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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13883 ***
+
+THE TREE OF HEAVEN
+
+by
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+Author of _The Belfry_, _The Three Sisters_, etc.
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+PEACE
+
+
+
+I
+
+Frances Harrison was sitting out in the garden under the tree that her
+husband called an ash-tree, and that the people down in her part of the
+country called a tree of Heaven.
+
+It was warm under the tree, and Frances might have gone to sleep there
+and wasted an hour out of the afternoon, if it hadn't been for
+the children.
+
+Dorothy, Michael and Nicholas were going to a party, and Nicky was
+excited. She could hear Old Nanna talking to Michael and telling him to
+be a good boy. She could hear young Mary-Nanna singing to Baby John.
+Baby John was too young himself to go to parties; so to make up for that
+he was riding furiously on Mary-Nanna's knee to the tune of the
+"Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major!"
+
+It was Nicky's first party. That was why he was excited.
+
+He had asked her for the third time what it would be like; and for the
+third time she had told him. There would be dancing and a Magic Lantern,
+and a Funny Man, and a Big White Cake covered with sugar icing and
+Rosalind's name on it in pink sugar letters and eight little pink wax
+candles burning on the top for Rosalind's birthday. Nicky's eyes shone
+as she told him.
+
+Dorothy, who was nine years old, laughed at Nicky.
+
+"Look at Nicky," she said, "how excited he is!"
+
+And every time she laughed at him his mother kissed him.
+
+"I don't care," said Nicky. "I don't care if I am becited!"
+
+And for the fifth time he asked, "When will it be time to go?"
+
+"Not for another hour and a half, my sweetheart."
+
+"How long," said Nicky, "is an hour and a half?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances had a tranquil nature and she never worried. But as she sat
+under her tree of Heaven a thought came that made a faint illusion of
+worry for her mind. She had forgotten to ask Grannie and Auntie Louie
+and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie to tea.
+
+She had come to think of them like that in relation to her children
+rather than to her or to each other.
+
+It was a Tuesday, and they had not been there since Friday. Perhaps, she
+thought, I'd better send over for them now. Especially as it's such a
+beautiful afternoon. Supposing I sent Michael?
+
+And yet, supposing Anthony came home early? He was always kind to her
+people, but that was the very reason why she oughtn't to let them spoil
+a beautiful afternoon for him. It could not be said that any of them
+was amusing.
+
+She could still hear Mary-Nanna singing her song about the
+Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major. She could still hear Old Nanna talking to
+Michael and telling him to be a good boy. That could only end in Michael
+being naughty. To avert naughtiness or any other disaster from her
+children was the end of Frances's existence.
+
+So she called Michael to come to her. He came, running like a little
+dog, obediently.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael was glad that he had been sent across the Heath to Grannie's
+house with a message. It made him feel big and brave. Besides, it would
+put off the moment when Mary-Nanna would come for him, to make him ready
+for the party. He was not sure that he wanted to go to it.
+
+Michael did not much like going to Grannie's house either. In all the
+rooms there was a queer dark-greenness and creepiness. It smelt of
+bird-cages and elder bushes and of Grandpapa's funeral. And when you had
+seen Auntie Edie's Senegal wax-bills, and the stuffed fish, and the
+inside of Auntie Louie's type-writer there was nothing else to see.
+
+His mother said that Grandpapa's funeral was all over, and that the
+green creepiness came from the green creepers. But Michael knew it
+didn't. She only said things like that to make you feel nice and comfy
+when you were going to bed. Michael knew very well that they had put
+Grandpapa into the drawing-room and locked the door so that the funeral
+men shouldn't get at him and take him away too soon. And Auntie Louie
+had kept the key in her pocket.
+
+Funerals meant taking people away.
+
+Old Nanna wouldn't let him talk about it; but Mary-Nanna had told him
+that was what funerals meant. All the same, as he went up the flagged
+path, he took care not to look through the black panes of the window
+where the elder bush was, lest he should see Grandpapa's coffin standing
+in the place where the big table used to be, and Grandpapa lying inside
+it wrapped in a white sheet.
+
+Michael's message was that Mummy sent her love, and would Grannie and
+Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie come to tea? She was
+going to have tea in the garden, and would they please come early? As
+early as possible. That was the part he was not to forget.
+
+The queer thing was that when Michael went to see Grannie and the
+Aunties in Grannie's house he saw four old women. They wore black
+dresses that smelt sometimes of something sweet and sometimes like your
+fingers when you get ink on them. The Aunties looked cross; and Auntie
+Emmeline smelt as if she had been crying. He thought that perhaps they
+had not been able to stop crying since Grandpapa's funeral. He thought
+that was why Auntie Louie's nose was red and shiny and Auntie Edie's
+eyelids had pink edges instead of lashes. In Grannie's house they never
+let you do anything. They never did anything themselves. They never
+wanted to do anything; not even to talk. He thought it was because they
+knew that Grandpapa was still there all the time.
+
+But outside it the Aunties were not so very old. They rode bicycles. And
+when they came to Michael's Father's house they forgot all about
+Grandpapa's funeral and ran about and played tennis like Michael's
+mother and Mrs. Jervis, and they talked a lot.
+
+Michael's mother was Grannie's child. To see how she could be a child
+you had only to think of her in her nightgown with her long brown hair
+plaited in a pigtail hanging down her back and tied with a blue ribbon.
+But he couldn't see how the three Aunties could be Grannie's other
+children. They were bigger than Grannie and they had grey hair. Grannie
+was a little thing; she was white and dry; and she had hair like hay.
+Besides, she hardly ever took any notice of them except to make a face
+at Auntie Emmeline or Auntie Edie now and then. She did it with her head
+a little on one side, pushing out her underlip and drawing it
+back again.
+
+Grannie interested Michael; but more when he thought about her than when
+she was actually there. She stood for him as the mark and measure of
+past time. To understand how old Grannie was you had to think backwards;
+this way: Once there was a time when there was no Michael; but there was
+Mummy and there was Daddy. And once there was a time when there was no
+Mummy and no Daddy; but there was Grannie and there was Grandpapa. Now
+there was no Grandpapa. But he couldn't think back far enough to get to
+the time when there was no Grannie.
+
+Michael thought that being Grannie must feel like being God.
+
+Before he came to the black window pane and the elder bush he had to run
+down the slopes and jump the gullies on his side of the Heath, and cross
+the West Road, and climb the other slope to Grannie's side. And it was
+not till you got to the row of elms on Judge's Walk that you had to go
+carefully because of the funeral.
+
+He stood there on the ridge of the Walk and looked back to his own side.
+There were other houses there; but he knew his father's house by the
+tree of Heaven in the garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The garden stood on a high, flat promontory jutting out into the Heath.
+A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like fortifications on a
+breastwork, enclosed it on three sides. From the flagged terrace at the
+bottom of the garden you looked down, through the tops of the
+birch-trees that rose against the rampart, over the wild places of the
+Heath. There was another flagged terrace at the other end of the garden.
+The house rose sheer from its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and
+flat-fronted, with the white wings of its storm shutters spread open,
+row on row. It barred the promontory from the mainland. And at the back
+of it, beyond its kitchen garden and its courtyard, a fringe of Heath
+still parted it from the hill road that went from "Jack Straw's Castle"
+to "The Bull and Bush." You reached it by a lane that led from the road
+to the Heath.
+
+The house belonged to the Heath and the open country. It was aware of
+nothing but the Heath and the open country between it and Harrow on the
+Hill. It had the air of all the old houses of Hampstead, the wonderful
+air of not acknowledging the existence of Bank Holidays. It was lifted
+up high above the town; shut in; utterly secluded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anthony Harrison considered that he had done well when he acquired West
+End House for his wife Frances, and for his children, Dorothea, Michael,
+Nicholas and John.
+
+Frances had said that, if he was thinking of her, he needn't buy a big
+place, because she didn't want one. But he might buy it for the children
+if he liked. Anthony had said that she had no idea of what she mightn't
+want, once she began to give her mind to it, and that he would like to
+think of her living in it after he was gone. Not that he had any
+intention of going; he was only thirty-six (not much older than Frances)
+and incurably healthy. But since his wife's attention had become
+absorbed in the children--to the exclusion of every other interest--he
+was always trying to harrow her by the suggestion. And Frances only
+laughed at him and told him that he was a silly old thing, and that he
+needn't think he was going to get round her that way.
+
+There was no other way open for Anthony; unless he were to go bankrupt
+or get pneumonia or peritonitis. Frances would have been the first to
+acknowledge that illness or misfortune constituted a claim. And the only
+things he ever did get were loud, explosive colds in his head which made
+him a mark for derision. His business was so sound that not even a
+revolution or a European war could shake it. And his appearance was
+incompatible with his pretensions to pathos.
+
+It would have paid him better to have been small and weedy, or
+lamentably fat, or to have had a bald place coming, or crow's feet
+pointing to grey hairs; for then there might have been a chance for him.
+But Anthony's body was well made, slender and tall. He had blue eyes and
+black-brown hair, and the look of an amiable hawk, alert, fiercely
+benevolent. Frances couldn't see any pathos in the kind of figure she
+happened to admire most, the only kind she would have tolerated in a
+husband. And if she _had_ seen any pathos in it she wouldn't have
+married it. Pathos, she said, was all very well in a father, or a
+brother, or a friend, but in choosing a husband you had to think of your
+children; and she had wanted boys that would look like Michael and
+Nicholas and John.
+
+"Don't you mean," Anthony had said, "boys that will look like me?"
+
+"I mean," she had answered, "exactly what I say. You needn't be so
+arrogant."
+
+_Her_ arrogance had been beyond all bearing since John, the third son,
+had been born.
+
+And it was Frances, after all, who had made him buy West End House for
+her own reasons. Both the day nursery and the night nursery had windows
+to the south. It was the kind of house she had always dreamed of living
+in, and of Michael, or Nicky living in after she and Anthony were gone.
+It was not more than seven minutes' walk from the bottom of the lane to
+the house where her people lived. She had to think about the old people
+when the poor dears had come up to London in order to be thought about.
+And it had white storm shutters and a tree of Heaven in the garden.
+
+And, because they had both decided that they would have that house
+whatever happened, they began to argue and to tease each other. Anthony
+had said it was all right, only the tree of Heaven wasn't a tree of
+Heaven; it was a common ash. He was one of the biggest timber merchants
+in the country and he ought to know. Frances said she mightn't know
+much, but she did know that was the kind of tree the people down in her
+part of the country called a tree of Heaven. Anthony said he couldn't
+help that. It didn't matter what they called it. It was a common ash.
+
+Then she told him he had no poetry in his composition. She had always
+dreamed of having a tree of Heaven in her garden; and he was destroying
+her dream. He replied that he didn't want to destroy her dream, but the
+tree really _was_ an ash. You could tell by the bark, and by the leaves
+and by the number and the shape of the leaflets. And anyhow, that was
+the first he'd heard about her dream.
+
+"You don't know," said Frances, "what goes on inside me."
+
+She said that if any of the children developed an imagination he needn't
+think _he_ had anything to do with it.
+
+"I shan't," said Anthony. "I wouldn't have anything to do with it if I
+could. Facts are good enough for me. The children must be brought up to
+realize facts."
+
+An ash-tree was a fact and a tree of Heaven was a fancy; unless by any
+chance she meant _ailanthus glandulosa_. (He knew she didn't.) If she
+wanted to know, the buds of the ash were black like ebony. The buds of
+the tree of Heaven were rose-red, like--like bad mahogany. Wait till the
+spring and look at the buds.
+
+Frances waited till the spring and looked at the buds, and, sure enough,
+they were black like ebony.
+
+Anthony also said that if they were choosing a house for the children,
+it was no earthly use to think about the old people. For the old people
+would go and the children would remain.
+
+As if to show how right he was, Grandpapa had died early in that summer
+of 'ninety-five, one month after they had moved into West End House.
+That still left Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie
+Edie for Anthony to look after.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was thinking of them now. She hoped that they would come early in
+time to see the children. She also hoped that they would go early, so
+that she and Anthony might have their three sets of tennis before
+dinner in peace.
+
+There would be no peace if Louie and Edie wanted to play too. The one
+thing that Anthony could not stand was people wanting to do things they
+couldn't do, and spoiling them for those who could. He used to say that
+the sight of Louie anywhere near the tennis court put him off
+his stroke.
+
+Again, the faint illusion of worry was created by the thought that this
+dreadful thing might happen, that Louie and Edie might want to play and
+that Anthony would be put off his stroke and be annoyed, and that his
+annoyance, his just and legitimate annoyance, would spoil the
+perfection of the afternoon. And as she played with the illusion it made
+more real her tranquillity, her incredible content.
+
+Her hands were busy now putting decorative stitches into a frock for
+John. She had pushed aside a novel by George Moore and a volume of
+Ibsen's plays. She disliked Ibsen and disapproved of George Moore. Her
+firm, tight little character defended itself against every form of
+intellectual disturbance. A copy of the _Times_ had fallen from her lap
+to her feet. Jane, the cat, had found it there, and, purring loudly, had
+trodden it down into a bed, and now lay on it, asleep. Frances had
+informed herself of the affairs of the nation.
+
+At the bottom of her mind was the conviction (profound, because
+unconscious) that the affairs of the nation were not to be compared for
+interest with her own affairs, and an attitude of condescension, as if
+she honoured the _Times_ by reading it and the nation by informing
+herself of its affairs; also the very distinct impression that evening
+papers were more attractive than morning papers. She would have admitted
+that they owed their attraction to the circumstance that Anthony brought
+them home with him in his pocket, and that in the evening she was not
+obliged to inform herself of what might be happening. Anthony was
+certain to inform her.
+
+Not that anything ever did happen. Except strikes; and even then, no
+sooner did the features of the strike begin to get dramatic than they
+were instantly submerged in the flood of conversation that was let loose
+over them. Mrs. Anthony pitied the poor editors and reporters while
+Parliament was sitting. She saw them as rather silly, violent and
+desperate men, yet pathetic in their silliness, violence and
+desperation, snatching at divorces, and breach of promise cases, and
+fires in paraffin shops, as drowning men snatch at straws.
+
+Her imagination refused to picture any end to this state of things.
+There would just be more speeches and more strikes, and still more
+speeches, going on for ever and ever at home; while foreign affairs and
+the British Empire went on for ever and ever too, with no connection
+between the two lines of sequence, and no likeness, except that both
+somehow went on and on.
+
+That was Anthony's view of England's parliament and of her imperial
+policy; and it was Mrs. Anthony's. Politics, Anthony said, had become
+static; and he assured Frances that there was no likelihood that they
+would ever become dynamic again--ever.
+
+Anthony's view of politics was Mrs. Anthony's view of life.
+
+Nothing ever really happened. Things did not change; they endured; they
+went on. At least everything that really mattered endured and went on.
+So that everything that really mattered could--if you were given to
+looking forward--be foreseen. A strike--a really bad one--might
+conceivably affect Anthony's business, for a time; but not all the
+strikes in the world, not all the silly speeches, not all the meddling
+and muddling of politicians could ever touch one of those
+enduring things.
+
+Frances believed in permanence because, in secret, she abhorred the
+thought of change. And she abhorred the thought of change because, at
+thirty-three, she had got all the things she wanted. But only for the
+last ten years out of the thirty-three. Before that (before she was Mrs.
+Anthony), wanting things, letting it be known that you wanted them, had
+meant not getting them. So that it was incredible how she had contrived
+to get them all. She had not yet left off being surprised at her own
+happiness. It was not like things you take for granted and are not aware
+of. Frances was profoundly aware of it. Her happiness was a solid,
+tangible thing. She knew where it resided, and what it was made of, and
+what terms she held it on. It depended on her; on her truth, her love,
+her loyalty; it was of the nature of a trust. But there was no illusion
+about it. It was the reality.
+
+She denied that she was arrogant, for she had not taken one of them for
+granted, not even Dorothy; though a little arrogance might have been
+excusable in a woman who had borne three sons and only one daughter
+before she was thirty-two. Whereas Grannie's achievement had been four
+daughters, four superfluous women, of whom Anthony had married one and
+supported three.
+
+To be sure there was Maurice. But he was worse than superfluous,
+considering that most of the time Anthony was supporting Maurice, too.
+
+She had only known one serious anxiety--lest her flesh and blood should
+harbour any of the blood and flesh left over after Morrie was made. She
+had married Anthony to drive out Morrie from the bodies and souls of her
+children. She meant that, through her and Anthony, Morrie should go, and
+Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas and John should remain.
+
+As Frances looked at the four children, her mouth tightened itself so as
+to undo the ruinous adoration of her eyes. She loved their slender
+bodies, their pure, candid faces, their thick, straight hair that parted
+solidly from the brush, clean-cut and shining like sheets of polished
+metal, brown for Dorothy, black-brown for Nicholas, red gold for Michael
+and white gold for John. She was glad that they were all made like that;
+slender and clear and hard, and that their very hair was a thing of
+clean surfaces and definite edges. She disliked the blurred outlines of
+fatness and fuzziness and fluffiness. The bright solidity of their forms
+helped her to her adored illusion, the illusion of their childhood as
+going on, lasting for ever and ever.
+
+They would be the nicest looking children at Mrs. Jervis's party. They
+would stand out solid from the fluffiness and fuzziness and fatness of
+the others. She saw people looking at them. She heard them saying: "Who
+are the two little boys in brown linen?"--"They are Michael and Nicholas
+Harrison." The Funny Man came and said: "Hello! I didn't expect to see
+you here!" It was Michael and Nicholas he didn't expect to see; and the
+noise in the room was Nicky's darling laughter.
+
+Music played. Michael and Nicholas danced to the music. It was Michael's
+body and Nicky's that kept for her the pattern of the dance, their feet
+that beat out its measure. Sitting under the tree of Heaven Frances
+could see Mrs. Jervis's party. It shimmered and clustered in a visionary
+space between the tree and the border of blue larkspurs on the other
+side of the lawn. The firm figures of Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy
+held it together, kept it from being shattered amongst the steep blue
+spires of the larkspurs. When it was all over they would still hold it
+together, so that people would know that it had really happened and
+remember having been there. They might even remember that Rosalind had
+had a birthday.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances had just bestowed this life after death on Mrs. Jervis's party
+when she heard Michael saying he didn't want to go to it.
+
+He had no idea why he didn't want to go except that he didn't.
+
+"What'?" said Frances. "Not when Nicky and Dorothy are going?"
+
+He shook his head. He was mournful and serious.
+
+"And there's going to be a Magic Lantern"--
+
+"I know."
+
+"And a Funny Man"--
+
+"I know."
+
+"And a Big White Cake with sugar icing and Rosalind's name on it in pink
+letters, and eight candles--"
+
+"I know, Mummy." Michael's under lip began to shake.
+
+"I thought it was only little baby boys that were silly and shy."
+
+Michael was not prepared to contest the statement. He saw it was the
+sort of thing that in the circumstances she was bound to say. All the
+same his under lip would have gone on shaking if he hadn't stopped it.
+
+"I thought you were a big boy," said Frances.
+
+"So I _was_, yesterday. To-day isn't yesterday, Mummy."
+
+"If John--John was asked to a beautiful party _he_ wouldn't be afraid to
+go."
+
+As soon as Michael's under lip had stopped shaking his eyelids began.
+You couldn't stop your eyelids.
+
+"It's not _afraid_, exactly," he said.
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"It's sort--sort of forgetting things."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"I don't know, Mummy. I think--it's pieces of me that I want to
+remember. At a party I can't feel all of myself at once--like I do now."
+
+She loved his strange thoughts as she loved his strange beauty, his
+reddish yellow hair, his light hazel eyes that were not hers and not
+Anthony's.
+
+"What will you do, sweetheart, all afternoon, without Nicky and Dorothy
+and Mary-Nanna?"
+
+"I don't want Nicky and Dorothy and Mary-Nanna. I want Myself. I want to
+play with Myself."
+
+She thought: "Why shouldn't he? What right have I to say these things to
+him and make him cry, and send him to stupid parties that he doesn't
+want to go to? After all, he's only a little boy."
+
+She thought of Michael, who was seven, as if he were younger than
+Nicholas, who was only five.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky was different. You could never tell what Michael would take it
+into his head to think. You could never tell what Nicky would take it
+into his head to do. There was no guile in Michael. But sometimes there
+was guile in Nicky. Frances was always on the look out for
+Nicky's guile.
+
+So when Michael remarked that Grannie and the Aunties would be there
+immediately and Nicky said, "Mummy, I think my ear is going to ache,"
+her answer was--"You won't have to stay more than a minute, darling."
+
+For Nicky lived in perpetual fear that his Auntie Louie might kiss at
+him.
+
+Dorothy saw her mother's profound misapprehension and she hastened to
+put it right.
+
+"It isn't Auntie Louie, Mummy. His ear is really aching."
+
+And still Frances went on smiling. She knew, and Nicky knew that, if a
+little boy could establish the fact of earache, he was absolved from all
+social and family obligations for as long as his affliction lasted. He
+wouldn't have to stand still and pretend he liked it while he was being
+kissed at.
+
+Frances kept her mouth shut when she smiled, as if she were trying not
+to. It was her upper lip that got the better of her. The fine, thin
+edges of it quivered and twitched and curled. You would have said the
+very down was sensitive to her thought's secret and iniquitous play. Her
+smile mocked other people's solemnities, her husband's solemnity, and
+the solemnity (no doubt inherited) of her son Michael; it mocked the
+demureness and the gravity of her face.
+
+She had brought her face close to Nicky's; and it was as if her mouth
+had eyes in it to see if there were guile in him.
+
+"Are you a little humbug?" she said.
+
+Nicky loved his mother's face. It never got excited or did silly things
+like other people's faces. It never got red and shiny like Auntie
+Louie's face, or hot and rough like Auntie Emmeline's, or wet and mizzly
+like Auntie Edie's. The softness and whiteness and dryness of his
+mother's face were delightful to Nicky. So was her hair. It was cold,
+with a funny sort of coldness that made your fingers tingle when you
+touched it; and it smelt like the taste of Brazil nuts.
+
+Frances saw the likeness of her smile quiver on Nicky's upper lip. It
+broke and became Nicky's smile that bared his little teeth and curled up
+the corners of his blue eyes. (His blue eyes and black brown hair were
+Anthony's.) It wasn't reasonable to suppose that Nicky had earache when
+he could smile like that.
+
+"I'm afraid," she said, "you're a little humbug. Run to the terrace and
+see if Grannie and the Aunties are coming."
+
+He ran. It was half a child's run and half a full-grown boy's.
+
+Then Mrs. Anthony addressed her daughter.
+
+"Why did you say his ear's aching when it isn't?"
+
+"Because," said Dorothy, "it _is_ aching."
+
+She was polite and exquisite and obstinate, like Anthony.
+
+"Nicky ought to know his own ear best. Go and tell him he's not to stand
+on the top of the wall. And if they're coming wave to them, to show
+you're glad to see them."
+
+"But--Mummy--I'm not."
+
+She knew it was dreadful before she said it. But she had warded off
+reproof by nuzzling against her mother's cheek as it tried to turn away
+from her. She saw her mother's upper lip moving, twitching. The
+sensitive down stirred on it like a dark smudge, a dust that quivered.
+Her own mouth, pushed forward, searching, the mouth of a nuzzling puppy,
+remained grave and tender. She was earnest and imperturbable in her
+truthfulness. "Whether you're glad or not you must go," said Frances.
+She meant to be obeyed.
+
+Dorothy went. Her body was obedient. For as yet she had her mother's
+body and her face, her blunted oval, the straight nose with the fine,
+tilted nostrils, her brown eyes, her solid hair, brown on the top and
+light underneath, and on the curve of the roll above her little ears.
+Frances had watched the appearance of those details with an anxiety that
+would have surprised her if she had been aware of it. She wanted to see
+herself in the bodies of her sons and in the mind of her daughter. But
+Dorothy had her father's mind. You couldn't move it. What she had said
+once she stuck to for ever, like Anthony to his ash-tree. As if sticking
+to a thing for ever could make it right once. And Dorothy had formed the
+habit of actually being right, like Anthony, nine times out of ten.
+Frances foresaw that this persistence, this unreasoning rectitude,
+might, in time, become annoying in a daughter. There were moments when
+she was almost perturbed by the presence of this small, mysterious
+organism, mixed up of her body and her husband's mind.
+
+But in secret she admired her daughter's candour, her downrightness and
+straightforwardness, her disdain of conventions and hypocrisies. Frances
+was not glad, she knew she was not glad, any more than Dorothy was glad,
+to see her mother and her sisters. She only pretended. In secret she was
+afraid of every moment she would have to live with them. She had lived
+with them too long. She foresaw what would happen this afternoon, how
+they would look, what they would say and do, and with what gestures. It
+would be like the telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that
+you know every word of.
+
+She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she had only
+asked them to come early in order that they might go early and leave her
+to her happiness.
+
+She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and Dorothy
+were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought that she
+wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if they were
+coming early. It struck her that this was sad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope under the
+Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the sallow grass and
+the yellow clay of the Heath.
+
+"How little they look," Michael said.
+
+Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them
+pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was the
+difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always would
+be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never would be
+sorry for being what she was. She seemed to be saying, already, in her
+clearness and hardness, "What I am I am, and you can't change me." The
+utmost you could wring from her was that she couldn't help it.
+
+Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black came
+nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the garden and
+the lane.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the lane to
+the tree of Heaven.
+
+She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace,
+advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really belonging to
+each other, as if they had been strangers associated by some accident.
+It had grown on them in their efforts to carry off the embarrassment of
+appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie carried it off best. Sharp
+and rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never lent itself to any group. But for
+her black gown she really might not have belonged.
+
+Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was only
+sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was wrapped
+up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed, fascinated by
+her sacred sense of bereavement. She moved as if hypnotized by her
+own sorrow.
+
+To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of mystic
+hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she suspected them
+of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if they could. But to
+her one married daughter and to her grand-children she was soft and
+gentle. So that, when they happened to be all together, her moods
+changed so rapidly that she seemed a creature of unaccountable caprice.
+One minute her small, white, dry face quivered with softness and
+gentleness, and the next it stiffened, or twitched with the inimical,
+disapproving look it had for Louie and Emmeline and Edith.
+
+The children lifted up their pure, impassive faces to be kissed at. Old
+Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother's knee. Dorothy
+and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party. Michael forgot all
+about playing with himself. He stayed where he was, drawn by the
+spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties. Grannie was clucking and chuckling
+to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled to her own babies long ago.
+Her under lip made itself wide and full; it worked with an in and out
+movement very funny and interesting to Michael. The movement meant that
+Grannie chuckled under protest of memories that were sacred to
+Grandpapa.
+
+"Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo--tchoo! Chuckaboo! Beautiful boy!" said Grannie.
+
+Auntie Louie looked at her youngest nephew. She smiled her downward,
+sagging smile, wrung from a virginity sadder than Grannie's grief. She
+spoke to Baby John.
+
+"You really are rather a nice boy," Auntie Louie said.
+
+But Edie, the youngest Auntie, was kneeling on the grass before him,
+bringing her face close to his. Baby John's new and flawless face was
+cruel to Auntie Edie's. So was his look of dignity and wisdom.
+
+"Oh, she says you're only rather nice," said Auntie Edie. "And you're
+the beautifullest, sweetest, darlingest that ever was. Wasn't she a
+nasty Auntie Louie? Ten little pink toes. And _there_ he goes. Five
+little tootsies to each of his footsies."
+
+She hid herself behind the _Times_ disturbing Jane.
+
+"Where's John-John?" she cried. "Where's he gone to? Can anybody tell me
+where to find John-John? Where's John-John? Peep-_bo_--there he is!
+John-John, look at Auntie Edie. Oh, he won't pay any attention to
+poor me."
+
+Baby John was playing earnestly with Grannie's watch-chain.
+
+"You might leave the child alone," said Grannie. "Can't you see he
+doesn't want you?"
+
+Auntie Edie made a little pouting face, like a scolded, pathetic child.
+Nobody ever did want Auntie Edie.
+
+And all the time Auntie Emmy was talking to Frances very loud and fast.
+
+"Frances, I do think your garden's too beautiful for words. How clever
+of you to think of clearing away the old flower-beds. I hate flower-beds
+on a lawn. Yet I don't suppose I should have had the strength of mind to
+get rid of them if it bad been me."
+
+As she talked Auntie Emmy opened her eyes very wide; her eyebrows
+jerked, the left one leaping up above the right; she thrust out her chin
+at you and her long, inquiring nose. Her thin face was the play of
+agitated nerve-strings that pulled it thus into perpetual, restless
+movements; and she made vague gestures with her large, bony hands. Her
+tongue went tick-tack, like a clock. Anthony said you-could hear Emmy's
+tongue striking the roof of her-mouth all thee time.
+
+"And putting those delphiniums all together like that--Massing the
+blues. Anthony? I _do_ think Anthony has perfect taste. I adore
+delphiniums."
+
+Auntie Emmy was behaving as if neither Michael nor Baby John was there.
+
+"Don't you think John-John's too beautiful for words?" said Frances.
+"Don't you like him a little bit too?"
+
+Auntie Emmy winced as if Frances had flicked something in her face.
+
+"Of course I like him too. Why shouldn't I?"
+
+"I don't think you _do_, Auntie Emmy," Michael said.
+
+Auntie Emmy considered him as for the first time.
+
+"What do you know about it?" she said.
+
+"I can tell by the funny things your face does."
+
+"I thought," said Frances, "you wanted to play by yourself."
+
+"So I do," said Michael.
+
+"Well then, go and play."
+
+He went and to a heavenly place that he knew of. But as he played with
+Himself there he thought: "Auntie Emmy doesn't tell the truth. I think
+it is because she isn't happy."
+
+Michael kept his best things to himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I suppose you're happy," said Grannie, "now you've got the poor child
+sent away."
+
+Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as much as to
+say she was helpless under her mother's stupidity.
+
+"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good for him
+to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."
+
+It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her sisters.
+
+"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it yourself."
+
+When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put her word
+in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the peace.
+
+Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her babies
+in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight of other people's babies
+was too much for Emmy. She could never be prepared for Emmy's moments.
+
+"It's all very well," Auntie Louie went on; "but I should like to hear
+of somebody admiring Dorothy. I don't see where Dorothy comes in."
+
+Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie's favourite.
+If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared that she was
+sure she wasn't.
+
+And again Frances knew what Louie meant--that she loved her three sons,
+Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her one daughter,
+Dorothea, with critical affection. That was the sort of thing that Louie
+was always saying and thinking about people, and nobody ever paid the
+slightest attention to what Louie said or thought. Frances told herself
+that if there was one emotion that she was more free from than another
+it was sex jealousy.
+
+The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given up
+Dorothy to Anthony. It was natural that he should care most for the
+little girl.
+
+Louie said that was easy--when she knew perfectly well that Anthony
+didn't. Like Frances he cared most for his three sons. She was leaving
+Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael and Nicholas
+to her.
+
+"You might just as well say," Frances said, "that I'm in love with
+John-John. Poor little Don-Don!"
+
+"I might," said Louie, "just as well."
+
+Grannie said she was sure she didn't understand what they were talking
+about and that Louie had some very queer ideas in her head.
+
+"Louie," she said, "knows more than I do."
+
+Frances thought: Was Grannie really stupid? Was she really innocent? Was
+she not, rather, clever, chock-full of the secret wisdom and the secret
+cruelty of sex?
+
+Frances was afraid of her thoughts. They came to her not like thoughts,
+but like quick rushes of her blood, partly confusing her. She did not
+like that.
+
+She thought: Supposing Grannie knew all the time that Emmy was unhappy,
+and took a perverse pleasure in her knowledge? Supposing she was not
+really soft and gentle? She could be soft and gentle to her, because of
+her children and because of Anthony. She respected Anthony because he
+was well-off and efficient and successful, and had supported her ever
+since Grandpapa had gone bankrupt. She was proud of Frances because she
+was Anthony's wife, who had had three sons and only one daughter.
+
+Grannie behaved as if her grandchildren were her own children, as if she
+had borne three Sons and only one daughter, instead of four daughters
+and only one son. Still, Frances was the vehicle of flesh and blood that
+carried on her flesh and blood in Michael and Nicholas and John. She
+respected Frances.
+
+But Frances could remember a time when she had been unmarried like her
+sisters, and when Grannie had turned on her, too, that look that was
+half contempt and half hostility or displeasure. Grannie had not wanted
+her to marry Anthony, any more than she would have wanted Louie or
+Emmeline or Edith to marry anybody, supposing anybody had wanted to
+marry them. And Frances and Anthony had defied her. They had insisted on
+marrying each other. Frances knew that if there had been no Anthony, her
+mother would have despised her in secret, as in secret she despised
+Emmeline and Edith. She despised them more than Louie, because, poor
+things, they wanted, palpably, to be married, whereas Louie didn't, or
+said she didn't. In her own way, Louie had defied her mother. She had
+bought a type-writer and a bicycle with her own earnings, and by
+partially supporting herself she had defied Anthony, the male
+benefactor, Louie's manner intimated that there was nothing Frances had
+that she wanted. She had resources in herself, and Frances had none.
+
+Frances persuaded herself that she admired and respected Louie. She knew
+that she, Frances, was only admired and respected because she had
+succeeded where her three sisters had failed. She was even afraid that,
+in moments of exasperation, Grannie used her and Anthony and the
+children to punish Emmy and Edie for their failure. The least she could
+do was to stand between them and Grannie.
+
+It was possible that if Grannie had been allowed to ignore them and give
+her whole attention to Frances or Michael or Baby John, she could have
+contrived to be soft and gentle for an afternoon. But neither Louie nor
+Emmeline, nor even Edith, would consent to be ignored. They refused to
+knuckle under, to give in. Theirs was a perpetual struggle to achieve an
+individuality in the teeth of circumstances that had denied them any.
+Frances acknowledged that they were right, that in the same
+circumstances she would have done the same.
+
+In their different ways and by different methods they claimed attention.
+They claimed it incessantly, Louie, the eldest, by an attitude of
+assurance and superiority so stiff and hard that it seemed invulnerable;
+Emmy by sudden jerky enthusiasms, exaltations, intensities; Edie by an
+exaggerated animation, a false excitement. Edie would drop from a
+childish merriment to a childish pathos, when she would call herself
+"Poor me," and demand pity for being tired, for missing a train, for
+cold feet, for hair coming down.
+
+There would be still more animation, and still more enthusiasm when
+Anthony came home.
+
+Frances prided herself on her power of foreseeing things. She foresaw
+that Anthony would come home early for his game. She foresaw the funny,
+nervous agony of his face when he appeared on the terrace and caught
+sight of Grannie and the three Aunties, and the elaborate and exquisite
+politeness with which he would conceal from them his emotion. She
+foresaw that she would say to Annie, "When the master comes tell him
+we're having tea in the garden, under the tree of--under the ash-tree"
+(for after all, he was the master, and discipline must be maintained).
+She foresaw the very gestures of his entrance, the ironically solemn bow
+that he would make to her, far-off, from the terrace; she even foresaw
+the kind of joke that, for the life of him, he would not be able to
+help making. She was so made that she could live happily in this world
+of small, foreseen things.
+
+
+
+III
+
+And it all happened as she had foreseen.
+
+Anthony came home early, because it was a fine afternoon. He made the
+kind of joke that calamity always forced from him, by some perversion of
+his instincts.
+
+"When is an ash-tree not an ash-tree? When it's a tree of Heaven."
+
+He was exquisitely polite to Grannie and the Aunties, and his manner to
+Frances, which she openly complained of, was, he said, what a woman
+brought on herself when she reserved her passion for her children, her
+sentiment for trees of Heaven, and her mockery for her devoted husband.
+
+"I suppose we can have some tennis _now_," said Auntie Louie.
+
+"Certainly," said Anthony, "we can, and we shall." He tried not to look
+at Frances.
+
+And Auntie Edie became automatically animated.
+
+"I can't serve for nuts, but I can run. Who's going to play with _me_?"
+
+"I am," said Anthony. He was perfect.
+
+The game of tennis had an unholy and terrible attraction for Auntie
+Louie and Auntie Edie. Neither of them could play. But, whereas Auntie
+Louie thought that she could play and took tennis seriously, Auntie Edie
+knew that she couldn't and took it as a joke.
+
+Auntie Louie stood tall and rigid and immovable. She planted herself,
+like a man, close up to the net, where Anthony wanted to be, and where
+he should have been; but Auntie Louie said she was no good if you put
+her to play back; she couldn't be expected to take every ball he missed.
+
+When Auntie Louie called out "Play!" she meant to send a nervous shudder
+through her opponents, shattering their morale. She went through all the
+gestures of an annihilating service that for some reason never happened.
+She said the net was too low and that spoiled her eye. And when she
+missed her return it was because Anthony had looked at her and put her
+off. Still Aunt Louie's attitude had this advantage that it kept her
+quiet in one place where Anthony could dance round and round her.
+
+But Auntie Edie played in little nervous runs and slides and rushes; she
+flung herself, with screams of excitement, against the ball, her partner
+and the net; and she brandished her racket in a dangerous manner. The
+oftener she missed the funnier it was to Auntie Edie. She had been
+pretty when she was young, and seventeen years ago her cries and tumbles
+and collisions had been judged amusing; and Auntie Edie thought they
+were amusing still. Anthony had never had the heart to undeceive her. So
+that when Anthony was there Auntie Edie still went about setting a
+standard of gaiety for other people to live up to; and still she was
+astonished that they never did, that other people had no sense
+of humour.
+
+Therefore Frances was glad when Anthony told her that he had asked Mr.
+Parsons, the children's tutor, and young Norris and young Vereker from
+the office to come round for tennis at six, and that dinner must be put
+off till half-past eight.
+
+All was well. The evening would be sacred to Anthony and the young men.
+The illusion of worry passed, and Frances's real world of happiness
+stood firm.
+
+And as Frances's mind, being a thoroughly healthy mind, refused to
+entertain any dreary possibility for long together, so it was simply
+unable to foresee downright calamity, even when it had been pointed out
+to her. For instance, that Nicky should really have chosen the day of
+the party for an earache, the worst earache he had ever had.
+
+He appeared at tea-time, carried in Mary-Nanna's arms, and with his head
+tied up in one of Mr. Jervis's cricket scarves. As he approached his
+family he tried hard not to look pathetic.
+
+And at the sight of her little son her whole brilliant world of
+happiness was shattered around Frances.
+
+"Nicky darling," she said, "why _didn't_ you tell me it was really
+aching?"
+
+"I didn't know," said Nicky.
+
+He never did know the precise degree of pain that distinguished the
+beginning of a genuine earache from that of a sham one, and he felt that
+to palm off a sham earache on his mother for a real one, was somehow a
+sneaky thing to do. And while his ear went on stabbing him, Nicky did
+his best to explain.
+
+"You see, I never know whether it's aching or whether it's only going to
+ache. It began a little, teeny bit when the Funny Man made me laugh.
+And I didn't see the Magic Lantern, and I didn't have any of Rosalind's
+cake. It came on when I was biting the sugar off. And it was aching in
+both ears at once. It was," said Nicky, "a jolly sell for me."
+
+At that moment Nicky's earache jabbed upwards at his eyelids and cut
+them, and shook tears out of them. But Nicky's mouth refused to take any
+part in the performance, though he let his father carry him upstairs.
+And, as he lay on the big bed in his mother's room, he said he thought
+he could bear it if he had Jane-Pussy to lie beside him, and his
+steam-engine.
+
+Anthony went back into the garden to fetch Jane. He spent an hour
+looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house and through
+the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He looked for Jane in
+the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under the rhubarb, and on the
+scullery roof, and in the water butt. It was just possible that on a day
+of complete calamity Jane should have slithered off the scullery roof
+into the water-butt. The least he could do was to find Jane, since Nicky
+wanted her.
+
+And in the end it turned out that Jane had been captured in her sleep,
+treacherously, by Auntie Emmy. And she had escaped, maddened with terror
+of the large, nervous, incessantly caressing hands. She had climbed into
+the highest branch of the tree of Heaven, and crouched there,
+glaring, unhappy.
+
+"Damn the cat!" said Anthony to himself. (It was not Jane he meant.)
+
+He was distressed, irritated, absurdly upset, because he would have to
+go back to Nicky without Jane, because he couldn't get Nicky what
+he wanted.
+
+In that moment Anthony loved Nicky more than any of them. He loved him
+almost more than Frances. Nicky's earache ruined the fine day.
+
+He confided in young Vereker. "I wouldn't bother," he said, "if the
+little chap wasn't so plucky about it."
+
+"Quite so, sir," said young Vereker.
+
+It was young Mr. Vereker who found Jane, who eventually recaptured her.
+Young Mr. Vereker made himself glorious by climbing up, at the risk of
+his neck and in his new white flannels, into the high branches of the
+tree of Heaven, to bring Jane down.
+
+And when Anthony thanked him he said, "Don't mention it, sir. It's only
+a trifle," though it was, as Mr. Norris said, palpable that the flannels
+were ruined. Still, if he hadn't found that confounded cat, they would
+never, humanly speaking, have had their tennis.
+
+The Aunties did not see Mr. Vereker climbing into the tree of Heaven.
+They did not see him playing with Mr. Parsons and Anthony and Mr.
+Norris. For as soon as the three young men appeared, and Emmeline and
+Edith began to be interested and emphatic, Grannie said that as they
+wouldn't see anything more of Frances and the children, it was no good
+staying any longer, and they'd better be getting back. It was as if she
+knew that they were going to enjoy themselves and was determined to
+prevent it.
+
+Frances went with them to the bottom of the lane. She stood there till
+the black figures had passed, one by one, through the white posts on to
+the Heath, till, in the distance, they became small again and harmless
+and pathetic.
+
+Then she went back to her room where Nicky lay in the big bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky lay in the big bed with Jane on one side of him and his
+steam-engine on the other, and a bag of hot salt against each ear. Now
+and then a thin wall of sleep slid between him and his earache.
+
+Frances sat by the open window and looked out into the garden where
+Anthony and Norris played, quietly yet fiercely, against Vereker and
+Parsons. Frances loved the smell of fresh grass that the balls and the
+men's feet struck from the lawn; she loved the men's voices subdued to
+Nicky's sleep, and the sound of their padding feet, the thud of the
+balls on the turf, the smacking and thwacking of the rackets. She loved
+every movement of Anthony's handsome, energetic body; she loved the
+quick, supple bodies of the young men, the tense poise and earnest
+activity of their adolescence. But it was not Vereker or Parsons or
+Norris that she loved or that she saw. It was Michael, Nicholas and John
+whose adolescence was foreshadowed in those athletic forms wearing white
+flannels; Michael, Nicky and John, in white flannels, playing fiercely.
+When young Vereker drew himself to his full height, when his young body
+showed lean and slender as he raised his arms for his smashing service,
+it was not young Vereker, but Michael, serious and beautiful. When young
+Parsons leaped high into the air and thus returned Anthony's facetious
+sky-scraper on the volley, that was Nicky. When young Norris turned and
+ran at the top of his speed, and overtook the ball on its rebound from
+the base line where young Vereker had planted it, when, as by a miracle,
+he sent it backwards over his own head, paralysing Vereker and Parsons
+with sheer astonishment, that was John.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her vision passed. She was leaning over Nicky now, Nicky so small in the
+big bed. Nicky had moaned.
+
+"Does it count if I make that little noise, Mummy? It sort of lets the
+pain out."
+
+"No, my lamb, it doesn't count. Is the pain very bad?"
+
+"Yes, Mummy, awful. It's going faster and faster. And it bizzes. And
+when it doesn't bizz, it thumps." He paused--"I think--p'raps--I could
+bear it better if I sat on your knee."
+
+Frances thought she could bear it better too. It would be good for Nicky
+that he should grow into beautiful adolescence and a perfect manhood;
+but it was better for her that he should be a baby still, that she
+should have him on her knee and hold him close to her; that she should
+feel his adorable body press quivering against her body, and the heat of
+his earache penetrating her cool flesh. For now she was lost to herself
+and utterly absorbed in Nicky. And her agony became a sort of ecstasy,
+as if, actually, she bore his pain.
+
+It was Anthony who could not stand it. Anthony had come in on his way to
+his dressing-room. As he looked at Nicky his handsome, hawk-like face
+was drawn with a dreadful, yearning, ineffectual pity. Frances had
+discovered that her husband could both be and look pathetic. He had
+wanted her to be sorry for him and she was sorry for him, because his
+male pity was all agony; there was no ecstasy in it of any sort at all.
+Nicky was far more her flesh and blood than he was Anthony's.
+
+Nicky stirred in his mother's lap. He raised his head. And when he saw
+that queer look on his father's face he smiled at it. He had to make the
+smile himself, for it refused to come of its own accord. He made it
+carefully, so that it shouldn't hurt him. But he made it so well that it
+hurt Frances and Anthony.
+
+"I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does," Frances said in her
+pride.
+
+"If he can bear it, _I_ can't," said Anthony. And he stalked into his
+dressing-room and shut the door on himself.
+
+"Daddy minds more than you do," said Frances.
+
+At that Nicky sat up. His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned with the
+fever of his earache.
+
+"I don't mind," he said. "Really and truly I don't mind. I don't care if
+my ear _does_ ache.
+
+"It's my eyes is crying, not me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner, Nicky sent
+for his father and mother. Something had happened.
+
+Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt most
+awfully. And when it had done cracking his earache had gone away. And
+Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind's party and Michael a
+tin train. And Michael had given him the train and he wouldn't take the
+trumpet instead. Oughtn't Michael to have had the trumpet?
+
+And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night nursery, he
+called them back again.
+
+"It was a jolly sell for me, wasn't it?" said Nicky. And he laughed.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever happened, and
+something was generally happening to him, he didn't care. When he scaled
+the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it gave way under his assault
+and threw him down the steps on to the gravel walk, he picked himself
+up, displaying a forehead that was a red abrasion filled in with yellow
+gravel and the grey dust of the smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't
+care. I liked it," before anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna
+stepped on his train and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I
+don't care. I shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't
+care came to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be
+life's last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen,
+would ever take him at a disadvantage.
+
+Two years passed and he was just the same.
+
+Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was adorable.
+
+But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when you had
+to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment by first
+admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a better one when
+it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him have any cake for
+tea after he had tested the resilience of the new tyres on his father's
+bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it would have been more to
+the purpose if they had taken his steam-engine from him for a week.
+
+"You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it," said Nicky.
+
+Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of Mutton
+Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't gone in
+after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to bed at four
+o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother came to tuck him up
+and say Good-night, she found him sitting up, smiling and ready.
+
+"Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit of good
+sending me to bed."
+
+"I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost
+suspected Nicky of insincerity.
+
+"So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things. You
+see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've 'vented three
+things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle stand still with
+Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of bottles; and a thing to
+make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't a punishment, is it, Mummy?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years passed and
+Nicky was still the same.
+
+And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John were not
+the same.
+
+For the awful thing about your children was that they were always dying.
+Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child Dorothy was dead and in
+her place was a strange big girl. The child Michael was dead and in his
+place was a strange big boy. And Frances mourned over the passing of
+each age. You could no more bring back that unique loveliness of two
+years old, of five years old, of seven, than you could bring back the
+dead. Even John-John was not a baby any more; he spoke another language
+and had other feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's
+knee. Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more
+wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and she
+wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on, at the
+same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies and the mother
+of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and women is to be born.
+
+Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.
+
+Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she wanted them
+to?
+
+There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make no
+impression on him.
+
+There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and showed
+that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare,
+extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not
+by anything solid and continuous. There was a softness in Michael that
+distressed and a hardness that perplexed her. You could make an
+impression on Michael--far too easily--and the impression stayed. You
+couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory was terrible. And he had secret
+ways. He was growing more and more sensitive, more and more wrapped up
+in Himself. Supposing Michael became a morbid egoist, like Anthony's
+brother, Bartholomew?
+
+And there was Dorothy. She went her own way more than ever, with the
+absolute conviction that it was the right way. Nothing could turn her.
+At thirteen her body was no longer obedient. Dorothy was not going to be
+her mother's companion, or her father's, either; she was Rosalind
+Jervis's companion. She seemed to care more about little fat, fluffy
+Rosalind than about any of them except Nicky. Dorothy was interested in
+Michael; she respected his queer thoughts. It was as if she recognized
+some power in him that could beat her somewhere some day, and was humble
+before a thing her cleverness had failed to understand. But it was Nicky
+that she adored, not Michael; and she was bad for Nicky. She encouraged
+his naughtiness because it amused her.
+
+Frances foresaw that a time would come, a little later, when Nicky and
+Dorothy would be companions, not Nicky and his mother.
+
+In the evenings, coming home from the golf-links, Frances and Anthony
+discussed their children.
+
+Frances said, "You can't make any impression on Nicky. There seems to be
+no way that you can get at him."
+
+Anthony thought there was a way. It was a way he had not tried yet, that
+he did not want to try. But, if he could only bring himself to it, he
+judged that he could make a distinct impression.
+
+"What the young rascal wants is a thorough good spanking," said Anthony.
+
+Nicky said so too.
+
+The first time he got it Nicky's criticism was that it wasn't a bad idea
+if his father could have pulled it off all right. But he said, "It's no
+good if you do it through the cloth. And it's no good unless you _want_
+to hurt me, Daddy. And you don't want. And even if you did want, badly
+enough to try and hurt, supposing you spanked ever so hard, you couldn't
+hurt as much as my earache. And I can bear that."
+
+"He's top dog again, you see," said Frances, not without a secret
+satisfaction.
+
+"Oh, is he?" said Anthony. "I don't propose to be downed by Nicky."
+
+Every instinct in him revolted against spanking Nicky. But when
+Williams, the groom, showed him a graze on each knee of the pony he had
+bought for Frances and the children, Anthony determined that, this time,
+Nicky should have a serious spanking.
+
+"Which of them took Roger out?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know, sir," said Williams.
+
+But Anthony knew. He lay in wait for Nicky by the door that led from the
+stable yard into the kitchen garden.
+
+Nicky was in the strawberry bed.
+
+"Was it you who took Roger out this afternoon?"
+
+Nicky did not answer promptly. His mouth was still full of strawberries.
+
+"What if I did?" he said at last, after manifest reflection.
+
+"If you did? Why, you let him down on Golders Hill and cut his knees."
+
+"Holly Mount," said Nicky.
+
+"Holly Mount or Golders Hill, it's all the same to you, you young
+monkey."
+
+"It isn't, Daddy. Holly Mount's much the worst. It's an awful hill."
+
+"That," said Anthony, "is why you're forbidden to ride down it. You've
+_got_ to be spanked for this, Nicky."
+
+"Have I? All right. Don't look so unhappy, Daddy."
+
+Anthony did much better this time. Nicky (though he shook with laughter)
+owned it very handsomely. And Anthony had handicapped himself again by
+doing it through the cloth. He drew the line at shaming Nicky.
+(Yet--_could_ you have shamed his indomitable impudence?)
+
+But he had done it. He had done it ruthlessly, while the strawberries
+were still wet on Nicky's mouth.
+
+And when it was all over Michael, looking for his father, came into the
+school-room where these things happened. He said he was awfully sorry,
+but he'd taken Roger out, and Roger had gone down on his knees and
+cut himself.
+
+No, it wasn't on Holly Mount, it was at the turn of the road on the hill
+past the "Spaniards."
+
+Anthony paid no attention to Michael. He turned on Michael's brother.
+
+"Nicky, what did you do it for?"
+
+"For a rag, of course. I knew you'd feel such a jolly fool when you
+found it wasn't me."
+
+"You see, Daddy," he explained later, "you might have known I wouldn't
+have let Roger down. But wasn't it a ripping sell?"
+
+"What are you to do," said Anthony, "with a boy like that?"
+
+Frances had an inspiration. "Do nothing," she said. Her tranquillity
+refused to be troubled for long together.
+
+"Nicky's right. It's no good trying to punish him. After all, _why_
+punish Nicky? It isn't as if he was really naughty. He never does unkind
+things, or mean things. And he's truthful."
+
+"Horribly truthful. They all are," said Anthony.
+
+"Well, then, what does Nicky do?"
+
+"He does dangerous things."
+
+"He forgets."
+
+"Nothing more dangerous than forgetting. We must punish him to make him
+remember."
+
+"But it doesn't make him remember. It only makes him think us fools."
+
+"You know what it means?" said Anthony. "We shall have to send him to
+school."
+
+"Not yet," said Frances.
+
+School was the thing in the future that she dreaded. Nicky was only
+nine, and they were all getting on well with Mt. Parsons. Anthony knew
+that to send Nicky to school now would be punishing Frances, not Nicky.
+The little fiend would only grin in their faces if they told him he was
+going to school.
+
+It was no use trying to make impressions on Nicky. He was as hard as
+nails. He would never feel things.
+
+Perhaps, Frances thought, it was just as well.
+
+
+
+V
+
+"I do think it was nice of Jane," said Nicky, "to have Jerry."
+
+"And I do think it was nice of me," said Dorothy, "to give him to you."
+
+Jane was Dorothy's cat; therefore her kittens were Dorothy's.
+
+"I wouldn't have given him to just anybody."
+
+"I know," said Nicky.
+
+"I might have kept him. He's the nicest kitten Jane ever had."
+
+"I know," said Nicky. "It _was_ nice of you."
+
+"I might want him back again."
+
+"I--know."
+
+Nicky was quiet and serious, almost humble, as if he went in the fear of
+losing Jerry. Nobody but Jerry and Dorothy saw Nicky in that mood.
+
+Not that he was really afraid. Nothing could take Jerry from him. If
+Dorothy could have taken him back again she wouldn't have, not even if
+she had really wanted him. Dorothy wasn't cruel, and she was
+only ragging.
+
+But certainly he was Jane's nicest kitten. Jane was half-Persian, white
+with untidy tabby patterns on her. Jerry was black all over. Whatever
+attitude he took, his tight, short fur kept the outlines of his figure
+firm and clear, whether he arched his back and jumped sideways, or
+rolled himself into a cushion, or squatted with haunches spread and
+paws doubled in under his breast, or sat bolt upright with his four legs
+straight like pillars, and his tail curled about his feet. Jerry's coat
+shone like black looking-glass, and the top of his head smelt sweet,
+like a dove's breast.
+
+And he had yellow eyes. Mary-Nanna said they would turn green some day.
+But Nicky didn't believe it. Mary-Nanna was only ragging. Jerry's eyes
+would always be yellow.
+
+Mr. Parsons declared that Nicky sat for whole hours meditating on Jerry,
+as if in this way he could make him last longer.
+
+Jerry's life was wonderful to Nicky. Once he was so small that his body
+covered hardly the palm of your hand; you could see his skin; it felt
+soft and weak through the thin fur, sleeked flat and wet where Jane had
+licked it. His eyes were buttoned up tight. Then they opened. He crawled
+feebly on the floor after Jane, or hung on to her little breasts,
+pressing out the milk with his clever paws. Then Jerry got older.
+Sometimes he went mad and became a bat or a bird, and flew up the
+drawing-room curtains as if his legs were wings.
+
+Nicky said that Jerry could turn himself into anything he pleased; a
+hawk, an owl, a dove, a Himalayan bear, a snake, a flying squirrel, a
+monkey, a rabbit, a panther, and a little black lamb of God.
+
+Jerry was a cat now; he was two years old.
+
+Jerry's fixed idea seemed to be that he was a very young cat, and that
+he must be nursed continually, and that nobody but Nicky must nurse him.
+Mr. Parsons found that Nicky made surprising progress in his Latin and
+Greek that year. What had baffled Mr. Parsons up till now had been
+Nicky's incapacity for sitting still. But he would sit still enough when
+Jerry was on his knee, pressed tight between the edge of the desk and
+Nicky's stomach, so that knowledge entered into Nicky through Jerry when
+there was no other way.
+
+Nicky would even sit still in the open air to watch Jerry as he stalked
+bees in the grass, or played by himself, over and over again, his own
+enchanted game. He always played it in the same way. He started from the
+same clump in the border, to run in one long careening curve across the
+grass; at the same spot in the lawn he bounded sideways and gave the
+same little barking grunt and dashed off into the bushes. When you tried
+to catch him midway he stood on his hind legs and bowed to you
+slantwise, waving his forepaws, or rushed like lightning up the tree of
+Heaven, and climbed into the highest branches and clung there, looking
+down at you. His yellow eyes shone through the green leaves; they
+quivered; they played; they mocked you with some challenge, some charm,
+secret and divine and savage.
+
+"The soul of Nicky is in that cat," Frances said.
+
+Jerry knew that he was Nicky's cat. When other people caught him he
+scrabbled over their shoulders with his claws and got away from them.
+When Nicky caught him he lay quiet and heavy in his arms, pressing down
+and spreading his soft body. Nicky's sense of touch had been hardened by
+violent impacts and collisions, by experiments with jack-knives and saws
+and chisels and gouges, and by struggling with the material of his
+everlasting inventions. Through communion with Jerry it became tender
+and sensitive again. It delighted in the cat's throbbing purr and the
+thrill of his feet, as Jerry, serious and earnest, padded down his bed
+on Nicky's knee.
+
+"I like him best, though," said Nicky, "when he's sleepy and at the same
+time bitesome."
+
+"You mustn't let him bite you," Frances said.
+
+"I don't mind," said Nicky. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't like me."
+
+Jerry had dropped off to sleep with his jaws closing drowsily on Nicky's
+arm. When it moved his hind legs kicked at it and tore.
+
+"He's dreaming when he does that," said Nicky. "He thinks he's a panther
+and I'm buffaloes."
+
+Mr. Parsons laughed at him. "Nicky and his cat!" he said. Nicky didn't
+care. Mr. Parsons was always ragging him.
+
+The tutor preferred dogs himself. He couldn't afford any of the
+expensive breeds; but that summer he was taking care of a Russian
+wolfhound for a friend of his. When Mr. Parsons ran with Michael and
+Nicky round the Heath, the great borzoi ran before them with long leaps,
+head downwards, setting an impossible pace. Michael and Dorothy adored
+Boris openly. Nicky, out of loyalty to Jerry, stifled a secret
+admiration. For Mr. Parsons held that a devotion to a cat was
+incompatible with a proper feeling for a dog, whence Nicky had inferred
+that any feeling for a dog must do violence to the nobler passion.
+
+Mr. Parsons tried to wean Nicky from what he pretended to regard as his
+unmanly weakness. "Wait, Nicky," he said, "till you've got a dog of
+your own."
+
+"I don't want a dog of my own," said Nicky. "I don't want anything but
+Jerry." Boris, he said, was not clever, like Jerry. He had a silly face.
+
+"Think so?" said Mr. Parsons. "Look at his jaws. They could break
+Jerry's back with one snap."
+
+"_Could_ he, Daddy?"
+
+They were at tea on the lawn, and Boris had gone to sleep under Mr.
+Parsons' legs with his long muzzle on his forepaws.
+
+"He could," said Anthony, "if he caught him."
+
+"But he couldn't catch him. Jerry'd be up a tree before Boris could look
+at him."
+
+"If you want Jerry to shin up trees you must keep his weight down."
+
+Nicky laughed. He knew that Boris could never catch Jerry. His father
+was only ragging him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky was in the schoolroom, bowed over his desk. He was doing an
+imposition, the second aorist of the abominable verb [Greek: erchomai],
+written out five and twenty times. (Luckily he could do the last fifteen
+times from memory.)
+
+Nicky had been arguing with Mr. Parsons. Mr. Parsons had said that the
+second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] was not [Greek: êrchon].
+
+Nicky had said, "I can't help it. If it's not [Greek: êrchon] it ought
+to be."
+
+Mr. Parsons had replied: "The verb [Greek: erchomai] is irregular." And
+Nicky had retorted, in effect, that no verb had any business to be as
+irregular as all that. Mr. Parsons had then suggested that Nicky might
+know more about the business of irregular verbs if he wrote out the
+second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] five and twenty times after tea. As
+it was a particularly fine afternoon, an imposition was, Nicky admitted,
+a score for Mr. Parsons and a jolly good sell for _him_.
+
+Mr. Parsons had not allowed him to have Jerry on his knee, or even in
+the room; and this, Nicky owned further, was but just. It wouldn't have
+been nearly so good a punishment if he had had Jerry with him.
+
+Nicky, bowed over his desk, struggled for the perfect legibility which
+Mr. Parsons had insisted on, as otherwise the imposition would do him
+more harm than good. He was in for it, and the thing must be done
+honourably if it was done at all. He had only looked out of the windows
+twice to make sure that Boris was asleep under Mr. Parsons' legs. And
+once he had left the room to see where Jerry was. He had found him in
+the kitchen garden, sitting on a bed of fresh-grown mustard and cress,
+ruining it. He sat like a lamb, his forepaws crossed, his head tilted
+slightly backwards. His yellow eyes gazed at Nicky with a sweet and
+mournful innocence.
+
+Nicky did not hear the voices in the garden.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, sir," Mr. Parsons was saying. "I can't think how it
+could have happened." Mr. Parsons' voice was thick and his face was very
+red. "I could have sworn the door was shut."
+
+"Johnnie opened it," said Anthony. He seemed to have caught, suddenly,
+one of his bad colds and to be giving it to Mr. Parsons. They were both
+in their shirtsleeves, and Anthony carried something in his arms which
+he had covered with his coat.
+
+The borzoi stood in front of them. His face had a look of foolish
+ecstasy. He stared at Mr. Parsons, and as he stared he panted. There was
+a red smear on his white breast; his open jaws still dripped a pink
+slaver. It sprayed the ground in front of them, jerked out with
+his panting.
+
+"Get away, you damned brute," said Mr. Parsons.
+
+Boris abashed himself; he stretched out his fore legs towards Mr.
+Parsons, shook his raised haunches, lifted up his great saw-like muzzle,
+and rolled into one monstrous cry a bark, a howl, a yawn.
+
+Nicky heard it, and he looked out of the schoolroom window. He saw the
+red smear on the white curly breast. He saw his father in his shirt
+sleeves, carrying something in his arms that he had covered with
+his coat.
+
+Under the tree of Heaven Dorothy and Michael, crouching close against
+their mother, cried quietly. Frances was crying, too; for it was she who
+would have to tell Nicky.
+
+Dorothy tried to console him.
+
+"Jerry's eyes would have turned green, if he had lived, Nicky. They
+would, really."
+
+"I wouldn't have minded. They'd have been Jerry's eyes."
+
+"But he wouldn't have looked like Jerry."
+
+"I wouldn't have cared what he looked like. He'd have _been_ Jerry."
+
+"I'll give you Jane, Nicky, and all the kittens she ever has, if that
+would make up."
+
+"It wouldn't. You don't seem to understand that it's Jerry I want. I
+wish you wouldn't talk about him."
+
+"Very well," said Dorothy, "I won't."
+
+Then Grannie tried. She recommended a holy resignation. God, she said,
+had given Jerry to Nicky, and God had taken him away.
+
+"He didn't give him me, and he'd no right to take him. Dorothy wouldn't
+have done it. She was only ragging. But when God does things," said
+Nicky savagely, "it isn't a rag."
+
+He hated Grannie, and he hated Mr. Parsons, and he hated God. But he
+loved Dorothy who had given him Jerry.
+
+Night after night Frances held him in her arms at bed-time while Nicky
+said the same thing. "If--if I could stop seeing him. But I keep on
+seeing him. When he sat on the mustard and cress. And when he bit me
+with his sleep-bites. And when he looked at me out of the tree of
+Heaven. Then I hear that little barking grunt he used to make when he
+was playing with himself--when he dashed off into the bushes.
+
+"And I can't _bear_ it."
+
+Night after night Nicky cried himself to sleep.
+
+For the awful thing was that it had been all his fault. If he had kept
+Jerry's weight down Boris couldn't have caught him.
+
+"Daddy said so, Mummy."
+
+Over and over again Frances said, "It wasn't your fault. It was
+Don-Don's. He left the door open. Surely you can forgive Don-Don?" Over
+and over again Nicky said, "I do forgive him."
+
+But it was no good. Nicky became first supernaturally subdued and
+gentle, then ill. They had to take him away from home, away from the
+sight of the garden, and away from Mr. Parsons, forestalling the
+midsummer holidays by two months.
+
+Nicky at the seaside was troublesome and happy, and they thought he had
+forgotten. But on the first evening at Hampstead, as Frances kissed him
+Good-night, he said: "Shall I have to see Mr. Parsons to-morrow?"
+
+Frances said: "Yes. Of course."
+
+"I'd rather not."
+
+"Nonsense, you must get over that."
+
+"I--can't, Mummy."
+
+"Oh, Nicky, can't you forgive poor Mr. Parsons? When he was so unhappy?"
+
+Nicky meditated.
+
+"Do you think," he said at last, "he really minded?"
+
+"I'm sure he did."
+
+"As much as you and Daddy?"
+
+"Quite as much."
+
+"Then," said Nicky, "I'll forgive him."
+
+But, though he forgave John and Mr. Parsons and even God, who, to do him
+justice, did not seem to have been able to help it, Nicky did not
+forgive himself.
+
+Yet Frances never could think why the sight of mustard and cress made
+Nicky sick. Neither did Mr. Parsons, nor any schoolmaster who came after
+him understand why, when Nicky knew all the rest of the verb [Greek:
+erchomai] by heart he was unable to remember the second aorist.
+
+He excellent memory, but there was always a gap in it just there.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+In that peace and tranquillity where nothing ever happened, Jerry's
+violent death would have counted as an event, a date to reckon by; but
+for three memorable things that happened, one after another, in the
+summer and autumn of 'ninety-nine: the return of Frances's brother,
+Maurice Fleming, from Australia where Anthony had sent him two years
+ago, on the express understanding that he was to stay there; the
+simultaneous arrival of Anthony's brother, Bartholomew, and his family;
+and the outbreak of the Boer War.
+
+The return of Morrie was not altogether unforeseen, and Bartholomew had
+announced his coming well beforehand, but who could have dreamed that at
+the end of the nineteenth century England would be engaged in a War that
+really _was_ a War? Frances, with the _Times_ in her hands, supposed
+that that meant more meddling and muddling of stupid politicians, and
+that it would mean more silly speeches in Parliament, and copy, at last,
+for foolish violent, pathetic and desperate editors, and breach of
+promise cases, divorces and fires in paraffin shops reduced to momentary
+insignificance.
+
+But as yet there was no war, nor any appearance that sensible people
+interpreted as a sign of war at the time of Morrie's return. It stood
+alone, as other past returns, the return from Bombay, the return from
+Canada, the return from Cape Colony, had stood, in its sheer awfulness.
+To Frances it represented the extremity of disaster.
+
+They might have known what was coming by Grannie's behaviour. One day,
+the day when the Australian mail arrived, she had subsided suddenly into
+a state of softness and gentleness. She approached her son-in-law with
+an air of sorrowful deprecation; she showed a certain deference to her
+daughter Louie; she was soft and gentle even with Emmeline and Edith.
+
+Mrs. Fleming broke the news to Louie who broke it to Frances who in her
+turn broke it to Anthony. That was the procedure they invariably
+adopted.
+
+"I wonder," Grannie said, "what he can be coming back for!" Each time
+she affected astonishment and incredulity, as if Morrie's coming back
+were, not a recurrence that crushed you with its flatness and staleness,
+but a thing that must interest Louie because of its utter un-likeliness.
+
+"I wonder," said Louie, "why he hasn't come before. What else did you
+expect?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," said Grannie helplessly. "Go and tell Frances."
+
+Louie went. And because she knew that the burden of Morrie would fall
+again on Frances's husband she was disagreeable with Frances.
+
+"It's all very well for you," she said. "You haven't got to live with
+him. You haven't got to sleep in the room next him. You don't know what
+it's like."
+
+"I do know," said Frances. "I remember. You'll have to bear it."
+
+"You haven't had to bear it for fourteen years."
+
+"You'll have to bear it," Frances repeated, "till Anthony sends him out
+again. That's all it amounts to."
+
+She waited till the children were in bed and she was alone with Anthony.
+
+"Something awful's happened," she said, and paused hoping he would
+guess.
+
+"I don't know how to tell you."
+
+"Don't tell me if it's that Nicky's been taking my new bike to pieces."
+
+"It isn't Nicky--It's Maurice."
+
+Anthony got up and cleared his pipe, thoroughly and deliberately. She
+wondered whether he had heard.
+
+"I'd no business to have married you--to have let you in for him."
+
+"Why? What's he been up to now?"
+
+"He's coming home."
+
+"So," said Anthony, "is Bartholomew. I'd no business to have let you in
+for _him_."
+
+"Don't worry, Frances. If Morrie comes home he'll be sent out again,
+that's all."
+
+"At your expense."
+
+"I don't grudge any expense in sending Morrie out. Nor in keeping him
+out."
+
+"Yes. But this time it's different. It's worse."
+
+"Why worse?"
+
+"Because of the children. They're older now than they were last time.
+They'll understand."
+
+"What if they do? They must learn," Anthony said, "to realize facts."
+
+They realized them rather sooner than he had expected. Nobody but Louie
+had allowed for the possibility of Morrie's sailing by the same steamer
+as his letter; and Louie had argued that, if he had done so, he was
+bound either to have arrived before the letter or to have sent a wire.
+Therefore they had at least a clear five days of peace before them.
+Anthony thought he had shown wisdom when, the next morning which was a
+Wednesday, he sent Grannie and the Aunties to Eastbourne for a week, so
+that they shouldn't worry Frances, and when on Thursday he made her go
+with him for a long day in the country, to take her mind off Morrie.
+
+They came back at nine in the evening and found Dorothy, Michael and
+Nicholas sitting up for them. Michael and Nicky were excited, but
+Dorothy looked grown-up and important.
+
+"Uncle Morrie's come," they said.
+
+"Dorothy saw him first--"
+
+"Nicky let him in--"
+
+"He hadn't got a hat on."
+
+"We kept him in the schoolroom till Nanna could come and put him to
+bed."
+
+"He was crying because he'd been to Grannie's house and there wasn't
+anybody there--"
+
+"And because he'd lost the love-birds he'd brought for Auntie Emmy--"
+
+"And because he couldn't remember which of us was dead."
+
+"No, Mummy, nobody's seen him but us and Nanna."
+
+"Nanna's with him now."
+
+Uncle Morrie never accounted, even to himself, for the time he had spent
+between the arrival of his ship at Tilbury on Sunday morning and that
+Saturday afternoon. Neither could he remember what had become of his
+luggage or whether he had ever had any. Only the County Council man,
+going his last rounds in the farthest places of the Heath, came upon a
+small bundle tied in a blue handkerchief, a cap belonging to E.D.
+Boulger, of the S.S. _Arizona_, a cage of love-birds, and a distinct
+impression of a recumbent human form, on the grass together, under a
+young birch tree.
+
+In the stuffy little house behind the Judge's Walk the four women lived
+now under male protection. When they crossed the Heath they had no
+longer any need to borrow Anthony from Frances; they had a man of their
+own. To make room for him Auntie Louie and her type-writer were turned
+out of their own place, and Auntie Louie had to sleep in Grannie's bed,
+a thing she hated. To make room for the type-writer the grey parrot was
+turned out of the dining-room into the drawing-room. And as Maurice
+couldn't stand either the noise of the type-writer or the noises of the
+parrot he found both the dining-room and the drawing-room uninhabitable.
+
+Day after day Dorothy and Michael and Nicky, on the terrace, looked out
+for his coming. (Only extreme distance made Uncle Morrie's figure small
+and harmless and pathetic.) Day after day he presented himself with an
+air of distinction and assurance, flushed, and a little battered, but
+still handsome, wearing a spruce grey suit and a panama hat bought with
+Anthony's money. Sheep-farming in Australia--he had infinitely preferred
+the Cape Mounted Police--had ruined Maurice's nerves. He was good for
+nothing but to lounge in Anthony's garden, to ride his horses--it was
+his riding that had got him into the Cape Mounted Police--to sit at his
+table and drink his wines, and, when there was no more wine for him, to
+turn into Jack Straw's Castle for a pick-me-up on his way home.
+
+And before July was out three others were added to the garden group:
+Bartholomew and Vera and Veronica. And after them a fourth, Vera's
+friend, Captain Ferdinand Cameron, home on sick leave before anybody
+expected him.
+
+Frances's tree of Heaven sheltered them all.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Bartholomew, Anthony's brother, lived in Bombay and looked after his
+business for him in the East. He had something the matter with him, and
+he had come home to look after his own health. At least, Bartholomew's
+health was what he was supposed to be looking after; but Dorothy had
+heard her father say that Bartie had come home to look after Vera.
+
+Vera was Bartie's wife and Veronica's mother. Before she became Mrs.
+Bartholomew Harrison she had been Frances's schoolfellow and her dearest
+friend. Frances Fleming had been her bridesmaid and had met Anthony for
+the first time at Vera's wedding, when he had fallen in love with her;
+and she had fallen in love with him when they stayed together in
+Bartholomew's house, before Bartholomew took Vera to Bombay.
+
+Bartie had not been married ten months before he wanted to get Vera out
+of England; and Vera had not been in India for ten weeks before he
+wanted her to go back. They were always coming backwards and forwards,
+but they never came together. Vera would be sent home first, and then
+Bartie would come over in a great hurry and take her out again.
+
+Twelve years after their marriage Veronica was born at Simla, and the
+coming and going ceased for three years. Then Bartie sent them both
+home. That time Vera had refused to travel farther westward than
+Marseilles. She was afraid of damp and cold, and she had got the ship's
+doctor to order her to the Riviera. She and Veronica had been living for
+two years in a small villa at Agaye.
+
+This summer she had come to England. She was no longer afraid of damp
+and cold. And Bartie followed her.
+
+Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera, though it was
+more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera looked the same.
+Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her face had still the
+same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell. And if these things had
+changed Frances would still have known her by her forehead that looked
+so broad because her eyebrows and her eyes were so long, and by her
+fine, unfinished, passionate mouth, by her pointed chin and by her ways.
+
+But though her brother-in-law's ways had always been more or less
+disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the renewed
+encounter with Bartholomew. Bartie was long and grey, and lean even when
+you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt. He wore a white scarf
+about his throat, for his idea was that he had cancer in it. Cancer made
+you look grey. He, too, had the face of a hawk, of a tired and irritable
+hawk. It drooped between his hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above
+the scarf as if he were too tired or too irritable to hold it up. He
+behaved to Vera and Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into
+cancer of the throat, they who tired and irritated him.
+
+Vera talked to him as you might talk to a sick child whose peevishness
+prolongs, unreasonably, its pain. Bartie's manner almost amounted to a
+public repudiation of her. The whole house vibrated to the shutting of
+his door at Good-night time. Yet when Bartie came down in the morning,
+late, and more morose than ever, Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some
+visionary image of the poor thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for
+one minute in his cancer. It was an excuse for the shutting of his door.
+
+She kept out of his way as much as possible; yet, when they were
+together they watched each other. They watched; Bartie openly with
+sudden dartings and swoopings of his hawk's eyes; Vera furtively. Her
+eyes were so large and long that, without turning her head, or any
+visible movement, they could hold his image.
+
+But for Captain Cameron Vera's eyes had a full, open gaze. Spread wide
+apart under her wide forehead they were like dark moth's wings; they
+hovered, rested, flickering, vibrating to the fine tips of
+their corners.
+
+Whatever had been the matter with him in India, Captain Cameron had
+recovered. His keen, fair, Highland face made Bartie's face look
+terrible. Ferdie was charming; not more charming to Bartie's wife than
+he was to Frances; not more charming to Frances than to her sisters; so
+that even Louie unbent, and Emmeline and Edith fell in love with him. He
+flirted with Frances under Anthony's nose; and with the Aunties under
+Grannie's nose. The corners of Vera's mouth followed the tilt of her
+long eyes' corners as she saw him do it.
