Kissing Kin (24 page)

And Jenny, unable to catch his eyes for any fleeting glance of mutual understanding, baffled by his lack of response to her own effervescence, confused by Calvert’s open idolatry of herself so shamelessly displayed against the seeming indifference of the man she had kissed in the lane, felt her evening crumbling beneath her just as the afternoon had begun by doing, and she was angry and afraid. Where were his tenderness and his laughter, where was the look she had brought back to his face which made him young and defenceless and her own? And she began to grope distractedly about in what had been said and done since their return for any cause of
offence on her part—should she have told them anyhow, to prove her pride in him?—or had she been too careless still and given it away somehow so that he was displeased?—or did he think she led Calvert on, or was she being too offhand with him, whom neither of them wanted to hurt? It was difficult to know how to behave, with both of them in the room. What had gone wrong again? What had she done? Or not done? She had never before known this bewilderment of unspecified guilt, this numbing uncertainty of herself and distruct of a beloved person—except with Gerald. And if Raymond, loving her, as
she had been so sure he did, could do exactly the same violence to her pride and her confidence as Gerald had done, what was the good of anything?

Once more the bright dream wilted in her hands and music died in her and Camilla was left playing alone, for her throat would not let her sing. It
isn’t
fun to be in love, Jenny argued passionately with Calvert’s light words of a few days before. Not with Raymond it wasn’t. And it was a perilous thing at best, to care too much what any one person thought or did. Raymond made it harder, you never knew what went on behind his brooding silences. To-night his face was heavy and sombre, his eyes were curtained by their thick lashes, his generous lips were closed on the pipe-stem. A new misgiving darted through Jenny’s troubled consciousness. She had been playing well, singing anything they asked for—pleased to entertain, happy in her modest drawing-room
accomplishments
. To Raymond, was that further evidence of the Duke’s daughter, educated, self-confident, perhaps to Raymond
conceited
with herself?

Jenny left the piano and wandered, suddenly listless, towards the sofa where Calvert lay, unconsciously turning for support to his steadfast admiration. Overwrought and let down, she wanted to cry, and despised herself accordingly. It’s no
use,
she thought, we’re too far apart to start with, I won’t go on, I won’t be made miserable again—by
anyone.
I won’t care, I won’t try, I won’t hope, any more. It doesn’t do. It’s too difficult for us, just as he says….

With Calvert’s eyes upon them both, Raymond had not moved nor glanced up as she passed close to his chair, Camilla’s fingers wandered on the keys, playing nostalgic bits of this and that, and drifting on. Calvert offered Jenny a ciragette, and though she seldom smoked she took it, and he struck a match. Raymond stirred, and gathering himself together knocked out his pipe. He had no words, even if he had felt free to speak, for the tumult inside him, and he dared not look at her with Calvert there.

Jenny had wangled permission to stay the night, and soon
after that they helped Calvert up the stairs and Raymond went into his room to help him to bed.

When she came down stairs in the morning the door to the front steps was open, and Raymond stood outside in the early sunlight with a pipe. He turned and saw her hesitating in the hall and said Good morning with his odd formality—and then, as he came towards her she saw that his face was alight with his love, and she stared up at him, her lips parted on words that never came.

“What’s the matter?” he asked in honest surprise.

“Why were you so strange last night?” she blurted, still confused and resentful.

“Strange?” He was at a loss. “What did I do?”

“You sulked all evening. I thought I must have done
something
you didn’t like.”

For a moment he looked at her without speaking, and she felt him exercising a deliberate patience and restraint. Then he glanced up the stairs behind her and out the open door, and moved her towards it, his fingers briefly touching her elbow. When they reached the steps outside, and his quick glance found a deserted drive and empty windows, he said very quietly, “You know I have to be careful, everyone was there. If I’d shown what I was feeling last night I’d have given the whole thing away.”

“You mean you—
liked
it?”

“Liked what?”

