And, “How can I look a woman in the face again?”
He stuck to his bandages as long as possible.
He learnt soon enough that some women could not look him in the face anyhow, and among them was one who should have hidden her inability from him at any cost.
And he was not only disfigured; he was crippled and unserviceable; so the Navy decided. Something had gone out of his eyesight; he could no longer jump safely nor hit a ball with certainty. He could not play tennis at all; he had ten minutes of humiliation with one of the nurses, protesting all the time. “Give me another chance and I’ll begin to get into it. Let me get my eye in—my only eye in. Oh, the devil! give a chap a chance!... Sorry, nurse. Now!... Damn! It’s no good. Oh God! it’s no good. What shall I do?” Even his walk had now a little flavour of precaution. But he could still shoot straight up to two or three hundred yards.... These facts formed the basis for much thinking on the part of a young man who had taken it for granted that he was destined to a bright and leading rôle in the world.
When first he realized that he was crippled and disabled for life, he thought of suicide. But in an entirely detached and theoretical spirit. Suicide had no real attraction for him. He meant to live anyhow. The only question therefore was the question of what he was to do. He would lie awake at nights sketching out careers that did not require athleticism or a good presence. “I suppose it’s got to be chiefly using my brains,” he decided. “The great trouble will be not to get fat and stuffy. I’ve never liked indoors....”
He did his best to ignore the fact that an honourable life before him meant a life of celibacy. But he could not do so. For many reasons arising out of his temperament and the experiences those women friendships had thrust upon him, that limitation had an effect of dismaying cruelty upon his mind. “Perhaps some day I shall find a blind girl,” he said, and felt his face doubtfully. “Oh, damn!” He perceived that the sewing up of his face was a mere prelude to the sewing up of his life. It distressed him beyond measure. It was the persuasion that the deprivation was final that obsessed him with erotic imaginations. For a time he was obsessed almost to the verge of madness.
He had moods of raving anger on account of this extravagant and uncontrollable preoccupation. He would indulge secretly in storms of cursing, torrents of foulness and foul blasphemies that left him strangely relieved. But he had an unquenchable sense of the need of a fight.
“I’ll get square with this damned world somehow,” he said. “I won’t be beaten.”
There were some ugly and dismal aspects in his attempt not to be beaten, plunges into strange mires with remorse at the far side. They need not deflect our present story.
“What’s the whole beastly game about anyhow?” he asked. “Why are we made like this?”