+
+You could not think of Vera as the children's Auntie, or as Bartie's
+wife, or as Veronica's mother.
+
+Veronica was a very little girl who sang songs and was afraid of
+ghosts.
+
+She slept in her mother's room, and so never could be put to bed till
+half-past seven, or till her mother was dressed to the last hook of her
+gown, the last hairpin, the last touch of powder (adhesive without
+bismuth), and the last shadow drawn fine about her eyelashes. When Vera
+beautiful in a beautiful gown, came trailing into the room where
+everybody waited for her, Veronica hid herself behind Uncle Anthony's
+big chair. When her father told her to come out of that and say
+good-night and be quick about it, she came slowly (she was not in the
+least afraid of Bartie), showing herself bit by bit, honey-coloured
+hair, eyebrows dark under her gold, very dark against her white;
+sorrowful, transparent, lucid eyes. A little girl with a straight white
+face. A little, slender girl in a straight white frock. She stood by
+Anthony's chair, spinning out the time, smiling at him with her childish
+wavering mouth, a smile that would not spread, that never went higher
+than the tip of her white nose, that left her lucid, transparent eyes
+still sorrowful.
+
+She knew that Anthony would take her on his knee, and that she could sit
+there with her head tucked under his chin, smiling at him, prolonging
+her caresses, till Vera told him to put her down and let her go.
+
+Bartie growled: "Did you hear your mother telling you to say
+Good-night?"
+
+"Yes. But I must kiss Uncle Anthony first. Properly. Once on his mouth.
+Once--on his nose. And once--on--his--eyes. And--once--on--his dear
+little--ears."
+
+After that, Veronica went slowly from chair to chair, lingering at each,
+sitting first on Frances's lap, then on Vera's, spinning out her
+caresses, that spun out the time and stretched it farther and farther
+between her and the unearthly hour ahead of her.
+
+But at her father's chair she did not linger for a single instant. She
+slipped her hand into his hand that dropped it as if it had hurt him;
+she touched his forehead with her small mouth, pushed out, absurdly, to
+keep her face as far as possible from his. For, though she was not
+afraid of Bartie, he was not nice either to sit on or to kiss.
+
+Half-way across the room she lingered.
+
+"I haven't sung 'London Bridge is broken down.' Don't you want me to
+sing it?"
+
+"No, darling. We want you to go to bed."
+
+"I'm going, Mummy."
+
+And at the door she turned and looked at them with her sorrowful, lucid,
+transparent eyes.
+
+Then she went, leaving the door open behind her. She left it open on
+purpose, so that she might hear their voices, and look down into the
+room on her way upstairs. Besides, she always hoped that somebody would
+call her back again.
+
+She lingered at the foot of the stairs till Bartie got up and shut the
+door on her. She lingered at the turn of the stairs and on the landing.
+But nobody ever called her back again.
+
+And nobody but Nicky knew what she was afraid of.
+
+Veronica was sitting up in the cot that used to be Nicky's when he was
+little. Nicky, rather cold in his pyjamas, sat on the edge of it beside
+her. A big, yellow, tremendous moon hung in the sky outside the window,
+behind a branch of the tree of Heaven, and looked at them.
+
+Veronica crouched sideways on her pillow in a corner of the cot, her
+legs doubled up tight under her tiny body, her shoulders hunched
+together, and her thin arms hanging before her straight to her lap. Her
+honey coloured hair was parted and gathered into two funny plaits, that
+stuck out behind her ear. Her head was tilted slightly backwards to rest
+against the rail of the cot. She looked at Nicky and her look reminded
+him of something, he couldn't remember what.
+
+"Were you ever afraid, Nicky?" she said.
+
+Nicky searched his memory for some image encircled by an atmosphere of
+terror, and found there a white hound with red smears on his breast and
+a muzzle like two saws.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I was once."
+
+A lamb--a white lamb--was what Veronica looked like. And Jerry bad
+looked at him like that when he found him sitting on the mustard and
+cress the day Boris killed him.
+
+"Afraid--what of?"
+
+"I don't know that it was 'of' exactly."
+
+"Would you be afraid of a ghost, now, if you saw one?"
+
+"I expect I jolly well should, if I _really_ saw one."
+
+"Being afraid of ghosts doesn't count, does it?"
+
+"No, of course it doesn't. You aren't afraid as long as I'm here, are
+you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I shall stay, then, till you go to sleep."
+
+Night after night he heard her calling to him, "Nicky, I'm frightened."
+Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that floor before
+midnight. Night after night he got up and came to her and stayed beside
+her till she went to sleep.
+
+Once he said, "If it was Michael he could tell you stories."
+
+"I don't _want_ Michael. I want you."
+
+In the day-time she went about looking for him. "Where's Nicky?" she
+said. "I want him."
+
+"Nicky's in the schoolroom. You can't have him."
+
+"But--I _want_ him."
+
+"Can't be helped. You must do without him."
+
+"Will he be very long?"
+
+"Yes, ever so long. Run away like a good little girl and play with
+Don-Don."
+
+She knew that they told her to play with Don-Don, because she was a
+little girl. If only she could grow big quick and be the same age
+as Nicky.
+
+Instead of running away and playing with Don-Don, Ronny went away by
+herself into the apple-tree house, to wait for Nicky.
+
+The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of the
+kitchen garden. The apple-tree had had no apples on it for years. It was
+so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched out two great boughs
+like twisted arms, and was propped up by a wooden post under each
+armpit. The breast of its trunk rested on a cross-beam. The posts and
+the cross-beam were the doorway of the house, and the branches were its
+roof and walls. Anthony had given it to Veronica to live in, and
+Veronica had given it to Nicky. It was Nicky's and Ronny's house. The
+others were only visitors who were not expected to stay. There was room
+enough for them both to stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the
+middle, and to lie flat at the far end.
+
+"What more," said Nicky, "do you want?"
+
+He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he played
+with Bonny in the apple-tree house.
+
+"I don't care a ram if they do," he said. But nobody ever did, not even
+Mr. Parsons.
+
+Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and Bonny
+sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled unwillingly. But
+her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all. Nicky wondered why.
+
+"Is it," said Dorothy one morning, "that Ronny doesn't look as if she
+was Uncle Bartie's daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as if he wasn't
+Ronny's father?"
+
+However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she brought it out
+as if it had been the result of long and mature consideration.
+
+"Or is it," said Vera, "that I don't look as if I were Ronny's mother?"
+
+Her eyes had opened all their length to take in Dorothy.
+
+"No. I think it is that Uncle Bartie looks--"
+
+Frances rushed in. "It doesn't matter, my dear, what you think."
+
+"It will some day," said Dorothy.
+
+It was perhaps the best thing she could have said, as showing that she
+was more interested in the effect she would produce some day than in the
+sensation she had created there and then.
+
+"May I go round to Rosalind's after lessons?"
+
+"You may."
+
+"And may I stay to lunch if they ask me?"
+
+"You may stay as long as they care to have you. Stay to tea, stay to
+dinner, if you like."
+
+Dorothy knew by the behaviour of her mother's face that she had scored
+somewhere, somehow. She also knew that she was in disgrace and yet not
+in disgrace; which, if you came to think of it, was a funny thing.
+
+About this time Frances began to notice a symptom in herself. She was
+apt to resent it when Vera discussed her children with her. One late
+afternoon she and Anthony were alone with Vera. Captain Cameron had not
+come round that day, and Bartie had gone into town to consult either his
+solicitor or a specialist. He was always consulting one or the other.
+
+"You're wrong, you two," said Vera. "You think Michael's tender and
+Nicky's hard and unimpressionable. Michael's hard. You won't have to
+bother about Michael's feelings."
+
+"Michael's feelings," said Frances, "are probably what I shall have to
+bother about more than anything."
+
+"You needn't. For one thing, they'll be so unlike your feelings that you
+won't know whether they're feelings at all. You won't even know whether
+he's having them or not. Nicky's the one you'll have to look out for.
+He'll go all the howlers."
+
+"I don't think that Nicky'll be very susceptible. He hasn't shown any
+great signs so far."
+
+"Hasn't he! Nicky's susceptibility is something awful."
+
+"My dear Vera, you say yourself you don't care about children and that
+you don't understand them."
+
+"No more I do," said Vera. "But I understand men."
+
+"Do you understand Veronica?"
+
+"Of course I don't. I said men. Veronica's a girl. Besides, I'm
+Veronica's mother."
+
+"Nicky," said Anthony, "is not much more than nine."
+
+"You keep on thinking of him as a child--a child--nothing but a child.
+Wait till Nicky has children of his own. Then you'll know."
+
+"They would be rather darlings, Nicky's children," Frances said.
+
+"So would Veronica's."
+
+"Ver-onica?"
+
+You needn't be frightened. Nicky's affection for Ronny is purely
+paternal."
+
+"I'm not frightened," said Frances. But she left the room. She did not
+care for the turn the talk had taken. Besides, she wanted Vera to see
+that she was not afraid to leave her alone with Anthony.
+
+"I'm glad Frances has gone," said Vera, "because I want to talk to you.
+You'd never have known each other if it hadn't been for me. She couldn't
+have married you. It was I who saw you both through."
+
+He assented.
+
+"And you said if there was ever anything you could do for me--You
+haven't by any chance forgotten?"
+
+"I have not."
+
+"Well, if anything should happen to me--"
+
+"But, my dear girl, what _should_ happen to you?"
+
+"Things _do_ happen, Anthony."
+
+"Yes, but how about Bartie?"
+
+"That's it. Supposing we separated."
+
+"Good Heavens, you're not contemplating _that_, are you?"
+
+"I'm not contemplating anything. But Bartie isn't very easy to live
+with, is he?"
+
+"No, he's not. He never was. All the same--"
+
+Bartie was impossible. Between the diseases he had and thought he hadn't
+and the diseases he hadn't and thought he had, he made life miserable
+for himself and other people. He was a jealous egoist; he had the morbid
+coldness of the neurotic, and Vera was passionate. She ought never to
+have married him. All the same--"
+
+"All the same I shall stick to Bartie as long as it's possible. And as
+long as it's possible Bartie'll stick to me. But, if anything happens I
+want you to promise that you'll take Ronny."
+
+"You must get Frances to promise."
+
+"She'll do anything you ask her to, Anthony."
+
+When Frances came into the room again Vera was crying.
+
+And so Frances promised.
+
+     "'London Bridge is broken down
+     (_Ride over My Lady Leigh_!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with stones so strong--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine'"--
+
+It was twenty to eight and Ronny had not so much as begun to say Good
+night. She was singing her sons to spin out the time.
+
+     "'London Bridge--'"
+
+"That'll do, Ronny, it's time you were in bed."
+
+There was no need for her to linger and draw out her caresses, no need
+to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's request, had had
+her cot moved up into the night nursery.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie out to
+this time, when the Boer War came and solved his problem.
+
+Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South Africa, to
+enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.
+
+Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders,
+solving, perhaps, another problem.
+
+"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.
+
+Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was what
+Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't come back?
+Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances hated problems when
+they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems when they
+bothered Frances.
+
+And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went on.
+
+"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."
+
+"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.
+
+Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said, "what else
+could he do? His only chance was to go away and do something so jolly
+plucky that _we_'re ashamed of ourselves, and never to come back again
+to spoil it. You don't want him to spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"
+
+Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to
+realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging over
+them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over them. It
+hung over a country that, except once when it had conveniently swallowed
+up Morrie, they had never thought about and could not care for, a
+landscape that they could not see. The war was not even part of that
+landscape; it refused to move over it in any traceable course. It simply
+hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another. It was not
+their fault. They tried to see it. They bought the special editions of
+the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of
+the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the
+printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and
+Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial; it was
+all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very
+blood of it ran grey.
+
+It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the open wings
+of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of Heaven were real; so
+were Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow on the Hill; morning and noon and
+night were real, and getting up and dressing and going to bed; most real
+of all the sight and sound and touch of her husband and her children.
+
+Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances carried
+about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she could attach the
+rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an immense slender muzzle,
+tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out Maurice.
+
+Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.
+
+"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy said he
+ought to be shut up somewhere."
+
+"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."
+
+"Or drink, ducky."
+
+"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"
+
+"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I shouldn't
+mind whether he came back or didn't. _You_'re cruel. You ought to think
+of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edie."
+
+"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle Morrie."
+
+She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had been, as
+a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two years younger
+than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted, who contrived,
+nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to want by crying for
+them, though everybody else went without. And in the grown-up Morrie's
+place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky.
+
+For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.
+
+"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss
+it."
+
+Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and Nicky,
+mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High Street with
+flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a Pro-Boer and flew no
+flags. All these things irritated Maurice.
+
+He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all the
+chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in hospital
+throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had missed the sortie
+of his squadron and the taking of the guns for which Ferdie Cameron got
+his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come back in the middle of the war
+with nothing but a bullet wound in his left leg to prove that he had
+taken part in it.
+
+The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only depressed
+him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence broke down the
+sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a period of sobriety
+beyond its natural limits.
+
+For there were two kinds of drinking: great drinking that came seldom
+and was the only thing that counted, and ordinary drinking that, though
+it went on most of the time, brought no satisfaction and didn't count at
+all. And there were two states of drunkenness to correspond: one intense
+and vivid, without memory, transcending all other states; and one that
+was no more remarkable than any other. Before the war Morrie's great
+drinking came seldom, by fits and bursts and splendid unlasting
+uprushes; after the war the two states tended to approach till they
+merged in one continual sickly soaking. And while other important and
+outstanding things, and things that he really wanted to remember,
+disappeared in the poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he
+never for one moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not
+Anthony, his brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded.
+
+He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the war. He
+was furious with Frances and Anthony. Not realizing the war meant not
+realizing what he had been through. He swore by some queer God of his
+that he would make them realize it. The least they could do for him was
+to listen to what he had to say.
+
+"You people here don't know what war is. You think it's all glory and
+pluck, and dashing out and blowing up the enemy's guns, and the British
+flag flying, and wounded pipers piping all the time and not caring a
+damn. Nobody caring a damn.
+
+"And it isn't. It's dirt and funk and stinks and more funk all the time.
+It's lying out all night on the beastly veldt, and going to sleep and
+getting frozen, and waking up and finding you've got warm again because
+your neighbour's inside's been fired out on the top of you. You get
+wounded when the stretcher-bearers aren't anywhere about, and you crawl
+over to the next poor devil and lie back to back with him to keep warm.
+And just when you've dropped off to sleep you wake up shivering, because
+he's died of a wound he didn't know he'd got.
+
+"You'll find a chap lying on his back all nice and comfy, and when you
+start to pick him up you can't lift him because his head's glued to the
+ground. You try a bit, gently, and the flesh gives way like rotten
+fruit, and the bone like a cup you've broken and stuck together without
+any seccotine, and you heave up a body with half a head on it. And all
+the brains are in the other half, the one that's glued down. That's war.
+
+"Huh!" He threw out his breath with a jerk of contempt. It seemed to him
+that neither Frances nor Anthony was listening to him. They were not
+looking at him. They didn't want to listen; they didn't want to look at
+him. He couldn't touch them; he couldn't evoke one single clear image in
+their minds; there was no horror he could name that would sting them to
+vision, to realization. They had not been there.
+
+Dorothy and Michael and Nicky were listening. The three kids had
+imagination; they could take it in. They stared as if he had brought
+those horrors into the room. But even they missed the reality of it.
+They saw everything he meant them to see, except him. It was as if they
+were in the conspiracy to keep him out of it.
+
+He glared at Frances and Anthony. What was the good of telling them, of
+trying to make them realize it? If they'd only given some sign, made
+some noise or some gesture, or looked at him, he might have spared them.
+But the stiff, averted faces of Frances and Anthony annoyed him.
+
+"And if you're a poor wretched Tommy like me, you'll have to sweat in a
+brutal sun, hauling up cases of fizz from the railway up country to
+Headquarters, with a thirst on you that frizzles your throat. You see
+the stuff shining and spluttering, and you go mad. You could kill the
+man if you were to see him drink it, when you know there's nothing for
+_you_ but a bucket of green water with typhoid germs swimming about in
+it. That's war.
+
+"You think you're lucky if you're wounded and get bumped down in a
+bullock wagon thirty miles to the base hospital. But the best thing you
+can do then is to pop off. For if you get better they make you hospital
+orderly. And the hospital orderly has to clean up all the muck of the
+butcher's shop from morning to night. When you're so sick you can't
+stand you get your supper, dry bread and bully beef. The bully beef
+reminds you of things, and the bread--well, the bread's all nice and
+white on the top. But when you turn it over on the other side--it's red.
+That's war."
+
+Frances looked at him. He thought: "At last she's turned; at last I've
+touched her; she can realize that."
+
+"Morrie dear, it must have been awful," she said. "It's _too_ awful. I
+don't mind your telling me and Anthony about it; but I'd rather you did
+it when the children aren't in the room."
+
+"Is that all you think about? The children? The children. You don't care
+a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn what happens to me
+or anybody else. What does it matter who's wounded or who's killed, as
+long as it isn't one of your own kids?
+
+"I'm simply trying to tell you what war _is_. It's dirt and stink and
+funk. That's all it is. And there's precious little glory in it, Nicky."
+
+"If the Boers won there would be glory," Michael said.
+
+"Not even if the Boers won," said Maurice.
+
+"Certainly not if the Boers won," said Anthony.
+
+"You'll say next there'd be no glory if there was war between England
+and Ireland and the Irish won. And yet there would be glory."
+
+"Would there? Go and read history and don't talk rot."
+
+"I have read it," said Michael.
+
+Frances thought: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why should
+he? He's barely thirteen. I can't think where he gets these ideas from.
+But he'll grow out of them."
+
+It was not Maurice that she saw in Maurice's war-pictures. But he had
+made them realize what war was; and they vowed that as long as they
+lived not one of their sons should have anything to do with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the spring of nineteen-one Anthony sent Maurice out to California.
+The Boer War was ended.
+
+Another year, and the vision of war passed from Frances as if it had
+never been.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Michael was unhappy.
+
+The almond trees flowered in front of the white houses in the strange
+white streets.
+
+White squares, white terraces, white crescents; at the turn of the roads
+the startling beauty of the trees covered with pink blossoms, hot
+against the hot white walls.
+
+After the pink blossoms, green leaves and a strange white heat
+everywhere. You went, from pavements burning white, down long avenues
+grey-white under the shadows of the limes.
+
+A great Promenade going down like a long green tunnel, from the big
+white Hotel at the top to the High Street at the bottom of the basin
+where the very dregs of the heat sank and thickened.
+
+Promenade forbidden for no earthly reason that Michael could see, except
+that it was beautiful. Hotel where his father gave him dinner on his
+last day of blessed life, telling him to choose what he liked best, as
+the condemned criminal chooses his last meal on the day they hang him.
+
+Cleeve Hill and Battledown and Birdlip, and the long rampart of
+Leckhampton, a thin, curling bristle of small trees on the edge of it;
+forms that made an everlasting pattern on his mind; forms that haunted
+him at night and tempted and tormented him all day. Memory which it
+would have been better for him if he had not had, of the raking open
+country over the top, of broad white light and luminous blue shadows, of
+white roads switchbacking through the sheep pastures; fields of bright
+yellow mustard in flower on the lower hills; then, rectangular fir
+plantations and copses of slender beech trees in the hollows. Somewhere,
+far-off, the Severn, faint and still, like a river in a dream.
+
+Memory of the round white town in the round pit of the valley, shining,
+smoking through the thick air and the white orchard blossoms; memory
+saturated by a smell that is like no other smell on earth, the delicate
+smell of the Midland limestone country, the smell of clean white dust,
+and of grass drying in the sun and of mustard flowers.
+
+Michael was in Cheltenham.
+
+It was a matter of many unhappinesses, not one unhappiness. A sudden
+intolerable unhappiness, the flash and stab of the beauty of the
+almond-flowers, seen in passing and never seized, beauty which it would
+have been better for him if he had not seen; the knowledge, which he
+ought never to have had, that this beauty had to die, was killed because
+he had not seized it, when, if he could but have held it for one minute,
+it would have been immortal. A vague, light unhappiness that came
+sometimes, could not for the life of him think why, from the sight of
+his own body stripped, and from the feeling of his own muscles. There
+was sadness for him in his very strength. A long, aching unhappiness
+that came with his memory of the open country over the tops of the
+hills, which, in their incredible stupidity and cruelty, they had let
+him see. A quick, lacerating unhappiness when he thought of his mother,
+and of the garden on the Heath, and the high ridge of the Spaniards'
+Road, and London below it, immense and beautiful.
+
+The unhappiness of never being by himself.
+
+He was afraid of the herd. It was with him night and day. He was afraid
+of the thoughts, the emotions that seized it, swaying, moving the
+multitude of undeveloped souls as if they had been one monstrous,
+dominating soul. He was afraid of their voices, when they chanted, sang
+and shouted together. He loathed their slang even when he used it. He
+disliked the collective, male odour of the herd, the brushing against
+him of bodies inflamed with running, the steam of their speed rising
+through their hot sweaters; and the smell of dust and ink and
+india-rubber and resinous wood in the warm class-rooms.
+
+Michael was at school.
+
+The thing he had dreaded, that had hung over him, threatening him for
+years before it happened, had happened. Nothing could have prevented it;
+their names had been down for Cheltenham long ago; first his, then
+Nicky's. Cheltenham, because Bartie and Vera lived there, and because it
+had a college for girls, and Dorothy, who wanted to go to Roedean, had
+been sent to Cheltenham, because of Bartie and Vera and for no other
+reason. First Dorothy; then, he, Michael; then, the next term, Nicky.
+And Nicky had been sent (a whole year before his time) because of
+Michael, in the hope that Michael would settle down better if he had his
+brother with him. It didn't seem reasonable.
+
+Not that either Dorothy or Nicky minded when they got there. All that
+Nicky minded was not being at Hampstead. Being at Cheltenham he did not
+mind at all. He rather liked it, since Major Cameron had come to stay
+just outside it--on purpose to annoy Bartie--and took them out riding.
+Even Michael did not mind Cheltenham more than any other place his
+people might have chosen. He was not unreasonable. All he asked was to
+be let alone, and to have room to breathe and get ahead in. As it was,
+he had either to go with the school mass, or waste energy in resisting
+its poisonous impact.
+
+He had chosen resistance.
+
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DEAREST MOTHER:
+
+I've put Sunday on this letter, though it's really Friday, because I'm
+supposed to be writing it on Sunday when the other fellows are writing.
+That's the beastly thing about this place, you're expected to do
+everything when the other fellows are doing it, whether you want to or
+not, as if the very fact that they're doing it too didn't make you
+hate it.
+
+I'm writing now because I simply must. If I waited till Sunday I
+mightn't want to, and anyhow I shouldn't remember a single thing I meant
+to say. Even now Johnson minor's digging his skinny elbows into one side
+of me, and Hartley major's biting the feathers off his pen and spitting
+them out again on the other. But they're only supposed to be doing Latin
+verse, so it doesn't matter so much. What I mean is it's as if their
+beastly minds kept on leaking into yours till you're all mixed up with
+them. That's why I asked Daddy to take me away next term. You see--it's
+more serious than he thinks--it is, really. You've no idea what it's
+like. You've got to swot every blessed thing the other fellows swot
+even if you can't do it, and whether it's going to be any good to you or
+not. Why, you're expected to sleep when they're sleeping, even if the
+chap next you snores. Daddy _might_ remember that it's Nicky who likes
+mathematics, not me. It's all very well for Nicky when he wants to go
+into the Army all the time. There are things _I_ want to do. I want to
+write and I'm going to write. Daddy can't keep me off it. And I don't
+believe he'd want to if he understood. There's nothing else in the world
+I'll ever be any good at.
+
+And there are things I want to know. I want to know Greek and Latin and
+French and German and Italian and Spanish, and Old French and Russian
+and Chinese and Japanese, oh, and Provençal, and every blessed language
+that has or has had a literature. I can learn languages quite fast. Do
+you suppose I've got a chance of knowing one of them--really
+knowing--even if I had the time? Not much. And that's where being here's
+so rotten. They waste your time as if it was theirs, not yours. They've
+simply no notion of the value of it. They seem to think time doesn't
+matter because you're young. Fancy taking three months over a Greek play
+you can read in three hours. That'll give you some idea.
+
+It all comes of being in a beastly form and having to go with the other
+fellows. Say they're thirty fellows in your form, and twenty-nine stick;
+you've got to stick with them, if it's terms and terms. They can't do it
+any other way. It's _because_ I'm young, Mummy, that I mind so awfully.
+Supposing I died in ten years' time, or even fifteen? It simply makes me
+hate everybody.
+
+Love to Daddy and Don.
+
+     Your loving MICK.
+
+P.S.-I don't mean that Hartley major isn't good at Latin verse. He is.
+He can lick me into fits when he's bitten _all_ the feathers off.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Tuesday_.
+
+DARLING MUMMY:
+
+Daddy _doesn't_ understand. You only think he does because you like him.
+It's all rot what he says about esprit de corps, the putridest rot,
+though I know he doesn't mean it.
+
+And he's wrong about gym, and drill and games and all that. I don't mind
+gym, and I don't mind drill, and I like games. I'm fairly good at most
+of them--except footer. All the fellows say I'm fairly good--otherwise I
+don't suppose they'd stick me for a minute. I don't even mind Chapel.
+You see, when it's only your body doing what the other chaps do, it
+doesn't seem to matter. If esprit de corps _was_ esprit de corps it
+would be all right. But it's esprit d'esprit. And it's absolutely
+sickening the things they can do to your mind. I can't stand another
+term of it.
+
+     Always your loving
+          MICK.
+P.S.-How do you know I shan't be dead in ten or
+fifteen years' time? It's enough to make me.
+
+P.P.S.-It's all very well for Daddy to talk--_he_ doesn't want to learn
+Chinese.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Thursday_.
+
+DEAR FATHER:
+
+All right. Have it your own way. Only I shall kill myself. You needn't
+tell Mother that--though it won't matter so much as she'll very likely
+think. And perhaps then you won't try and stop Nicky going into the Army
+as you've stopped me.
+
+I don't care a "ram", as Nicky would say, whether you bury me or cremate
+me; only you might give my Theocritus to old Parsons, and my revolver
+to Nicky if it doesn't burst. He'd like it.
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+P.S.--If Parsons would rather have my _Æschylus_ he can, or both.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DARLING MUMMY:
+
+It's your turn for a letter. Do you think Daddy'd let me turn the
+hen-house into a workshop next holidays, as there aren't any hens? And
+would he give me a proper lathe for turning steel and brass and stuff
+for my next birthday I'm afraid it'll cost an awful lot; but he could
+take it out of my other birthdays, I don't mind how many so long as I
+can have the lathe this one.
+
+This place isn't half bad once you get used to it. I like the fellows,
+and all the masters are really jolly decent, though I wish we had old
+Parsons here instead of the one we have to do Greek for. He's an awful
+chap to make you swot.
+
+I don't know what you mean about Mick being seedy. He's as fit as fit.
+You should see him when he's stripped. But he hates the place like
+poison half the time. He can't stand being with a lot of fellows. He's a
+rum chap because they all like him no end, the masters and the fellows,
+though they think he's funny, all except Hartley major, but he's such a
+measly little blighter that he doesn't count.
+
+We had a ripping time last Saturday. Bartie went up to town, and Major
+Cameron took Dorothy and Ronny and Vera and me and Mick to Birdlip in
+his dog-cart, only Mick and me had to bike because there wasn't room
+enough. However we grabbed the chains behind and the dog-cart pulled us
+up the hills like anything, and we could talk to Dorothy and Ronny
+without having to yell at each other. He did us jolly well at tea
+afterwards.
+
+Dorothy rode my bike stridelegs coming back, so that I could sit in the
+dog-cart. She said she'd get a jolly wigging if she was seen. We shan't
+know till Monday.
+
+You know, Mummy, that kid Ronny's having a rotten time, what with Bartie
+being such a beast and Vera chumming up with Ferdie and going off to
+country houses where he is. I really think she'd better come to us for
+the holidays. Then I could teach her to ride. Bartie won't let her learn
+here, though Ferdie'd gone and bought a pony for her. That was to spite
+Ferdie. He's worse than ever, if you can imagine that, and he's got
+three more things the matter with him.
+
+I must stop now.
+
+Love to Dad and Don and Nanna. Next year I'm to go into physics and
+stinks--that's chemistry.
+
+Your loving NICKY.
+
+     THE LEAS. PARABOLA ROAD.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DEAREST MUMMY:
+
+I'm awfully sorry you don't like my last term's school report. I know it
+wasn't what it ought to have been. I have to hold myself in so as to
+keep in the same class with Rosalind when we're moved up after
+Midsummer. But as she's promised me faithfully she'll let herself rip
+next term, you'll see it'll be all right at Xmas. We'll both be in I A
+the Midsummer after, and we can go in for our matic, together. I wish
+you'd arrange with Mrs. Jervis for both of us to be at Newnham at the
+same time. Tell her Rosalind's an awful slacker if I'm not there to keep
+her up to the mark. No--don't tell her that. Tell her _I'm_ a slacker if
+she isn't there.
+
+I was amused by your saying it was decent of Bartie to have us so often.
+He only does it because things are getting so tight between him and
+Vera that he's glad of anything that relaxes the strain a bit. Even us.
+He's snappier than ever with Ronny. I can't think how the poor kid
+stands it.
+
+You know that ripping white serge coat and skirt you sent me? Well, the
+skirt's not nearly long enough. It doesn't matter a bit though, because
+I can keep it for hockey. It's nice having a mother who _can_ choose
+clothes. You should see the last blouse Mrs. Jervis got for Rosalind.
+She's burst out of _all_ the seams already. You could have heard
+her doing it.
+
+Much love to you and Daddy and Don-Don. I can't send any to Mr. Parsons
+now my hair's up. But you might tell him I'm going in strong for
+Sociology and Economics.--
+
+     Your loving
+          DOROTHY.
+
+P.S.--Vera asked me if I thought you'd take her and Ronny in at
+Midsummer. I said of course you would--like a shot.
+
+
+     LANSDOWN LODGE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Friday._
+
+MY DEAREST FRANCES:
+
+I hope you got my two wires in time. You needn't come down, either of
+you. And you needn't worry about Mick. Ferdie went round and talked to
+him like a fa--I mean a big brother, and the revolver (bless his heart!)
+is at present reposing at the bottom of my glove-box.
+
+All the same we both think you'd better take him away at Midsummer. He
+says he can stick it till then, but not a day longer. Poor Mick! He has
+the most mysterious troubles.
+
+I daresay it's the Cheltenham climate as much as anything. It doesn't
+suit me or Bonny either, and it's simply killing Ferdie by inches. I
+suppose that's why Bartie makes us stay here--in the hope--
+
+Oh! my dear, I'm worried out of my life about him. He's never got over
+that fever he had in South Africa. He's looking ghastly.
+
+And the awful thing is that I can't do a thing for him. Not a thing.
+Unless--
+
+You haven't forgotten the promise you made me two years ago, have you?
+
+Dorothy seemed to think you could put Bonny and me up--again!--at
+Midsummer. Can you? And if poor Ferdie wants to come and see us, you
+won't turn him off your door-mat, will you?
+
+     Your lovingest
+          "VERA."
+
+Frances said, "Poor Vera! She even makes poor Mick an excuse for seeing
+Ferdie."
+
+
+
+X
+
+Three more years passed and Frances had fulfilled her promise. She had
+taken Veronica.
+
+The situation had become definite. Bartie had delivered his ultimatum.
+Either Vera must give up Major Cameron, signing a written pledge in the
+presence of three witnesses, Frances, Anthony and Bartie's solicitor,
+that she would neither see him nor write to him, nor hold any sort or
+manner of communication with him, direct or indirect, or he would obtain
+a judicial separation. It was to be clearly understood by both of them
+that he would not, in any circumstances, divorce her. Bartie knew that a
+divorce was what they wanted, what they had been playing for, and he was
+not going to make things easy for them; he was going to make things hard
+and bitter and shameful He had based his ultimatum on the calculation
+that Vera would not have the courage of her emotions; that even her
+passion would surrender when she found that it had no longer the
+protection of her husband's house and name. Besides Vera was expensive,
+and Cameron was a spendthrift on an insufficient income; he could not
+possibly afford her. If Bartie's suspicions were correct, the thing had
+been going on for the last twelve years, and if in twelve years' time
+they had not forced his hand that was because they had counted the cost,
+and decided that, as Frances had put it, the "game was not worth the
+scandal."
+
+For when suspicion became unendurable he had consulted Anthony who
+assured him that Frances, who ought to know, was convinced that there
+was nothing in it except incompatibility, for which Bartie was
+superlatively responsible.
+
+Anthony's manner did not encourage confidence, and he gathered that his
+own more sinister interpretation would be dismissed with contemptuous
+incredulity. Anthony was under his wife's thumb and Frances had been
+completely bamboozled by her dearest friend. Still, when once their eyes
+were opened, he reckoned on the support of Anthony and Frances. It was
+inconceivable, that, faced with a public scandal, his brother and his
+sister-in-law would side with Vera.
+
+It was a game where Bartie apparently held all the cards. And his trump
+card was Veronica.
+
+He was not going to keep Veronica without Vera. That had been tacitly
+understood between them long ago. If Vera went to Cameron she could not
+take Veronica with her without openly confirming Bartie's worst
+suspicion.
+
+And yet all these things, so inconceivable to Bartie, happened. When it
+came to the stabbing point the courage of Vera's emotions was such that
+she defied her husband and his ultimatum, and went to Cameron. By that
+time Ferdie was so ill that she would have been ashamed of herself if
+she had not gone. And though Anthony's house was not open to the unhappy
+lovers, Frances and Anthony had taken Veronica.
+
+Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie came over
+to West End House when they heard that it had been decided. It was
+time, they said, that somebody should protest, that somebody should
+advise Frances for her own good and for the good of her children.
+
+They had always detested and distrusted Vera Harrison; they had always
+known what would happen. The wonder was it had not happened before. But
+why Frances should make it easy for her, why Frances should shoulder
+Vera Harrison's responsibilities, and burden herself with that child,
+and why Anthony should give his consent to such a proceeding, was more
+than they could imagine.
+
+Once Frances had stood up for the three Aunties, against Grannie; now
+Grannie and the three Aunties were united against Frances.
+
+"Frances, you're a foolish woman."
+
+"My folly is my own affair and Anthony's."
+
+"You'll have to pay for it some day."
+
+"You might have thought of your own children first."
+
+"I did. I thought, How would I like _them_ to be forsaken like poor
+Ronny?"
+
+"You should have thought of the boys. Michael's growing up; so is
+Nicky."
+
+"Nicky is fifteen; Ronny is eleven, if you call that growing up."
+
+"That's all very well, but when Nicky is twenty-one and Ronny is
+seventeen what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm not going to turn Ronny out of doors for fear Nicky should fall in
+love with her, if that's what you mean."
+
+"It _is_ what I mean, now you've mentioned it."
+
+"He's less likely to fall in love with her if I bring them up as
+brother and sister."
+
+"You might think of Anthony. Bartholomew's wife leaves him for another
+man, and you aid and abet her by taking her child, relieving her of her
+one responsibility."
+
+"Bartie's wife leaves him, and we help Bartie by taking care of his
+child--who is _our niece_, not yours."
+
+"My dear Frances, that attitude isn't going to deceive anybody. If you
+don't think of Anthony and your children, you might think of us. We
+don't want to be mixed up in this perfectly horrible affair."
+
+"How are you mixed up in it?"
+
+"Well, after all, Frances, we are the family. We are your sisters and
+your mother and your children's grand-mother and aunts."
+
+"Then," said Frances with decision, "you must try to bear it. You must
+take the rough with the smooth, as Anthony and I do."
+
+And as soon as she had said it she was sorry. It struck her for the
+first time that her sisters were getting old. It was no use for Auntie
+Louie, more red and more rigid than ever, to defy the imminence of her
+forty-ninth birthday. Auntie Emmy's gestures, her mouthings and
+excitement, only drew attention to the fact that she was forty-seven.
+And Edie, why, even poor little Auntie Edie was forty-five. Grannie, dry
+and wiry, hardly looked older than Auntie Edie.
+
+They left her, going stiffly, in offence. And again the unbearable
+pathos of them smote her. The poor Aunties. She was a brute to hurt
+them. She still thought of them as Auntie Louie, Auntie Emmy, Auntie
+Edie. It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed upon them a colour and
+vitality that, but for her and for her children, they would not have
+had. They were helpless, tiresome, utterly inefficient. In all their
+lives they had never done anything vigorous or memorable. They were
+doomed to go out before her children; when they were gone they would be
+gone altogether. Neither Auntie Louie, nor Auntie Emmy, nor Auntie Edie
+would leave any mark or sign of herself. But her children gave them
+titles by which they would be remembered after they were gone. It was as
+if she had bestowed on them a little of her own enduring life.
+
+It was absurd and pathetic that they should think that they were the
+Family.
+
+But however sorry she was for them she could not allow them to dictate
+to her in matters that concerned her and Anthony alone. If they were so
+worried, about the scandal, why hadn't they the sense to see that the
+only way to meet it was to give it the lie by taking Ronny, by behaving
+as if Ronny were unquestionably Bartie's daughter and their niece? They
+were bound to do it, if not for Vera's sake, for the dear little girl's
+sake. And that was what Vera had been thinking of; that was why she had
+trusted them.
+
+But her three sisters had always disliked Vera. They disliked her
+because, while they went unmarried, Vera, not content with the one man
+who was her just and legal portion, had taken another man whom she had
+no right to. And Auntie Emmeline had been in love with Ferdie.
+
+Still, there was a certain dreadful truth in their reproaches; and it
+stung. Frances said to herselv that she had not been wise. She had done
+a risky thing in taking Ronny. It was not fair to her children, to
+Michael and Nicholas and John. She was afraid. She had been afraid when
+Vera had talked to her about Nicky and Veronica; and when she had seen
+Veronica and Nicky playing together in the apple-tree house; and when
+she had heard Ronny's voice outside the schoolroom door crying, "Where's
+Nicky? I want him. Will he be very long?"
+
+Supposing Veronica should go on wanting Nicky, and supposing Nicky--
+
+Frances was so worried that, when Dorothy came striding across the lawn
+to ask her what the matter was, and what on earth Grannie and the
+Aunties had been gassing about all that time, she told her.
+
+Dorothy was nineteen. And Dorothy at nineteen, tall and upright, was
+Anthony's daughter. Her face and her whole body had changed; they were
+Anthony's face and body made feminine. Her little straight nose had now
+a short high bridge; her brown eyes were keen and alert; she had his
+hawk's look. She put her arm in Frances's, protecting her, and they
+walked up and down the terrace path, discussing it. In the distance
+Grannie and the Aunties could be seen climbing the slope of the Heath to
+Judges' Walk. They were not, Dorothy protested, pathetic; they were
+simply beastly. She hated them for worrying her mother.
+
+"They think I oughtn't to have taken Ronny. They think Nicky'll want to
+marry her."
+
+"But Ronny's a kid--"
+
+"When she's not a kid."
+
+"He won't, Mummy ducky, he won't. She'll be a kid for ages. Nicky'll
+have married somebody else before she's got her hair up."
+
+"Then Ronny'll fall in love with _him_, and get her little heart
+broken."
+
+"She won't, Mummy, she won't. They only talk like that because they
+think Ferdie's Ronny's father."
+
+"Dorothy!"
+
+Frances, in horror, released herself from that protecting arm. The
+horror came, not from the fact, but from her daughter's knowledge of it.
+
+"Poor Mummy, didn't you know? That's why Bartie hates her."
+
+"It isn't true."
+
+"What's the good of that as long as Bartie thinks it is?" said Dorothy.
+
+     "London Bridge is broken down
+     (_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)"
+
+Veronica was in the drawing-room, singing "London Bridge."
+
+Michael, in all the beauty of his adolescence, lay stretched out on the
+sofa, watching her. Her small, exquisite, childish face between the
+plaits of honey-coloured hair, her small, childish face thrilled him
+with a singular delight and sadness. She was so young and so small, and
+at the same time so perfect that Michael could think of her as looking
+like that for ever, not growing up into a tiresome, bouncing, fluffy
+flapper like Rosalind Jervis.
+
+Aunt Louie and Aunt Emmeline said that Rosalind was in love with him.
+Michael thought that was beastly of them and he hoped it wasn't true.
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine'"--
+
+Veronica was happy; for she knew herself to be a cause of happiness.
+Like Frances once, she was profoundly aware of her own happiness, and
+for the same reason. It was, if you came to think of it, incredible. It
+had been given to her, suddenly, when she was not looking for it, after
+she had got used to unhappiness.
+
+As long as she could remember Veronica had been aware of herself. Aware
+of herself, chiefly, not as a cause of happiness, but as a cause of
+embarrassment and uncertainty and trouble to three people, her father,
+her mother and Ferdie, just as they were causes of embarrassment and
+trouble and uncertainty to her. They lived in a sort of violent mystery
+that she, incomprehensibly, was mixed up with. As long as she could
+remember, her delicate, childish soul had quivered with the vibration of
+their incomprehensible and tiresome passions. You could never tell what
+any of them really wanted, though among them they managed to create an
+atmosphere of most devastating want. Only one thing she knew
+definitely--that they didn't want _her_.
+
+She was altogether out of it except as a meaningless counter in their
+incomprehensible, grown-up game. Her father didn't want her; her mother
+didn't want her very much; and though now and then Ferdie (who wasn't
+any relation at all) behaved as if he wanted her, _his_ wanting only
+made the other two want her less than ever.
+
+There had been no peace or quietness or security in her little life of
+eleven years. Their places (and they had had so many of them!) had never
+had any proper place for her. She seemed to have spent most of her time
+in being turned out of one room because her father had come into it, and
+out of another because her mother wanted to be alone in it with Ferdie.
+And nobody, except Ferdie sometimes, when they let him, ever wanted to
+be alone in any room with her. She was so tired of the rooms where she
+was obliged to be always alone with herself or with the servants, though
+the servants were always kind.
+
+Now, in Uncle Anthony's house, there was always peace and quietness and
+an immense security. She knew that, having taken her, they wouldn't
+give her up.
+
+She was utterly happy.
+
+And the house, with its long, wainscoted rooms, its whiteness and
+darkness, with its gay, clean, shining chintzes, the delicate, faded
+rose stuffs, the deep blue and purple and green stuffs, and the blue and
+white of the old china, and its furniture of curious woods, the golden,
+the golden-brown, the black and the wine-coloured, bought by Anthony in
+many countries, the round concave mirrors, the pictures and the old
+bronzes, all the things that he had gathered together and laid up as
+treasure for his Sons; and the garden on the promontory, with its
+buttressed walls and its green lawn, its flower borders, and its tree of
+Heaven, saturated with memories, became for her, as they had become for
+Frances, the sanctuary, crowded with visible and tangible symbols, of
+the Happiness she adored.
+
+"Sing it again, Ronny."
+
+She sang it again.
+
+     "'London Bridge is broken down'"--
+
+It was funny of Michael to like the silly, childish song; but if he
+wanted it he should have it. Veronica would have given any of them
+anything they wanted. There was nothing that she had ever wanted that
+they had not given to her.
+
+She had wanted to be strong, to be able to run and ride, to play tennis
+and cricket and hockey, and Nicky had shown her how. She had wanted
+books of her own, and Auntie Frances, and Uncle Anthony and Dorothy and
+Michael had given her books, and Nicky had made her a bookcase. Her room
+(it was all her own) was full of treasures. She had wanted to learn to
+sing and play properly, and Uncle Anthony had given her masters. She had
+wanted people to love her music, and they loved it. She had wanted a
+big, grown-up sister like Dorothy, and they had given her Dorothy; and
+she had wanted a little brother of her own age, and they had given her
+John. John had a look of Nicky. His golden white hair was light brown
+now; his fine, wide mouth had Nicky's impudence, even when, like
+Frances, he kept it shut to smile her unwilling, twitching, mocking
+smile. She had wanted a father and mother like Frances and Anthony; and
+they had given her themselves.
+
+And she had wanted to live in the same house with Nicky always.
+
+So if Michael wanted her to sing "London Bridge" to him twenty times
+over, she would sing it, provided Nicky didn't ask her to do anything
+else at the same time. For she wanted to do most for Nicky, always.
+
+And yet she was aware of something else that was not happiness. It was
+not a thing you could name or understand, or seize, or see; you were
+simply aware of it, as you were aware of ghosts in your room at night.
+Like the ghosts, it was not always there; but when it was there
+you knew.
+
+It felt sometimes as if Auntie Frances was afraid of her; as if she,
+Veronica, was a ghost.
+
+And Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I am not good. She thinks
+I'll worry her. But I shan't."
+
+That was before the holidays. Now that they had come and Nicky was back,
+"it" seemed to her something to do with Nicky; and Veronica said to
+herself, "She is afraid I'll get in his way and worry him, because he's
+older. But I shan't."
+
+As if she had not been taught and trained not to get in older people's
+ways and worry them. And as if she wasn't growing older every
+minute herself!
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine--
+     (_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with stones so strong'"--
+
+She had her back to the door and to the mirror that reflected it, yet
+she knew that Nicky had come in.
+
+"That's the song you used to sing at bed-time when you were frightened,"
+he said.
+
+She was sitting now in the old hen-house that was Nicky's workshop,
+watching him as he turned square bars of brass into round bars with his
+lathe. She had plates of steel to polish, and pieces of wood to rub
+smooth with glass-paper. There were sheets of brass and copper, and bars
+and lumps of steel, and great poles and planks of timber reared up round
+the walls of the workshop. The metal filings fell from Nicky's lathe
+into sawdust that smelt deliciously.
+
+The workshop was nicer than the old apple-tree house, because there were
+always lots of things to do in it for Nicky.
+
+"Nicky," she said suddenly, "do you believe in ghosts?"
+
+"Well--" Nicky caught his bar as it fell from the lathe and examined it
+critically.
+
+"You remember when I was afraid of ghosts, and you used to come and sit
+with me till I went to sleep?"
+
+"Rather."
+
+"Well--there _are_ ghosts. I saw one last night. It came into the room
+just after I got into bed."
+
+"You _can_ see them," Nicky said. "Ferdie's seen heaps. It runs in his
+family. He told me."
+
+"He never told _me_."
+
+"Rather not. He was afraid you'd be frightened."
+
+"Well, I wasn't frightened. Not the least little bit."
+
+"I shall tell him that. He wanted most awfully to know whether you saw
+them too."
+
+"_Me_? But Nicky--it was Ferdie I saw. He stood by the door and looked
+at me. Like he does, you know."
+
+The next morning Frances had a letter of two lines from Veronica's
+mother:
+
+     "Ferdie died last evening at half past eight.
+
+     "He wants you to keep Ronny.
+
+          "VERA."
+
+It was not till years later that Veronica knew that "He wanted most
+awfully to know whether you saw them too" meant "He wanted most awfully
+to know whether you really were his daughter."
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE VORTEX
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Three years passed. It was the autumn of nineteen-ten. Anthony's house
+was empty for the time being of all its children except Dorothea.
+
+Michael was in the beginning of his last year at Cambridge. Nicholas was
+in his second year. He had taken up mathematics and theoretical
+mechanics. In the long vacation, when the others went into the country,
+he stayed behind to work in the engineering sheds of the Morss Motor
+Company. John was at Cheltenham. Veronica was in Dresden.
+
+Dorothea had left Newnham a year ago, having taken a first-class in
+Economics.
+
+As Anthony came home early one evening in October, he found a group of
+six strange women in the lane, waiting outside his garden door in
+attitudes of conspiracy.
+
+Four of them, older women, stood together in a close ring. The two
+others, young girls, hung about near, but a little apart from the ring,
+as if they desired not to identify themselves with any state of mind
+outside their own. By their low sibilant voices, the daring sidelong
+sortie of their bright eyes, their gestures, furtive and irrepressible,
+you gathered that there was unanimity on one point. All six considered
+themselves to have been discovered.
+
+At Anthony's approach they moved away, with slow, casual steps, passed
+through the posts at the bottom of the lane and plunged down the steep
+path, as if under the impression that the nature of the ground covered
+their retreat. They bobbed up again, one after the other, when the lane
+was clear.
+
+The first to appear was a tall, handsome, bad-tempered-looking girl. She
+spoke first.
+
+"It's a damned shame of them to keep us waiting like this."
+
+She propped herself up against Anthony's wall and smouldered there in
+her dark, sullen beauty.
+
+"We were here at six sharp."
+
+"When they know we were told not to let on where we meet."
+
+"We're led into a trap," said a grey-haired woman.
+
+"I say, who is Dorothea Harrison?"
+
+"She's the girl who roped Rosalind in. She's all right."
+
+"Yes, but are her people all right?"
+
+"Rosalind knows them."
+
+The grey-haired woman spoke again.
+
+"Well, if you think this lane is a good place for a secret meeting, I
+don't. Are you aware that the yard of `Jack Straw's Castle' is behind
+that wall? What's to prevent them bringing up five or six coppers and
+planting them there? Why, they've only got to post one 'tee at the top
+of the lane, and another at the bottom, and we're done. Trapped. I call
+it rotten."
+
+"It's all right. Here they are."
+
+Dorothea Harrison and Rosalind Jervis came down the lane at a leisured
+stride, their long coats buttoned up to their chins and their hands in
+their pockets. Their I gestures were devoid of secrecy or any guile.
+Each had a joyous air of being in command, of being able to hold up the
+whole adventure at her will, or let it rip.
+
+Rosalind Jervis was no longer a bouncing, fluffy flapper. In three years
+she had shot up into the stature of command. She slouched, stooping a
+little from the shoulders, and carried her pink face thrust forward, as
+if leaning from a platform to address an audience. From this salience
+her small chin retreated delicately into her pink throat.
+
+"Is Miss Maud Blackadder here?" she said, marshalling her six.
+
+The handsome girl detached herself slowly from Anthony's wall.
+
+"What's the point," she said, "of keeping us hanging about like this--"
+
+"Till _all_ our faces are known to the police--"
+
+"There's a johnnie gone in there who can swear to _me_. Why didn't you
+two turn up before?" said the handsome girl.
+
+"Because," said Dorothea, "that johnnie was my father. He was pounding
+on in front of us all up East Heath Road. If we'd got here sooner I
+should have had to introduce you."
+
+She looked at the six benevolently, indulgently. They might have been
+children whose behaviour amused her. It was as if she had said, "I
+avoided that introduction, not because it would have been dangerous and
+indiscreet, but because it would have spoiled your fun for you."
+
+She led the way into the garden and the house and through the hall into
+the schoolroom. There they found eleven young girls who had come much
+too soon, and mistaking the arrangements, had rung the bell and allowed
+themselves to be shown in.
+
+The schoolroom had been transformed into a sort of meeting hall. The big
+oblong table had been drawn across one end of it. Behind it were chairs
+for the speakers, before it were three rows of chairs where the eleven
+young girls sat scattered, expectant.
+
+The six stood in the free space in front of the table and looked at
+Rosalind with significance.
+
+"This," said Rosalind, "is our hostess, Miss Dorothea Harrison. Dorothy,
+I think you've met Mrs. Eden, our Treasurer. This is our secretary, Miss
+Valentina Gilchrist; Miss Ethel Farmer; Miss Winifred Burstall--"
+
+Dorothy greeted in turn Mrs. Eden, a pretty, gentle woman with a face of
+dreaming tragedy (it was she who had defended Rosalind outside the
+gate); Miss Valentina Gilchrist, a middle-aged woman who displayed a
+large grey pompadour above a rosy face with turned-back features which,
+when she was not excited, had an incredulous quizzical expression (Miss
+Gilchrist was the one who had said they had been led into a trap); Miss
+Ethel Farmer, fair, attenuated, scholastic, wearing pince-nez with an
+air of not seeing you; and Miss Winifred Burstall, weather-beaten, young
+at fifty, wearing pince-nez with an air of seeing straight through you
+to the other side.
+
+Rosalind went on. "Miss Maud Blackadder--"
+
+Miss Blackadder's curt bow accused Rosalind of wasting time in
+meaningless formalities.
+
+"Miss--" Rosalind was at a loss.
+
+The other girl, the youngest of the eight, came forward, holding out a
+slender, sallow-white hand. She was the one who had hung with Miss
+Blackadder in the background.
+
+"Desmond," she said. "Phyllis Desmond."
+
+She shrugged her pretty shoulders and smiled slightly, as much as to
+say, "She forgets what she ought to remember, but it doesn't matter."
+
+Phyllis Desmond was beautiful. But for the moment her beauty was asleep,
+stilled into hardness. Dorothy saw a long, slender, sallow-white face,
+between sleek bands of black hair; black eyes, dulled as if by a subtle
+film, like breath on a black looking-glass; a beautiful slender mouth,
+pressed tight, holding back the secret of its sensual charm.
+
+Dorothy thought she had seen her before, but she couldn't remember
+where.
+
+Rosalind Jervis looked at her watch with a businesslike air; paper and
+pencils were produced; coats were thrown on the little school-desks and
+benches in the corner where Dorothy and her brothers had sat at their
+lessons with Mr. Parsons some twelve years ago; and the eight gathered
+about the big table, Rosalind taking the presidential chair (which had
+once been Mr. Parsons' chair) in the centre between Miss Gilchrist and
+Miss Blackadder.
+
+Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer looked at each other and Miss Burstall
+spoke.
+
+"We understood that this was to be an informal meeting. Before we begin
+business I should like to ask one question. I should like to know what
+we are and what we are here for?"
+
+"We, Mrs. Eden, Miss Valentina Gilchrist, Miss Maud Blackadder and
+myself," said Rosalind in the tone of one dealing reasonably with an
+unreasonable person, "are the Committee of the North Hampstead Branch of
+the Women's Franchise Union. Miss Gilchrist is our secretary, I am the
+President and Miss Blackadder is--er--the Committee."
+
+"By whom elected? This," said Miss Burstall, "is most irregular."
+
+Rosalind went on: "We are here to appoint a vice-president, to elect
+members of the Committee and enlist subscribers to the Union. These
+things will take time."
+
+"_We_ were punctual," said Miss Farmer.
+
+Rosalind did not even look at her. The moment had come to address the
+meeting.
+
+"I take it that we are all agreed as to the main issue, that we have not
+come here to convert each other, that we all want Women's Franchise,
+that we all mean to have it, that we are all prepared to work for it,
+and, if necessary, to fight for it, to oppose the Government that
+withholds it by every means in our power--"
+
+"By every constitutional means," Miss Burstall amended, and was told by
+Miss Gilchrist that, if she desired proceedings to be regular, she must
+not interrupt the Chairwoman.
+
+"--To oppose the Government that refuses us the vote, whatever
+Government it may be, regardless of party, by _every means in
+our power_."
+
+Rosalind's sentences were punctuated by a rhythmic sound of tapping.
+Miss Maud Blackadder, twisted sideways on the chair she had pushed
+farther and farther back from the table, so as to bring herself
+completely out of line with the other seven, from time to time,
+rhythmically, twitching with impatience, struck her own leg with her own
+walking-stick.
+
+Rosalind perorated. "If we differ, we differ, not as to our end, but
+solely as to the means we, personally and individually, are prepared to
+employ." She looked round. "Agreed."
+
+"Not agreed," said Dorothy and Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer all at
+once.
+
+"I will now call on Miss Maud Blackadder to speak. She will explain to
+those of you who are strangers" (she glanced comprehensively at the
+eleven young girls) "the present program of the Union."
+
+"I protest," said Miss Burstall. "There has been confusion."
+
+"There really _has_, Rosalind," said Dorothy. "You _must_ get it
+straight. You can't start all at sixes and sevens. I protest too."
+
+"We all three protest," said Miss Farmer, frowning and blinking in an
+agony of protest.
+
+"Silence, if you please, for the Chairwoman," said Miss Gilchrist.
+
+"May we not say one word?"
+
+"You may," said Rosalind, "in your turn. I now call on Miss Blackadder
+to speak."
+
+At the sound of her own name Miss Blackadder jumped to her feet. The
+walking-stick fell to the floor with a light clatter and crash,
+preluding her storm. She jerked out her words at a headlong pace, as if
+to make up for the time the others had wasted in futilities.
+
+"I am not going to say much, I am not going to take up your time. Too
+much time has been lost already. I am not a speaker, I am not a writer,
+I am not an intellectual woman, and if you ask me what I am and what I
+am here for, and what I am doing in the Union, and what the Union is
+doing with me, and what possible use I, an untrained girl, can be to you
+clever women" (she looked tempestuously at Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer
+who did not flinch), "I will tell you. I am a fighter. I am here to
+enlist volunteers. I am the recruiting sergeant for this district. That
+is the use my leaders, who should be _your_ leaders, are making
+of _me_."
+
+Her head was thrown back, her body swayed, rocked from side to side with
+the violent rhythm of her speech.
+
+"If you ask me why they have chosen _me_ I will tell you. It's because I
+know what I want and because I know how to get what I want.
+
+"I know what I want. Oh, yes, you think that's nothing; you all think
+you know what you want. But do you? _Do_ you?"
+
+"Of course we do!"
+
+"We want the vote!"
+
+"Nothing but the vote!"
+
+"_Nothing but?_ Are you quite sure of that? Can you even say you want it
+till you know whether there are things you want more?"
+
+"What are you driving at?"
+
+"You'll soon see what I'm driving at. I drive straight. And I ride
+straight. And I don't funk my fences.
+
+"Well--say you all want the vote. Do you know how much you want it? Do
+you know how much you want to pay for it? Do you know what you're
+prepared to give up for it? Because, if you don't know _that_, you don't
+know how much you want it."
+
+"We want it as much as you do, I imagine."
+
+"You want it as much as I do? Good. _Then_ you're going to pay the price
+whatever the price is. _Then_ you're ready to give up everything else,
+your homes and your families and your friends and your incomes. Until
+you're enfranchised you are not going to own any _man_ as father, or
+brother or husband" (her voice rang with a deeper and stronger
+vibration) "or lover, or friend. And the man who does not agree with
+you, the man who refuses you the vote, the man who opposes your efforts
+to get the vote, the man who, whether he agrees with you or not, _will
+not help you to get it_, you count as your enemy. That is wanting the
+vote. That is wanting it as much as I do.
+
+"You women--are you prepared to go against your men? To give up your
+men?"
+
+There were cries of "Rather!" from two of the eleven young girls who had
+come too soon.
+
+Miss Burstall shook her head and murmured, "Hopeless confusion of
+thought. If _this_ is what it's going to be like, Heaven help us!"
+
+"You really _are_ getting a bit mixed," said Dorothy.
+
+"We protest--"
+
+"Protest then; protest as much as you like. Then we shall know where we
+are; then we shall get things straight; then we can begin. You all want
+the vote. Some of you don't know how much, but at least you know you
+want it. Nobody's confused about that. Do you know how you're going to
+get it? Tell me that."
+
+Lest they should spoil it all by telling her Miss Blackadder increased
+her vehement pace. "You don't because you can't and _I_ will tell you.
+You won't get it by talking about it or by writing about it, or by
+sitting down and thinking about it, you'll get it by coming in with me,
+coming in with the Women's Franchise Union, and fighting for it.
+Fighting women, not talkers--not writers--not thinkers are what we
+want!" She sat down, heaving a little with the ground-swell of her
+storm, amid applause in which only Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer did not
+join. She was now looking extraordinarily handsome.
+
+Rosalind bent over and whispered something in her ear. She rose to her
+feet again, flushed, smiling at them, triumphant.
+
+"Our Chairwoman has reminded me that I came here to tell you what the
+program of our Union is. And I can tell you in six words. It's
+Hell-for-leather, and it's Neck-or-nothing!"
+
+"Now," said Rosalind sweetly, bowing towards Miss Burstall, "it's your
+turn. We should like to know what you have to say."
+
+Miss Burstall did not rise and in the end Dorothea spoke.
+
+"My friend, Miss Rosalind Jervis, assumed that we were all agreed, not
+only as to our aims, but as to our policy. She has not yet discriminated
+between constitutional and unconstitutional means. When we protested,
+she quashed our protest. We took exception to the phrase 'every means in
+our power,' because that would commit us to all sorts of
+unconstitutional things. It is in my power to squirt water into the back
+of the Prime Minister's neck, or to land a bomb in the small of his
+back, or in the centre of the platform at his next public meeting. We
+were left to conclude that the only differences between us would concern
+our choice of the squirt or the bomb. As some of us here might equally
+object to using the bomb or the squirt, I submit that either our protest
+should have been allowed or our agreement should not have been taken for
+granted at the start.
+
+"Again, Miss Maud Blackadder, in her sporting speech, her heroic speech,
+has not cleared the question. She has appealed to us to come in, without
+counting the cost; but she has said nothing to convince us that when our
+account at our bank is overdrawn, and we have declared war on all our
+male friends and relations, and have left our comfortable homes, and are
+all camping out on the open Heath--I repeat, she has said nothing to
+convince us that the price we shall have paid is going to get us the
+thing we want.
+
+"She says that fighters are wanted, and not talkers and writers and
+thinkers. Are we not then to fight with our tongues and with our brains?
+Is she leaving us anything but our bare fists? She has told us that she
+rides straight and that she doesn't funk her fences; but she has not
+told us what sort of country she is going to ride over, nor where the
+fences are, not what Hell-for-leather and Neck-or-nothing means.
+
+"We want meaning; we want clearness and precision. We have not been
+given it yet.
+
+"I would let all this pass if Miss Blackadder were not your
+colour-sergeant. Is it fair to call for volunteers, for raw recruits,
+and not tell them precisely and clearly what services will be required
+of them? How many" (Dorothy glanced at the eleven) "realize that the
+leaders of your Union, Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, and Mrs. Blathwaite, and
+Miss Angela Blathwaite, demand from its members blind, unquestioning
+obedience?"
+
+Maud Blackadder jumped up.
+
+"I protest. I, too, have the right to protest. Miss Harrison calls me to
+order. She tells me to be clear and precise. Will she be good enough to
+be clear and precise herself? Will she say whether she is with us or
+against us? If she is not with us she is against us. Let her explain her
+position."
+
+She sat down; and Rosalind rose.
+
+"Miss Harrison," she said, "will explain her position to the Committee
+later. This is an open meeting till seven. It is now five minutes to.
+Will any of you here"--she held the eleven with her eyes--"who were not
+present at the meeting in the Town Hall last Monday, hold up your hands.
+No hands. Then you must all be aware of the object and the policy and
+the rules of the Women's Franchise Union. Its members pledge themselves
+to help, as far as they can, the object of the Union; to support the
+decisions of their leaders; to abstain from public and private criticism
+of those decisions and of any words or actions of their leaders; and to
+obey orders--not blindly or unquestioningly, but within the terms of
+their undertakings.
+
+"Those of you who wish to join us will please write your names and
+addresses on the slips of white paper, stating what kind of work you are
+willing to do and the amount of your subscription, if you subscribe, and
+hand your slips to the Secretary at the door, as you go out."
+
+Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer went out. Miss Blackadder
+counted--"One--two--"
+
+Eight of the eleven young girls signed and handed in the white slips at
+the door, and went out.
+
+"Three--four--"
+
+Miss Blackadder reckoned that Dorothea Harrison's speech had cost her
+five recruits. Her own fighting speech had carried the eleven in a
+compact body to her side: Dorothea's speech had divided and scattered
+them again.
+
+Miss Blackadder hurled her personality at the heads of audiences in the
+certainty that it would hit them hard. That was what she was there for.
+She knew that the Women's Franchise union relied on her to wring from
+herself the utmost spectacular effect. And she did it every time. She
+never once missed fire. And Dorothea Harrison had come down on the top
+of her triumph and destroyed the effect of all her fire. She had
+corrupted five recruits. And, supposing there was a secret program, she
+had betrayed the women of the Union to fourteen outsiders, by giving it
+away. Treachery or no treachery, Dorothea Harrison would have to pay
+for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everybody had gone except the members of the Committee and Phyllis
+Desmond who waited for her friend, Maud Blackadder.
+
+Dorothy remembered Phyllis Desmond now; she was that art-student girl
+that Vera knew. She had seen her at Vera's house.
+
+They had drawn round the table again. Miss Blackadder and Miss Gilchrist
+conferred in whispers.
+
+"Before we go," said Rosalind, "I propose that we ask Miss Dorothea
+Harrison to be our Vice-President."
+
+Miss Gilchrist nodded to Miss Blackadder who rose. It was her moment.
+
+"And _I_ propose," she said, "that before we invite Miss Harrison to be
+anything we ask her to define her position--clearly and precisely."
+
+She made a sign, and the Secretary was on her feet.
+
+"And first we must ask Miss Harrison to explain _how_ she became
+possessed of the secret policy of the Union which has never been
+discussed at any open meeting and is unknown to members of the General
+Committee."
+
+"Then," said Dorothy, "there _is_ a secret policy?"
+
+"You seem to know it. We have the right to ask _how_ you know? Unless
+you invented it."
+
+Dorothy faced them. It was inconceivable that it should have happened,
+that she should be standing there, in the old schoolroom of her father's
+house, while two strange women worried her. She knew that her back was
+to the wall and that the Blackadder girl had been on the watch for the
+last half-hour to get her knife into her. (Odd, for she had admired the
+Blackadder girl and her fighting gestures.) It was inconceivable that
+she should have to answer to that absurd committee for her honour. It
+was inconceivable that Rosalind, her friend, should not help her.
+
+Yet it had happened. With all her platform eloquence Rosalind couldn't,
+for the life of her, get out one heroic, defending word. From the moment
+when the Gilchrist woman had pounced, Rosalind had simply sat and
+stared, like a rabbit, like a fish, her mouth open for the word that
+would not come. Rosalind was afraid to stand up for her. It was
+dreadful, and it was funny to see Rosalind looking like that, and to
+realize the extent of her weakness and her obstinacy.
+
+Yet Rosalind had not changed. She was still the school-girl slacker who
+could never do a stroke of work until somebody had pushed her into it,
+who could never leave off working until stopped by the same hand that
+had set her going. Her power to go, and to let herself rip, and the
+weakness that made her depend on Dorothy to start her were the qualities
+that attracted Dorothy to Rosalind from the beginning. But now she was
+the tool of the fighting Suffrage Women. Or if she wasn't a tool, she
+was a machine; her brain was a rapid, docile, mechanical apparatus for
+turning out bad imitations of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and the two
+Blathwaites. Her air of casual command, half-swagger, half-slouch, her
+stoop and the thrusting forward of her face, were copied sedulously from
+an admired model.
+
+Dorothy found her pitiable. She was hypnotized by the Blathwaites who
+worked her and would throw her away when she was of no more use. She
+hadn't the strength to resist the pull and the grip and the drive of
+other people. She couldn't even hold out against Valentina Gilchrist and
+Maud Blackadder. Rosalind would always be caught and spun round by any
+movement that was strong enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex.
+
+That was Dorothy's fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled the
+slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of the
+Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught and sucked
+down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go on whirling,
+under the impression that her movements made it move.
+
+The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She liked the
+feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat up against
+the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and
+swerve away before the thing got her.
+
+For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael
+had been afraid of the little vortex of school. She was afraid of the
+herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices
+skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and
+the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge
+of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the
+collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many
+as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the
+clearness and hardness of her soul. It was her soul they wanted, these
+women of the Union, the Blathwaites and the Palmerston-Swetes, and
+Rosalind, and the Blackadder girl and the Gilchrist woman; they ran out
+after her like a hungry pack yelping for her soul; and she was not going
+to throw it to them. She would fight for freedom, but not in their way
+and not at their bidding.
+
+She was her brother Michael, refusing to go to the party; refusing to
+run with the school herd, holding out for his private soul against other
+people who kept him from remembering. Only Michael did not hold out. He
+ran away. She would stay, on the edge of the vortex, fascinated by its
+danger, and resisting.
+
+But as she looked at them, at Rosalind with her open mouth, at the
+Blackadder girl who was scowling horribly, and at Valentina Gilchrist,
+sceptical and quizzical, she laughed. The three had been trying to rush
+her, and because they couldn't rush her they were questioning her
+honour. She had asked them plainly for a plain meaning, and their idea
+of apt repartee was to pretend to question her honour.
+
+Perhaps they really did question it. She didn't care. She loathed their
+excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't care. It was she who
+had drawn them and led them on to this display of incomparable idiocy.
+Like her brother Nicholas she found that adversity was extremely funny;
+and she laughed.
+
+She was no longer Michael, she was Nicky, not caring, delighting in her
+power to fool them.
+
+"You think," she said, "I'd no business to find out?"
+
+"Your knowledge would certainly have been mysterious," said the
+Secretary; "unless at least two confidences had been betrayed. Supposing
+there had been any secret policy."
+
+"Well, you see, I don't know it; and I didn't invent it; and I didn't
+find it out--precisely. Your secret policy is the logical conclusion of
+your present policy. I deduced it; that's all. Anybody could have done
+the same. Does that satisfy you? (They won't love me any better for
+making them look fools!)"
+
+"Thank you," said Miss Gilchrist. "We only wanted to be sure."
+
+The dinner-bell rang as Dorothy was defining her position.
+
+"I'll work for you; I'll speak for you; I'll write for you; I'll fight
+for you. I'll make hay of every Government meeting, if I can get in
+without lying and sneaking for it. I'll go to prison for you, if I can
+choose my own crime. But I won't give up my liberty of speech and
+thought and action. I won't pledge myself to obey your orders. I won't
+pledge myself not to criticize policy I disapprove of. I won't come on
+your Committee, and I won't join your Union. Is that clear and
+precise enough?"
+
+Somebody clapped and somebody said, "Hear, Hear!" And somebody said, "Go
+it, Dorothy!"
+
+It was Anthony and Frances and Captain Drayton, who paused outside the
+door on their way to the dining-room, and listened, basely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were all going now. Dorothy stood at the door, holding it open for
+them, glad that it was all over.
+
+Only Phyllis Desmond, the art-student, lingered. Dorothy reminded her
+that they had met at her aunt Vera Harrison's house.
+
+The art-student smiled. "I wondered when you were going to remember."
+
+"I did, but they all called you Desmond. That's what put me out."
+
+"Everybody calls me Desmond. You had a brother or something with you,
+hadn't you?"
+
+"I might have had two. Which? Michael's got green eyes and yellow hair.
+Nicky's got blue eyes and black hair."
+
+"It was Nicky--nice name--then."
+
+Desmond's beauty stirred in its sleep. The film of air was lifted from
+her black eyes.
+
+"I'm dining with Mrs. Harrison to-night," she said.
+
+"You'll be late then."
+
+"It doesn't matter. Lawrence Stephen's never there till after eight. She
+won't dine without him."
+
+Dorothy stiffened. She did not like that furtive betrayal of Vera and
+Lawrence Stephen.
+
+"I wish you'd come and see me at my rooms in Chelsea. And bring your
+brother. Not the green and yellow one. The blue and black one."
+
+Dorothy took the card on which Desmond had scribbled an address. But she
+did not mean to go and see her. She wasn't sure that she liked Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Rosalind stayed on to dine with Dorothy's family. She was no longer
+living with her own family, for Mrs. Jervis was hostile to Women's
+Franchise. She had rooms off the Strand, not far from the headquarters
+of the Union.
+
+Frances looked a little careworn. She had been sent for to Grannie's
+house to see what could be done with Aunt Emmeline, and had found, as
+usual, that nothing could be done with her. In the last three years the
+second Miss Fleming had become less and less enthusiastic, and more and
+more emphatic, till she ceased from enthusiasm altogether and carried
+emphasis beyond the bounds of sanity. She had become, as Frances put it,
+extremely tiresome.
+
+It was not accurate to say, as Mrs. Fleming did, that you never knew
+when Emmeline would start a nervous crisis; for as a matter of fact you
+could time her to a minute. It was her habit to wait till her family was
+absorbed in some urgent affair that diverted attention from her case,
+and then to break out alarmingly. Dorothy was generally sent for to
+bring her round; but to-day it was Dorothy who had important things on
+hand. Aunt Emmeline had scented the Suffrage meeting from afar, and had
+made arrangements beforehand for a supreme crisis that would take all
+the shine out of Dorothy's affair.
+
+When Frances said that Aunt Emmy had been tiresome again, Dorothy knew
+what she meant. For Aunt Emmy's idea was that her sisters persecuted
+her; that Edie was jealous of her and hated her; that Louie had always
+trampled on her and kept her under; that Frances had used her influence
+with Grannie to spoil all her chances one after another. It was all
+Frances's fault that Vera Harrison had come between her and Major
+Cameron; Frances had encouraged Vera in her infamous intrigue; and
+between them they had wrecked two lives. And they had killed
+Major Cameron.
+
+Since Ferdie's death Emmeline Fleming had lived most of the time in a
+sort of dream in which it seemed to her that these things had
+really happened.
+
+This afternoon she had been more than usually tiresome. She had simply
+raved.
+
+"You should have brought her round to the meeting," said Dorothy, "and
+let her rave there. I'd back Aunt Emmeline against Maud Blackadder. I
+wish, Rosalind, you'd leave off making faces and kicking my shins. You
+needn't worry any more, Mummy ducky. I'm going to rope them all into
+the Suffrage Movement. Aunt Edie can distribute literature, Aunt Louie
+can interrupt like anything, and Aunt Emmeline can shout and sing."
+
+"I think, Dorothy," said Rosalind with weak bitterness, "that you might
+have stuck by me."
+
+The two were walking down East Heath Road to the tram-lines where the
+motor buses started for Charing Cross.
+
+"It was you who dragged me into it, and the least you could do was to
+stick. Why didn't you keep quiet instead of forcing our hands?"
+
+"I couldn't keep quiet. I'll go with you straight or I won't go with you
+at all."
+
+"You know what's the matter with you? It's your family. You'll never be
+any good to us, you'll never be any good to yourself till you've chucked
+them and got away. For years--ever since you've been born--you've simply
+been stewing there in the family juice until you're soaked with it. You
+oughtn't to be living at home. You ought to be on your own--like me."
+
+"You're talking rot, Rosalind. If my people were like yours I'd have to
+chuck them, I suppose; but they're not. They're angels."
+
+"That's why they're so dangerous. They couldn't influence you if they
+weren't angels."
+
+"They don't influence me the least little bit. I'd like to see them try.
+They're much too clever. They know I'd be off like a shot if they did.
+Why, they let me do every mortal thing I please--turn the schoolroom
+into a meeting hall for your friends to play the devil in. That
+Blackadder girl was yelling the house down, yet they didn't say
+anything. And your people aren't as bad as you make out, you know. You
+couldn't live on your own if your father didn't give you an allowance. I
+like Mrs. Jervis."
+
+"Because she likes you."
+
+"Well, that's a reason. It isn't the reason why I like my own mother,
+because she doesn't like me so very much. That's why she lets me do what
+I like. She doesn't care enough to stop me. She only really cares for
+Dad and John and Nicky and Michael."
+
+Rosalind looked fierce and stubborn.
+
+"That's what's the matter with all of you," she said.
+
+"What is?"
+
+"Caring like that. It's all sex. Sex instinct, sex feeling. Maud's
+right. It's what we're up against all the time."
+
+Dorothy said to herself, "That's what's the matter with Rosalind, if she
+only knew it."
+
+Rosalind loved Michael and Michael detested her, and Nicky didn't like
+her very much. She always looked fierce and stubborn when she heard
+Michael's name.
