Part 44

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. More barbed wire.

The engine was missing. Ugh! _That fairly put the lid on!_

Peter was already asleep and dreaming. The great blood spots had returned and increased, but now they were getting black, they were black, huge black blotches; they blotted out the world!

Peter, Peter as we have known him, discontinued existence....

It was an automaton, aided by good luck, that dropped his machine half a mile behind the French trenches....

§ 15

Peter had no memory of coming to again from his faint. For a long time he must have continued to be purely automatic. His flaming wrist was the centre of his being. Then for a time consciousness resumed, as abruptly as the thread of a story one finds upon the torn page of a novel.

He found himself in the midst of a friendly group of pale blue uniforms; he was standing up and being very lively in spite of the strong taste of blood in his mouth and a feeling that his wrist was burning as a match burns, and that the left upper half of his body had been changed into a lump of raw and bleeding meat. He was talking a sort of French. “_C’est sacré bon stuff, cet eau-de-vie Française_,” he was saying gaily and rather loudly.

“Haf some more,” said a friendly voice.

“Not half, old chap,” said Peter, and felt at the time that this was not really good French.

He tried to slap the man on the shoulder, but he couldn’t.

“_Bon!_” he said, “as we say in England,” and felt that that remark also failed.

Some one protested softly against his being given more brandy....

Then this clear fragment ended again. There was a kind of dream of rather rough but efficient surgery upon a shoulder and arm that was quite probably his own, and some genially amiable conversation. There was a very nice Frenchman with a black beard and soft eyes, who wore a long white overall, and seemed to be looking after him as tenderly as a woman could do.

But with these things mingled the matter of delirium. At one time the Kaiser prevailed in Peter’s mind, a large, foolish, pompous person with waxed moustaches and distraught eyes, who crawled up to Peter over immense piles of white and grey and green rotting corpses, and began gnawing at his shoulder almost absent-mindedly. Peter struggled and protested. What business had this beastly German to come interfering with Peter’s life? He started a vast argument about that, in which all sorts of people, including the nice-looking Frenchman in the white overall, took part.

Peter was now making a formal complaint about the conduct of the universe. “No,” he insisted time after time, “I will not deal with subordinates. I insist on seeing the Head,” and so at last he found himself in the presence of the Lord God....

But Peter’s vision of the Lord God was the most delirious thing of all. He imagined him in an office, a little office in a vast building, and so out of the way that people had to ask each other which was the passage and which the staircase. Old men stood and argued at corners with Peter’s girl-guide whether it was this way or that. People were being shown over the building by girl-guides; it was very like the London War Office, only more so; there were great numbers of visitors, and they all seemed to be in considerable hurry and distress, and most of them were looking for the Lord God to lodge a complaint and demand an explanation, just as Peter was. For a time all the visitors became wounded men, and nurses mixed up with the girl-guides, and Peter was being carried through fresh air to an ambulance train. His shoulder and wrist were very painful and singing, as it were, a throbbing duet together.

For a time Peter did seem to see the Lord God; he was in his office, a little brown, rather tired-looking man in a kepi, and Peter was on a stretcher, and the Lord God or some one near him was saying: “_Quel numéro_?” But that passed away, and Peter was again conducting his exploration of the corridors with a girl-guide who was sometimes like Joan and sometimes like Hetty—and then there was a queer disposition to loiter in the passages.... For a time he sat in dishabille while Hetty tried to explain God.... Dreams cross the scent of dreams.

Then it seemed to Peter’s fevered brain that he was sitting, and had been sitting for a long time, in the little office of the Lord God of Heaven and Earth. And the Lord God had the likeness of a lean, tired, intelligent-looking oldish man, with an air of futile friendliness masking a fundamental indifference.

“My dear sir,” the Lord God was saying, “do please put that cushion behind your poor shoulder. I can’t bear to see you so uncomfortable. And tell me everything. Everything....”

The office was the dingiest and untidiest little office it was possible to imagine. The desk at which God sat was in a terrible litter. On a side table were some grubby test tubes and bottles at which the Lord God had apparently been trying over a new element. The windows had not been cleaned for ages, they were dark with spiders’ webs, they crawled with a buzzing nightmare of horrible and unmeaning life. It was a most unbusinesslike office. There were no proper files, no card indexes; bundles of dusty papers were thrust into open fixtures, papers littered the floors, and there were brass-handled drawers—. Peter looked again, and blood was oozing from these drawers and little cries came out of them. He glanced quickly at God, and God was looking at him. “But did you really make this world?” he asked.

“I _thought_ I did,” said God.

“But why did you do it? _Why?_”

“Ah, _there_ you have me!” said the Lord God with bonhomie.

“But why don’t you exert yourself?” said Peter, hammering at the desk with his sound hand. “Why don’t you exert yourself?”

Could delirium have ever invented a more monstrous conception than this of Peter hammering on an untidy desk amidst old pen nibs, bits of sealing-wax, half-sheets of notepaper, returns of nature’s waste, sample bones of projected animals, mineral samples, dirty little test tubes, and the like, and lecturing the Almighty upon the dreadful confusion into which the world had fallen? “Here was I, sir, and millions like me, with a clear promise of life and freedom! And what are we now? Bruises, red bones, dead bodies! This German Kaiser fellow—an ass, sir, a perfect ass, gnawing a great hole in my shoulder! He and his son, stuffing themselves with a Blut-Wurst made out of all our lives and happiness! What does it mean, sir? Has it gone entirely out of your control? And it isn’t as if the whole thing was ridiculous, sir. It isn’t. In some ways it’s an extraordinarily fine world—one has to admit that. That is why it is all so distressing, so unendurably distressing. I don’t in the least want to leave it.”

