Part 46

The powers that were set over Peter’s life played fast and loose with him in the matter of leave. They treated him at first as though he was a rare and precious hero—who had to be saved from his friends. They put him to mend at Broadstairs, and while he was at Broadstairs he had three visits from Hetty, whose days were free, and only one hasty Sunday glimpse of Joan, who was much in demand at the Ministry of Munitions. And Oswald could not come to see him because Oswald himself was a casualty mending slowly at Pelham Ford. Hetty and Joan and returning health fired the mind of Peter with great expectations of the leave that was to come. These expectations were, so to speak, painted in panels. Forgetful of the plain fact that a Joan who was not available at Broadstairs would also not be available at Pelham Ford, the panels devoted to the latter place invariably included Joan as a principal figure, they represented leave as a glorious escape from war to the space, the sunshine, the endlessness of such a summer vacation as only schoolboys know. He would be climbing trees with Joan, “mucking about” in the boats with Joan, lying on the lawn just on the edge of the cedar’s shadow with Joan, nibbling stems of grass. The London scenes were narrower and more intense. He wanted the glitter and fun of lunching in the Carlton grill-room or dining at the Criterion, in the company of a tremendous hat and transparent lace, and there were scenes in Hetty’s studio, quite a lot of fantastic and elemental scenes in Hetty’s studio.

But the Germans have wiped those days of limitless leisure out of the life of mankind. Even our schoolboys stay up in their holidays now to make munitions. Peter had scarcely clambered past the approval of a medical board before active service snatched him again. He was wanted urgently. Peter was no good as a pilot any more, it was true; his right wrist was doomed to be stiff and weak henceforth, and there were queer little limitations upon the swing of his arm, but the powers had suddenly discovered other uses for him. There was more of Peter still left than they had assumed at first. For one particular job, indeed, he was just the man they needed. They docked him a wing—it seemed in mockery of the state of his arm—and replaced the two wings that had adorned him by one attached to the letter O, and they marked him down to join “balloons” at the earliest possible moment, for just then they were developing kite balloons very fast for artillery observation, and were eager for any available men. Peter was slung out into freedom for one-and-twenty days, and then told to report himself for special instruction in the new work at Richmond Park.

One-and-twenty days! He had never been so inordinately greedy for life, free to live and go as you please, in all his days before. Something must happen, he was resolved, something bright and intense, on every one of those days. He snatched at both sides of life. He went down to Pelham Ford, but he had a little list of engagements in town in his pocket. Joan was not down there, and never before had he realized how tremendously absent Joan could be. And then at the week-end she couldn’t come. There were French and British G.H.Q. bigwigs to take down to some experiments in Sussex, but she couldn’t even explain that, she had to send a telegram at the eleventh hour: “_Week-end impossible._” To Peter that seemed the most brutally offhand evasion in the world. Peter was disappointed in Pelham Ford. It was altogether different from those hospital dreams; even the weather, to begin with, was chilly and unsettled. Oswald had had a set-back with his knee, and had to keep his leg up on a deck chair; he could only limp about on crutches. He seemed older and more distant from Peter than he had ever been before; Peter was obsessed by the idea that he ought to be treated with solicitude, and a further gap was opened between them by Peter’s subaltern habit of saying “Sir” instead of the old familiar “Nobby.” Peter sat beside the deck chair through long and friendly, but very impatient hours; and he talked all the flying shop he could, and Oswald talked of his Africans, and they went over the war and newspapers again and again, and they reverted to Africa and flying shop, and presently they sat through several silences, and at the end of one of them Oswald inquired: “Have you ever played chess, Peter—or piquet?”

Now chess and piquet are very good pastimes in their way, but not good enough for the precious afternoons of a very animated and greedy young man keenly aware that they are probably his last holiday afternoons on earth.

Sentiment requires that Peter should have gone to London and devoted himself to adorning the marginal freedom of Joan’s days. He did do this once. He took her out to dinner to Jules’, in Jermyn Street; he did her well there; but she was a very tired Joan that day; she had driven a good hundred and fifty miles, and, truth to tell, in those days Peter did not like Joan and she did not like herself in London, and more especially in smart London restaurants. They sat a little aloof from one another, and about them all the young couples warmed to another and smiled. She jarred with this atmosphere of meretricious ease and indulgence. She had had no time to get back to Hampstead and change; she was at a disadvantage in her uniform. It became a hair shirt, a Nessus shirt as the evening proceeded. It emphasized the barrier of seriousness between them cruelly. She was a policeman, a prig, the harshest thing in life; all those pretty little cocottes and flirts, with their little soft brightnesses and adornments, must be glancing at her coarse, unrevealing garments and noting her for the fool she was. She felt ugly and ungainly; she was far too much tormented by love to handle herself well. She could get no swing and forgetfulness into the talk. And about Peter, too, was a reproach for her. He talked of work and the war—as if in irony. And his eyes wandered. Naturally, his eyes wandered.

“Good-night, old Peter,” she said when they parted.

She lay awake for two hours, exasperated, miserable beyond tears, because she had not said: “Good night, old Peter _dear_.” She had intended to say it. It was one of her prepared effects. But she was a weary and a frozen young woman. Duty had robbed her of the energy for love. Why had she let things come to this pass? Peter was her business, and Peter alone. She damned the Woman’s Legion, Woman’s Part in the War, and all the rest of it, with fluency and sincerity.

And while Joan wasted the hours of sleep in this fashion Peter was also awake thinking over certain schemes he had discussed with Hetty that afternoon. They involved some careful and deliberate lying. The idea was that for the purposes of Pelham Ford he should terminate his leave on the fourteenth instead of the twenty-first, and so get a clear week free—for life in the vein of Hetty.

He lay fretting, and the hot greed of youth persuaded him, and the clean honour of youth reproached him. And though he knew the way the decision would go, he tossed about and damned as heartily as Joan.

He could not remember if at Pelham Ford he had set a positive date to his leave, but, anyhow, it would not be difficult to make out that there had been some sort of urgent call.... It could be done.... The alternative was Piquet.

Peter returned to Pelham Ford and put his little fabric of lies upon Oswald without much difficulty. Then at the week-end came Joan, rejoicing. She came into the house tumultuously; she had caught a train earlier than the one they had expected her to come by. “I’ve got all next week. Seven days, Petah! Never mind how, but I’ve got it. I’ve got it!”

There was a suggestion as of some desperate battle away there in London from which Joan had snatched these fruits of victory. She was so radiantly glad to have them that Peter recoiled from an immediate reply.

“I didn’t seem to see you in London somehow,” said Joan. “I don’t think you were really there. Let’s have a look at you, old Petah. Tenshun!... Lift the arm.... Rotate the arm.... It isn’t so bad, Petah, after all. Is tennis possible?”

“I’d like to try.”

“Boats certainly. No reason why we shouldn’t have two or three long walks. A week’s a long time nowadays.”

“But I have to go back on Monday,” said Peter.

Joan stood stock still.

“Pity, isn’t it?” said Peter weakly.

“But why?” she asked at last in a little flat voice.

“I have to go back.”

“But your leave——?”

“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.