+
+Rosalind went on. "When it comes to sex you don't revolt. You sit down."
+
+"I do revolt. I'm revolting now. I go much farther than you do. I think
+the marriage laws are rotten; I think divorce ought to be for
+incompatibility. I think love isn't love and can't last unless it's
+free. I think marriage ought to be abolished--not yet, perhaps, but when
+we've become civilized. It will be. It's bound to be. As it is, I think
+every woman has a right to have a baby if she wants one. If Emmeline
+had had a baby, she wouldn't be devastating us now."
+
+"That's what you think, but it isn't what you feel. It's all thinking
+with you, Dorothy. The revolt goes on in your brain. You'll never do
+anything. It isn't that you haven't the courage to go against your men.
+You haven't the will. You don't want to."
+
+"Why should I? What do they do? Father and Michael and Nicky don't
+interfere with me any more than Mother does."
+
+"You know I'm not thinking of them. They don't really matter."
+
+"Who are you thinking of then? Frank Drayton? You needn't!"
+
+It was mean of Rosalind to hit below the belt like that, when she knew
+that _she_ was safe. Michael had never been brought against her and
+never would be. It was disgusting of her to imply that Dorothy's state
+of mind was palpable, when her own (though sufficiently advertised by
+her behaviour) had received from Michael's sister the consecration of
+silence as a secret, tragic thing.
+
+They had reached the tram-lines.
+
+At the sight of the Charing Cross `bus Rosalind assumed an air of
+rollicking, adventurous travel.
+
+"My hat! What an evening! I shall have a ripping ride down. Don't say
+there's no room on the top. Cheer up, Dorothy!"
+
+Which showed that Rosalind Jervis was a free woman, suggested that life
+had richer thrills than marrying Dorothy's brother Michael, and fixed
+the detested imputation securely on her friend.
+
+Dorothy watched her as she swung herself on to the footboard and up the
+stair of the motor bus. There was room on the top. Rosalind, in fact,
+had the top all to herself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Dorothy crossed the Heath again in the twilight she saw something
+white on the terrace of her father's house. Her mother was waiting
+for her.
+
+She thought at first that Aunt Emmeline had gone off her head and that
+she had been sent for to keep her quiet. She gloried in their dependence
+on her. But no, that wasn't likely. Her mother was just watching for her
+as she used to watch for her and the boys when they were little and had
+been sent across the Heath to Grannie's house with a message.
+
+And at the sight and memory of her mother Dorothy felt a childish, sick
+dissatisfaction with herself and with her day, and an absurd longing for
+the tranquillity and safety of the home whose chief drawback lately had
+been that it was too tranquil and too safe. She could almost have told
+her mother how they had all gone for her, and how Rosalind had turned
+out rotten, and how beastly it had all been. Almost, but not quite.
+Dorothy had grown up, and she was there to protect and not to be
+protected. However agreeable it might have been to confide in her
+mother, it wouldn't have done.
+
+Frances met her at the garden door. She had been crying.
+
+"Nicky's come home," she said.
+
+"Nicky?"
+
+"He's been sent down."
+
+"Whatever for?"
+
+"Darling, I can't possibly tell you."
+
+But in the end she did.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Up till now Frances had taken a quiet interest in Women's Suffrage. It
+had got itself into the papers and thus become part of the affairs of
+the nation. The names of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and
+Angela Blathwaite had got into the papers, where Frances hoped and
+prayed that the name of Dorothea Harrison might not follow them. The
+spectacle of a frantic Government at grips with the Women's Franchise
+Union had not yet received the head-lines accorded to the reports of
+divorce and breach of promise cases and fires in paraffin shops; still,
+it was beginning to figure, and if Frances's _Times_ ignored it, there
+were other papers that Dorothy brought home.
+
+But for Frances the affairs of the nation sank into insignificance
+beside Nicky's Cambridge affair.
+
+There could be no doubt that Nicky's affair was serious. You could not,
+Anthony said, get over the letters, the Master's letter and the
+Professor's letter and Michael's. They had arrived one hour after Nicky,
+Nicky so changed from his former candour that he refused to give any
+account of himself beyond the simple statement that he had been sent
+down. They'd know, he had said, soon enough why.
+
+And soon enough they did know.
+
+To be sure no details could be disentangled from the discreet
+ambiguities of the Master and the Professor. But Michael's letter was
+more explicit. Nicky had been sent down because old "Booster" had got
+it into his head that Nicky had been making love to "Booster's" wife
+when she didn't want to be made love to, and nothing could get it out of
+"Booster's" head.
+
+Michael was bound to stand up for his brother, and it was clear to
+Anthony that so grave a charge could hardly have been brought without
+some reason. The tone of the letters, especially the Professor's, was
+extraordinarily restrained. That was what made the thing stand out in
+its sheer awfulness. The Professor, although, according to Michael, he
+conceived himself to be profoundly injured, wrote sorrowfully, in
+consideration of Nicky's youth.
+
+There was one redeeming circumstance, the Master and the Professor both
+laid stress on it: Anthony's son had not attempted to deny it.
+
+"There must," Frances said wildly, "be some terrible mistake."
+
+But Nicky cut the ground from under the theory of the terrible mistake
+by continuing in his refusal to deny it.
+
+"What sort of woman," said Anthony, "is the Professor's wife?"
+
+"Oh, awfully decent," said Nicky.
+
+"You had no encouragement, then, no provocation?"
+
+"She's awfully fascinating," said Nicky.
+
+Then Frances had another thought. It seemed to her that Nicky was
+evading.
+
+"Are you sure you're not screening somebody else?"
+
+"Screening somebody else? Do you mean some other fellow?"
+
+"Yes. I'm not asking you to give the name, Nicky."
+
+"I swear I'm not. Why should I be? I can't think why you're all making
+such a fuss about it. I don't mean poor old 'Booster.' He's got some
+cause, if you like."
+
+"But what was it you did--really did, Nicky?"
+
+"You've read the letters, Mother."
+
+Nicky's adolescence seemed to die and pass from him there and then; and
+she saw a stubborn, hard virility that frightened and repelled her,
+forcing her to believe that it might have really happened.
+
+To Frances the awfulness of it was beyond belief. And the pathos of her
+belief in Nicky was unbearable to Anthony. There were the letters.
+
+"I think, dear," Anthony said, "you'd better leave us."
+
+"Mayn't I stay?" It was as if she thought that by staying she could
+bring Nicky's youth back to life again.
+
+"No," said Anthony.
+
+She went, and Nicky opened the door for her. His hard, tight man's face
+looked at her as if it had been she who had sinned and he who suffered,
+intolerably, for her sin. The click of the door as he shut it
+stabbed her.
+
+"It's a damnable business, father. We'd better not talk about it."
+
+But Anthony would talk about it. And when he had done talking all that
+Nicky had to say was: "You know as well as I do that these
+things happen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For Nicky had thought it out very carefully beforehand in the train.
+What else could he say? He couldn't tell them that "Booster's" poor
+little wife had lost her head and made hysterical love to him, and had
+been so frightened at what she had done that she had made him promise on
+his word of honour that, whatever happened, he wouldn't give her away to
+anybody, not even to his own people.
+
+He supposed that either Peggy had given herself away, or that poor old
+"Booster" had found her out. He supposed that, having found her out,
+there was no other line that "Booster" could have taken. Anyhow, there
+was no other line that _he_ could take; because, in the world where
+these things happened, being found out would be fifty times worse for
+Peggy than it would be for him.
+
+He tried to recall the scene in the back drawing-room where she had
+asked him so often to have tea with her alone. The most vivid part was
+the end of it, after he had given his promise. Peggy had broken down and
+put her head on his shoulder and cried like anything. And it was at that
+moment that Nicky thought of "Booster," and how awful and yet how funny
+it would be if he walked into the room and saw him there. He had tried
+hard not to think what "Booster's" face would look like; he had tried
+hard not to laugh as long as Peggy's head was on his shoulder, for fear
+of hurting her feelings; but when she took it off he did give one
+half-strangled snort; for it really was the rummest thing that had ever
+happened to him.
+
+He didn't know, and he couldn't possibly have guessed, that as soon as
+the door had shut on him Peggy's passion had turned to rage and utter
+detestation of Nicky (for she had heard the snort); and that she had
+gone straight to her husband's study and put her head on _his_ shoulder,
+and cried, and told him a lie; and that it was Peggy's lie and not the
+Professor's imagination that had caused him to be sent down. And even if
+Peggy had not been Lord Somebody's daughter and related to all sorts of
+influential people she would still have been capable of turning every
+male head in the University. For she was a small, gentle woman with
+enchanting manners and the most beautiful and pathetic eyes, and she had
+not yet been found out. Therefore it was more likely that an
+undergraduate with a face like Nicky's should lose his head than that a
+woman with a face like Peggy's should, for no conceivable reason, tell a
+lie. So that, even if Nicky's word of honour had not been previously
+pledged to his accuser, it would have had no chance against any
+statement that she chose to make. And even if he had known that she had
+lied, he couldn't very well have given it against poor pretty Peggy who
+had lost her head and got frightened.
+
+As Nicky packed up his clothes and his books he said, "I don't care if I
+am sent down. It would have been fifty times worse for her than it
+is for me."
+
+He had no idea how bad it was, nor how much worse it was going to be.
+For it ended in his going that night from his father's house to the
+house in St. John's Wood where Vera and Mr. Lawrence Stephen lived.
+
+And it was there that he met Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky congratulated himself on having pulled it off so well. At the
+same time he was a little surprised at the ease with which he had taken
+his father and mother in. He might have understood it if he had known
+that Vera had been before him, and that she had warned them long ago
+that this was precisely the sort of thing they would have to look out
+for. And as no opinion ever uttered on the subject of their children was
+likely to be forgotten by Frances and Anthony, when this particular
+disaster came they were more prepared for it than they would have
+believed possible.
+
+But there were two members of his family whom Nicky had failed
+altogether to convince, Michael and Dorothy. Michael luckily, Nicky said
+to himself, was not on the spot, and his letter had no weight against
+the letters of the Master and the Professor, and on this also Nicky had
+calculated. He reckoned without Dorothy, judging it hardly likely that
+she would be allowed to know anything about it. Nobody, not even
+Frances, was yet aware of Dorothy's importance.
+
+And Dorothy, because of her importance, blamed herself for all that
+happened afterwards. If she had not had that damned Suffrage meeting,
+Rosalind would not have stayed to dinner; if Rosalind had not stayed to
+dinner she would not have gone with her to the tram-lines; if she had
+not gone with her to the tram-lines she would have been at home to stop
+Nicky from going to St. John's Wood. As it was, Nicky had reached the
+main road at the top of the lane just as Dorothy was entering it from
+the bottom.
+
+At first Frances did not want Dorothy to see her father. He was most
+horribly upset and must not be disturbed. But Dorothy insisted. Her
+father had the letters, and she must see the letters.
+
+"I may understand them better than you or Daddy," she said. "You see,
+Mummy, I know these Cambridge people. They're awful asses, some
+of them."
+
+And though her mother doubted whether attendance at the Professor's
+lectures would give Dorothy much insight into the affair, she had her
+way. Anthony was too weak to resist her. He pushed the letters towards
+her without a word. He would rather she had been left out of it. And yet
+somehow the sight of her, coming in, so robust and undismayed and
+competent, gave him a sort of comfort.
+
+Dorothy did not agree with Michael. There was more in it than the
+Professor's imagination. The Professor, she said, hadn't got any
+imagination; you could tell from the way he lectured. But she did not
+believe one word of the charge against her brother. Something had
+happened and Nicky was screening somebody.
+
+"I'll bet you anything you like," said Dorothy, "it's 'Booster's' wife.
+She's made him give his word."
+
+Dorothy was sure that "Booster's" wife was a bad lot.
+
+"Nicky said she was awfully decent."
+
+"He'd _have_ to. He couldn't do it by halves."
+
+"They couldn't have sent him down, unless they'd sifted the thing to the
+bottom."
+
+"I daresay they've sifted all they could, the silly asses."
+
+She could have killed them for making her father suffer. The sight of
+his drawn face hurt her abominably. She had never seen him like that.
+She wasn't half so sorry for her mother who was sustained by a secret,
+ineradicable faith in Nicky. Why couldn't he have faith in Nicky too?
+Was it because he was a man and knew that these things happened?
+
+"Daddy--being sent down isn't such an awful calamity. It isn't going to
+blast his career or anything. It's always touch and go. _I_ might have
+been sent down any day. I should have been if they'd known about me half
+what they don't know about Nicky. Why can't you take it as a rag? You
+bet _he_ does."
+
+Anthony removed himself from her protecting hand. He got up and went to
+bed.
+
+But he did not sleep there. Neither he nor Frances slept. And he came
+down in the morning looking worse than ever.
+
+Dorothy thought, "It must be awful to have children if it makes you feel
+like that." She thought, "It's a lucky thing they're not likely to cut
+up the same way about me." She thought again, "It must be awful to have
+children." She thought of the old discussions in her room at Newnham,
+about the woman's right to the child, and free union, and easy divorce,
+and the abolition of the family. Her own violent and revolutionary
+speeches (for which she liked to think she might have been sent down)
+sounded faint and far-off and irrelevant. She did not really want to
+abolish Frances and Anthony. And yet, if they had been abolished, as
+part of the deplorable institution of parentage, it would have been
+better for them; for then they would not be suffering as they did.
+
+It must be awful to have children. But perhaps they knew that it was
+worth it.
+
+And as her thoughts travelled that way they were overtaken all of a
+sudden by an idea. She did not stop to ask herself what business her
+idea had in that neighbourhood. She went down first thing after
+breakfast and sent off two wires; one to Captain Drayton at Croft House,
+Eltham; one to the same person at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
+
+"Can I see you? It's about Nicky.
+
+"DOROTHY HARRISON."
+
+Wires to show that she was impersonal and businesslike, and that her
+business was urgent. "Can I see you?" to show that he was not being
+invited to see _her_. "It's about Nicky" to justify the whole
+proceeding. "Dorothy Harrison" because "Dorothy" by itself was too much.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as she had sent off her wires Dorothy felt a sense of happiness
+and well-being. She had no grounds for happiness; far otherwise; her
+great friendship with Rosalind Jervis was disintegrating bit by bit
+owing to Rosalind's behaviour; the fiery Suffrage meeting had turned
+into dust and ashes; her darling Nicky was in a nasty scrape; her father
+and mother were utterly miserable; yet she was happy.
+
+Half-way home her mind began to ask questions of its own accord.
+
+"Supposing you had to choose between the Suffrage and Frank Drayton?"
+
+"But I haven't got to."
+
+"You might have. You know you might any minute. You know he hates it.
+And supposing--"
+
+But Dorothy refused to give any answer.
+
+His wire came within the next half hour.
+
+"Coming three sharp. FRANK."
+
+Her sense of well-being increased almost to exaltation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He arrived with punctuality at three o'clock. (He was in the gunners and
+had a job at Woolwich.) She found him standing on the hearth-rug in the
+drawing-room. He had blown his nose when he heard her coming, and
+that meant that he was nervous. She caught him stuffing his
+pocket-handkerchief (a piece of damning evidence) into his
+breast-pocket.
+
+With her knowledge of his nervousness her exaltation ceased as if it had
+not been. At the sight of him it was as if the sentence hidden somewhere
+in her mind--"You'll have to choose. You know you'll have to"--escaping
+thought and language, had expressed itself in one suffocating pang.
+Unless Nicky's affair staved off the dreadful moment.
+
+"Were you frightfully busy?"
+
+"No, thank goodness."
+
+The luck she had had! Of course, if he had been busy he couldn't
+possibly have come.
+
+She could look at him now without a tightening in her throat. She liked
+to look at him. He was made all of one piece. She liked his square face
+and short fine hair, both the colour of light-brown earth; his eyes, the
+colour of light brown earth under clear water; eyes that looked small
+because they were set so deep. She liked their sudden narrowing and
+their deep wrinkles when he smiled. She liked his jutting chin, and the
+fine, rather small mouth that jerked his face slightly crooked when he
+laughed. She liked that slender crookedness that made it a face
+remarkable and unique among faces. She liked his brains. She liked all
+that she had ever seen or heard of him.
+
+Vera had told them that once, at an up-country station in India, he had
+stopped a mutiny in a native battery by laughing in the men's faces.
+Somebody that Ferdie knew had been with him and saw it happen. The men
+broke into his office where he was sitting, vulnerably, in his
+shirt-sleeves. They had brought knives with them, beastly native things,
+and they had their hands on the handles, ready. They screamed and
+gesticulated with excitement. And Frank Drayton leaned back in his
+office chair and looked at them, and burst out laughing, because, he
+said, they made such funny faces. When they got to fingering their
+knives, he tilted back his chair and rocked with laughter. His sudden,
+incredible mirth frightened them and stopped the mutiny. She could see
+him, she could see his face jerked crooked with delight.
+
+That was the sort of thing that Nicky would have done. She loved him for
+that. She loved him because he was like Nicky.
+
+She was not able to recall the process of the states that flowered in
+that mysterious sense of well-being and exaltation. A year ago Frank
+Drayton had been only "that nice man we used to meet at Cheltenham."
+First of all he had been Ferdie's and Vera's friend. Then he became
+Nicky's friend; the only one who took a serious interest in his
+inventions and supported him when he wanted to go into the Army and
+consoled him when he was frustrated. Then he had become the friend of
+the family. Now he was recognized as more particularly Dorothea's
+friend.
+
+At Cheltenham he had been home on leave; and it was not until this year
+that he had got his job at Woolwich teaching gunnery, while he waited
+for a bigger job in the Ordnance Department. Ferdie Cameron had always
+said that Frank Drayton would be worth watching. He would be part of the
+brains of the Army some day. Nicky watched him. His brains and their
+familiarity with explosives and the machinery of warfare had been his
+original attraction for Nicky. But it was Dorothea who watched him most.
+
+She plunged abruptly into Nicky's affair, giving names and lineage. "You
+know all sorts of people, do you know anything about her?"
+
+He looked at her clearly, without smiling. Then he said "Yes. I know a
+good bit about her. Is that what's wrong with Nicky?"
+
+"Not exactly. But he's been sent down."
+
+His wry smile intimated that such things might be.
+
+Then she told him what the Master had written and what the Professor had
+written and what Michael had written, and what Nicky had said, and what
+she, Dorothea thought. Drayton smiled over the Master's and the
+Professor's letters, but when it came to Michael's letter he
+laughed aloud.
+
+"It's all very well for _us_. But Daddy and Mummy are breaking their
+hearts. Daddy says he's going down to Cambridge to see what really
+did happen."
+
+Again that clear look. She gathered that he disapproved of "Booster's"
+wife. He disapproved of so many things: of Women's Suffrage; of
+revolutions; of women who revolted; of anybody who revolted; of Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite. It was
+putting it too mildly to say he disapproved of Rosalind Jervis; he
+detested her. He disapproved of Vera and of her going to see Vera; she
+remembered that he had even disapproved, long ago, of poor Ferdie,
+though he liked him. Evidently he disapproved of "Booster's" wife for
+the same reason that he disapproved of Vera. That was why he didn't
+say so.
+
+"I believe you think all the time I'm right," she said. "Would you go
+down if you were he?"
+
+"No. I wouldn't."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because he won't get anything out of them. They can't give her away any
+more than Nicky can. Or than _you_ can, Dorothy."
+
+"You mean I've done it already--to you. I _had_ to, because of Nicky. I
+can't help it if you _do_ think it was beastly of me."
+
+"My dear child--"
+
+He got up vehemently, as if his idea was to take her in his arms and
+stifle her outbreak that way. But something in her eyes, cold, unready,
+yet aware of him, repelled him.
+
+He thought: "It's too soon. She's all rigid. She isn't alive yet.
+That's not what she wired for." He thought: "I wish people wouldn't send
+their children to Newnham. It retards their development by ten years."
+
+And she thought: "No. I mustn't let him do that. For then he won't be
+able to go back on me when I tell him my opinions. It would be simply
+trapping him. Supposing--supposing--"
+
+She did not know that that instinctive renunciation was her answer to
+the question. Her honour would come first.
+
+"Of course. Of course you had to."
+
+"What would you do about it if you were Daddy?"
+
+"I should send them all to blazes."
+
+"No, but _really_ do?"
+
+"I should do nothing. I should leave it. You'll find that before very
+long there'll be letters of apology and restitution."
+
+"Will you come down to the office with me and tell Daddy that?"
+
+"Yes, if you'll come to tea with me somewhere afterwards."
+
+(He really couldn't be expected to do all this for nothing.)
+
+She sent her mother to him while she put on her hat and coat. When she
+came down Frances was happy again.
+
+"You see, Mummy, I was right, after all."
+
+"You always were right, darling, all the time."
+
+For the life of her she couldn't help giving that little flick at her
+infallible daughter.
+
+"She _is_ right--most of the time," said Drayton. His eyes covered and
+protected her.
+
+Anthony was in his office, sitting before the open doors of the cabinet
+where he kept his samples of rare and valuable woods. The polished slabs
+were laid before him on the table in rows, as he had arranged them to
+show to a customer: wine-coloured mahogany, and golden satinwood; ebony
+black as jet; tulip-wood mottled like fine tortoiseshell; coromandel
+wood, striped black and white like the coat of a civet cat; ghostly
+basswood, shining white on dead white; woods of clouded grain, and woods
+of shining grain, grain that showed like the slanting, splintered lines
+of hewn stone, like moss, like the veins of flowers, the fringes of
+birds' feathers, the striping and dappling of beasts; woods of exquisite
+grain where the life of the tree drew its own image in its own heart;
+woods whose surface was tender to the touch like a fine tissue; and
+sweet-smelling sandalwood and camphor-wood and cedar.
+
+Anthony loved his shining, polished slabs of wood. If a man must have a
+business, let it be timber. Timber was a clean and fine and noble thing.
+He had brought the working of his business to such a pitch of smooth
+perfection that his two elder sons, Michael and Nicholas, could catch up
+with it easily and take it in their stride.
+
+Now he was like a sick child that has ranged all its toys in front of it
+and finds no comfort in them.
+
+And, as he looked at them, the tulip-wood and the scented sandalwood and
+camphor-wood gave him an idea.
+
+The Master and the Professor had both advised him to send his son
+Nicholas out of England for a little while. "Let him travel for six
+months and get the whole miserable business out of his head."
+
+Nicky, when he gave up the Army, had told him flatly that he would
+rather die than spend his life sitting in a beastly office. Nicky had
+put it to him that timber meant trees, and trees meant forests; why,
+lots of the stuff they imported came from the Himalaya and the West
+Indies and Ceylon. He had reminded him that he was always saying a
+timber merchant couldn't know enough about the living tree. Why
+shouldn't he go into the places where the living trees grew and learn
+all about them? Why shouldn't he be a tree-expert? Since they were
+specializing in rare and foreign woods, why shouldn't he specialize in
+rare and foreign trees?
+
+And the slabs of tulip-wood and scented camphor-wood and sandalwood were
+saying to Anthony, "Why not?" Neither he nor Frances had wanted Nicky to
+go off to the West Indies and the Himalaya; but now, since clearly he
+must go off somewhere, why not?
+
+Drayton and Dorothy came in just as Anthony (still profoundly
+dejected) was saying to himself, "Reinstate him. Give him
+responsibility--curiosity--healthy interests. Get the whole miserable
+business out of his head."
+
+It seemed incredible, after what they had gone through, that Drayton
+should be standing there, telling him that there was nothing in it, that
+there never had been any miserable business, that it was all a storm in
+a hysterical woman's teacup. He blew the whole dirty nightmare to
+nothing with the laughter that was like Nicky's own laughter.
+
+Then Anthony and Drayton and Dorothy sat round the table, drafting
+letters to the Master and the Professor. Anthony, at Drayton's
+dictation, informed them that he regretted the step they had seen fit to
+take; that he knew his own son well enough to be pretty certain that
+there had been some misunderstanding; therefore, unless he received
+within three days a written withdrawal of the charge against his son
+Nicholas, he would be obliged to remove his son Michael from the
+Master's College.
+
+The idea of removing Michael was Anthony's own inspiration.
+
+Drayton's advice was that he should give Nicky his choice between Oxford
+and Germany, the big School of Forestry at Aschaffenburg. If he chose
+Germany, he would be well grounded; he could specialize and travel
+afterwards.
+
+"Now _that's_ all over," Anthony said, "you two had better come and have
+tea with me somewhere."
+
+But there was something in their faces that made him consult his watch
+and find that "Oh dear me, no! he was afraid he couldn't." He had an
+appointment at five.
+
+When they were well out of sight he locked up his toys in his cabinet,
+left the appointment at five to Mr. Vereker, and went home to tell
+Frances about the letters he had written to Cambridge and the plans that
+had been made for Nicky's future.
+
+"He'll choose Germany," Anthony said. "But that can't be helped."
+
+Frances agreed that they could hardly have hit upon a better plan.
+
+So the affair of Nicky and "Booster's" wife was as if it had never been.
+And for that they thanked the blessed common sense and sanity of
+Captain Drayton.
+
+And yet Anthony's idea was wrecked by "Booster's" wife. It had come too
+late. Anthony had overlooked the fact that his son had seventeen hours'
+start of him. He was unaware of the existence of Nicky's own idea; and
+he had not allowed for the stiff logic of his position.
+
+When he drove down in his car to St. John's Wood to fetch Nicky, he
+found that he had left that afternoon for Chelsea, where, Vera told him,
+he had taken rooms.
+
+She gave him the address. It had no significance for Anthony.
+
+Nicky refused to be fetched back from his rooms in Chelsea. For he had
+not left his father's house in a huff; he had left it in his wisdom, to
+avoid the embarrassment of an incredible position. His position, as he
+pointed out to his father, had not changed. He was as big a blackguard
+to-day as he was yesterday; the only difference was, that to-morrow or
+the next day he would be a self-supporting blackguard.
+
+He wouldn't listen to his father's plan. It was a beautiful plan, but it
+would only mean spending more money on him. He'd be pretty good, he
+thought, at looking after machinery. He was going to try for a job as a
+chauffeur or foreman mechanic. He thought he knew where he could get
+one; but supposing he couldn't get it, if his father cared to take him
+on at the works for a bit he'd come like a shot; but he couldn't stay
+there, because it wouldn't be good enough.
+
+He was absolutely serious, and absolutely firm in the logic of his
+position. For he argued that, if he allowed himself to be taken back as
+though nothing had happened, this, more than anything he could well
+think of, would be giving Peggy away.
+
+He sent his love to his mother and Dorothy, and promised to come out and
+dine with them as soon as he had got his job.
+
+So Anthony drove back without him. But as he drove he smiled. And
+Frances smiled, too, when he told her.
+
+"There he is, the young monkey, and there he'll stay. It's magnificent,
+but of course he's an ass."
+
+"If you can't be an ass at twenty," said Frances, "when can you be?"
+
+They said it was so like Nicky. For all he knew to the contrary his
+career was ruined; but he didn't care. You couldn't make any impression
+on him. They wondered if anybody ever would.
+
+Dorothy wondered too.
+
+"What sort of rooms has he got, Anthony?" said Frances.
+
+"Very nice rooms, at the top of the house, looking over the river."
+
+"Darling Nicky, I shall go and see him. What are you thinking of,
+Dorothy?"
+
+Dorothy was thinking that Nicky's address at Chelsea was the address
+that Desmond had given her yesterday.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with the
+painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and see her.
+She could never bring herself to go to the St. John's Wood house that
+was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen's house than it was Vera's.
+
+The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back on
+Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with their
+liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged that
+frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen's society that
+otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.
+
+Vera understood that her husband's brother and sister-in-law could
+hardly be expected to condone her last aberration. Her attachment to
+Ferdie Cameron had been different. It was inevitable, and in a sense
+forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by Bartie's sheer
+impossibility. Besides, the knowledge of it had dawned on them so
+gradually and through so many stages of extenuating tragedy, that, even
+when it became an open certainty, the benefit of the long doubt
+remained. And there was Veronica. There was still Veronica. Even without
+Veronica Vera would have had to think of something far worse than
+Lawrence Stephen before Frances would have cast her off. Frances felt
+that it was not for her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree
+of Heaven. Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had
+Ferdie, could she have lived without him? For Frances nothing in the
+world had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her
+children; her children first, and Anthony after them. For Vera nothing
+in the world counted but her lover.
+
+"If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!" she would
+say.
+
+Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously, through the
+very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.
+
+Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made up for
+it by an incorruptible adoration of the living. And she had been made
+notorious chiefly through Stephen's celebrity, which was, you might say,
+a pure accident.
+
+Thus Frances made shelter for her friend. Only Vera must be made to
+understand that, though _she_ was accepted Lawrence Stephen was not. He
+was the point at which toleration ceased.
+
+And Vera did understand. She understood that Frances and Anthony
+disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie's and
+Veronica's account than on Bartie's. Even family loyalty could not
+espouse Bartie's cause with any zest. For Bartie showed himself
+implacable. Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her so
+that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had refused.
+His idea was to assert himself by refusals. In that way he could still
+feel that he had power over her and a sort of possession. It was he who
+was scandalous. Even now neither Frances nor Anthony had a word to
+say for him.
+
+So Vera consented to be received surreptitiously, by herself, and
+without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn. It had hurt her; but
+Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so distinguished
+that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either, would ever have
+been received by him without Vera. She came, looking half cynical, half
+pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a little beaten after seventeen
+years of passion and danger, saying that she wasn't going to force Larry
+down their throats if they didn't like him; and she went away sustained
+by her sense of his distinction and _his_ repudiations.
+
+And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances and
+Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn't. Michael and
+Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he knew; and
+he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be seen at the
+parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself distinction. Vera
+had never forgotten and never would forget what Anthony and Frances had
+done for her and Ferdie when they took Veronica. She wanted to make up,
+to pay back, to help their children as they had helped her child; to
+give the best she had, and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't
+possibly have done. Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was
+lamentable. In his family and in the dull round of their acquaintance
+there was not anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael;
+not anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old
+attitude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had promised
+her that he would help Michael.
+
+And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas and
+Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm, well-ordered
+sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral vortex that to her was
+the most redoubtable of all. She hid her fear, because in her wisdom she
+knew that to show fear was not the way to keep her children. She hid her
+strength because she knew that to show it was not the way. Her strength
+was in their love of her. She had only used it once when she had stopped
+Nicky from going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will
+never do that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a
+treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be bargained
+with. She tried to hold the balance even between their youth and
+their maturity.
+
+So Frances fought her fear.
+
+She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in spite of
+everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and she did not know
+that he had sensibilities and prejudices and scruples like her own, and
+that he and Vera distinguished very carefully between the people who
+would be good for Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who
+would not. She did not know that they both drew the line at Desmond.
+
+Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's fault
+that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet each other.
+She did not deny that it was in her house they _had_ met; but she had
+not introduced them. Desmond had introduced herself, on the grounds that
+she knew Dorothy. Vera suspected that, from the first moment when she
+had seen him there--by pure accident--she had marked him down. Very
+likely she had wriggled into Dorothy's Suffrage meeting on purpose. She
+was capable of anything.
+
+Not that Vera thought there was any need for Frances to worry. It was
+most unlikely that Desmond's business with Nicky could be serious. For
+one thing she was too young herself to care for anybody as young as
+Nicky. For another she happened to be in the beginning, or the middle,
+certainly nowhere near the end of a tremendous affair with Headley
+Richards. As she was designing the dresses and the scenery for the new
+play he was putting on at the Independent Theatre, Vera argued very
+plausibly that the affair had only just started, and that Frances must
+allow it a certain time to run.
+
+"I hope to goodness that the Richards man will marry her."
+
+"My dear, how can he? He's married already to a nice little woman that
+he isn't half tired of yet. Desmond was determined to have him and she's
+got him; but he's only taken her in his stride, as you may say. I don't
+suppose he cares very much one way or another. But with Desmond it's a
+point of honour."
+
+"What's a point of honour?"
+
+"Why, to have him. Not to be left out. Besides, she always said she
+could take him from poor little Ginny Richards, and she's done it. That
+was another point of honour."
+
+With a calmness that was horrible to Frances Vera weighed her friend
+Desmond's case. To Frances it was as if she had never known Vera. Either
+Vera had changed or she had never known her. She had never known women,
+or men either, who discussed such performances with calmness. Vera
+herself hadn't made her infidelities a point of honour.
+
+These were the passions and the thoughts of Lawrence Stephen's and of
+Desmond's world; these were the things it took for granted. These people
+lived in a moral vortex; they whirled round and round with each other;
+they were powerless to resist the swirl. Not one of them had any other
+care than to love and to make love after the manner of the Vortex. This
+was their honour, not to be left out of it, not to be left out of the
+vortex, but to be carried away, to be sucked in, and whirl round and
+round with each other and the rest.
+
+The painter girl Desmond was horrible to Frances.
+
+And all the time her mind was busy with one question: "Do you think
+Nicky knows?"
+
+"I'm perfectly sure he doesn't."
+
+"Perhaps--if he did--"
+
+"No, my dear, that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe it.
+You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting into his
+head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And you'll be
+putting it into Desmond's head."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him alone." Those
+painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You couldn't take them
+seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything that Vera Harrison said
+she was. He didn't think, though, that the idea of making love to her
+would enter Nicky's head if they left him alone. Nicky's head had more
+important ideas in it.
+
+So they left him alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of Desmond. Too
+busy with his assistant manager's job at the Morss Motor Works; too busy
+with one of the little ideas to which he owed the sudden rise in his
+position: the little idea of making the Morss cars go faster; too busy
+with his big Idea which had nothing whatever to do with the Morss
+Company and their cars.
+
+His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a French
+engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the _forteresse mobile_, had
+become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality for his idea. It was a
+composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with
+caterpillar wheels and the motor-car. These things had welded themselves
+together gradually in Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge.
+The table in Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was
+now covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made
+them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him,
+and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little
+ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day
+in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless
+spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took
+shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had
+conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image
+of the _forteresse mobile_, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost that
+stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the vision.
+
+But the image of Desmond was there.
+
+At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder when
+Desmond will have finished the drawings."
+
+The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond's caprice.
+
+The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before these
+could be fitted together and the permanent model of the Moving Fortress
+set up. The Moving Fortress itself waited upon Desmond.
+
+For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not draw his
+plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who understood engines to
+draw them. He was haunted, almost insanely, by the fear that somebody
+else would hit upon the idea of the Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so
+obvious that no gunner and no engineer could miss it. And the drawings
+Desmond made for him, the drawings in black and white, the drawings in
+grey wash, and the coloured drawings were perfect. Nicky, unskilled in
+everything but the inventing and building up of engines, did not know
+how perfect the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the
+extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the easels in
+her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he took Desmond
+into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on her.
+
+He didn't care. He liked Desmond. He couldn't help it if Drayton
+disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn't like her. She was, he said to
+himself, a ripping good sort. She might be frightfully clever; Nicky
+rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she never talked
+that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy's other friends talked. She
+let you think.
+
+It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn't like her and that
+Frank Drayton disapproved of her.
+
+"They wouldn't," said Nicky, "if they knew you." And he turned again to
+the subject of his Moving Fortress.
+
+For Desmond's intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was perfect,
+and her way of listening was perfect. She sat on the floor, on the
+orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience, embracing her
+knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms, while Nicky stamped up
+and down her studio and talked to her, like a monomaniac, about his
+Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have
+to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at
+him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she
+liked his young naïveté and monomania; she liked his face and all his
+gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.
+
+And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled eyes and in
+her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It
+was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its
+long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven
+with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body
+than to her spirit and her mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early summer,
+when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent him motoring
+about the country on their business, he took Desmond with him and
+Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on the grass borders
+of the high roads and on the edges of the woods and moors, and Desmond
+painted her extraordinary pictures while Nicky lay on his back beside
+her with his face turned up to the sky and dreamed of flying machines.
+
+For he had done with his Moving Fortress. It only waited for Desmond to
+finish the last drawing.
+
+When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank Drayton
+before he sent them to the War Office.
+
+He lived for that moment of completion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of nineteen-eleven
+Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased and flowered and
+ripened to its fulfilment. And in the early summer she found that things
+had happened as she had meant that they should happen.
+
+She had always meant it. She had always said, and she had always thought
+that women were no good unless they had the courage of their opinions;
+the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice that prevented them
+from getting what they wanted.
+
+Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked her in.
+Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought that by simply
+spinning round faster and faster she added her own energy to the whirl.
+It was not Dorothy's vortex, or the vortex of the fighting Suffrage
+woman. Desmond didn't care very much about the Suffrage; or about any
+kind of freedom but her own kind; or about anybody's freedom but her
+own. Maud Blackadder's idea of freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and
+physical insanity. Yet each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and
+Mrs. Blathwaite and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own
+particular swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century. If you had
+youth and life in you, you were in revolt.
+
+Desmond's theories were Dorothy's theories too; only that while Dorothy,
+as Rosalind had said, thought out her theories in her brain without
+feeling them, Desmond felt them with her whole being; and with her whole
+being, secret, subtle and absolutely relentless, she was bent on
+carrying them out.
+
+And in the summer, in the new season, Headley Richards decided that he
+had no further use for Desmond. The new play had run its course at the
+Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards had been
+disappointed. He put down the failure mainly to the queerness of the
+dresses and the scenery she had designed for him. Desmond's new art was
+too new; people weren't ready yet for that sort of thing. At the same
+time he discovered that he was really very much attached to his own wife
+Ginny, and when Ginny nobly offered to give him his divorce he had
+replied nobly that he didn't want one. And he left Desmond to face
+the music.
+
+Desmond's misery was acute; but it was not so hopeless as it would have
+been if she could have credited Ginny Richards with any permanent power
+of attraction for Headley. She knew he would come back to her. She knew
+the power of her own body. She held him by the tie that was never broken
+so long as it endured. He would never marry her; yet he would come back.
+
+But in the interval between these acts there was the music.
+
+And the first sound of the music, the changed intonations of her
+landlady, frightened Desmond; for though she was older than Nicky she
+was very young. And there were Desmond's people. You may forget that you
+have people and behave as if they weren't there; but, if they are there,
+sooner or later they will let you know it. An immense volume of sound
+and some terrifying orchestral effects were contributed by Desmond's
+people. So that the music was really very bad to bear.
+
+Desmond couldn't bear it. And in her fright she thought of Nicky.
+
+She knew that she hadn't a chance so long as he was absorbed in the
+Moving Fortress. But the model was finished and set up and she was at
+work on the last drawing. And no more ideas for engines were coming into
+Nicky's head. The Morss Company and Nicky himself were even beginning to
+wonder whether there ever would be any more.
+
+Then Nicky thought of Desmond. And he showed that he was thinking of her
+by sitting still and not talking when he was with her. She did not fill
+that emptiness and spaciousness of Nicky's head, but he couldn't get her
+out of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Vera noticed the silence of the two she became uneasy, and judged
+that the time had come for discreet intervention.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "is it true that Desmond's been doing drawings for
+you?"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky, "she's done any amount."
+
+"My dear boy, have you any idea of the amount you'll have to pay her?"
+
+"I haven't," said Nicky, "I wish I had. I hate asking her, and yet I
+suppose I'll have to."
+
+"Of course you'll have to. _She_ won't hate it. She's got to earn her
+living as much as you have."
+
+"Has she? You don't mean to say she's hard up?"
+
+He had never thought of Desmond as earning her own living, still less as
+being hard up.
+
+"I only wish she were," said Vera, "for your sake."
+
+"Why on earth for my sake?"
+
+"Because _then_, my dear Nicky, you wouldn't have to pay so stiff a
+price."
+
+"I don't care," said Nicky, "how stiff the price is. I shall pay it."
+
+And Vera replied that Desmond, in her own queer way, really was a rather
+distinguished painter. "Pay her," she said. "Pay her for goodness sake
+and have done with it. And if she wants to give you things don't
+let her."
+
+"As if," said Nicky, "I should dream of letting her."
+
+And he went off to Chelsea to pay Desmond then and there.
+
+Vera thought that she had been rather clever. Nicky would dash in and do
+the thing badly. He would be very proud about it, and he would revolt
+from his dependence on Desmond, and he would show her--Vera hoped that
+he would show her--that he did not want to be under any obligation to
+her. And Desmond would be hurt and lose her temper. The hard look would
+get into her face and destroy its beauty, and she would say detestable
+things in a detestable voice, and a dreadful ugliness would come between
+them, and the impulse of Nicky's yet unborn passion would be checked,
+and the memory of that abominable half-hour would divide them for ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Vera herself had grown hard and clever. She had forgotten Nicky's
+tenderness, and she knew nothing at all about Desmond's fright. And, as
+it happened, neither Nicky nor Desmond did any of the things she thought
+they would do.
+
+Nicky was not impetuous. He found Desmond in her studio working on the
+last drawing of the Moving Fortress, with the finished model before her.
+That gave him his opening, and he approached shyly and tentatively.
+
+Desmond put on an air of complete absorption in her drawing; but she
+smiled. A pretty smile that lifted the corners of her mouth and made it
+quiver, and gave Nicky a queer and unexpected desire to kiss her.
+
+He went on wanting to know what his debt was--not that he could ever
+really pay it.
+
+"Oh, you foolish Nicky," Desmond said.
+
+He repeated himself over and over again, and each time she had an
+answer, and the answers had a cumulative effect.
+
+"There isn't any debt. You don't pay anything--"
+
+"I didn't do it for _that_, you silly boy."
+
+"What did I do it for? I did it for fun. You couldn't draw a thing like
+that for anything else. Look at it--"
+
+--"Well, if you want to be horrid and calculating about it, think of the
+lunches and the dinners and the theatre tickets and the flowers you've
+given _me_. Oh, and the gallons and gallons of petrol. How am I ever to
+pay you back again?"
+
+Thus she mocked him.
+
+"Can't you see how you're spoiling it all?"
+
+And then, passionately: "Oh, Nicky, please don't say it again. It
+hurts."
+
+She turned on him her big black looking-glass eyes washed bright, each
+with one tear that knew better than to fall just yet. He must see that
+she was holding herself well in hand. It would be no use letting herself
+go until he had forgotten his Moving Fortress. He was looking at the
+beastly thing now, instead of looking at her.
+
+"Are you thinking of another old engine?"
+
+"No," said Nicky. "I'm not thinking of anything."
+
+"Then you don't want me to do any more drawings?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well then--I wonder whether you'd very much mind going away?"
+
+"Now?"
+
+"No. Not now. But soon. From here. Altogether."
+
+"Go? Altogether? Me? Why?"
+
+He was utterly astonished. He thought that he had offended Desmond past
+all forgiveness.
+
+"Because I came here to be alone. To work. And I can't work. And I want
+to be alone again."
+
+"Am I--spoiling it?"
+
+"Yes. You're spoiling it damnably."
+
+"I'm sorry, Desmond. I didn't mean to. I thought--" But he hadn't the
+heart to say what he had thought.
+
+She looked at him and knew that the moment was coming.
+
+It had come.
+
+She turned away from the table where the Moving Fortress stood,
+threatening her with its mimic guns, and reminding Nicky of the things
+she most wanted him to forget. She withdrew to her crouching place at
+the other end of the studio, among the cushions.
+
+He followed her there with slow, thoughtful steps, steps full of
+brooding purpose and of half-unconscious meaning.
+
+"Nicky, I'm so unhappy. I didn't know it was possible for anybody to be
+so unhappy in this world."
+
+She began to cry quietly.
+
+"Desmond--what is it? What is it? Tell me. Why can't you tell me?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She thought, "It will be all right if he kisses me once. If he holds me
+in his arms once. Then I can tell him."
+
+For then he would know that he loved her. He was not quite sure now. She
+knew that he was not quite sure. She trusted to the power of her body to
+make him sure.
+
+Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor pitied
+it.
+
+He had kissed her. He had held her in his arms and kissed her more than
+once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow of his arm.
+She was weak and small. She was like some small, soft, helpless animal
+and she was hurt. Her sobbing and panting made her ribs feel fragile
+like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless animal under the pressure of
+his arms. And she was frightened.
+
+He couldn't stand the sight of suffering. He had never yet resisted the
+appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and pain. He could feel
+Desmond's heart going thump, thump, under the blue thing he called her
+pinafore. Her heart hurt him with its thumping.
+
+And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was smooth and
+sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf. And Desmond knew that he knew it.
+His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over the long, polished
+bands of her black hair; and he thought that he loved her. Desmond knew
+that he thought it.
+
+And still she waited. She said to herself, "It's no good his thinking
+it. I daren't tell him till he says it. Till he asks me to marry him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had said it at last. And he had asked her to marry him. And then she
+had told him.
+
+And all that he said was, "I don't care." He said it to Desmond, and he
+said it to himself.
+
+The funny thing was that he did not care. He was as miserable as it was
+well possible to be, but he didn't really care. He was not even
+surprised. It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in the back
+of his head behind all the ideas.
+
+And yet he couldn't have known it all the time. Either it must have gone
+away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not to see it.
+
+She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her mouth
+and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief, controlling herself,
+crying quietly.
+
+She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn't love her. If
+he had loved her he would have cared intolerably. He didn't care about
+Headley Richards because he didn't care about Desmond any more. He was
+only puzzled.
+
+"Why did you do it?"
+
+"I can't think why. I must have been off my head. I didn't know what it
+was like. I didn't know. I thought it would be wonderful and beautiful.
+I thought he was wonderful and beautiful."
+
+"Poor little Desmond."
+
+"Oh, Nicky, do you think me a beast? Does it make you hate me?"
+
+"No. Of course it doesn't. The only awful thing is--"
+
+"What? Tell me."
+
+"Well--you see--"
+
+"You mean the baby? I know it's awful. You needn't tell me that, Nicky."
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"I mean it's so awful for _it_."
+
+She thought he had been thinking of himself and her.
+
+"Why should it be?"
+
+"Why? There isn't any why. It just is. I _know_ it is."
+
+He was thinking of Veronica.
+
+"You see," he said simply, "that's why this sort of thing is such a
+rotten game. It's so hard on the kiddy. I suppose you didn't think of
+that. You couldn't have, or else you wouldn't--"
+
+He paused. There was one thing he had to know. He must get it out of
+her.
+
+"It hasn't made you feel that you don't want it?"
+
+"Oh--I don't know what I want--_now_. I don't know what it makes me
+feel!"
+
+"Don't let it, Desmond. Don't let it. It'll be all right. You won't feel
+like that when you've married me. Can't you see that _that's_ the
+wonderful and beautiful part?"
+
+"_What_ is?" she said in her tired drawl.
+
+"_It_--the poor kiddy."
+
+Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Veronica's mother was the first to hear about it. Desmond told her.
+
+Veronica's mother was determined to stop it for the sake of everybody
+concerned.
+
+She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her one
+evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else. (Lawrence
+Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where Vera was not
+received; but sometimes, when the occasion was political, or otherwise
+important, he had to. That was her punishment, as Bartholomew had meant
+that it should be.)
+
+Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt's assaults and
+manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.
+
+"You mustn't do it; you simply mustn't."
+
+He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.
+
+"It isn't. It's the affair of everybody who cares for you."
+
+"Their caring isn't my affair," said Nicky.
+
+And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.
+
+"It's absurd of you," she said, "to treat her as if she was an innocent
+child. She isn't a child, and she isn't innocent. She knew perfectly
+well what she was about. There's nothing she doesn't know. She meant it
+to happen, and she made it happen. She said she would. She meant you to
+marry her, and she's making you marry her. I daresay she said she would.
+She's as clever and determined as the devil. Neither you nor Headley
+Richards ever had a chance against her."
+
+"She hasn't got a dog's chance against all you people yelping at her now
+she's down. I should have thought--"
+
+"You mean _I_'ve no business to? That was different. I didn't take any
+other woman's husband, or any other woman's lover, Nicky."
+
+"If you had," said Nicky, "I wouldn't have interfered."
+
+"I wouldn't interfere if I thought you cared _that_ for Desmond. But you
+don't. You know you don't."
+
+"Of course I care for her."
+
+He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew that he
+was vulnerable.
+
+"Oh, Nicky dear, if you'd only waited--"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched. "I don't
+know what I mean. Unless I mean that you're just a little young to
+marry anybody."
+
+"I don't care if I am. I don't _feel_ young, I can tell you. Anyhow
+Desmond's years younger."
+
+"Desmond is twenty-three. You're twenty. It's Veronica who's years
+younger."
+
+"Veronica?"
+
+"She's sixteen. You don't imagine Desmond is as young as that, do you?
+Wait till she's twenty-five and you're twenty-two."
+
+"It wouldn't do poor Desmond much good if I did. I could kill Headley
+Richards."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"For leaving her."
+
+Vera smiled. "That shows how much you care. You wouldn't have felt like
+killing him if he'd stuck to her. Why should you marry Headley Richards'
+mistress and take on his child? It's preposterous."
+
+"It isn't. If the other fellow's a brute it's all the more reason why I
+shouldn't be. I want to be some use in this rotten world where people
+are so damnably cruel to each other. And there's that unhappy kiddy.
+You've forgotten the kiddy."
+
+"Do you mean to say it's Desmond's child _you_'re thinking of?"
+
+"I can't understand any woman not thinking of it," said Nicky.
+
+He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.
+
+Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.
+
+"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for your own
+children?"
+
+It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why don't
+you marry _her_?"
+
+"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.
+
+Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry
+Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards. "Nothing I said
+made the least impression on him."
+
+That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true.
+But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to
+it that Desmond's affair would have made no impression on him if it had
+not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor's wife. And it
+would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made
+love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry
+Phyllis Desmond.
+
+These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of
+Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.
+
+Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not been
+removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of apology and
+restitution came. But both apology and restitution came too late.
+
+For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.
+
+Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their house,
+one on each side of the fireplace. They had it all to themselves, except
+for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on the hearthrug at their
+feet. Frances's forehead and her upper lip were marked delicately with
+shallow, tender lines; Anthony's eyes had crow's-feet at their corners,
+pointing to grey hairs at his temples. To each other their faces were as
+they had been fifteen years ago. The flight of time was measured for
+them by the generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry.
+For still in secret they refused to think of their children as grown-up.
+
+Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the Women's
+Franchise Union. They owed it to her magnanimity that they had one child
+remaining with them in the house. John was at Cheltenham; Veronica was
+in Dresden. Michael was in Germany, too, at that School of Forestry at
+Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant for Nicky. They couldn't bear to
+think where Nicky was.
+
+When Frances thought about her children now her mind went backwards. If
+only they hadn't grown-up; if only they could have stayed little for
+ever! In another four years even Don-Don would be grown-up--Don-Don who
+was such a long time getting older that at fourteen, only two years
+ago, he had been capable of sitting in her lap, a great long-legged,
+flumbering puppy, while mother and son rocked dangerously together in
+each other's arms, like two children, laughing together, mocking
+each other.
+
+She was going to be wiser with Don-Don than she had been with Nicky. She
+would be wiser with Michael when he came back from Germany. She would
+keep them both out of the Vortex, the horrible Vortex that Lawrence
+Stephen and Vera had let Nicky in for, the Vortex that seized on youth
+and forced it into a corrupt maturity. After Desmond's affair Anthony
+and Frances felt that to them the social circle inhabited by Vera and
+Lawrence Stephen would never be anything but a dirty hell.
+
+As for Veronica, the longer she stayed in Germany the better.
+
+Yet Frances knew that they had not sent Veronica to Dresden to prevent
+her mother from getting hold of her. When she remembered the fear she
+had had of the apple-tree house, she said to herself that Desmond was a
+judgment on her for sending little Veronica away.
+
+And yet it was the kindest thing they could have done for her. Veronica
+was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and studying music and
+the language. She had no idea that music and the language were mere
+blinds, and that she had been sent to the German family to keep her out
+of Nicky's way.
+
+They would have them all back again at Christmas. Frances counted the
+days. From to-night, the seventh of June, to December the twentieth was
+not much more than six months.
+
+To-night, the seventh of June, was Nicky's wedding-night. But they did
+not know that. Nicky had kept the knowledge from them, in his mercy, to
+save them the agony of deciding whether they would recognize the
+marriage or not. And as neither Frances nor Anthony had ever faced
+squarely the prospect of disaster to their children, they had turned
+their backs on Nicky's marriage and supported each other in the hope
+that at the last minute something would happen to prevent it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ten o'clock post, and two letters from Germany. Not from Michael,
+not from Veronica. One from Frau Schäfer, the mother of the German
+family. It was all in German, and neither Anthony nor Frances could make
+out more than a word here and there. "Das süsse, liebe Mädchen" meant
+Veronica. But certain phrases: "traurige Nachrichten" ... "furchtbare
+Schwächheit" ... "... eine entsetzliche Blutleere ..." terrified them,
+and they sent for Dorothy to translate.
+
+Dorothy was a good German scholar, but somehow she was not very fluent.
+She scowled over the letter.
+
+"What does it mean?" said Frances. "Hæmorhage?"
+
+"No. No. Anæmia. Severe anæmia. Heart and stomach trouble."
+
+"But 'traurige Nachrichten' is 'bad news.' They're breaking it to us
+that she's dying."
+
+(It was unbearable to think of Nicky marrying Ronny; but it was more
+unbearable to think of Ronny dying.)
+
+"They don't say they're sending _us_ bad news; they say they think
+Ronny must have had some. To account for her illness. Because they say
+she's been so happy with them."
+
+"But what bad news could she have had?"
+
+"Perhaps she knows about Nicky."
+
+"But nobody's told her, unless Vera has."
+
+"She hasn't. I know she hasn't. She didn't want her to know."
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+"Mummy, you don't _have_ to tell Ronny things. She always knows them."
+
+"How on earth could she know a thing like that?"
+
+"She might. She sort of sees things--like Ferdie. She may have seen him
+with Desmond. You can't tell."
+
+"Do they say what the doctor thinks?"
+
+"Yes. He thinks it's worry and Heimweh--homesickness. They want us to
+send for her and take her back. Not let her have another term."
+
+Though Frances loved Veronica she was afraid of her coming back. For she
+was more than ever convinced that something would happen and that Nicky
+would not marry Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The other letter was even more difficult to translate or to understand
+when translated.
+
+The authorities at Aschaffenburg requested Herr Harrison to remove his
+son Michael from the School of Forestry. Michael after his first few
+weeks had done no good at the school. In view of the expense to Herr
+Harrison involved in his fees and maintenance, they could not honestly
+advise his entering upon another term. It would only be a deplorable
+throwing away of money on a useless scheme. His son Michael had no
+thoroughness, no practical ability, and no grasp whatever of theoretic
+detail. From Herr Harrison's point of view this was the more regrettable
+inasmuch as the young man had colossal decision and persistence and
+energy of his own. He was an indefatigable dreamer. Very likely--when
+his dreams had crystallized--a poet. But the idea Herr Harrison had had
+that his son Michael would make a man of business, or an expert in
+Forestry, was altogether fantastic and absurd. And from the desperate
+involutions of the final sentence Dorothy disentangled the clear fact
+that Michael's personal charm, combined with his hostility to
+discipline, his complete indifference to the aims of the authorities,
+and his utter lack of any sense of responsibility, made him a dangerous
+influence in any school.
+
+That was the end of Anthony's plans for Michael.
+
+The next morning Nicky wired from some village in Sussex: "Married
+yesterday.--NICKY."
+
+After that nothing seemed to matter. With Nicky gone from them they were
+glad to have Michael back again. Frances said they might be thankful for
+one thing--that there wasn't any German Peggy or any German Desmond in
+Michael's problem.
+
+And since both Michael and Veronica were to be removed at once, the
+simplest arrangement was that he should return to Dresden and bring her
+back with him.
+
+Frances had never been afraid for Michael.
+
+Michael knew that he had made havoc of his father's plans. He couldn't
+help that. His affair was far too desperate. And any other man but his
+father would have foreseen that the havoc was inevitable and would have
+made no plans. He knew he had been turned into the tree-travelling
+scheme that had been meant for Nicky, because, though Nicky had slipped
+out of it, his father simply couldn't bear to give up his idea. And no
+wonder, when the dear old thing had so few of them.
+
+He had been honest with his father about it; every bit as honest as
+Nicky had been. He had wanted to travel if he could go to China and
+Japan, just as Nicky had wanted to travel if he could go to places like
+the West Indies and the Himalaya. And he didn't mind trying to get the
+trees in when he was there. He was even prepared to accept Germany and
+the School for Forestry if Germany was the only way to China and Japan.
+But he had told his father not to mind if nothing came of it at the end
+of all the travelling. And his father had said he would take the risk.
+He preferred taking the risk to giving up his idea.
+
+And Michael had been honest with himself. He had told himself that he
+too must take some risks, and the chances were that a year or two in
+Germany wouldn't really hurt him. Things never did hurt you as much as
+you thought they would. He had thought that Cambridge would do all sorts
+of things to him, and Cambridge had not done anything to him at all. As
+for Oxford, it had given him nearly all the solitude and liberty he
+wanted, and more companionship than he was ever likely to want. At
+twenty-two Michael was no longer afraid of dying before he had finished
+his best work. In spite of both Universities he had done more or less
+what he had meant to do before he went to Germany. His work had not yet
+stood the test of time, but to make up for that he himself, in his
+uneasy passion for perfection, like Time, destroyed almost as much as he
+created. Still, after some pitiless eliminations, enough of his verse
+remained for one fine, thin book.
+
+It would be published if Lawrence Stephen approved of the selection.
+
+So, Michael argued, even if he died to-morrow there was no reason why he
+should not go to Germany to-day.
+
+He was too young to know that he acquiesced so calmly because his soul
+was for a moment appeased by accomplishment.
+
+He was too young to know that his soul had a delicate, profound and
+hidden life of its own, and that in secret it approached the crisis of
+transition. It was passing over from youth to maturity, like a
+sleep-walker, unconscious, enchanted, seeing its way without seeing it,
+safe only from the dangers of the passage if nobody touched it, and if
+it went alone.
+
+Michael had no idea of what Germany could and would do to his soul.
+
+Otherwise he might have listened to what Paris had to say by way of
+warning.
+
+For his father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to Germany,
+as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's point of view)
+was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old Pater be expected to
+know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no sort of way even to South
+Germany? He should have gone to Brussels, if he was ever, spiritually
+speaking, to get there at all.
+
+And neither Anthony nor Frances knew that Lawrence Stephen had plans for
+Michael.
+
+Michael went to Paris with his unpublished poems in his pocket and a
+letter of introduction from Stephen to Jules Réveillaud. He left it with
+revolution in his soul and the published poems of Réveillaud and his
+followers in his suit-case, straining and distending it so that it burst
+open of its own accord at the frontier.
+
+Lawrence Stephen had said to him: "Before you write another line read
+Réveillaud and show him what you've written."
+
+Jules Réveillaud was ten years older than Michael, and he recognized the
+symptoms of the crisis. He could see what was happening and what had
+happened and would happen in Michael's soul. He said: "One third of each
+of your poems is good. And there are a few--the three last--which are
+all good."
+
+"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."
+
+"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is why they
+are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do not publish
+these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more experiments. And
+whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School of Forestry would be
+very bad for you. Why not," said Réveillaud, "stay where you are?"
+
+Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris with
+Jules Réveillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because his conscience
+kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a blackguard if he
+stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.
+
+In the train, going into Germany, he read Réveillaud's "Poèmes" and the
+"Poèmes" of the young men who followed him. He had read in Paris
+Réveillaud's "Critique de la Poésie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he
+read his poems, he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with
+"la poésie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had supposed,
+alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms, doing new
+things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other people, in a
+world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen, understood or cared for
+what he did, it was pure illusion. These young Frenchmen, with Jules
+Réveillaud at their head, were doing the same thing, making the same
+experiment, believing in the experiment, caring for nothing but the
+experiment, and carrying it farther than he had dreamed of carrying it.
+They were not so far ahead of him in time; Réveillaud himself had only
+two years' start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that
+he must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of rottenness,
+"la poésie anglaise contemporaine."
+
+He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse" before he
+left England, after he had said he would go to Germany, even after the
+final arrangements had been made. His father had given him a month to
+"turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had turned completely round.
+
+He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what to
+think of them himself. But he could see, when once Réveillaud had
+pointed it out to him, that they were the stuff that counted.
+
+In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things that
+Réveillaud had said: "Nous avons trempé la poésie dans la peinture et la
+musique. Il faut la délivrer par la sculpture. Chaque ligne, chaque
+vers, chaque poème taillé en bloc, sans couleur, sans decor, sans
+rime."... "La sainte pauvresse du style dépouillé."... "Il faut de la
+dureté, toujours de la dureté."
+
+He thought of Réveillaud's criticism, and his sudden startled spurt of
+admiration: "Mais! Vous l'avez trouvée, la beauté de la ligne droite."
+
+And Réveillaud's question: "Vraiment? Vous n'avez jamais lu un seul vers
+de mes poèmes? Alors, c'est étonnant." And then: "C'est que la réalité
+est plus forte que nous."
+
+The revolting irony of it! After stumbling and fumbling for years by
+himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard Reality; trying
+not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary rottenness; and,
+suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had got it, so that, but for
+Réveillaud, he might easily have died in his ignorance; and then, in the
+incredible moment of realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on
+Paris, where he wanted to live, and on Réveillaud whom he wanted to
+know, and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off
+to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.
+
+He wondered if he could have done it if he had not loved his father? He
+wondered if his father would ever understand that it was the hardest
+thing he had ever yet done or could do?
+
+But the trees would be beautiful. He would rather like seeing the trees.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether he would ever care about a tree again.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether he would ever see a tree again, ever smell tree-sap,
+or hear the wind sounding in the ash-trees like a river and in the firs
+like a sea.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether any tree would ever come to life for him again.
+
+He looked on at the tree-felling. He saw slaughtered trees, trees that
+tottered, trees that staggered in each other's branches. He heard the
+scream and the shriek of wounded boughs, the creaking and crashing of
+the trunk, and the long hiss of branches falling, trailing through
+branches to the ground. He smelt the raw juice of broken leaves and the
+sharp tree dust in the saw pits. The trees died horrible deaths, in the
+forests under the axes of the woodmen, and in the schools under the
+tongues of the Professors, and in Michael's soul. The German Government
+was determined that he should know all about trees. Its officials, the
+Professors and instructors, were sorry if he didn't like it, but they
+were ordered by their Government and paid by their Government to impart
+this information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to
+his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they imparted it
+with all their might.
+
+Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg. Instead of despising
+him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a tree expert, they
+admired and respected him because he was a poet. The family he lived
+with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his fellow-boarders, Carl and
+Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel, and Hedwig and Löttchen admired
+and respected him because he was a poet. When he walked with Ludwig in
+the great forests Michael chanted his poems, both in English and in
+German, till Ludwig's soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow,
+so that Ludwig actually shed tears in the forest. He said that if he had
+not done so he would have burst. Ludwig's emotions had nothing whatever
+to do with the forest or with Michael's poems, but he thought they had.
+
+Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was to show
+an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished his
+incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some superofficial
+wrote a letter to his father that gave him his liberty.
+
+The Henschels were sorry when he left. The students, Otto and Carl and
+Ludwig, implored him not to forget them. Hedwig and Löttchen cried.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by Dresden
+to bring Veronica back. He wanted to be alone on the journey. He wanted
+to stop in Paris and see Jules Réveillaud. He was afraid that Ronny had
+grown into a tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.
+
+And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had grown up.
+Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker plait tied up with
+broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not yet seventeen.
+
+Ronny was tired. She did not want to talk. When he had tucked her up
+with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat still with her
+hands in her muff.
+
+"I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael," she said.
+
+She knew what he had been thinking. Her clear eyes gazed at him out of
+her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual maturity.
+
+"What can have happened to her?" he wondered.
+
+But she did not disturb his thoughts.
+
+Up till then Michael's thoughts had not done him any good. They had been
+bitter thoughts of the months he had been compelled to waste in Bavaria
+when every minute had an incomparable value; worrying, irritating
+thoughts of the scenes he would have to have with his father, who must
+be made to understand, once for all, that in future he meant to have
+every minute of his own life for his own work. He wondered how on earth
+he was to make his people see that his work justified his giving every
+minute to it. He had asked Réveillaud to give him a letter that he could
+show to his father. He was angry with his father beforehand, he was so
+certain that he wouldn't see.
+
+He had other thoughts now. Thoughts of an almond tree flowering in a
+white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting a thin
+shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the sting of
+white dust in an east wind; a drift of white dust against the wall.
+
+Thoughts of pine-trees falling in the forest, glad to fall. He thought:
+The pine forest makes itself a sea for the land wind, and the young pine
+tree is mad for the open sea. She gives her slender trunk with passion
+to the ax; for she thinks that she will be stripped naked, and that she
+will be planted in the ship's hold, and that she will carry the great
+main-sail. She thinks that she will rock and strain in the grip of the
+sea-wind, and that she will be whitened with the salt and the foam
+of the sea.
+
+She does not know that she will be sawn into planks and made into a
+coffin for the wife of the sexton and grave-digger of Aschaffenburg.
+
+Thoughts of Veronica in her incredible maturity, and of her eyes,
+shining in her dead white face, far back through deep crystal, and of
+the sense he got of her soul poised, steady and still, with wings
+vibrating.
+
+He wondered where it would come down.
+
+He thought: "Of course, Veronica's soul will come down like a wild
+pigeon into the ash-tree in our garden, and she will think that our
+ash-tree is a tree of Heaven."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently he roused himself to talk to her.
+
+"How is your singing getting on, Ronny?"
+
+"My singing voice has gone."
+
+"It'll come back again."
+
+"Not unless-"
+
+But he couldn't make her tell him what would bring it back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Michael came to his father and mother to have it out with them his
+face had a hard, stubborn look. He was ready to fight them. He was so
+certain that he would have to fight. He had shown them Jules
+Réveillaud's letter.
+
+He said, "Look here, we've got to get it straight. It isn't any use
+going on like this. I'm afraid I wasn't very honest about Germany."
+
+"Weren't you?" said Anthony. "Let me see, I think you said you'd take it
+on your way to China and Japan."
+
+"Did I? I tried to be straight about it. I thought I was giving it a
+fair chance. But that was before I'd seen Réveillaud."
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "now that you have seen him, what is it exactly
+that you want to do?"
+
+Michael told him.
+
+"You can make it easy for me. Or you can make it hard. But you can't
+stop me."
+
+"What makes you think I want to stop you?"
+
+"Well--you want me to go into the business, though I told you years ago
+there was only one thing I should ever be any good at. And I see your
+point. I can't earn my living at it. That's where I'm had. Still, I
+think Lawrence Stephen will give me work, and I can rub along somehow."
+
+"Without my help, you mean?"
+
+"Well, yes. Why _should_ you help me? You've wasted tons of money on me
+as it is. Nicky's earning his own living, and he's got a wife, too.
+Why not me?"
+
+"Because you can't do it, Michael."
+
+"I can. I don't mind roughing it. I could live on a hundred a year--or
+less, if I don't marry."
+
+"Well, I don't mean you to try. You needn't bother about what you can
+live on and what you can't live on. It was all settled last night. Your
+mother and I talked it over. We don't want you to go into the business.
+We don't want you to take work from Mr. Stephen. We want you to be
+absolutely free to do your own work, under the best possible conditions,
+whether it pays or not. Nothing in the world matters to us but your
+happiness. You're to have a hundred and fifty a year when you're living
+at home and two hundred and fifty when you're living abroad. I suppose
+you'll want to go abroad sometimes. I can't give you a bigger allowance,
+because I have to help Nicky--"
+
+Michael covered his face with his hands.
+
+"Oh--don't, Daddy. You do make me feel a rotten beast."
+
+"We should feel rottener beasts," said Frances, "if we stood in your
+way."
+
+"Then," said Michael (he was still incredulous), "you do care?"
+
+"Of course we care," said Anthony.
+
+"I don't mean for me--for _it_?"
+
+"My dear Mick," said Frances, "we care for It almost as much as we care
+for you. We're sorry about Germany though. Germany was one of your
+father's bad jokes."
+
+"Germany--a joke?"
+
+"Did you take it seriously? Oh, you silly Michael!"
+
+"But," said Michael, "how about Daddy's idea? He loved it."
+
+"I loved it," said Anthony, "but I've given it up."
+
+They knew that this was defeat, for Michael was top-dog. And it was also
+victory.
+
+They had lost Nicholas, or thought they had lost Nicholas, by opposing
+him. But Michael and Michael's affection they would have always.
+
+Besides, Anthony hadn't given up his idea. He had only transferred
+it--to his youngest son, John.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+It was five weeks since Nicholas's wedding-day and Desmond had
+quarrelled with him three times.
+
+First, because he had taken a flat in Aubrey Walk, with a studio inside
+it, instead of a house in Campden Hill Square with a studio outside it
+in the garden.
+
+Then, because he had refused to go into his father's business.
+
+Last of all, because of Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress.
+
+Nicky had said that his father, who was paying his rent, couldn't afford
+the house with the studio in the garden; and Desmond said Nicky's father
+could afford it perfectly well if he liked. He said he had refused to go
+into his father's business for reasons which didn't concern her. Desmond
+pointed out that the consequences of his refusal were likely to concern
+her very much indeed. As for Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress,
+nobody but a supreme idiot would have done what Nicky did.
+
+But Nicky absolutely refused to discuss what he had done. Nobody but a
+cad and a rotter would have done anything else.
+
+In the matter of the Moving Fortress what had happened was this.
+
+The last of the drawings was not finished until Desmond had settled down
+in the flat in Aubrey Walk. You couldn't hurry Desmond. Nicky hadn't
+even waited to sign his name in the margins before he had packed the
+plans in his dispatch box and taken them to the works, and thence,
+hidden under a pile of Morss estimates, to Eltham. He couldn't rest till
+he had shown them to Frank Drayton. He could hardly wait till they had
+dined, and till Drayton, who thought he was on the track of a new and
+horrible explosive, had told him as much as he could about it.
+
+Nicky gave his whole mind to Drayton's new explosive in the hope that,
+when his turn came, Drayton would do as much for him.
+
+"You know," he said at last, "the old idea of the _forteresse mobile_?
+
+"Yes."
+
+He couldn't tell whether Drayton was going to be interested or not. He
+rather thought he wasn't.
+
+"It hasn't come to anything, _has_ it?"
+
+Drayton smiled and his eyes glittered. He knew what that excited gleam
+in Drayton's eyes meant.
+
+"No," he said. "Not yet."
+
+And Nicky had an awful premonition of his doom.
+
+"Well," he said, "I believe there's something in it."
+
+"So do I, Nicky."
+
+Drayton went on. "I believe there's so much in it that--Look here, I
+don't know what put it into your head, and I'm not asking, but that
+idea's a dead secret. For God's sake don't talk about it. You mustn't
+breathe it, or it'll get into the air. And if it does my five years'
+work goes for nothing. Besides we don't want Germany to collar it."
+
+And then: "Don't look so scared, old chap. I was going to tell you
+about it when I'd got the plans drawn."
+
+He told him about it then and there.
+
+"Low on the ground like a racing-car--"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky.
+
+"Revolving turret for the guns--no higher than _that_--"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky.
+
+"Sort of armoured train. Only it mustn't run on rails. It's got to go
+everywhere, through anything, over anything, if it goes at all. It must
+turn in its own length. It must wade and burrow and climb, Nicky. It
+must have caterpillar wheels--"
+
+"By Jove, of course it must," said Nicky, as if the idea had struck him
+for the first time.
+
+"What have you got there?" said Drayton finally as Nicky rose and picked
+up his dispatch-box. "Anything interesting?
+
+"No," said Nicky. "Mostly estimates."
+
+For a long time afterwards he loathed the fields between Eltham and
+Kidbrooke, and the Mid-Kent line, and Charing Cross Station. He felt as
+a man feels when the woman he loves goes from him to another man. His
+idea had gone from him to Drayton.
+
+And that, he said to himself, was just like his luck, just like the
+jolly sells that happened to him when he was a kid.
+
+To be sure, there was such a thing as sharing. He had only to produce
+his plans and his finished model, and he and Drayton would go partners
+in the Moving Fortress. There was no reason why he shouldn't do it.
+Drayton had not even drawn his plans yet; he hadn't thought out the
+mechanical details.
+
+He thought, "I could go back now and tell him."
+
+But he did not go back. He knew that he would never tell him. If Drayton
+asked him to help him with the details he would work them out all over
+again with him; but he would never show his own finished plans or his
+own model.
+
+He didn't know whether it had been hard or easy for him to give up the
+Moving Fortress. He did it instinctively. There was--unless he had
+chosen to be a blackguard--nothing else for him to do.
+
+Besides, the Moving Fortress wasn't his idea. Drayton had had it first.
+Anybody might have had it. He hadn't spoken of it first; but that was
+nothing. The point was that he had had it first, and Nicky wasn't going
+to take it from him.
+
+It meant more to Drayton, who was in the Service, than it could possibly
+mean to him. He hadn't even got a profession.
+
+As he walked back through the fields to the station, he said to himself
+that he didn't really care. It was only one more jolly sell. He didn't
+like giving up his Moving Fortress; but it wouldn't end him. There was
+something in him that would go on.
+
+He would make another engine.
+
+He didn't care. There was something in him that would go on.
+
+"I can't see," Desmond had said, "why Captain Drayton should be allowed
+to walk off with your idea."
+
+"He's worked five years on it."
+
+"He hasn't worked it _out_ yet, and you have. Can't you see "--her face
+was dark and hard with anger--"there's money in it?"
+
+"If there is, all the more reason why I shouldn't bag it."
+
+"And where do I come in?"
+
+"Not just here, I'm afraid. It isn't your business."
+
+"Not my business? When I did the drawings? You couldn't possibly have
+done them yourself."
+
+At that point Nicky refused to discuss the matter farther.
+
+And still Desmond brooded on her grievance. And still at intervals
+Desmond brought it up again.
+
+"There's stacks of money in your father's business--"
+
+"There's stacks of money in that Moving Fortress--"
+
+"You are a fool, Nicky, to throw it all away."
+
+He never answered her. He said to himself that Desmond was hysterical
+and had a morbid fancy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But it didn't end there.
+
+He had taken the drawings and the box that had the model of the Moving
+Fortress in it and buried them in the locker under the big north window
+in Desmond's studio.
+
+And there, three weeks later, Desmond found them. And she packed the
+model of the Moving Fortress and marked it "Urgent with Care," and sent
+it to the War Office with a letter. She packed the drawings in a
+portfolio--having signed her own and Nicky's name on the margins--and
+sent them to Captain Drayton with a letter. She said she had no doubt
+she was doing an immoral thing; but she did it in fairness to Captain
+Drayton, for she was sure he would not like Nicky to make so great a
+sacrifice. Nicky, she said, was wrapped up in his Moving Fortress. It
+was his sweetheart, his baby. "He will never forgive me," she said, "as
+long as he lives. But I simply had to let you know. It means so much
+to him."
+
+For she thought, "Because Nicky's a fool, I needn't be one."
+
+Drayton came over the same evening after he had got the letter. He
+shouted with laughter.
+
+"Nicky," he said, "you filthy rotter, why on earth didn't you tell
+me?... It _was_ Nickyish of you.... What if I did think of it first? I
+should have had to come to you for the details. It would have been jolly
+to have worked it out together.... Not a bit of it! Your wife's
+absolutely right. Good thing, after all, you married her.
+
+"By the way, she says there's a model. I want to see that model. Have
+you got it here?"
+
+Nicky went up into the studio to look for it. He couldn't find it in the
+locker where he'd left it. "Wherever is the damned thing?" he said.
