Part 51

There were two days yet before Peter went back to his work in London. Saturday dawned blue and fine, and Joan and he determined to spend it in a long tramp over the Hertfordshire hills and fields. He meant to stand no nonsense from his foot. “If I can’t walk four miles an hour then I must do two,” he said. “And if the pace is too slow for you, Joan, you must run round and round me and bark.” They took a long route by field and lane through Albury and Furneaux Pelham to the little inn at Stocking Pelham, where they got some hard biscuits and cheese and shandygaff, and came home by way of Patmore Heath, and the golden oaks and the rivulet. And as they went Peter talked of Oswald.

“Naturally he wants to know what we are going to do,” said Peter, and then, rather inconsequently, “He’s ill.

“This war is like a wasting fever in the blood and in the mind,” said Peter. “All Europe is ill. But with him it mixes with the old fever. That splinter at Fricourt was no joke for him. He oughtn’t to have gone out. He’s getting horribly lean, and his eye is like a garnet.”

“I love him,” said Joan.

But she did not want to discuss Oswald just then.

“About this new theology of yours, Peter,” she said....

“Well?” said Peter.

“What do you mean by this Old Experimenter of yours? Is he—_God_?”

“I don’t know. I thought he was. He’s—— He’s a Symbol. He’s just a Caricature I make to express how all _this_”—Peter swept his arm across the sunlit world—“seems to stand to me. If one can’t draw the thing any better, one has to make a caricature.”

Joan considered that gravely.

“I thought of him first in my dream as the God of the Universe,” Peter explained.

“You couldn’t love a God like that,” Joan remarked.

“Heavens, _no_! He’s too vast, too incomprehensible. I love you—and Oswald—and the R.F.C., Joan, and biology. But he’s above and beyond that sort of thing.”

“Could you pray to him?” asked Joan.

“Not to _him_,” said Peter.

“I pray,” said Joan. “Don’t you?”

“And swear,” said Peter.

“One prays to something—it isn’t oneself.”

“The fashion nowadays is to speak of the God in the Heart and the God in the Universe.”

“Is it the same God?”

“Leave it at that,” said Peter. “We don’t know. All the waste and muddle in religion is due to people arguing and asserting that they are the same, that they are different but related, or that they are different but opposed. And so on and so on. How can we know? What need is there to know? In view of the little jobs we are doing. Let us leave it at that.”

Joan was silent for a while. “I suppose we must,” she said.

“And what are we going to do with ourselves,” asked Joan, “when the war is over?”

“They can’t keep us in khaki for ever,” Peter considered. “There’s a Ministry of Reconstruction foozling away in London, but it’s never said a word to me of the some-day that is coming. I suppose it hasn’t learnt to talk yet.”

“What do you think of doing?” asked Joan.

“Well, first—a good medical degree. Then I can doctor if I have to. But, if I’m good enough, I shall do research. I’ve a sort of feeling that along the border line of biology and chemistry I might do something useful. I’ve some ideas.... I suppose I shall go back to Cambridge for a bit. We neither of us need earn money at once. It will be queer—after being a grown-up married man—to go back to proctors and bulldogs. What are _you_ going to do, Joan, when you get out of uniform?”

“Look after you first, Petah. Oh! it’s worth doing. And it won’t take me all my time. And then I’ve got my own ideas....”

“Out with ’em, Joan.”

“Well——”

“Well?”

“Petah, I shall learn plumbing.”

“Jobbing?”

“No. And bricklaying and carpentry. All I can. And then I am going to start building houses.”

“Architect?”

“As little as possible,” said Joan. “No. No beastly Architecture for Art’s sake for me! Do you remember how people used to knock their heads about at The Ingle-Nook? I’ve got some money. Why shouldn’t I be able to build houses as well as the fat builder-men with big, flat thumbs who used to build houses before the war?”

“Jerry-building?”

“High-class jerry-building, if you like. Cottages with sensible insides, real insides, and not so much waste space and scamping to make up for it. They’re half a million houses short in this country already. There’s something in building appeals to my sort of imagination. And I’m going to make money, Petah.”

