Part 45

These Americans amused and interested him tremendously. He had met hardly any Americans before so as to talk to them at all intimately, but they suffered from an inhibition of French perhaps more permanent than his own, and so the three were thrown into an unlimited intimacy of conversation. At first he found these Americans rather fatiguing, and then he found them very refreshing because of their explicitness of mind. Except when they broke into frothy rapids of slang they were never allusive; in serious talk they said everything. They laid a firm foundation for all their assertions. That is the last thing an Englishman does. They talked of the war and of the prospect of America coming into the war, and of England and America and again of the war, and of the French and of the French and Americans and of the war, and of Taft’s League to Enforce Peace and the true character of Wilson and Teddy and of the war, and of Sam Hughes and Hughes the Australian, and whether every country has the Hughes it deserves and of the war, and of going to England after the war, and of Stratford-on-Avon and Chester and Windsor, and of the peculiarities of English people. Their ideas of England Peter discovered were strange and picturesque. They believed all Englishmen lived in a glow of personal loyalty to the Monarch, and were amazed to learn that Peter’s sentiments were republican; and they thought that every Englishman dearly loved a lord. “We think that of Americans,” said Peter. “That’s our politeness,” said they in a chorus, and started a train of profound discoveries in international relationships in Peter’s mind.

“The ideas of every country about every country are necessarily a little stale. What England is, what England thinks, and what England is becoming, isn’t on record. What is on record is the England of the ’eighties and ’nineties.”

“Now, that’s very true,” said the nearer American. “And you can apply it right away, with a hundred per cent. or so added, to all your ideas of America.”

As a consequence both sides in this leisurely discussion found how widely they had been out in their ideas about each other. Peter discovered America as not nearly so commercial and individualistic as he had supposed; he had been altogether ignorant of the increasing part the universities were playing in her affairs; the Americans were equally edified to find that the rampant imperialism of Cecil Rhodes and his group no longer ruled the British imagination. “If things are so,” said the diplomatist in the nearer bed, “then I seem to see a lot more coming together between us than I’ve ever been disposed to think possible before. If you British aren’t so keen over this king business——”

“_Keen!_” said Peter.

“If you don’t hold you are IT and unapproachable—in the way of Empires.”

“The Empire is yours for the asking,” said Peter.

“Then all there is between us is the Atlantic—and that grows narrower every year. We’re the same people.”

“So long as we have the same languages and literature,” said Peter....

From these talks onward Peter may be regarded as having a Foreign Policy of his own.

§ 17

And it was in this hospital that Peter first clearly decided to become personally responsible for the reconstruction of the British Empire.

This decision was precipitated by the sudden reappearance in his world of Mir Jelalludin, the Indian whom he had once thought unsuitable company for Joan.

Peter had been dozing when Jelalludin appeared. He found him sitting beside the bed, and stared at the neat and smiling brown face, unable to place him, and still less able to account for the uniform he was wearing. For Jelalludin was wearing the uniform of the French aviator, and across his breast he wore four palms.

“I had the pleasure of knowing you at Cambridge,” said Mir Jelalludin in his Indian staccato. “Cha’med I was of use to you.”

An explanatory Frenchman standing beside the Indian dabbed his finger on the last of Jelalludin’s decorations. “He killed von Papen after your crash,” said the Frenchman.

“You were that Frenchman——?” said Peter.

“In your fight,” said Mir Jelalludin.

“He’d have finished me,” said Peter.

“I finished _him_,” said the Indian, laughing with sheer happiness, and showing his beautiful teeth.

Peter contemplated the situation. He made a movement and was reminded of his bandages.

“I wish I could shake hands,” he said.

The Indian smiled with a phantom malice in his smile.

Peter went bluntly to a question that had arisen in his mind. “Why aren’t you in khaki?” he asked.

“The Brish’ Gu’ment objects to Indian flyers,” said Mir Jelalludin. “I tried. But Brish’ Gu’ment thinks flying beyond us. And bad for Prestige. Prestige very important thing to Brish’ Gu’ment. So I came to France.”