+
+"The damned thing," said Desmond, "is where you should have sent it
+first of all--at the War Office. You're clever, Nicky, but you aren't
+quite clever enough."
+
+"I'm afraid," he said, "_you've_ been a bit too clever, this time."
+
+Drayton agreed with him. It was, he said, about the worst thing that
+could possibly have happened.
+
+"She shouldn't have done that, Nicky. What on earth could have made her
+do it?"
+
+"Don't ask me," said Nicky, "what makes her do things."
+
+"It looks," Drayton meditated, "as if she didn't trust me. I'm afraid
+she's dished us. God knows whether we can ever get it back!"
+
+Desmond had a fit of hysterics when she realized how clever she had
+been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desmond's baby was born late in November of that year, and it died when
+it was two weeks old. It was as if she had not wanted it enough to give
+it life for long outside her body.
+
+For though Desmond had been determined to have a child, and had declared
+that she had a perfect right to have one if she chose, she did not care
+for it when it came. And when it died Nicky was sorrier than Desmond.
+
+He had not wanted to be a father to Headley Richards' child. And yet it
+was the baby and nothing but the baby that had let him in for marrying
+Desmond. So that, when it died, he felt that somehow things had tricked
+and sold him. As they had turned out he need not have married Desmond
+after all.
+
+She herself had pointed out the extreme futility of his behaviour, lest
+he should miss the peculiar irony of it. For when her fright and the
+cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented Nicky's having married
+her. She didn't really want anybody to marry her, and nobody but Nicky
+would have dreamed of doing it.
+
+She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and for a
+little while after she was content to lie stretched out among her
+cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her. But, when she
+got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that Desmond's weakness
+and pathos had come with the baby and had gone with it. The real Desmond
+was not weak, she was not pathetic. She was strong and hard and clever
+with a brutal cleverness. She didn't care how much he saw. He could see
+to the bottom of her nature, if he liked, and feel how hard it was. She
+had no more interest in deceiving him.
+
+She had no more interest in him at all.
+
+She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long fits, after
+long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard, passionless
+efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous and repulsive; but
+he did not say so. He was not aware of the extent to which Desmond
+imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones. He knew nothing about painting
+and he had got used to the things. He had got used to Desmond, slouching
+about the flat, in her sloping, slovenly grace, dressed in her queer
+square jacket and straight short skirt, showing her long delicate
+ankles, and her slender feet in their grey stockings and black slippers.
+
+He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched up on her
+cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a word, and
+watched him sullenly. Her long, slippered feet, thrust out, pointed at
+him, watching. Her long face watched him between the sleek bands of hair
+and the big black bosses plaited over her ears.
+
+The beauty of Desmond's face had gone to sleep again, stilled into
+hardness by the passing of her passion. A sort of ugliness was awake
+there, and it watched him.
+
+In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted with
+two-thirds of her power. Yet the third part still served to hold him,
+used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy. He resented it,
+resisted it over and over again; and over and over again it conquered
+resentment and resistance. It had something to do with her subtle,
+sloping lines, with her blackness and her sallow whiteness, with the
+delicate scent and the smoothness of her skin under the sliding hand. He
+couldn't touch her without still feeling a sort of pity, a sort of
+affection.
+
+But she could take and give caresses while she removed her soul from him
+in stubborn rancour.
+
+He couldn't understand that. It amazed him every time. He thought it
+horrible. For Nicky's memory was faithful. It still kept the impression
+of the Desmond he had married, the tender, frightened, helpless Desmond
+he had thought he loved. The Desmond he remembered reminded him
+of Veronica.
+
+And Desmond said to herself, "He's impossible. You can't make any
+impression on him. I might as well be married to a Moving Fortress."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Months passed. The War Office had not yet given up Nicky's model of the
+Moving Fortress. In the first month it was not aware of any letter or of
+any parcel or of any Mr. Nicholas Harrison. In the second month
+inquiries would be made and the results communicated to Captain Drayton.
+In the third month the War Office knew nothing of the matter referred to
+by Captain Drayton.
+
+Drayton hadn't a hope. "We can't get it back, Nicky," he said.
+
+"I can," said Nicky, "I can get it back out of my head."
+
+All through the winter of nineteen-eleven and the spring of
+nineteen-twelve they worked at it together. They owned that they were
+thus getting better results than either of them could have got alone.
+There were impossibilities about Nicky's model that a gunner would have
+seen at once, and there were faults in Drayton's plans that an engineer
+would not have made. Nicky couldn't draw the plans and Drayton couldn't
+build the models. They said it was fifty times better fun to work at
+it together.
+
+Nicky was happy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desmond watched them sombrely. She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the painter,
+laughed at them behind their backs. She said "How funny they are! Frank
+wouldn't hurt a fly and Nicky wouldn't say 'Bo!' to a goose if he
+thought it would frighten the goose, and yet they're only happy when
+they're inventing some horrible machine that'll kill thousands of people
+who never did them any harm." He said, "That's because they haven't any
+imagination."
+
+Nicky got up early and went to bed late to work at the Moving Fortress.
+The time between had to be given to the Works. The Company had paid him
+fairly well for all his patents in the hope of getting more of his
+ideas, and when they found that no ideas were forthcoming they took it
+out of him in labour. He was too busy and too happy to notice what
+Desmond was doing.
+
+One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is going
+about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?"
+
+"Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?"
+
+"Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason."
+
+"You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?"
+
+"You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond."
+
+"What do you think I ought to do about it?"
+
+"Nothing. She goes about with scores of people. It doesn't follow that
+there's anything in it."
+
+"Oh, Lord, I should hope not! That beastly bounder. What _could_ there
+be in it?"
+
+"He's a clever painter, Nicky. So's Desmond. There's that in it."
+
+"I've hardly a right to object to that, have I? It's not as if I were a
+clever painter myself."
+
+But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St. John's
+Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down the north
+side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing
+to shreds.
+
+There couldn't be anything in it.
+
+He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall lean body
+in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie. He could see
+his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric face with its seven
+fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the black moustache, the high,
+close-clipped side whiskers, the two forks of the black beard.
+
+There couldn't be anything in it.
+
+Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.
+
+And yet he never came home rather later than usual without saying to
+himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with her?"
+
+He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask himself
+that question.
+
+He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He wondered what
+other men did. It never occurred to him that at twenty-two he was young
+to be considering this problem.
+
+He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face
+and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face
+and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging
+him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered
+what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when they got
+to the bottom. Perhaps they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He
+would hang on to the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door
+of the studio and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there
+would be nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look
+an awful ass doing it. He saw himself standing in the room and looking
+at them, and saying, "I've no intention of interrupting you." Perhaps
+Desmond would answer, "You're not interrupting us. We've finished all
+we had to say." And _he_ would walk out and leave them there.
+Not caring.
+
+He wondered if _he_ would look an awful ass doing it.
+
+In the end, when it came, he hadn't to do any of these things. It
+happened very quietly and simply, early on a Sunday evening after he had
+got back from Eltham. He had dined with Drayton and his people on
+Saturday, and stayed, for once, over-night, risking it.
+
+Desmond was sitting on a cushion, on the floor, with her thin legs in
+their grey stockings slanting out in front of her. She propped her chin
+on her hands. Her thin, long face, between the great black ear-bosses,
+looked at him thoughtfully, without rancour.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "Alfred Orde-Jones slept with me last night."
+
+And he said, simply and quietly, "Very well, Desmond; then I shall leave
+you. You can keep the flat, and I or my father will make you an
+allowance. I shan't divorce you, but I won't live with you."
+
+"Why won't you divorce me?" she said.
+
+"Because I don't want to drag you through the dirt."
+
+She laughed quietly. "Dear Nicky," she said, "how sweet and like you.
+But don't let's have any more chivalrous idiocy. I don't want it. I
+never did." (She had forgotten that she had wanted it very badly once.
+But Nicky did not remind her of that time. No matter. She didn't want it
+now). "Let's look at the thing sensibly, without any rotten sentiment.
+We've had some good times together, and we've had some bad times. I'll
+admit that when you married me you saved me from a very bad time.
+That's no reason why we should go on giving each other worse times
+indefinitely. You seem to think I don't want you to divorce me. What
+else do you imagine Alfred came for last night? Why we've been trying
+for it for the last three months.
+
+"Of course, if you'll let _me_ divorce _you_ for desertion, it would be
+very nice of you. That," said Desmond, "is what decent people do."
+
+He went out and telephoned to his father. Then he left her and went back
+to his father's house.
+
+Desmond asked the servant to remember particularly that it was the
+fifteenth of June and that the master was going away and would not come
+back again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Nicky walked up the hill and across the Heath, he wondered why it had
+happened, and why, now that it had happened, he cared so little. He
+could have understood it if he hadn't cared at all for Desmond. But he
+had cared in a sort of way. If she had cared at all for him he thought
+they might have made something of it, something enduring, perhaps, if
+they had had children of their own.
+
+He still couldn't think why it had happened. But he knew that, even if
+he had loved Desmond with passion, it wouldn't have been the end of him.
+The part of him that didn't care, that hadn't cared much when he lost
+his Moving Fortress, was the part that Desmond never would have
+cared for.
+
+He didn't know whether it was outside him and beyond him, bigger and
+stronger than he was, or whether it was deep inside, the most real part
+of him. Whatever happened or didn't happen it would go on.
+
+How could he have ended _here_, with poor little Desmond? There was
+something ahead of him, something that he felt to be tremendous and
+holy. He had always known it waited for him. He was going out to meet
+it; and because of it he didn't care.
+
+And after a year of Desmond he was glad to go back to his father's
+house; even though he knew that the thing that waited for him was
+not there.
+
+Frances and Anthony were happy again. After all, Heaven had manipulated
+their happiness with exquisite art and wisdom, letting Michael and
+Nicholas go from them for a little while that they might have them again
+more completely, and teaching them the art and wisdom that would
+keep them.
+
+Some day the children would marry; even Nicky might marry again. They
+would prepare now, by small daily self-denials, for the big renunciation
+that must come.
+
+Yet in secret they thought that Michael would never marry; that Nicky,
+made prudent by disaster, wasn't really likely to marry again. John
+would marry; and they would be happy in John's happiness and in
+John's children.
+
+And Nicky had not been home before he offered to his parents the
+spectacle of an outrageous gaiety. You would have said that life to
+Nicholas was an amusing game where you might win or lose, but either way
+it didn't matter. It was a rag, a sell. Even the preceedings, the
+involved and ridiculous proceedings of his divorce, amused him.
+
+It was undeniably funny that he should be supposed to have deserted
+Desmond.
+
+Frances wondered, again, whether Nicky really had any feelings, and
+whether things really made any impression on him.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+It was a quarter past five on a fine morning, early in July. On the
+stroke of the quarter Captain Frank Drayton's motor-car, after exceeding
+the speed limit along the forlorn highway of the Caledonian Road, drew
+up outside the main entrance of Holloway Gaol. Captain Frank Drayton was
+alone in his motor-car.
+
+He had the street all to himself till twenty past five, when he was
+joined by another motorist, also conspicuously alone in his car. Drayton
+tried hard to look as if the other man were not there.
+
+The other man tried even harder to look as if he were not there himself.
+He was the first to be aware of the absurdity of their competitive
+pretences. He looked at his watch and spoke.
+
+"I hope they'll be punctual with those doors. I was up at four o'clock."
+
+"I," said Drayton, "was up at three."
+
+"I'm waiting for my wife," said the other man.
+
+"I am _not_," said Drayton, and felt that he had scored.
+
+The other man's smile allowed him the point he made.
+
+"Yes, but my wife happens to be Lady Victoria Threlfall."
+
+The other man laughed as if he had made by far the better joke.
+
+Drayton recognized Mr. Augustin Threlfall, that Cabinet Minister made
+notorious by his encounters with the Women's Franchise Union. Last year
+Miss Maud Blackadder had stalked him in the Green Park and lamed him by
+a blow from her hunting-crop. This year his wife, Lady Victoria
+Threlfall, had headed the June raid on the House of Commons.
+
+And here he was at twenty minutes past five in the morning waiting to
+take her out of prison.
+
+And here was Drayton, waiting for Dorothea, who was not his wife yet.
+
+"Anyhow," said the Cabinet Minister, "we've done them out of their
+Procession."
+
+"What Procession?"
+
+All that Drayton knew about it was that, late last night, a friend he
+had in the Home Office had telephoned to him that the hour of Miss
+Dorothea Harrison's release would be five-thirty, not six-thirty as the
+papers had it.
+
+"The Procession," said the Cabinet Minister, "that was to have met 'em
+at six-thirty. A Car of Victory for Mrs. Blathwaite, and a bodyguard of
+thirteen young women on thirteen white horses. The girl who smashed my
+knee-cap is to be Joan of Arc and ride at the head of 'em. In armour.
+Fact. There's to be a banquet for 'em at the Imperial at nine. We can't
+stop _that_. And they'll process down the Embankment and down Pall Mall
+and Piccadilly at eleven; but they won't process here. We've let 'em out
+an hour too soon."
+
+A policeman came from the prison-yard. He blew a whistle. Four taxi-cabs
+crept round the corner furtively, driven by visibly hilarious
+chauffeurs.
+
+"The triumphant procession from Holloway," said the Cabinet Minister,
+"is you and me, sir, and those taxi-cabs."
+
+On the other side of the gates a woman laughed. The released prisoners
+were coming down the prison-yard.
+
+The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous glee. He was
+boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had done them out of
+the Car of Victory and the thirteen white horses.
+
+The prison-gates opened. The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised their
+caps.
+
+The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete came first. Then Lady Victoria Threlfall. Then
+Dorothea. Then sixteen other women.
+
+Drayton did not look at them. He did not see what happened when the
+Cabinet Minister met his wife. He did not see the sixteen other women.
+He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.
+
+She had no hat on. Her clothes were as the great raid had left them, a
+month ago. Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket, the
+three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining. Another
+three-cornered flap hung from her right knee. She carried her small,
+hawk-like head alert and high. Her face had the incomparable bloom of
+youth. Her eyes shone. They and her face showed no memory of the
+prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they showed no sense
+of Drayton's decency in coming to meet her, no sense of anything at all
+but of the queerness, the greatness and the glory of the world--of him,
+perhaps, as a part of it. She stepped into the car as if they had met by
+appointment for a run into the country. "I shan't hurt your car. I'm
+quite clean, though you mightn't think it. The cells were all right
+this time."
+
+He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.
+
+"Dorothy," he said, "do you want to go to that banquet?"
+
+"No, but I've got to. I must go through with it. I swore I'd do the
+thing completely or not at all."
+
+"It isn't till nine. We've three whole hours before we need start."
+
+"What are you going to do with me?"
+
+"I'm going to take you home first. Then I suppose I shall have to drive
+you down to that beastly banquet."
+
+"That won't take three and a half hours. It's a heavenly morning. Can't
+we do something with it?"
+
+"What would you like to do?"
+
+"I'd like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall. I'm hungry. Then--Are you
+frightfully sleepy?"
+
+"Me? Oh, Lord, no."
+
+"Then let's go off somewhere into the country." They went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the buns they
+had brought with them from the coffee-stall.
+
+"Did you ever smell anything like this lane? Did you ever eat anything
+like these buns? Did you ever drink anything like that divine coffee? If
+epicures had any imagination they'd go out and obstruct policemen and
+get put in prison for the sake of the sensations they'd have
+afterwards."
+
+"That reminds me," he said, "that I want to talk to you. No--but
+seriously."
+
+"I don't mind how seriously you talk if I may go on eating."
+
+"That's what I brought the buns for. So that I mayn't be interrupted.
+First of all I want to tell you that you haven't taken me in. Other
+people may be impressed with this Holloway business, but not me. I'm not
+moved, or touched, or even interested."
+
+"Still," she murmured, "you did get up at three o'clock in the morning."
+
+"If you think I got up at three o'clock in the morning to show my
+sympathy, you're mistaken."
+
+"Sympathy? I don't need your sympathy. It was worth it, Frank. There
+isn't anything on earth like coming out of prison. Unless it is
+going in."
+
+"That won't work, Dorothy, when I know why you went in. It wasn't to
+prove your principles. Your principles were against that sort of thing.
+It wasn't to get votes for women. You know as well as I do that you'll
+never get them that way. It wasn't to annoy Mr. Asquith. You knew Mr.
+Asquith wouldn't care a hang. It was to annoy me."
+
+"I wonder," she said dreamily, "if I shall _ever_ be able to stop
+eating."
+
+"You can't take me in. I know too much about it. You said you were going
+to keep out of rows. You weren't going on that deputation because it
+meant a row. You went because I asked you not to go."
+
+"I did; and I should go again tomorrow for the same reason."
+
+"But it isn't a reason. It's not as if I'd asked you to go against your
+conscience. Your conscience hadn't anything to do with it."
+
+"Oh, hadn't it! I went because you'd no right to ask me not to."
+
+"If I'd had the right you'd have gone just the same."
+
+"What do you mean by the right?"
+
+"You know perfectly well what I mean."
+
+"Of course I do. You mean, and you meant that if I'd married you you'd
+have had the right, not just to ask me not to, but to prevent me. That
+was what I was out against. I'd be out against it tomorrow and the next
+day, and for as long as you keep up that attitude."
+
+"And yet--you said you loved me."
+
+"So I did. So I do. But I'm out against that too."
+
+"Good Lord, against what?"
+
+"Against your exploiting my love for your purposes."
+
+"My poor dear child, what do you suppose I wanted?"
+
+She had reached the uttermost limit of absurdity, and in that moment she
+became to him helpless and pathetic.
+
+"I knew there was going to be the most infernal row and I wanted to keep
+you out of it. Look here, you'd have thought me a rotter if I hadn't,
+wouldn't you?
+
+"Of course you would. And there's another thing. You weren't straight
+about it. You never told me you were going."
+
+"I never told you I wasn't."
+
+"I don't care, Dorothy; you weren't straight. You ought to have told
+me."
+
+"How could I tell you when I knew you'd only go trying to stop me and
+getting yourself arrested."
+
+"Not me. They wouldn't have touched me."
+
+"How was I to know that? If they had I should have dished you. And I'd
+have stayed away rather than do that. I didn't tell Michael or Nicky or
+Father for the same reason."
+
+"You'd have stayed at home rather than have dished me? Do you really
+mean that?"
+
+"Of course I mean it. And I meant it. It's you," she said, "who don't
+care."
+
+"How do you make that out?"
+
+He really wanted to know. He really wanted, if it were possible, to
+understand her.
+
+"I make it out this way. Here have I been through the adventure and the
+experience of my life. I was in the thick of the big raid; I was four
+weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don't care; you're not
+interested. You never said to yourself, 'Dorothy was in the big raid, I
+wonder what happened to her?' or 'Dorothy's in prison, I wonder how
+she's feeling?' You didn't care; you weren't interested.
+
+"If it had happened to you, I couldn't have thought of anything else, I
+couldn't have got it out of my head. I should have been wondering all
+the time what you were feeling; I couldn't have rested till I knew. It
+would have been as if I was in prison myself. And now, when I've come
+out, all you think of is how you can rag and score off me."
+
+She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane. Her hands were
+clasped round her knees. One knickerbockered knee protruded through the
+three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared across the road, a long,
+straight stare that took no heed of what she saw, the grey road, and
+the green bank on the other side, topped by its hedge of trees.
+
+Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of self-pity
+or reproach. It was as if she were making statements that had no
+emotional significance whatever.
+
+She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was sorest.
+
+"I wanted to tell you about it. I counted the days, the minutes till I
+could tell you; but you wouldn't listen. You don't want to hear."
+
+"I won't listen if it's about women's suffrage. And I don't want to hear
+if it's anything awful about you."
+
+"It is about me, but it isn't awful.
+
+"That's what I want to tell you.
+
+"But, first of all--about the raid. I didn't mean to be in it at all, as
+it happens. I meant to go with the deputation because you told me not
+to. You're right about that. But I meant to turn back as soon as the
+police stopped us, because I hate rows with the police, and because I
+don't believe in them, and because I told Angela Blathwaite I wasn't
+going in with her crowd any way. You see, she called me a coward before
+a lot of people and said I funked it. So I did. But I should have been a
+bigger coward if I'd gone against my own will, just because of what she
+said. That's how she collars heaps of women. They adore her and they're
+afraid of her. Sometimes they lie and tell her they're going in when
+their moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they're not going in at
+all. I don't adore her, and I'm not afraid of her, and I didn't lie.
+
+"So I went at the tail of the deputation where I could slip out when the
+row began. I swear I didn't mean to be in it. I funked it far too much.
+I didn't mind the police and I didn't mind the crowd. But I funked being
+with the women. When I saw their faces. You world have funked it.
+
+"And anyhow I don't like doing things in a beastly body. Ugh!
+
+"And then they began moving.
+
+"The police tried to stop them. And the crowd tried. The crowd began
+jeering at them. And still they moved. And the mounted police horses got
+excited, and danced about and reared a bit, and the crowd was in a funk
+then and barged into the women. That was rather awful.
+
+"I could have got away then if I'd chosen. There was a man close to me
+all the time who kept making spaces for me and telling me to slip
+through. I was just going to when a woman fell. Somewhere in the front
+of the deputation where the police were getting nasty.
+
+"Then I had to stay. I had to go on with them. I swear I wasn't excited
+or carried away in the least. Two women near me were yelling at the
+police. I hated them. But I felt I'd be an utter brute if I left them
+and got off safe. You see, it was an ugly crowd, and things were
+beginning to be jolly dangerous, and I'd funked it badly. Only the first
+minute. It went--the funk I mean--when I saw the woman go down. She fell
+sort of slanting through the crowd, and it was horrible. I couldn't have
+left them then any more than I could have left children in a
+burning house.
+
+"I thought of you."
+
+"You thought of me?"
+
+"Yes. I thought of you--how you'd have hated it. But I didn't care. I
+was sort of boosted up above caring. The funk had all gone and I was
+absolutely happy. Not insanely happy like some of the other women, but
+quietly, comfily happy.
+
+"After all, I didn't do anything you _need_ have minded."
+
+"What _did_ you do?" he said.
+
+"I just went on and stood still and refused to go back. I stuck my hands
+in my pockets so that I shouldn't let out at a policeman or anything (I
+knew you wouldn't like _that_). I may have pushed a bit now and then
+with my shoulders and my elbows; I can't remember. But I didn't make one
+sound. I was perfectly lady-like and perfectly dignified."
+
+"I suppose you _know_ you haven't got a hat on?"
+
+"It didn't _come_ off. I _took_ it off and threw it to the crowd when
+the row began. It doesn't matter about your hair coming down if you
+haven't got a hat on, but if your hair's down and your hat's bashed in
+and all crooked you look a perfect idiot.
+
+"It wasn't a bad fight, you know, twenty-one women to I don't know how
+many policemen, and the front ones got right into the doorway of St.
+Stephen's. That was where they copped me.
+
+"But that, isn't the end of it.
+
+"The fight was only the first part of the adventure. The wonderful thing
+was what happened afterwards. In prison.
+
+"I didn't think I'd really _like_ prison. That was another thing I
+funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the dirt, you know.
+And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And after the crowds of
+women, after the meetings and the speeches, the endless talking and the
+boredom, that cell was like heaven.
+
+"Thank God, it's always solitary confinement. The Government doesn't
+know that if they want to make prison a deterrent they'll shut us up
+together. You won't give the Home Secretary the tip, will you?
+
+"But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about.
+
+"It was something bigger, something tremendous. You'll not believe this
+part of it, but I was absolutely happy in that cell. It was a sort of
+deep-down unexcited happiness. I'm not a bit religious, but I _know_ how
+the nuns feel in their cells when they've given up everything and shut
+themselves up with God. The cell was like a convent cell, you know, as
+narrow as that bit of shadow there is, and it had nice white-washed
+walls, and a planked-bed in the corner, and a window high, high up.
+There ought to have been a crucifix on the wall above the plank-bed, but
+there wasn't a crucifix. There was only a shiny black Bible on
+the chair.
+
+"Really Frank, if you're to be shut up for a month with just one book,
+it had better be the Bible. Isaiah's ripping. I can remember heaps of
+it: 'in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with
+reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall
+walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall return with singing into
+Zion' ... 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they
+shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary;
+they shall walk, and not faint.' I used to read like anything; and I
+thought of things. They sort of came to me.
+
+"That's what I wanted to tell you about. The things that came to me were
+so much bigger than the thing I went in for. I could see all along we
+weren't going to get it that way. And I knew we _were_ going to get it
+some other way. I don't in the least know how, but it'll be some big,
+tremendous way that'll make all this fighting and fussing seem the
+rottenest game. That was one of the things I used to think about."
+
+"Then," he said, "you've given it up? You're corning out of it?"
+
+She looked at him keenly. "Are those still your conditions?"
+
+He hesitated one second before he answered firmly. "Yes, those are still
+my conditions. You still won't agree to them?"
+
+"I still won't agree. It's no use talking about it. You don't believe in
+freedom. We're incompatible. We don't stand for the same ideals."
+
+"Oh, Lord, what _does_ that matter?"
+
+"It matters most awfully."
+
+"I should have thought," said Drayton, "it would have mattered more if
+I'd had revolting manners or an impediment in my speech or something."
+
+"It wouldn't, _really_."
+
+"Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things. Did you ever once
+think about me, Dorothy?"
+
+"Yes, I did. Have you ever read the Psalms? There's a jolly one that
+begins: 'Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to
+war and my fingers to fight.' I used to think of you when I read that. I
+thought of you a lot.
+
+"That's what I was coming to. It was the queerest thing of all.
+Everything seemed ended when I went to prison. I knew you wouldn't care
+for me after what I'd done--you must really listen to this, Frank--I
+knew you couldn't and wouldn't marry me; and it somehow didn't matter.
+What I'd got hold of was bigger than that. I knew that all this Women's
+Suffrage business was only a part of it, a small, ridiculous part.
+
+"I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord. They were men, as well as
+women, Frank. And they were all free. They were all free because they
+were redeemed. And the funny thing was that you were part of it. You
+were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business. Everything was
+ended. And everything was begun; so that I knew you understood even when
+you didn't understand. It was really as if I'd got you tight, somehow;
+and I knew you couldn't go, even when you'd gone."
+
+"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."
+
+"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if you mean
+going.
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"A quarter to eight."
+
+"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't make me
+late for that infernal banquet. You _are_ going to drive me there?"
+
+"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with you."
+
+"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"
+
+He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it burnished
+and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the broad red, white
+and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union slanting across
+her breast.
+
+He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial Hotel,
+Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too much for
+speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there was that queer
+exaltation that had sustained her in prison.
+
+He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and Nicholas
+waited to receive her.
+
+Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated it, but
+they went in.
+
+Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red, white and
+blue ribbons.
+
+"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you through."
+
+"How can he when he feels like that about it?"
+
+"As if we didn't feel!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall
+to receive the prisoners.
+
+The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue of the
+Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned banners. The
+silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage Leagues and
+Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged along three
+walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and heroic colours,
+purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and royal blue, black, white
+and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure white, dead-black, orange and
+scarlet and magenta.
+
+From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent tables
+decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In the centre of
+the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the tricolour, were set
+like three thrones for the three leaders. They were flanked by nine
+other chairs on the right and nine on the left for the eighteen other
+prisoners.
+
+There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to the high
+table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged sound of rustling
+as the three hundred and fifty turned in their places.
+
+The twenty-one prisoners came in.
+
+A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself up in
+the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to their feet.
+
+And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a savage
+and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as of glass or
+thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of
+small, slender-throated animals were held together by ringing,
+vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins playing in the treble. And
+now a woman's voice started off on its own note and tore the delicate
+tissue of this sound with a solitary scream; and now a man's voice
+filled up a pause in the shrill hurrahing with a solitary boom.
+
+To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right hand, to
+Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among the crowd, that
+collective sound was frightful.
+
+From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one on each
+side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing them, she
+saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.
+
+It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The crowd was
+on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their high places.
+
+Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and seventy-nine
+women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of the
+Militant Women.
+
+     Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,
+     Our army moves from east to west.
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     With flag and sword from south and north,
+     The sounding, shining hosts go forth.
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     Do you not bear our marching feet,
+     From door to door, from street to street?
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying, excited
+crowd.
+
+Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top of
+their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang from the
+back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently open; she
+sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever it might cost
+her and other people.
+
+Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its utmost, was
+overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang shrill and loud;
+her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a fantastic march. With one
+large, long hand raised she beat the measure of the music. Her head was
+thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy
+rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane.
+
+Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.
+
+The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her
+old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion threatened her.
+She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its
+nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her
+soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd
+in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by
+the Vortex. She felt the rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her
+breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing
+almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.
+
+She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the same
+awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at Emmeline she
+saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and hard and sane.
+
+She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and
+Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul.
+The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as needles, tortured him.
+Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom. His fair, handsome face was
+set clear and hard. His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his
+head like a cap of solid, polished metal. Weariness and disgust made a
+sort of cloud over his light green eyes. When Nicky looked at him
+Nicky's face twitched and twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as
+Michael hated it.
+
+She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they stuck
+it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria Threlfall
+were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from Blackfriars Bridge
+along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall and
+Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and Nicholas would march
+beside them to hold up the poles of the standard which, after all, they
+were not strong enough to carry.
+
+She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same time
+she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison cell. She
+had told him the most real thing that had ever happened to her, and he
+had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would have listened. Michael
+would have cared intensely.
+
+She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The sword
+was between her and her lover.
+
+She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the Vortex,
+but between him and her vision which was more than either of them or
+than all this.
+
+She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in the
+hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her lover. She
+wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could have done as
+much, supposing they had had a choice?
+
+Then she looked at Veronica.
+
+Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was slender and
+beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin. Presently she would be
+marching in the Procession. She would carry a thin, tall pole, with a
+round olive wreath on the top of it, and a white dove sitting in the
+ring of the olive wreath. And she would look as if she was not in the
+Procession but in another place.
+
+When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane ecstasy
+and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of Veronica went
+alone in utter freedom.
+
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,
+     And Love's our mighty battle-lord.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     And Justice is our flag unfurled,
+     The flaming flag that sweeps the world.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;
+     For Freedom we will fight and die.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+The Procession was over a mile long.
+
+It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge to
+Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and the
+Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside Cleopatra's
+Needle and the Sphinxes.
+
+Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to Northumberland
+Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and Societies and Leagues,
+of the trades and the professions and the arts, carrying their banners,
+the purple and the blue, the black, white and gold, the green, the
+orange and the scarlet and magenta.
+
+Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady Victoria
+Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense tricolour
+standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them. Behind the
+prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of young girls
+dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying a pole with the
+olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the obviousness of extreme
+innocence, the peace that follows victory. They were led by Veronica.
+
+She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because of her
+youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought that the Union
+had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged to Dorothea.
+
+From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the big red,
+white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady Victoria
+Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria, white and tense,
+would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation, hardly knowing where
+she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would go in pride, and in disdain
+for the proceedings in which her honour forced her to take part; she
+would have an awful knowledge of what she was doing and of where she
+was; she would drink every drop of the dreadful cup she had poured out
+for herself, hating it.
+
+Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she thought
+that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But she did not
+hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful and too big to
+hate, and her part in it was too little.
+
+She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the Procession.
+She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements, pressing closer
+and closer, pushed back continually by the police. Her soul was by
+itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the soul of the crowd
+and the soul of the Procession; only it was not proud; it was
+simply happy.
+
+The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the music
+sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the march.
+
+Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release, and the
+whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard music, to the
+rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.
+
+They went through what were once streets between walls of houses, and
+were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The visible aspect
+of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted. The houses stood
+farther back behind the walls of people; they were hung with people; a
+swarm of people clung like bees to the house walls.
+
+All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still and
+stationary world the Procession was the only thing that moved.
+
+She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was friendly.
+
+A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the
+cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign
+expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman was
+friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.
+
+Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary Procession
+should be allowed to fill the streets of a great capital, and that a
+body of the same police that arrested the insurgents should go with it
+to protect them, to clear their triumphal way before them, holding up
+the entire traffic of great thoroughfares that their bands and their
+banners and their regiments should go through. She said to herself "What
+a country! It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France,
+or anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in England."
+
+Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly. The band
+was playing the Marseillaise.
+
+And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down from its
+place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they played the
+Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the Procession to the
+ends of the world; she could march into battle to the Marseillaise; she
+could fight to that music and die.
+
+The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang the
+words of the Women's Marseillaise.
+
+And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another song.
+She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.
+
+     "'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab,
+     Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;
+      Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--
+      Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schützen!'"
+
+The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn Hill.
+
+Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that they were
+there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the standard that they
+carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and front of the Procession,
+the purple and the blue, the gold and white, the green, the scarlet and
+orange and magenta standards rocked and staggered; they bent forwards;
+they were flung backwards as the west wind took them. But the red, white
+and blue standard that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her,
+steady and straight and high.
+
+And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the olive
+wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the ring of the
+wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine sounding in
+her soul.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Another year passed.
+
+Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in. Because
+of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children who had most
+hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide himself from her to
+the very end.
+
+Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and gone into
+his father's business for a while, to see whether he could stand it.
+John was going into the business too when he left Oxford. John was even
+looking forward to his partnership in what he called "the Pater's old
+tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get my hand well in. Won't we
+make it rip!"
+
+John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble. He had no
+genius for adventure. He would never strike out for himself any strange
+or dangerous line. He had settled down at Cheltenham; he had settled
+down at Oxford.
+
+And Dorothea had settled down.
+
+The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution.
+Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and
+down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer
+bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into
+pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in
+barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from
+infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons
+and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show
+what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or
+two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
+perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed
+by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering seriously the
+very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British
+sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in some drastic and
+terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.
+
+And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind. It
+would never suck her in. She worked now in the office of the Social
+Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for _The New
+Commonwealth_ on Economics and the Marriage Laws.
+
+Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the revolution
+was all in Dorothea's brain.
+
+When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was
+being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances
+confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged
+it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it was _the_ Vortex,
+the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever
+do anything.
+
+And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.
+
+Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she
+did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on
+him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help
+him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his
+_Review_. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would
+give a whole article to that book in his _Review_. If Michael's prose
+should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on
+the _Review_.
+
+In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the
+revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems
+were beginning to appear, one after another, in the _Green Review_. He
+had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year;
+they were better than those that Réveillaud had approved of two years
+ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in the _Green Review_.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he said, who
+would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.
+
+And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence Stephen she
+was afraid.
+
+"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.
+
+For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand
+Cameron's place.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland
+with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was
+a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be
+compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's
+body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit
+hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation
+for himself.
+
+He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken
+from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the
+English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to
+love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in
+Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn;
+he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get
+his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn
+in England's side.
+
+And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his
+talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but
+he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one
+of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland
+produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels
+like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny
+as itself. Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the
+material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.
+
+He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner
+settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled with this
+mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim
+where his people married.
+
+Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have
+been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
+inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too
+wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary politics
+and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own. And yet
+few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on the House of
+Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic politician he ran
+Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists
+nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief.
+In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a
+novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed
+not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men
+of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
+sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
+qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated
+by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there
+was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.
+
+Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he would, he
+fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and
+England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike,
+and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and
+every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men
+were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet
+on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.
+
+A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It would at
+any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he presented to two
+countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with
+violence in a dead straight line. He moved so fast that to a stationary
+on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended. It
+was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a
+complete all-round view of the amazing man.
+
+But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious
+brilliance.
+
+And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet
+forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men
+of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all England you could not
+have found a lonelier man.
+
+The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations
+of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison
+and yet he was not married. He was neither bound nor free.
+
+All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.
+
+And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the
+Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera,
+after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for
+everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.
+
+All his life _his_ passions had been at the service of ideas. All his
+life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction
+and consummation; and he had not found it.
+
+In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was
+still waiting for his supreme opportunity.
+
+Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.
+
+But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily
+on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture,
+to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had put his political
+failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as an artist or not at
+all." They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.
+
+There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was
+in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just
+behind him. To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution
+in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was
+happening without him. He was not the primal energy in the movement of
+the Vortex. In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he
+was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther
+than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was attracted to the
+young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had
+rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own
+youth. They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction,
+his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity. A prosperous,
+well-established Stephen would have revolted them. He gave the
+revolutionaries the shelter of his _Review_, the support of his name,
+and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in
+return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their
+merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
+abominated.
+
+"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
+Swinburne."
+
+Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.
+
+He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew that the
+young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his
+dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when
+he made place for the new.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
+Stephen's study.
+
+He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated,
+half affable affection.
+
+The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that house in
+St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera Harrison. They
+were at home there. Their books stood in his bookcase; they laid their
+manuscripts on his writing table and left them there; they claimed his
+empty spaces for the hanging of their pictures yet unsold.
+
+Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at the top
+of the house, and they talked.
+
+Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet them there,
+and to listen and to talk.
+
+To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were Austen
+Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young sculptor,
+and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton Ellis's disciples.
+
+Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
+rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
+religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean and
+dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses, smooth and
+straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and a bitter,
+sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard drawn, while the
+lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and protested and recanted, was
+sceptical and sensitive and tender. His short, high nose had wide yet
+fastidious nostrils.
+
+It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
+affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes followed
+with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he
+might escape her, might be off, God knew where.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of
+his mistress and his friends.
+
+"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I
+want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in
+Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley
+and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their
+imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in
+destroying them."
+
+"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They breed
+the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a stinking
+suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if we're to get
+rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new and clean. There
+isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So long as old masters are
+kow-towed to as masters people will go on imitating them. When a poet
+ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go."
+
+Michael said, "How about _us_ when people imitate us? Have we got to
+go?"
+
+Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't
+got to go."
+
+"I don't see how you get out of it."
+
+"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."
+
+There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It
+made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.
+
+"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.
+
+"Nobody, so far, _has_ imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have
+_succeeded_ in imitating me."
+
+There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the
+imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by
+his contemporaries.
+
+"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy
+Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."
+
+"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does
+come down out of heaven. You _can_ trace my sources, thank God, because
+they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine
+like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions)
+"have made filthy with their paddling."
+
+He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised, Harrison, is
+absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then, supposing the
+revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because it's come. We
+_are_ the revolution--the revolution means that we've made a clean sweep
+of the past. In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody. No
+artist will be allowed to exist unless he's prepared to be buried alive
+or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the
+processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.
+
+"That's why violence is right.
+
+     "'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo
+     Sanguigno, stupra le albe,
+     irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,
+     fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,
+     fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,
+     fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'
+
+"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right because it's
+necessary."
+
+"You mean it's necessary because it's right."
+
+Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
+flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of great
+strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair grow long
+and cultivating two beards instead of one.
+
+"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy must be
+got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy instead of
+standing still. The difference between Pastism and Futurism is the
+difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist art is simply art that
+has gone on, that, has left off being static and become dynamic. It
+expresses movement. Owen will tell you better than I can why it
+expresses movement."
+
+A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul Monier-Owen had
+curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes of a young wild animal
+roused in its lair.
+
+Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little distance he
+had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black panther, half cub,
+half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of his prominent eyes, his
+eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted slightly upwards and backwards.
+Under his slender, mournful nose his restless smile showed the white
+teeth of a young animal.
+
+Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded incessantly
+to any childish provocation, the intelligence of Monier-Owen watched in
+his calm and beautiful forehead and in his eyes.
+
+He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as
+cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into
+the lines and masses that compose them, and project those lines and
+masses into space on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes
+you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to
+express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By
+decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of
+figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can
+represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the
+cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to
+escape the eye.
+
+"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It
+can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitchell breaks them
+up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It
+can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and masses as I dislocate
+them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact
+body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.
+
+"By taking time into account as well as space we produce rhythm.
+
+"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the
+Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the
+sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are
+supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because
+arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of
+arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.
+
+"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body
+which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in
+movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and
+in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I
+wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."
+
+"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out
+against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw
+a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and
+nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of
+Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality
+what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.
+But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present
+rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."
+
+He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted
+language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely
+arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and
+individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more
+than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver
+the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas.
+Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is
+the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.
+
+"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the
+innocence of the eye."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
+constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and
+broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on
+the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and
+scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high
+adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences
+over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for
+an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute
+ineptitudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and
+---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet,
+Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the
+Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.
+
+Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in
+Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than he
+believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules
+Réveillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all
+the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of
+qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.
+
+But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old
+horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
+unanimity. The vortex--_the_ Vortex--was like the little vortex of
+school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a
+herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the
+same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective
+and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry
+was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the
+fugitive, solitary private soul.
+
+And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had
+the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing
+some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away
+from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.
+
+Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a
+great longing to break loose and get away.
+
+He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think
+they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come
+of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't
+see what's coming. Yet something must come. _They_ can't be the end."
+
+He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.
+It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have
+helped to clear it."
+
+He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and
+of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+VICTORY
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles
+because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political
+atmosphere due to the fine weather.
+
+Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his family
+that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and that the mere
+off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the striker. And when
+Michael asked him contentiously what the weather had to do with Home
+Rule, he answered that it had everything to do with it by increasing
+parliamentary blood-pressure.
+
+"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how long
+the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to Mr.
+Redmond then."
+
+Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew that Home
+Rule had never been a part of practical politics and never would be.
+
+And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own views about
+the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they could have told
+Anthony what the answers were going to be; only they said it wasn't any
+good talking to Father; when he got an idea into his dear old head it
+stuck there.
+
+Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make some
+impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could get
+them out.
+
+Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children, had time
+for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent woman than the
+Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago, informed herself of the
+affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming of the _Times_. In the last
+four years the affairs of the nation had thrust themselves violently
+upon her attention. She had even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement
+as a vivid and vital affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the
+fighting and had gone to prison.
+
+Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the
+_Times_, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn't
+happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any reason to
+complain that nothing happened.
+
+It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and Ireland were
+on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the
+head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael's
+insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green Review.
+
+For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly thirteen
+when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be
+glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still. His poem was the
+green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country.
+Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the
+imminence of civil war (only that they didn't really believe in it),
+when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else.
+In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of
+Ireland's freedom was a secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew
+shared it but Lawrence Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him
+hot and restless and intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish
+crisis when she said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own
+business. This excitement is very bad for Michael."
+
+And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of
+them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two,
+Anthony and the boys would be out of it.
+
+Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour. There was,
+indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this
+particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was being
+disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.
+
+So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his
+idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had even
+thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the
+Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of
+last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme
+measure was unnecessary.
+
+And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy. For the
+children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what
+was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever. Michael
+and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete
+ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year
+each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from
+Michael. Nicholas was doing the chauffeur's work in his absence; and
+John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it
+on his father as his contribution to the family economies.
+
+Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through
+Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's and
+Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her poor
+little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.
+
+There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike. Her mind
+refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of
+exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and
+Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was
+arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like
+Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in
+the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before,
+and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of
+mind or Anthony's prosperity.
+
+The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony
+Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the
+twenty-fifth of July.
+
+Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of it.
+
+Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of those slight
+changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a
+change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of
+exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate
+trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at
+first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get
+used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it
+seriously. It had been forced on her. Dorothea had decided that she must
+have a Day, like other people.
+
+She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come out in the
+spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday
+evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at Michael's
+father's house.
+
+Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this
+palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful,
+energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred the air about him
+and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices,
+and of their laughter. And when the house was quiet and Anthony had
+Frances to himself he liked that, too.
+
+But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so often--if only
+I could have my children sometimes to myself!"
+
+It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and suckled them.
+
+There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted and
+diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd of
+tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves over the
+whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent happiness to the
+"Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and
+Edith Fleming, who figured as essential parts of the social event. She
+meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in the inconceivability of their absence
+on Frances's Bay, wondered more than ever why their daughter Rosalind
+found them so impossible. She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the
+office, and their wives and children, and Anthony's secretary, Miss
+Lathom. If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she
+soon would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and
+guileless faces.
+
+Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from India for
+good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more dangerous than
+his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was genuinely invalided,
+who had come back from California for the last time and would never be
+sent out anywhere again.
+
+Dorothea had said: "Let's kill them all off in one awful day." Frances
+had said: "Yes, but we must do it decently. We must be kind to them,
+poor dears!"
+
+Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to Uncle
+Morrie and Uncle Bartie. That was the only burden she had laid on her
+children. It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth constrained
+them. They had received so much, and they had been let off so much; not
+one of them had inherited the taint that made Maurice and Emmeline
+Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased and irresponsible. They
+could afford to be pitiful and merciful.
+
+And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to be
+pitiful and merciful herself. She could even afford to be grateful to
+the poor dears. She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and Bartie as
+scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose affliction left her
+children clean. She thought of them more and more in this sacred and
+sacrificial character. At fifty-two Frances could be gentle over the
+things that had worried and irritated her at thirty-three. Like Anthony
+she was still young and strong through the youth and strength of
+her children.
+
+And the poor dears were getting weak and old. Grannie was seventy-nine,
+and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was forty-nine, and he
+looked sixty. Every year Frances was more acutely aware of their pathos,
+their futility, their mortality. They would be broken and gone so soon
+and so utterly, leaving no name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only
+living in the memories of her children who would remain.
+
+And, with an awful sense of mortality surrounding them, her children had
+learned that they must be kind because the old people would be gone
+while they endured and remained.
+
+This Saturday being the last of the season, they had all come; not only
+the Flemings, but the Jervises and Verekers and Norrises, and Uncle
+Bartie. The fine weather alone would have brought them.
+
+Bartie, more morose and irritable than ever, sat under the tree of
+Heaven and watched the triumphal progress of the Day. He scowled darkly
+and sourly at each group in turn; at the young men in white flannels
+playing tennis; at Mr. and Mr. Jervis and the Verekers and Norrises; at
+the Flemings, old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith, and
+the disgraceful Maurice, all five of them useless pensioners on his
+brother's bounty; Maurice a thing of battered, sodden flesh hanging
+loose on brittle bone, a rickety prop for the irreproachable summer
+suit bought with Anthony's money. He scowled at the tables covered with
+fine white linen, and at the costly silver and old china, at the
+sandwiches and cakes and ices, and the piled-up fruits and the claret
+cup and champagne cup glowing and shining in the tall glass jugs, and at
+the pretty maidservants going to and fro in their accomplished service.
+
+Bartie wondered how on earth Anthony managed it. His wonder was a savage
+joy to Bartie.
+
+Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed it, and
+Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr. Vereker and Mr.
+Norris, who held that a strike was a downright serious matter, also
+wondered. But they were sustained by their immense belief in Mr.
+Anthony. Mr. Anthony knew what he was doing; he always had known. A
+strike might be serious while it lasted, but it didn't last. And Mr.
+Nicholas was in the business now, and Mr. John was coming into it next
+year, and Mr. Nicholas might be married again by that time; and the
+chances were that the firm of Harrison and Harrison would last long
+enough to provide for a young Vereker and a still younger Norris.
+
+In spite of the strike, Mr. and Mrs. Vereker and Mr. and Mrs. Norris,
+like Frances and Anthony, were extraordinarily cheerful that afternoon.
+
+So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.
+
+"I can't think why I feel so happy," said Mrs. Vereker to Mrs. Norris.
+She was looking at her son George.
+
+"Nor I, either," said Miss Lathom, who was trying suddenly to look at
+nothing in particular.
+
+Miss Lathom lied and Mrs. Vereker lied; they knew perfectly well why
+they were happy. Each knew that the other lied; each knew that the other
+knew she knew; and neither of them could have said why she found it so
+necessary to lie.
+
+And to Frances this happiness of Mrs. Vereker, and of young Vereker and
+Miss Lathom was significant and delightful, as if she had been
+personally responsible for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and of
+something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up with Mr.
+and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind. She stared at the larkspurs as if they
+held the clue--Nicky's face appeared among the tall blue spires, Nicky's
+darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and yellow
+stripes--something to do with a White Cake--it must have been somebody's
+birthday. Now she had it--Mr. Jervis's cricket scarf. It was the day of
+Nicky's worst earache, the day when Mr. Vereker climbed the tree of
+Heaven--was it possible that Mr. Vereker had ever climbed that
+tree?--the day when Michael wouldn't go to the party--Rosalind's
+birthday.
+
+Eight candles burning for Rosalind. Why, it was nineteen years ago.
+Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only little boys.
+And look at them now!
+
+She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit, slender bodies
+of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously and well.
+
+"Dorothy is looking very handsome," Mrs. Jervis said. Yes, certainly
+Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before all things the
+male beauty of her sons. In Michael and Nicholas it had reached
+perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last, as Anthony's
+had lasted.
+
+She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many deaths,
+each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of babyhood, of
+childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of their young
+manhood would be with her for a long time. John would have it. John was
+only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had not hardened; his
+boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his mouth, and in his eyelids
+and the soft corners of his eyes; so that in John she could still see
+what Nicky had been.
+
+She had adored Anthony's body, as if she had foreseen that it would give
+her such sons as these; and in her children she had adored the small
+bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she foresaw the beauty of their
+manhood. These were the same bodies, the same faces that she had loved
+in them as children; nothing was blurred or twisted or overlaid.
+
+Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had foreseen
+him. Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other moments she was
+proud of his genius; but at this particular moment, sitting beside her
+friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was chiefly aware of his body.
+
+Michael's body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but austere
+and tranquil satisfaction. It was when she looked at her second son that
+something caught at her breath and held it. She saw him as the lover
+and bridegroom of Veronica. Her sense of his virility was terrible to
+her and delightful.
+
+Perhaps they were engaged already.
+
+And Frances was sorry for Mrs. Jervis, who had borne no sons, who had
+only borne one unattractive and unsatisfactory daughter. She used to be
+sorry for her because Rosalind was pink and fat and fluffy; she was
+sorry for her now because Rosalind was unsatisfactory. She was sorry for
+Mrs. Norris because her boy could never grow up like Michael or Nicholas
+or John. She was sorry for Mrs. Vereker because George, though he looked
+all right when he was by himself, became clumsy and common at once
+beside Michael and Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels;
+he played furiously and well; he played too furiously and too
+consciously well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp
+and excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang.
+
+Her arrogance nourished itself on these contrasts.
+
+Mrs. Jervis looked wistfully at the young men as they played. She looked
+still more wistfully at Dorothy.
+
+"What do you do," she said, "to keep your children with you?"
+
+"I do nothing," Frances said. "I don't try to keep them. I've never
+appealed to their feelings for my own purposes, or taken advantage of
+their affection, that's all.
+
+"They know that if they want to walk out of the house to-morrow, and
+stay out, they can. Nobody'll stop them."
+
+There was a challenging, reminiscent glint in Mr. Jervis's eyes, and his
+wife was significantly silent. Frances knew what they were thinking.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "walked out; but he came back again as soon as he
+was in trouble. Michael walks out and goes abroad every year; but he
+comes back again. Dorothy walks out, but she's never dreamed of not
+coming back again."
+
+"Of course, if you aren't afraid of taking risks," said Mr. Jervis.
+
+"I am afraid. But I've never shown it."
+
+"It's very strange that Dorothy hasn't married." Mrs. Jervis spoke. She
+derived comfort from the thought that Dorothy was eight-and-twenty and
+not married.
+
+"Dorothy," said Frances, "could marry to-morrow if she wanted to; but
+she doesn't want."
+
+She was sorry for her friend, but she really could not allow her that
+consolation.
+
+"Veronica is growing up very good-looking," said Mrs. Jervis then.
+
+But it was no use. Frances was aware that Veronica was grown up, and
+that she was good-looking, and that Nicky loved her; but Mrs. Jervis's
+shafts fell wide of all her vulnerable places. Frances was no
+longer afraid.
+
+"Veronica," she said, "is growing up very good." It was not the word she
+would have chosen, yet it was the only one she could think of as likely
+to convey to Mrs. Jervis what she wanted her to know, though it left her
+obtuseness without any sense of Veronica's mysterious quality.
+
+She herself had never tried to think of a word for it before; she was
+only driven to it now because she detected in her friend's tone a
+challenge and a warning. It was as if Rosalind's mother had said,
+extensively and with pointed reference to the facts: "Veronica is
+dangerous. Her mother has had adventures. She is grown-up and she is
+good-looking, and Nicky is susceptible to that sort of thing. If you
+don't look out he will be caught again. The only difference between
+Phyllis Desmond and Veronica is in their skins."
+
+So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs. Jervis
+should understand, once for all, that she was not in the least like her
+mother or like Phyllis Desmond.
+
+That was enough for Mrs. Jervis. But it was not enough for Frances, who
+found her mind wandering off from Rosalind's mother and looking for the
+word of words that would express her own meaning to her own
+satisfaction.
+
+Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation that
+flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs. Vereker
+and Mrs. Norris on her left.
+
+Veronica was good. But she was not wrapped up in other people's lives as
+Frances was wrapped up. She was wrapped up, not in herself, but in some
+life of her own that, as Frances made it out, had nothing in the world
+to do with anybody else's.
+
+And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were thinking,
+and what you were going to do, and what was happening to you. (She had
+really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky when Desmond made
+him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls that divide every soul
+from every other soul were made of some thin and porous stuff that let
+things through. And in this life of yours, for the moments that she
+shared it, she lived intensely, with uncanny delight and pain that were
+her own and not her own.
+
+And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile these
+extremes of penetration and detachment.
+
+She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that. He saw things.
+He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights. She supposed
+it was the Highland blood in both of them.
+
+Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr. Bartholomew was
+better. Frances said he never would be better till chemists were
+forbidden to advertise and the _British Medical Journal_ and _The
+Lancet_ were suppressed. Bartie would read them; and they supplied him
+with all sorts of extraordinary diseases.
+
+She thought: Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and Veronica
+in her innermost life was happy. She had been happy when she came back
+from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky cared for her,
+before Nicky knew it himself.
+
+Supposing she had known it all the time? But that, Frances said to
+herself, was nonsense. If she had known as much as all that, why should
+she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of it?
+Unless--supposing--it had been his suffering that she had nearly
+died of?
+
+Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr. Maurice
+looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that Morrie hadn't
+been fit for anything since he was in South Africa.
+
+Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme
+sustained itself. She thought: Then, Nicky had suffered. And Veronica
+was the only one who knew. She knew more about Nicky than Nicky's
+mother. This thought was disagreeable to Frances.
+
+It was all nonsense. She didn't really believe that these things
+happened. Yet, why not? Michael said they happened. Even Dorothy, who
+didn't believe in God and immortality or anything, believed that.
+
+She gave it up; it was beyond her; it bothered her.
+
+"Yes. Seventy-nine her last birthday."
+
+Mrs. Norris had said that Mrs. Fleming was wonderful.
+
+Frances thought: "It's wonderful what Veronica does to them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sets had changed. Nicholas and a girl friend of Veronica's played
+against George Vereker and Miss Lathom; John, with Mr. Jervis for his
+handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The very young Norris
+fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to distinguish himself by catching
+some ball in full flight as it went "out." It was a pure and high
+ambition, for he knew he was so young and unimportant that only the eyes
+of God and of his mother watched him.
+
+Michael had dropped out of it. He sat beside Dorothy under the tree of
+Heaven and watched Veronica.
+
+"Veronica's wonderful," he said. "Did you see that?"
+
+Dorothy had seen.
+
+Veronica had kept Aunt Emmeline quiet all afternoon. She bad made Bartie
+eat an ice under the impression that it would be good for him. And now
+she had gone with Morrie to the table where the drinks were, and had
+taken his third glass of champagne cup from him and made him drink
+lemonade instead.
+
+"How does she do it?" said Michael.
+
+"I don't know. She doesn't know herself. I used to think I could manage
+people, but I'm not in it with Ronny. She ought to be a wardress in a
+lunatic asylum."
+
+"Now look at that!"
+
+Veronica had returned to the group formed by Grannie and the Aunties and
+some strangers. The eyes of the four Fleming women had looked after her
+as she went from them; they looked towards her now as if some great
+need, some great longing were appeased by her return.
+
+Grannie made a place by her side for the young girl; she took her arm,
+the young white arm, bare from the elbow in its short sleeve, and made
+it lie across her knees. From time to time Grannie's yellow, withered
+hand stroked the smooth, warm white arm, or held it. Emmeline and Edith
+squatted on the grass at Veronica's feet; their worn faces and the worn
+face of Louie looked at her. They hung on her, fascinated, curiously
+tranquillized, as if they drank from her youth.
+
+"It's funny," Dorothy said, "when you think how they used to hate her."
+
+"It's horrible," said Michael.
+
+He got up and took Veronica away.
+
+He was lying at her feet now on the grass in the far corner of the lawn
+under the terrace.
+
+"Why do you go to them?" he said.
+
+"Because they want me."
+
+"You mustn't go when they want you. You mustn't let them get hold of
+you."
+
+"They don't get hold of me--nothing gets hold of me. I want to help
+them. They say it does them good to have me with them."
+
+"I should think it did do them good! They feed on you, Ronny. I can see
+it by the way they look at you. You'll die of them if you don't give
+it up."
+
+"Give what up?"
+
+"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it?
+Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to have
+been dead years ago.
+
+"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can remember
+them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin sacrificed to
+them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're making them go on."
+
+"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael, when
+you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without being happy,
+without loving.
+
+"They used to hate me because I'm Vera's daughter. They don't hate me
+now."
+
+"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires. They'll
+suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of them.
+
+"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a kid and
+Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky house they
+live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's ghost I funked. But
+I know now it wasn't. It was those four terrible women. They're ghosts.
+I thought you were afraid of ghosts."
+
+"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see how awful
+it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living people. Everybody
+afraid of them--not wanting them."
+
+"Michael--it would be better to be dead!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its appearance
+and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's friends played singles
+with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting the partners offered them
+and disdaining inferior antagonists; they played, Ellis against Mitchell
+and Monier-Owen against Nicholas.
+
+They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.
+
+It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could not go on
+for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had done so much for
+Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of Michael's Poems had made an
+end of that old animosity a year ago. Practically, they had had to
+choose between Bartie and Lawrence Stephen as the turning point of
+honour. Michael had made them see that it was possible to overvalue
+Bartie; also that it was possible to pay too high a price for a
+consecrated moral attitude. In all his life the wretched Bartie had
+never done a thing for any of them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather
+extraordinary success absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made
+his father bankrupt he would owe his very means of livelihood to
+Lawrence Stephen.
+
+Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most frightfully to
+go on living in the same house with people who disliked him.
+
+If, Michael said, they chose to dissociate themselves altogether from
+their eldest son and his career, very well. They could go on ignoring
+and tacitly insulting Mr. Stephen. He could understand their taking a
+consistently wrong-headed line like that; but so long as they had any
+regard, either for him or his career, he didn't see how they could very
+well keep it up any longer. He was sorry, of course, that his career had
+let them in for Stephen if they didn't like him; but there it was.
+
+And beyond a doubt it was there.
+
+"You might vindicate Bartie gloriously," Michael said, "by turning me
+out of the house and disinheriting me. But would it be worth while? I'm
+not asking you to condone Stephen's conduct--if you can't condone it;
+I'm asking you either to acknowledge _or_ repudiate your son's debts.
+
+"After all, if _he_ can condone your beastly treatment of him--I
+wouldn't like him if he was the swine you think him."
+
+And Anthony had appealed to Michael's mother.
+
+To his "Well, Frances, what do you think? Ought we or oughtn't we?" she
+had replied: "I think we ought to stand solid behind Michael."
+
+It was Michael's life that counted, for it was going on into a great
+future. Bartie would pass and Michael would remain.
+
+Their nervous advances had ended in a complete surrender to Stephen's
+charm.
+
+Vera and Stephen seemed to think that the way to show the sincerity and
+sweetness of their reconciliation was to turn up as often as possible on
+Frances's Day. They arrived always at the same hour, a little late; they
+came by the road and the front door, so that when Bartie saw them
+coming he could retreat through the garden door and the lane. The
+Flemings and the Jervises retreated with him; and presently, when it had
+had a good look at the celebrities, the rest of the party followed.
+
+This Saturday Frances's Day dwindled and melted away and closed, after
+its manner; only Vera and Stephen lingered. They stayed on talking to
+Michael long after everybody else had gone.
+
+Stephen said he had come to say good-bye to Michael's people and to make
+a proposal to Michael himself. He was going to Ireland.
+
+Vera interrupted him with passion.
+
+"He isn't. He hasn't any proposal to make. He hasn't come to say
+good-bye."
+
+Her restless, unhappy eyes turned to him incessantly, as if, more than
+ever, she was afraid that he would escape her, that he would go off God
+knew where.
+
+God knew where he was going, but Vera did not believe that he was going
+to Ireland. He had talked about going to Ireland for years, and he had
+never gone.
+
+Stephen looked as if he did not see her; as if he did not even see
+Michael very distinctly.
+
+"I'm going," he said, "to Ireland on Monday week, the third of August. I
+mayn't come back for long enough. I may not come back at all."
+
+"That's the sort of thing he keeps on saying."
+
+"I may not come back _at all_. So I want you to take over the _Review_
+for me. Ellis and my secretary will show you how it stands. You'll know
+what to do. I can trust you not to let it down."
+
+"He doesn't mean what he says, Michael. He's only saying it to frighten
+me. He's been holding it over me for years.
+
+"_Say_ you'll have nothing to do with it. _Say_ you won't touch his old
+_Review_."
+
+"Could I go to Ireland for you?"
+
+"You couldn't."
+
+"Why not? What do you think you're going to do there?"
+
+"I'm going to pull the Nationalists together, so that if there's civil
+war in Ireland, the Irish will have a chance to win. Thank God for
+Carson! He's given us the opportunity we wanted."
+
+"Tell him he's not to go, Michael. He won't listen to me, but he'll mind
+what you say."
+
+"I want to go instead of him."
+
+"You can't go instead of me. Nobody can go instead of me."
+
+"I can go with you."
+
+"You can't."
+
+"Larry, if you take Michael to Ireland, Anthony and Frances will never
+forgive you. _I_'ll never forgive you."
+
+"I'm not taking Michael to Ireland, I'm telling you. There's no reason
+why Michael should go to Ireland at all. It isn't _his_ country."
+
+"You needn't rub _that_ in," said Michael.
+
+"It isn't _yours_," said Vera. "Ireland doesn't want you. The
+Nationalists don't want you. You said yourself they've turned you out of
+Ireland. When you've lived in England all these years why should you go
+back to a place that doesn't want you?"
+
+"Because if Carson gets a free hand I see some chance of Ireland being a
+free country."
+
+Vera wailed and entreated. She said it showed how much he cared for her.
+It showed that he was tired of her. Why couldn't he say so and have
+done with it?
+
+"It's not," she said, "as if you could really do anything. You're a
+dreamer. Ireland has had enough of dreamers." And Stephen's eyes looked
+over her head, into the high branches of the tree of Heaven, as if he
+saw his dream shining clear through them like a moon.
+
+The opportunist could see nothing but his sublime opportunity.
+
+Michael went back with him to dine and talk it over. There was to be
+civil war in Ireland then?
+
+He thought: If only Lawrence would let him go with him. He wanted to go
+to Ireland. To join the Nationalists and fight for Ireland, fight for
+the freedom he was always dreaming about--_that_ would be a fine thing.
+It would be a finer thing than writing poems about Ireland.
+
+Lawrence Stephen went soberly and steadily through the affair of the
+_Review_, explaining things to Michael. He wanted this done, and this.
+And over and over again Michael's voice broke through his instructions.
+Why couldn't he go to Ireland instead of Lawrence? Or, if Lawrence
+wouldn't let him go instead of him, he might at least take him with him.
+He didn't want to stay at home editing the _Review_. Ellis or Mitchell
+or Monier-Owen would edit it better than he could. Even the wretched
+Wadham would edit it just as well. He wanted to go to Ireland and fight.
+
+But Lawrence wouldn't let him go. He wasn't going to have the boy's
+blood on his hands. His genius and his youth were too precious.
+
+Besides, Ireland was not his country.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was past ten o'clock. Frances was alone in the drawing-room. She sat
+by the open window and waited and watched.
+
+The quiet garden lay open to her sight. Only the inner end of the
+farther terrace, under the orchard wall, was hidden by a high screen
+of privet.
+
+It seemed hours to Frances since she had seen Nicky and Veronica go down
+the lawn on to the terrace.
+
+And then Anthony had gone out too. She was vexed with Anthony. She could
+see him sitting under his ash-tree, her tree of heaven; his white
+shirt-front gave out an oblong gleam like phosphorous in the darkness
+under the tree. She was watching to see that he didn't get up and go on
+to the terrace. Anthony had no business in the garden at all. He was
+catching cold in it. He had sneezed twice. She wanted Nicholas and
+Veronica to have the garden to themselves to-night, and the perfect
+stillness of the twilight to themselves, every tree and every little
+leaf and flower keeping quiet for them; and there was Anthony sneezing.
+
+She was restless and impatient, as if she carried the burden of their
+passion in her own heart.
+
+Presently she could bear it no longer. She got up and called to Anthony
+to come in. He came obediently. "What are you thinking of," she said,
+"planting yourself out there and sneezing? I could see your shirt-front
+a mile off. It's indecent of you."
+
+"Why indecent?"
+
+"Because Nicky and Veronica are out there."
+
+"I don't see them."
+
+"Do you suppose they want you to see them?"
+
+She turned the electric light on full, to make darkness of their
+twilight out there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky and Veronica talked together in the twilight, sitting on the seat
+under the orchard well behind the privet screen. They did not see
+Anthony sitting under the ash-tree, they did not hear him, they did not
+hear Frances calling to him to come in. They were utterly unaware of
+Frances and Anthony.
+
+"Ronny," he said, "did Michael say anything to you?"
+
+"When?"
+
+"This afternoon, when he made you come with him here?"
+
+"How do you mean, 'say anything'?"
+
+"You know what I mean."
+
+"_Mick_?"
+
+"Yes. Did he ask you to marry him?"
+
+"No. He said a lot of funny things, but he didn't say that. He
+wouldn't."
+
+"Why wouldn't he?"
+
+"Because--he just wouldn't."
+
+"Well, he says he understands you."
+
+"Then," said Veronica conclusively, "of course he wouldn't."
+
+"Yes; but he says _I_ don't."
+
+"Dear Nicky, you understand me when nobody else does. You always did."
+
+"Yes, when we were kids. But supposing _now_ I ever didn't, would it
+matter? You see, I'm stupid, and caring--caring awfully--might make me
+stupider. _Have_ people got to understand each other?"
+
+To that she replied astonishingly, "Are you quite sure you understand
+about Ferdie?"
+
+"Ferdie?"
+
+"Yes." She turned her face full to him. "I don't know whether you know
+about it. _I_ didn't till Mother told me the other day. I'm
+Ferdie's daughter.
+
+"Did you know?"
+
+"Oh, Lord, yes. I've known it for--oh, simply ever so long."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Dorothy, I think. But I guessed it because of something he said once
+about seeing ghosts."
+
+"I wonder if you know how I feel about it? I want you to understand
+that. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I'm proud. I'm _glad_ I'm Ferdie's
+daughter, not Bartie's.... I'd take his name, so that everybody should
+know I was his daughter, only that I like Uncle Anthony's name best. I'm
+glad Mother loved him."
+
+"So am I, Ronny. I know I shouldn't have liked Bartie's daughter.
+Bartie's daughter wouldn't have been you."
+
+He took her in his arms and held her face against his face. And it was
+as if Desmond had never been.
+
+A little while ago he had hated Desmond because she had come before
+Veronica; she had taken what belonged to Veronica, the first tremor of
+his passion, the irrecoverable delight and surprise. And now he knew
+that, because he had not loved her, she had taken nothing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"Do you love _me_?"
+
+"You know I love you."
+
+"You know. You know."
+
+What they said was new and wonderful to them as if nobody before them
+had ever thought of it.
+
+Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the birch-trees,
+and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in each other's arms and
+said the same thing in the same words: "Do you love me?" "You know I
+love you!" over and over, in voices drowsy and thick with love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And that's that
+damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to wait goodness knows
+how long. Ages we may have to."
+
+"I'd wait all my life if I could have you in the last five seconds of
+it. And if I couldn't, I'd still wait."
+
+And presently Veronica remembered Michael.
+
+"Why did you ask me whether Mick had said anything?"
+
+"Because I thought you ought to know about it before you--Besides, if he
+_had_, we should have had to wait a bit before we told him."
+
+It seemed that there was nothing to prevent them marrying to-morrow if
+they liked. The strike, Anthony said, couldn't hit him as badly as
+all that.
+
+He and Frances sat up till long past midnight, talking about their
+plans, and the children's plans. It was all settled. The first week in
+August they would go down to Morfe for the shooting. They would stay
+there till the first week in September. Nicky and Veronica would be
+married the first week in October. And they would go to France and
+Belgium and Germany for their honeymoon.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+They did not go down to Morfe the first week in August for the shooting.
+
+Neither did Lawrence Stephen go to Ireland on Monday, the third. At the
+moment when he should have been receiving the congratulations of the
+Dublin Nationalists after his impassioned appeal for militant
+consolidation, Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson were shaking hands
+dramatically in the House of Commons. Stephen's sublime opportunity, the
+civil war, had been snatched from him by the unforeseen.
+
+And there was no chance of Nicky and Veronica going to Belgium and
+France and Germany for their honeymoon.
+
+For within nine days of Frances's Day Germany had declared war on France
+and Russia, and was marching over the Belgian frontier on her way
+to Paris.
+
+Frances, aroused at last to realization of the affairs of nations,
+asked, like several million women, "What does it mean?"
+
+And Anthony, like several million men, answered, "It means Armageddon."
+Like several million people, they both thought he was saying something
+as original as it was impressive, something clear and final and
+descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative people went about
+saying it to each other. The sound of the word thrilled them,
+intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that was at the same time,
+in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them with a solemn and sombre
+passion. They said "Armageddon. It means Armageddon." Yet nobody knew
+and nobody asked or thought of asking what Armageddon meant.
+
+"Shall We come into it?" said Frances. She was thinking of the Royal
+Navy turning out to the last destroyer to save England from invasion; of
+the British Army most superfluously prepared to defend England from the
+invader, who, after all, could not invade; of Indian troops pouring into
+England if the worst came to the worst. She had the healthy British mind
+that refuses and always has refused to acknowledge the possibility of
+disaster. Yet she asked continually, "Would England be drawn in?" She
+was thankful that none of her sons had gone into the Army or the Navy.
+Whoever else was in, they would be out of it.
+
+At first Anthony said, "No. Of course England wouldn't be drawn in."
+
+Then, on the morning of England's ultimatum, the closing of the Stock
+Exchange and the Banks made him thoughtful, and he admitted that it
+looked as if England might be drawn in after all. The long day, without
+any business for him and Nicholas, disturbed him. There was a nasty,
+hovering smell of ruin in the air. But there was no panic. The closing
+of the Banks was only a wise precaution against panic. And by evening,
+as the tremendous significance of the ultimatum sank into him, he said
+definitively that England would not be drawn in.
+
+Then Drayton, whom they had not seen for months (since he had had his
+promotion) telephoned to Dorothy to come and dine with him at his club
+in Dover Street. Anthony missed altogether the significance of _that_.
+
+He had actually made for himself an after-dinner peace in which coffee
+could be drunk and cigarettes smoked as if nothing were happening
+to Europe.
+
+"England," he said, "will not be drawn in, because her ultimatum will
+stop the War. There won't be any Armageddon."
+
+"Oh, won't there!" said Michael. "And I can tell you there won't be much
+left of us after it's over."
+
+He had been in Germany and he knew. He carried himself with a sort of
+stern haughtiness, as one who knew better than any of them. And yet his
+words conveyed no picture to his brain, no definite image of anything
+at all.
+
+But in Nicholas's brain images gathered fast, one after another; they
+thickened; clear, vivid images with hard outlines. They came slowly but
+with order and precision. While the others talked he had been silent and
+very grave.
+
+"_Some_ of us'll be left," he said. "But it'll take us all our time."
+
+Anthony looked thoughtfully at Nicholas. A sudden wave of realization
+beat up against his consciousness and receded.
+
+"Well," he said, "we shall know at midnight."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An immense restlessness came over them.
+
+At a quarter-past eight Dorothy telephoned from her club in Grafton
+street. Frank had had to leave her suddenly. Somebody had sent for him.
+And if they wanted to see the sight of their lives they were to come
+into town at once. St. James's was packed with people from Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace. It was like nothing on earth, and they mustn't miss
+it. She'd wait for them in Grafton Street till a quarter to nine, but
+not a minute later.
+
+Nicky got out his big four-seater Morss car. They packed themselves into
+it, all six of them somehow, and he drove them into London. They had a
+sense of doing something strange and memorable and historic. Dorothy,
+picked up at her club, showed nothing but a pleasurable excitement. She
+gave no further information about Frank. He had had to go off and see
+somebody. What did he think? He thought what he had always thought; only
+he wouldn't talk about it.
+
+Dorothy was not inclined to talk about it either. The Morss was caught
+in a line blocked at the bottom of Albemarle Street by two streams of
+cars, mixed with two streams of foot passengers, that poured steadily
+from Piccadilly into St. James's Street.
+
+Michael and Dorothy got out and walked. Nicholas gave up his place to
+Anthony and followed with Veronica.
+
+Their restlessness had been a part of the immense restlessness of the
+crowd. They were drawn, as the crowd was drawn; they went as the crowd
+went, up and down, restlessly, from Trafalgar Square and Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace; from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall and Trafalgar
+Square. They drifted down Parliament Street to Westminster and back
+again. An hour ago the drifting, nebulous crowd had split, torn asunder
+between two attractions; its two masses had wheeled away, one to the
+east and the other to the west; they had gathered themselves together,
+one at each pole of the space it now traversed. The great meeting in
+Trafalgar Square balanced the multitude that had gravitated towards
+Buckingham Palace, to see the King and Queen come out on their balcony
+and show themselves to their people.
+
+And as the edges of the two masses gave way, each broke and scattered,
+and was mixed again with the other. Like a flood, confined and shaken,
+it surged and was driven back and surged again from Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace, from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall. It looked for an
+outlet in the narrow channels of the side-streets, or spread itself over
+the flats of the Green Park, only to return restlessly upon itself,
+sucked back by the main current in the Mall.
+
+It was as if half London had met there for Bank Holiday. Part of this
+crowd was drunk; it was orgiastic; it made strange, fierce noises, like
+the noises of one enormous, mystically excited beast; here and there,
+men and women, with inflamed and drunken faces, reeled in each other's
+arms; they wore pink paper feathers in their hats. Some, only half
+intoxicated, flicked at each other with long streamers of pink and white
+paper, carried like scourges on small sticks. These were the inspired.
+
+But the great body of the crowd was sober. It went decorously in a long
+procession, young men with their sweethearts, friends, brothers and
+sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers with their children;
+none, or very few, went alone that night.
+
+It was an endless procession of faces; grave and thoughtful faces;
+uninterested, respectable faces; faces of unmoved integrity; excited
+faces; dreaming, wondering, bewildered faces; faces merely curious, or
+curiously exalted, slightly ecstatic, open-mouthed, fascinated by each
+other and by the movements and the lights; laughing, frivolous faces,
+and faces utterly vacant and unseeing.
+
+On every other breast there was a small Union Jack pinned; every other
+hand held and waggled a Union Jack. The Union Jack flew from the engine
+of every other automobile. In twelve hours, out of nowhere, thousands
+and thousands of flags sprang magically into being; as if for years
+London had been preparing for this day.
