“I thought, I suppose, my arm was in splinters.  Or perhaps of the scraps and ends of rods and wires flying about us.  It is curious that while I remember the word I cannot recall the idea. . . .

“When I became conscious again the chief thing present in my mind was that all those fellows round were young soldiers who wouldn’t at all understand bad behaviour.  My arm was—­orchestral, but still far from being real suffering in me.  Also I wanted to know what Challoner had got.  They wouldn’t understand my questions, and then I twisted round and saw from the negligent way his feet came out from under the engine that he must be dead.  And dark red stains with bright red froth—­

“Of course!

“There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity.  I wasn’t sorry for him any more than I was for myself.

“It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable, vivid, but all right. . . .”

8

“But though there is little or no fear in an aeroplane, even when it is smashing up, there is fear about aeroplanes.  There is something that says very urgently, ‘Don’t,’ to the man who looks up into the sky.  It is very interesting to note how at a place like Eastchurch or Brooklands the necessary discretion trails the old visceral feeling with it, and how men will hang about, ready to go up, resolved to go up, but delaying.  Men of indisputable courage will get into a state between dread and laziness, and waste whole hours of flying weather on any excuse or no excuse.  Once they are up that inhibition vanishes.  The man who was delaying and delaying half an hour ago will now be cutting the most venturesome capers in the air.  Few men are in a hurry to get down again.  I mean that quite apart from the hesitation of landing, they like being up there.”

Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.

“Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it is not the ruler of experience.  That is what I am driving at in all this.  The bark of danger is worse than its bite.  Inside the portals there may be events and destruction, but terror stays defeated at the door.  It may be that when that old man was killed by a horse the child who watched suffered more than he did. . . .

“I am sure that was so. . . .”

9

As White read Benham’s notes and saw how his argument drove on, he was reminded again and again of those schoolboy days and Benham’s hardihood, and his own instinctive unreasonable reluctance to follow those gallant intellectual leads.  If fear is an ancient instinctive boundary that the modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to ignore and transcend, may this not also be the case with pain?  We do a little adventure into the “life beyond fear”; may we not also think of adventuring into the life beyond pain?  Is pain any saner a warning than fear?  May not pain just as much as fear keep us from possible and splendid things?