Atdtda [4]: A narrow escape, 112-113

[Paul Nightingale]

The new section begins with the Chums "ready to take once more to the sky";
without further ado, "the figurehead dispute [has now] been resolved
amicably". As time passes ("[a]fter a while") the episode will appear less
and less important, "a time of illness, or youthful folly". Lindsay offers a
good old-fashioned functionalist explanation for this momentary aberration,
or "contamination by the secular" (113): such experiences "provide
cautionary lessons". Hence, even conflict is good if we can learn from it
and move on, reaffirm shared values. Such a revisionist account, of course,
offers a writing of history that might be called whiggish; Darby insists
that he "kind of enjoyed it", as though it were a game played to rehearse
positions and relations. From Darby here, then, there is no "scowl[ing]"
(109) or "snarl[ing]" (111).

Lindsay emphasises that they are not like "ground people" (113); and the
section ends by looking ahead to a time ("shortly") when "the boys would
grasp unreflectively at a chance to transcend 'the secular' ..." etc. This
final paragraph invokes the omniscient narrator who opened the novel, not
least in the insistence that they are still "boys". Such cracks that have
appeared have been papered over, but at a "cost" yet to be determined.