§ 19

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 523that 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 524snatched 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 525jarred 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 cruel............