.... Inadaptability.... Unintelligent opposition.”