For some seconds solemnity hung about them. Then Peter turned upon Miss Jepson. “Do you want a kiss?” said Peter....
Miss Jepson was all for kissing, and then with a laugh and an effect of escape Peter had gone ... into the outer world ... into the outer air....
§ 13
He flew to France the next day, above the grey and shining stretches of water and two little anxious ships, and he sent Joan a cheerful message on a picture-postcard of a shell-smashed church to tell of his safe arrival.
Joan was dismayed. In war time we must not brood on death, one does not think of death if one can help it; it is the chance that wrecks all calculations; but the fear of death had fallen suddenly upon all her plans. And what was there left now of all her plans? She might write him letters.
Death is more terrible to a girl in love than to any other living thing. “If he dies,” said Joan, “I am killed. I shall be worse than a widow—an Indian girl widow. Suttee; what will be left of me but ashes?... Some poor dregs of Joan carrying on a bankrupt life.... No me....”
There was nothing for it but to write him letters. And Joan found those letters incredibly difficult to write. All lightness had gone from her touch. After long and tiring days with her car she sat writing and tearing up and beginning again. It was so difficult now to write to him, to be easy in manner and yet insidious. She wanted still to seem his old companion, and yet to hint subtly at the new state of things. “There’s a dull feeling now you’ve gone out of England, Peter,” she wrote. “I’ve never had company I cared for in all the world as I care for yours.” And, “I shall count the days to your leave, Peter, as soon as I know how many to count. I didn’t guess before that you were a sort of necessity to me.” Over such sentences, sentences that must have an edge and yet not be too bold, sentences full of tenderness and above all suspicion of “soppiness,” Joan pondered like a poet writing a sonnet....
But letters went slowly, and life and death hustled along together very swiftly in the days of the great war....
§ 14
Joan’s mind was full of love and life and the fear of losing them, but Peter was thinking but little of love and life; he was secretly preoccupied with the thought, the forbidden thought, of death, and with the strangeness of war and of this earth seen from an aeroplane ten thousand feet or so above the old battlefields of mankind. He was seeing the world in plan, and realizing what a flat and shallow thing it was. On clear days the circuit of the world he saw had a circumference of hundreds of miles, night flying was a journey amidst the stars with the little black planet far away; there was no former achievement of the race that did not seem to him now like a miniature toy set out upon the floor of an untidy nursery. He had beaten up towards the very limits of life and air, to the clear thin air of twenty-two or twenty-three thousand feet; he had been in the blinding sunlight when everything below was still asleep in the blue of dawn.