“The music—and the clowning I did. It wasn’t just showing off, I only—we always try to put on a show for Calvert, he enjoys it and his days are so long and dull the best we can do.”

“It was wonderful. I loved it.”

“You—?” She gave a breathless little laugh. “Oh, darling, I thought you didn’t! You were black as a thundercloud, you wouldn’t look at me, you didn’t say anything—”

“I didn’t dare. Don’t you see, I—just didn’t dare.” His eyes were steady. “I won’t ever forget a minute of last evening. I didn’t know you could sing like that, I—”

Sosthène came round the corner of the house with Mimi, still out of earshot. Raymond’s face changed at once, and he took a casual step back from her.

“I’ve got till Tuesday here,” he said very low. “Will I see you again?”

“Oh,
yes
—I’ll get some time off on Sunday somehow.”

“Remember, now—I’ve got to be careful. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Look out, he’s coming.”

Jenny recovered to answer Sosthène’s smiling greeting. Camilla ran downstairs calling out that Calvert was ramping and would Raymond please go up to him.

After breakfast they said a casual Goodbye, with everyone looking on, and Jenny departed on her bicycle for the Hall, sustained by the thought of Sunday.

But the few hours they had in each other’s company then passed like minutes, much as the evening had gone, and they faced the parting suddenly with no more time together. Jenny was longing for one more look from him, a dozen words, the briefest kiss, when she heard him saying to Camilla, “I’ll get the bike and ride part of the way with her, it’s getting dark.”

There was that dangerous moment when Camilla might have said she would go along on another bike, but Calvert was looking rather exhausted by too much exertion and she had no thought of leaving him. Awed by their good fortune, they left the house by the garden door and went round to the stables where the bicycles were. When they had ridden almost in silence to the same place in the lane, they stopped without words and faced each other gravely in the fading light.

“Don’t look like that,” he said compassionately. “I’ll have another leave, before I go to France.”

“I
will
see you again?”

“Yes, dear—yon will.” He glanced up and down the empty lane and took her in his arms. “It’s been wonderful—I’ll always remember those songs you sang.” He kissed her, hard, but briefly. “Don’t cry, Jenny. The war’s going to end some time.”

She clung to him silently, her face buried against him, tearless but trembling.

“Don’t, Jenny—what can I say—don’t.”

“You could say you love me!” she cried in almost hysterical exasperation, hating his deep reserve, longing perversely for evidence that he suffered too, and she beat his solid shoulder with one small clenched fist.

The result lifted her right off her feet, up into his arms, and the kiss he took while all the breath was squeezed out of her was so long and possessive that she broke it herself. But
Raymond
went on kissing her, again and again, till they were both spent and shaking, and then he said, “Now see what you’ve done,” and stepped back from her, his hand going automatically to the pocket where his cigarettes were.

Jenny dropped down on the grass at his feet, sitting in a little huddle with her face hidden, and heard the rasp of his lighter, and caught the first whiff of smoke on the still air. He did not sit down beside her, but took a few steps up and down the edge of the road, and his voice came coolly from a little distance.

“We mustn’t stay here any longer, they’ll be wondering about us. And you mustn’t go back to the Hall crying. Get up, Jenny.”

Slowly she got to her feet, her head down, groped for her hat on the grass, and came towards him where he stood beside the bicycles. He took the soft tweed hat from her hands and set it gently on her bright hair, bent to brush some leaves from her skirt, and then held the bicycle for her. She looked up piteously into his face and found in his eyes a flicker of almost paternal amusement.

“I told you it wasn’t safe to kiss a man in a dark lane,” he said gently. “Smile, Jenny.”

She tried to.

“Goodbye,” she whispered, and he shook his head.

“So long,” he said in correction.

Her bicycle was waiting. She mounted, watching his face as it was now, for her, and then rode away without looking back.

