Part 43

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....

§ 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.