'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