“I love the way you carry your tail,” said Peter. “Always.”

“Well, doing running repairs hardens a woman’s soul.”

“You’ll make more money than I shall, perhaps. But now I begin to understand all these extraordinary books you’ve been studying.... I might have guessed.... Why not?”

He limped along, considering it. “Why shouldn’t you?” he said. “A service flat will leave your hands free.... I’ve always wondered secretly why women didn’t plunge into that sort of business more.”

“It’s been just diffidence,” said Joan.

“_Click!_” said Peter. “That’s gone, anyhow. If a lot of women do as you do and become productive for good, this old muddle of a country will sit up in no time. It doubles the output.... I wonder if the men will like working under you?”

“There’ll be a boss in the background,” said Joan. “Mr. John Debenham. Who’ll never turn up. Being, in fact, no more than camouflage for Joan of that ilk. I shall be just my own messenger and agent.

“One thing I know,” said Joan, “and that is, that I will make a cottage or a flat that won’t turn a young woman into an old one in ten years’ time. Living in that Jepson flat without a servant has brightened me up in a lot of ways.... And a child will grow up in my cottages without being crippled in its mind by awkwardness and ugliness.... This sort of thing always has been woman’s work really. Only we’ve been so busy chittering and powdering our silly noses—and laying snares for our Peters. Who didn’t know what was good for them.”

Peter laughed and was amused. He felt a pleasant assurance that Joan really was going to build houses.

“Joan,” he said, “it’s a bleak world before us—and I hate to think of Nobby. He’s so _ill_. But the work—the good hard work—there’s times when I rather like to think of that.... They were beastly years just before the war.”

“I hated them,” said Joan.

“But what a lot of stuff there was about!” said Peter. “The petrol! Given away, practically, along the roadside everywhere. And the joints of meat. Do you remember the big hams we used to have on the sideboard? For breakfast. A lot of sausages going sizzle! Eggs galore! Bacon! Haddock. Perhaps cutlets. And the way one could run off abroad!”

“To Italy,” said Joan dangerously.

“God knows when those times will come back again! Not for years. Not for our lifetimes.”

“If they came back all at once we’d have indigestion,” said Joan.

“Orgy,” said Peter. “But they won’t.”...

Presently their note became graver.

“We’ve got to live like fanatics. If a lot of us don’t live like fanatics, this staggering old world of ours won’t recover. It will stagger and then go flop. And a race of Bolshevik peasants will breed pigs among the ruins. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world to prevent that.”

“And we owe it to the ones who have died,” said Joan.

She hesitated, and then she began to tell him something of the part Wilmington had played in their lives.

They went through field after field, through gates and over stiles and by a coppice spangled with primroses, while she told him of the part that Wilmington had played in bringing them together; Wilmington who was now no more than grey soil where the battle still raged in France. Many were the young people who talked so of dead friends in those days. Their voices became grave and faintly deferential, as though they had invoked a third presence to mingle with their duologue. They were very careful to say nothing and to think as little as possible that might hurt Wilmington’s self-love.

Presently they found themselves speculating again about the kind of world that lay ahead of them—whether it would be a wholly poor world or a poverty-struck world infested and devastated by a few hundred millionaires and their followings. Poor we were certain to be. We should either be sternly poor or meanly poor. But Peter was disposed to doubt whether the war millionaires would “get away with the swag.”

“There’s too much thinking and reading nowadays for that,” said Peter. “They won’t get away with it. This is a new age, Joan. If they try that game they won’t have five years’ run.”

No, it would be a world generally poor, a tired but chastened world getting itself into order again.... Would there be much music in the years ahead? Much writing or art? Would there be a new theatre and the excitement of first nights again? Should we presently travel by aeroplane, and find all the world within a few days’ journey? They were both prepared to resign themselves to ten years’ of work and scarcity, but they both clung to the hope of returning prosperity and freedom after that.