Peter continued to digest the situation.

“Of course,” said Jelalludin, “no commissions given in regular army to Indians. Brish’ soldiers not allowed to s’lute Indian officers. Not part of the Great White Race. Otherwise hundreds of flyers could come from India, hundreds and hundreds. We play cricket—good horsemen. Many Indian gentlemen must be first-rate flying stuff. But Gu’ment says ’No.’”

He continued to smile more cheerfully than ever.

“Hundreds of juvenile Indians ready and willing to be killed for your Empire”—he rubbed it in—“but—No, Thank You. Indo-European people we are, Aryans, more consanguineous than Jews or Japanese. Ready to take our places beside you.... Well, anyhow, I rejoice to see that you are recovering to entire satisfaction. It was only when I descended after the fight that I perceived that it was you, and it seemed to me then that you were very seriously injured. I was anxious. And mem’ries of otha days. I felt I must see you.”

Peter and the young Indian looked at one another.

“Look here, Jelalludin,” he said, “I must apologize.”

“But why?”

“As part of the British Empire. No! don’t interrupt. I do. But, I say, do they—do we really bar you—absolutely?”

“Absolutely. Not only from the air force, but from any commission at all. The lowest little bazaar clerk from Clapham, who has got a commission, is over our Indian officers—over our princes. It is an everlasting humiliation. Necessary for Prestige.”

“The French have more sense, anyhow.”

“They take us on our merits.

“If I _had_ a British commission,” said Jelalludin, “I should be made very uncomfortable. It is the way with British officers and gentlemen. The French are not so—particular.”

“At present,” said Peter, “I can’t be moved.”

“You improve.”

“But when I get up this is one of the things I have to see to. You see, Jelalludin, this Empire of ours—yours and mine—has got into the hands of a gang of gory Old Fools. Partly my negligence—as God said.”

“God?” said Jelalludin.

“Oh, nothing! I mean we young men haven’t been given a proper grasp of the Indian situation. Or any situation. No. This business of the commissions——! after all that you fellows have done here in France! It’s disgraceful. You see, we don’t see or learn anything about India. Even at Cambridge——”

“You didn’t see much of us there,” smiled the Indian.

“I’m sorry,” said Peter.

“I didn’t come to talk about this,” said Jelalludin, “it came out.”

“I’m glad it came out,” said Peter.

A pause.

“I mustn’t tire you,” said Mir Jelalludin, and rose to go.

Peter thanked him for coming.

“And your cha’ming sister?” asked the Indian, as if by an afterthought.

“Foster sister. She drives a big car about London,” said Peter....

Peter meditated profoundly upon that interview for some days.

Then he tried over the opinions of the Americans about India. But Americans are of little help to the British about India. Their simple uncriticized colour prejudice covers all “Asiatics” except the inhabitants of Siberia. They had a more than English ignorance of ethnology, and Oswald had at least imparted some fragments of that important science to his ward. Their working classification of mankind was into Anglo-Saxons, Frenchmen, Sheenies, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Dagoes, Chinks, Coloured People, and black Niggers. They esteemed Mir Jelalludin a Coloured Person. Peter had to fall back upon himself again.

§ 18

It contributed to the thoroughness of Peter’s thinking that it was some time before he could be put into a position to read comfortably. And it has to be recorded in the teeth of the dictates of sentiments and the most sacred traditions of romance that the rôle played by both Joan and Hetty in these meditations was secondary and incidental. It was an attenuated and abstract Peter who lay in the French hospital, his chief link of sense with life was a growing hunger; he thought very much about fate, pain, the nature of things, and God, and very little about persons and personal incidents—and so strong an effect had his dream that God remained fixed steadfastly in his mind as that same intellectual non-interventionist whom he had visited in the fly-blown office. But about God’s rankling repartee, “Why don’t _you_ exert yourself?” there was accumulating a new conception, the conception of Man taking hold of the world, unassisted by God but with the acquiescence of God, and in fulfilment of some remote, incomprehensible planning on the part of God. Probably Peter in thinking this was following one of the most ancient and well-beaten of speculative paths, but it seemed to him that it was a new way of thinking. And he was Man. It was he who had to establish justice in the earth, achieve unity, and rule first the world and then the stars.

