Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

“I mustn’t tire you,” said Mir Jelalludin, and rose to go.

Peter thanked him for coming.

“And your cha’ming sister?” asked the Indian, as if by an afterthought.

“Foster sister. She drives a big car about London,” said Peter....

Peter meditated profoundly upon that interview for some days.

Then he tried over the opinions of the Americans about India. But Americans are of little help to the British about India. Their simple uncriticized colour prejudice covers all “Asiatics” except the inhabitants of Siberia. They had a more than English ignorance of ethnology, and Oswald had at least imparted some fragments of that important science to his ward. Their working classification of mankind was into Anglo-Saxons, Frenchmen, Sheenies, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Dagoes, Chinks, Coloured People, and black Niggers. They esteemed Mir Jelalludin a Coloured Person. Peter had to fall back upon himself again.

§ 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, the 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. There must be girls in the world who would fly as well as any man, or better.