I
N
J
ULY THE FIGHTING
flared again in France, with a new German drive on Paris, which was held at the Marne with terrible losses on both sides. And then Foch made the first small move in his long-planned, long-awaited counter-attack which was designed to grow and grow, until almost
imperceptibly
at first the tide had turned, and the Germans began an orderly but still costly retreat. They were not beaten, they were still fighting hard. The Canadians were in it, and the tanks, and air fighting was intense and continuous. But the Allies
progressed
. Soissons was recovered, and Montdidier—Albert—Thiepval—the old familiar, agonizing names again, but now they were coming home.

In the midst of it, Archie got influenza on a trip to the north of England, and died before Virginia could reach his bedside. The family was stunned. Not Archie. Archie never made anything of being in the war, Archie had one of the dull, safe jobs. Archie with his light touch, his understatement, his straight-faced foolery—his diffident, flaming, shame-faced adoration of Virginia, which always so far outmatched his traditional British offhandedness. Archie’s children waited in a white-faced, tear-stained group for the arrival of their
white-faced
,
tearless mother. And Virginia, viewing with concern their piteous self-control, held out her arms to them and said, “It’s all over, darlings, and now we can have a good cry together—” And they did, and felt better for it.

Raymond was sent to France on twenty-four hours notice, without time to return to Farthingale for goodbyes. He had completed his training at Upavon with distinction and was a full-fledged Flying Officer with a gold stripe on
his sleeve and wings on his breast, and with fighter pilot qualifications. He would be thrown straight into the air with the best of the Royal Flying Corps against the best the Germans could produce.

Calvert swore with disappointment because they would not see him before he went, Camilla said it wasn’t fair, and Jenny turned white and became very busy during the ensuing days at the Hall, so they saw very little of her.

A man who has been handed a new single-seater war plane with a scarlet nose and told to fly it to a certain spot on the map of France and keep in formation while he does so, has a number of things to think about more immediate than the girl he loves or his own problematical future. There were five of them, and their Flight Commander, sitting in their machines on that sunny August morning in the south of England, with a mechanic facing each propeller. Raymond, first on the left, laid his hand on the control stick which was all his, and grinned over the side at the little group of pilots and ground people who had gathered to see them off, and whose turn was not yet or who had unfinished business with the Gothas which came to England. Despite the slight crinkle of nerves in the pit of his stomach, he was awash with pure joy. He had his wings, he had his machine, he knew his job, he was on his way.

The shout of the man who was waiting to spin the Flight Commander’s prop reached his ears on the warm wind—“Contaxer!” “Contact!” The Flight Commander’s engine roared, the prop spun, the chocks came away, he was up. Raymond fingered his stick. One more plane, before him.
Away. “
Contact!
” It was his own voice, answering. His own engine sang, the wind was in the wires, the stick came back, he was in the air, circling for height and position.

Easy, confident flyer though he was, it was a busy time. She was very sensitive on the controls, and to keep his place in the group took all his attention—not to overhaul or be
overhauled
, not to deviate from the course sidewise or upwards—a cloudbank awaited them over the Channel—down to three thousand feet where there was clear air again—a few ships on the water—and then both coasts were in view, England’s knotty with coves and capes, France’s sweeping in a long curve to the corner at Grisnez—Calais, there below, and a
right-hand
swing following their leader—the straight, white tree-bordered roads of France—the spider-web of canals—down at the depot of St. Gregoire for oil and petrol, and the man ahead bent an axle and tore a tyre in landing.

Raymond put her down lightly, with a conscious neatness, entirely in order. Later in the afternoon, with the damaged plane mended, they flew southward, along the British lines, into country which became a scorched wilderness of war—dented roads, mottled fields, burnt, scraggy woods. Ghostly Ypres was still recognizable. And then, with the brownish strip or trenches winding through the desolation it was familiar ground to Raymond—St. Eloi, and Messines, and Armentières. He leaned over the edge of the cockpit, peering down. He had come a long way since that time in the craters at St. Eloi. Arras, and the long, straight road from Albert to Bapaume—scrap-heaps that once were villages—the sparkling ribbon of the Somme—an aerodrome below—the Flight Commander headed for it, the group streaming behind him—an exhibition landing—and champagne in their honour at supper in the mess. He had come a long way from Jenny too.