“Well, well, Joan,” said Peter, “these times teach us to love. I’m crippled. We’ve got to work hard. But I’m not unhappy. I’m happier than I was when I had no idea of what I wanted in life, when I lusted for everything and was content with nothing, in the days before the war. I’m a wise old man now with my stiff wrist and my game leg. You change everything, Joan. You make everything worth while.”

“I’d like to think it was me,” said Joan idiomatically.

“It’s you....

“After all there must be some snatches of holiday. I shall walk with you through beautiful days—as we are doing today—days that would only be like empty silk purses if it wasn’t that they held you in them. Scenery and flowers and sunshine mean nothing to me—until you come in. I’m blind until you give me eyes. Joan, do you know how beautiful you are? When you smile? When you stop to think? Frowning a little. When you look—yes, just like that.”

“_No!_” said Joan, but very cheerfully.

“But you are—you are endlessly beautiful. Endlessly. Making love to Joan—it’s the intensest of joys. Every time—— As if one had just discovered her.”

“There’s a certain wild charm about Petah,” Joan admitted, “for a coarse taste.”

“After all, whether it’s set in poverty or plenty,” said Peter; “whether it’s rational or irrational, making love is still at the heart of us humans.”...

For a time they exulted shamelessly in themselves. They talked of the good times they had had together in the past. They revived memories of Bungo Peter and the Sagas that had slumbered in silence since the first dawn of adolescence. She recalled a score of wonderful stories and adventures that he had altogether forgotten. She had a far clearer and better memory for such things than he. “D’you remember lightning slick, Petah? And how the days went faster? D’you remember how he put lightning slick on his bicycle?”...

But Peter had forgotten that.

“And when we fought for that picshua you made of Adela,” Joan said. “When I bit you.... It was my first taste of you, Petah. You tasted dusty....”

“I suppose we’ve always had a blind love for each other,” said Peter, “always.”

“I hated you to care for any one but myself,” said Joan, “since ever I can remember. I hated even Billy.”

“It’s well we found out in time,” said Peter.

“_I_ found out,” said Joan.

“Ever since we stopped being boy and girl together,” said Peter, “I’ve never been at peace in my nerves and temper till now.... Now I feel as though I swung free in life, safe, sure, content.”

“_Content_,” weighed Joan suspiciously. “But you’re still in love with me, Petah?”

“Not particularly _in_ love,” said Peter. “No. But I’m loving you—as the June sun loves an open meadow, shining all over it. I shall always love you, Joan, because there is no one like you in all the world. No one at all. Making love happens, but love endures. How can there be companionship and equality except between the like?—who can keep step, who can climb together, joke broad and shameless, and never struggle for the upper hand? And where in all the world shall I find that, Joan, but in you? Listen to wisdom, Joan! There are two sorts of love between men and women, and only two—love like the love of big carnivores who know their mates and stick to them, or love like some man who follows a woman home because he’s never seen anything like her before. I’ve done with that sort of love for ever. There’s men who like to exaggerate every difference in women. They pretend women are mysterious and dangerous and wonderful. They like sex served up with lies and lingerie.... Where’s the love in that? Give me my old brown Joan.”

“Not so beastly brown,” said Joan.

“Joan _nature_.”

“Tut, tut!” said Joan.

“There’s people who scent themselves to make love,” said Peter.

“Experienced Petah,” said Joan.

“I’ve read of it,” said Peter, and a little pause fell between them....

“Every one ought to be like us,” said Joan sagely, with the spring sunshine on her dear face.

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” said Peter.

“Everybody ought to have a lover,” said Joan. “Everybody. There’s no clean life without it.”...

“We’ve been through some beastly times, Joan. We’ve run some beastly risks.... We’ve just scrambled through, Joan, to love—as I scrambled through to life. After being put down and shot at.”...