He lay staring at the ceiling, and quite happy now that healing and habituation had freed him from positive pain, thinking out how he was to release and co-operate with his India, which had invariably the face of Mir Jelalludin, how he was to reunite himself with his brothers in America, and how the walls and divisions of mankind, which look so high and invincible upon the ground and so trivial from twelve thousand feet above, were to be subdued to such greater ends.

It was only as the blood corpuscles multiplied inside him that Peter ceased to be constantly Man contemplating his Destiny and Races and Empires, and for more and more hours in the day shrank to the dimensions and natural warmth of Mr. Peter Stubland contemplating convalescence in Blighty. He became eager first for the dear old indulgent and welcoming house at Pelham Ford, and then for prowls and walks and gossip with Joan and Oswald, and then, then for London and a little “fun.” Life was ebbing back into what is understood to be the lower nature, and was certainly the most intimate and distinctive substance of Mr. Peter Stubland. His correspondence became of very great interest to him. Certain letters from Joan, faint but pursuing, had reached him, those letters over which Joan had sat like a sonneteer. He read them and warmed to them. He thought what luck it was that he had a Joan to be the best of sisters to him, to be even more than a sister. She was the best friend he had, and it was jolly to read so plainly that he was her best friend. He would like to do work with Joan better than with any man he knew. Driving a car wasn’t half good enough for her. Some day he’d be able to show her how to fly, and he would. It would be great fun going up with Joan on a double control and letting her take over. There must be girls in the world who would fly as well as any man, or better.

He scribbled these ideas in his first letter to Joan, and they pleased her mightily. To fly with Peter would be surely to fly straight into heaven.

And mixed up with Joan’s letters were others that he presently sorted out from hers and put apart, as though even letters might hold inconvenient communion. For the most part they came from Hetty Reinhart, and displayed the emotions of a consciously delicious female enamoured and enslaved by one of the heroes of the air. She had dreamt of him coming in through the skylight of her studio, Lord Cupid visiting his poor little Psyche—“but it was only the moonlight,” and she thought of him now always with great overshadowing wings. Sometimes they were great white wings that beat above her, and sometimes they were thrillingly soft and exquisite wings, like the wings of the people in _Peter Wilkins_. She sent him a copy of _Peter Wilkins_, book beloved by Poe and all readers of the fantastic. Then came the news of his smash. She had been clever enough to link it with the death of von Papen, the Hun Matador. “Was that your fight, dear Peterkins? Did you _begin_ on Goliath?” As the cordials of recovery raced through Peter’s veins there were phases when the thought of visiting the yielding fair, Jovelike and triumphant in winged glory, became not simply attractive but insistent. But he wrote to Hetty modestly, “They’ve clipped one wing for ever.”

And so in a quite artless and inevitable way Peter found his first leave, when the British hospital had done with him, mortgaged up to hilt almost equally to dear friend Joan and to Cleopatra Hetty.

The young man only realized the duplicity of his nature and the complications of his position as the hospital boat beat its homeward way across the Channel. The night was smooth and fine, with a high full moon which somehow suggested Hetty, and with a cloud scheme of great beauty and distinction that had about it a flavour of Joan. And as he meditated upon these complications that had been happening in his more personal life while his attention had been still largely occupied with divinity and politics, he was hailed by an unfamiliar voice and addressed as “Simon Peter.” “Excuse me,” said the stout young officer tucked up warmly upon the next deck chair between a pair of crutches, “but aren’t you Simon Peter?”

Peter had heard that name somewhere before. “My name’s Stubland,” he said.

“Ah! Stubland! I forgot your surname. Of High Cross School?”