“You admit that it’s fine—in places,” said the Lord God, as if he valued the admission.

“But the management, sir! the management! Yours—ultimately. Don’t you realize, sir——? I had the greatest trouble in finding you. Half the messengers don’t know where this den of yours is. It’s _forgotten_. Practically forgotten. The Head Office! And now I’m here I can tell you everything is going to rack and ruin, driving straight to an absolute and final smash and break-up.”

“As bad as that?” said the Lord God.

“It’s the appalling waste,” Peter continued. “The waste of material, the waste of us, the waste of everything. A sort of splendour in it, there is; touches of real genius about it, that I would be the last to deny; but that only increases the bitterness of the disorder. It’s a good enough world to lament. It’s a good enough life to resent having to lose it. There’s some lovely things in it, sir; courage, endurance, and oh! many beautiful things. But when one gets here, when one begins to ask for you and hunt about for you, and finds this, this muddle, sir, then one begins to understand. _Look_ at this room, consider it—as a general manager’s room. No decency. No order. Everywhere the dust of ages, muck indescribable, bacteria! And that!”

That was a cobweb across the grimy window pane, in which a freshly entangled bluebottle fly was buzzing fussily. “That ought not to be here at all,” said Peter. “It really ought not to exist at all. Why does it? Look at that beastly spider in the corner! Why do you suffer all these cruel and unclean things?”

“You don’t like it?” said the Lord God, without any sign either of apology or explanation.

“No,” said Peter.

“Then _change_ it,” said the Lord God, nodding his head as who should say “got you there.”

“But how are we to change it?”

“If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it,” said the Lord God, leaning back with the weariness of one who has had to argue with each generation from Job onward, precisely the same objections and precisely the same arguments.

“After all,” said the Lord God, giving Peter no time to speak further; “after all, you are three-and-twenty, Mr. Peter Stubland, and you’ve been pretty busy complaining of me and everything between me and you, your masters, pastors, teachers, and so forth, for the last half-dozen years. Meanwhile, is your own record good? Positive achievements, forgive me, are still to seek. You’ve been nearly drunk several times, you’ve soiled yourself with a lot of very cheap and greedy love-making—I gave you something beautiful there anyhow, and you knew that while you spoilt it—you’ve been a vigorous member of the consuming class, and really, you’ve got nothing clear and planned, nothing at all. You complain of my lack of order; where’s the order in your own mind? If I was the hot-tempered old autocrat some of you people pretend I am, I should have been tickling you up with a thunderbolt long ago. But I happen to have this democratic fad as badly as any one—Free Will is what they used to call it—and so I leave you to work out your own salvation. And if I leave you alone then I have to leave that other—that other Mr. Toad at Potsdam alone. He tries me, I admit, almost to the miracle pitch at times with the tone of his everlasting prepaid telegrams—but one has to be fair. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the Kaiser. I’ve got to leave you all alone if I leave one alone. Don’t you see that? In spite of the mess you are in. So don’t blame me. Don’t blame me. There isn’t a thing in the whole of this concern of mine that Man can’t control if only he chooses to control it. It’s arranged like that. There’s a lot more system here than you suspect, only it’s too ingenious for you to see. It’s yours to command. If you want a card index for the world—well, get a card index. I won’t prevent you. If you don’t like my spiders, kill my spiders. I’m not conceited about them. If you don’t like the Kaiser, hang him, assassinate him. Why don’t you abolish Kings? You could. But it was your sort, with your cheap and quick efficiency schemes, who set up Saul—in spite of my protests—ages ago.... Humanity either makes or breeds or tolerates all its own afflictions, great and small. Not my doing. Take Kings and Courts. Take dungheaps and flies. It’s astonishing you people haven’t killed off all the flies in the world long ago. They do no end of mischief, and it would be perfectly easy to do. They’re purely educational. Purely. Even as you lie in hospital, there they are buzzing within an inch of your nose and landing on your poor forehead to remind you of what a properly organized humanity could do for its own comfort. But there’s men in this world who want me to act as a fly-paper, simply because they are too lazy to get one for themselves. My dear Mr. Peter! if people haven’t taught you properly, teach yourself. If they don’t know enough, find out. It’s all here. All here.” He made a comprehensive gesture. “I’m not mocking you.”

“You’re not mocking me?” said Peter keenly....

“It depends upon you,” said the Lord God with an enigmatic smile. “You asked me why I didn’t exert myself. Well—why don’t _you_ exert yourself?

“Why don’t _you_ exert yourself?” the Lord God repeated almost rudely, driving it home.

“That pillow under your shoulder still isn’t comfortable,” said the Lord God, breaking off....

The buzzing of the entangled fly changed to the drone of a passing aeroplane, and the dingy office expanded into a hospital ward. Some one was adjusting Peter’s pillows....

§ 16

If his shoulder-blade was to mend, Peter could not be moved; and for a time he remained in the French hospital in a long, airy room that was full mostly with flying men like himself. At first he could not talk very much, but later he made some friends. He was himself very immobile, but other men came and sat by him to talk.

He talked chiefly to two Americans, who were serving at that time in the French flying corps. He found it much easier to talk English than French in his exhausted state, for though both he and Joan spoke French far above the average public school level, he found that now it came with an effort. It was as if his mind had for a time been pared down to its essentials.