+
+And in and out of this crowd the train of automobiles with their flags
+dashed up and down the Mall for hours, appearing and disappearing.
+Intoxicated youths with inflamed faces, in full evening dress, squatted
+on the roofs of taxi-cabs or rode astride on the engines of their cars,
+waving flags.
+
+All this movement, drunken, orgiastic, somnambulistic, mysteriously
+restless, streamed up and down between two solemn and processional lines
+of lights, two solemn and processional lines of trees, lines that
+stretched straight from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace in a recurrent
+pattern of trees and lamps, dark trees, twilit trees, a lamp and a tree
+shining with a metallic unnatural green; and, at the end of the avenue,
+gilded gates and a golden-white façade.
+
+The crowd was drifting now towards the Palace. Michael and Dorothea,
+Nicholas and Veronica, went with it. In this eternal perambulation they
+met people that they knew; Stephen and Vera; Mitchell, Monier-Owen;
+Uncle Morrie and his sisters. Anthony, looking rather solemn, drove
+past them in his car. It was like impossible, grotesque encounters in
+a dream.
+
+Outside the Palace the crowd moved up and down without rest; it drifted
+and returned; it circled round and round the fountain. In the open
+spaces the intoxicated motor-cars and taxi-cabs darted and tore with the
+folly of moths and the fury of destroyers. They stung the air with their
+hooting. Flags, intoxicated flags, still hung from their engines. They
+came flying drunkenly out of the dark, like a trumpeting swarm of
+enormous insects, irresistibly, incessantly drawn to the lights of the
+Palace, hypnotized by the golden-white façade.
+
+Suddenly, Michael's soul revolted.
+
+"If this demented herd of swine is a great people going into a great
+war, God help us! Beasts--it's not as if _their_ bloated skins were
+likely to be punctured."
+
+He called back over his shoulders to the others.
+
+"Let's get out of this. If we don't I shall be sick."
+
+He took Dorothy by her arm and shouldered his way out.
+
+The water had ceased playing in the fountain.
+
+Nicholas and Veronica stood by the fountain. The water in the basin was
+green like foul sea-water. The jetsam of the crowd floated there. A
+small child leaned over the edge of the basin and fished for Union Jacks
+in the filthy pool. Its young mother held it safe by the tilted edge of
+its petticoats. She looked up at them and smiled. They smiled back again
+and turned away.
+
+It was quiet on the south side by the Barracks. Small, sober groups of
+twos and threes strolled there, or stood with their faces pressed close
+against the railings, peering into the barrack yard. Motionless,
+earnest and attentive, they stared at the men in khaki moving about on
+the other side of the railings. They were silent, fascinated by the men
+in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing, they stared at them with an
+awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in khaki stared back, proud,
+self-conscious, as men who know that the hour is great and that it is
+their hour.
+
+"Nicky," Veronica said, "I wish Michael wouldn't say things like that."
+
+"He's dead right, Ronny. That isn't the way to take it, getting drunk
+and excited, and rushing about making silly asses of themselves. They
+_are_ rather swine, you know."
+
+"Yes; but they're pathetic. Can't you see how pathetic they are? Nicky,
+I believe I love the swine--even the poor drunken ones with the pink
+paper feathers--just because they're English; because awful things are
+going to happen to them, and they don't know it. They're English."
+
+"You think God's made us all like that? He _hasn't_."
+
+They found Anthony in the Mall, driving up and down, looking for them.
+He had picked up Dorothy and Aunt Emmeline and Uncle Morrie.
+
+"We're going down to the Mansion House," he said, "to hear the
+Proclamation. Will you come?"
+
+But Veronica and Nicholas were tired of crowds, even of historic crowds.
+Anthony drove off with his car-load, and they went home.
+
+"I never saw Daddy so excited," Nicky said.
+
+But Anthony was not excited. He had never felt calmer or cooler in his
+life.
+
+He returned some time after midnight. By that time it had sunk into him.
+Germany _had_ defied the ultimatum and England _had_ declared war
+on Germany.
+
+He said it was only what was to be foreseen. He had known all the time
+that it would happen--really.
+
+The tension of the day of the ultimatum had this peculiar psychological
+effect that all over England people who had declared up to the last
+minute that there would be no War were saying the same thing as Anthony
+and believing it.
+
+Michael was disgusted with the event that had put an end to the Irish
+Revolution. It was in this form that he conceived his first grudge
+against the War.
+
+This emotion of his was like some empty space of horror opened up
+between him and Nicholas; Nicky being the only one of his family who was
+as yet aware of its existence.
+
+For the next three days, Nicholas, very serious and earnest, shut
+himself up in his workshop at the bottom of the orchard and laboured
+there, putting the last touches to the final, perfect, authoritative
+form of the Moving Fortress, the joint creation of his brain and
+Drayton's, the only experiment that had survived the repeated onslaughts
+of the Major's criticism. The new model was three times the size of the
+lost original; it was less like a battleship and more like a racing-car
+and a destroyer. It was his and Drayton's last word on the subject of
+armaments.
+
+It was going to the War Office, this time, addressed to the right
+person, and accompanied by all sorts of protective introductions, and
+Drayton blasting its way before it with his new explosive.
+
+In those three days Nick found an immense distraction in his Moving
+Fortress. It also served to blind his family to his real intentions. He
+knew that his real intentions could not be kept from them very long.
+Meanwhile the idea that he was working on something made them happy.
+When Frances saw him in his overalls she smiled and said: "Nicky's got
+_his_ job, anyhow." John came and looked at him through the window of
+the workshop and laughed.
+
+"Good old Nicky," he said. "Doing his bit!"
+
+In those three days John went about with an air of agreeable excitement.
+Or you came upon him sitting in solitary places like the dining-room,
+lost in happy thought. Michael said of him that he was unctuous. He
+exuded a secret joy and satisfaction. John had acquired a sudden
+remarkable maturity. He shone on each member of his family with
+benevolence and affection, as if he were its protector and consoler, and
+about to confer on it some tremendous benefit.
+
+"Look at Don-Don," Michael said. "The bloodthirsty little brute. He's
+positively enjoying the War."
+
+"You might leave me alone," said Don-Don. "I shan't have it to enjoy for
+long."
+
+He was one of those who believed that the War would be over in four
+months.
+
+Michael, pledged to secrecy, came and looked at the Moving Fortress. He
+was interested and intelligent; he admired that efficiency of Nicky's
+that was so unlike his own.
+
+Yet, he wondered, after all, was it so unlike? He, too, was aiming at an
+art as clean and hard and powerful as Nicky's, as naked of all blazonry
+and decoration, an art which would attain its objective by the simplest,
+most perfect adjustment of means to ends.
+
+And Anthony was proud of that hidden wonder locked behind the door of
+the workshop in the orchard. He realized that his son Nicholas had taken
+part in a great and important thing. He was prouder of Nicholas than he
+had been of Michael.
+
+And Michael knew it.
+
+Nicky's brains could be used for the service of his country.
+
+But Michael's? Anthony said to himself that there wasn't any sense--any
+sense that he could endure to contemplate--in which Michael's brains
+could be of any use to his country. When Anthony thought of the
+mobilization of his family for national service, Michael and Michael's
+brains were a problem that he put behind him for the present and refused
+to contemplate. There would be time enough for Michael later.
+
+Anthony was perfectly well aware of his own one talent, the talent which
+had made "Harrison and Harrison" the biggest timber-importing firm in
+England. If there was one thing he understood it was organization. If
+there was one thing he could not tolerate it was waste of good material,
+the folly of forcing men and women into places they were not fit for. He
+had let his eldest son slip out of the business without a pang, or with
+hardly any pang. He had only taken Nicholas into it as an experiment.
+It was on John that he relied to inherit it and carry it farther.
+
+As a man of business he approved of the advertised formula: "Business as
+Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which England expected
+every man to do was to stay in the place he was most fitted for and to
+go where he was most wanted. Nothing but muddle and disaster could
+follow any departure from this rule.
+
+It was fitting that Frances and Veronica should do Red Cross work. It
+was fitting that Dorothy should help to organize the relief of the
+Belgium refugees. It was fitting that John should stay at home and carry
+on the business, and that he, Anthony, should enlist when he had settled
+John into his place. It was, above all, fitting that Nicky should devote
+himself to the invention and manufacture of armaments. He could not
+conceive anything more wantonly and scandalously wasteful than a system
+that could make any other use of Nicky's brains. He thanked goodness
+that, with a European War upon us, such a system, if it existed, would
+not be allowed to live a day.
+
+As for Michael, it might be fitting later--very much later--perhaps. If
+Michael wanted to volunteer for the Army then, and if it were necessary,
+he would have no right to stop him. But it would not be necessary.
+England was going to win this War on the sea and not on land. Michael
+was practically safe.
+
+And behind Frances's smile, and John's laughter, and Michael's
+admiration, and Anthony's pride there was the thought: "Whatever
+happens, Nicky will he safe."
+
+And the model of the Moving Fortress was packed up--Veronica and Nicky
+packed it--and it was sent under high protection to the War Office. And
+Nicky unlocked the door of his workshop and rested restlessly from
+his labour.
+
+And there was a call for recruits, and for still more recruits.
+
+Westminster Bridge became a highway for regiments marching to battle.
+The streets were parade-grounds for squad after squad of volunteers in
+civilian clothes, self-conscious and abashed under the eyes of the
+men in khaki.
+
+And Michael said: "This is the end of all the arts. Artists will not be
+allowed to exist except as agents for the recruiting sergeant.
+We're dished."
+
+That was the second grudge he had against the War. It killed the arts in
+the very hour of their renaissance. "Eccentricities" by Morton Ellis,
+with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, and the "New Poems" of Michael
+Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to have come out
+in September. But it was not conceivable that they should come out.
+
+At the first rumour of the ultimatum Michael and Ellis had given
+themselves up for lost.
+
+Liége fell and Namur was falling.
+
+And the call went on for recruits, and for still more recruits. And
+Nicky in five seconds had destroyed his mother's illusions and the whole
+fabric of his father's plans.
+
+It was one evening when they were in the drawing-room, sitting up after
+Veronica had gone to bed.
+
+"I hope you won't mind, Father," he said; "but I'm going to enlist
+to-morrow."
+
+He did not look at his father's face. He looked at his mother's. She was
+sitting opposite him on the couch beside Dorothy. John balanced himself
+on the head of the couch with his arm round his mother's shoulder. Every
+now and then he stooped down and rubbed his cheek thoughtfully
+against her hair.
+
+A slight tremor shook her sensitive, betraying upper lip; then she
+looked back at Nicholas and smiled.
+
+Dorothy set her mouth hard, unsmiling.
+
+Anthony had said nothing. He stared before him at Michael's foot, thrust
+out and tilted by the crossing of his knees. Michael's foot, with its
+long, arched instep, fascinated Anthony. He seemed to be thinking: "If I
+look at it long enough I may forget what Nicky has said."
+
+"I hope you won't mind, Father; but I'm enlisting too."
+
+John's voice was a light, high echo of Nicky's.
+
+With a great effort Anthony roused himself from his contemplation of
+Michael's foot.
+
+"I--can't--see--that my minding--or not minding--has anything--to
+do--with it."
+
+He brought his words out slowly and with separate efforts, as if they
+weighed heavily on his tongue. "We've got to consider what's best for
+the country all round, and I doubt if either of you is called upon
+to go."
+
+"Some of us have got to go," said Nicky.
+
+"Quite so. But I don't think it ought to be you, Nicky; or John,
+either."
+
+"I suppose," said Michael, "you mean it ought to be me."
+
+"I don't mean anything of the sort. One out of four's enough."
+
+"One out of four? Well then--"
+
+"That only leaves me to fight," said Dorothy.
+
+"I wasn't thinking of you, Michael. Or of Dorothy."
+
+They all looked at him where he sat, upright and noble, in his chair,
+and most absurdly young.
+
+Dorothy said under her breath: "Oh, you darling Daddy."
+
+"_You_ won't be allowed to go, anyhow," said John to his father. "You
+needn't think it."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well--." He hadn't the heart to say: "Because you're too old."
+
+"Nicky's brains will be more use to the country than my old carcass."
+
+Nicky thought: "You're the very last of us that can be spared." But he
+couldn't say it. The thing was so obvious. All he said was: "It's out of
+the question, your going."
+
+"Old Nicky's out of the question, if you like," said John. "He's going
+to be married. He ought to be thinking of his wife and children."
+
+"Of course he ought," said Anthony. "Whoever goes first, it isn't
+Nicky."
+
+"You ought to think of Mummy, Daddy ducky; and you ought to think of
+_us_," said Dorothy.
+
+"I," said John, "haven't got anybody to think of. I'm not going to be
+married, and I haven't any children."
+
+"I haven't got a wife and children yet," said Nicky.
+
+"You've got Veronica. You ought to think of her."
+
+"I am thinking of her. You don't suppose Veronica'd stop me if I wanted
+to go? Why, she wouldn't look at me if I didn't want to go."
+
+Suddenly he remembered Michael.
+
+"I mean," he said, "after my _saying_ that I was going."
+
+Their eyes met. Michael's flickered. He knew that Nicky was thinking of
+him.
+
+"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.
+
+"Of course she knows. _You_ aren't going to try to stop me, Mother?"
+
+"No," she said. "I'm not going to try to stop you--this time."
+
+She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would be safe
+now, with the Army in India."
+
+One by one they got up and said "Good night" to each other.
+
+But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.
+
+He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not enlisting. At
+any rate, _not yet_. Don't worry about Don and Daddy. They won't take
+Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his heart that he doesn't know
+about. He's going to be jolly well sold, poor chap. And they won't take
+the guv'nor because he's too old; though the dear old thing thinks he
+can bluff them into it because he doesn't look it.
+
+"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned, the War's
+a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the Army. You know
+how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now I'm going in and
+nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me out. Soon they'll all
+be as pleased as Punch about it.
+
+"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want to stick
+bayonets into German tummies, just _because_ they're so large and oodgy.
+You'd think of that first and all the time and afterwards. And I shan't
+think of it at all.
+
+"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons that I
+can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect yourself if
+you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I stayed out."
+
+"I wonder," Michael said, "if you really see it."
+
+"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing chaps. You
+seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves."
+
+When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really does see?
+Or if he made it all up?"
+
+They had not said to each other all that they had really meant. Of
+Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered vividly,
+"Not yet."
+
+Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up between him
+and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the two words:
+"Not yet."
+
+
+
+XX
+
+It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on
+account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn't
+know about.
+
+The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was under
+thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if he'd left it
+at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than most of 'em when he
+was stripped. But they'd given him so good an innings that the poor old
+thing got above himself, and spun them a yarn about his hair having gone
+grey from a recent shock. That dished him. They said they knew that sort
+of hair; they'd been seeing a lot of it lately.
+
+Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape," and
+declared that if that was the way things were going to be managed it was
+a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He said the man who
+examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know his own rotten
+business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to tell him they didn't
+want him dropping down dead when he went into action, or fainting from
+sheer excitement after they'd been to the trouble and expense of
+training him. As if he'd be likely to do a damn silly thing like that.
+He'd never been excited in his life. It was enough to _give_ him
+heart-disease.
+
+So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the
+ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they learned to their
+disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for
+Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.
+
+At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business by a
+sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the War would
+be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal
+significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate
+message for him was that business must be attended to. He had not
+attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay
+there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories.
+He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the
+glamour of the Front. The particular business in hand had great issues
+and a fascination of its own.
+
+And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a
+brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and
+abstracted soul.
+
+And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through the first
+courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind
+and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in
+earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder
+every day.
+
+And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael widened.
+
+With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's entire
+family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances
+and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red
+Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be
+sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained
+and ready when the moment of the summons came. Strong young girls
+hustled for the best places at the ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly
+women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless
+ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained
+by their extraordinary illusion.
+
+Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with
+bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if nobody
+else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral
+excitement, while still struggling to find each other's arteries,
+declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no earthly reason
+why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency
+class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage
+round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor. He got mixed up with
+his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a
+lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders
+to go to the Front.
+
+They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each other's
+hopes.
+
+For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had
+ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a curious
+gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael's
+study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the
+queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith
+over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline's head,
+and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie's little, clumsy,
+pinching fingers. It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and
+charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.
+
+And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out
+her lower lip at them.
+
+"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you
+might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every woman in
+England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have enough socks
+for his Army."
+
+Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted conspicuously, as a
+protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action
+an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even
+Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be
+unravelled overnight, to save the wool.
+
+"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting khaki!"
+
+Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as
+if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were
+interfering with them.
+
+Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men.
+The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers
+received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during
+the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the
+Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and
+disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late
+enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to
+its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture
+and embarassment.
+
+The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into
+the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and
+went into uniform.
+
+And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and
+puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance
+as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it.
+Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of
+the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon
+Street Station.
+
+She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street
+Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery
+of Belgium poured and was congested.
+
+Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of
+her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with
+the scene.
+
+Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred
+transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that
+was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light,
+filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes,
+hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and
+large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a
+ghastly, ruinous life.
+
+The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the
+immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of carriages packed tight
+with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and
+there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in
+the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.
+
+For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding wounds
+and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this one
+incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon Street
+Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the sequences of
+which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of men, women and
+children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they were staggering under
+those bundles along their straight, flat roads between the everlasting
+rows of poplars; their towns and villages flamed and smoked behind them;
+some of them, goaded like tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at
+their backs--yesterday. And this morning they were here, brave and gay,
+smiling at Dorothea as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their
+small children in her arms.
+
+And they were still proud of themselves.
+
+A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a large
+pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other a cage with
+a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and smiled, proud of
+herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A Belgium boy carried a
+paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He grinned at Dorothea, proud of
+himself because he had saved his grandfather. A young Flemish peasant
+woman pushed back the shawl that covered her baby's face to show her how
+pretty he was; she laughed because she had borne him and saved him.
+
+And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women and girls
+idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in trying to throw
+himself into a moving train because he thought his lost mother was in
+it. The ring screening the agony of a woman giving birth to her child on
+the platform. A death in the train; stiff, upturned feet at the end of a
+stretcher that the police-ambulance carried away.
+
+And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect
+safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and
+bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous
+longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the shells burst,
+and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads
+between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and
+flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger. She was not
+feeling anything now except the shame of her immunity.
+
+She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I were
+dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."
+
+Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were in
+Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could walk."
+
+Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians, because it
+was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate, were safe. Her
+father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not in it--yet; though
+of course he would be in it some time. She tried not to think too much
+about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next six months. And Frank was
+safe. Frank was training recruits. He had told her he might be kept
+indefinitely at that infernal job. But for that he would be fighting
+now. He wanted her to be sorry for him; and she was sorry for him. And
+she was glad too.
+
+One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till
+dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she found
+him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting for her by
+himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.
+
+"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait up here."
+
+She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust
+on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and
+hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.
+
+He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was the first
+time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose
+felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust
+and dirt of her; and he smiled. His smile had none of the cynical
+derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant
+suffragist.
+
+"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe me now."
+
+"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.
+
+"Not _yet_--worse luck."
+
+"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas, or
+what?"
+
+"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair off?"
+
+"They might. They might do anything. This is a most extraordinary war."
+
+"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."
+
+"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in him.
+
+"What did you think?"
+
+"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like business.
+Do you really mean it? Are you really going to Flanders?"
+
+"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she
+wasn't going _some_where?"
+
+He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And then:
+"It makes you look about eighteen."
+
+"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."
+
+"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that you're not
+eighteen? You're eight and twenty."
+
+"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you did,
+you wouldn't say so."
+
+"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made a
+pretty mess of each other's lives."
+
+"Have I made a mess of _your_ life?'
+
+"A beastly mess."
+
+"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known. You know
+I wouldn't.
+
+"But one doesn't know things."
+
+"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully well; but
+not the things that matter."
+
+"Well--but what could I do?" she said.
+
+"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married me. And
+we would have had three years of each other."
+
+"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't manage
+it."
+
+"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.
+
+"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I get
+leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three days."
+
+"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three
+days--No, it wasn't worth while.
+
+"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn't
+change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change. So, you see,
+it's got to be one thing or another."
+
+And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not worth
+while?
+
+"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There really
+isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what you like and
+do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I shan't care if
+you'll only marry me."
+
+"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love me. You
+never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all that."
+
+"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine years--ten
+years?"
+
+"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go off and
+get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.
+
+"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my
+face--filthy--you mustn't--"
+
+"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't care."
+
+The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He
+said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she
+keeps it on _now_!"
+
+She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a
+Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over
+her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her
+shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast
+to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the
+youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.
+
+He said to himself, "She _shall_ come alive. She _shall_ feel. She
+_shall want_ me. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten
+years ago."
+
+Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands.
+And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing something
+happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him
+now--to-night."
+
+Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what
+she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had
+made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.
+
+She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me if he
+knew."
+
+Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and
+hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.
+
+"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there
+was anything that could have prevented it."
+
+"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it
+made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the
+difference. And there we were."
+
+"It didn't--really."
+
+She shook her head. "We thought it did."
+
+"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?
+
+"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it.
+I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."
+
+"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that we seemed
+to go wrong.
+
+"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand
+going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I
+didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or
+wondered what you were feeling? _That's_ what put me off. It hurt so
+atrociously that I couldn't say anything.
+
+"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about nothing
+else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.
+
+"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't true. I
+was listening like anything."
+
+"Darling--what did I tell you?"
+
+"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your adventure, or
+something."
+
+"My adventure?"
+
+"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I
+couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's
+beyond me now."
+
+"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"
+
+"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something big and
+important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to bother me. I kept
+on trying to get it, and not getting it."
+
+"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully big and
+important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had happened to
+somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."
+
+"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of that
+business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."
+
+"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the War."
+
+"You're not swallowed up."
+
+"Perhaps I shall be."
+
+"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you to know
+that I understand what you were driving at. It was this way, wasn't it?
+You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You couldn't keep out of
+it any more than I can keep out of this War."
+
+"You couldn't stay out just for me any more than I can stay out for just
+you."
+
+"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way you were
+in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."
+
+"How clever of you," she said, "to see it!"
+
+"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a war on.
+We've both had to pay for my stupidity."
+
+"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see, or
+risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."
+
+"Well, anyhow, we've got this evening."
+
+"We haven't. I've got to drive Belgians from nine till past midnight."
+
+"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married in. I
+say--how about to-morrow evening?"
+
+"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know who'll
+drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married in, too."
+
+She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out. If he
+is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."
+
+It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch at their
+happiness and secure it, before their hour came.
+
+She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the British line
+was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of course it would
+recover. We always began like that. We went back to go forwards faster,
+when we got into our stride.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next evening, Thursday, the girl she knew drove for Dorothea.
+
+When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her with two
+frocks over her arm.
+
+"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell whether
+to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if it mattered
+more than anything. More than anything on earth."
+
+Frances considered it--Dorothea in her uniform, and the white frock and
+the blue frock.
+
+"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose to you
+in that get-up--"
+
+"Can't you see that I want to make up for _that_ and for all the things
+he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only I was as beautiful
+as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."
+
+"My dear--my dear--"
+
+Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as Nicky
+with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up Dorothy in
+khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and blue frocks, made
+Frances want to cry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy that he
+couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only have one hour
+to give her.
+
+Frances and Anthony looked at each other. But Dorothy looked at
+Veronica.
+
+"What's the matter, Ronny? You look simply awful."
+
+"Do I? My head's splitting. I think I'll go and lie down."
+
+"You'd better."
+
+"Go straight to bed," said Frances. "and let Nanna bring you some hot
+soup."
+
+But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to take
+herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "if she's going to worry herself sick about Nicky
+now--"
+
+Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.
+
+It was nine o'clock.
+
+At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought: "Supposing he
+hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely. If he hadn't got
+leave he would have said so when he telephoned.
+
+The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would hold her
+in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be afraid, and
+she would be afraid, and he would let her go.
+
+The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud and quick
+on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room to them,
+holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes shone with
+excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that narrowed his eyes and
+jerked his mouth slightly crooked.
+
+They all spoke at once. "You've got leave?" "_He's_ got it all right."
+"What kept you?" "You _have_ got leave?"
+
+His eyes still shone; his mouth still jerked, laughing.
+
+"Well, no," he said. "That's what I haven't got. In fact, I'm lucky to
+be here at all."
+
+Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat down on
+the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his spoon, and smiling
+as if at something pleasant that he knew, something that he would tell
+them presently when Nanna left the room.
+
+The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening intently
+for the click of the latch.
+
+"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off till you
+come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then they say
+they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that day.
+
+"Twelve hours isn't much notice to give a fellow."
+
+He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was speaking
+to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions about trains
+and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if he were not
+conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat, slowly stirring his
+coffee without drinking it. The vibration of her nerves made his answers
+sound muffled and far-off.
+
+She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing from her
+minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable longing to be
+alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what she had felt
+yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in yesterday, and
+refused to move on into to-day.
+
+Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they stopped
+talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would be the end.
+
+Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup he had
+not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea that for a
+moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small sound. She saw
+her mother take the cup from him and set it on the table.
+
+One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they were
+guilty, and left her alone with him.
+
+It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He sat
+there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance. He seemed
+to be wondering how she was going to take it.
+
+He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to make her
+want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left it."
+
+And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.
+
+She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be ready
+to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness he
+required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes implored
+her to put away from her.
+
+There was something more.
+
+He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is hard luck
+on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard for me." (She
+could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He knew she was brave;
+he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he knew he hadn't got to say
+the obvious things.
+
+There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her with the
+power and sweetness of first passion; but without its fear. She no
+longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her as he had held
+her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it vibrated to an
+intenser rhythm.
+
+She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that they were
+seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more than they. When
+realization passed it would endure.
+
+Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it, to say to
+each other what it was they felt and saw.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He said, "I shall have to go soon."
+
+And she said, "I know. Is there anything I can do?"
+
+"I wish you'd go and see my mother some time. She'd like it."
+
+"I should love to go and see her. What else?"
+
+"Well--I've no business to ask you, but I wish you'd give it up."
+
+"I'll give anything up. But what?"
+
+"That ambulance of yours that's going to get into the firing line."
+
+"Oh--"
+
+"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the hardest and
+most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it easier for us to win
+the War. You can't expect us to fight so comfy, and to be killed so
+comfy, if we know our womenkind are being pounded to bits in the ground
+we've just cleared. If I thought _you_ were knocking about
+anywhere there--"
+
+"It would make it too hard?"
+
+"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much time to
+think about it, but when I did--"
+
+"You'd think 'She might have spared me _that_.'"
+
+"Yes. And you might think of your people. It's bad enough for them,
+Nicky going."
+
+"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and where
+he'll be. That was natural."
+
+"It's also natural that we should like to find you here when we come
+back."
+
+"I was thinking of those Belgian women, and the babies--and England; so
+safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."
+
+"I know. Leaving the children in the burning house?"
+
+(She had said that once and he had remembered.)
+
+"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you to take
+the hardest job, really."
+
+"It isn't; if it's what you want most."
+
+He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and they
+were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous thing.
+
+"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about it. I
+want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."
+
+"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it's _your_ War,
+too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"
+
+"I know," she said.
+
+And then: "Have you got all your things?"
+
+"Somebody's got 'em."
+
+"I haven't given you anything. You must have my wrist-watch."
+
+She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.
+
+"My wrist's a whopper."
+
+"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's phosphorous," she
+said. "You can see the time by it in the dark."
+
+"I've nothing for _you_. Except--" he fumbled in his pockets--"I
+say--here's the wedding-ring."
+
+They laughed.
+
+"What more could you want?" she said.
+
+He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he stooped and
+kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But it was not like
+yesterday.
+
+Suddenly his face stiffened. "Tell them," he said, "that I'm going."
+
+The British were retreating from Mons.
+
+The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like the
+travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There was no
+end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no end to the
+German people. And there was no news of British reinforcements, or
+rumour of reinforcements.
+
+"They come on like waves. Like waves," said Dorothea, reading from the
+papers.
+
+"I wouldn't read about it if I were you, darling," said Frances.
+
+"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we don't."
+
+Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way
+before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat
+from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.
+
+Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours'
+notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it.
+They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least
+we could do for _them_ was to trust them, and not believe any tales of
+their retreating.
+
+And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By
+letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home,
+listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing
+of the bell.
+
+She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message
+came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child for me that my
+son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to
+come and see me; but not just yet."
+
+She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter from
+his Colonel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into Cannon Street
+Station.
+
+Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she
+could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned
+it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly,
+beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept,
+worn out with her hard day's driving.
+
+She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have
+had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.
+
+"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a
+brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died
+for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered.
+He said 'It's _your_ War--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's
+killed in it.
+
+"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for one
+night.
+
+"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was
+a coward. He got nothing."
+
+His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that
+prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a
+contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion.
+She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.
+
+Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they
+had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had
+dreamed it or made it up.
+
+Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The
+Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and
+it would take her car with it and a new driver.
+
+Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.
+
+"If I could only help you."
+
+"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave
+the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more
+often she hid away somewhere by herself.
+
+Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go
+to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's
+Veronica."
+
+But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to
+Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been
+killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He
+couldn't have had five hours' fighting.
+
+"And to be killed--Retreating.
+
+"He got nothing out of it but agony."
+
+Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know
+what he may have got in the last minute of it."
+
+"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to
+Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me.
+But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.
+
+"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"
+
+"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you, more
+alive."
+
+"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with
+it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:
+
+"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must
+have known that he would not come back."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I
+want you to see that my memory is fairly good."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for
+markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."
+
+The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah xxxv.
+and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:
+
+"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my
+fingers to fight."...
+
+"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and
+the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...
+
+... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall
+mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they
+shall walk and not faint."
+
+And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet and
+powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold again on the
+Reality they had seen and felt together.
+
+The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it lasted
+she was at peace.
+
+But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of remorse
+for all that she had wasted.
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had ceased to
+feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in vain for them.
+They did not believe that it had saved Paris.
+
+Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was no more
+Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were only a question
+of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there would be no more
+France. They were face to face with the further possibility of there
+being no more England.
+
+In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances were
+changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before the War,
+Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she would, after
+careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I like England. But I
+dislike the English people. They are narrow and hypocritical and
+conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs." At the time of the Boer
+War, beyond thinking that the British ought to win, and that they would
+win, and feeling a little spurt as of personal satisfaction when they
+did win, she had had no consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for
+loving it, she loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of
+mild, cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her
+house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as well
+talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once sat in
+peace under the tree of Heaven with her _Times_ newspaper, and flicked
+the affairs of the nation from her as less important than the stitching
+on her baby's frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else.
+She was sad, not because her son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling
+week by week, but because England was in danger; she was worried, not
+because Lord Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son
+Michael, but because she had found that the race was to the swift and
+the battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent
+sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she left
+her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City with
+Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office, receiving,
+packing, and sending off great cases of food and clothing to the
+Belgian soldiers.
+
+Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all well
+under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the Government
+persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber that swelled and
+shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and because officials
+wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them what he knew about
+timber, and because the head of a department had talked to _him_ about
+private firms and profiteering. As if any man with three sons under
+twenty-seven would want to make a profit out of the War; and as if they
+couldn't cut down everybody's profits if they took the trouble. They
+might cut his to the last cent so long as we had gun-carriages that
+would carry guns and rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was
+talking about and they didn't.
+
+And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who had
+once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it
+now. She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at
+the head of departments we should win the War. We were losing it for
+want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of
+organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud of him, not
+because he was her husband and the father of her children, but because
+he was a man who could help England. They were both proud of Michael and
+Nicholas and John, not because they were their sons, but because they
+were men who could fight for England.
+
+They found that they loved England with a secret, religious, instinctive
+love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man might stand and
+fight for, became, mysteriously and magically, dearer to them than their
+home. They loved England more than their own life or the lives of their
+children. Long ago they had realized that fathers do not beget children
+nor mothers bear them merely to gratify themselves. Now, in September
+and October, they were realizing that children are not begotten and born
+for their own profit and pleasure either.
+
+When they sat together after the day's work they found themselves saying
+the most amazing things to each other.
+
+Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better. I
+shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had been
+pleasant to him.
+
+And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of three,
+we ought to send them all."
+
+"Positively," said Anthony. "I believe I'd let Dorothy go out now if she
+insisted."
+
+"Oh, no, I think we might be allowed to keep Dorothy."
+
+She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I grudged
+giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if he went out
+to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how splendid it was
+of him."
+
+"I wish poor Dorothy could feel that way about Drayton."
+
+"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was his
+profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."
+
+He did not remind her that Frank's free will had counted in his choice
+of a profession.
+
+"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count more than
+the whole Army put together."
+
+They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing that sooner
+or later they must speak of it.
+
+Frances was the braver of the two. She spoke first.
+
+"There's Michael. I don't know what to make of him. He doesn't seem to
+want to go."
+
+That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably in
+secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something must be
+done about Michael.
+
+"I wish you'd say something to him, Anthony."
+
+"I would if I were going myself. But how can I?"
+
+"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you were young
+enough."
+
+"I can't say anything. You'll have to."
+
+"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky is the
+only one of us who has any right to."
+
+"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her way."
+
+"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."
+
+But in the end she did say something.
+
+She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding himself
+away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she thought, "as if he
+were ashamed of himself."
+
+Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious beauty of his
+young face; at the thick masses of his hair that would not stay as they
+were brushed back, but fell over his forehead; it was still yellow, and
+shining as it shone when he was a little boy.
+
+He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of verse on the
+white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came in lest she
+should see them. That hurt her.
+
+"Michael," she said, "I wonder if you _ever_ realize that we are at
+war."
+
+"The War isn't a positive obsession to me, if that's what you mean."
+
+"It isn't what I mean. Only--that when other people are doing so much--
+
+"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."
+
+"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If George
+Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."
+
+"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason, when so
+much more has been done for you than was ever done for him?"
+
+"It's no use trying to get at me."
+
+"England's fighting for her life," said Frances.
+
+"So's Germany.
+
+"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker hates
+Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear old Frau
+Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and Carl, and make
+Hedwig and Löttchen cry."
+
+"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George and
+Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."
+
+"Bayonetting isn't my business."
+
+"Your own safety is. How can you bear to let other men fight for you?"
+
+"They're not fighting for _me_, Mother. You ask them if they are, and
+see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God knows what; but
+they're no more fighting for me than they're fighting for Aunt
+Emmeline."
+
+"They _are_ fighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting for everything
+that's weak and defenceless."
+
+"Well, then, they're not fighting for me. I'm not weak and defenceless,"
+said Michael.
+
+"All the more shame for you, then."
+
+He smiled, acknowledging her score.
+
+"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the opening for
+a repartee. It was quite a nice one."
+
+"If," she said, "you were only _doing_ something. But you go on with
+your own things as though nothing had happened."
+
+"I _am_ doing something. I'm keeping sane. And I'm keeping sanity alive
+in other people."
+
+"Much you care for other people," said Frances as she left the room.
+
+But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him again. She
+went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his room.
+
+"_Well?_" he said.
+
+"It's no use. He won't go."
+
+And Frances, quite suddenly and to her own surprise, burst into tears.
+
+He drew her to him, and she clung to him, sobbing softly.
+
+"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's as
+obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."
+
+He pressed her tighter to him. He loved her in her unfamiliar weakness,
+crying and clinging to him.
+
+"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm glad he
+didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to him, I couldn't
+bear to be the one who made him go."
+
+After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.
+
+They were silent.
+
+"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.
+
+But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.
+
+"He must know that _public_ feeling's pretty strong against him. To say
+nothing of _my_ feeling and _your_ feeling."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his father and
+his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't bear to look at
+Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her
+way as much as possible.
+
+As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he against
+it.
+
+But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these
+antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go.
+Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had always
+offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul. From his very
+first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had
+seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective
+emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils
+and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that
+challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of
+what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more
+appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their
+Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one
+monstrous soul.
+
+And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment,
+was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the
+awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and
+from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine
+emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you
+and you were done for. He was determined that it shouldn't get him. They
+couldn't see--and that was Michael's grievance--that his resistance was
+his strength and not his weakness.
+
+Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize
+that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the same entity
+as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the party, who had
+wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of
+forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted to remember." He was
+Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about
+shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the
+other fellows were doing. He objected to being suddenly required to feel
+patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that
+Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was
+in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.
+
+Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.
+
+He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that
+he resented. There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and
+tyranny about it all.
+
+It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to fight. He
+had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight any day in a
+cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a cause that had not
+been messed about so much by other people. Other people had not put
+pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact they had tried to stop
+him. Michael was also aware that in the matter of Ireland his emotions,
+though shared by considerable numbers of the Irish people, were not
+shared by his family or by many people whom he knew; to all intents and
+purposes he had them to himself.
+
+It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and mother, for
+they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the more he would
+seem to them to be a shirker.
+
+He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff,
+reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's silence
+when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their eyes--his
+mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the unspoken question:
+"Why don't you go and get killed--for England--like other people?"
+
+Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible, palpable; he
+knew where he was with them. What he could not stand was that empty
+spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him where he was most
+vulnerable--in his imagination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.
+
+It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion, and your
+religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored Beauty as the
+supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else; if you lived,
+impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive; and for no other end,
+how could you consent to take part in this bloody business? That would
+be the last betrayal, the most cowardly surrender.
+
+And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one of the
+leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the world, of all
+the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For Michael, even more than Ellis, had given himself up as lost.
+
+And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect. When the
+young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed it with a calm,
+high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on, without pay, without
+praise, without any sort of recognition. Any fool could fight; but, if
+you were an artist, your honour bound you to ignore the material
+contest, to refuse, even to your country, the surrender of the highest
+that you knew. They believed with the utmost fervour and sincerity that
+they defied Germany more effectually, because more spiritually, by going
+on and producing fine things with imperturbability than if they went out
+against the German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they
+were restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.
+
+They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly, on
+Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease (but rather
+less than more) in Stephen's study.
+
+They had asked each other: "Are _you_ going to fight for your country?"
+
+And Ellis had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country; and
+Mitchell had said he hadn't got a country, so there was no point in his
+fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could show him a country
+that cared for the arts before anything he'd fight for it; but that
+England was very far from being that country.
+
+And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.
+
+And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not listening to
+what was said.
+
+And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral. Michael
+said to himself that he could stand these massed war emotions if they
+were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral who
+had never cared a damn about either before the War.
+
+Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired whether
+Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral?
+
+Michael shrugged his shoulders. "Why bother," he said, "about Rheims
+Cathedral and Louvain? From your point of view it's all right. If
+Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the enemy's artillery
+they've got to go. They didn't happen to be in the way of ours,
+that's all."
+
+Michael's mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its malady.
+He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of the Allies and
+to justify the acts of Germany.
+
+"It's up to the French to defend Paris. And what have we got to do with
+Alsace-Lorraine? As if every inteligent Frenchman didn't know that
+Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt. No. I'm not pro-German. I simply
+see things as they are."
+
+"I think," Frances would say placably, "we'd better not talk about the
+War."
+
+He would remind them that it was not his subject.
+
+And John laughed at him. "Poor old Nick hates the War because it's
+dished him. He knows his poems can't come out till it's over."
+
+As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.
+
+After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris. As Stephen pointed
+out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael. In magnificent
+defiance of the enemy, the "New Poems" of Michael Harrison, with
+illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as forthcoming in
+October; and Morton Ellis's "Eccentricities," with illustrations by
+Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month. Even Wadham's poems
+would come out some time, perhaps next spring.
+
+Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War Office as
+posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the morale of the
+Allied Armies. "If England could afford to publish Michael--"
+
+Michael's family made no comment on the appearance of his poems. The
+book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for weeks.
+When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none of his
+people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or hold it in
+their hands. It seemed to Michael that they were conscious of it all the
+time, and that they turned their faces away from it pointedly. They
+hated it. They hated him for having written it.
+
+He remembered that it had been different when his first book had come
+out two years ago. They had read that; they had snatched at all the
+reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was that they
+had missed.
+
+They had taken each other aside, and it had been:
+
+"Anthony, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+"Dorothy, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+"Nicky, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+He remembered his mother's apology for not understanding them: "Darling,
+I _do_ see that they're very beautiful." He remembered how he had wished
+that they would give up the struggle and leave his poems alone. They
+were not written for them. He had been amused and irritated when he had
+seen his father holding the book doggedly in front of him, his poor old
+hands twitching with embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was
+looking at him.
+
+And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was
+sensitive to the least quiver of his mother's upper lip.
+
+Veronica's were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did not hunt
+him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.
+
+Veronica had been rejected too. She was not strong enough to nurse in
+the hospitals. She was only strong enough to work from morning to night,
+packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the Belgian soldiers. She
+wanted Michael to be sorry for her because she couldn't be a nurse.
+Rosalind Jervis was a nurse. But he was not sorry. He said he would very
+much rather she didn't do anything that Rosalind did.
+
+"So would Nicky," he said.
+
+And then: "Veronica, do _you_ think I ought to enlist?"
+
+The thought was beginning to obsess him.
+
+"No," she said; "you're different.
+
+"I know how you feel about it. Nicky's heart and soul are in the War. If
+he's killed it can only kill his body. _Your_ soul isn't in it. It would
+kill your soul."
+
+"It's killing it now, killing everything I care for."
+
+"Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can't kill."
+
+That was one Sunday evening in October. They were standing together on
+the long terrace under the house wall. Before them, a little to the
+right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree rose over the garden.
+The curved and dipping branches swayed and swung in a low wind that
+moved like quiet water.
+
+"Michael," she said, "do look what's happening to that tree."
+
+"I see," he said.
+
+It made him sad to look at the tree; it made him sad to look at
+Veronica--because both the tree and Veronica were beautiful.
+
+"When I was a little girl I used to sit and look and look at that tree
+till it changed and got all thin and queer and began to move towards me.
+
+"I never knew whether it had really happened or not; I don't know
+now--or whether it was the tree or me. It was as if by looking and
+looking you could make the tree more real and more alive."
+
+Michael remembered something.
+
+"Dorothy says you saw Ferdie the night he died."
+
+"So I did. But that's not the same thing. I didn't have to look and
+look. I just saw him. I _sort_ of saw Frank that last night--when the
+call came--only sort of--but I knew he was going to be killed.
+
+"I didn't see him nearly so distinctly as I saw Nicky-"
+
+"Nicky? You didn't see him--as you saw Ferdie?"
+
+"No, no, no! it was ages ago--in Germany--before he married. I saw him
+with Desmond."
+
+"Have you ever seen me?"
+
+"Not yet. That's because you don't want me as they did."
+
+"Don't I! Don't I!"
+
+And she said again: "Not yet."
+
+Nicky had had leave for Christmas. He had come and gone.
+
+Frances and Anthony were depressed; they were beginning to be
+frightened.
+
+For Nicky had finished his training. He might be sent out any day.
+
+Nicky had had some moments of depression. Nothing had been heard of the
+Moving Fortress. Again, the War Office had given no sign of having
+received it. It was hard luck, he said, on Drayton.
+
+And John was depressed after he had gone.
+
+"They'd much better have taken me," he said.
+
+"What's the good of sending the best brains in the Army to get pounded?
+There's Drayton. He ought to have been in the Ordnance. He's killed.
+
+"And here's Nicky. Nicky ought to be in the engineers or the gunners or
+the Royal Flying Corps; but he's got to stand in the trenches and
+be pounded.
+
+"Lot they care about anybody's brains. Drayton could have told Kitchener
+that we can't win this war without high-explosive shells. So
+could Nicky.
+
+"You bet they've stuck all those plans and models in the sanitary
+dust-bin behind the War Office back door. It's enough to make Nicky blow
+his brains out."
+
+"Nicky doesn't care, really," Veronica said. "He just leaves things--and
+goes on."
+
+That night, after the others had gone to bed, Michael stayed behind with
+his father.
+
+"It must look to you," he said, "as if I ought to have gone instead of
+Nicky."
+
+"I don't say so, Michael. And I'm sure Nicky wouldn't."
+
+"No, but you both think it. You see, if I went I shouldn't be any good
+at it. Not the same good as Nicky. He wants to go and I don't. Can't you
+see it's different?"
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "I see. I've seen it for some time."
+
+And Michael remembered the night in August when his brother came to him
+in his room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beauty--the Forlorn Hope of God--if he cared for it supremely, why was
+he pursued and tormented by the thought of the space between him
+and Nicky?
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Michael had gone to Stephen's house.
+
+He was no longer at his ease there. It seemed to him that Lawrence's
+eyes followed him too; not with hatred, but with a curious
+meditative wonder.
+
+To-night Stephen said to him, "Did you know that Réveillaud's killed?"
+
+"Killed? Killed? I didn't even know he was fighting."
+
+Lawrence laughed. "What did you suppose he was doing?"
+
+"No--but how?"
+
+"Out with the patrol and shot down. There you are--"
+
+He shoved the _Times_ to him, pointing to the extract from _Le Matin_:
+"It is with regret that we record the death of M. Jules Réveillaud, the
+brilliant young poet and critic--"
+
+Michael stared at the first three lines; something in his mind prevented
+him from going on to the rest, as if he did not care to read about
+Réveillaud and know how he died.
+
+"It is with regret that we record the death. It is with regret that we
+record--with regret--"
+
+Then he read on, slowly and carefully, to the end. It was a long
+paragraph.
+
+"To think," he said at last, "that this revolting thing should have
+happened to him."
+
+"His death?"
+
+"No--_this_. The _Matin_ never mentioned Réveillaud before. None of the
+big papers, none of the big reviews noticed his existence except to
+sneer at him. He goes out and gets killed like any little bourgeois, and
+the swine plaster him all over with their filthy praise. He'd rather
+they'd spat on him."
+
+He meditated fiercely. "Well--he couldn't help it. He was conscripted."
+
+"You think he wouldn't have gone of his own accord?"
+
+"I'm certain he wouldn't."
+
+"And I'm certain he would."
+
+"I wish to God we'd got conscription here. I'd rather the Government
+commandeered my body than stand this everlasting interference with
+my soul."
+
+"Then," said Lawrence, "you'll not be surprised at my enlisting."
+
+"You're not--"
+
+"I am. I'd have been in the first week if I'd known what to do about
+Vera."
+
+"But--it's--it's not sane."
+
+"Perhaps not. But it's Irish."
+
+"Irish? I can understand ordinary Irishmen rushing into a European row
+for the row's sake, just because they haven't got a civil war to mess
+about in. But you--of all Irishmen--why on earth should _you_ be in it?"
+
+"Because I want to be in it."
+
+"I thought," said Michael, "you were to have been a thorn in England's
+side?"
+
+"So I was. So I am. But not at this minute. My grandmother was a hard
+Ulster woman and I hated her. But I wouldn't be a thorn in my
+grandmother's side if the old lady was assaulted by a brutal voluptuary,
+and I saw her down and fighting for her honour.
+
+"I've been a thorn in England's side all my life. But it's nothing to
+the thorn I'll be if I'm killed fighting for her."
+
+"Why--why--if you want to fight in the civil war afterwards?"
+
+"Why? Because I'm one of the few Irishmen who can reason straight. I was
+going into the civil war last year because it was a fight for freedom.
+I'm going into this War this year because it's a bigger fight for a
+bigger freedom.
+
+"You can't have a free Ireland without a free England, any more than you
+can have religious liberty without political liberty. If the Orangemen
+understood anything at all about it they'd see it was the Nationalists
+and the Sinn Feiners that'll help them to put down Catholicism
+in Ireland."
+
+"You think it matters to Ireland whether Germany licks us or we lick
+Germany?"
+
+"I think it matters to the whole world."
+
+"What's changed you?" said Michael.
+
+He was angry with Lawrence. He thought: "He hasn't any excuse for
+failing us. He hasn't been conscripted."
+
+"Nothing's changed me. But supposing it didn't matter to the whole
+world, or even to Europe, and supposing the Allies were beaten in the
+end, you and I shouldn't be beaten, once we'd stripped ourselves,
+stripped our souls clean, and gone in.
+
+"Victory, Michael--victory is a state of mind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity.
+
+He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he had
+said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not making it easy
+now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered about him,
+fluttering with anxiety.
+
+When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for Veronica.
+
+Veronica said, "You must let him go."
+
+"I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's over age.
+He's no more fit than I am."
+
+"You'll have to, sooner or later."
+
+"Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let them
+come and take him."
+
+"It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll tear at you
+if you keep him."
+
+"He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his tearing.
+I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded, paralysed, broken
+to pieces."
+
+"You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully."
+
+"I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once. But he
+came back. He can't really do without me."
+
+"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and what he
+wants most."
+
+"_I_ used to be what he wanted most."
+
+"Well--it's his honour now."
+
+"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy. They're men
+and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a woman.
+
+"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep him--they say
+you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the way you go on!"
+
+"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have kept Nicky
+for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him. She wants
+Michael to go."
+
+"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are lying.
+Either they don't care--they're just _lumps_, with no hearts and no
+nerves in them--or they lie.
+
+"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each other,
+like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael sick."
+
+"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut about
+and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and
+sentimentalizing--
+
+"Lying--lying--lying."
+
+"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it
+sends them off happy?"
+
+"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever happened to us.
+I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my life."
+
+"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up. You were a
+miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you look as if every
+drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens. If that's
+your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself. It seems to be all
+you've got."
+
+"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it _would_ have been
+all I've got."
+
+Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really
+was. The child was not a child any more. She was a woman, astonishingly
+and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in;
+they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with
+perfect accuracy.
+
+"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still, you can
+thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony."
+
+Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's your
+beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're keeping
+him for."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She knew; and Lawrence knew.
+
+That night he told her that if he hadn't wanted to enlist he'd be driven
+to it to get away from her.
+
+And she was frightened and held her tongue.
+
+Then she got desperate. She did things. She intrigued behind his back to
+keep him; and he found her out.
+
+He came to her, furious.
+
+"You needn't lie about it," he said. "I know what you've done. You've
+been writing letters and getting at people. You've told the truth about
+my age and you've lied about my health. You've even gone round cadging
+for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press Bureau and the
+Intelligence Department, and God only knows whether I'm supposed to have
+put you up to it."
+
+"I took care of that, Larry."
+
+"You? You'd no right to interfere with my affairs."
+
+"Hadn't I? Not after living with you seven years?"
+
+"If you'd lived with me seven centuries you'd have had no right to try
+to keep a man back from the Army."
+
+"I'm trying to keep a man's brain for my country."
+
+"You lie. It's my body you're trying to keep for yourself. As you did
+when I was going to Ireland."
+
+"Oh, then--I tried to stop you from being a traitor to England. They'd
+have hanged you, my dear, for that."
+
+"Traitor? It's women like you that are the traitors. My God, if there
+was a Government in this country that could govern, you'd be strung up
+in a row, all of you, and hanged."
+
+"No wonder you think you're cut out for a soldier. You're cruel enough."
+
+"_You're_ cruel. I'd rather be hanged than live with you a day longer
+after what you've done. A Frenchman shot his _wife_ the other day for
+less than that."
+
+"What was 'less than that'?" she said.
+
+"She crawled after him to the camp, like a bitch.
+
+"He sent her away and she came again and again. He _had_ to shoot her."
+
+"Was there nothing to be said for her?"
+
+"There was. She knew it was a big risk and she took it. _You_ knew you
+were safe while you slimed my honour."
+
+"She loved him, and he shot her, and you think that's a fine thing.
+_How_ she must have loved him!"
+
+"Men don't want to be loved that way. That's the mistake you women will
+make."
+
+"It's the way you've taught us. I should like to know what other way you
+ever want us to love you?"
+
+"The way Veronica loves Nicky, and Dorothy loved Drayton and Frances
+loves Anthony."
+
+"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."
+
+"Men's lives aren't ruined that way. And not all women's."
+
+"Well, anyhow, if she'd loved him she'd have married him. And Frances
+loves her children better than Anthony, and Anthony knows it."
+
+"Veronica, then."
+
+"Veronica doesn't know what passion is. The poor child's anæmic."
+
+"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have more
+passion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."
+
+"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her eyelashes
+instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."
+
+He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.
+
+"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the Front.
+It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and pose as
+heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and mistresses--they're tired
+of because the poor things aren't young or pretty any longer."
+
+She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her. "I'm
+old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and uglier. And
+I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How _can_ I keep you when
+I'm old and ugly?"
+
+He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always worked
+in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained with crying.
+
+"That's how--by getting older.
+
+"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were when I
+first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm sure I
+love you."
+
+She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.
+
+"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they believe
+you; but not me."
+
+"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were married to
+me I should have enlisted months ago.
+
+"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm sick and
+tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with it. I'd rather
+be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house of yours."
+
+"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it now?"
+
+"Everything. Those damned lime-trees all round it. And that damned white
+wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.
+
+"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.
+
+"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.
+
+"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones,
+drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis
+are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk's
+the divinest thing in God's universe.
+
+"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my life--the
+one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from it."
+
+They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the next. And
+Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to train it upwards in
+the way she hated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the moustache
+stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He was another
+man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she hated him or not.
+
+But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best gown to
+do honour to his khaki.
+
+She said, "It'll be like living with another man."
+
+"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.
+
+And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her passion
+for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to violence, to
+perversity.
+
+And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out of her
+reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where he was
+stationed.
+
+"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot me?"
+
+"I might shoot _myself_. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear from me
+again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.
+
+She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent, till
+she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he had gone
+she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a sort of peace.
+She told herself that she would rather he were killed soon than that she
+should be tortured any longer with suspense.
+
+"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind. That
+would end it."
+
+And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers for fear
+lest she should see his name in the lists.
+
+But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement, and
+died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.
+
+The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before he died.
+She gave details and a message.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to forgive him
+and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought it would be (he
+means the fighting) only much more so--all except this last bit.
+
+"He wants you to tell Michael and Dicky?--Nicky?--that. He says: 'It's
+odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'
+
+"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go to the
+War.)"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"8.30. It is all over.
+
+"He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his love."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Vera said to herself: "He didn't. She made that up."
+
+She hated the Red Cross woman who had been with Lawrence and had seen so
+much; who had dared to tell her what he meant and to make up messages.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+Nicholas had applied for a commission, and he had got it, and Frances
+was glad.
+
+She had been proud of him because he had chosen the ranks instead of the
+Officers' Training Corps; but she persisted in the belief that, when it
+came to the trenches, second lieutenants stood a better chance. "For
+goodness' sake," Nicholas had said, "don't tell her that they're over
+the parapet first."
+
+That was in December. In February he got a week's leave--sudden,
+unforeseen and special leave. It had to be broken to her this time that
+leave as special as that meant war-leave.
+
+She said, "Well, if it does, I shall have him for six whole days." She
+had learned how to handle time, how to prolong the present, drawing it
+out minute by minute; thus her happiness, stretched to the snapping
+point, vibrated.
+
+She had a sense of its vibration now, as she looked at Nicholas. It was
+the evening of the day he had come home, and they were all in the
+drawing-room together. He was standing before her, straight and tall, on
+the hearthrug, where he had lifted the Persian cat, Timmy, out of his
+sleep and was holding him against his breast. Timmy spread himself
+there, softly and heavily, hanging on to Nicky's shoulder by his claws;
+he butted Nicky's chin with his head, purring.
+
+"I don't know how I'm to tear myself away from Timmy. I should like to
+wear him alive as a waistcoat. Or hanging on my shoulder like a cape,
+with his tail curled tight round my neck. He'd look uncommonly _chic_
+with all his khaki patches."
+
+"Why don't you take him with you?" Anthony said.
+
+"'Cos he's Ronny's cat."
+
+"He isn't. I've given him to you," Veronica said.
+
+"When?"
+
+"Now, this minute. To sleep on your feet and keep you warm."
+
+Frances listened and thought: "What children--what babies they are,
+after all." If only this minute could be stretched out farther.
+
+"I mustn't," Nicky said. "I should spend hours in dalliance; and if a
+shell got him it would ruin my morale."
+
+Timmy, unhooked from Nicky's shoulder, lay limp in his arms. He lay on
+his back, in ecstasy, his legs apart, showing the soft, cream-white fur
+of his stomach. Nicky rubbed his face against the soft, cream-white fur.
+
+"I say, what a heavenly death it would be to die--smothered in Timmies."
+
+"Nicky, you're a beastly sensualist. That's what's the matter with you,"
+John said. And they all laughed.
+
+The minute broke, stretched to its furthest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances was making plans now for Nicky's week. There were things they
+could do, plays they could see, places they could go to. Anthony would
+let them have the big car as much as they wanted. For you could stretch
+time out by filling it; you could multiply the hours by what they held.
+
+"Ronny and I are going to get married to-morrow," Nicky said. "We
+settled it that we would at once, if I got war-leave. It's the best
+thing to do."
+
+"Of course," Frances said, "it's the best thing to do."
+
+But she had not allowed for it, nor for the pain it gave her. That pain
+shocked her. It was awful to think that, after all her surrenders,
+Nicky's happiness could give her pain. It meant that she had never let
+go her secret hold. She had been a hypocrite to herself.
+
+Nicky was talking on about it, excitedly, as he used to talk on about
+his pleasures when he was a child.
+
+If Dad'll let us have the racing car, we'll go down to Morfe. We can do
+it in a day."
+
+"My dear boy," Anthony said, "don't you know I've lent the house to the
+Red Cross, and let the shooting?"
+
+"I don't care. There's the little house in the village we can have. And
+Harker and his wife can look after us."
+
+"Harker gone to the War, and his wife's looking after his brother's
+children somewhere. And I've put two Belgian refugees into it."
+
+"_They_ can look after us," said Nicky. "We'll stay three days, run
+back, and have one day at home before I sail."
+
+Frances gave up her play with time. She was beaten.
+
+And still she thought: "At least I shall have him one whole day."
+
+And then she looked across the room to Michael, as if Michael's face
+had signalled to her. His clear, sun-burnt skin showed blotches of white
+where the blood had left it. A light sweat was on his forehead. When
+their eyes met, he shifted his position to give himself an appearance
+of ease.
+
+Michael had not reckoned on his brother's marriage, either. It was when
+he asked himself: "On what, then, _had_ he been reckoning?" that the
+sweat broke out on his forehead.
+
+He had not reckoned on anything. But the sudden realization of what he
+might have reckoned on made him sick. He couldn't bear to think of Ronny
+married. And yet again, he couldn't bear to think of Nicky not marrying
+her. If he had had a hold on her he would have let her go. In this he
+knew himself to be sincere. He had had no hold on her, and to talk about
+letting her go was idiotic; still, there was a violent pursuit and
+possession by the mind--and Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy,
+that psychic assault and outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual
+surrender of her was so perfect that his very imagination gave her up
+to Nicky.
+
+He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing could
+take their three days from them, even when the War had done its worst.
+
+And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she think I
+was reckoning on that?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead Town
+Hall, before the Registrar.
+
+They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying and
+circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky said, whole
+handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals, with a clear run
+before him, he let out the racing car to its top speed on the Great
+North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed like some immense,
+nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all its weight were purged
+from it by speed. It flew up and down the hills of Hertfordshire and
+Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat country round Peterborough and
+Grantham, a country of silver green and emerald green grass and purple
+fallow land and bright red houses; and so on to the great plain of York,
+and past Reyburn up towards the bare hill country netted with grey
+stone walls.
+
+Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road.
+
+It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed enormous
+and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen moon. Other
+hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous, stood piled up in
+front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale.
+
+Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was as if,
+ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that incredibly high,
+immense obstruction. They were thrilled, mysteriously, as before the
+image of monstrous and omnipotent disaster. Then the dale widened; it
+made way for them and saved them.
+
+The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a coronet
+and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights of the village
+below, the village they were making for, showed as if dropped out of the
+pattern on the hill.
+
+One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage chamber.
+Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch to receive
+them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage torches. The old
+woman held her light low down, lighting the flagstone of the threshold.
+The old man lifted his high, showing the lintel of the door. It was so
+low that Nicholas had to stoop to go in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning they read the date cut in the wall above the porch: 1665.
+
+The house was old and bent and grey. Its windows were narrow slits in
+the stone mullions. It crouched under the dipping boughs of the ash-tree
+that sheltered it. Inside there was just room for Veronica to stand up.
+Nicholas had to stoop or knock his head against the beams. It had only
+four rooms, two for Nicholas and Veronica, and two for Jean and Suzanne.
+And it was rather dark.
+
+But it pleased them. They said it was their apple-tree-house grown up
+because they were grown up, and keeping strict proportions. You had to
+crawl into it, and you were only really comfortable sitting or lying
+down. So they sat outside it, watching old Suzanne through the window as
+she moved about the house place, cooking Belgian food for them, and old
+Jean as he worked in the garden.
+
+Veronica loved Jean and Suzanne. She had found out all about them the
+first morning.
+
+"Only think, Nicky. They're from Termonde, and their house was burnt
+behind them as they left it. They saw horrors, and their son was killed
+in the War.
+
+"Yet they're happy and at peace. Almost as if they'd forgotten. He'll
+plant flowers in his garden."
+
+"They're old, Ronny. And perhaps they were tired already when it
+happened."
+
+"Yes, that must be it. They're old and tired."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now it was the last adventure of their last day. They were walking
+on the slope of Renton Moor that looks over Rathdale towards Greffington
+Edge. The light from the west poured itself in vivid green down the
+valley below them, broke itself into purple on Karva Hill to the north
+above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle blue and violet from the
+stone rampart of the Edge.
+
+Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources of the
+country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge, on Sarrack
+Moor. The raking lines of the hills were straight as if they had been
+measured with a ruler and then planed.
+
+"Ronny," he said at last, "we've licked 'em in the first round, you and
+I. The beastly Boche can't do us out of these three days."
+
+"No. We've been absolutely happy. And we'll never forget it. Never."
+
+"Perhaps it was a bit rough on Dad and Mummy, our carting ourselves up
+here, away from them. But, you see, they don't really mind. They're
+feeling about it now just as we feel about it. I knew they would."
+
+There had been a letter from Frances saying she was glad they'd gone.
+She was so happy thinking how happy they were.
+
+"They're angels, Nicky."
+
+"Aren't they? Simply angels. That's the rotten part of it. I wish--
+
+"I wish I could tell them what I think of them. But you can't, somehow.
+It sticks in your throat, that sort of thing."
+
+"You needn't," she said; "they know all right."
+
+She thought: "This is what he wants me to tell them about--afterwards."
+
+"Yes, but--I must have hurt them--hurt them horribly--lots of times. I
+wish I hadn't.
+
+"But" he went on, "they're funny, you know. Dad actually thought it
+idiotic of us to do this. He said it would only make it harder for us
+when I had to go. They don't see that it's just piling it on--going from
+one jolly adventure to another.
+
+"I'm afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on you;
+because the rest of it's all my show."
+
+"But it isn't all your show, Nicky darling. It's mine, and it's
+theirs--because we haven't grudged you your adventure."
+
+"That's exactly how I want you to feel about it."
+
+"And they're assuming that I shan't come back. Which, if you come to
+think of it, is pretty big cheek. They talk, and they think, as though
+nobody ever got through. Whereas I've every intention of getting through
+and of coming back. I'm the sort of chap who does get through, who does
+come back."
+
+"And even if I wasn't, if they studied statistics they'd see that it's a
+thousand chances to one against the Boches getting me--just me out of
+all the other chaps. As if I was so jolly important.
+
+"No; don't interrupt. Let's get this thing straight while we can.
+Supposing--just supposing I didn't get through--didn't come
+back--supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to think
+of _that_, not as a clumsy accident, but just another awfully
+interesting thing I'd done.
+
+"Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you took
+the thing as a shock instead of--of what it probably really is, and went
+and got cut up about it, you might start the little beggar with a sort
+of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that it would be jumpy
+all its life.
+
+"It ought," said Nicky, "to sit in its little house all quiet and comfy
+till it's time for it to come out."
+
+He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might be, what
+probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted more than
+anything, next to Veronica.
+
+"It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy."
+
+"If _that_ came off all right," he said, "it would make it up to Mother
+no end."
+
+"It wouldn't make it up to me."
+
+"You don't know what it would do," he said.
+
+She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but you."
+
+"That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of kin--the one
+they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way; it'll only make him
+madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid of you or Mummy or Dad, or
+Michael being told first."
+
+"It doesn't matter a bit who's _told_ first. I shall _know_ first," she
+said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't kill either me or the baby.
+If a shock could kill me I should have died long ago."
+
+"When?"
+
+"When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear it any
+longer, something happened."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't know what it _is_ now; I only know what it does.
+It always happens--always--when you want it awfully. And when you're
+quiet and give yourself up to it."
+
+"It'll happen again."
+
+He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite interested;
+puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if something had come
+between him and her.
+
+"You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so that when
+things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to happen to
+Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she was absolutely
+happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came to her. And, Nicky,
+they were the same queer things that came to me. It was like something
+getting through to her."
+
+"I say--did you ever do it to me?"
+
+"Only once, when you wanted it awfully."
+
+"When? When?"
+
+Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her trail.
+
+"When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it didn't
+matter, it wasn't the end."
+
+"But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself. It looks
+as if it worked, then?"
+
+"It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with _you_ it would
+always come; because you're more _me_ than other people; I mean I care
+more for you."
+
+She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother about me,
+Nicky. If _the_ most awful thing happened, and you didn't come back, It
+would come."
+
+"I wish I knew what It was," he said.
+
+"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's God."
+
+"That's why _they're_ so magnificently brave--Dorothy and Aunt Frances
+and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't know it's there;
+even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and still they go on bearing
+and bearing; and they were glad to give you up."
+
+"I know," he said; "lots of people _say_ they're glad, but they really
+_are_ glad."
+
+He meditated.
+
+"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's praying or
+something; and if you're going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you'd
+be careful; because it seems to me that if there's anything in it at
+all, there might be hitches. I mean to say, you might work it just
+enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from
+being blown off. Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might
+bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic.
+
+"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I thought
+about it. Luckily one doesn't think."
+
+"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than I tried
+before."
+
+"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"
+
+"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin with, I
+won't believe that you're not going to get through.
+
+"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't believe
+you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to something
+else. It doesn't end him.'"
+
+He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a
+pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to.
+
+Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind talking about
+it?" she said.
+
+"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I believe
+in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling, that you go on.
+You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't care. They used to
+think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn't care. But I really
+didn't. Things, most things, don't much matter, because there's always
+something else. You go on to it.
+
+"I care for _you_. _You_ matter most awfully; and my people; but most of
+all you. You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the
+first time I heard you calling out to me to come and sit on your bed
+because you were frightened. You always will matter.
+
+"But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make me
+_think_ she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her because she
+was going to have a baby. And _that_ was because I remembered you and
+the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would have kept me straight
+with women if nothing else did.
+
+"Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying you till
+Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too late.
+
+"That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby."
+
+"Yes, Nicky.
+
+"I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The cottage
+belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?"
+
+"I think he'd give it to you if you asked him."
+
+"For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll give it to
+me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where it's all quiet
+and you'd never know there was a war at all--even the Belgians have
+forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look at that hill, because
+it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I simply won't think of anything
+that isn't straight and beautiful. And I shall get strong. Then the baby
+will be straight and beautiful and strong, too.
+
+"I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little things
+that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and she, to be on
+the edge of something great, something satisfying and revealing. It was
+to come in a look or a word; and both would remember it afterwards
+for ever.
+
+In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline, and
+Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say good-bye.
+And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited and happy, as he
+had gone off on his wedding journey. And between Frances and her son the
+great thing remained unsaid.
+
+Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine sand.
+
+
+     _February 27th, 1915._
+          B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you all for
+the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long way, that's been
+seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it because it "looked as
+if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It makes me feel as if I
+_was_ Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs, rampant, clawing at the Boches.
+Just think of the effect if he got up over the parapet!
+
+The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't think what
+else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those tubes of chutney are
+a good idea.
+
+No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no English
+and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to himself, you
+simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old Mick could send
+himself out by himself against the whole German Army he'd manage to put
+in some first rate fancy work in the second or two before they got him.
+He'd be quite capable of going off and doing grisly things that would
+make me faint with funk, if he was by himself, with nothing but the eye
+of God to look at him. And _then_ he'd rather God wasn't there. He
+always _was_ afraid of having a crowd with him.
+
+The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were you two,
+I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he is
+the youngest.
+
+And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest curtain
+fire there _are_ holes; there are more holes than there is stuff; and
+the chances are I shall be where a hole is.
+
+Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight for you
+like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's going to get
+you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of personal
+resentment which must be the worst part of the business. Bits of shells
+that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew all about before
+and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted out in the open, the
+peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is it more than the peculiar
+awfulness of being run over by express trains let loose about the sky?
+Tell Don that when shrapnel empties itself over your head like an old
+tin pail, you might feel injured, but the big shell has a most disarming
+air of not being able to help itself, of not looking for anybody in
+particular. It's so innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it
+any day than fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe.
+
+That's an answer to his question.
+
+And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action.
+Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I told
+her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but Stephen was
+absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than anything you could
+have imagined. I'm not speaking only for myself.
+
+There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between your
+parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it too--when you're
+afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before you get there. But it
+doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply swinging you on to them, and
+that swing makes up for all the rotten times put together. You needn't
+be sorry for us. It's waste of pity.
+
+I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us. But I'm
+not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving,
+
+     NICKY.
+
+               May, 1915.
+          B.E.F., FRANCE
+
+My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when you
+loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you needn't
+do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the papers more or
+less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith is saying or what
+Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's motives are. Personally, I
+should say he was simply trying, like most of us, to save his country.
+Looks like it. But you can tell him from me, if he gets them to send us
+enough shells out _in time_ we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow
+that sort of thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much
+better than you, if you don't mind my saying so.
+
+What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the last
+sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my billet for
+one of his _worst_ jokes. And I like to hear about Morrie going on the
+bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if it really is anxiety
+about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd leave off thinking about me,
+poor old thing.
+
+More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's looking and
+what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot, and she may tell
+you things she won't tell the others. That's why I'm glad you're there
+and not here.
+
+And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel about it. I
+think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were a "putrid
+Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes me like
+religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say,
+but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't
+take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that
+expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it
+isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead
+of the Government, you'd have been in at the start, before me.
+
+Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never can
+tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those of us who
+are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a long way. There's
+no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the finish; so that the
+patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to join up will be jolly well
+sold, poor devils. Take me, for instance. If I'd got what I wanted and
+been out in Flanders in 1914, ten to one I should have been in the
+retreat from Mons, like Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have
+given my head to have gone to Gallipoli; but _now_, well, I'm just as
+glad I'm not mixed up in that affair.
+
+Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you can get
+out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to win the War.
+At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the Rhine, while all
+the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash on the way there. So
+if you're going to be converted let's hope you'll be converted quick.
+
+If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight away.
+There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a Tommy. For
+instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your brother Tommies. I
+slept for three months next to a beastly blighter who used to come in
+drunk and tread on my face and be ill all over me.
+
+Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything that's
+happened out here. But that's because at home your mind isn't adjusted
+to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise to me every time.
+I _couldn't_ get used to him. Whereas out here everything's shifted in
+the queerest way. Your mind shifts. You funk your first and your second
+sight, say, of a bad stretcher case; but when it comes to the third and
+the fourth you don't funk at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit
+surprised. It's all in the picture, and you're in the picture too.
+There's a sort of horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly
+dream which doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the
+beastliness.
+
+No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what d'you
+think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run over the
+other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian at that.
+There were two or three women round it, crying and gesticulating. It
+looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath of blood. That made me
+sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the picture. I hadn't
+bargained for him.
+
+Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa--do you remember how he
+_would_ tell us about them?--weren't in it with the things that happened
+here. Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do, apparently on
+their own, are simply unbelievable--what the war correspondents call
+"fantastic postures." But I haven't got to the point when I can slap my
+thighs, and roar with laughter--if they happen to be Germans.
+
+In between, the boredom is so awful that I've heard some of our men say
+they'd rather have things happening. And, of course, we're all hoping
+that when those shells come along there won't be quite so much
+"between."
+
+Love to Ronny and Mother and all of them.--Your very affectionate,
+
+     NICHOLAS.
+
+
+          June 1st, 1915.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+My Darling Ronny,--Yes, I think all your letters must have come, because
+you've answered everything. You always tell me just what I want to know.
+When I see the fat envelopes coming I know they're going to be
+chock-full of the things I've happened to be thinking about. Don't let's
+ever forget to put the dates, because I make out that I've always
+dreamed about you, too, the nights you've written.
+
+And so the Aunties are working in the War Hospital Supply Depôt? It's
+frightfully funny what Dorothy says about their enjoying the War and
+feeling so important. Don't let her grudge it them, though; it's all the
+enjoyment, or importance, they're ever had in their lives, poor dears.
+But I shall know, if a swab bursts in my inside, that it's Auntie
+Edie's. As for Auntie Emmeline's, I can't even imagine what they'd be
+like--monstrosities--or little babies injured at birth. Aunt Louie's
+would be well-shaped and firm, but erring a little on the hard side,
+don't you think?
+
+That reminds me, I suppose I may tell you now since it's been in the
+papers, that we've actually got Moving Fortresses out here. I haven't
+seen them yet, but a fellow who has thinks they must be uncommonly like
+Drayton's and my thing. I suspect, from what he says, they're a bit
+better, though. We hadn't got the rocking-horse idea.
+
+It's odd--this time last year I should have gone off my head with agony
+at the mere thought of anybody getting in before us; and now I don't
+care a bit. I do mind rather for Drayton's sake, though I don't suppose
+he cares, either. The great thing is that it's been done, and done
+better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the Germans had got on to
+them, and trotted them out first, and one of our own guns had potted him
+or me, _that_ would have been a jolly sell.
+
+What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the awful
+thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the base hospital
+on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock, and--_he never came
+back again_. It doesn't matter, because the weather's so warm now that I
+don't want him. But I'm sorry because you all gave him to me and it
+looks as if I hadn't cared for him. But I did....
+
+     June 10th.
+
+Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather
+suddenly. I wish I could tell you _what_, but we mustn't let on what
+happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still, there are all
+the other things I couldn't say anything about at the time.
+
+If you _must_ know, I've been up "over the top" three times now since I
+came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all right.
+
+Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's been like
+that every time (except that I've got over the queer funky feeling
+half-way through). It'll be like that again next time, I know. Because
+now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't tell Dorothy this, because
+she'd think it was all rot--but when you're up first out of the trench
+and stand alone on the parapet, it's absolute happiness. And the charge
+is--well, it's simply heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till
+then; I certainly hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three
+days we had together.
+
+That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something rotten
+about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this
+gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's trying for) is
+nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks that's all there is in
+it, he doesn't know much about war, or love either. Though I'm bound to
+say there's a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing. He
+says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same
+as I do; but that it's simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the
+top--a hidden lust for killing, and the hidden memory of having killed,
+he called it. He's always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had
+been drunk.
+
+And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but "a
+ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give mine to a
+funny chap who _knows_ he's going to have collywobbles as soon as he
+gets out into the open.
+
+But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it, because
+they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of being killed.
+_That_--when you realize it--well, it's like the thing you told me about
+that you said you thought must be God because it's so real. I didn't
+understand it then, but I do now. You're bang up against reality--you're
+going clean into it--and the sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while
+one half of you is feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill
+and doing its best to keep on _this_ side reality. But I've been near
+enough to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come
+out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick. _He_'d
+write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's a sin that I
+should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't do anything
+with it.
+
+Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your loving,
+
+     NICKY.
+
+P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and Dorothy and
+Mother. It would save them half the misery they're probably
+going through.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the garden,
+weeding the delphinium border.