Peter peered and saw a round fair face that slowly recalled memories. “Wait a moment!” said Peter.... “_Ames!_”

“Guessed it in one. Probyn and I were chums.”

“What have you got?” said Peter.

“Leg below the knee off, damn it!” said Ames. “One month at the front. Not much of a career. But they say they do you a leg now better than reality. But I’d have liked to have batted the pants of the unspeakable Hun a bit more before I retired. What have you got?”

“Wrist chiefly and shoulder-blade. Air fight. After six weeks.”

“Does you out?”

“For flying, I’m afraid. But there’s lots of ground jobs. And anyhow—home’s pleasant.”

“Yes,” said Ames. “Home’s pleasant. But I’d like to have got a scalp of some sort. Doubt if I killed a single Hun. D’you remember Probyn at school?—a dark chap.”

Peter found he still hated Probyn. “I remember him,” he said.

“He’s killed. He got the M.M. and the V.C. He wouldn’t take a commission. He was sergeant-major in my battalion. I just saw him, but I’ve heard about him since. His men worshipped him. Queer how men come out in a new light in this war.”

“How was he killed?” asked Peter.

“In a raid. He was with a bombing party, and three men straggled up a sap and got cornered. He’d taken two machine-guns and they’d used most of the bombs, and his officer was knocked out, so he sent the rest of his party back with the stuff and went to fetch his other men. One had been hit and the other two were thinking of surrendering when he came back to them. He stood right up on the parados, they say, and slung bombs at the Germans, a whole crowd of them, until they went back. His two chaps got the wounded man out and carried him back, and left him still slinging bombs. He’d do that. He’d stand right up and bung bombs at them until they seemed to lose their heads. Then he seems to have spotted that this particular bunch of Germans had gone back into a sort of blind alley. He was very quick at spotting a situation, and he followed them up, and the sheer blank recklessness of it seems to have put their wind up absolutely. They’d got bombs and there was an officer with them. But they held up their hands—nine of them. Panic. He got them right across to our trenches before the searchlights found him, and the Germans got him and two of their own chaps with a machine-gun. That was just the last thing he did. He’d been going about for months doing stunts like that—sort of charmed life business. The way he slung bombs, they say, amounted to genius.

“They say he’d let his hair grow long—perfect golliwog. When I saw him it certainly _was_ long, but he’d got it plastered down. And there’s a story that he used to put white on his face like a clown with a great red mouth reaching from ear to ear—— Yes, painted on. It’s put the Huns’ wind up something frightful. Coming suddenly on a chap like that in the glare of a searchlight or a flare.”

“Queer end,” said Peter.

“Queer chap altogether,” said Ames....

He thought for a time, and then went on to philosophize about Probyn.

“Clever chap he was,” said Ames, “but an absolute failure. Of course old High Cross wasn’t anything very much in the way of a school, but whatever there was to be learnt there he learnt. He was the only one of us who ever got hold of speaking French. I heard him over there—regular fluent. And he’d got a memory like an encyclopædia. I always said he’d do wonders....”

Ames paused. “Sex was his downfall,” said Ames.

“I saw a lot of him altogether, off and on, right up to the time of the war,” said Ames. “My people are furniture people, you know, in Tottenham Court Road, and his were in the public-house fitting line—in Highbury. We went about together. I saw him make three or four good starts, but there was always some trouble. I suppose most of us were a bit—well, _keen_ on sex; most of us young men. But he was ravenous. Even at school. Always on it. Always thinking about it. I could tell you stories of him.... Rum place that old school was, come to think of it. They left us about too much. I don’t know how far you——.... Of course you were about the most innocent thing that ever came to High Cross School,” said Ames.

“Yes,” said Peter. “I suppose I was.”

“Curious how it gnaws at you once it’s set going,” said Ames....

Peter made a noise that might have been assent.

Ames remained thinking for a time, watching the swish and surge of the black Channel waters. Peter pursued their common topic in silence.