Presently Joan suspected a drag in Peter’s paces and decided at the sight of a fallen tree in a little grass lane to profess fatigue. They sat down upon the scaly trunk, just opposite to where a gate pierced a budding hedge and gave a view of a long, curved ridge of sunlit blue, shooting corn with red budding and green-powdered trees beyond, and far away a woldy upland rising out of an intervening hidden valley. And Peter admitted that he, too, felt a little tired. But each was making a pretence for the sake of the other.

“We’ve rediscovered a lot of the old things, Joan,” said Peter. “The war has knocked sense into us. There wasn’t anything to work for, there wasn’t much to be loyal to in the days of the Marconi scandals and the Coronation Durbar. Slack times, more despair in them by far than in these red days. Rotten, aimless times.... Oh! the world’s not done for....

“I don’t grudge my wrist or my leg,” said Peter. “I can hop. I’ve still got five and forty years, fifty years, perhaps, to spend. In this new world.”...

He said no more for a time. There were schemes in his head, so immature as yet that he could not even sketch them out to her.

He sat with his eyes dreaming, and Joan watched him. There was much of the noble beast in this Peter of hers. In the end now, she was convinced, he was going to be an altogether noble beast. Through her. He was hers to cherish, to help, to see grow.... He was her chosen man.... Depths that were only beginning to awaken in Joan were stirred. She would sustain Peter, and also presently she would renew Peter. A time would come when this dear spirit would be born again within her being, when the blood in her arteries and all the grace of her body would be given to a new life—to new lives, that would be beautiful variations of this dearest tune in the music of the world.... They would have courage; they would have minds like bright, sharp swords. They would lift their chins as Peter did.... It became inconceivable to Joan that women could give their bodies to bear the children of unloved men. “_Dear_ Petah,” her lips said silently. Her heart swelled; her hands tightened. She wanted to kiss him....

Then in a whim of reaction she was moved to mockery.

“Do you feel so _very_ stern and strong, dear Petah?” she whispered close to his shoulder.

He started, surprised, stared at her for a moment, and smiled into her eyes.

“Old Joan,” he said and kissed her....

§ 10

When he returned to the house on Monday morning after he had seen the two young people off, a burthen of desolation came upon Oswald.

It was a loneliness as acute as a physical pain. It was misery. If they had been dead, he could not have been more unhappy. The work that had been the warm and living substance of fifteen years was now finished and done. The nest was empty. The road and the stream, the gates and the garden, the house and the hall, seemed to ache with emptiness and desertion. He went into their old study, from which they had already taken a number of their most intimate treasures, and which was now as disordered as a room after a sale. Most of their remaining personal possessions were stacked ready for removal; discarded magazines and books and torn paper made an untidy heap beside the fireplace. “I could not feel a greater pain if I had lost a son,” he thought, staring at these untidy vestiges.

He went to his own study and sat down at his desk, though he knew there was no power of attention in him sufficient to begin work.

Mrs. Moxton, for reasons best known to herself, was interested in his movements that morning. She saw him presently wander into the garden and then return to the hall. He took his cap and stick and touched the bell. “I’ll not be back to lunch, Mrs. Moxton,” he called.

“Very well, sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, unseen upon the landing above, nodding her head approvingly.

At first the world outside was as lonely as his study.

He went up the valley along the high road for half a mile, and then took a winding lane under almost overhanging boughs—the hawthorn leaves now were nearly out and the elder quite—up over the hill and thence across fields and through a wood until he came to where the steep lane runs down to Braughing. And by that time, although the spring-time world was still immensely lonely and comfortless, he no longer felt that despairful sense of fresh and irremediable loss with which he started. He was beginning to realize now that he had always been a solitary being; that all men, even in crowds, carry a certain solitude with them; and loneliness thus lifted to the level of a sustained and general experience ceased to feel like a dagger turning in his heart.