+
+It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was digging in
+the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering green peas and
+fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came through the open
+door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace with the piled up
+baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to Veronica.
+
+It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came, Veronica
+could time it by the striking of the clock heard through the open
+doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and then, almost
+on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious happiness.
+
+Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity made each
+small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged at the weeds,
+and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the palms of her hand
+smoothed over the places where they had been. She thought of old Jean
+and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at Renton, and of that
+tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest thing she had ever seen.
+
+And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the half-hour, not
+out of herself or out of her thoughts, but mysteriously and from
+somewhere a long way off.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through the door
+with her basket, and it was then that she saw Nicholas.
+
+He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised between her
+and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested in the act of
+looking back to see if she were following him. His eyes shone, vivid and
+blue, as they always shone when he was happy. He smiled at her, but
+with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to her, but with no sound.
+
+Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her heart was
+still; it beat steadily.
+
+She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust itself
+between them, and he was gone.
+
+And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had seen her
+when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of the sun.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+The young men had gone--Morton Ellis, who had said he was damned if he'd
+fight for his country; and Austin Mitchell who had said he hadn't got a
+country; and Monier-Owen, who had said that England was not a country
+you could fight for. George Wadham had gone long ago. That, Michael
+said, was to be expected. Even a weak gust could sweep young Wadham off
+his feet--and he had been fairly carried away. He could no more resist
+the vortex of the War than he could resist the vortex of the arts.
+
+Michael had two pitiful memories of the boy: one of young Wadham
+swaggering into Stephen's room in uniform (the first time he had it on),
+flushed and pleased with himself and talking excitedly about the "Great
+Game"; and one of young Wadham returned from the Front, mature and hard,
+not talking about the "Great Game" at all, and wincing palpably when
+other people talked; a young Wadham who, they said, ought to be arrested
+under the Defence of the Realm Act as a quencher of war-enthusiasms.
+
+The others had gone later, one by one, each with his own gesture:
+Mitchell and Monier-Owen when Stephen went; Ellis the day after
+Stephen's death. It had taken Stephen's death to draw him.
+
+Only Michael remained.
+
+He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going would
+inspire him to follow them. It, and Stephen's death, merely intensified
+the bitterness he felt towards the War. He was more than ever determined
+to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to his Forlorn Hope. If they
+fell back, all the more reason why be should go on.
+
+And, while he waited for the moment of vision, he continued Stephen's
+work on the _Green Review_. Stephen had left it to him when he went out.
+Michael tried to be faithful to the tradition he thus inherited; but
+gradually Stephen's spirit disappeared from the _Review_ and its place
+was taken by the clear, hard, unbreakable thing that was Michael's mind.
+
+And Michael knew that he was beginning to make himself felt.
+
+But Stephen's staff, such as it was, and nearly all his contributors had
+gone to the War, one after another, and Michael found himself taking all
+their places. He began to feel a strain, which he took to be the strain
+of overwork, and he went down to Renton to recover.
+
+That was on the Tuesday that followed Veronica's Sunday.
+
+He thought that down there he would get away from everything that did
+him harm: from his father's and mother's eyes; from his sister's proud,
+cold face; and from his young brother's smile; and from Veronica's
+beauty that saddened him; and from the sense of Nicky's danger that
+brooded as a secret obsession over the house. He would fill up the awful
+empty space. He thought: "For a whole fortnight I shall get away from
+this infernal War."
+
+But he did not get away from it. On every stage of the journey down he
+encountered soldiers going to the Front. He walked in the Park at
+Darlington between his trains, and wounded soldiers waited for him on
+every seat, shuffled towards him round every turning, hobbled after him
+on their crutches down every path. Their eyes looked at him with a
+shrewd hostility. He saw the young Yorkshire recruits drinking in the
+open spaces. Sergeants' eyes caught and measured him, appraising his
+physique. Behind and among them he saw Drayton's, and Réveillaud's, and
+Stephen's eyes; and young Wadham's eyes, strange and secretive and hard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Reyburn Michael's train was switched off to a side platform in the
+open. Before he left Darlington, a thin, light rain had begun to fall
+from a shred of blown cloud; and at Reyburn the burst mass was coming
+down. The place was full of the noise of rain. The drops tapped on the
+open platform and hissed as the wind drove them in a running stream.
+They drummed loudly on the station roof. But these sounds went out
+suddenly, covered by the trampling of feet.
+
+A band of Highlanders with their bagpipes marched into the station. They
+lined up solemnly along the open platform with their backs to Michael's
+train and their faces to the naked rails on the other side. Higher up
+Michael could see the breast of an engine; it was backing, backing,
+towards the troop-train that waited under the cover of the roof. He
+could hear the clank of the coupling and the recoil. At that sound the
+band had their mouths to their bagpipes and their fingers ready on the
+stops. Two or three officers hurried down from the station doors and
+stood ready.
+
+The train came on slowly, packed with men; men who thrust their heads
+and shoulders through the carriage windows, and knelt on the seats, and
+stood straining over each other's backs to look out; men whose faces
+were scarlet with excitement; men with open mouths shouting for joy.
+
+The officers saluted as it passed. It halted at the open platform, and
+suddenly the pipers began to play.
+
+Michael got out of his train and watched.
+
+Solemnly, in the grey evening of the rain, with their faces set in a
+sort of stern esctasy, the Highlanders played to their comrades. Michael
+did not know whether their tune was sad or gay. It poured itself into
+one mournful, savage, sacred cry of salutation and valediction. When it
+stopped the men shouted; there were voices that barked hoarsely and
+broke; voices that roared; young voices that screamed, strung up by the
+skirling of the bagpipes. The pipers played to them again.
+
+And suddenly Michael was overcome. Pity shook him and grief and an
+intolerable yearning, and shame. For one instant his soul rose up above
+the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he cowered under it,
+stripped and beaten. He clenched his fists, hating this emotion that
+stung him to tears and tore at his heart and at the hardness of
+his mind.
+
+As the troop-train moved slowly out of the station the pipers, piping
+more and more shrilly, swung round and marched beside it to the end of
+the platform. The band ceased abruptly, and the men answered with shout
+after shout of violent joy; they reared up through the windows,
+straining for the last look--and were gone.
+
+Michael turned to the porter who lifted his luggage from the rack. "What
+regiment are they?" he said.
+
+"Camerons, sir. Going to the Front."
+
+The clear, uncanny eyes of Veronica's father pursued him now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last he had got away from it.
+
+In Rathdale, at any rate, there was peace. The hills and their pastures,
+and the flat river fields were at peace. And in the villages of Morfe
+and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few men had gone from
+them. The rest were tied to the land, and they were more absorbed in the
+hay-harvest than in the War. Even the old Belgians in Veronica's cottage
+were at peace. They had forgotten.
+
+For three days Michael himself had peace.
+
+He went up to Veronica's hill and sat on it; and thought how for
+hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was not a
+soul whom he knew. In all his life he had never been more by himself.
+
+This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael's mind. So far
+from having got away from the War he had never been more conscious of it
+than he was now. What he had got away from was other people's
+consciousness. From the beginning the thing that threatened him had
+been, not the War but this collective war-spirit, clamouring for his
+private soul.
+
+For the first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found himself
+thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity, about the War.
+He had really known, half the time, that it was the greatest War of
+Independence that had ever been. As for his old hatred of the British
+Empire, he had seen long ago that there was no such thing, in the
+continental sense of Empire; there was a unique thing, the rule, more
+good than bad, of an imperial people. He had seen that the strength of
+the Allies was in exact proportion to the strength and the enlightenment
+of their democracies. Reckoning by decades, there could be no deadlock
+in the struggle; the deadlock meant a ten years' armistice and another
+war. He could not help seeing these things. His objection to occupying
+his mind with them had been that they were too easy.
+
+Now that he could look at it by himself he saw how the War might take
+hold of you like a religion. It was the Great War of Redemption. And
+redemption meant simply thousands and millions of men in troop-ships and
+troop-trains coming from the ends of the world to buy the freedom of the
+world with their bodies. It meant that the very fields he was looking
+over, and this beauty of the hills, those unused ramparts where no
+batteries were hid, and the small, silent villages, Morfe and Renton,
+were bought now with their bodies.
+
+He wondered how at this moment any sane man could be a Pacifist. And,
+wondering, he felt a reminiscent sting of grief and yearning. But he
+refused, resolutely, to feel any shame.
+
+His religion also was good; and, anyhow, you didn't choose your
+religion; it chose you.
+
+And on Saturday the letters came: John's letter enclosing the wire from
+the War Office, and the letter that Nicky's Colonel had written
+to Anthony.
+
+Nicky was killed.
+
+Michael took in the fact, and the date (it was last Sunday). There were
+some official regrets, but they made no impression on him. John's letter
+made no impression on him. Last Sunday Nicky was killed.
+
+He had not even unfolded the Colonel's letter yet. The close black lines
+showed through the thin paper. Their closeness repelled him. He did not
+want to know how his brother had died; at least not yet. He was afraid
+of the Colonel's letter. He felt that by simply not reading it he could
+put off the unbearable turn of the screw.
+
+He was shivering with cold. He drew up his chair to the wide, open
+hearth-place where there was no fire; he held out his hands over it. The
+wind swept down the chimney and made him colder; and he felt sick.
+
+He had been sitting there about an hour when Suzanne came in and asked
+him if he would like a little fire. He heard himself saying, "No, thank
+you," in a hard voice. The idea of warmth and comfort was disagreeable
+to him. Suzanne asked him then if he had had bad news? And he heard
+himself saying: "Yes," and Suzanne trying, trying very gently, to
+persuade him that it was perhaps only that Monsieur Nicky was wounded?
+
+"No? _Then_," said the old woman, "he is killed." And she began to cry.
+
+Michael couldn't stand that. He got up and opened the door into the
+outer room, and she passed through before him, sobbing and whimpering.
+Her voice came to him through the closed door in a sharp cry telling
+Jean that Monsieur Nicky was dead, and Jean's voice came, hushing her.
+
+Then he heard the feet of the old man shuffling across the kitchen
+floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and through the
+windows at the back of the room, he saw, without heeding, as the
+Belgians passed and went up into the fields together, weeping, leaving
+him alone.
+
+They had remembered.
+
+It was then that Michael read the Colonel's letter, and learned the
+manner of his brother's death: "... About a quarter past four o'clock in
+the afternoon his battalion was being pressed back, when he rallied his
+men and led them in as gallant an attack as was ever made by so small a
+number in this War. He was standing on the enemy's parapet when he was
+shot through the heart and fell. By a quarter to five the trench was
+stormed and taken, owing to his personal daring and impetus and to the
+affection and confidence he inspired.... We hear it continually said of
+our officers and men that 'they're all the same,' and I daresay as far
+as pluck goes they are. But, if I may say so, we all felt that your son
+had something that we haven't got...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael lay awake in the bed that had been his brother's marriage bed.
+The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him. For three nights the
+room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had never gone from it. They had
+compelled him to think of them. They had lain where he lay, falling
+asleep in each other's arms.
+
+The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them had in no
+way troubled him. It had been simply there like some exquisite
+atmosphere, intensifying his peace. He had had the same feeling he
+always had when Veronica was with him. He had liked to lie with his head
+on their pillow, to touch what they had touched, to look at the same
+things in the same room, to go in and out through the same doors over
+the same floors, remembering their hands and feet and eyes, and saying
+to himself: "They did this and this"; or, "That must have pleased them."
+
+It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine why it
+was not.
+
+And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of Nicky and
+Veronica together. The room had emptied itself of its own memory and
+significance. He was aware of nothing but the bare, spiritual space
+between him and Nicky. He lay contemplating it steadily and without
+any horror.
+
+He thought: "This ends it. Of course I shall go out now. I might have
+known that this would end it. _He_ knew."
+
+He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night in
+August. He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed,
+half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.
+
+Nicky had taken it for granted even then that he would go out some time.
+He remembered how he had said, "Not yet."
+
+He thought: "Of course; this must have been what he meant."
+
+And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time appeased.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was morning.
+
+Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as he
+struggled to wake.
+
+Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came clear out
+of this drowning.
+
+Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last Sunday. He knew that. But that
+wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed on--
+
+Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be killed
+too. And because he was going out, and because he would be killed, he
+was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should have thought he
+would have felt it. He had been let off that.
+
+He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do, feeling
+a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and Réveillaud and Lawrence
+had gone out, and they had been killed. Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen were going out and they would certainly be killed. Wadham
+had gone out and young Vereker, and they also would be killed.
+
+Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.
+
+His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without concern. It
+was aware that his going depended on his own will. But never in all his
+life had he brought so little imagination to the act of willing.
+
+He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast. He
+accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or concern.
+
+Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other things: "I
+know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know how you cared
+for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not bear it, Michael, if
+we were not so proud of him."
+
+He answered this letter at once. He wrote: "I couldn't bear it either,
+if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now."
+
+As he signed himself, "Your loving Michael," he thought: "That settles
+it." Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it he would
+have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night had settled it;
+that his resolution had been absolutely self-determined and absolutely
+irrevocable then, and that his signature gave it no more sanctity or
+finality than it had already. If he was conscript, he was conscript to
+his own will.
+
+He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the post did
+not leave Renton for another five hours.
+
+It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the letter-box
+that shook him into realization of what he had done and of what was
+before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to write that letter
+and to post it. By those two slight acts, not dreadful nor difficult in
+themselves, he had put it out of his power to withdraw from the one
+supremely difficult and dreadful act. A second ago, while the letter was
+still in his hands, he could have backed out, because he had not given
+any pledge. Now he would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly
+for the first time what it was that he would have to go through.
+
+He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along the top
+for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and seeing nothing
+before him but his own act and what must come afterwards. By to-morrow,
+or the next day at the latest, he would have enlisted; by six months, at
+the latest, three months if he had what they called "luck," he would be
+in the trenches, fighting and killing, not because he chose, but because
+he would be told to fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that
+letter to his mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.
+
+And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying that he
+didn't funk it.
+
+Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked looking on at
+fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn't think he would
+really mind that so much. It would come--it must come--as a relief from
+the horrors he would have to see before it came. Nicky had said that
+they were unbelievable; he had seemed to think you couldn't imagine them
+if you hadn't seen them. But Michael could. He had only to think of them
+to see them now. He could make war-pictures for himself, in five
+minutes, every bit as terrifying as the things they said happened under
+fire. Any fool, if he chose to think about it, could see what must
+happen. Only people didn't think. They rushed into it without seeing
+anything; and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it,
+before and during and afterwards and all the time.
+
+Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that the
+others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very well to
+say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as their phrase was,
+"Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far as he was concerned,
+the end of beauty and of the making of beauty, and of everything worth
+caring for; but it was also the beginning of a life that Michael dreaded
+more than fighting and killing and being killed: a life of boredom, of
+obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection. For
+of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he
+could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed
+beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he
+could smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.
+
+Of course he was going through with it; only--this was the thought his
+mind turned round and round on in horror at itself--he funked it. He
+funked it so badly that he would really rather die than go through with
+it. When he was actually killed that would be his second death; months
+before it could happen he would have known all about it; he would have
+been dead and buried and alive again in hell.
+
+What shocked Michael was his discovering, not that he funked it now,
+which was natural, almost permissible, but that he had funked it all the
+time. He could see now that, since the War began, he had been struggling
+to keep out of it. His mind had fought every suggestion that he should
+go in. It had run to cover, like a mad, frightened animal before the
+thoughts that hunted it down. Funk, pure funk, had been at the bottom of
+all he had said and thought and done since August, nineteen-fourteen;
+his attitude to the War, his opinion of the Allies, and of the
+Government and of its conduct of the War, all his wretched criticisms
+and disparagements--what had they been but the very subterfuges
+of funk?
+
+His mother had known it; his father had known it; and Dorothy and John.
+It was not conceivable that Nicky did not know it.
+
+That was what had made the horror of the empty space that separated
+them.
+
+Lawrence Stephen had certainly known it.
+
+He could not understand his not knowing it himself, not seeing that he
+struggled. Yet he must have seen that Nicky's death would end it.
+Anyhow, it _was_ ended; if not last night, then this morning when he
+posted the letter.
+
+But he was no longer appeased by this certainty of his. He was going out
+all right. But merely going out was not enough. What counted was the
+state of mind in which you went. Lawrence had said, "Victory--Victory is
+a state of mind."
+
+Well--it was a state that came naturally to Nicky, and did not come
+naturally to him. It was all very well for Nicky: he had wanted to go.
+He had gone out victorious before victory. Michael would go beaten
+before defeat.
+
+He thought: "If this is volunteering, give me compulsion." All the same
+he was going.
+
+All morning and afternoon, as he walked and walked, his thoughts went
+the same round. And in the evening they began again, but on a new track.
+He thought: "It's all very well to say I'm going; but how _can_ I go?"
+He had Lawrence Stephen's work to do; Lawrence's Life and Letters were
+in his hands. How could he possibly go and leave Lawrence dead and
+forgotten? This view seemed to him to be sanity and common sense.
+
+As his mind darted up this turning it was driven back. He saw Lawrence
+Stephen smiling at him as he had smiled at him when Réveillaud died.
+Lawrence would have wanted him to go more than anything. He would have
+chosen to be dead and forgotten rather than keep him.
+
+At night these thoughts left him. He began to think of Nicky and of his
+people. His father and mother would never be happy again. Nicky had been
+more to them than he was, or even John. He had been more to Dorothy. It
+was hard on Dorothy to lose Nicky and Drayton too.
+
+He thought of Nicky and Veronica. Poor little Ronny, what would she do
+without Nicky? He thought of Veronica, sitting silent in the train, and
+looking at him with her startling look of spiritual maturity. He thought
+of Veronica singing to him over and over again:
+
+     "London Bridge is broken down--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "Build it up with gold so fine--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "Build it up with stones so strong--"
+
+He thought of Veronica running about the house and crying, "Where's
+Nicky? I want him."
+
+Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in the
+morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of Renton
+Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way as yesterday.
+The images were, if anything, more crowded and more horrible; but they
+had lost their hold. He was tired of looking at them.
+
+About five o'clock he turned abruptly and went back to the village the
+same way by which he came.
+
+And as he swung down the hill road in sight of Renton, suddenly there
+was a great clearance in his soul.
+
+When he went into the cottage he found Veronica there waiting for him.
+She sat with her hands lying in her lap, and she had the same look he
+had seen when she was in the train.
+
+"Ronny--"
+
+She stood up to greet him, as if it had been she who was staying there
+and he who had incredibly arrived.
+
+"They told me you wouldn't be long," she said.
+
+"I? You haven't come because you were ill or anything?"
+
+She smiled and shook her head. "No. Not for anything like that."
+
+"I didn't write, Ronny. I couldn't."
+
+"I know." Their eyes met, measuring each other's grief. "That's why I
+came. I couldn't bear to leave you to it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'd have come before, Michael, if you'd wanted me."
+
+They were sitting together now, on the settle by the hearth-place.
+
+"I can't understand your being able to think of me," he said.
+
+"Because of Nicky? If I haven't got Nicky it's all the more reason why I
+should think of his people."
+
+He looked up. "I say--how are they? Mother and Father?"
+
+"They're very brave.
+
+"It's worse for them than it is for me," she said. "What they can't bear
+is your going."
+
+"Mother got my letter, then?"
+
+"Yes. This morning."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"She said: 'Oh, no. _Not_ Michael.'
+
+"It was a good thing you wrote, though. Your letter made her cry. It
+made even Dorothy cry. They hadn't been able to, before."
+
+"I should have thought if they could stand Nicky's going--"
+
+"That was different. They know it was different."
+
+"Do you suppose _I_ don't know how different it was? They mean I funked
+it and Nicky didn't."
+
+"They mean that Nicky got what he wanted when he went, and that there
+was nothing else he could have done so well, except flying, or
+engineering."
+
+"It comes to the same thing, Nicky simply wasn't afraid."
+
+"Yes, Michael, he _was_ afraid."
+
+"What _of_?"
+
+"He was most awfully afraid of seeing suffering."
+
+"Well, so am I. And I'm afraid of suffering myself too. I'm afraid of
+the whole blessed thing from beginning to end."
+
+"That's because you keep on seeing the whole blessed thing from
+beginning to end. Nicky only saw little bits of it. The bits he liked.
+Machine-guns working beautifully, and shells dropping in the right
+places, and trenches being taken.
+
+"And then, remember--Nicky hadn't so much to give up."
+
+"He had you."
+
+"Oh, no. He knew that was the way to keep me."
+
+"Ronny--if Nicky had been like me could he have kept you?"
+
+She considered it.
+
+"Yes--if he could have been himself too."
+
+"He couldn't, you see. He never could have felt like that."
+
+"I don't say He could."
+
+"Well--the awful thing is 'feeling like that.'"
+
+"And the magnificent thing is 'feeling like that,' and going all the
+same. Everybody knows that but you, Michael."
+
+"Yes," he said. "I'm _going_. But I'm not going to lie about it and say
+I don't funk it. Because I do."
+
+"You don't _really_."
+
+"I own I didn't the first night--the night I knew Nicky was killed.
+Because I couldn't think of anything else _but_ Nicky.
+
+"It was after I'd written to Mother that it came on. Because I knew then
+I couldn't back out of it. That's what I can't get over--my having to do
+that--to clinch it--because I was afraid."
+
+"My dear, my dear, thousands of men do that every day for the same
+reason, only they don't find themselves out; and if they did they
+wouldn't care. You're finding yourself out all the time, and killing
+yourself with caring."
+
+"Of course I care. Can't you see it proves that I never meant to go at
+all?"
+
+"It proves that you knew you'd have to go through hell first and you
+were determined that even hell shouldn't keep you back."
+
+"Ronny--that's what it _has_ been. Simply hell. It's been inconceivable.
+Nothing--absolutely nothing out there could be as bad. It went on all
+yesterday and to-day--till you came."
+
+"I know, Michael. That's why I came."
+
+"To get me out of it?"
+
+"To get you out of it.
+
+"It's all over," she said.
+
+"It may come back--out there."
+
+"It won't. Out there you'll be happy. I saw Nicky on Sunday--the minute
+before he was killed, Michael. And he was happy."
+
+"He would be." He was silent for a long time.
+
+"Ronny. Did Nicky know I funked it?"
+
+"Never! He knew you wouldn't keep out. All he minded was your missing
+any of it."
+
+She got up and put on her hat. "I must go. It's getting late. Will you
+walk up to Morfe with me? I'm sleeping there. In the hotel."
+
+"No, I say--I'm not going to let you turn out for me. _I_'ll sleep at
+the hotel."
+
+She smiled at him with a sort of wonder, as if she thought: "Has he
+forgotten, so soon?" And he remembered.
+
+"I can't stop here," she said. "That would be more than even _I_ can
+bear."
+
+He thought: "She's gone through hell herself, to get me out of it."
+
+          May, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER,--Yes, "Captain," please. (I can hardly
+believe it myself, but it is so.) It was thundering good luck getting
+into dear old Nicky's regiment. The whole thing's incredible. But
+promotion's nothing. Everybody's getting it like lightning now. You're
+no sooner striped than you're starred.
+
+I'm glad I resisted the Adjutant and worked up from the ranks. I own it
+was a bit beastly at the time--quite as beastly as Nicky said it would
+be; but it was worth while going through with it, especially living in
+the trenches as a Tommy. There's nothing like it for making you know
+your men. You can tell exactly what's going to bother them, and what
+isn't. You've got your finger on the pulse of their morale--not that
+it's jumpier than yours; it isn't--and their knowing that they haven't
+got to stand anything that you haven't stood gives you no end of a pull.
+Honestly, I don't believe I could have faced them if it wasn't for that.
+So that _your_ morale's the better for it as well as theirs. You know,
+if you're shot down this minute it won't matter. The weediest Tommy in
+your Company can "carry on."
+
+_We_'re a funny crowd in my billet all risen from the ranks except my
+Senior. John would love us. There's a chap who writes short stories and
+goes out very earnestly among the corpses to find copy; and there's
+another who was in the publishing business and harks back to it, now and
+then, in a dreamy nostalgic way, and rather as if he wanted to rub it
+into us writing chaps what he _could_ do for us, only he wouldn't; and
+there's a tailor who swears he could tell a mile off where my tunic came
+from; and a lawyer's clerk who sticks his cigarette behind his ear. (We
+used to wonder what he'd do with his revolver till we saw what he did
+with it.) They all love thinking of what they've been and telling you
+about it. I almost wish I'd gone into Daddy's business. Then perhaps I'd
+know what it feels like to go straight out of a shop or an office into
+the most glorious Army in history.
+
+I forgot the Jew pawnbroker at least we _think_ he's a pawnbroker--who's
+always inventing things; stupendous and impossible things. His last idea
+was machine-howitzers fourteen feet high, that take in shells exactly as
+a machine-gun takes in bullets. He says "You'll see them in the next
+War." When you ask him how he's going to transport and emplace and hide
+his machine-howitzers, he looks dejected, and says "I never thought of
+_that_," and has another idea at once, even more impossible.
+
+That reminds me. I've seen the "Tanks" (Nicky's Moving Fortresses) in
+action. I'd give my promotion if only he could have seen them too. We
+mustn't call them Fortresses any more--they're most violently for
+attack. As far as I can make out Nicky's and Drayton's thing was
+something between these and the French ones; otherwise one might have
+wondered whether their plans and models really did go where John says
+they did! I wish I could believe that Nicky and Drayton really _had_ had
+a hand in it.
+
+I'm most awfully grieved to hear that young Vereker's reported missing.
+Do you remember how excited he used to be dashing about the lawn at
+tennis, and how Alice Lathom used to sit and look at him, and jump if
+you brought her her tea too suddenly? Let's hope we'll have finished up
+this damned War before they get little Norris.
+
+Love to Dorothy and Don and Ronny.--Your loving, MICK.
+
+When Frances read that letter she said, "I wonder if he really is all
+right. He says very little about himself."
+
+And Anthony said, "Then you may be sure he is."
+
+          May 31st, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad Mummy and Father have got all my letters. They
+won't mind my writing to you this time. It really _is_ your turn now.
+Thanks for Wadham's "Poems" (I wish they'd been Ellis's). It's a shame
+to laugh at Waddy--but--he _has_ spread himself over Flanders, hasn't
+he? Like the inundations round Ypres.
+
+I'm most awfully touched at Dad and Mummy wanting to publish mine. Here
+they all are--just as I wrote them, in our billet, at night or in the
+early morning, when the others were sleeping and I wasn't. I don't know
+whether they're bad or good; I haven't had time to think about them. It
+all seems so incredibly far away. Even last week seems far away. You go
+on so fast here.
+
+I'd like Ellis and Monier-Owen to see them and to weed out the bad ones.
+But you mustn't ask them to do anything. They haven't time, either. I
+think you and Dorothy and Dad will manage it all right among you. If you
+don't I shan't much care.
+
+Of course I'm glad that they've taken you on at the Hampstead Hospital,
+if it makes you happier to nurse. And I'm glad Dad put his foot down on
+your going to Vera. She gave you up to my people and she can't take you
+back now. I'm sorry for her though; so is he.
+
+Have I had any adventures "by myself"? Only two. (I've given up what
+Mother calls my "not wanting to go to the party.") One came off in "No
+Man's Land" the other night. I went out with a "party" and came back by
+myself--unless you count a damaged Tommy hanging on to me. It began in
+pleasurable excitement and ended in some perturbation, for I had to get
+him in under cover somehow, and my responsibility weighed on me--so did
+he. The other was ages ago in a German trench. I was by myself, because
+I'd gone in too quick, and the "party" behind me took the wrong turning.
+I did manage to squeeze a chilly excitement out of going on alone. Then
+I bumped up against a fat German officer and his revolver. That really
+was an exquisite moment, and I was beast enough to be glad I had it all
+to myself. It meant a bag of fifteen prisoners--all my own. But that was
+nothing; they'd have surrendered to a mouse. There was no reason why
+they shouldn't, because I'd fired first and there was no more officer to
+play up to.
+
+But the things you don't do by yourself are a long way the best.
+Nothing--not even poetry--can beat an infantry charge when you're
+leading it. That's because of your men. It feels as if you were drawing
+them all up after you. Of course you aren't. They're coming on their
+own, and you're simply nothing, only a little unimportant part of
+them--even when you're feeling as if you were God Almighty.
+
+I'm afraid it _does_ look awfully as if young Vereker were killed. They
+may hear, you know, in some roundabout way--through the Red Cross, or
+some of his men. I've written to them.
+
+Love to everybody. Certainly you may kiss Nanna for me, if she'd like
+it. I wish I liked Waddy more--when you've given him to me.--Always your
+affectionate,
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+P.S.--I don't sound pleased about the publication; but I am. I can't get
+over their wanting to do it. I thought they didn't care.
+
+Ronny--I've been such a beast to them--when Father tried to read my
+stuff--bless him!--and couldn't, I used to wish to God he'd leave it
+alone. And now I'd give anything to see his dear old paws hanging on to
+it and twitching with fright, and his eyes slewing round to see if I'm
+looking at him.
+
+          June 14th, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad you like them, and I'm glad Father thinks he
+"understands Michael's poems" this time, and I'm glad they've made
+Mother and Dorothy feel happier about me--BUT--they must get it out of
+their heads that they're my "message," or any putrescent thing of that
+sort. The bare idea of writing a message, or of being supposed to write
+a message, makes me sick. I know it's beastly of me, but, really I'd
+rather they weren't published at all, if there's the smallest chance of
+their being taken that way.
+
+But if Ellis is doing the introduction there isn't the smallest chance.
+Thank God for Ellis.
+
+There--I've let off all my beastliness.
+
+And now I'll try to answer your letter. Yes; the "ecstasy" in the last
+two poems _is_ Nicky's ecstasy. And as Ellis says it strikes him as
+absolutely real, I take it that some of Nicky's "reality" has got
+through. It's hard on Ellis that he has to take _his_ ecstasy from me,
+instead of coming out and getting it for himself.
+
+But you and Nicky and Lawrence are right. It _is_ absolutely real. I
+mean it has to do with absolute reality. With God. It hasn't anything to
+do with having courage, or not having courage; it's another state of
+mind altogether. It isn't what Nicky's man said it was--you're not
+ashamed of it the next day. It isn't excitement; you're not excited. It
+isn't a tingling of your nerves; they don't tingle. It's all curiously
+quiet and steady. You remember when you saw Nicky--how everything stood
+still? And how two times were going on, and you and Nicky were in one
+time, and Mother was in the other? Well--it's like that. Your body and
+its nerves aren't in it at all. Your body may be moving violently, with
+other bodies moving violently round it; but _you_'re still.
+
+But suppose it is your nerves. Why should they tingle at just that
+particular moment, the moment that makes _animals_ afraid? Why should
+you be so extraordinarily happy? Why should the moment of extreme danger
+be always the "exquisite" moment? Why not the moment of safety?
+
+Doesn't it look as if danger were the point of contact with reality, and
+death the closest point? You're through. Actually you lay hold on
+eternal life, and you know it.
+
+Another thing--it always comes with that little shock of recognition.
+It's happened before, and when you get near to it again you know what it
+is. You keep on wanting to get near it, wanting it to happen again. You
+may lose it the next minute, but you know. Lawrence knew what it was.
+Nicky knew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     June 19th.
+
+I'm coming back to it--after that interruption--because I want to get
+the thing clear. I have to put it down as I feel it; there's no other
+way. But they mustn't think it's something that only Lawrence and Nicky
+and I feel. The men feel it too, even when they don't know what it is.
+And some of them _do_ know.
+
+Of course we shall be accused of glorifying War and telling lies about
+it. Well--there's a Frenchman who has told the truth, piling up all the
+horrors, faithfully, remorselessly, magnificently. But he seems to think
+people oughtn't to write about this War at all unless they show up the
+infamy of it, as a deterrent, so that no Government can ever start
+another one. It's a sort of literary "frightfulness." But who is he
+trying to frighten? Does he imagine that France, or England, or Russia
+or Belgium, or Serbia, will want to start another war when this is over?
+And does he suppose that Germany--if we don't beat her--will be deterred
+by his frightfulness? Germany's arrogance will be satisfied when she
+knows she's made a Frenchman feel like that about it.
+
+He's got his truth all right. As Morrie would say: "That's War." But a
+peaceful earthquake can do much the same thing. And if _our_ truth--what
+_we_'ve seen--isn't War, at any rate it's what we've got out of it, it's
+our "glory," our spiritual compensation for the physical torture, and
+there would be a sort of infamy in trying to take it from us. It isn't
+the French Government, or the British that's fighting Germany; it's
+we--all of us. To insist on the world remembering nothing but these
+horrors is as if men up to their knees in the filth they're clearing
+away should complain of each other for standing in it and splashing
+it about.
+
+The filth of War--and the physical torture--Good God! As if the world
+was likely to forget it. Any more than we're likely to forget what
+_we_ know.
+
+You remember because you've known it before and it all hangs together.
+It's not as if danger were the only point of contact with reality. You
+get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition, and the same utter
+satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing. At least to me it's like
+that. You know what Nicky thought it was like. You know what it was like
+when you used to sit looking and looking at Mother's "tree of Heaven."
+
+It's odd, Ronny, to have gone all your life trying to get reality,
+trying to get new beauty, trying to get utter satisfaction; to have
+funked coming out here because you thought it was all obscene ugliness
+and waste and frustration, and then to come out, and to find what
+you wanted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     June 25th.
+
+I wrote all that, while I could, because I want to make them see it.
+It's horrible that Dorothy should think that Drayton's dead and that
+Mother should think that Nicky's dead, when they wouldn't, if they
+really knew. If they don't believe Lawrence or me, can't they believe
+Nicky? I'm only saying what he said. But I can't write to them about it
+because they make me shy, and I'm afraid they'll think I'm only gassing,
+or "making poetry"--as if poetry wasn't the most real thing there is!
+
+If anybody can make them see it, you can.--Always your affectionate,
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Anthony was going into the house to take back the key of the workshop.
+
+He had locked the door of the workshop a year ago, after Nicky's death,
+and had not opened it again until to-day. This afternoon in the orchard
+he had seen that the props of the old apple-tree were broken and he had
+thought that he would like to make new ones, and the wood was in
+the workshop.
+
+Everything in there was as it had been when Nicky finished with his
+Moving Fortress. The brass and steel filings lay in a heap under the
+lathe, the handle was tilted at the point where he had left it; pits in
+the saw-dust showed where his feet had stood. His overalls hung over the
+bench where he had slipped them off.
+
+Anthony had sat down on the bench and had looked at these things with
+remembrance and foreboding. He thought of Nicky and of Nicky's pleasure
+and excitement over the unpacking of his first lathe--the one he had
+begged for for his birthday--and of his own pleasure and excitement as
+he watched his boy handling it and showing him so cleverly how it
+worked. It stood there still in the corner. Nicky had given it to
+Veronica. He had taught her how to use it. And Anthony thought of
+Veronica when she was little; he saw Nicky taking care of her, teaching
+her to run and ride and play games. And he remembered what Veronica's
+mother had said to him and Frances: "Wait till Nicky has children of
+his own."
+
+He thought of John. John had volunteered three times and had been three
+times rejected. And now conscription had got him. He had to appear
+before the Board of Examiners that afternoon. He might be rejected
+again. But the standard was not so exacting as it had been--John
+might be taken.
+
+He thought of his business--John's business and his, and Bartie's. Those
+big Government contracts had more than saved them. They were making tons
+of money out of the War. Even when the Government cut down their
+profits; even when they had given more than half they made to the War
+funds, the fact remained that they were living on the War. Bartie,
+without a wife or children, was appallingly rich.
+
+If John were taken. If John were killed--
+
+If Michael died--
+
+Michael had been reported seriously wounded.
+
+He had thought then of Michael. And he had not been able to bear
+thinking any more. He had got up and left the workshop, locking the door
+behind him, forgetting what he had gone in for; and he had taken the key
+back to the house. He kept it in what his children used to call the
+secret drawer of his bureau. It lay there with Nicky's last letter of
+June, 1915, and a slab of coromandel wood.
+
+It was when he was going into the house with the key that John met him.
+
+"Have they taken you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+John's face was hard and white. They went together into Anthony's room.
+
+"It's what you wanted," Anthony said.
+
+"Of course it's what I wanted. I want it more than ever now.
+
+"The wire's come, Father. Mother opened it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was five days now since they had heard that Michael had died of his
+wounds. Frances was in Michael's room. She was waiting for Dorothea and
+Veronica to help her to find his papers. It was eight o'clock in the
+evening, and they had to be sorted and laid out ready for Morton Ellis
+to look over them to-morrow. To-morrow Morton Ellis would come, and he
+would take them away.
+
+The doors of Michael's and of Nicky's rooms were always kept shut;
+Frances knew that, if she were to open the door on the other side of the
+corridor and look in, every thing in Nicky's room would welcome her with
+tenderness even while it inflicted its unique and separate wound. But
+Michael's room was bare and silent. He had cleared everything away out
+of her sight last year before he went. The very books on the shelves
+repudiated her; reminded her that she had never understood him, that he
+had always escaped her. His room kept his secret, and she felt afraid
+and abashed in it, knowing herself an intruder. Presently all that was
+most precious in it would be taken from her and given over to a stranger
+whom he had never liked.
+
+Her mind turned and fastened on one object--the stiff, naked wooden
+chair standing in its place before the oak table by the window. She
+remembered how she had come to Michael there and found him writing at
+his table, and how she had talked to him as though he had been a shirker
+and a coward.
+
+She had borne Nicky's death. But she could not bear Michael's. She stood
+there in his room, staring, hypnotized by her memory. She heard Dorothea
+come in and go out again. And then Veronica came in.
+
+She turned to Veronica to help her.
+
+She clung to Veronica and was jealous of her. Veronica had not come
+between her and Nicky as long as he was alive, but now that he was dead
+she came between them. She came between her and Michael too. Michael's
+mind had always been beyond her; she could only reach it through
+Veronica and through Veronica's secret. Her mind clutched at Veronica's
+secret, and flung it away as useless, and returned, clutching at
+it again.
+
+It was as if Veronica held the souls of Michael and Nicholas in her
+hands. She offered her the souls of her dead sons. She was the mediator
+between her and their souls.
+
+"I could bear it, Veronica, if I hadn't made him go. I came to him,
+here, in this room, and bullied him till he went. I said horrible things
+to him--that he must have remembered.
+
+"He wasn't like Nicky--it was infinitely worse for him. And I was cruel
+to him. I had no pity. I drove him out--to be killed.
+
+"And I simply cannot bear it."
+
+"But--he didn't go then. He waited till--till he was free. If anybody
+could have made him, Nicky could. But it wasn't even Nicky. It was
+himself."
+
+"If he'd been killed as Nicky was--but to die like that, in the
+hospital--of those horrible wounds."
+
+"He was leading a charge, just as Nicky was. And you know he was happy,
+just as Nicky was. Every line he's written shows that he was happy."
+
+"It only shows that they were both full of life, that they loved their
+life and wanted to live.
+
+"It's no use, Ronny, you're saying you know they're there. I don't. I'd
+give anything to believe it. And yet it wouldn't be a bit of good if I
+did. I don't _want_ them all changed into something spiritual that I
+shouldn't know if it was there. I want their bodies with me just as they
+used to be. I want to hear them and touch them, and see them come in in
+their old clothes.
+
+"To see Nicky standing on the hearthrug with Timmy in his arms. I want
+things like that, Ronny. Even if you're right, it's all clean gone."
+
+Her lips tightened.
+
+"I'm talking as if I was, the only one. But I know it's worse for you,
+Ronny. I _had_ them all those years. And I've got Anthony. You've had
+nothing but your poor three days."
+
+Veronica thought: "How can I tell her that I've got more than she
+thinks? It's awful that I should have what she hasn't." She was ashamed
+and beaten before this irreparable, mortal grief.
+
+"And it's worse," Frances said, "for the wretched mothers whose sons
+haven't fought."
+
+For her pride rose in her again--the pride that uplifted her
+supernaturally when Nicky died.
+
+"You mustn't think I grudge them. I don't. I don't even grudge John."
+
+The silence of Michael's room sank into them, it weighed on their hearts
+and they were afraid of each other's voices. Frances was glad when
+Dorothy came and they could begin their work there.
+
+But Michael had not left them much to do. They found his papers all in
+one drawer of his writing-table, sorted and packed and labelled, ready
+for Morton Ellis to take away. One sealed envelope lay in a place by
+itself. Frances thought: "He didn't want any of us to touch his things."
+
+Then she saw Veronica's name on the sealed envelope. She was glad when
+Veronica left them and went to her hospital.
+
+And when she was gone she wanted her back again.
+
+"I wish I hadn't spoken that way to Veronica," she said.
+
+"She won't mind. She knows you couldn't help it."
+
+"I could, Dorothy, if I wasn't jealous of her. I mean I'm jealous of her
+certainty. If I had it, too, I shouldn't be jealous."
+
+"She wants you to have it. She's trying to give it you.
+
+"Mother--how do we know she isn't right? Nicky said she was. And Michael
+said Nicky was right.
+
+"If it had been only Nicky--_he_ might have got it from Veronica. But
+Michael never got things from anybody. And you _do_ know things in queer
+ways. Even I do. At least I did once--when I was in prison. I knew
+something tremendous was going to happen. I saw it, or felt it, or
+something. I won't swear I knew it was the War. I don't suppose I did.
+But I knew Frank was all mixed up with it. And it was the most awfully
+real thing. You couldn't go back on it, or get behind it. It was as if
+I'd seen that he and Lawrence and Nicky and Michael and all of them
+would die in it to save the whole world. Like Christ, only that they
+really _did_ die and the whole world _was_ saved. There was nothing
+futile about it."
+
+"Well--?"
+
+"Well, _they_ might see their real thing the same way--in a flash.
+Aren't they a thousand times more likely to know than we are? What right
+have we--sitting here safe--to say it isn't when they say it is?"
+
+"But--if there's anything in it--why can't I see it as well as you and
+Veronica? After all, I'm their mother."
+
+"Perhaps that's why it takes you longer, Mummy. You think of their
+bodies more than we do, because they were part of your body. Their
+souls, or whatever it is, aren't as real to you just at first."
+
+"I see," said Frances, bitterly. "You've only got to be a mother, and
+give your children your flesh and blood, to be sure of their souls going
+from you and somebody else getting them."
+
+"That's the price you pay for being mothers."
+
+"Was Frank's soul ever more real to _you_, Dorothy?"
+
+"Yes. It was once--for just one minute. The night he went away. That's
+another queer thing that happened."
+
+"It didn't satisfy you, darling, did it?"
+
+"Of course it didn't satisfy me. I want more and more of it. Not just
+flashes."
+
+"You say it's the price we pay for being mothers. Yet if Veronica had
+had a child--"
+
+"You needn't be so sorry for Veronica."
+
+"I'm not. It's you I'm sorriest for. You've had nothing. From beginning
+to end you had nothing.
+
+"I might at least have seen that you had it in the beginning."
+
+"_You_, Mummy?"
+
+"Yes. Me. You _shall_ have it now. Unless you want to leave me."
+
+"I wouldn't leave you for the world, Mummy ducky. Only you must let me
+work always and all the time."
+
+"Let you? I'll let you do what you like, my dear."
+
+"You always have let me, haven't you?"
+
+"It was the least I could do."
+
+"Poor Mummy, did you think you had to make up because you cared for them
+more than me?"
+
+"I wonder," said Frances, thoughtfully, "if I did."
+
+"Of course. Of course you did. Who wouldn't?"
+
+"I never meant you to know it, Dorothy."
+
+"Of course I knew it. I must have known it ever since Michael was born.
+I knew you couldn't help it. You had to. Even when I was a tiresome kid
+I knew you had to. It was natural."
+
+"Natural or unnatural, many girls have hated their mothers for less.
+You've been very big and generous.
+
+"Perhaps--if you'd been little and weak--but you were always such an
+independent thing. I used to think you didn't want me."
+
+"I wanted you a lot more than you thought. But, you see, I've learned to
+do without."
+
+She thought: "It's better she should have it straight."
+
+"If you'd think less about me, Mother," she said, "and more about
+Father--"
+
+"Father?"
+
+"Yes. Father isn't independent--though he looks it. He wants you
+awfully. He always has wanted you. And he hasn't learned to do without."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"He's sitting out there in the garden, all by himself, in the dark,
+under the tree."
+
+Frances went to him there.
+
+"I wondered whether you would come to me," he said.
+
+"I was doing something for Michael."
+
+"Is it done?"
+
+"Yes. It's done."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Five months passed. It was November now.
+
+In the lane by the side door, Anthony was waiting in his car. Rain was
+falling, hanging from the trees and falling. Every now and then he
+looked at his watch.
+
+He had still a quarter of an hour before he need start. But he was not
+going back into the house. They were all in there saying good-bye to
+John: old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith. And Maurice.
+And his brother Bartie.
+
+The door in the garden wall opened and they came out: the four women in
+black--the black they still wore for Michael--and the two men.
+
+They all walked slowly up the lane. Anthony could see Bartie's shoulders
+hunched irritably against the rain. He could see Morrie carrying his
+sodden, quivering body with care and an exaggerated sobriety. He saw
+Grannie, going slowly, under the umbrella, very upright and conscious of
+herself as wonderful and outlasting.
+
+He got down and cranked up his engine.
+
+Then he sat sternly in his car and waited, with his hands on the
+steering-wheel, ready.
+
+The engine throbbed, impatient for the start.
+
+John came out very quickly and took his seat beside his father. And the
+car went slowly towards the high road.
+
+Uncle Morrie stood waiting for it by the gate at the top of the lane. As
+it passed through he straightened himself and put up his hand in a
+crapulous salute.
+
+The young man smiled at him, saluted, and was gone
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13883 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13883 ***</div>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Tree of Heaven, by May Sinclair</h1>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>THE<br>
+TREE OF HEAVEN</h1>
+<br>
+<h4>BY</h4>
+<h3>MAY SINCLAIR</h3>
+<h5>Author of<br>
+<i>The Belfry</i>, <i>The Three Sisters</i>, etc.</h5>
+<br>
+<h4>1918</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<center><b>Contents</b><br>
+<br>
+<a href="#PART_I">Part 1</a>: [<a href="#I">1</a>] [<a href=
+"#II">2</a>] [<a href="#III">3</a>] [<a href="#IV">4</a>] [<a href=
+"#V">5</a>] [<a href="#VI">6</a>] [<a href="#VII">7</a>] [<a href=
+"#VIII">8</a>] [<a href="#IX">9</a>] [<a href="#X">10</a>]<br>
+<a href="#PART_II">Part 2</a>: [<a href="#XI">11</a>] [<a href=
+"#XII">12</a>] [<a href="#XIII">13</a>] [<a href="#XIV">14</a>]
+[<a href="#XV">15</a>] [<a href="#XVI">16</a>] [<a href=
+"#XVII">17</a>]<br>
+<a href="#PART_III">Part 3</a>: [<a href="#XVIII">18</a>] [<a href=
+"#XIX">19</a>] [<a href="#XX">20</a>] [<a href="#XXI">21</a>]
+[<a href="#XXII">22</a>] [<a href="#XXIII">23</a>] [<a href=
+"#XXIV">24</a>]</center>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>THE TREE OF HEAVEN</h1>
+<h2><a name="PART_I">PART I</a></h2>
+<h3><i>PEACE</i></h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="I"></a>I</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Frances Harrison was sitting out in the garden under the tree
+that her husband called an ash-tree, and that the people down in
+her part of the country called a tree of Heaven.</p>
+<p>It was warm under the tree, and Frances might have gone to sleep
+there and wasted an hour out of the afternoon, if it hadn't been
+for the children.</p>
+<p>Dorothy, Michael and Nicholas were going to a party, and Nicky
+was excited. She could hear Old Nanna talking to Michael and
+telling him to be a good boy. She could hear young Mary-Nanna
+singing to Baby John. Baby John was too young himself to go to
+parties; so to make up for that he was riding furiously on
+Mary-Nanna's knee to the tune of the "Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major!"</p>
+<p>It was Nicky's first party. That was why he was excited.</p>
+<p>He had asked her for the third time what it would be like; and
+for the third time she had told him. There would be dancing and a
+Magic Lantern, and a Funny Man, and a Big White Cake covered with
+sugar icing and Rosalind's name on it in pink sugar letters and
+eight little pink wax candles burning on the top for Rosalind's
+birthday. Nicky's eyes shone as she told him.</p>
+<p>Dorothy, who was nine years old, laughed at Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Look at Nicky," she said, "how excited he is!"</p>
+<p>And every time she laughed at him his mother kissed him.</p>
+<p>"I don't care," said Nicky. "I don't care if I am becited!"</p>
+<p>And for the fifth time he asked, "When will it be time to
+go?"</p>
+<p>"Not for another hour and a half, my sweetheart."</p>
+<p>"How long," said Nicky, "is an hour and a half?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances had a tranquil nature and she never worried. But as she
+sat under her tree of Heaven a thought came that made a faint
+illusion of worry for her mind. She had forgotten to ask Grannie
+and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie to tea.</p>
+<p>She had come to think of them like that in relation to her
+children rather than to her or to each other.</p>
+<p>It was a Tuesday, and they had not been there since Friday.
+Perhaps, she thought, I'd better send over for them now. Especially
+as it's such a beautiful afternoon. Supposing I sent Michael?</p>
+<p>And yet, supposing Anthony came home early? He was always kind
+to her people, but that was the very reason why she oughtn't to let
+them spoil a beautiful afternoon for him. It could not be said that
+any of them was amusing.</p>
+<p>She could still hear Mary-Nanna singing her song about the
+Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major. She could still hear Old Nanna talking to
+Michael and telling him to be a good boy. That could only end in
+Michael being naughty. To avert naughtiness or any other disaster
+from her children was the end of Frances's existence.</p>
+<p>So she called Michael to come to her. He came, running like a
+little dog, obediently.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael was glad that he had been sent across the Heath to
+Grannie's house with a message. It made him feel big and brave.
+Besides, it would put off the moment when Mary-Nanna would come for
+him, to make him ready for the party. He was not sure that he
+wanted to go to it.</p>
+<p>Michael did not much like going to Grannie's house either. In
+all the rooms there was a queer dark-greenness and creepiness. It
+smelt of bird-cages and elder bushes and of Grandpapa's funeral.
+And when you had seen Auntie Edie's Senegal wax-bills, and the
+stuffed fish, and the inside of Auntie Louie's type-writer there
+was nothing else to see.</p>
+<p>His mother said that Grandpapa's funeral was all over, and that
+the green creepiness came from the green creepers. But Michael knew
+it didn't. She only said things like that to make you feel nice and
+comfy when you were going to bed. Michael knew very well that they
+had put Grandpapa into the drawing-room and locked the door so that
+the funeral men shouldn't get at him and take him away too soon.
+And Auntie Louie had kept the key in her pocket.</p>
+<p>Funerals meant taking people away.</p>
+<p>Old Nanna wouldn't let him talk about it; but Mary-Nanna had
+told him that was what funerals meant. All the same, as he went up
+the flagged path, he took care not to look through the black panes
+of the window where the elder bush was, lest he should see
+Grandpapa's coffin standing in the place where the big table used
+to be, and Grandpapa lying inside it wrapped in a white sheet.</p>
+<p>Michael's message was that Mummy sent her love, and would
+Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie come
+to tea? She was going to have tea in the garden, and would they
+please come early? As early as possible. That was the part he was
+not to forget.</p>
+<p>The queer thing was that when Michael went to see Grannie and
+the Aunties in Grannie's house he saw four old women. They wore
+black dresses that smelt sometimes of something sweet and sometimes
+like your fingers when you get ink on them. The Aunties looked
+cross; and Auntie Emmeline smelt as if she had been crying. He
+thought that perhaps they had not been able to stop crying since
+Grandpapa's funeral. He thought that was why Auntie Louie's nose
+was red and shiny and Auntie Edie's eyelids had pink edges instead
+of lashes. In Grannie's house they never let you do anything. They
+never did anything themselves. They never wanted to do anything;
+not even to talk. He thought it was because they knew that
+Grandpapa was still there all the time.</p>
+<p>But outside it the Aunties were not so very old. They rode
+bicycles. And when they came to Michael's Father's house they
+forgot all about Grandpapa's funeral and ran about and played
+tennis like Michael's mother and Mrs. Jervis, and they talked a
+lot.</p>
+<p>Michael's mother was Grannie's child. To see how she could be a
+child you had only to think of her in her nightgown with her long
+brown hair plaited in a pigtail hanging down her back and tied with
+a blue ribbon. But he couldn't see how the three Aunties could be
+Grannie's other children. They were bigger than Grannie and they
+had grey hair. Grannie was a little thing; she was white and dry;
+and she had hair like hay. Besides, she hardly ever took any notice
+of them except to make a face at Auntie Emmeline or Auntie Edie now
+and then. She did it with her head a little on one side, pushing
+out her underlip and drawing it back again.</p>
+<p>Grannie interested Michael; but more when he thought about her
+than when she was actually there. She stood for him as the mark and
+measure of past time. To understand how old Grannie was you had to
+think backwards; this way: Once there was a time when there was no
+Michael; but there was Mummy and there was Daddy. And once there
+was a time when there was no Mummy and no Daddy; but there was
+Grannie and there was Grandpapa. Now there was no Grandpapa. But he
+couldn't think back far enough to get to the time when there was no
+Grannie.</p>
+<p>Michael thought that being Grannie must feel like being God.</p>
+<p>Before he came to the black window pane and the elder bush he
+had to run down the slopes and jump the gullies on his side of the
+Heath, and cross the West Road, and climb the other slope to
+Grannie's side. And it was not till you got to the row of elms on
+Judge's Walk that you had to go carefully because of the
+funeral.</p>
+<p>He stood there on the ridge of the Walk and looked back to his
+own side. There were other houses there; but he knew his father's
+house by the tree of Heaven in the garden.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The garden stood on a high, flat promontory jutting out into the
+Heath. A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like
+fortifications on a breastwork, enclosed it on three sides. From
+the flagged terrace at the bottom of the garden you looked down,
+through the tops of the birch-trees that rose against the rampart,
+over the wild places of the Heath. There was another flagged
+terrace at the other end of the garden. The house rose sheer from
+its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and flat-fronted, with the
+white wings of its storm shutters spread open, row on row. It
+barred the promontory from the mainland. And at the back of it,
+beyond its kitchen garden and its courtyard, a fringe of Heath
+still parted it from the hill road that went from "Jack Straw's
+Castle" to "The Bull and Bush." You reached it by a lane that led
+from the road to the Heath.</p>
+<p>The house belonged to the Heath and the open country. It was
+aware of nothing but the Heath and the open country between it and
+Harrow on the Hill. It had the air of all the old houses of
+Hampstead, the wonderful air of not acknowledging the existence of
+Bank Holidays. It was lifted up high above the town; shut in;
+utterly secluded.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Anthony Harrison considered that he had done well when he
+acquired West End House for his wife Frances, and for his children,
+Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas and John.</p>
+<p>Frances had said that, if he was thinking of her, he needn't buy
+a big place, because she didn't want one. But he might buy it for
+the children if he liked. Anthony had said that she had no idea of
+what she mightn't want, once she began to give her mind to it, and
+that he would like to think of her living in it after he was gone.
+Not that he had any intention of going; he was only thirty-six (not
+much older than Frances) and incurably healthy. But since his
+wife's attention had become absorbed in the children--to the
+exclusion of every other interest--he was always trying to harrow
+her by the suggestion. And Frances only laughed at him and told him
+that he was a silly old thing, and that he needn't think he was
+going to get round her that way.</p>
+<p>There was no other way open for Anthony; unless he were to go
+bankrupt or get pneumonia or peritonitis. Frances would have been
+the first to acknowledge that illness or misfortune constituted a
+claim. And the only things he ever did get were loud, explosive
+colds in his head which made him a mark for derision. His business
+was so sound that not even a revolution or a European war could
+shake it. And his appearance was incompatible with his pretensions
+to pathos.</p>
+<p>It would have paid him better to have been small and weedy, or
+lamentably fat, or to have had a bald place coming, or crow's feet
+pointing to grey hairs; for then there might have been a chance for
+him. But Anthony's body was well made, slender and tall. He had
+blue eyes and black-brown hair, and the look of an amiable hawk,
+alert, fiercely benevolent. Frances couldn't see any pathos in the
+kind of figure she happened to admire most, the only kind she would
+have tolerated in a husband. And if she <i>had</i> seen any pathos
+in it she wouldn't have married it. Pathos, she said, was all very
+well in a father, or a brother, or a friend, but in choosing a
+husband you had to think of your children; and she had wanted boys
+that would look like Michael and Nicholas and John.</p>
+<p>"Don't you mean," Anthony had said, "boys that will look like
+me?"</p>
+<p>"I mean," she had answered, "exactly what I say. You needn't be
+so arrogant."</p>
+<p><i>Her</i> arrogance had been beyond all bearing since John, the
+third son, had been born.</p>
+<p>And it was Frances, after all, who had made him buy West End
+House for her own reasons. Both the day nursery and the night
+nursery had windows to the south. It was the kind of house she had
+always dreamed of living in, and of Michael, or Nicky living in
+after she and Anthony were gone. It was not more than seven
+minutes' walk from the bottom of the lane to the house where her
+people lived. She had to think about the old people when the poor
+dears had come up to London in order to be thought about. And it
+had white storm shutters and a tree of Heaven in the garden.</p>
+<p>And, because they had both decided that they would have that
+house whatever happened, they began to argue and to tease each
+other. Anthony had said it was all right, only the tree of Heaven
+wasn't a tree of Heaven; it was a common ash. He was one of the
+biggest timber merchants in the country and he ought to know.
+Frances said she mightn't know much, but she did know that was the
+kind of tree the people down in her part of the country called a
+tree of Heaven. Anthony said he couldn't help that. It didn't
+matter what they called it. It was a common ash.</p>
+<p>Then she told him he had no poetry in his composition. She had
+always dreamed of having a tree of Heaven in her garden; and he was
+destroying her dream. He replied that he didn't want to destroy her
+dream, but the tree really <i>was</i> an ash. You could tell by the
+bark, and by the leaves and by the number and the shape of the
+leaflets. And anyhow, that was the first he'd heard about her
+dream.</p>
+<p>"You don't know," said Frances, "what goes on inside me."</p>
+<p>She said that if any of the children developed an imagination he
+needn't think <i>he</i> had anything to do with it.</p>
+<p>"I shan't," said Anthony. "I wouldn't have anything to do with
+it if I could. Facts are good enough for me. The children must be
+brought up to realize facts."</p>
+<p>An ash-tree was a fact and a tree of Heaven was a fancy; unless
+by any chance she meant <i>ailanthus glandulosa</i>. (He knew she
+didn't.) If she wanted to know, the buds of the ash were black like
+ebony. The buds of the tree of Heaven were rose-red, like--like bad
+mahogany. Wait till the spring and look at the buds.</p>
+<p>Frances waited till the spring and looked at the buds, and, sure
+enough, they were black like ebony.</p>
+<p>Anthony also said that if they were choosing a house for the
+children, it was no earthly use to think about the old people. For
+the old people would go and the children would remain.</p>
+<p>As if to show how right he was, Grandpapa had died early in that
+summer of 'ninety-five, one month after they had moved into West
+End House. That still left Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie
+Emmeline and Auntie Edie for Anthony to look after.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She was thinking of them now. She hoped that they would come
+early in time to see the children. She also hoped that they would
+go early, so that she and Anthony might have their three sets of
+tennis before dinner in peace.</p>
+<p>There would be no peace if Louie and Edie wanted to play too.
+The one thing that Anthony could not stand was people wanting to do
+things they couldn't do, and spoiling them for those who could. He
+used to say that the sight of Louie anywhere near the tennis court
+put him off his stroke.</p>
+<p>Again, the faint illusion of worry was created by the thought
+that this dreadful thing might happen, that Louie and Edie might
+want to play and that Anthony would be put off his stroke and be
+annoyed, and that his annoyance, his just and legitimate annoyance,
+would spoil the perfection of the afternoon. And as she played with
+the illusion it made more real her tranquillity, her incredible
+content.</p>
+<p>Her hands were busy now putting decorative stitches into a frock
+for John. She had pushed aside a novel by George Moore and a volume
+of Ibsen's plays. She disliked Ibsen and disapproved of George
+Moore. Her firm, tight little character defended itself against
+every form of intellectual disturbance. A copy of the <i>Times</i>
+had fallen from her lap to her feet. Jane, the cat, had found it
+there, and, purring loudly, had trodden it down into a bed, and now
+lay on it, asleep. Frances had informed herself of the affairs of
+the nation.</p>
+<p>At the bottom of her mind was the conviction (profound, because
+unconscious) that the affairs of the nation were not to be compared
+for interest with her own affairs, and an attitude of
+condescension, as if she honoured the <i>Times</i> by reading it
+and the nation by informing herself of its affairs; also the very
+distinct impression that evening papers were more attractive than
+morning papers. She would have admitted that they owed their
+attraction to the circumstance that Anthony brought them home with
+him in his pocket, and that in the evening she was not obliged to
+inform herself of what might be happening. Anthony was certain to
+inform her.</p>
+<p>Not that anything ever did happen. Except strikes; and even
+then, no sooner did the features of the strike begin to get
+dramatic than they were instantly submerged in the flood of
+conversation that was let loose over them. Mrs. Anthony pitied the
+poor editors and reporters while Parliament was sitting. She saw
+them as rather silly, violent and desperate men, yet pathetic in
+their silliness, violence and desperation, snatching at divorces,
+and breach of promise cases, and fires in paraffin shops, as
+drowning men snatch at straws.</p>
+<p>Her imagination refused to picture any end to this state of
+things. There would just be more speeches and more strikes, and
+still more speeches, going on for ever and ever at home; while
+foreign affairs and the British Empire went on for ever and ever
+too, with no connection between the two lines of sequence, and no
+likeness, except that both somehow went on and on.</p>
+<p>That was Anthony's view of England's parliament and of her
+imperial policy; and it was Mrs. Anthony's. Politics, Anthony said,
+had become static; and he assured Frances that there was no
+likelihood that they would ever become dynamic again--ever.</p>
+<p>Anthony's view of politics was Mrs. Anthony's view of life.</p>
+<p>Nothing ever really happened. Things did not change; they
+endured; they went on. At least everything that really mattered
+endured and went on. So that everything that really mattered
+could--if you were given to looking forward--be foreseen. A
+strike--a really bad one--might conceivably affect Anthony's
+business, for a time; but not all the strikes in the world, not all
+the silly speeches, not all the meddling and muddling of
+politicians could ever touch one of those enduring things.</p>
+<p>Frances believed in permanence because, in secret, she abhorred
+the thought of change. And she abhorred the thought of change
+because, at thirty-three, she had got all the things she wanted.
+But only for the last ten years out of the thirty-three. Before
+that (before she was Mrs. Anthony), wanting things, letting it be
+known that you wanted them, had meant not getting them. So that it
+was incredible how she had contrived to get them all. She had not
+yet left off being surprised at her own happiness. It was not like
+things you take for granted and are not aware of. Frances was
+profoundly aware of it. Her happiness was a solid, tangible thing.
+She knew where it resided, and what it was made of, and what terms
+she held it on. It depended on her; on her truth, her love, her
+loyalty; it was of the nature of a trust. But there was no illusion
+about it. It was the reality.</p>
+<p>She denied that she was arrogant, for she had not taken one of
+them for granted, not even Dorothy; though a little arrogance might
+have been excusable in a woman who had borne three sons and only
+one daughter before she was thirty-two. Whereas Grannie's
+achievement had been four daughters, four superfluous women, of
+whom Anthony had married one and supported three.</p>
+<p>To be sure there was Maurice. But he was worse than superfluous,
+considering that most of the time Anthony was supporting Maurice,
+too.</p>
+<p>She had only known one serious anxiety--lest her flesh and blood
+should harbour any of the blood and flesh left over after Morrie
+was made. She had married Anthony to drive out Morrie from the
+bodies and souls of her children. She meant that, through her and
+Anthony, Morrie should go, and Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas and John
+should remain.</p>
+<p>As Frances looked at the four children, her mouth tightened
+itself so as to undo the ruinous adoration of her eyes. She loved
+their slender bodies, their pure, candid faces, their thick,
+straight hair that parted solidly from the brush, clean-cut and
+shining like sheets of polished metal, brown for Dorothy,
+black-brown for Nicholas, red gold for Michael and white gold for
+John. She was glad that they were all made like that; slender and
+clear and hard, and that their very hair was a thing of clean
+surfaces and definite edges. She disliked the blurred outlines of
+fatness and fuzziness and fluffiness. The bright solidity of their
+forms helped her to her adored illusion, the illusion of their
+childhood as going on, lasting for ever and ever.</p>
+<p>They would be the nicest looking children at Mrs. Jervis's
+party. They would stand out solid from the fluffiness and fuzziness
+and fatness of the others. She saw people looking at them. She
+heard them saying: "Who are the two little boys in brown
+linen?"--"They are Michael and Nicholas Harrison." The Funny Man
+came and said: "Hello! I didn't expect to see you here!" It was
+Michael and Nicholas he didn't expect to see; and the noise in the
+room was Nicky's darling laughter.</p>
+<p>Music played. Michael and Nicholas danced to the music. It was
+Michael's body and Nicky's that kept for her the pattern of the
+dance, their feet that beat out its measure. Sitting under the tree
+of Heaven Frances could see Mrs. Jervis's party. It shimmered and
+clustered in a visionary space between the tree and the border of
+blue larkspurs on the other side of the lawn. The firm figures of
+Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy held it together, kept it from
+being shattered amongst the steep blue spires of the larkspurs.
+When it was all over they would still hold it together, so that
+people would know that it had really happened and remember having
+been there. They might even remember that Rosalind had had a
+birthday.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances had just bestowed this life after death on Mrs. Jervis's
+party when she heard Michael saying he didn't want to go to it.</p>
+<p>He had no idea why he didn't want to go except that he
+didn't.</p>
+<p>"What'?" said Frances. "Not when Nicky and Dorothy are
+going?"</p>
+<p>He shook his head. He was mournful and serious.</p>
+<p>"And there's going to be a Magic Lantern"--</p>
+<p>"I know."</p>
+<p>"And a Funny Man"--</p>
+<p>"I know."</p>
+<p>"And a Big White Cake with sugar icing and Rosalind's name on it
+in pink letters, and eight candles--"</p>
+<p>"I know, Mummy." Michael's under lip began to shake.</p>
+<p>"I thought it was only little baby boys that were silly and
+shy."</p>
+<p>Michael was not prepared to contest the statement. He saw it was
+the sort of thing that in the circumstances she was bound to say.
+All the same his under lip would have gone on shaking if he hadn't
+stopped it.</p>
+<p>"I thought you were a big boy," said Frances.</p>
+<p>"So I <i>was</i>, yesterday. To-day isn't yesterday, Mummy."</p>
+<p>"If John--John was asked to a beautiful party <i>he</i> wouldn't
+be afraid to go."</p>
+<p>As soon as Michael's under lip had stopped shaking his eyelids
+began. You couldn't stop your eyelids.</p>
+<p>"It's not <i>afraid</i>, exactly," he said.</p>
+<p>"What is it, then?"</p>
+<p>"It's sort--sort of forgetting things."</p>
+<p>"What things?"</p>
+<p>"I don't know, Mummy. I think--it's pieces of me that I want to
+remember. At a party I can't feel all of myself at once--like I do
+now."</p>
+<p>She loved his strange thoughts as she loved his strange beauty,
+his reddish yellow hair, his light hazel eyes that were not hers
+and not Anthony's.</p>
+<p>"What will you do, sweetheart, all afternoon, without Nicky and
+Dorothy and Mary-Nanna?"</p>
+<p>"I don't want Nicky and Dorothy and Mary-Nanna. I want Myself. I
+want to play with Myself."</p>
+<p>She thought: "Why shouldn't he? What right have I to say these
+things to him and make him cry, and send him to stupid parties that
+he doesn't want to go to? After all, he's only a little boy."</p>
+<p>She thought of Michael, who was seven, as if he were younger
+than Nicholas, who was only five.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky was different. You could never tell what Michael would
+take it into his head to think. You could never tell what Nicky
+would take it into his head to do. There was no guile in Michael.
+But sometimes there was guile in Nicky. Frances was always on the
+look out for Nicky's guile.</p>
+<p>So when Michael remarked that Grannie and the Aunties would be
+there immediately and Nicky said, "Mummy, I think my ear is going
+to ache," her answer was--"You won't have to stay more than a
+minute, darling."</p>
+<p>For Nicky lived in perpetual fear that his Auntie Louie might
+kiss at him.</p>
+<p>Dorothy saw her mother's profound misapprehension and she
+hastened to put it right.</p>
+<p>"It isn't Auntie Louie, Mummy. His ear is really aching."</p>
+<p>And still Frances went on smiling. She knew, and Nicky knew
+that, if a little boy could establish the fact of earache, he was
+absolved from all social and family obligations for as long as his
+affliction lasted. He wouldn't have to stand still and pretend he
+liked it while he was being kissed at.</p>
+<p>Frances kept her mouth shut when she smiled, as if she were
+trying not to. It was her upper lip that got the better of her. The
+fine, thin edges of it quivered and twitched and curled. You would
+have said the very down was sensitive to her thought's secret and
+iniquitous play. Her smile mocked other people's solemnities, her
+husband's solemnity, and the solemnity (no doubt inherited) of her
+son Michael; it mocked the demureness and the gravity of her
+face.</p>
+<p>She had brought her face close to Nicky's; and it was as if her
+mouth had eyes in it to see if there were guile in him.</p>
+<p>"Are you a little humbug?" she said.</p>
+<p>Nicky loved his mother's face. It never got excited or did silly
+things like other people's faces. It never got red and shiny like
+Auntie Louie's face, or hot and rough like Auntie Emmeline's, or
+wet and mizzly like Auntie Edie's. The softness and whiteness and
+dryness of his mother's face were delightful to Nicky. So was her
+hair. It was cold, with a funny sort of coldness that made your
+fingers tingle when you touched it; and it smelt like the taste of
+Brazil nuts.</p>
+<p>Frances saw the likeness of her smile quiver on Nicky's upper
+lip. It broke and became Nicky's smile that bared his little teeth
+and curled up the corners of his blue eyes. (His blue eyes and
+black brown hair were Anthony's.) It wasn't reasonable to suppose
+that Nicky had earache when he could smile like that.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid," she said, "you're a little humbug. Run to the
+terrace and see if Grannie and the Aunties are coming."</p>
+<p>He ran. It was half a child's run and half a full-grown
+boy's.</p>
+<p>Then Mrs. Anthony addressed her daughter.</p>
+<p>"Why did you say his ear's aching when it isn't?"</p>
+<p>"Because," said Dorothy, "it <i>is</i> aching."</p>
+<p>She was polite and exquisite and obstinate, like Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Nicky ought to know his own ear best. Go and tell him he's not
+to stand on the top of the wall. And if they're coming wave to
+them, to show you're glad to see them."</p>
+<p>"But--Mummy--I'm not."</p>
+<p>She knew it was dreadful before she said it. But she had warded
+off reproof by nuzzling against her mother's cheek as it tried to
+turn away from her. She saw her mother's upper lip moving,
+twitching. The sensitive down stirred on it like a dark smudge, a
+dust that quivered. Her own mouth, pushed forward, searching, the
+mouth of a nuzzling puppy, remained grave and tender. She was
+earnest and imperturbable in her truthfulness. "Whether you're glad
+or not you must go," said Frances. She meant to be obeyed.</p>
+<p>Dorothy went. Her body was obedient. For as yet she had her
+mother's body and her face, her blunted oval, the straight nose
+with the fine, tilted nostrils, her brown eyes, her solid hair,
+brown on the top and light underneath, and on the curve of the roll
+above her little ears. Frances had watched the appearance of those
+details with an anxiety that would have surprised her if she had
+been aware of it. She wanted to see herself in the bodies of her
+sons and in the mind of her daughter. But Dorothy had her father's
+mind. You couldn't move it. What she had said once she stuck to for
+ever, like Anthony to his ash-tree. As if sticking to a thing for
+ever could make it right once. And Dorothy had formed the habit of
+actually being right, like Anthony, nine times out of ten. Frances
+foresaw that this persistence, this unreasoning rectitude, might,
+in time, become annoying in a daughter. There were moments when she
+was almost perturbed by the presence of this small, mysterious
+organism, mixed up of her body and her husband's mind.</p>
+<p>But in secret she admired her daughter's candour, her
+downrightness and straightforwardness, her disdain of conventions
+and hypocrisies. Frances was not glad, she knew she was not glad,
+any more than Dorothy was glad, to see her mother and her sisters.
+She only pretended. In secret she was afraid of every moment she
+would have to live with them. She had lived with them too long. She
+foresaw what would happen this afternoon, how they would look, what
+they would say and do, and with what gestures. It would be like the
+telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that you know
+every word of.</p>
+<p>She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she
+had only asked them to come early in order that they might go early
+and leave her to her happiness.</p>
+<p>She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and
+Dorothy were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought
+that she wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if
+they were coming early. It struck her that this was sad.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope
+under the Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the
+sallow grass and the yellow clay of the Heath.</p>
+<p>"How little they look," Michael said.</p>
+<p>Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made
+them pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was
+the difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and
+always would be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and
+Dorothy never would be sorry for being what she was. She seemed to
+be saying, already, in her clearness and hardness, "What I am I am,
+and you can't change me." The utmost you could wring from her was
+that she couldn't help it.</p>
+<p>Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in
+black came nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the
+garden and the lane.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="II"></a>II</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the
+lane to the tree of Heaven.</p>
+<p>She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace,
+advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really
+belonging to each other, as if they had been strangers associated
+by some accident. It had grown on them in their efforts to carry
+off the embarrassment of appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie
+carried it off best. Sharp and rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never
+lent itself to any group. But for her black gown she really might
+not have belonged.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was
+only sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was
+wrapped up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed,
+fascinated by her sacred sense of bereavement. She moved as if
+hypnotized by her own sorrow.</p>
+<p>To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of
+mystic hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she
+suspected them of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if
+they could. But to her one married daughter and to her
+grand-children she was soft and gentle. So that, when they happened
+to be all together, her moods changed so rapidly that she seemed a
+creature of unaccountable caprice. One minute her small, white, dry
+face quivered with softness and gentleness, and the next it
+stiffened, or twitched with the inimical, disapproving look it had
+for Louie and Emmeline and Edith.</p>
+<p>The children lifted up their pure, impassive faces to be kissed
+at. Old Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother's
+knee. Dorothy and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party.
+Michael forgot all about playing with himself. He stayed where he
+was, drawn by the spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties. Grannie was
+clucking and chuckling to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled
+to her own babies long ago. Her under lip made itself wide and
+full; it worked with an in and out movement very funny and
+interesting to Michael. The movement meant that Grannie chuckled
+under protest of memories that were sacred to Grandpapa.</p>
+<p>"Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo--tchoo! Chuckaboo! Beautiful boy!" said
+Grannie.</p>
+<p>Auntie Louie looked at her youngest nephew. She smiled her
+downward, sagging smile, wrung from a virginity sadder than
+Grannie's grief. She spoke to Baby John.</p>
+<p>"You really are rather a nice boy," Auntie Louie said.</p>
+<p>But Edie, the youngest Auntie, was kneeling on the grass before
+him, bringing her face close to his. Baby John's new and flawless
+face was cruel to Auntie Edie's. So was his look of dignity and
+wisdom.</p>
+<p>"Oh, she says you're only rather nice," said Auntie Edie. "And
+you're the beautifullest, sweetest, darlingest that ever was.