They were posted to a fighting squadron whose job was to patrol inside the German lines and knock down anything they encountered there—no bombs to carry, no reconnaissance to make, no lumbering camera planes to escort—no red tape.
Just go out and look for trouble. You were sure to find it. Raymond began at once to feel at home.

The air war was on in earnest now. In 1914 the British pilots had gone up in anything that could get off the ground, with nothing to shoot but their own side arms. It was two years before they began to catch up, and after last spring’s Bloody April their losses were only now again evening up, with fast new planes and a new crop of pilots. They had discovered in the interim that German infantry didn’t like being fired on from above, to the extent of utter panic, and low-flying tactics against ground personnel had become a craze with this squadron.

That first evening in the mess Raymond heard how only yesterday a whole trenchful of Boches had surrendered to Fenton, there—a fair, tousled boy who chortled round his pipe at the memory—by waving handkerchiefs and anything white to stop him flying up and down two hundred yards above the trench and spraying them with machine-gun bullets. The lines lay close together there, and by waggling his wings and motioning with his arms he had managed to convey to his own side that they should move in and take possession. It was still funny in the mess. And then there was the story about the new baby pilot—glances at the recent arrivals—who flew berserk and dived through the Bapaume barrage of
anti-aircraft
fire and let off a hundred rounds into the town square at eight hundred feet and raced away pursued by rocket-shells—no, Bapaume had not surrendered—yet. Troop trains were fair game too—the engineers shut off the steam and tried to become invisible, but Middleton, there, had chased one for miles and finally derailed it before he ran out of ammunition.

Ground strafing was a welcome change from the
comparative
boredom of patrols and dogfights at ten thousand feet. Anyway, there were no rules to this game, nor any precedents, because no two air fights were ever alike. You could only go by hard experience and practice, learning as you went.
Raymond
knew now that he had come to the right place.

There were a few first precepts, of course, which every cub pilot was taught. Blind sporting courage wasn’t enough, you had to know wind and sun and deflection, you had to know what your own plane was capable of and to guess your enemy’s intention in time. Willingness was no good without
knowledge
, and on top of that experience. Always dive out of the sun; time and direction both go from you in cloud; the plane that fell behind in a group attack was cold meat to the Fokkers; in a general dogfight the man you get seldom sees you, and you seldom see the man who gets you; get on his tail and watch your own; never jump out when you catch fire—stay with it and put her down if you can. The rest of it you must learn the hard way, by trial and error.

Pilots on maiden flights nearly always tried to do too much and became a nuisance to their mates and sometimes casualties in consequence of over-eagerness. Mindful of his manners in his first flight over enemy lines, flying next to last in a group of five, Raymond nevertheless managed to land a burst in a scarlet Fokker which was already in difficulties, during a brisk scrap with eleven enemy planes. It went down in flames behind its own lines, and he knew then for the first time the sickness in his own stomach, the shuddering horror of fire which comes to every pilot sooner or later, and often grows to an obsession and a nightmare.
Shot
down
in flames.
Now he had seen it. He was still shaken, still adjusting himself to realities, when he felt his own plane hit and saw ominous holes in the left wing. Instinctively he yanked the stick and the plane stood on its tail while he emptied his drum into the Fokker as it roared past and over him. It was hit, but it turned and came at him again.

He dived sharply under the German’s fire, kicked over the rudder, pulled up hard, the stick in his tummy, the sky a dazzling blur, completed the loop and straightened out. The German was still there, and now the Flight Commander, anxious about his fledgling, was coming to join in. Raymond banked, gave him room, and circled back. His left wing was damaged, wires hung loose, a strut had been carried away, his
engine was shirking. The Flight Commander dived on the red Fokker, spitting bullets, and the German seemed to stumble in mid-air, and then fell like a dead leaf past Raymond’s plane, so near that he could see the blood on the pilot’s face. He let it go, the Flight Commander’s kill, and found that the other enemy planes were drawing away. Had enough, he thought with a sober sort of elation, and thereafter had all he could do to get back to the aerodrome right side up, shepherded by the rest of the group, all a little the worse for wear, but none missing.

