Fly Away Peter

Ashley arranges for Bert to take Jim up in the biplane, thinking it will delight him to be in the air amongst the birds. However, he’s wrong about this, since Jim is uninterested in climbing into the sky. In fact, he discovers that he’s quite afraid of going up in Bert’s aircraft, though he doesn’t voice this fear. Instead, he shows up at the agreed upon time and gets into the plane, which seems small and unwieldy. As he does so, he considers the fact that these machines have “entered a new dimension” in the past few months—while they used to be “toys of a boyish but innocent adventuring,” now they are “weapons” that have already dropped bombs in Europe. In fact, in just two weeks, Bert himself will join the military as a pilot.

When the biplane gets into the air, Jim looks down and sees that the aerial view of the swampland he often imagines is actually quite accurate. The experience is a “confirmation” that the image in his head is “a true picture and that he need never go up again.” Still, he thinks about this internal “map” and compares it to what the birds must have in their own heads, realizing just how extraordinary it is that these tiny creatures have such an intuitive sense of a vast geography. 

Around this time, people start responding to the war with a “new seriousness” brought about by their closeness to the increasing number of dead. Jim’s father suddenly starts talking about how he would gladly go to war if he were young enough, and Jim senses that the old man thinks he—Jim—“should be lost as well.” A “bitter” man, his father believes that Jim is “depriving him of his chance” to  be a part of “the new century.” Two weeks later, Jim gets drunk and signs up for the military, thinking that if he doesn’t go, he won’t understand how or why everything around him has changed.

Ashley doesn’t say much when Jim tells him he has signed up for the war, though it goes without saying that Jim’s job will be waiting for him when he returns. Miss Harcourt, on the other hand, seems hurt and angry. Nevertheless, she’s the one who ends up accompanying him to the train station when he leaves. As for his father, he finally becomes “sentimental,” giving his son some money and drawing him close. This makes Jim suddenly feel “as if a line had been drawn between the past” and future, “the two parts of his life,” the first of which he can see “clearly now” that he is leaving it. Within three months, after Julia gives birth to their first child, Ashley joins the war as an officer.