+Wasn't she a nasty Auntie Louie? Ten little pink toes. And
+<i>there</i> he goes. Five little tootsies to each of his
+footsies."</p>
+<p>She hid herself behind the <i>Times</i> disturbing Jane.</p>
+<p>"Where's John-John?" she cried. "Where's he gone to? Can anybody
+tell me where to find John-John? Where's John-John?
+Peep-<i>bo</i>--there he is! John-John, look at Auntie Edie. Oh, he
+won't pay any attention to poor me."</p>
+<p>Baby John was playing earnestly with Grannie's watch-chain.</p>
+<p>"You might leave the child alone," said Grannie. "Can't you see
+he doesn't want you?"</p>
+<p>Auntie Edie made a little pouting face, like a scolded, pathetic
+child. Nobody ever did want Auntie Edie.</p>
+<p>And all the time Auntie Emmy was talking to Frances very loud
+and fast.</p>
+<p>"Frances, I do think your garden's too beautiful for words. How
+clever of you to think of clearing away the old flower-beds. I hate
+flower-beds on a lawn. Yet I don't suppose I should have had the
+strength of mind to get rid of them if it bad been me."</p>
+<p>As she talked Auntie Emmy opened her eyes very wide; her
+eyebrows jerked, the left one leaping up above the right; she
+thrust out her chin at you and her long, inquiring nose. Her thin
+face was the play of agitated nerve-strings that pulled it thus
+into perpetual, restless movements; and she made vague gestures
+with her large, bony hands. Her tongue went tick-tack, like a
+clock. Anthony said you-could hear Emmy's tongue striking the roof
+of her-mouth all thee time.</p>
+<p>"And putting those delphiniums all together like that--Massing
+the blues. Anthony? I <i>do</i> think Anthony has perfect taste. I
+adore delphiniums."</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy was behaving as if neither Michael nor Baby John was
+there.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think John-John's too beautiful for words?" said
+Frances. "Don't you like him a little bit too?"</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy winced as if Frances had flicked something in her
+face.</p>
+<p>"Of course I like him too. Why shouldn't I?"</p>
+<p>"I don't think you <i>do</i>, Auntie Emmy," Michael said.</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy considered him as for the first time.</p>
+<p>"What do you know about it?" she said.</p>
+<p>"I can tell by the funny things your face does."</p>
+<p>"I thought," said Frances, "you wanted to play by yourself."</p>
+<p>"So I do," said Michael.</p>
+<p>"Well then, go and play."</p>
+<p>He went and to a heavenly place that he knew of. But as he
+played with Himself there he thought: "Auntie Emmy doesn't tell the
+truth. I think it is because she isn't happy."</p>
+<p>Michael kept his best things to himself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"I suppose you're happy," said Grannie, "now you've got the poor
+child sent away."</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as
+much as to say she was helpless under her mother's stupidity.</p>
+<p>"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good
+for him to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."</p>
+<p>It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her
+sisters.</p>
+<p>"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it
+yourself."</p>
+<p>When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put
+her word in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the
+peace.</p>
+<p>Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her
+babies in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight of other
+people's babies was too much for Emmy. She could never be prepared
+for Emmy's moments.</p>
+<p>"It's all very well," Auntie Louie went on; "but I should like
+to hear of somebody admiring Dorothy. I don't see where Dorothy
+comes in."</p>
+<p>Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie's
+favourite. If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared
+that she was sure she wasn't.</p>
+<p>And again Frances knew what Louie meant--that she loved her
+three sons, Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her
+one daughter, Dorothea, with critical affection. That was the sort
+of thing that Louie was always saying and thinking about people,
+and nobody ever paid the slightest attention to what Louie said or
+thought. Frances told herself that if there was one emotion that
+she was more free from than another it was sex jealousy.</p>
+<p>The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given
+up Dorothy to Anthony. It was natural that he should care most for
+the little girl.</p>
+<p>Louie said that was easy--when she knew perfectly well that
+Anthony didn't. Like Frances he cared most for his three sons. She
+was leaving Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael
+and Nicholas to her.</p>
+<p>"You might just as well say," Frances said, "that I'm in love
+with John-John. Poor little Don-Don!"</p>
+<p>"I might," said Louie, "just as well."</p>
+<p>Grannie said she was sure she didn't understand what they were
+talking about and that Louie had some very queer ideas in her
+head.</p>
+<p>"Louie," she said, "knows more than I do."</p>
+<p>Frances thought: Was Grannie really stupid? Was she really
+innocent? Was she not, rather, clever, chock-full of the secret
+wisdom and the secret cruelty of sex?</p>
+<p>Frances was afraid of her thoughts. They came to her not like
+thoughts, but like quick rushes of her blood, partly confusing her.
+She did not like that.</p>
+<p>She thought: Supposing Grannie knew all the time that Emmy was
+unhappy, and took a perverse pleasure in her knowledge? Supposing
+she was not really soft and gentle? She could be soft and gentle to
+her, because of her children and because of Anthony. She respected
+Anthony because he was well-off and efficient and successful, and
+had supported her ever since Grandpapa had gone bankrupt. She was
+proud of Frances because she was Anthony's wife, who had had three
+sons and only one daughter.</p>
+<p>Grannie behaved as if her grandchildren were her own children,
+as if she had borne three Sons and only one daughter, instead of
+four daughters and only one son. Still, Frances was the vehicle of
+flesh and blood that carried on her flesh and blood in Michael and
+Nicholas and John. She respected Frances.</p>
+<p>But Frances could remember a time when she had been unmarried
+like her sisters, and when Grannie had turned on her, too, that
+look that was half contempt and half hostility or displeasure.
+Grannie had not wanted her to marry Anthony, any more than she
+would have wanted Louie or Emmeline or Edith to marry anybody,
+supposing anybody had wanted to marry them. And Frances and Anthony
+had defied her. They had insisted on marrying each other. Frances
+knew that if there had been no Anthony, her mother would have
+despised her in secret, as in secret she despised Emmeline and
+Edith. She despised them more than Louie, because, poor things,
+they wanted, palpably, to be married, whereas Louie didn't, or said
+she didn't. In her own way, Louie had defied her mother. She had
+bought a type-writer and a bicycle with her own earnings, and by
+partially supporting herself she had defied Anthony, the male
+benefactor, Louie's manner intimated that there was nothing Frances
+had that she wanted. She had resources in herself, and Frances had
+none.</p>
+<p>Frances persuaded herself that she admired and respected Louie.
+She knew that she, Frances, was only admired and respected because
+she had succeeded where her three sisters had failed. She was even
+afraid that, in moments of exasperation, Grannie used her and
+Anthony and the children to punish Emmy and Edie for their failure.
+The least she could do was to stand between them and Grannie.</p>
+<p>It was possible that if Grannie had been allowed to ignore them
+and give her whole attention to Frances or Michael or Baby John,
+she could have contrived to be soft and gentle for an afternoon.
+But neither Louie nor Emmeline, nor even Edith, would consent to be
+ignored. They refused to knuckle under, to give in. Theirs was a
+perpetual struggle to achieve an individuality in the teeth of
+circumstances that had denied them any. Frances acknowledged that
+they were right, that in the same circumstances she would have done
+the same.</p>
+<p>In their different ways and by different methods they claimed
+attention. They claimed it incessantly, Louie, the eldest, by an
+attitude of assurance and superiority so stiff and hard that it
+seemed invulnerable; Emmy by sudden jerky enthusiasms, exaltations,
+intensities; Edie by an exaggerated animation, a false excitement.
+Edie would drop from a childish merriment to a childish pathos,
+when she would call herself "Poor me," and demand pity for being
+tired, for missing a train, for cold feet, for hair coming
+down.</p>
+<p>There would be still more animation, and still more enthusiasm
+when Anthony came home.</p>
+<p>Frances prided herself on her power of foreseeing things. She
+foresaw that Anthony would come home early for his game. She
+foresaw the funny, nervous agony of his face when he appeared on
+the terrace and caught sight of Grannie and the three Aunties, and
+the elaborate and exquisite politeness with which he would conceal
+from them his emotion. She foresaw that she would say to Annie,
+"When the master comes tell him we're having tea in the garden,
+under the tree of--under the ash-tree" (for after all, he was the
+master, and discipline must be maintained). She foresaw the very
+gestures of his entrance, the ironically solemn bow that he would
+make to her, far-off, from the terrace; she even foresaw the kind
+of joke that, for the life of him, he would not be able to help
+making. She was so made that she could live happily in this world
+of small, foreseen things.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="III"></a>III</h2>
+<br>
+<p>And it all happened as she had foreseen.</p>
+<p>Anthony came home early, because it was a fine afternoon. He
+made the kind of joke that calamity always forced from him, by some
+perversion of his instincts.</p>
+<p>"When is an ash-tree not an ash-tree? When it's a tree of
+Heaven."</p>
+<p>He was exquisitely polite to Grannie and the Aunties, and his
+manner to Frances, which she openly complained of, was, he said,
+what a woman brought on herself when she reserved her passion for
+her children, her sentiment for trees of Heaven, and her mockery
+for her devoted husband.</p>
+<p>"I suppose we can have some tennis <i>now</i>," said Auntie
+Louie.</p>
+<p>"Certainly," said Anthony, "we can, and we shall." He tried not
+to look at Frances.</p>
+<p>And Auntie Edie became automatically animated.</p>
+<p>"I can't serve for nuts, but I can run. Who's going to play with
+<i>me</i>?"</p>
+<p>"I am," said Anthony. He was perfect.</p>
+<p>The game of tennis had an unholy and terrible attraction for
+Auntie Louie and Auntie Edie. Neither of them could play. But,
+whereas Auntie Louie thought that she could play and took tennis
+seriously, Auntie Edie knew that she couldn't and took it as a
+joke.</p>
+<p>Auntie Louie stood tall and rigid and immovable. She planted
+herself, like a man, close up to the net, where Anthony wanted to
+be, and where he should have been; but Auntie Louie said she was no
+good if you put her to play back; she couldn't be expected to take
+every ball he missed.</p>
+<p>When Auntie Louie called out "Play!" she meant to send a nervous
+shudder through her opponents, shattering their morale. She went
+through all the gestures of an annihilating service that for some
+reason never happened. She said the net was too low and that
+spoiled her eye. And when she missed her return it was because
+Anthony had looked at her and put her off. Still Aunt Louie's
+attitude had this advantage that it kept her quiet in one place
+where Anthony could dance round and round her.</p>
+<p>But Auntie Edie played in little nervous runs and slides and
+rushes; she flung herself, with screams of excitement, against the
+ball, her partner and the net; and she brandished her racket in a
+dangerous manner. The oftener she missed the funnier it was to
+Auntie Edie. She had been pretty when she was young, and seventeen
+years ago her cries and tumbles and collisions had been judged
+amusing; and Auntie Edie thought they were amusing still. Anthony
+had never had the heart to undeceive her. So that when Anthony was
+there Auntie Edie still went about setting a standard of gaiety for
+other people to live up to; and still she was astonished that they
+never did, that other people had no sense of humour.</p>
+<p>Therefore Frances was glad when Anthony told her that he had
+asked Mr. Parsons, the children's tutor, and young Norris and young
+Vereker from the office to come round for tennis at six, and that
+dinner must be put off till half-past eight.</p>
+<p>All was well. The evening would be sacred to Anthony and the
+young men. The illusion of worry passed, and Frances's real world
+of happiness stood firm.</p>
+<p>And as Frances's mind, being a thoroughly healthy mind, refused
+to entertain any dreary possibility for long together, so it was
+simply unable to foresee downright calamity, even when it had been
+pointed out to her. For instance, that Nicky should really have
+chosen the day of the party for an earache, the worst earache he
+had ever had.</p>
+<p>He appeared at tea-time, carried in Mary-Nanna's arms, and with
+his head tied up in one of Mr. Jervis's cricket scarves. As he
+approached his family he tried hard not to look pathetic.</p>
+<p>And at the sight of her little son her whole brilliant world of
+happiness was shattered around Frances.</p>
+<p>"Nicky darling," she said, "why <i>didn't</i> you tell me it was
+really aching?"</p>
+<p>"I didn't know," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>He never did know the precise degree of pain that distinguished
+the beginning of a genuine earache from that of a sham one, and he
+felt that to palm off a sham earache on his mother for a real one,
+was somehow a sneaky thing to do. And while his ear went on
+stabbing him, Nicky did his best to explain.</p>
+<p>"You see, I never know whether it's aching or whether it's only
+going to ache. It began a little, teeny bit when the Funny Man made
+me laugh. And I didn't see the Magic Lantern, and I didn't have any
+of Rosalind's cake. It came on when I was biting the sugar off. And
+it was aching in both ears at once. It was," said Nicky, "a jolly
+sell for me."</p>
+<p>At that moment Nicky's earache jabbed upwards at his eyelids and
+cut them, and shook tears out of them. But Nicky's mouth refused to
+take any part in the performance, though he let his father carry
+him upstairs. And, as he lay on the big bed in his mother's room,
+he said he thought he could bear it if he had Jane-Pussy to lie
+beside him, and his steam-engine.</p>
+<p>Anthony went back into the garden to fetch Jane. He spent an
+hour looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house
+and through the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He
+looked for Jane in the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under
+the rhubarb, and on the scullery roof, and in the water butt. It
+was just possible that on a day of complete calamity Jane should
+have slithered off the scullery roof into the water-butt. The least
+he could do was to find Jane, since Nicky wanted her.</p>
+<p>And in the end it turned out that Jane had been captured in her
+sleep, treacherously, by Auntie Emmy. And she had escaped, maddened
+with terror of the large, nervous, incessantly caressing hands. She
+had climbed into the highest branch of the tree of Heaven, and
+crouched there, glaring, unhappy.</p>
+<p>"Damn the cat!" said Anthony to himself. (It was not Jane he
+meant.)</p>
+<p>He was distressed, irritated, absurdly upset, because he would
+have to go back to Nicky without Jane, because he couldn't get
+Nicky what he wanted.</p>
+<p>In that moment Anthony loved Nicky more than any of them. He
+loved him almost more than Frances. Nicky's earache ruined the fine
+day.</p>
+<p>He confided in young Vereker. "I wouldn't bother," he said, "if
+the little chap wasn't so plucky about it."</p>
+<p>"Quite so, sir," said young Vereker.</p>
+<p>It was young Mr. Vereker who found Jane, who eventually
+recaptured her. Young Mr. Vereker made himself glorious by climbing
+up, at the risk of his neck and in his new white flannels, into the
+high branches of the tree of Heaven, to bring Jane down.</p>
+<p>And when Anthony thanked him he said, "Don't mention it, sir.
+It's only a trifle," though it was, as Mr. Norris said, palpable
+that the flannels were ruined. Still, if he hadn't found that
+confounded cat, they would never, humanly speaking, have had their
+tennis.</p>
+<p>The Aunties did not see Mr. Vereker climbing into the tree of
+Heaven. They did not see him playing with Mr. Parsons and Anthony
+and Mr. Norris. For as soon as the three young men appeared, and
+Emmeline and Edith began to be interested and emphatic, Grannie
+said that as they wouldn't see anything more of Frances and the
+children, it was no good staying any longer, and they'd better be
+getting back. It was as if she knew that they were going to enjoy
+themselves and was determined to prevent it.</p>
+<p>Frances went with them to the bottom of the lane. She stood
+there till the black figures had passed, one by one, through the
+white posts on to the Heath, till, in the distance, they became
+small again and harmless and pathetic.</p>
+<p>Then she went back to her room where Nicky lay in the big
+bed.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky lay in the big bed with Jane on one side of him and his
+steam-engine on the other, and a bag of hot salt against each ear.
+Now and then a thin wall of sleep slid between him and his
+earache.</p>
+<p>Frances sat by the open window and looked out into the garden
+where Anthony and Norris played, quietly yet fiercely, against
+Vereker and Parsons. Frances loved the smell of fresh grass that
+the balls and the men's feet struck from the lawn; she loved the
+men's voices subdued to Nicky's sleep, and the sound of their
+padding feet, the thud of the balls on the turf, the smacking and
+thwacking of the rackets. She loved every movement of Anthony's
+handsome, energetic body; she loved the quick, supple bodies of the
+young men, the tense poise and earnest activity of their
+adolescence. But it was not Vereker or Parsons or Norris that she
+loved or that she saw. It was Michael, Nicholas and John whose
+adolescence was foreshadowed in those athletic forms wearing white
+flannels; Michael, Nicky and John, in white flannels, playing
+fiercely. When young Vereker drew himself to his full height, when
+his young body showed lean and slender as he raised his arms for
+his smashing service, it was not young Vereker, but Michael,
+serious and beautiful. When young Parsons leaped high into the air
+and thus returned Anthony's facetious sky-scraper on the volley,
+that was Nicky. When young Norris turned and ran at the top of his
+speed, and overtook the ball on its rebound from the base line
+where young Vereker had planted it, when, as by a miracle, he sent
+it backwards over his own head, paralysing Vereker and Parsons with
+sheer astonishment, that was John.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Her vision passed. She was leaning over Nicky now, Nicky so
+small in the big bed. Nicky had moaned.</p>
+<p>"Does it count if I make that little noise, Mummy? It sort of
+lets the pain out."</p>
+<p>"No, my lamb, it doesn't count. Is the pain very bad?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, Mummy, awful. It's going faster and faster. And it bizzes.
+And when it doesn't bizz, it thumps." He paused--"I
+think--p'raps--I could bear it better if I sat on your knee."</p>
+<p>Frances thought she could bear it better too. It would be good
+for Nicky that he should grow into beautiful adolescence and a
+perfect manhood; but it was better for her that he should be a baby
+still, that she should have him on her knee and hold him close to
+her; that she should feel his adorable body press quivering against
+her body, and the heat of his earache penetrating her cool flesh.
+For now she was lost to herself and utterly absorbed in Nicky. And
+her agony became a sort of ecstasy, as if, actually, she bore his
+pain.</p>
+<p>It was Anthony who could not stand it. Anthony had come in on
+his way to his dressing-room. As he looked at Nicky his handsome,
+hawk-like face was drawn with a dreadful, yearning, ineffectual
+pity. Frances had discovered that her husband could both be and
+look pathetic. He had wanted her to be sorry for him and she was
+sorry for him, because his male pity was all agony; there was no
+ecstasy in it of any sort at all. Nicky was far more her flesh and
+blood than he was Anthony's.</p>
+<p>Nicky stirred in his mother's lap. He raised his head. And when
+he saw that queer look on his father's face he smiled at it. He had
+to make the smile himself, for it refused to come of its own
+accord. He made it carefully, so that it shouldn't hurt him. But he
+made it so well that it hurt Frances and Anthony.</p>
+<p>"I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does," Frances said in
+her pride.</p>
+<p>"If he can bear it, <i>I</i> can't," said Anthony. And he
+stalked into his dressing-room and shut the door on himself.</p>
+<p>"Daddy minds more than you do," said Frances.</p>
+<p>At that Nicky sat up. His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned
+with the fever of his earache.</p>
+<p>"I don't mind," he said. "Really and truly I don't mind. I don't
+care if my ear <i>does</i> ache.</p>
+<p>"It's my eyes is crying, not me."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner,
+Nicky sent for his father and mother. Something had happened.</p>
+<p>Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt
+most awfully. And when it had done cracking his earache had gone
+away. And Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind's party
+and Michael a tin train. And Michael had given him the train and he
+wouldn't take the trumpet instead. Oughtn't Michael to have had the
+trumpet?</p>
+<p>And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night
+nursery, he called them back again.</p>
+<p>"It was a jolly sell for me, wasn't it?" said Nicky. And he
+laughed.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever
+happened, and something was generally happening to him, he didn't
+care. When he scaled the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it
+gave way under his assault and threw him down the steps on to the
+gravel walk, he picked himself up, displaying a forehead that was a
+red abrasion filled in with yellow gravel and the grey dust of the
+smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't care. I liked it," before
+anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna stepped on his train
+and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I don't care. I
+shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't care came
+to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be life's
+last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen, would
+ever take him at a disadvantage.</p>
+<p>Two years passed and he was just the same.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was
+adorable.</p>
+<p>But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when
+you had to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment
+by first admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a
+better one when it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him
+have any cake for tea after he had tested the resilience of the new
+tyres on his father's bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it
+would have been more to the purpose if they had taken his
+steam-engine from him for a week.</p>
+<p>"You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it,"
+said Nicky.</p>
+<p>Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of
+Mutton Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't
+gone in after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to
+bed at four o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother
+came to tuck him up and say Good-night, she found him sitting up,
+smiling and ready.</p>
+<p>"Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit
+of good sending me to bed."</p>
+<p>"I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost
+suspected Nicky of insincerity.</p>
+<p>"So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things.
+You see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've
+'vented three things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle
+stand still with Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of
+bottles; and a thing to make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't
+a punishment, is it, Mummy?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years
+passed and Nicky was still the same.</p>
+<p>And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John
+were not the same.</p>
+<p>For the awful thing about your children was that they were
+always dying. Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child
+Dorothy was dead and in her place was a strange big girl. The child
+Michael was dead and in his place was a strange big boy. And
+Frances mourned over the passing of each age. You could no more
+bring back that unique loveliness of two years old, of five years
+old, of seven, than you could bring back the dead. Even John-John
+was not a baby any more; he spoke another language and had other
+feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's knee.
+Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more
+wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and
+she wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on,
+at the same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies
+and the mother of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and
+women is to be born.</p>
+<p>Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.</p>
+<p>Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she
+wanted them to?</p>
+<p>There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make
+no impression on him.</p>
+<p>There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and
+showed that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful
+words, by rare, extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with
+his self-will; not by anything solid and continuous. There was a
+softness in Michael that distressed and a hardness that perplexed
+her. You could make an impression on Michael--far too easily--and
+the impression stayed. You couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory
+was terrible. And he had secret ways. He was growing more and more
+sensitive, more and more wrapped up in Himself. Supposing Michael
+became a morbid egoist, like Anthony's brother, Bartholomew?</p>
+<p>And there was Dorothy. She went her own way more than ever, with
+the absolute conviction that it was the right way. Nothing could
+turn her. At thirteen her body was no longer obedient. Dorothy was
+not going to be her mother's companion, or her father's, either;
+she was Rosalind Jervis's companion. She seemed to care more about
+little fat, fluffy Rosalind than about any of them except Nicky.
+Dorothy was interested in Michael; she respected his queer
+thoughts. It was as if she recognized some power in him that could
+beat her somewhere some day, and was humble before a thing her
+cleverness had failed to understand. But it was Nicky that she
+adored, not Michael; and she was bad for Nicky. She encouraged his
+naughtiness because it amused her.</p>
+<p>Frances foresaw that a time would come, a little later, when
+Nicky and Dorothy would be companions, not Nicky and his
+mother.</p>
+<p>In the evenings, coming home from the golf-links, Frances and
+Anthony discussed their children.</p>
+<p>Frances said, "You can't make any impression on Nicky. There
+seems to be no way that you can get at him."</p>
+<p>Anthony thought there was a way. It was a way he had not tried
+yet, that he did not want to try. But, if he could only bring
+himself to it, he judged that he could make a distinct
+impression.</p>
+<p>"What the young rascal wants is a thorough good spanking," said
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>Nicky said so too.</p>
+<p>The first time he got it Nicky's criticism was that it wasn't a
+bad idea if his father could have pulled it off all right. But he
+said, "It's no good if you do it through the cloth. And it's no
+good unless you <i>want</i> to hurt me, Daddy. And you don't want.
+And even if you did want, badly enough to try and hurt, supposing
+you spanked ever so hard, you couldn't hurt as much as my earache.
+And I can bear that."</p>
+<p>"He's top dog again, you see," said Frances, not without a
+secret satisfaction.</p>
+<p>"Oh, is he?" said Anthony. "I don't propose to be downed by
+Nicky."</p>
+<p>Every instinct in him revolted against spanking Nicky. But when
+Williams, the groom, showed him a graze on each knee of the pony he
+had bought for Frances and the children, Anthony determined that,
+this time, Nicky should have a serious spanking.</p>
+<p>"Which of them took Roger out?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I don't know, sir," said Williams.</p>
+<p>But Anthony knew. He lay in wait for Nicky by the door that led
+from the stable yard into the kitchen garden.</p>
+<p>Nicky was in the strawberry bed.</p>
+<p>"Was it you who took Roger out this afternoon?"</p>
+<p>Nicky did not answer promptly. His mouth was still full of
+strawberries.</p>
+<p>"What if I did?" he said at last, after manifest reflection.</p>
+<p>"If you did? Why, you let him down on Golders Hill and cut his
+knees."</p>
+<p>"Holly Mount," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Holly Mount or Golders Hill, it's all the same to you, you
+young monkey."</p>
+<p>"It isn't, Daddy. Holly Mount's much the worst. It's an awful
+hill."</p>
+<p>"That," said Anthony, "is why you're forbidden to ride down it.
+You've <i>got</i> to be spanked for this, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"Have I? All right. Don't look so unhappy, Daddy."</p>
+<p>Anthony did much better this time. Nicky (though he shook with
+laughter) owned it very handsomely. And Anthony had handicapped
+himself again by doing it through the cloth. He drew the line at
+shaming Nicky. (Yet--<i>could</i> you have shamed his indomitable
+impudence?)</p>
+<p>But he had done it. He had done it ruthlessly, while the
+strawberries were still wet on Nicky's mouth.</p>
+<p>And when it was all over Michael, looking for his father, came
+into the school-room where these things happened. He said he was
+awfully sorry, but he'd taken Roger out, and Roger had gone down on
+his knees and cut himself.</p>
+<p>No, it wasn't on Holly Mount, it was at the turn of the road on
+the hill past the "Spaniards."</p>
+<p>Anthony paid no attention to Michael. He turned on Michael's
+brother.</p>
+<p>"Nicky, what did you do it for?"</p>
+<p>"For a rag, of course. I knew you'd feel such a jolly fool when
+you found it wasn't me."</p>
+<p>"You see, Daddy," he explained later, "you might have known I
+wouldn't have let Roger down. But wasn't it a ripping sell?"</p>
+<p>"What are you to do," said Anthony, "with a boy like that?"</p>
+<p>Frances had an inspiration. "Do nothing," she said. Her
+tranquillity refused to be troubled for long together.</p>
+<p>"Nicky's right. It's no good trying to punish him. After all,
+<i>why</i> punish Nicky? It isn't as if he was really naughty. He
+never does unkind things, or mean things. And he's truthful."</p>
+<p>"Horribly truthful. They all are," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Well, then, what does Nicky do?"</p>
+<p>"He does dangerous things."</p>
+<p>"He forgets."</p>
+<p>"Nothing more dangerous than forgetting. We must punish him to
+make him remember."</p>
+<p>"But it doesn't make him remember. It only makes him think us
+fools."</p>
+<p>"You know what it means?" said Anthony. "We shall have to send
+him to school."</p>
+<p>"Not yet," said Frances.</p>
+<p>School was the thing in the future that she dreaded. Nicky was
+only nine, and they were all getting on well with Mt. Parsons.
+Anthony knew that to send Nicky to school now would be punishing
+Frances, not Nicky. The little fiend would only grin in their faces
+if they told him he was going to school.</p>
+<p>It was no use trying to make impressions on Nicky. He was as
+hard as nails. He would never feel things.</p>
+<p>Perhaps, Frances thought, it was just as well.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="V"></a>V</h2>
+<br>
+<p>"I do think it was nice of Jane," said Nicky, "to have
+Jerry."</p>
+<p>"And I do think it was nice of me," said Dorothy, "to give him
+to you."</p>
+<p>Jane was Dorothy's cat; therefore her kittens were
+Dorothy's.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't have given him to just anybody."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"I might have kept him. He's the nicest kitten Jane ever
+had."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Nicky. "It <i>was</i> nice of you."</p>
+<p>"I might want him back again."</p>
+<p>"I--know."</p>
+<p>Nicky was quiet and serious, almost humble, as if he went in the
+fear of losing Jerry. Nobody but Jerry and Dorothy saw Nicky in
+that mood.</p>
+<p>Not that he was really afraid. Nothing could take Jerry from
+him. If Dorothy could have taken him back again she wouldn't have,
+not even if she had really wanted him. Dorothy wasn't cruel, and
+she was only ragging.</p>
+<p>But certainly he was Jane's nicest kitten. Jane was
+half-Persian, white with untidy tabby patterns on her. Jerry was
+black all over. Whatever attitude he took, his tight, short fur
+kept the outlines of his figure firm and clear, whether he arched
+his back and jumped sideways, or rolled himself into a cushion, or
+squatted with haunches spread and paws doubled in under his breast,
+or sat bolt upright with his four legs straight like pillars, and
+his tail curled about his feet. Jerry's coat shone like black
+looking-glass, and the top of his head smelt sweet, like a dove's
+breast.</p>
+<p>And he had yellow eyes. Mary-Nanna said they would turn green
+some day. But Nicky didn't believe it. Mary-Nanna was only ragging.
+Jerry's eyes would always be yellow.</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons declared that Nicky sat for whole hours meditating
+on Jerry, as if in this way he could make him last longer.</p>
+<p>Jerry's life was wonderful to Nicky. Once he was so small that
+his body covered hardly the palm of your hand; you could see his
+skin; it felt soft and weak through the thin fur, sleeked flat and
+wet where Jane had licked it. His eyes were buttoned up tight. Then
+they opened. He crawled feebly on the floor after Jane, or hung on
+to her little breasts, pressing out the milk with his clever paws.
+Then Jerry got older. Sometimes he went mad and became a bat or a
+bird, and flew up the drawing-room curtains as if his legs were
+wings.</p>
+<p>Nicky said that Jerry could turn himself into anything he
+pleased; a hawk, an owl, a dove, a Himalayan bear, a snake, a
+flying squirrel, a monkey, a rabbit, a panther, and a little black
+lamb of God.</p>
+<p>Jerry was a cat now; he was two years old.</p>
+<p>Jerry's fixed idea seemed to be that he was a very young cat,
+and that he must be nursed continually, and that nobody but Nicky
+must nurse him. Mr. Parsons found that Nicky made surprising
+progress in his Latin and Greek that year. What had baffled Mr.
+Parsons up till now had been Nicky's incapacity for sitting still.
+But he would sit still enough when Jerry was on his knee, pressed
+tight between the edge of the desk and Nicky's stomach, so that
+knowledge entered into Nicky through Jerry when there was no other
+way.</p>
+<p>Nicky would even sit still in the open air to watch Jerry as he
+stalked bees in the grass, or played by himself, over and over
+again, his own enchanted game. He always played it in the same way.
+He started from the same clump in the border, to run in one long
+careening curve across the grass; at the same spot in the lawn he
+bounded sideways and gave the same little barking grunt and dashed
+off into the bushes. When you tried to catch him midway he stood on
+his hind legs and bowed to you slantwise, waving his forepaws, or
+rushed like lightning up the tree of Heaven, and climbed into the
+highest branches and clung there, looking down at you. His yellow
+eyes shone through the green leaves; they quivered; they played;
+they mocked you with some challenge, some charm, secret and divine
+and savage.</p>
+<p>"The soul of Nicky is in that cat," Frances said.</p>
+<p>Jerry knew that he was Nicky's cat. When other people caught him
+he scrabbled over their shoulders with his claws and got away from
+them. When Nicky caught him he lay quiet and heavy in his arms,
+pressing down and spreading his soft body. Nicky's sense of touch
+had been hardened by violent impacts and collisions, by experiments
+with jack-knives and saws and chisels and gouges, and by struggling
+with the material of his everlasting inventions. Through communion
+with Jerry it became tender and sensitive again. It delighted in
+the cat's throbbing purr and the thrill of his feet, as Jerry,
+serious and earnest, padded down his bed on Nicky's knee.</p>
+<p>"I like him best, though," said Nicky, "when he's sleepy and at
+the same time bitesome."</p>
+<p>"You mustn't let him bite you," Frances said.</p>
+<p>"I don't mind," said Nicky. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't like
+me."</p>
+<p>Jerry had dropped off to sleep with his jaws closing drowsily on
+Nicky's arm. When it moved his hind legs kicked at it and tore.</p>
+<p>"He's dreaming when he does that," said Nicky. "He thinks he's a
+panther and I'm buffaloes."</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons laughed at him. "Nicky and his cat!" he said. Nicky
+didn't care. Mr. Parsons was always ragging him.</p>
+<p>The tutor preferred dogs himself. He couldn't afford any of the
+expensive breeds; but that summer he was taking care of a Russian
+wolfhound for a friend of his. When Mr. Parsons ran with Michael
+and Nicky round the Heath, the great borzoi ran before them with
+long leaps, head downwards, setting an impossible pace. Michael and
+Dorothy adored Boris openly. Nicky, out of loyalty to Jerry,
+stifled a secret admiration. For Mr. Parsons held that a devotion
+to a cat was incompatible with a proper feeling for a dog, whence
+Nicky had inferred that any feeling for a dog must do violence to
+the nobler passion.</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons tried to wean Nicky from what he pretended to regard
+as his unmanly weakness. "Wait, Nicky," he said, "till you've got a
+dog of your own."</p>
+<p>"I don't want a dog of my own," said Nicky. "I don't want
+anything but Jerry." Boris, he said, was not clever, like Jerry. He
+had a silly face.</p>
+<p>"Think so?" said Mr. Parsons. "Look at his jaws. They could
+break Jerry's back with one snap."</p>
+<p>"<i>Could</i> he, Daddy?"</p>
+<p>They were at tea on the lawn, and Boris had gone to sleep under
+Mr. Parsons' legs with his long muzzle on his forepaws.</p>
+<p>"He could," said Anthony, "if he caught him."</p>
+<p>"But he couldn't catch him. Jerry'd be up a tree before Boris
+could look at him."</p>
+<p>"If you want Jerry to shin up trees you must keep his weight
+down."</p>
+<p>Nicky laughed. He knew that Boris could never catch Jerry. His
+father was only ragging him.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky was in the schoolroom, bowed over his desk. He was doing
+an imposition, the second aorist of the abominable verb [Greek:
+erchomai], written out five and twenty times. (Luckily he could do
+the last fifteen times from memory.)</p>
+<p>Nicky had been arguing with Mr. Parsons. Mr. Parsons had said
+that the second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] was not [Greek:
+&ecirc;rchon].</p>
+<p>Nicky had said, "I can't help it. If it's not [Greek:
+&ecirc;rchon] it ought to be."</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons had replied: "The verb [Greek: erchomai] is
+irregular." And Nicky had retorted, in effect, that no verb had any
+business to be as irregular as all that. Mr. Parsons had then
+suggested that Nicky might know more about the business of
+irregular verbs if he wrote out the second aorist of [Greek:
+erchomai] five and twenty times after tea. As it was a particularly
+fine afternoon, an imposition was, Nicky admitted, a score for Mr.
+Parsons and a jolly good sell for <i>him</i>.</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons had not allowed him to have Jerry on his knee, or
+even in the room; and this, Nicky owned further, was but just. It
+wouldn't have been nearly so good a punishment if he had had Jerry
+with him.</p>
+<p>Nicky, bowed over his desk, struggled for the perfect legibility
+which Mr. Parsons had insisted on, as otherwise the imposition
+would do him more harm than good. He was in for it, and the thing
+must be done honourably if it was done at all. He had only looked
+out of the windows twice to make sure that Boris was asleep under
+Mr. Parsons' legs. And once he had left the room to see where Jerry
+was. He had found him in the kitchen garden, sitting on a bed of
+fresh-grown mustard and cress, ruining it. He sat like a lamb, his
+forepaws crossed, his head tilted slightly backwards. His yellow
+eyes gazed at Nicky with a sweet and mournful innocence.</p>
+<p>Nicky did not hear the voices in the garden.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully sorry, sir," Mr. Parsons was saying. "I can't think
+how it could have happened." Mr. Parsons' voice was thick and his
+face was very red. "I could have sworn the door was shut."</p>
+<p>"Johnnie opened it," said Anthony. He seemed to have caught,
+suddenly, one of his bad colds and to be giving it to Mr. Parsons.
+They were both in their shirtsleeves, and Anthony carried something
+in his arms which he had covered with his coat.</p>
+<p>The borzoi stood in front of them. His face had a look of
+foolish ecstasy. He stared at Mr. Parsons, and as he stared he
+panted. There was a red smear on his white breast; his open jaws
+still dripped a pink slaver. It sprayed the ground in front of
+them, jerked out with his panting.</p>
+<p>"Get away, you damned brute," said Mr. Parsons.</p>
+<p>Boris abashed himself; he stretched out his fore legs towards
+Mr. Parsons, shook his raised haunches, lifted up his great
+saw-like muzzle, and rolled into one monstrous cry a bark, a howl,
+a yawn.</p>
+<p>Nicky heard it, and he looked out of the schoolroom window. He
+saw the red smear on the white curly breast. He saw his father in
+his shirt sleeves, carrying something in his arms that he had
+covered with his coat.</p>
+<p>Under the tree of Heaven Dorothy and Michael, crouching close
+against their mother, cried quietly. Frances was crying, too; for
+it was she who would have to tell Nicky.</p>
+<p>Dorothy tried to console him.</p>
+<p>"Jerry's eyes would have turned green, if he had lived, Nicky.
+They would, really."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't have minded. They'd have been Jerry's eyes."</p>
+<p>"But he wouldn't have looked like Jerry."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't have cared what he looked like. He'd have
+<i>been</i> Jerry."</p>
+<p>"I'll give you Jane, Nicky, and all the kittens she ever has, if
+that would make up."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't. You don't seem to understand that it's Jerry I
+want. I wish you wouldn't talk about him."</p>
+<p>"Very well," said Dorothy, "I won't."</p>
+<p>Then Grannie tried. She recommended a holy resignation. God, she
+said, had given Jerry to Nicky, and God had taken him away.</p>
+<p>"He didn't give him me, and he'd no right to take him. Dorothy
+wouldn't have done it. She was only ragging. But when God does
+things," said Nicky savagely, "it isn't a rag."</p>
+<p>He hated Grannie, and he hated Mr. Parsons, and he hated God.
+But he loved Dorothy who had given him Jerry.</p>
+<p>Night after night Frances held him in her arms at bed-time while
+Nicky said the same thing. "If--if I could stop seeing him. But I
+keep on seeing him. When he sat on the mustard and cress. And when
+he bit me with his sleep-bites. And when he looked at me out of the
+tree of Heaven. Then I hear that little barking grunt he used to
+make when he was playing with himself--when he dashed off into the
+bushes.</p>
+<p>"And I can't <i>bear</i> it."</p>
+<p>Night after night Nicky cried himself to sleep.</p>
+<p>For the awful thing was that it had been all his fault. If he
+had kept Jerry's weight down Boris couldn't have caught him.</p>
+<p>"Daddy said so, Mummy."</p>
+<p>Over and over again Frances said, "It wasn't your fault. It was
+Don-Don's. He left the door open. Surely you can forgive Don-Don?"
+Over and over again Nicky said, "I do forgive him."</p>
+<p>But it was no good. Nicky became first supernaturally subdued
+and gentle, then ill. They had to take him away from home, away
+from the sight of the garden, and away from Mr. Parsons,
+forestalling the midsummer holidays by two months.</p>
+<p>Nicky at the seaside was troublesome and happy, and they thought
+he had forgotten. But on the first evening at Hampstead, as Frances
+kissed him Good-night, he said: "Shall I have to see Mr. Parsons
+to-morrow?"</p>
+<p>Frances said: "Yes. Of course."</p>
+<p>"I'd rather not."</p>
+<p>"Nonsense, you must get over that."</p>
+<p>"I--can't, Mummy."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Nicky, can't you forgive poor Mr. Parsons? When he was so
+unhappy?"</p>
+<p>Nicky meditated.</p>
+<p>"Do you think," he said at last, "he really minded?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure he did."</p>
+<p>"As much as you and Daddy?"</p>
+<p>"Quite as much."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Nicky, "I'll forgive him."</p>
+<p>But, though he forgave John and Mr. Parsons and even God, who,
+to do him justice, did not seem to have been able to help it, Nicky
+did not forgive himself.</p>
+<p>Yet Frances never could think why the sight of mustard and cress
+made Nicky sick. Neither did Mr. Parsons, nor any schoolmaster who
+came after him understand why, when Nicky knew all the rest of the
+verb [Greek: erchomai] by heart he was unable to remember the
+second aorist.</p>
+<p>He excellent memory, but there was always a gap in it just
+there.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>In that peace and tranquillity where nothing ever happened,
+Jerry's violent death would have counted as an event, a date to
+reckon by; but for three memorable things that happened, one after
+another, in the summer and autumn of 'ninety-nine: the return of
+Frances's brother, Maurice Fleming, from Australia where Anthony
+had sent him two years ago, on the express understanding that he
+was to stay there; the simultaneous arrival of Anthony's brother,
+Bartholomew, and his family; and the outbreak of the Boer War.</p>
+<p>The return of Morrie was not altogether unforeseen, and
+Bartholomew had announced his coming well beforehand, but who could
+have dreamed that at the end of the nineteenth century England
+would be engaged in a War that really <i>was</i> a War? Frances,
+with the <i>Times</i> in her hands, supposed that that meant more
+meddling and muddling of stupid politicians, and that it would mean
+more silly speeches in Parliament, and copy, at last, for foolish
+violent, pathetic and desperate editors, and breach of promise
+cases, divorces and fires in paraffin shops reduced to momentary
+insignificance.</p>
+<p>But as yet there was no war, nor any appearance that sensible
+people interpreted as a sign of war at the time of Morrie's return.
+It stood alone, as other past returns, the return from Bombay, the
+return from Canada, the return from Cape Colony, had stood, in its
+sheer awfulness. To Frances it represented the extremity of
+disaster.</p>
+<p>They might have known what was coming by Grannie's behaviour.
+One day, the day when the Australian mail arrived, she had subsided
+suddenly into a state of softness and gentleness. She approached
+her son-in-law with an air of sorrowful deprecation; she showed a
+certain deference to her daughter Louie; she was soft and gentle
+even with Emmeline and Edith.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Fleming broke the news to Louie who broke it to Frances who
+in her turn broke it to Anthony. That was the procedure they
+invariably adopted.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," Grannie said, "what he can be coming back for!" Each
+time she affected astonishment and incredulity, as if Morrie's
+coming back were, not a recurrence that crushed you with its
+flatness and staleness, but a thing that must interest Louie
+because of its utter un-likeliness.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said Louie, "why he hasn't come before. What else
+did you expect?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I don't know," said Grannie helplessly. "Go and tell
+Frances."</p>
+<p>Louie went. And because she knew that the burden of Morrie would
+fall again on Frances's husband she was disagreeable with
+Frances.</p>
+<p>"It's all very well for you," she said. "You haven't got to live
+with him. You haven't got to sleep in the room next him. You don't
+know what it's like."</p>
+<p>"I do know," said Frances. "I remember. You'll have to bear
+it."</p>
+<p>"You haven't had to bear it for fourteen years."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to bear it," Frances repeated, "till Anthony sends
+him out again. That's all it amounts to."</p>
+<p>She waited till the children were in bed and she was alone with
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Something awful's happened," she said, and paused hoping he
+would guess.</p>
+<p>"I don't know how to tell you."</p>
+<p>"Don't tell me if it's that Nicky's been taking my new bike to
+pieces."</p>
+<p>"It isn't Nicky--It's Maurice."</p>
+<p>Anthony got up and cleared his pipe, thoroughly and
+deliberately. She wondered whether he had heard.</p>
+<p>"I'd no business to have married you--to have let you in for
+him."</p>
+<p>"Why? What's he been up to now?"</p>
+<p>"He's coming home."</p>
+<p>"So," said Anthony, "is Bartholomew. I'd no business to have let
+you in for <i>him</i>."</p>
+<p>"Don't worry, Frances. If Morrie comes home he'll be sent out
+again, that's all."</p>
+<p>"At your expense."</p>
+<p>"I don't grudge any expense in sending Morrie out. Nor in
+keeping him out."</p>
+<p>"Yes. But this time it's different. It's worse."</p>
+<p>"Why worse?"</p>
+<p>"Because of the children. They're older now than they were last
+time. They'll understand."</p>
+<p>"What if they do? They must learn," Anthony said, "to realize
+facts."</p>
+<p>They realized them rather sooner than he had expected. Nobody
+but Louie had allowed for the possibility of Morrie's sailing by
+the same steamer as his letter; and Louie had argued that, if he
+had done so, he was bound either to have arrived before the letter
+or to have sent a wire. Therefore they had at least a clear five
+days of peace before them. Anthony thought he had shown wisdom
+when, the next morning which was a Wednesday, he sent Grannie and
+the Aunties to Eastbourne for a week, so that they shouldn't worry
+Frances, and when on Thursday he made her go with him for a long
+day in the country, to take her mind off Morrie.</p>
+<p>They came back at nine in the evening and found Dorothy, Michael
+and Nicholas sitting up for them. Michael and Nicky were excited,
+but Dorothy looked grown-up and important.</p>
+<p>"Uncle Morrie's come," they said.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy saw him first--"</p>
+<p>"Nicky let him in--"</p>
+<p>"He hadn't got a hat on."</p>
+<p>"We kept him in the schoolroom till Nanna could come and put him
+to bed."</p>
+<p>"He was crying because he'd been to Grannie's house and there
+wasn't anybody there--"</p>
+<p>"And because he'd lost the love-birds he'd brought for Auntie
+Emmy--"</p>
+<p>"And because he couldn't remember which of us was dead."</p>
+<p>"No, Mummy, nobody's seen him but us and Nanna."</p>
+<p>"Nanna's with him now."</p>
+<p>Uncle Morrie never accounted, even to himself, for the time he
+had spent between the arrival of his ship at Tilbury on Sunday
+morning and that Saturday afternoon. Neither could he remember what
+had become of his luggage or whether he had ever had any. Only the
+County Council man, going his last rounds in the farthest places of
+the Heath, came upon a small bundle tied in a blue handkerchief, a
+cap belonging to E.D. Boulger, of the S.S. <i>Arizona</i>, a cage
+of love-birds, and a distinct impression of a recumbent human form,
+on the grass together, under a young birch tree.</p>
+<p>In the stuffy little house behind the Judge's Walk the four
+women lived now under male protection. When they crossed the Heath
+they had no longer any need to borrow Anthony from Frances; they
+had a man of their own. To make room for him Auntie Louie and her
+type-writer were turned out of their own place, and Auntie Louie
+had to sleep in Grannie's bed, a thing she hated. To make room for
+the type-writer the grey parrot was turned out of the dining-room
+into the drawing-room. And as Maurice couldn't stand either the
+noise of the type-writer or the noises of the parrot he found both
+the dining-room and the drawing-room uninhabitable.</p>
+<p>Day after day Dorothy and Michael and Nicky, on the terrace,
+looked out for his coming. (Only extreme distance made Uncle
+Morrie's figure small and harmless and pathetic.) Day after day he
+presented himself with an air of distinction and assurance,
+flushed, and a little battered, but still handsome, wearing a
+spruce grey suit and a panama hat bought with Anthony's money.
+Sheep-farming in Australia--he had infinitely preferred the Cape
+Mounted Police--had ruined Maurice's nerves. He was good for
+nothing but to lounge in Anthony's garden, to ride his horses--it
+was his riding that had got him into the Cape Mounted Police--to
+sit at his table and drink his wines, and, when there was no more
+wine for him, to turn into Jack Straw's Castle for a pick-me-up on
+his way home.</p>
+<p>And before July was out three others were added to the garden
+group: Bartholomew and Vera and Veronica. And after them a fourth,
+Vera's friend, Captain Ferdinand Cameron, home on sick leave before
+anybody expected him.</p>
+<p>Frances's tree of Heaven sheltered them all.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Bartholomew, Anthony's brother, lived in Bombay and looked after
+his business for him in the East. He had something the matter with
+him, and he had come home to look after his own health. At least,
+Bartholomew's health was what he was supposed to be looking after;
+but Dorothy had heard her father say that Bartie had come home to
+look after Vera.</p>
+<p>Vera was Bartie's wife and Veronica's mother. Before she became
+Mrs. Bartholomew Harrison she had been Frances's schoolfellow and
+her dearest friend. Frances Fleming had been her bridesmaid and had
+met Anthony for the first time at Vera's wedding, when he had
+fallen in love with her; and she had fallen in love with him when
+they stayed together in Bartholomew's house, before Bartholomew
+took Vera to Bombay.</p>
+<p>Bartie had not been married ten months before he wanted to get
+Vera out of England; and Vera had not been in India for ten weeks
+before he wanted her to go back. They were always coming backwards
+and forwards, but they never came together. Vera would be sent home
+first, and then Bartie would come over in a great hurry and take
+her out again.</p>
+<p>Twelve years after their marriage Veronica was born at Simla,
+and the coming and going ceased for three years. Then Bartie sent
+them both home. That time Vera had refused to travel farther
+westward than Marseilles. She was afraid of damp and cold, and she
+had got the ship's doctor to order her to the Riviera. She and
+Veronica had been living for two years in a small villa at
+Agaye.</p>
+<p>This summer she had come to England. She was no longer afraid of
+damp and cold. And Bartie followed her.</p>
+<p>Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera,
+though it was more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera
+looked the same. Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her
+face had still the same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell.
+And if these things had changed Frances would still have known her
+by her forehead that looked so broad because her eyebrows and her
+eyes were so long, and by her fine, unfinished, passionate mouth,
+by her pointed chin and by her ways.</p>
+<p>But though her brother-in-law's ways had always been more or
+less disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the
+renewed encounter with Bartholomew. Bartie was long and grey, and
+lean even when you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt.
+He wore a white scarf about his throat, for his idea was that he
+had cancer in it. Cancer made you look grey. He, too, had the face
+of a hawk, of a tired and irritable hawk. It drooped between his
+hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above the scarf as if he were
+too tired or too irritable to hold it up. He behaved to Vera and
+Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into cancer of the
+throat, they who tired and irritated him.</p>
+<p>Vera talked to him as you might talk to a sick child whose
+peevishness prolongs, unreasonably, its pain. Bartie's manner
+almost amounted to a public repudiation of her. The whole house
+vibrated to the shutting of his door at Good-night time. Yet when
+Bartie came down in the morning, late, and more morose than ever,
+Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some visionary image of the poor
+thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for one minute in his cancer.
+It was an excuse for the shutting of his door.</p>
+<p>She kept out of his way as much as possible; yet, when they were
+together they watched each other. They watched; Bartie openly with
+sudden dartings and swoopings of his hawk's eyes; Vera furtively.
+Her eyes were so large and long that, without turning her head, or
+any visible movement, they could hold his image.</p>
+<p>But for Captain Cameron Vera's eyes had a full, open gaze.
+Spread wide apart under her wide forehead they were like dark
+moth's wings; they hovered, rested, flickering, vibrating to the
+fine tips of their corners.</p>
+<p>Whatever had been the matter with him in India, Captain Cameron
+had recovered. His keen, fair, Highland face made Bartie's face
+look terrible. Ferdie was charming; not more charming to Bartie's
+wife than he was to Frances; not more charming to Frances than to
+her sisters; so that even Louie unbent, and Emmeline and Edith fell
+in love with him. He flirted with Frances under Anthony's nose; and
+with the Aunties under Grannie's nose. The corners of Vera's mouth
+followed the tilt of her long eyes' corners as she saw him do
+it.</p>
+<p>You could not think of Vera as the children's Auntie, or as
+Bartie's wife, or as Veronica's mother.</p>
+<p>Veronica was a very little girl who sang songs and was afraid of
+ghosts.</p>
+<p>She slept in her mother's room, and so never could be put to bed
+till half-past seven, or till her mother was dressed to the last
+hook of her gown, the last hairpin, the last touch of powder
+(adhesive without bismuth), and the last shadow drawn fine about
+her eyelashes. When Vera beautiful in a beautiful gown, came
+trailing into the room where everybody waited for her, Veronica hid
+herself behind Uncle Anthony's big chair. When her father told her
+to come out of that and say good-night and be quick about it, she
+came slowly (she was not in the least afraid of Bartie), showing
+herself bit by bit, honey-coloured hair, eyebrows dark under her
+gold, very dark against her white; sorrowful, transparent, lucid
+eyes. A little girl with a straight white face. A little, slender
+girl in a straight white frock. She stood by Anthony's chair,
+spinning out the time, smiling at him with her childish wavering
+mouth, a smile that would not spread, that never went higher than
+the tip of her white nose, that left her lucid, transparent eyes
+still sorrowful.</p>
+<p>She knew that Anthony would take her on his knee, and that she
+could sit there with her head tucked under his chin, smiling at
+him, prolonging her caresses, till Vera told him to put her down
+and let her go.</p>
+<p>Bartie growled: "Did you hear your mother telling you to say
+Good-night?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. But I must kiss Uncle Anthony first. Properly. Once on his
+mouth. Once--on his nose. And once--on--his--eyes.
+And--once--on--his dear little--ears."</p>
+<p>After that, Veronica went slowly from chair to chair, lingering
+at each, sitting first on Frances's lap, then on Vera's, spinning
+out her caresses, that spun out the time and stretched it farther
+and farther between her and the unearthly hour ahead of her.</p>
+<p>But at her father's chair she did not linger for a single
+instant. She slipped her hand into his hand that dropped it as if
+it had hurt him; she touched his forehead with her small mouth,
+pushed out, absurdly, to keep her face as far as possible from his.
+For, though she was not afraid of Bartie, he was not nice either to
+sit on or to kiss.</p>
+<p>Half-way across the room she lingered.</p>
+<p>"I haven't sung 'London Bridge is broken down.' Don't you want
+me to sing it?"</p>
+<p>"No, darling. We want you to go to bed."</p>
+<p>"I'm going, Mummy."</p>
+<p>And at the door she turned and looked at them with her
+sorrowful, lucid, transparent eyes.</p>
+<p>Then she went, leaving the door open behind her. She left it
+open on purpose, so that she might hear their voices, and look down
+into the room on her way upstairs. Besides, she always hoped that
+somebody would call her back again.</p>
+<p>She lingered at the foot of the stairs till Bartie got up and
+shut the door on her. She lingered at the turn of the stairs and on
+the landing. But nobody ever called her back again.</p>
+<p>And nobody but Nicky knew what she was afraid of.</p>
+<p>Veronica was sitting up in the cot that used to be Nicky's when
+he was little. Nicky, rather cold in his pyjamas, sat on the edge
+of it beside her. A big, yellow, tremendous moon hung in the sky
+outside the window, behind a branch of the tree of Heaven, and
+looked at them.</p>
+<p>Veronica crouched sideways on her pillow in a corner of the cot,
+her legs doubled up tight under her tiny body, her shoulders
+hunched together, and her thin arms hanging before her straight to
+her lap. Her honey coloured hair was parted and gathered into two
+funny plaits, that stuck out behind her ear. Her head was tilted
+slightly backwards to rest against the rail of the cot. She looked
+at Nicky and her look reminded him of something, he couldn't
+remember what.</p>
+<p>"Were you ever afraid, Nicky?" she said.</p>
+<p>Nicky searched his memory for some image encircled by an
+atmosphere of terror, and found there a white hound with red smears
+on his breast and a muzzle like two saws.</p>
+<p>"Yes," he said, "I was once."</p>
+<p>A lamb--a white lamb--was what Veronica looked like. And Jerry
+bad looked at him like that when he found him sitting on the
+mustard and cress the day Boris killed him.</p>
+<p>"Afraid--what of?"</p>
+<p>"I don't know that it was 'of' exactly."</p>
+<p>"Would you be afraid of a ghost, now, if you saw one?"</p>
+<p>"I expect I jolly well should, if I <i>really</i> saw one."</p>
+<p>"Being afraid of ghosts doesn't count, does it?"</p>
+<p>"No, of course it doesn't. You aren't afraid as long as I'm
+here, are you?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"I shall stay, then, till you go to sleep."</p>
+<p>Night after night he heard her calling to him, "Nicky, I'm
+frightened." Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that
+floor before midnight. Night after night he got up and came to her
+and stayed beside her till she went to sleep.</p>
+<p>Once he said, "If it was Michael he could tell you stories."</p>
+<p>"I don't <i>want</i> Michael. I want you."</p>
+<p>In the day-time she went about looking for him. "Where's Nicky?"
+she said. "I want him."</p>
+<p>"Nicky's in the schoolroom. You can't have him."</p>
+<p>"But--I <i>want</i> him."</p>
+<p>"Can't be helped. You must do without him."</p>
+<p>"Will he be very long?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, ever so long. Run away like a good little girl and play
+with Don-Don."</p>
+<p>She knew that they told her to play with Don-Don, because she
+was a little girl. If only she could grow big quick and be the same
+age as Nicky.</p>
+<p>Instead of running away and playing with Don-Don, Ronny went
+away by herself into the apple-tree house, to wait for Nicky.</p>
+<p>The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of
+the kitchen garden. The apple-tree had had no apples on it for
+years. It was so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched
+out two great boughs like twisted arms, and was propped up by a
+wooden post under each armpit. The breast of its trunk rested on a
+cross-beam. The posts and the cross-beam were the doorway of the
+house, and the branches were its roof and walls. Anthony had given
+it to Veronica to live in, and Veronica had given it to Nicky. It
+was Nicky's and Ronny's house. The others were only visitors who
+were not expected to stay. There was room enough for them both to
+stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the middle, and to lie
+flat at the far end.</p>
+<p>"What more," said Nicky, "do you want?"</p>
+<p>He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he
+played with Bonny in the apple-tree house.</p>
+<p>"I don't care a ram if they do," he said. But nobody ever did,
+not even Mr. Parsons.</p>
+<p>Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and
+Bonny sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled
+unwillingly. But her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all.
+Nicky wondered why.</p>
+<p>"Is it," said Dorothy one morning, "that Ronny doesn't look as
+if she was Uncle Bartie's daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as
+if he wasn't Ronny's father?"</p>
+<p>However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she
+brought it out as if it had been the result of long and mature
+consideration.</p>
+<p>"Or is it," said Vera, "that I don't look as if I were Ronny's
+mother?"</p>
+<p>Her eyes had opened all their length to take in Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"No. I think it is that Uncle Bartie looks--"</p>
+<p>Frances rushed in. "It doesn't matter, my dear, what you
+think."</p>
+<p>"It will some day," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>It was perhaps the best thing she could have said, as showing
+that she was more interested in the effect she would produce some
+day than in the sensation she had created there and then.</p>
+<p>"May I go round to Rosalind's after lessons?"</p>
+<p>"You may."</p>
+<p>"And may I stay to lunch if they ask me?"</p>
+<p>"You may stay as long as they care to have you. Stay to tea,
+stay to dinner, if you like."</p>
+<p>Dorothy knew by the behaviour of her mother's face that she had
+scored somewhere, somehow. She also knew that she was in disgrace
+and yet not in disgrace; which, if you came to think of it, was a
+funny thing.</p>
+<p>About this time Frances began to notice a symptom in herself.
+She was apt to resent it when Vera discussed her children with her.
+One late afternoon she and Anthony were alone with Vera. Captain
+Cameron had not come round that day, and Bartie had gone into town
+to consult either his solicitor or a specialist. He was always
+consulting one or the other.</p>
+<p>"You're wrong, you two," said Vera. "You think Michael's tender
+and Nicky's hard and unimpressionable. Michael's hard. You won't
+have to bother about Michael's feelings."</p>
+<p>"Michael's feelings," said Frances, "are probably what I shall
+have to bother about more than anything."</p>
+<p>"You needn't. For one thing, they'll be so unlike your feelings
+that you won't know whether they're feelings at all. You won't even
+know whether he's having them or not. Nicky's the one you'll have
+to look out for. He'll go all the howlers."</p>
+<p>"I don't think that Nicky'll be very susceptible. He hasn't
+shown any great signs so far."</p>
+<p>"Hasn't he! Nicky's susceptibility is something awful."</p>
+<p>"My dear Vera, you say yourself you don't care about children
+and that you don't understand them."</p>
+<p>"No more I do," said Vera. "But I understand men."</p>
+<p>"Do you understand Veronica?"</p>
+<p>"Of course I don't. I said men. Veronica's a girl. Besides, I'm
+Veronica's mother."</p>
+<p>"Nicky," said Anthony, "is not much more than nine."</p>
+<p>"You keep on thinking of him as a child--a child--nothing but a
+child. Wait till Nicky has children of his own. Then you'll
+know."</p>
+<p>"They would be rather darlings, Nicky's children," Frances
+said.</p>
+<p>"So would Veronica's."</p>
+<p>"Ver-onica?"</p>
+<p>You needn't be frightened. Nicky's affection for Ronny is purely
+paternal."</p>
+<p>"I'm not frightened," said Frances. But she left the room. She
+did not care for the turn the talk had taken. Besides, she wanted
+Vera to see that she was not afraid to leave her alone with
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>"I'm glad Frances has gone," said Vera, "because I want to talk
+to you. You'd never have known each other if it hadn't been for me.
+She couldn't have married you. It was I who saw you both
+through."</p>
+<p>He assented.</p>
+<p>"And you said if there was ever anything you could do for
+me--You haven't by any chance forgotten?"</p>
+<p>"I have not."</p>
+<p>"Well, if anything should happen to me--"</p>
+<p>"But, my dear girl, what <i>should</i> happen to you?"</p>
+<p>"Things <i>do</i> happen, Anthony."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but how about Bartie?"</p>
+<p>"That's it. Supposing we separated."</p>
+<p>"Good Heavens, you're not contemplating <i>that</i>, are
+you?"</p>
+<p>"I'm not contemplating anything. But Bartie isn't very easy to
+live with, is he?"</p>
+<p>"No, he's not. He never was. All the same--"</p>
+<p>Bartie was impossible. Between the diseases he had and thought
+he hadn't and the diseases he hadn't and thought he had, he made
+life miserable for himself and other people. He was a jealous
+egoist; he had the morbid coldness of the neurotic, and Vera was
+passionate. She ought never to have married him. All the
+same--"</p>
+<p>"All the same I shall stick to Bartie as long as it's possible.
+And as long as it's possible Bartie'll stick to me. But, if
+anything happens I want you to promise that you'll take Ronny."</p>
+<p>"You must get Frances to promise."</p>
+<p>"She'll do anything you ask her to, Anthony."</p>
+<p>When Frances came into the room again Vera was crying.</p>
+<p>And so Frances promised.</p>
+<blockquote>"'London Bridge is broken down<br>
+(<i>Ride over My Lady Leigh</i>!)<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+"'Build it up with stones so strong--<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+"'Build it up with gold so fine'"--</blockquote>
+<p>It was twenty to eight and Ronny had not so much as begun to say
+Good night. She was singing her sons to spin out the time.</p>
+<blockquote>"'London Bridge--'"</blockquote>
+<p>"That'll do, Ronny, it's time you were in bed."</p>
+<p>There was no need for her to linger and draw out her caresses,
+no need to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's
+request, had had her cot moved up into the night nursery.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie
+out to this time, when the Boer War came and solved his
+problem.</p>
+<p>Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South
+Africa, to enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.</p>
+<p>Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders,
+solving, perhaps, another problem.</p>
+<p>"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.</p>
+<p>Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was
+what Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't
+come back? Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances
+hated problems when they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems
+when they bothered Frances.</p>
+<p>And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went
+on.</p>
+<p>"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."</p>
+<p>"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said,
+"what else could he do? His only chance was to go away and do
+something so jolly plucky that <i>we</i>'re ashamed of ourselves,
+and never to come back again to spoil it. You don't want him to
+spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"</p>
+<p>Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to
+realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging
+over them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over
+them. It hung over a country that, except once when it had
+conveniently swallowed up Morrie, they had never thought about and
+could not care for, a landscape that they could not see. The war
+was not even part of that landscape; it refused to move over it in
+any traceable course. It simply hung, or lay as one photographic
+film might lie upon another. It was not their fault. They tried to
+see it. They bought the special editions of the evening papers;
+they read the military dispatches and the stories of the war
+correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the
+printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and
+Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial;
+it was all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated
+papers; the very blood of it ran grey.</p>
+<p>It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the
+open wings of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of
+Heaven were real; so were Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow on the
+Hill; morning and noon and night were real, and getting up and
+dressing and going to bed; most real of all the sight and sound and
+touch of her husband and her children.</p>
+<p>Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances
+carried about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she
+could attach the rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an
+immense slender muzzle, tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out
+Maurice.</p>
+<p>Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.</p>
+<p>"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy
+said he ought to be shut up somewhere."</p>
+<p>"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."</p>
+<p>"Or drink, ducky."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"</p>
+<p>"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I
+shouldn't mind whether he came back or didn't. <i>You</i>'re cruel.
+You ought to think of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and
+Auntie Edie."</p>
+<p>"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle
+Morrie."</p>
+<p>She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had
+been, as a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two
+years younger than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted,
+who contrived, nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to
+want by crying for them, though everybody else went without. And in
+the grown-up Morrie's place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.</p>
+<p>"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to
+miss it."</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and
+Nicky, mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High
+Street with flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a
+Pro-Boer and flew no flags. All these things irritated Maurice.</p>
+<p>He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all
+the chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in
+hospital throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had
+missed the sortie of his squadron and the taking of the guns for
+which Ferdie Cameron got his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come
+back in the middle of the war with nothing but a bullet wound in
+his left leg to prove that he had taken part in it.</p>
+<p>The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only
+depressed him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence
+broke down the sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a
+period of sobriety beyond its natural limits.</p>
+<p>For there were two kinds of drinking: great drinking that came
+seldom and was the only thing that counted, and ordinary drinking
+that, though it went on most of the time, brought no satisfaction
+and didn't count at all. And there were two states of drunkenness
+to correspond: one intense and vivid, without memory, transcending
+all other states; and one that was no more remarkable than any
+other. Before the war Morrie's great drinking came seldom, by fits
+and bursts and splendid unlasting uprushes; after the war the two
+states tended to approach till they merged in one continual sickly
+soaking. And while other important and outstanding things, and
+things that he really wanted to remember, disappeared in the
+poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he never for one
+moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not Anthony, his
+brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded.</p>
+<p>He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the
+war. He was furious with Frances and Anthony. Not realizing the war
+meant not realizing what he had been through. He swore by some
+queer God of his that he would make them realize it. The least they
+could do for him was to listen to what he had to say.</p>
+<p>"You people here don't know what war is. You think it's all
+glory and pluck, and dashing out and blowing up the enemy's guns,
+and the British flag flying, and wounded pipers piping all the time
+and not caring a damn. Nobody caring a damn.</p>
+<p>"And it isn't. It's dirt and funk and stinks and more funk all
+the time. It's lying out all night on the beastly veldt, and going
+to sleep and getting frozen, and waking up and finding you've got
+warm again because your neighbour's inside's been fired out on the
+top of you. You get wounded when the stretcher-bearers aren't
+anywhere about, and you crawl over to the next poor devil and lie
+back to back with him to keep warm. And just when you've dropped
+off to sleep you wake up shivering, because he's died of a wound he
+didn't know he'd got.</p>
+<p>"You'll find a chap lying on his back all nice and comfy, and
+when you start to pick him up you can't lift him because his head's
+glued to the ground. You try a bit, gently, and the flesh gives way
+like rotten fruit, and the bone like a cup you've broken and stuck
+together without any seccotine, and you heave up a body with half a
+head on it. And all the brains are in the other half, the one
+that's glued down. That's war.</p>
+<p>"Huh!" He threw out his breath with a jerk of contempt. It
+seemed to him that neither Frances nor Anthony was listening to
+him. They were not looking at him. They didn't want to listen; they
+didn't want to look at him. He couldn't touch them; he couldn't
+evoke one single clear image in their minds; there was no horror he
+could name that would sting them to vision, to realization. They
+had not been there.</p>
+<p>Dorothy and Michael and Nicky were listening. The three kids had
+imagination; they could take it in. They stared as if he had
+brought those horrors into the room. But even they missed the
+reality of it. They saw everything he meant them to see, except
+him. It was as if they were in the conspiracy to keep him out of
+it.</p>
+<p>He glared at Frances and Anthony. What was the good of telling
+them, of trying to make them realize it? If they'd only given some
+sign, made some noise or some gesture, or looked at him, he might
+have spared them. But the stiff, averted faces of Frances and
+Anthony annoyed him.</p>
+<p>"And if you're a poor wretched Tommy like me, you'll have to
+sweat in a brutal sun, hauling up cases of fizz from the railway up
+country to Headquarters, with a thirst on you that frizzles your
+throat. You see the stuff shining and spluttering, and you go mad.
+You could kill the man if you were to see him drink it, when you
+know there's nothing for <i>you</i> but a bucket of green water
+with typhoid germs swimming about in it. That's war.</p>
+<p>"You think you're lucky if you're wounded and get bumped down in
+a bullock wagon thirty miles to the base hospital. But the best
+thing you can do then is to pop off. For if you get better they
+make you hospital orderly. And the hospital orderly has to clean up
+all the muck of the butcher's shop from morning to night. When
+you're so sick you can't stand you get your supper, dry bread and
+bully beef. The bully beef reminds you of things, and the
+bread--well, the bread's all nice and white on the top. But when
+you turn it over on the other side--it's red. That's war."</p>
+<p>Frances looked at him. He thought: "At last she's turned; at
+last I've touched her; she can realize that."</p>
+<p>"Morrie dear, it must have been awful," she said. "It's
+<i>too</i> awful. I don't mind your telling me and Anthony about
+it; but I'd rather you did it when the children aren't in the
+room."</p>
+<p>"Is that all you think about? The children? The children. You
+don't care a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn
+what happens to me or anybody else. What does it matter who's
+wounded or who's killed, as long as it isn't one of your own
+kids?</p>
+<p>"I'm simply trying to tell you what war <i>is</i>. It's dirt and
+stink and funk. That's all it is. And there's precious little glory
+in it, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"If the Boers won there would be glory," Michael said.</p>
+<p>"Not even if the Boers won," said Maurice.</p>
+<p>"Certainly not if the Boers won," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>"You'll say next there'd be no glory if there was war between
+England and Ireland and the Irish won. And yet there would be
+glory."</p>
+<p>"Would there? Go and read history and don't talk rot."</p>
+<p>"I have read it," said Michael.</p>
+<p>Frances thought: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why
+should he? He's barely thirteen. I can't think where he gets these
+ideas from. But he'll grow out of them."</p>
+<p>It was not Maurice that she saw in Maurice's war-pictures. But
+he had made them realize what war was; and they vowed that as long
+as they lived not one of their sons should have anything to do with
+it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>In the spring of nineteen-one Anthony sent Maurice out to
+California. The Boer War was ended.</p>
+<p>Another year, and the vision of war passed from Frances as if it
+had never been.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+<p>Michael was unhappy.</p>
+<p>The almond trees flowered in front of the white houses in the
+strange white streets.</p>
+<p>White squares, white terraces, white crescents; at the turn of
+the roads the startling beauty of the trees covered with pink
+blossoms, hot against the hot white walls.</p>
+<p>After the pink blossoms, green leaves and a strange white heat
+everywhere. You went, from pavements burning white, down long
+avenues grey-white under the shadows of the limes.</p>
+<p>A great Promenade going down like a long green tunnel, from the
+big white Hotel at the top to the High Street at the bottom of the
+basin where the very dregs of the heat sank and thickened.</p>
+<p>Promenade forbidden for no earthly reason that Michael could
+see, except that it was beautiful. Hotel where his father gave him
+dinner on his last day of blessed life, telling him to choose what
+he liked best, as the condemned criminal chooses his last meal on
+the day they hang him.</p>
+<p>Cleeve Hill and Battledown and Birdlip, and the long rampart of
+Leckhampton, a thin, curling bristle of small trees on the edge of
+it; forms that made an everlasting pattern on his mind; forms that
+haunted him at night and tempted and tormented him all day. Memory
+which it would have been better for him if he had not had, of the
+raking open country over the top, of broad white light and luminous
+blue shadows, of white roads switchbacking through the sheep
+pastures; fields of bright yellow mustard in flower on the lower
+hills; then, rectangular fir plantations and copses of slender
+beech trees in the hollows. Somewhere, far-off, the Severn, faint
+and still, like a river in a dream.</p>
+<p>Memory of the round white town in the round pit of the valley,
+shining, smoking through the thick air and the white orchard
+blossoms; memory saturated by a smell that is like no other smell
+on earth, the delicate smell of the Midland limestone country, the
+smell of clean white dust, and of grass drying in the sun and of
+mustard flowers.</p>
+<p>Michael was in Cheltenham.</p>
+<p>It was a matter of many unhappinesses, not one unhappiness. A
+sudden intolerable unhappiness, the flash and stab of the beauty of
+the almond-flowers, seen in passing and never seized, beauty which
+it would have been better for him if he had not seen; the
+knowledge, which he ought never to have had, that this beauty had
+to die, was killed because he had not seized it, when, if he could
+but have held it for one minute, it would have been immortal. A
+vague, light unhappiness that came sometimes, could not for the
+life of him think why, from the sight of his own body stripped, and
+from the feeling of his own muscles. There was sadness for him in
+his very strength. A long, aching unhappiness that came with his
+memory of the open country over the tops of the hills, which, in
+their incredible stupidity and cruelty, they had let him see. A
+quick, lacerating unhappiness when he thought of his mother, and of
+the garden on the Heath, and the high ridge of the Spaniards' Road,
+and London below it, immense and beautiful.</p>
+<p>The unhappiness of never being by himself.</p>
+<p>He was afraid of the herd. It was with him night and day. He was
+afraid of the thoughts, the emotions that seized it, swaying,
+moving the multitude of undeveloped souls as if they had been one
+monstrous, dominating soul. He was afraid of their voices, when
+they chanted, sang and shouted together. He loathed their slang
+even when he used it. He disliked the collective, male odour of the
+herd, the brushing against him of bodies inflamed with running, the
+steam of their speed rising through their hot sweaters; and the
+smell of dust and ink and india-rubber and resinous wood in the
+warm class-rooms.</p>
+<p>Michael was at school.</p>
+<p>The thing he had dreaded, that had hung over him, threatening
+him for years before it happened, had happened. Nothing could have
+prevented it; their names had been down for Cheltenham long ago;
+first his, then Nicky's. Cheltenham, because Bartie and Vera lived
+there, and because it had a college for girls, and Dorothy, who
+wanted to go to Roedean, had been sent to Cheltenham, because of
+Bartie and Vera and for no other reason. First Dorothy; then, he,
+Michael; then, the next term, Nicky. And Nicky had been sent (a
+whole year before his time) because of Michael, in the hope that
+Michael would settle down better if he had his brother with him. It
+didn't seem reasonable.</p>
+<p>Not that either Dorothy or Nicky minded when they got there. All
+that Nicky minded was not being at Hampstead. Being at Cheltenham
+he did not mind at all. He rather liked it, since Major Cameron had
+come to stay just outside it--on purpose to annoy Bartie--and took
+them out riding. Even Michael did not mind Cheltenham more than any
+other place his people might have chosen. He was not unreasonable.