Their aerodrome was next to a decrepit little village with a still beautiful church, and the squadron’s tents were pitched in a leafy orchard with field kitchens and mess hall adjacent. As Raymond left the hangar that first day, a muddy infantry battalion was arriving from the trenches for a few days’ rest and recuperation. The weary, grey-faced men distributed
themselves
without much commotion among the cottages and barns and went to sleep. Raymond regarded them with compassion and drank a cup of hot tea in his comfortable quarters with almost a feeling of guilt. He had been one of them once. He knew how it felt to come out of the Line too tired to do anything but drop in your tracks.

During the following week, the infantry, clean and shaved and polished, visited the aerodrome and watched the planes come in and crowded round to count the bullet holes. Mess courtesies were exchanged by the officers, and stories were told, and the gramophone ground through its repertoire. And then, in a pelting cold rain, to the tune of
The
Long,
Long
Trail,
they marched out again on their way back to the Line, jaunty enough now, but leaving a silence round the aerodrome, where no one would have changed places with them.

Raymond, with the rather enviable reputation of having been scared into a magnificent loop in the first minutes of his first fight, had settled down to the business of ground-strafing with that special group of pilots who were at their best under five hundred feet, machine-gunning whatever they spotted, troop columns, transport, trains, officers’ cars—those whose
particular joy it was to swoop along the trench or road, panicking the Boche.

He caught a large general once, riding alone in his dignity in the open tonneau of a staff-car—and flying at an angle which threatened to nose-dive the plane into the ground, Raymond drove the car into the ditch and the general and his chauffeur up the bank into the woods—“For his size, he sure made time uphill,” said Raymond later in the mess. He found a troop inspection by some Boche brass hats once, going full swing, and turned it into an ant-hill by diving on the field and frolicking back and forth two hundred feet above it till his ammunition gave out and five waspish Fokker triplanes bustled out to chase him off. He got away with some holes in his tail and a derisive waggle of his wings. Raymond always waggled at the end of a fight—salute to the fallen or swagger of triumph?—he flew alone, and no one knew. He never returned to the aerodrome with unused ammunition, but always disposed of it in a final zigzag over the enemy trenches and then hedge-hopped home. Finally, when he had been with the squadron about a month, there was the affair of the lavender Fokker.

The colour of the plane irked him—it had lavender wings and a pale green fuselage, which seemed a bit girlish for a war, and it always went for Raymond, or perhaps he was first to single it out. Anyway, the feud was on, and they spent a great deal of air time chasing each other’s tails on a dozen different days with no decisive result. By common consent in the squadron the lavender plane was regarded as Raymond’s particular pigeon, and they left it to him whenever it appeared.

There was a day when young Fenton got in the way and went down in a sickening spiral with smoke coming out of his engine. Raymond saw him drop, apparently out of control, and was taken with one of his stolid rages. He flew head-on at the lavender one with his gun blazing—they said later in the mess that he would have rammed the thing if its pilot had not lost his nerve and dived—but Raymond made a tight turn
almost on his wing-tip and found himself at last above and behind. There he stayed, spitting fire, while the German
zigzagged
and twisted and dived from seven to two thousand feet.

The duel took place directly above where Fenton’s shattered plane had landed in an open field far behind the German trenches. Again the Fokker dived, so steeply that it seemed unlikely he could ever come out of it in time, and Raymond roared after him. A few hundred feet above the ground the lavender plane miraculously flattened, and came down right side up. Raymond circled low, and saw that Fenton was clear of his burning plane and apparently unhurt, running towards the German.