§ 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, 516the 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. 517There 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 518hailed 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 519came 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 bac............