“What’s the sense of it?” said Ames, plunging towards philosophy.

“It’s the system on which life goes—on this planet,” Peter contributed, but Ames had not had a biological training, and was unprepared to take that up.

“Too much of it,” said Ames.

“Over-sexed,” said Peter.

“Whether one ought to hold oneself in or let oneself go,” said Ames. “But perhaps these things don’t bother you?”

Peter wasn’t disposed towards confidences with Ames. “I’m moderate in all things,” he said.

“Lucky chap! I’ve worried about this business no end. One doesn’t want to use up all one’s life like a blessed monkey. There’s other things in life—if only this everlasting want-a-girl want-a-woman would let one get at them.”

His voice at Peter’s shoulder ceased for a while, and then resumed. “It’s the best chaps, seems to me, who get it worst. Chaps with imaginations, I mean, men of vitality. Take old Probyn. He could have done anything—anything. And he was eaten up. Like a fever....”

Ames went down into a black silence for a couple of minutes or more, and came up again with an astonishing resolution. “I shall marry,” he said.

“Got the lady?” asked Peter.

“Near enough,” said Ames darkly.

“St. Paul’s method,” said Peter.

“I was talking to a fellow the other day,” said Ames. “He’d got a curious idea. Something in it perhaps. He said that every one was clean-minded and romantic, that’s how he put it, about sixteen or seventeen. Even if you’ve been a bit dirty as a schoolboy you sort of clean up then. Adolescence, in fact. And he said you ought to fall in love and pair off then. Kind of Romeo and Juliet business. First love and all that.”

“Juliet wasn’t exactly Romeo’s first love,” said Peter.

“Young beggar!” said Ames. “But, anyhow, that was only by way of illustration. His idea was that we’d sort of put off marriage and all that sort of thing later and later. Twenty-eight. Thirty. Thirty-five even. And that put us wrong. We kind of curdled and fermented. Spoilt with keeping. Larked about with girls we didn’t care for. Demi-vierge stunts and all that. Got promiscuous. Let anything do. His idea was you’d got to pair off with a girl and look after her, and she look after you. And keep faith. And stop all stray mucking about. ’Settle down to a healthy sexual peace,’ he said.”

Ames paused. “Something in it?”

“Ever read the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury?” asked Peter.

“Never.”

“He worked out that theory quite successfully. Married before he went up to Oxford. There’s a lot in it. Sex. Delayed. Fretting. Overflowing. Getting experimental and nasty.... But that doesn’t exhaust the question. The Old Experimenter sits there——”

“_What_ experimenter?”

“The chap who started it all. There’s no way yet of fitting it up perfectly. We’ve got to make it fit.”

Peter was so interested that he forgot his aversion from confiding in Ames. The subject carried him on.

“Any healthy young man,” Peter generalized, “could be happy and contented with any pretty girl, so far as love-making goes. It doesn’t strike you—as a particularly recondite art, eh? But you’ve got to be in love with each other generally. That’s more difficult. You’ve got to talk together and go about together. In a complicated artificial world. The sort of woman it’s easy and pleasant to make love to, may not be the sort of woman you really think splendid. It’s easier to make love to a woman you don’t particularly respect, who’s good fun, and all that. Which is just the reason why you wouldn’t be tied up with her for ever. No.”

“So we worship the angels and marry the flappers,” said Ames.... “I shan’t do that, anyhow. The fact is, one needs a kind of motherliness in a woman.”

“By making love too serious, we’ve made it not serious enough,” said Peter with oracular profundity, and then in reaction, “Oh! _I_ don’t know.”

“_I_ don’t know,” said Ames.

“Which doesn’t in the least absolve us from the necessity of going on living right away.”

“I shall marry,” said Ames, in a tone of unalterable resolve.

They lapsed into self-centred meditations....

“Why! there’s the coast,” said Ames suddenly. “Quite close, too. _Dark._ Do you remember, before the war, how the lights of Folkestone used to run along the top there like a necklace of fire?”

§ 19