Down the middle of Braughing village, among spaces of grass, runs the little Quin, now a race of crystalline water over pebbly shallows and now a brown purposefulness flecked with foam, in which reeds bend and recover as if they kept their footing by perpetual feats of dexterity. There are two fords, and midway between them a little bridge with a handrail on which Oswald stayed for a time, watching the lives and adventures of an endless stream of bubbles that were begotten thirty feet away where the eddy from the depths beneath a willow root dashed against a bough that bobbed and dipped in the water. He found a great distraction and relief in following their adventures. On they came, large and small, in strings, in spinning groups, busy bubbles, quiet bubbles, dignified solitary bubbles, and passed a dangerous headland of watercress and ran the gauntlet between two big stones and then, if they survived, came with a hopeful rush for the shadow under the bridge and vanished utterly....

For all the rest of the day those streaming bubbles glittered and raced and jostled before Oswald’s eyes, and made a veil across his personal desolation. His mind swung like a pendulum between two ideas; those bubbles were like human life; they were not like human life....

Philosophy is the greatest of anodynes.

“Why is a man’s life different from a bubble? Like a bubble he is born of the swirl of matter, like a bubble he reflects the universe, he is driven and whirled about by forces he does not comprehend, he shines here and is darkened there and is elated or depressed he knows not why, and at last passes suddenly out into the darkness....”

In the evening Oswald sat musing by his study fire, his lamp unlit. He sat in an attitude that had long become habitual to him, with the scarred side of his face resting upon and hidden by his hand. His walk had wearied him, but not unpleasantly, his knee was surprisingly free from pain, and he was no longer acutely unhappy. The idea, a very engaging idea, had come into his head that it was not really the education of Joan and Peter that had come to an end, but his own. They were still learners—how much they had still to learn! At Peter’s age he had not yet gone to Africa. They had finished with school and college perhaps, but they were but beginning in the university of life. Neither of them had yet experienced a great disillusionment, neither of them had been shamed or bitterly disappointed; they had each other. They had seen the great war indeed, and Peter knew now what wounds and death were like—but he himself had been through that at one-and-twenty. Neither had had any such dark tragedy as, for example, if one of them had been killed, or if one of them had betrayed and injured the other. Perhaps they would always have fortunate lives.

But he himself had had to learn the lesson to the end. His life had been a darkened one. He had loved intensely and lost. He had had to abandon his chosen life work when it was barely half done. He had a present sense of the great needs of the world, and he was bodily weak and mentally uncertain. He would spend days now of fretting futility, unable to achieve anything. He loved these dear youngsters, but the young cannot give love to the old because they do not yet understand. He was alone. And yet, it was strange, he kept on. With such strength as he had he pursued his ends. Those two would go on, full of hope, helping one another, thinking together, succeeding. The lesson he had learnt was that without much love, without much vitality, with little hope of seeing a single end achieved for which he worked, he could still go on.

He drifted through his memories, seeking for the motives that had driven him on from experience to experience. But while he could remember the experiences it was very hard now to recover any inkling of his motives. He remembered himself at school as a violent egotist, working hard, openly and fairly, for his ascendancy in the school games, working hard secretly for his school position. It seemed now as though all that time he had been no more than a greed and a vanity.... Was that fair to himself? Or had he forgotten the redeeming dreams of youth?...

The scene shifted to the wardroom of his first battleship, and then to his first battle. He saw again the long low line of the Egyptian coast, and the batteries of Alexandria and Ramleh spitting fire and the _Condor_ standing in. He recalled the tense excitement of that morning, the boats rowing to land, but strangely enough the incident that had won him the Victoria Cross had been blotted completely from his mind by his injury. He could not recover even the facts, much less the feel of that act.... Why had he done what he had done? Did he himself really do it?... Then very vividly came the memory of his first sight of his smashed, disfigured face. That had been horrible at the time—in a way it was horrible still—but after that it seemed as though for the first time he had ceased then to be an egotism, a vanity. After that the memories of impersonal interests began. He thought of his attendance at Huxley’s lectures at South Kensington and the wonder of making his first dissections. About that time he met Dolly, but here again was a queer gap; he could not remember anything very distinctly about his early meetings with Dolly except that she wore white and that they happened in a garden.

Yet, in a little while, all his being had been hungry for Dolly!