+All he asked was to be let alone, and to have room to breathe and
+get ahead in. As it was, he had either to go with the school mass,
+or waste energy in resisting its poisonous impact.</p>
+<p>He had chosen resistance.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Sunday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAREST MOTHER:</p>
+<p>I've put Sunday on this letter, though it's really Friday,
+because I'm supposed to be writing it on Sunday when the other
+fellows are writing. That's the beastly thing about this place,
+you're expected to do everything when the other fellows are doing
+it, whether you want to or not, as if the very fact that they're
+doing it too didn't make you hate it.</p>
+<p>I'm writing now because I simply must. If I waited till Sunday I
+mightn't want to, and anyhow I shouldn't remember a single thing I
+meant to say. Even now Johnson minor's digging his skinny elbows
+into one side of me, and Hartley major's biting the feathers off
+his pen and spitting them out again on the other. But they're only
+supposed to be doing Latin verse, so it doesn't matter so much.
+What I mean is it's as if their beastly minds kept on leaking into
+yours till you're all mixed up with them. That's why I asked Daddy
+to take me away next term. You see--it's more serious than he
+thinks--it is, really. You've no idea what it's like. You've got to
+swot every blessed thing the other fellows swot even if you can't
+do it, and whether it's going to be any good to you or not. Why,
+you're expected to sleep when they're sleeping, even if the chap
+next you snores. Daddy <i>might</i> remember that it's Nicky who
+likes mathematics, not me. It's all very well for Nicky when he
+wants to go into the Army all the time. There are things <i>I</i>
+want to do. I want to write and I'm going to write. Daddy can't
+keep me off it. And I don't believe he'd want to if he understood.
+There's nothing else in the world I'll ever be any good at.</p>
+<p>And there are things I want to know. I want to know Greek and
+Latin and French and German and Italian and Spanish, and Old French
+and Russian and Chinese and Japanese, oh, and Proven&ccedil;al, and
+every blessed language that has or has had a literature. I can
+learn languages quite fast. Do you suppose I've got a chance of
+knowing one of them--really knowing--even if I had the time? Not
+much. And that's where being here's so rotten. They waste your time
+as if it was theirs, not yours. They've simply no notion of the
+value of it. They seem to think time doesn't matter because you're
+young. Fancy taking three months over a Greek play you can read in
+three hours. That'll give you some idea.</p>
+<p>It all comes of being in a beastly form and having to go with
+the other fellows. Say they're thirty fellows in your form, and
+twenty-nine stick; you've got to stick with them, if it's terms and
+terms. They can't do it any other way. It's <i>because</i> I'm
+young, Mummy, that I mind so awfully. Supposing I died in ten
+years' time, or even fifteen? It simply makes me hate
+everybody.</p>
+<p>Love to Daddy and Don.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your loving
+MICK.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.-I don't mean that Hartley major isn't good at Latin verse.
+He is. He can lick me into fits when he's bitten <i>all</i> the
+feathers off.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Tuesday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DARLING MUMMY:</p>
+<p>Daddy <i>doesn't</i> understand. You only think he does because
+you like him. It's all rot what he says about esprit de corps, the
+putridest rot, though I know he doesn't mean it.</p>
+<p>And he's wrong about gym, and drill and games and all that. I
+don't mind gym, and I don't mind drill, and I like games. I'm
+fairly good at most of them--except footer. All the fellows say I'm
+fairly good--otherwise I don't suppose they'd stick me for a
+minute. I don't even mind Chapel. You see, when it's only your body
+doing what the other chaps do, it doesn't seem to matter. If esprit
+de corps <i>was</i> esprit de corps it would be all right. But it's
+esprit d'esprit. And it's absolutely sickening the things they can
+do to your mind. I can't stand another term of it.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Always your loving<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+MICK.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.-How do you know I shan't be dead in ten or fifteen years'
+time? It's enough to make me.</p>
+<p>P.P.S.-It's all very well for Daddy to talk--<i>he</i> doesn't
+want to learn Chinese.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Thursday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAR FATHER:</p>
+<p>All right. Have it your own way. Only I shall kill myself. You
+needn't tell Mother that--though it won't matter so much as she'll
+very likely think. And perhaps then you won't try and stop Nicky
+going into the Army as you've stopped me.</p>
+<p>I don't care a "ram", as Nicky would say, whether you bury me or
+cremate me; only you might give my Theocritus to old Parsons, and
+my revolver to Nicky if it doesn't burst. He'd like it.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MICHAEL.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.--If Parsons would rather have my <i>&AElig;schylus</i> he
+can, or both.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Sunday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DARLING MUMMY:</p>
+<p>It's your turn for a letter. Do you think Daddy'd let me turn
+the hen-house into a workshop next holidays, as there aren't any
+hens? And would he give me a proper lathe for turning steel and
+brass and stuff for my next birthday I'm afraid it'll cost an awful
+lot; but he could take it out of my other birthdays, I don't mind
+how many so long as I can have the lathe this one.</p>
+<p>This place isn't half bad once you get used to it. I like the
+fellows, and all the masters are really jolly decent, though I wish
+we had old Parsons here instead of the one we have to do Greek for.
+He's an awful chap to make you swot.</p>
+<p>I don't know what you mean about Mick being seedy. He's as fit
+as fit. You should see him when he's stripped. But he hates the
+place like poison half the time. He can't stand being with a lot of
+fellows. He's a rum chap because they all like him no end, the
+masters and the fellows, though they think he's funny, all except
+Hartley major, but he's such a measly little blighter that he
+doesn't count.</p>
+<p>We had a ripping time last Saturday. Bartie went up to town, and
+Major Cameron took Dorothy and Ronny and Vera and me and Mick to
+Birdlip in his dog-cart, only Mick and me had to bike because there
+wasn't room enough. However we grabbed the chains behind and the
+dog-cart pulled us up the hills like anything, and we could talk to
+Dorothy and Ronny without having to yell at each other. He did us
+jolly well at tea afterwards.</p>
+<p>Dorothy rode my bike stridelegs coming back, so that I could sit
+in the dog-cart. She said she'd get a jolly wigging if she was
+seen. We shan't know till Monday.</p>
+<p>You know, Mummy, that kid Ronny's having a rotten time, what
+with Bartie being such a beast and Vera chumming up with Ferdie and
+going off to country houses where he is. I really think she'd
+better come to us for the holidays. Then I could teach her to ride.
+Bartie won't let her learn here, though Ferdie'd gone and bought a
+pony for her. That was to spite Ferdie. He's worse than ever, if
+you can imagine that, and he's got three more things the matter
+with him.</p>
+<p>I must stop now.</p>
+<p>Love to Dad and Don and Nanna. Next year I'm to go into physics
+and stinks--that's chemistry.</p>
+<p>Your loving NICKY.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE LEAS. PARABOLA
+ROAD.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Sunday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAREST MUMMY:</p>
+<p>I'm awfully sorry you don't like my last term's school report. I
+know it wasn't what it ought to have been. I have to hold myself in
+so as to keep in the same class with Rosalind when we're moved up
+after Midsummer. But as she's promised me faithfully she'll let
+herself rip next term, you'll see it'll be all right at Xmas. We'll
+both be in I A the Midsummer after, and we can go in for our matic,
+together. I wish you'd arrange with Mrs. Jervis for both of us to
+be at Newnham at the same time. Tell her Rosalind's an awful
+slacker if I'm not there to keep her up to the mark. No--don't tell
+her that. Tell her <i>I'm</i> a slacker if she isn't there.</p>
+<p>I was amused by your saying it was decent of Bartie to have us
+so often. He only does it because things are getting so tight
+between him and Vera that he's glad of anything that relaxes the
+strain a bit. Even us. He's snappier than ever with Ronny. I can't
+think how the poor kid stands it.</p>
+<p>You know that ripping white serge coat and skirt you sent me?
+Well, the skirt's not nearly long enough. It doesn't matter a bit
+though, because I can keep it for hockey. It's nice having a mother
+who <i>can</i> choose clothes. You should see the last blouse Mrs.
+Jervis got for Rosalind. She's burst out of <i>all</i> the seams
+already. You could have heard her doing it.</p>
+<p>Much love to you and Daddy and Don-Don. I can't send any to Mr.
+Parsons now my hair's up. But you might tell him I'm going in
+strong for Sociology and Economics.--</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your loving<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+DOROTHY.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.--Vera asked me if I thought you'd take her and Ronny in at
+Midsummer. I said of course you would--like a shot.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LANSDOWN LODGE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Friday.</i></blockquote>
+<p>MY DEAREST FRANCES:</p>
+<p>I hope you got my two wires in time. You needn't come down,
+either of you. And you needn't worry about Mick. Ferdie went round
+and talked to him like a fa--I mean a big brother, and the revolver
+(bless his heart!) is at present reposing at the bottom of my
+glove-box.</p>
+<p>All the same we both think you'd better take him away at
+Midsummer. He says he can stick it till then, but not a day longer.
+Poor Mick! He has the most mysterious troubles.</p>
+<p>I daresay it's the Cheltenham climate as much as anything. It
+doesn't suit me or Bonny either, and it's simply killing Ferdie by
+inches. I suppose that's why Bartie makes us stay here--in the
+hope--</p>
+<p>Oh! my dear, I'm worried out of my life about him. He's never
+got over that fever he had in South Africa. He's looking
+ghastly.</p>
+<p>And the awful thing is that I can't do a thing for him. Not a
+thing. Unless--</p>
+<p>You haven't forgotten the promise you made me two years ago,
+have you?</p>
+<p>Dorothy seemed to think you could put Bonny and me
+up--again!--at Midsummer. Can you? And if poor Ferdie wants to come
+and see us, you won't turn him off your door-mat, will you?</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your lovingest<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+"VERA."</blockquote>
+<p>Frances said, "Poor Vera! She even makes poor Mick an excuse for
+seeing Ferdie."</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="X"></a>X</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Three more years passed and Frances had fulfilled her promise.
+She had taken Veronica.</p>
+<p>The situation had become definite. Bartie had delivered his
+ultimatum. Either Vera must give up Major Cameron, signing a
+written pledge in the presence of three witnesses, Frances, Anthony
+and Bartie's solicitor, that she would neither see him nor write to
+him, nor hold any sort or manner of communication with him, direct
+or indirect, or he would obtain a judicial separation. It was to be
+clearly understood by both of them that he would not, in any
+circumstances, divorce her. Bartie knew that a divorce was what
+they wanted, what they had been playing for, and he was not going
+to make things easy for them; he was going to make things hard and
+bitter and shameful He had based his ultimatum on the calculation
+that Vera would not have the courage of her emotions; that even her
+passion would surrender when she found that it had no longer the
+protection of her husband's house and name. Besides Vera was
+expensive, and Cameron was a spendthrift on an insufficient income;
+he could not possibly afford her. If Bartie's suspicions were
+correct, the thing had been going on for the last twelve years, and
+if in twelve years' time they had not forced his hand that was
+because they had counted the cost, and decided that, as Frances had
+put it, the "game was not worth the scandal."</p>
+<p>For when suspicion became unendurable he had consulted Anthony
+who assured him that Frances, who ought to know, was convinced that
+there was nothing in it except incompatibility, for which Bartie
+was superlatively responsible.</p>
+<p>Anthony's manner did not encourage confidence, and he gathered
+that his own more sinister interpretation would be dismissed with
+contemptuous incredulity. Anthony was under his wife's thumb and
+Frances had been completely bamboozled by her dearest friend.
+Still, when once their eyes were opened, he reckoned on the support
+of Anthony and Frances. It was inconceivable, that, faced with a
+public scandal, his brother and his sister-in-law would side with
+Vera.</p>
+<p>It was a game where Bartie apparently held all the cards. And
+his trump card was Veronica.</p>
+<p>He was not going to keep Veronica without Vera. That had been
+tacitly understood between them long ago. If Vera went to Cameron
+she could not take Veronica with her without openly confirming
+Bartie's worst suspicion.</p>
+<p>And yet all these things, so inconceivable to Bartie, happened.
+When it came to the stabbing point the courage of Vera's emotions
+was such that she defied her husband and his ultimatum, and went to
+Cameron. By that time Ferdie was so ill that she would have been
+ashamed of herself if she had not gone. And though Anthony's house
+was not open to the unhappy lovers, Frances and Anthony had taken
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie
+came over to West End House when they heard that it had been
+decided. It was time, they said, that somebody should protest, that
+somebody should advise Frances for her own good and for the good of
+her children.</p>
+<p>They had always detested and distrusted Vera Harrison; they had
+always known what would happen. The wonder was it had not happened
+before. But why Frances should make it easy for her, why Frances
+should shoulder Vera Harrison's responsibilities, and burden
+herself with that child, and why Anthony should give his consent to
+such a proceeding, was more than they could imagine.</p>
+<p>Once Frances had stood up for the three Aunties, against
+Grannie; now Grannie and the three Aunties were united against
+Frances.</p>
+<p>"Frances, you're a foolish woman."</p>
+<p>"My folly is my own affair and Anthony's."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to pay for it some day."</p>
+<p>"You might have thought of your own children first."</p>
+<p>"I did. I thought, How would I like <i>them</i> to be forsaken
+like poor Ronny?"</p>
+<p>"You should have thought of the boys. Michael's growing up; so
+is Nicky."</p>
+<p>"Nicky is fifteen; Ronny is eleven, if you call that growing
+up."</p>
+<p>"That's all very well, but when Nicky is twenty-one and Ronny is
+seventeen what are you going to do?"</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to turn Ronny out of doors for fear Nicky should
+fall in love with her, if that's what you mean."</p>
+<p>"It <i>is</i> what I mean, now you've mentioned it."</p>
+<p>"He's less likely to fall in love with her if I bring them up as
+brother and sister."</p>
+<p>"You might think of Anthony. Bartholomew's wife leaves him for
+another man, and you aid and abet her by taking her child,
+relieving her of her one responsibility."</p>
+<p>"Bartie's wife leaves him, and we help Bartie by taking care of
+his child--who is <i>our niece</i>, not yours."</p>
+<p>"My dear Frances, that attitude isn't going to deceive anybody.
+If you don't think of Anthony and your children, you might think of
+us. We don't want to be mixed up in this perfectly horrible
+affair."</p>
+<p>"How are you mixed up in it?"</p>
+<p>"Well, after all, Frances, we are the family. We are your
+sisters and your mother and your children's grand-mother and
+aunts."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Frances with decision, "you must try to bear it.
+You must take the rough with the smooth, as Anthony and I do."</p>
+<p>And as soon as she had said it she was sorry. It struck her for
+the first time that her sisters were getting old. It was no use for
+Auntie Louie, more red and more rigid than ever, to defy the
+imminence of her forty-ninth birthday. Auntie Emmy's gestures, her
+mouthings and excitement, only drew attention to the fact that she
+was forty-seven. And Edie, why, even poor little Auntie Edie was
+forty-five. Grannie, dry and wiry, hardly looked older than Auntie
+Edie.</p>
+<p>They left her, going stiffly, in offence. And again the
+unbearable pathos of them smote her. The poor Aunties. She was a
+brute to hurt them. She still thought of them as Auntie Louie,
+Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edie. It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed
+upon them a colour and vitality that, but for her and for her
+children, they would not have had. They were helpless, tiresome,
+utterly inefficient. In all their lives they had never done
+anything vigorous or memorable. They were doomed to go out before
+her children; when they were gone they would be gone altogether.
+Neither Auntie Louie, nor Auntie Emmy, nor Auntie Edie would leave
+any mark or sign of herself. But her children gave them titles by
+which they would be remembered after they were gone. It was as if
+she had bestowed on them a little of her own enduring life.</p>
+<p>It was absurd and pathetic that they should think that they were
+the Family.</p>
+<p>But however sorry she was for them she could not allow them to
+dictate to her in matters that concerned her and Anthony alone. If
+they were so worried, about the scandal, why hadn't they the sense
+to see that the only way to meet it was to give it the lie by
+taking Ronny, by behaving as if Ronny were unquestionably Bartie's
+daughter and their niece? They were bound to do it, if not for
+Vera's sake, for the dear little girl's sake. And that was what
+Vera had been thinking of; that was why she had trusted them.</p>
+<p>But her three sisters had always disliked Vera. They disliked
+her because, while they went unmarried, Vera, not content with the
+one man who was her just and legal portion, had taken another man
+whom she had no right to. And Auntie Emmeline had been in love with
+Ferdie.</p>
+<p>Still, there was a certain dreadful truth in their reproaches;
+and it stung. Frances said to herselv that she had not been wise.
+She had done a risky thing in taking Ronny. It was not fair to her
+children, to Michael and Nicholas and John. She was afraid. She had
+been afraid when Vera had talked to her about Nicky and Veronica;
+and when she had seen Veronica and Nicky playing together in the
+apple-tree house; and when she had heard Ronny's voice outside the
+schoolroom door crying, "Where's Nicky? I want him. Will he be very
+long?"</p>
+<p>Supposing Veronica should go on wanting Nicky, and supposing
+Nicky--</p>
+<p>Frances was so worried that, when Dorothy came striding across
+the lawn to ask her what the matter was, and what on earth Grannie
+and the Aunties had been gassing about all that time, she told
+her.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was nineteen. And Dorothy at nineteen, tall and upright,
+was Anthony's daughter. Her face and her whole body had changed;
+they were Anthony's face and body made feminine. Her little
+straight nose had now a short high bridge; her brown eyes were keen
+and alert; she had his hawk's look. She put her arm in Frances's,
+protecting her, and they walked up and down the terrace path,
+discussing it. In the distance Grannie and the Aunties could be
+seen climbing the slope of the Heath to Judges' Walk. They were
+not, Dorothy protested, pathetic; they were simply beastly. She
+hated them for worrying her mother.</p>
+<p>"They think I oughtn't to have taken Ronny. They think Nicky'll
+want to marry her."</p>
+<p>"But Ronny's a kid--"</p>
+<p>"When she's not a kid."</p>
+<p>"He won't, Mummy ducky, he won't. She'll be a kid for ages.
+Nicky'll have married somebody else before she's got her hair
+up."</p>
+<p>"Then Ronny'll fall in love with <i>him</i>, and get her little
+heart broken."</p>
+<p>"She won't, Mummy, she won't. They only talk like that because
+they think Ferdie's Ronny's father."</p>
+<p>"Dorothy!"</p>
+<p>Frances, in horror, released herself from that protecting arm.
+The horror came, not from the fact, but from her daughter's
+knowledge of it.</p>
+<p>"Poor Mummy, didn't you know? That's why Bartie hates her."</p>
+<p>"It isn't true."</p>
+<p>"What's the good of that as long as Bartie thinks it is?" said
+Dorothy.</p>
+<blockquote>"London Bridge is broken down<br>
+(<i>Ride over my Lady Leigh</i>!)"</blockquote>
+<p>Veronica was in the drawing-room, singing "London Bridge."</p>
+<p>Michael, in all the beauty of his adolescence, lay stretched out
+on the sofa, watching her. Her small, exquisite, childish face
+between the plaits of honey-coloured hair, her small, childish face
+thrilled him with a singular delight and sadness. She was so young
+and so small, and at the same time so perfect that Michael could
+think of her as looking like that for ever, not growing up into a
+tiresome, bouncing, fluffy flapper like Rosalind Jervis.</p>
+<p>Aunt Louie and Aunt Emmeline said that Rosalind was in love with
+him. Michael thought that was beastly of them and he hoped it
+wasn't true.</p>
+<blockquote>"'Build it up with gold so fine'"--</blockquote>
+<p>Veronica was happy; for she knew herself to be a cause of
+happiness. Like Frances once, she was profoundly aware of her own
+happiness, and for the same reason. It was, if you came to think of
+it, incredible. It had been given to her, suddenly, when she was
+not looking for it, after she had got used to unhappiness.</p>
+<p>As long as she could remember Veronica had been aware of
+herself. Aware of herself, chiefly, not as a cause of happiness,
+but as a cause of embarrassment and uncertainty and trouble to
+three people, her father, her mother and Ferdie, just as they were
+causes of embarrassment and trouble and uncertainty to her. They
+lived in a sort of violent mystery that she, incomprehensibly, was
+mixed up with. As long as she could remember, her delicate,
+childish soul had quivered with the vibration of their
+incomprehensible and tiresome passions. You could never tell what
+any of them really wanted, though among them they managed to create
+an atmosphere of most devastating want. Only one thing she knew
+definitely--that they didn't want <i>her</i>.</p>
+<p>She was altogether out of it except as a meaningless counter in
+their incomprehensible, grown-up game. Her father didn't want her;
+her mother didn't want her very much; and though now and then
+Ferdie (who wasn't any relation at all) behaved as if he wanted
+her, <i>his</i> wanting only made the other two want her less than
+ever.</p>
+<p>There had been no peace or quietness or security in her little
+life of eleven years. Their places (and they had had so many of
+them!) had never had any proper place for her. She seemed to have
+spent most of her time in being turned out of one room because her
+father had come into it, and out of another because her mother
+wanted to be alone in it with Ferdie. And nobody, except Ferdie
+sometimes, when they let him, ever wanted to be alone in any room
+with her. She was so tired of the rooms where she was obliged to be
+always alone with herself or with the servants, though the servants
+were always kind.</p>
+<p>Now, in Uncle Anthony's house, there was always peace and
+quietness and an immense security. She knew that, having taken her,
+they wouldn't give her up.</p>
+<p>She was utterly happy.</p>
+<p>And the house, with its long, wainscoted rooms, its whiteness
+and darkness, with its gay, clean, shining chintzes, the delicate,
+faded rose stuffs, the deep blue and purple and green stuffs, and
+the blue and white of the old china, and its furniture of curious
+woods, the golden, the golden-brown, the black and the
+wine-coloured, bought by Anthony in many countries, the round
+concave mirrors, the pictures and the old bronzes, all the things
+that he had gathered together and laid up as treasure for his Sons;
+and the garden on the promontory, with its buttressed walls and its
+green lawn, its flower borders, and its tree of Heaven, saturated
+with memories, became for her, as they had become for Frances, the
+sanctuary, crowded with visible and tangible symbols, of the
+Happiness she adored.</p>
+<p>"Sing it again, Ronny."</p>
+<p>She sang it again.</p>
+<blockquote>"'London Bridge is broken down'"--</blockquote>
+<p>It was funny of Michael to like the silly, childish song; but if
+he wanted it he should have it. Veronica would have given any of
+them anything they wanted. There was nothing that she had ever
+wanted that they had not given to her.</p>
+<p>She had wanted to be strong, to be able to run and ride, to play
+tennis and cricket and hockey, and Nicky had shown her how. She had
+wanted books of her own, and Auntie Frances, and Uncle Anthony and
+Dorothy and Michael had given her books, and Nicky had made her a
+bookcase. Her room (it was all her own) was full of treasures. She
+had wanted to learn to sing and play properly, and Uncle Anthony
+had given her masters. She had wanted people to love her music, and
+they loved it. She had wanted a big, grown-up sister like Dorothy,
+and they had given her Dorothy; and she had wanted a little brother
+of her own age, and they had given her John. John had a look of
+Nicky. His golden white hair was light brown now; his fine, wide
+mouth had Nicky's impudence, even when, like Frances, he kept it
+shut to smile her unwilling, twitching, mocking smile. She had
+wanted a father and mother like Frances and Anthony; and they had
+given her themselves.</p>
+<p>And she had wanted to live in the same house with Nicky
+always.</p>
+<p>So if Michael wanted her to sing "London Bridge" to him twenty
+times over, she would sing it, provided Nicky didn't ask her to do
+anything else at the same time. For she wanted to do most for
+Nicky, always.</p>
+<p>And yet she was aware of something else that was not happiness.
+It was not a thing you could name or understand, or seize, or see;
+you were simply aware of it, as you were aware of ghosts in your
+room at night. Like the ghosts, it was not always there; but when
+it was there you knew.</p>
+<p>It felt sometimes as if Auntie Frances was afraid of her; as if
+she, Veronica, was a ghost.</p>
+<p>And Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I am not good. She
+thinks I'll worry her. But I shan't."</p>
+<p>That was before the holidays. Now that they had come and Nicky
+was back, "it" seemed to her something to do with Nicky; and
+Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I'll get in his way and
+worry him, because he's older. But I shan't."</p>
+<p>As if she had not been taught and trained not to get in older
+people's ways and worry them. And as if she wasn't growing older
+every minute herself!</p>
+<blockquote>"'Build it up with gold so fine--<br>
+(<i>Ride over my Lady Leigh</i>!)<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+"'Build it up with stones so strong'"--</blockquote>
+<p>She had her back to the door and to the mirror that reflected
+it, yet she knew that Nicky had come in.</p>
+<p>"That's the song you used to sing at bed-time when you were
+frightened," he said.</p>
+<p>She was sitting now in the old hen-house that was Nicky's
+workshop, watching him as he turned square bars of brass into round
+bars with his lathe. She had plates of steel to polish, and pieces
+of wood to rub smooth with glass-paper. There were sheets of brass
+and copper, and bars and lumps of steel, and great poles and planks
+of timber reared up round the walls of the workshop. The metal
+filings fell from Nicky's lathe into sawdust that smelt
+deliciously.</p>
+<p>The workshop was nicer than the old apple-tree house, because
+there were always lots of things to do in it for Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said suddenly, "do you believe in ghosts?"</p>
+<p>"Well--" Nicky caught his bar as it fell from the lathe and
+examined it critically.</p>
+<p>"You remember when I was afraid of ghosts, and you used to come
+and sit with me till I went to sleep?"</p>
+<p>"Rather."</p>
+<p>"Well--there <i>are</i> ghosts. I saw one last night. It came
+into the room just after I got into bed."</p>
+<p>"You <i>can</i> see them," Nicky said. "Ferdie's seen heaps. It
+runs in his family. He told me."</p>
+<p>"He never told <i>me</i>."</p>
+<p>"Rather not. He was afraid you'd be frightened."</p>
+<p>"Well, I wasn't frightened. Not the least little bit."</p>
+<p>"I shall tell him that. He wanted most awfully to know whether
+you saw them too."</p>
+<p>"<i>Me</i>? But Nicky--it was Ferdie I saw. He stood by the door
+and looked at me. Like he does, you know."</p>
+<p>The next morning Frances had a letter of two lines from
+Veronica's mother:</p>
+<blockquote>"Ferdie died last evening at half past eight.<br>
+<br>
+"He wants you to keep Ronny.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "VERA."<br>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It was not till years later that Veronica knew that "He wanted
+most awfully to know whether you saw them too" meant "He wanted
+most awfully to know whether you really were his daughter."</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="PART_II"></a>PART II</h2>
+<h3><i>THE VORTEX</i></h3>
+&gt;<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Three years passed. It was the autumn of nineteen-ten. Anthony's
+house was empty for the time being of all its children except
+Dorothea.</p>
+<p>Michael was in the beginning of his last year at Cambridge.
+Nicholas was in his second year. He had taken up mathematics and
+theoretical mechanics. In the long vacation, when the others went
+into the country, he stayed behind to work in the engineering sheds
+of the Morss Motor Company. John was at Cheltenham. Veronica was in
+Dresden.</p>
+<p>Dorothea had left Newnham a year ago, having taken a first-class
+in Economics.</p>
+<p>As Anthony came home early one evening in October, he found a
+group of six strange women in the lane, waiting outside his garden
+door in attitudes of conspiracy.</p>
+<p>Four of them, older women, stood together in a close ring. The
+two others, young girls, hung about near, but a little apart from
+the ring, as if they desired not to identify themselves with any
+state of mind outside their own. By their low sibilant voices, the
+daring sidelong sortie of their bright eyes, their gestures,
+furtive and irrepressible, you gathered that there was unanimity on
+one point. All six considered themselves to have been
+discovered.</p>
+<p>At Anthony's approach they moved away, with slow, casual steps,
+passed through the posts at the bottom of the lane and plunged down
+the steep path, as if under the impression that the nature of the
+ground covered their retreat. They bobbed up again, one after the
+other, when the lane was clear.</p>
+<p>The first to appear was a tall, handsome, bad-tempered-looking
+girl. She spoke first.</p>
+<p>"It's a damned shame of them to keep us waiting like this."</p>
+<p>She propped herself up against Anthony's wall and smouldered
+there in her dark, sullen beauty.</p>
+<p>"We were here at six sharp."</p>
+<p>"When they know we were told not to let on where we meet."</p>
+<p>"We're led into a trap," said a grey-haired woman.</p>
+<p>"I say, who is Dorothea Harrison?"</p>
+<p>"She's the girl who roped Rosalind in. She's all right."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but are her people all right?"</p>
+<p>"Rosalind knows them."</p>
+<p>The grey-haired woman spoke again.</p>
+<p>"Well, if you think this lane is a good place for a secret
+meeting, I don't. Are you aware that the yard of `Jack Straw's
+Castle' is behind that wall? What's to prevent them bringing up
+five or six coppers and planting them there? Why, they've only got
+to post one 'tee at the top of the lane, and another at the bottom,
+and we're done. Trapped. I call it rotten."</p>
+<p>"It's all right. Here they are."</p>
+<p>Dorothea Harrison and Rosalind Jervis came down the lane at a
+leisured stride, their long coats buttoned up to their chins and
+their hands in their pockets. Their I gestures were devoid of
+secrecy or any guile. Each had a joyous air of being in command, of
+being able to hold up the whole adventure at her will, or let it
+rip.</p>
+<p>Rosalind Jervis was no longer a bouncing, fluffy flapper. In
+three years she had shot up into the stature of command. She
+slouched, stooping a little from the shoulders, and carried her
+pink face thrust forward, as if leaning from a platform to address
+an audience. From this salience her small chin retreated delicately
+into her pink throat.</p>
+<p>"Is Miss Maud Blackadder here?" she said, marshalling her
+six.</p>
+<p>The handsome girl detached herself slowly from Anthony's
+wall.</p>
+<p>"What's the point," she said, "of keeping us hanging about like
+this--"</p>
+<p>"Till <i>all</i> our faces are known to the police--"</p>
+<p>"There's a johnnie gone in there who can swear to <i>me</i>. Why
+didn't you two turn up before?" said the handsome girl.</p>
+<p>"Because," said Dorothea, "that johnnie was my father. He was
+pounding on in front of us all up East Heath Road. If we'd got here
+sooner I should have had to introduce you."</p>
+<p>She looked at the six benevolently, indulgently. They might have
+been children whose behaviour amused her. It was as if she had
+said, "I avoided that introduction, not because it would have been
+dangerous and indiscreet, but because it would have spoiled your
+fun for you."</p>
+<p>She led the way into the garden and the house and through the
+hall into the schoolroom. There they found eleven young girls who
+had come much too soon, and mistaking the arrangements, had rung
+the bell and allowed themselves to be shown in.</p>
+<p>The schoolroom had been transformed into a sort of meeting hall.
+The big oblong table had been drawn across one end of it. Behind it
+were chairs for the speakers, before it were three rows of chairs
+where the eleven young girls sat scattered, expectant.</p>
+<p>The six stood in the free space in front of the table and looked
+at Rosalind with significance.</p>
+<p>"This," said Rosalind, "is our hostess, Miss Dorothea Harrison.
+Dorothy, I think you've met Mrs. Eden, our Treasurer. This is our
+secretary, Miss Valentina Gilchrist; Miss Ethel Farmer; Miss
+Winifred Burstall--"</p>
+<p>Dorothy greeted in turn Mrs. Eden, a pretty, gentle woman with a
+face of dreaming tragedy (it was she who had defended Rosalind
+outside the gate); Miss Valentina Gilchrist, a middle-aged woman
+who displayed a large grey pompadour above a rosy face with
+turned-back features which, when she was not excited, had an
+incredulous quizzical expression (Miss Gilchrist was the one who
+had said they had been led into a trap); Miss Ethel Farmer, fair,
+attenuated, scholastic, wearing pince-nez with an air of not seeing
+you; and Miss Winifred Burstall, weather-beaten, young at fifty,
+wearing pince-nez with an air of seeing straight through you to the
+other side.</p>
+<p>Rosalind went on. "Miss Maud Blackadder--"</p>
+<p>Miss Blackadder's curt bow accused Rosalind of wasting time in
+meaningless formalities.</p>
+<p>"Miss--" Rosalind was at a loss.</p>
+<p>The other girl, the youngest of the eight, came forward, holding
+out a slender, sallow-white hand. She was the one who had hung with
+Miss Blackadder in the background.</p>
+<p>"Desmond," she said. "Phyllis Desmond."</p>
+<p>She shrugged her pretty shoulders and smiled slightly, as much
+as to say, "She forgets what she ought to remember, but it doesn't
+matter."</p>
+<p>Phyllis Desmond was beautiful. But for the moment her beauty was
+asleep, stilled into hardness. Dorothy saw a long, slender,
+sallow-white face, between sleek bands of black hair; black eyes,
+dulled as if by a subtle film, like breath on a black
+looking-glass; a beautiful slender mouth, pressed tight, holding
+back the secret of its sensual charm.</p>
+<p>Dorothy thought she had seen her before, but she couldn't
+remember where.</p>
+<p>Rosalind Jervis looked at her watch with a businesslike air;
+paper and pencils were produced; coats were thrown on the little
+school-desks and benches in the corner where Dorothy and her
+brothers had sat at their lessons with Mr. Parsons some twelve
+years ago; and the eight gathered about the big table, Rosalind
+taking the presidential chair (which had once been Mr. Parsons'
+chair) in the centre between Miss Gilchrist and Miss
+Blackadder.</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer looked at each other and Miss
+Burstall spoke.</p>
+<p>"We understood that this was to be an informal meeting. Before
+we begin business I should like to ask one question. I should like
+to know what we are and what we are here for?"</p>
+<p>"We, Mrs. Eden, Miss Valentina Gilchrist, Miss Maud Blackadder
+and myself," said Rosalind in the tone of one dealing reasonably
+with an unreasonable person, "are the Committee of the North
+Hampstead Branch of the Women's Franchise Union. Miss Gilchrist is
+our secretary, I am the President and Miss Blackadder is--er--the
+Committee."</p>
+<p>"By whom elected? This," said Miss Burstall, "is most
+irregular."</p>
+<p>Rosalind went on: "We are here to appoint a vice-president, to
+elect members of the Committee and enlist subscribers to the Union.
+These things will take time."</p>
+<p>"<i>We</i> were punctual," said Miss Farmer.</p>
+<p>Rosalind did not even look at her. The moment had come to
+address the meeting.</p>
+<p>"I take it that we are all agreed as to the main issue, that we
+have not come here to convert each other, that we all want Women's
+Franchise, that we all mean to have it, that we are all prepared to
+work for it, and, if necessary, to fight for it, to oppose the
+Government that withholds it by every means in our power--"</p>
+<p>"By every constitutional means," Miss Burstall amended, and was
+told by Miss Gilchrist that, if she desired proceedings to be
+regular, she must not interrupt the Chairwoman.</p>
+<p>"--To oppose the Government that refuses us the vote, whatever
+Government it may be, regardless of party, by <i>every means in our
+power</i>."</p>
+<p>Rosalind's sentences were punctuated by a rhythmic sound of
+tapping. Miss Maud Blackadder, twisted sideways on the chair she
+had pushed farther and farther back from the table, so as to bring
+herself completely out of line with the other seven, from time to
+time, rhythmically, twitching with impatience, struck her own leg
+with her own walking-stick.</p>
+<p>Rosalind perorated. "If we differ, we differ, not as to our end,
+but solely as to the means we, personally and individually, are
+prepared to employ." She looked round. "Agreed."</p>
+<p>"Not agreed," said Dorothy and Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer all
+at once.</p>
+<p>"I will now call on Miss Maud Blackadder to speak. She will
+explain to those of you who are strangers" (she glanced
+comprehensively at the eleven young girls) "the present program of
+the Union."</p>
+<p>"I protest," said Miss Burstall. "There has been confusion."</p>
+<p>"There really <i>has</i>, Rosalind," said Dorothy. "You
+<i>must</i> get it straight. You can't start all at sixes and
+sevens. I protest too."</p>
+<p>"We all three protest," said Miss Farmer, frowning and blinking
+in an agony of protest.</p>
+<p>"Silence, if you please, for the Chairwoman," said Miss
+Gilchrist.</p>
+<p>"May we not say one word?"</p>
+<p>"You may," said Rosalind, "in your turn. I now call on Miss
+Blackadder to speak."</p>
+<p>At the sound of her own name Miss Blackadder jumped to her feet.
+The walking-stick fell to the floor with a light clatter and crash,
+preluding her storm. She jerked out her words at a headlong pace,
+as if to make up for the time the others had wasted in
+futilities.</p>
+<p>"I am not going to say much, I am not going to take up your
+time. Too much time has been lost already. I am not a speaker, I am
+not a writer, I am not an intellectual woman, and if you ask me
+what I am and what I am here for, and what I am doing in the Union,
+and what the Union is doing with me, and what possible use I, an
+untrained girl, can be to you clever women" (she looked
+tempestuously at Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer who did not flinch),
+"I will tell you. I am a fighter. I am here to enlist volunteers. I
+am the recruiting sergeant for this district. That is the use my
+leaders, who should be <i>your</i> leaders, are making of
+<i>me</i>."</p>
+<p>Her head was thrown back, her body swayed, rocked from side to
+side with the violent rhythm of her speech.</p>
+<p>"If you ask me why they have chosen <i>me</i> I will tell you.
+It's because I know what I want and because I know how to get what
+I want.</p>
+<p>"I know what I want. Oh, yes, you think that's nothing; you all
+think you know what you want. But do you? <i>Do</i> you?"</p>
+<p>"Of course we do!"</p>
+<p>"We want the vote!"</p>
+<p>"Nothing but the vote!"</p>
+<p>"<i>Nothing but?</i> Are you quite sure of that? Can you even
+say you want it till you know whether there are things you want
+more?"</p>
+<p>"What are you driving at?"</p>
+<p>"You'll soon see what I'm driving at. I drive straight. And I
+ride straight. And I don't funk my fences.</p>
+<p>"Well--say you all want the vote. Do you know how much you want
+it? Do you know how much you want to pay for it? Do you know what
+you're prepared to give up for it? Because, if you don't know
+<i>that</i>, you don't know how much you want it."</p>
+<p>"We want it as much as you do, I imagine."</p>
+<p>"You want it as much as I do? Good. <i>Then</i> you're going to
+pay the price whatever the price is. <i>Then</i> you're ready to
+give up everything else, your homes and your families and your
+friends and your incomes. Until you're enfranchised you are not
+going to own any <i>man</i> as father, or brother or husband" (her
+voice rang with a deeper and stronger vibration) "or lover, or
+friend. And the man who does not agree with you, the man who
+refuses you the vote, the man who opposes your efforts to get the
+vote, the man who, whether he agrees with you or not, <i>will not
+help you to get it</i>, you count as your enemy. That is wanting
+the vote. That is wanting it as much as I do.</p>
+<p>"You women--are you prepared to go against your men? To give up
+your men?"</p>
+<p>There were cries of "Rather!" from two of the eleven young girls
+who had come too soon.</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall shook her head and murmured, "Hopeless confusion
+of thought. If <i>this</i> is what it's going to be like, Heaven
+help us!"</p>
+<p>"You really <i>are</i> getting a bit mixed," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"We protest--"</p>
+<p>"Protest then; protest as much as you like. Then we shall know
+where we are; then we shall get things straight; then we can begin.
+You all want the vote. Some of you don't know how much, but at
+least you know you want it. Nobody's confused about that. Do you
+know how you're going to get it? Tell me that."</p>
+<p>Lest they should spoil it all by telling her Miss Blackadder
+increased her vehement pace. "You don't because you can't and
+<i>I</i> will tell you. You won't get it by talking about it or by
+writing about it, or by sitting down and thinking about it, you'll
+get it by coming in with me, coming in with the Women's Franchise
+Union, and fighting for it. Fighting women, not talkers--not
+writers--not thinkers are what we want!" She sat down, heaving a
+little with the ground-swell of her storm, amid applause in which
+only Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer did not join. She was now
+looking extraordinarily handsome.</p>
+<p>Rosalind bent over and whispered something in her ear. She rose
+to her feet again, flushed, smiling at them, triumphant.</p>
+<p>"Our Chairwoman has reminded me that I came here to tell you
+what the program of our Union is. And I can tell you in six words.
+It's Hell-for-leather, and it's Neck-or-nothing!"</p>
+<p>"Now," said Rosalind sweetly, bowing towards Miss Burstall,
+"it's your turn. We should like to know what you have to say."</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall did not rise and in the end Dorothea spoke.</p>
+<p>"My friend, Miss Rosalind Jervis, assumed that we were all
+agreed, not only as to our aims, but as to our policy. She has not
+yet discriminated between constitutional and unconstitutional
+means. When we protested, she quashed our protest. We took
+exception to the phrase 'every means in our power,' because that
+would commit us to all sorts of unconstitutional things. It is in
+my power to squirt water into the back of the Prime Minister's
+neck, or to land a bomb in the small of his back, or in the centre
+of the platform at his next public meeting. We were left to
+conclude that the only differences between us would concern our
+choice of the squirt or the bomb. As some of us here might equally
+object to using the bomb or the squirt, I submit that either our
+protest should have been allowed or our agreement should not have
+been taken for granted at the start.</p>
+<p>"Again, Miss Maud Blackadder, in her sporting speech, her heroic
+speech, has not cleared the question. She has appealed to us to
+come in, without counting the cost; but she has said nothing to
+convince us that when our account at our bank is overdrawn, and we
+have declared war on all our male friends and relations, and have
+left our comfortable homes, and are all camping out on the open
+Heath--I repeat, she has said nothing to convince us that the price
+we shall have paid is going to get us the thing we want.</p>
+<p>"She says that fighters are wanted, and not talkers and writers
+and thinkers. Are we not then to fight with our tongues and with
+our brains? Is she leaving us anything but our bare fists? She has
+told us that she rides straight and that she doesn't funk her
+fences; but she has not told us what sort of country she is going
+to ride over, nor where the fences are, not what Hell-for-leather
+and Neck-or-nothing means.</p>
+<p>"We want meaning; we want clearness and precision. We have not
+been given it yet.</p>
+<p>"I would let all this pass if Miss Blackadder were not your
+colour-sergeant. Is it fair to call for volunteers, for raw
+recruits, and not tell them precisely and clearly what services
+will be required of them? How many" (Dorothy glanced at the eleven)
+"realize that the leaders of your Union, Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, and
+Mrs. Blathwaite, and Miss Angela Blathwaite, demand from its
+members blind, unquestioning obedience?"</p>
+<p>Maud Blackadder jumped up.</p>
+<p>"I protest. I, too, have the right to protest. Miss Harrison
+calls me to order. She tells me to be clear and precise. Will she
+be good enough to be clear and precise herself? Will she say
+whether she is with us or against us? If she is not with us she is
+against us. Let her explain her position."</p>
+<p>She sat down; and Rosalind rose.</p>
+<p>"Miss Harrison," she said, "will explain her position to the
+Committee later. This is an open meeting till seven. It is now five
+minutes to. Will any of you here"--she held the eleven with her
+eyes--"who were not present at the meeting in the Town Hall last
+Monday, hold up your hands. No hands. Then you must all be aware of
+the object and the policy and the rules of the Women's Franchise
+Union. Its members pledge themselves to help, as far as they can,
+the object of the Union; to support the decisions of their leaders;
+to abstain from public and private criticism of those decisions and
+of any words or actions of their leaders; and to obey orders--not
+blindly or unquestioningly, but within the terms of their
+undertakings.</p>
+<p>"Those of you who wish to join us will please write your names
+and addresses on the slips of white paper, stating what kind of
+work you are willing to do and the amount of your subscription, if
+you subscribe, and hand your slips to the Secretary at the door, as
+you go out."</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer went out. Miss Blackadder
+counted--"One--two--"</p>
+<p>Eight of the eleven young girls signed and handed in the white
+slips at the door, and went out.</p>
+<p>"Three--four--"</p>
+<p>Miss Blackadder reckoned that Dorothea Harrison's speech had
+cost her five recruits. Her own fighting speech had carried the
+eleven in a compact body to her side: Dorothea's speech had divided
+and scattered them again.</p>
+<p>Miss Blackadder hurled her personality at the heads of audiences
+in the certainty that it would hit them hard. That was what she was
+there for. She knew that the Women's Franchise union relied on her
+to wring from herself the utmost spectacular effect. And she did it
+every time. She never once missed fire. And Dorothea Harrison had
+come down on the top of her triumph and destroyed the effect of all
+her fire. She had corrupted five recruits. And, supposing there was
+a secret program, she had betrayed the women of the Union to
+fourteen outsiders, by giving it away. Treachery or no treachery,
+Dorothea Harrison would have to pay for it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Everybody had gone except the members of the Committee and
+Phyllis Desmond who waited for her friend, Maud Blackadder.</p>
+<p>Dorothy remembered Phyllis Desmond now; she was that art-student
+girl that Vera knew. She had seen her at Vera's house.</p>
+<p>They had drawn round the table again. Miss Blackadder and Miss
+Gilchrist conferred in whispers.</p>
+<p>"Before we go," said Rosalind, "I propose that we ask Miss
+Dorothea Harrison to be our Vice-President."</p>
+<p>Miss Gilchrist nodded to Miss Blackadder who rose. It was her
+moment.</p>
+<p>"And <i>I</i> propose," she said, "that before we invite Miss
+Harrison to be anything we ask her to define her position--clearly
+and precisely."</p>
+<p>She made a sign, and the Secretary was on her feet.</p>
+<p>"And first we must ask Miss Harrison to explain <i>how</i> she
+became possessed of the secret policy of the Union which has never
+been discussed at any open meeting and is unknown to members of the
+General Committee."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Dorothy, "there <i>is</i> a secret policy?"</p>
+<p>"You seem to know it. We have the right to ask <i>how</i> you
+know? Unless you invented it."</p>
+<p>Dorothy faced them. It was inconceivable that it should have
+happened, that she should be standing there, in the old schoolroom
+of her father's house, while two strange women worried her. She
+knew that her back was to the wall and that the Blackadder girl had
+been on the watch for the last half-hour to get her knife into her.
+(Odd, for she had admired the Blackadder girl and her fighting
+gestures.) It was inconceivable that she should have to answer to
+that absurd committee for her honour. It was inconceivable that
+Rosalind, her friend, should not help her.</p>
+<p>Yet it had happened. With all her platform eloquence Rosalind
+couldn't, for the life of her, get out one heroic, defending word.
+From the moment when the Gilchrist woman had pounced, Rosalind had
+simply sat and stared, like a rabbit, like a fish, her mouth open
+for the word that would not come. Rosalind was afraid to stand up
+for her. It was dreadful, and it was funny to see Rosalind looking
+like that, and to realize the extent of her weakness and her
+obstinacy.</p>
+<p>Yet Rosalind had not changed. She was still the school-girl
+slacker who could never do a stroke of work until somebody had
+pushed her into it, who could never leave off working until stopped
+by the same hand that had set her going. Her power to go, and to
+let herself rip, and the weakness that made her depend on Dorothy
+to start her were the qualities that attracted Dorothy to Rosalind
+from the beginning. But now she was the tool of the fighting
+Suffrage Women. Or if she wasn't a tool, she was a machine; her
+brain was a rapid, docile, mechanical apparatus for turning out bad
+imitations of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and the two Blathwaites. Her
+air of casual command, half-swagger, half-slouch, her stoop and the
+thrusting forward of her face, were copied sedulously from an
+admired model.</p>
+<p>Dorothy found her pitiable. She was hypnotized by the
+Blathwaites who worked her and would throw her away when she was of
+no more use. She hadn't the strength to resist the pull and the
+grip and the drive of other people. She couldn't even hold out
+against Valentina Gilchrist and Maud Blackadder. Rosalind would
+always be caught and spun round by any movement that was strong
+enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex.</p>
+<p>That was Dorothy's fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled
+the slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of
+the Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught
+and sucked down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go
+on whirling, under the impression that her movements made it
+move.</p>
+<p>The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She
+liked the feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to
+beat up against the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round
+outside it, and swerve away before the thing got her.</p>
+<p>For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother
+Michael had been afraid of the little vortex of school. She was
+afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the
+high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of
+committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the
+tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the
+gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and
+heaving and rushing forward of the many as one. She would not be
+carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and hardness of
+her soul. It was her soul they wanted, these women of the Union,
+the Blathwaites and the Palmerston-Swetes, and Rosalind, and the
+Blackadder girl and the Gilchrist woman; they ran out after her
+like a hungry pack yelping for her soul; and she was not going to
+throw it to them. She would fight for freedom, but not in their way
+and not at their bidding.</p>
+<p>She was her brother Michael, refusing to go to the party;
+refusing to run with the school herd, holding out for his private
+soul against other people who kept him from remembering. Only
+Michael did not hold out. He ran away. She would stay, on the edge
+of the vortex, fascinated by its danger, and resisting.</p>
+<p>But as she looked at them, at Rosalind with her open mouth, at
+the Blackadder girl who was scowling horribly, and at Valentina
+Gilchrist, sceptical and quizzical, she laughed. The three had been
+trying to rush her, and because they couldn't rush her they were
+questioning her honour. She had asked them plainly for a plain
+meaning, and their idea of apt repartee was to pretend to question
+her honour.</p>
+<p>Perhaps they really did question it. She didn't care. She
+loathed their excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't
+care. It was she who had drawn them and led them on to this display
+of incomparable idiocy. Like her brother Nicholas she found that
+adversity was extremely funny; and she laughed.</p>
+<p>She was no longer Michael, she was Nicky, not caring, delighting
+in her power to fool them.</p>
+<p>"You think," she said, "I'd no business to find out?"</p>
+<p>"Your knowledge would certainly have been mysterious," said the
+Secretary; "unless at least two confidences had been betrayed.
+Supposing there had been any secret policy."</p>
+<p>"Well, you see, I don't know it; and I didn't invent it; and I
+didn't find it out--precisely. Your secret policy is the logical
+conclusion of your present policy. I deduced it; that's all.
+Anybody could have done the same. Does that satisfy you? (They
+won't love me any better for making them look fools!)"</p>
+<p>"Thank you," said Miss Gilchrist. "We only wanted to be
+sure."</p>
+<p>The dinner-bell rang as Dorothy was defining her position.</p>
+<p>"I'll work for you; I'll speak for you; I'll write for you; I'll
+fight for you. I'll make hay of every Government meeting, if I can
+get in without lying and sneaking for it. I'll go to prison for
+you, if I can choose my own crime. But I won't give up my liberty
+of speech and thought and action. I won't pledge myself to obey
+your orders. I won't pledge myself not to criticize policy I
+disapprove of. I won't come on your Committee, and I won't join
+your Union. Is that clear and precise enough?"</p>
+<p>Somebody clapped and somebody said, "Hear, Hear!" And somebody
+said, "Go it, Dorothy!"</p>
+<p>It was Anthony and Frances and Captain Drayton, who paused
+outside the door on their way to the dining-room, and listened,
+basely.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They were all going now. Dorothy stood at the door, holding it
+open for them, glad that it was all over.</p>
+<p>Only Phyllis Desmond, the art-student, lingered. Dorothy
+reminded her that they had met at her aunt Vera Harrison's
+house.</p>
+<p>The art-student smiled. "I wondered when you were going to
+remember."</p>
+<p>"I did, but they all called you Desmond. That's what put me
+out."</p>
+<p>"Everybody calls me Desmond. You had a brother or something with
+you, hadn't you?"</p>
+<p>"I might have had two. Which? Michael's got green eyes and
+yellow hair. Nicky's got blue eyes and black hair."</p>
+<p>"It was Nicky--nice name--then."</p>
+<p>Desmond's beauty stirred in its sleep. The film of air was
+lifted from her black eyes.</p>
+<p>"I'm dining with Mrs. Harrison to-night," she said.</p>
+<p>"You'll be late then."</p>
+<p>"It doesn't matter. Lawrence Stephen's never there till after
+eight. She won't dine without him."</p>
+<p>Dorothy stiffened. She did not like that furtive betrayal of
+Vera and Lawrence Stephen.</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd come and see me at my rooms in Chelsea. And bring
+your brother. Not the green and yellow one. The blue and black
+one."</p>
+<p>Dorothy took the card on which Desmond had scribbled an address.
+But she did not mean to go and see her. She wasn't sure that she
+liked Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Rosalind stayed on to dine with Dorothy's family. She was no
+longer living with her own family, for Mrs. Jervis was hostile to
+Women's Franchise. She had rooms off the Strand, not far from the
+headquarters of the Union.</p>
+<p>Frances looked a little careworn. She had been sent for to
+Grannie's house to see what could be done with Aunt Emmeline, and
+had found, as usual, that nothing could be done with her. In the
+last three years the second Miss Fleming had become less and less
+enthusiastic, and more and more emphatic, till she ceased from
+enthusiasm altogether and carried emphasis beyond the bounds of
+sanity. She had become, as Frances put it, extremely tiresome.</p>
+<p>It was not accurate to say, as Mrs. Fleming did, that you never
+knew when Emmeline would start a nervous crisis; for as a matter of
+fact you could time her to a minute. It was her habit to wait till
+her family was absorbed in some urgent affair that diverted
+attention from her case, and then to break out alarmingly. Dorothy
+was generally sent for to bring her round; but to-day it was
+Dorothy who had important things on hand. Aunt Emmeline had scented
+the Suffrage meeting from afar, and had made arrangements
+beforehand for a supreme crisis that would take all the shine out
+of Dorothy's affair.</p>
+<p>When Frances said that Aunt Emmy had been tiresome again,
+Dorothy knew what she meant. For Aunt Emmy's idea was that her
+sisters persecuted her; that Edie was jealous of her and hated her;
+that Louie had always trampled on her and kept her under; that
+Frances had used her influence with Grannie to spoil all her
+chances one after another. It was all Frances's fault that Vera
+Harrison had come between her and Major Cameron; Frances had
+encouraged Vera in her infamous intrigue; and between them they had
+wrecked two lives. And they had killed Major Cameron.</p>
+<p>Since Ferdie's death Emmeline Fleming had lived most of the time
+in a sort of dream in which it seemed to her that these things had
+really happened.</p>
+<p>This afternoon she had been more than usually tiresome. She had
+simply raved.</p>
+<p>"You should have brought her round to the meeting," said
+Dorothy, "and let her rave there. I'd back Aunt Emmeline against
+Maud Blackadder. I wish, Rosalind, you'd leave off making faces and
+kicking my shins. You needn't worry any more, Mummy ducky. I'm
+going to rope them all into the Suffrage Movement. Aunt Edie can
+distribute literature, Aunt Louie can interrupt like anything, and
+Aunt Emmeline can shout and sing."</p>
+<p>"I think, Dorothy," said Rosalind with weak bitterness, "that
+you might have stuck by me."</p>
+<p>The two were walking down East Heath Road to the tram-lines
+where the motor buses started for Charing Cross.</p>
+<p>"It was you who dragged me into it, and the least you could do
+was to stick. Why didn't you keep quiet instead of forcing our
+hands?"</p>
+<p>"I couldn't keep quiet. I'll go with you straight or I won't go
+with you at all."</p>
+<p>"You know what's the matter with you? It's your family. You'll
+never be any good to us, you'll never be any good to yourself till
+you've chucked them and got away. For years--ever since you've been
+born--you've simply been stewing there in the family juice until
+you're soaked with it. You oughtn't to be living at home. You ought
+to be on your own--like me."</p>
+<p>"You're talking rot, Rosalind. If my people were like yours I'd
+have to chuck them, I suppose; but they're not. They're
+angels."</p>
+<p>"That's why they're so dangerous. They couldn't influence you if
+they weren't angels."</p>
+<p>"They don't influence me the least little bit. I'd like to see
+them try. They're much too clever. They know I'd be off like a shot
+if they did. Why, they let me do every mortal thing I please--turn
+the schoolroom into a meeting hall for your friends to play the
+devil in. That Blackadder girl was yelling the house down, yet they
+didn't say anything. And your people aren't as bad as you make out,
+you know. You couldn't live on your own if your father didn't give
+you an allowance. I like Mrs. Jervis."</p>
+<p>"Because she likes you."</p>
+<p>"Well, that's a reason. It isn't the reason why I like my own
+mother, because she doesn't like me so very much. That's why she
+lets me do what I like. She doesn't care enough to stop me. She
+only really cares for Dad and John and Nicky and Michael."</p>
+<p>Rosalind looked fierce and stubborn.</p>
+<p>"That's what's the matter with all of you," she said.</p>
+<p>"What is?"</p>
+<p>"Caring like that. It's all sex. Sex instinct, sex feeling.
+Maud's right. It's what we're up against all the time."</p>
+<p>Dorothy said to herself, "That's what's the matter with
+Rosalind, if she only knew it."</p>
+<p>Rosalind loved Michael and Michael detested her, and Nicky
+didn't like her very much. She always looked fierce and stubborn
+when she heard Michael's name.</p>
+<p>Rosalind went on. "When it comes to sex you don't revolt. You
+sit down."</p>
+<p>"I do revolt. I'm revolting now. I go much farther than you do.
+I think the marriage laws are rotten; I think divorce ought to be
+for incompatibility. I think love isn't love and can't last unless
+it's free. I think marriage ought to be abolished--not yet,
+perhaps, but when we've become civilized. It will be. It's bound to
+be. As it is, I think every woman has a right to have a baby if she
+wants one. If Emmeline had had a baby, she wouldn't be devastating
+us now."</p>
+<p>"That's what you think, but it isn't what you feel. It's all
+thinking with you, Dorothy. The revolt goes on in your brain.
+You'll never do anything. It isn't that you haven't the courage to
+go against your men. You haven't the will. You don't want to."</p>
+<p>"Why should I? What do they do? Father and Michael and Nicky
+don't interfere with me any more than Mother does."</p>
+<p>"You know I'm not thinking of them. They don't really
+matter."</p>
+<p>"Who are you thinking of then? Frank Drayton? You needn't!"</p>
+<p>It was mean of Rosalind to hit below the belt like that, when
+she knew that <i>she</i> was safe. Michael had never been brought
+against her and never would be. It was disgusting of her to imply
+that Dorothy's state of mind was palpable, when her own (though
+sufficiently advertised by her behaviour) had received from
+Michael's sister the consecration of silence as a secret, tragic
+thing.</p>
+<p>They had reached the tram-lines.</p>
+<p>At the sight of the Charing Cross `bus Rosalind assumed an air
+of rollicking, adventurous travel.</p>
+<p>"My hat! What an evening! I shall have a ripping ride down.
+Don't say there's no room on the top. Cheer up, Dorothy!"</p>
+<p>Which showed that Rosalind Jervis was a free woman, suggested
+that life had richer thrills than marrying Dorothy's brother
+Michael, and fixed the detested imputation securely on her
+friend.</p>
+<p>Dorothy watched her as she swung herself on to the footboard and
+up the stair of the motor bus. There was room on the top. Rosalind,
+in fact, had the top all to herself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>As Dorothy crossed the Heath again in the twilight she saw
+something white on the terrace of her father's house. Her mother
+was waiting for her.</p>
+<p>She thought at first that Aunt Emmeline had gone off her head
+and that she had been sent for to keep her quiet. She gloried in
+their dependence on her. But no, that wasn't likely. Her mother was
+just watching for her as she used to watch for her and the boys
+when they were little and had been sent across the Heath to
+Grannie's house with a message.</p>
+<p>And at the sight and memory of her mother Dorothy felt a
+childish, sick dissatisfaction with herself and with her day, and
+an absurd longing for the tranquillity and safety of the home whose
+chief drawback lately had been that it was too tranquil and too
+safe. She could almost have told her mother how they had all gone
+for her, and how Rosalind had turned out rotten, and how beastly it
+had all been. Almost, but not quite. Dorothy had grown up, and she
+was there to protect and not to be protected. However agreeable it
+might have been to confide in her mother, it wouldn't have
+done.</p>
+<p>Frances met her at the garden door. She had been crying.</p>
+<p>"Nicky's come home," she said.</p>
+<p>"Nicky?"</p>
+<p>"He's been sent down."</p>
+<p>"Whatever for?"</p>
+<p>"Darling, I can't possibly tell you."</p>
+<p>But in the end she did.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Up till now Frances had taken a quiet interest in Women's
+Suffrage. It had got itself into the papers and thus become part of
+the affairs of the nation. The names of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and
+Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite had got into the papers,
+where Frances hoped and prayed that the name of Dorothea Harrison
+might not follow them. The spectacle of a frantic Government at
+grips with the Women's Franchise Union had not yet received the
+head-lines accorded to the reports of divorce and breach of promise
+cases and fires in paraffin shops; still, it was beginning to
+figure, and if Frances's <i>Times</i> ignored it, there were other
+papers that Dorothy brought home.</p>
+<p>But for Frances the affairs of the nation sank into
+insignificance beside Nicky's Cambridge affair.</p>
+<p>There could be no doubt that Nicky's affair was serious. You
+could not, Anthony said, get over the letters, the Master's letter
+and the Professor's letter and Michael's. They had arrived one hour
+after Nicky, Nicky so changed from his former candour that he
+refused to give any account of himself beyond the simple statement
+that he had been sent down. They'd know, he had said, soon enough
+why.</p>
+<p>And soon enough they did know.</p>
+<p>To be sure no details could be disentangled from the discreet
+ambiguities of the Master and the Professor. But Michael's letter
+was more explicit. Nicky had been sent down because old "Booster"
+had got it into his head that Nicky had been making love to
+"Booster's" wife when she didn't want to be made love to, and
+nothing could get it out of "Booster's" head.</p>
+<p>Michael was bound to stand up for his brother, and it was clear
+to Anthony that so grave a charge could hardly have been brought
+without some reason. The tone of the letters, especially the
+Professor's, was extraordinarily restrained. That was what made the
+thing stand out in its sheer awfulness. The Professor, although,
+according to Michael, he conceived himself to be profoundly
+injured, wrote sorrowfully, in consideration of Nicky's youth.</p>
+<p>There was one redeeming circumstance, the Master and the
+Professor both laid stress on it: Anthony's son had not attempted
+to deny it.</p>
+<p>"There must," Frances said wildly, "be some terrible
+mistake."</p>
+<p>But Nicky cut the ground from under the theory of the terrible
+mistake by continuing in his refusal to deny it.</p>
+<p>"What sort of woman," said Anthony, "is the Professor's
+wife?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, awfully decent," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"You had no encouragement, then, no provocation?"</p>
+<p>"She's awfully fascinating," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>Then Frances had another thought. It seemed to her that Nicky
+was evading.</p>
+<p>"Are you sure you're not screening somebody else?"</p>
+<p>"Screening somebody else? Do you mean some other fellow?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. I'm not asking you to give the name, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"I swear I'm not. Why should I be? I can't think why you're all
+making such a fuss about it. I don't mean poor old 'Booster.' He's
+got some cause, if you like."</p>
+<p>"But what was it you did--really did, Nicky?"</p>
+<p>"You've read the letters, Mother."</p>
+<p>Nicky's adolescence seemed to die and pass from him there and
+then; and she saw a stubborn, hard virility that frightened and
+repelled her, forcing her to believe that it might have really
+happened.</p>
+<p>To Frances the awfulness of it was beyond belief. And the pathos
+of her belief in Nicky was unbearable to Anthony. There were the
+letters.</p>
+<p>"I think, dear," Anthony said, "you'd better leave us."</p>
+<p>"Mayn't I stay?" It was as if she thought that by staying she
+could bring Nicky's youth back to life again.</p>
+<p>"No," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>She went, and Nicky opened the door for her. His hard, tight
+man's face looked at her as if it had been she who had sinned and
+he who suffered, intolerably, for her sin. The click of the door as
+he shut it stabbed her.</p>
+<p>"It's a damnable business, father. We'd better not talk about
+it."</p>
+<p>But Anthony would talk about it. And when he had done talking
+all that Nicky had to say was: "You know as well as I do that these
+things happen."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>For Nicky had thought it out very carefully beforehand in the
+train. What else could he say? He couldn't tell them that
+"Booster's" poor little wife had lost her head and made hysterical
+love to him, and had been so frightened at what she had done that
+she had made him promise on his word of honour that, whatever
+happened, he wouldn't give her away to anybody, not even to his own
+people.</p>
+<p>He supposed that either Peggy had given herself away, or that
+poor old "Booster" had found her out. He supposed that, having
+found her out, there was no other line that "Booster" could have
+taken. Anyhow, there was no other line that <i>he</i> could take;
+because, in the world where these things happened, being found out
+would be fifty times worse for Peggy than it would be for him.</p>
+<p>He tried to recall the scene in the back drawing-room where she
+had asked him so often to have tea with her alone. The most vivid
+part was the end of it, after he had given his promise. Peggy had
+broken down and put her head on his shoulder and cried like
+anything. And it was at that moment that Nicky thought of
+"Booster," and how awful and yet how funny it would be if he walked
+into the room and saw him there. He had tried hard not to think
+what "Booster's" face would look like; he had tried hard not to
+laugh as long as Peggy's head was on his shoulder, for fear of
+hurting her feelings; but when she took it off he did give one
+half-strangled snort; for it really was the rummest thing that had
+ever happened to him.</p>
+<p>He didn't know, and he couldn't possibly have guessed, that as
+soon as the door had shut on him Peggy's passion had turned to rage
+and utter detestation of Nicky (for she had heard the snort); and
+that she had gone straight to her husband's study and put her head
+on <i>his</i> shoulder, and cried, and told him a lie; and that it
+was Peggy's lie and not the Professor's imagination that had caused
+him to be sent down. And even if Peggy had not been Lord Somebody's
+daughter and related to all sorts of influential people she would
+still have been capable of turning every male head in the
+University. For she was a small, gentle woman with enchanting
+manners and the most beautiful and pathetic eyes, and she had not
+yet been found out. Therefore it was more likely that an
+undergraduate with a face like Nicky's should lose his head than
+that a woman with a face like Peggy's should, for no conceivable
+reason, tell a lie. So that, even if Nicky's word of honour had not
+been previously pledged to his accuser, it would have had no chance
+against any statement that she chose to make. And even if he had
+known that she had lied, he couldn't very well have given it
+against poor pretty Peggy who had lost her head and got
+frightened.</p>
+<p>As Nicky packed up his clothes and his books he said, "I don't
+care if I am sent down. It would have been fifty times worse for
+her than it is for me."</p>
+<p>He had no idea how bad it was, nor how much worse it was going
+to be. For it ended in his going that night from his father's house
+to the house in St. John's Wood where Vera and Mr. Lawrence Stephen
+lived.</p>
+<p>And it was there that he met Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky congratulated himself on having pulled it off so well. At
+the same time he was a little surprised at the ease with which he
+had taken his father and mother in. He might have understood it if
+he had known that Vera had been before him, and that she had warned
+them long ago that this was precisely the sort of thing they would
+have to look out for. And as no opinion ever uttered on the subject
+of their children was likely to be forgotten by Frances and
+Anthony, when this particular disaster came they were more prepared
+for it than they would have believed possible.</p>
+<p>But there were two members of his family whom Nicky had failed
+altogether to convince, Michael and Dorothy. Michael luckily, Nicky
+said to himself, was not on the spot, and his letter had no weight
+against the letters of the Master and the Professor, and on this
+also Nicky had calculated. He reckoned without Dorothy, judging it
+hardly likely that she would be allowed to know anything about it.
+Nobody, not even Frances, was yet aware of Dorothy's
+importance.</p>
+<p>And Dorothy, because of her importance, blamed herself for all
+that happened afterwards. If she had not had that damned Suffrage
+meeting, Rosalind would not have stayed to dinner; if Rosalind had
+not stayed to dinner she would not have gone with her to the
+tram-lines; if she had not gone with her to the tram-lines she
+would have been at home to stop Nicky from going to St. John's
+Wood. As it was, Nicky had reached the main road at the top of the
+lane just as Dorothy was entering it from the bottom.</p>
+<p>At first Frances did not want Dorothy to see her father. He was
+most horribly upset and must not be disturbed. But Dorothy
+insisted. Her father had the letters, and she must see the
+letters.</p>
+<p>"I may understand them better than you or Daddy," she said. "You
+see, Mummy, I know these Cambridge people. They're awful asses,
+some of them."</p>
+<p>And though her mother doubted whether attendance at the
+Professor's lectures would give Dorothy much insight into the
+affair, she had her way. Anthony was too weak to resist her. He
+pushed the letters towards her without a word. He would rather she
+had been left out of it. And yet somehow the sight of her, coming
+in, so robust and undismayed and competent, gave him a sort of
+comfort.</p>
+<p>Dorothy did not agree with Michael. There was more in it than
+the Professor's imagination. The Professor, she said, hadn't got
+any imagination; you could tell from the way he lectured. But she
+did not believe one word of the charge against her brother.
+Something had happened and Nicky was screening somebody.</p>
+<p>"I'll bet you anything you like," said Dorothy, "it's
+'Booster's' wife. She's made him give his word."</p>
+<p>Dorothy was sure that "Booster's" wife was a bad lot.</p>
+<p>"Nicky said she was awfully decent."</p>
+<p>"He'd <i>have</i> to. He couldn't do it by halves."</p>
+<p>"They couldn't have sent him down, unless they'd sifted the
+thing to the bottom."</p>
+<p>"I daresay they've sifted all they could, the silly asses."</p>
+<p>She could have killed them for making her father suffer. The
+sight of his drawn face hurt her abominably. She had never seen him
+like that. She wasn't half so sorry for her mother who was
+sustained by a secret, ineradicable faith in Nicky. Why couldn't he
+have faith in Nicky too? Was it because he was a man and knew that
+these things happened?</p>
+<p>"Daddy--being sent down isn't such an awful calamity. It isn't
+going to blast his career or anything. It's always touch and go.
+<i>I</i> might have been sent down any day. I should have been if
+they'd known about me half what they don't know about Nicky. Why
+can't you take it as a rag? You bet <i>he</i> does."</p>
+<p>Anthony removed himself from her protecting hand. He got up and
+went to bed.</p>
+<p>But he did not sleep there. Neither he nor Frances slept. And he
+came down in the morning looking worse than ever.</p>
+<p>Dorothy thought, "It must be awful to have children if it makes
+you feel like that." She thought, "It's a lucky thing they're not
+likely to cut up the same way about me." She thought again, "It
+must be awful to have children." She thought of the old discussions
+in her room at Newnham, about the woman's right to the child, and
+free union, and easy divorce, and the abolition of the family. Her
+own violent and revolutionary speeches (for which she liked to
+think she might have been sent down) sounded faint and far-off and
+irrelevant. She did not really want to abolish Frances and Anthony.
+And yet, if they had been abolished, as part of the deplorable
+institution of parentage, it would have been better for them; for
+then they would not be suffering as they did.</p>
+<p>It must be awful to have children. But perhaps they knew that it
+was worth it.</p>
+<p>And as her thoughts travelled that way they were overtaken all
+of a sudden by an idea. She did not stop to ask herself what
+business her idea had in that neighbourhood. She went down first
+thing after breakfast and sent off two wires; one to Captain
+Drayton at Croft House, Eltham; one to the same person at the Royal
+Military Academy, Woolwich.</p>
+<p>"Can I see you? It's about Nicky.</p>
+<p>"DOROTHY HARRISON."</p>
+<p>Wires to show that she was impersonal and businesslike, and that
+her business was urgent. "Can I see you?" to show that he was not
+being invited to see <i>her</i>. "It's about Nicky" to justify the
+whole proceeding. "Dorothy Harrison" because "Dorothy" by itself
+was too much.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>As soon as she had sent off her wires Dorothy felt a sense of
+happiness and well-being. She had no grounds for happiness; far
+otherwise; her great friendship with Rosalind Jervis was
+disintegrating bit by bit owing to Rosalind's behaviour; the fiery
+Suffrage meeting had turned into dust and ashes; her darling Nicky
+was in a nasty scrape; her father and mother were utterly
+miserable; yet she was happy.</p>
+<p>Half-way home her mind began to ask questions of its own
+accord.</p>
+<p>"Supposing you had to choose between the Suffrage and Frank
+Drayton?"</p>
+<p>"But I haven't got to."</p>
+<p>"You might have. You know you might any minute. You know he
+hates it. And supposing--"</p>
+<p>But Dorothy refused to give any answer.</p>
+<p>His wire came within the next half hour.</p>
+<p>"Coming three sharp. FRANK."</p>
+<p>Her sense of well-being increased almost to exaltation.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He arrived with punctuality at three o'clock. (He was in the
+gunners and had a job at Woolwich.) She found him standing on the
+hearth-rug in the drawing-room. He had blown his nose when he heard
+her coming, and that meant that he was nervous. She caught him
+stuffing his pocket-handkerchief (a piece of damning evidence) into
+his breast-pocket.</p>
+<p>With her knowledge of his nervousness her exaltation ceased as
+if it had not been. At the sight of him it was as if the sentence
+hidden somewhere in her mind--"You'll have to choose. You know
+you'll have to"--escaping thought and language, had expressed
+itself in one suffocating pang. Unless Nicky's affair staved off
+the dreadful moment.</p>
+<p>"Were you frightfully busy?"</p>
+<p>"No, thank goodness."</p>
+<p>The luck she had had! Of course, if he had been busy he couldn't
+possibly have come.</p>
+<p>She could look at him now without a tightening in her throat.
+She liked to look at him. He was made all of one piece. She liked
+his square face and short fine hair, both the colour of light-brown
+earth; his eyes, the colour of light brown earth under clear water;
+eyes that looked small because they were set so deep. She liked
+their sudden narrowing and their deep wrinkles when he smiled. She
+liked his jutting chin, and the fine, rather small mouth that
+jerked his face slightly crooked when he laughed. She liked that
+slender crookedness that made it a face remarkable and unique among
+faces. She liked his brains. She liked all that she had ever seen
+or heard of him.</p>
+<p>Vera had told them that once, at an up-country station in India,
+he had stopped a mutiny in a native battery by laughing in the
+men's faces. Somebody that Ferdie knew had been with him and saw it
+happen. The men broke into his office where he was sitting,
+vulnerably, in his shirt-sleeves. They had brought knives with
+them, beastly native things, and they had their hands on the
+handles, ready. They screamed and gesticulated with excitement. And
+Frank Drayton leaned back in his office chair and looked at them,
+and burst out laughing, because, he said, they made such funny
+faces. When they got to fingering their knives, he tilted back his
+chair and rocked with laughter. His sudden, incredible mirth
+frightened them and stopped the mutiny. She could see him, she
+could see his face jerked crooked with delight.</p>
+<p>That was the sort of thing that Nicky would have done. She loved
+him for that. She loved him because he was like Nicky.</p>
+<p>She was not able to recall the process of the states that
+flowered in that mysterious sense of well-being and exaltation. A
+year ago Frank Drayton had been only "that nice man we used to meet
+at Cheltenham." First of all he had been Ferdie's and Vera's
+friend. Then he became Nicky's friend; the only one who took a
+serious interest in his inventions and supported him when he wanted
+to go into the Army and consoled him when he was frustrated. Then
+he had become the friend of the family. Now he was recognized as
+more particularly Dorothea's friend.</p>
+<p>At Cheltenham he had been home on leave; and it was not until
+this year that he had got his job at Woolwich teaching gunnery,
+while he waited for a bigger job in the Ordnance Department. Ferdie
+Cameron had always said that Frank Drayton would be worth watching.
+He would be part of the brains of the Army some day. Nicky watched
+him. His brains and their familiarity with explosives and the
+machinery of warfare had been his original attraction for Nicky.
+But it was Dorothea who watched him most.</p>
+<p>She plunged abruptly into Nicky's affair, giving names and
+lineage. "You know all sorts of people, do you know anything about
+her?"</p>
+<p>He looked at her clearly, without smiling. Then he said "Yes. I
+know a good bit about her. Is that what's wrong with Nicky?"</p>
+<p>"Not exactly. But he's been sent down."</p>
+<p>His wry smile intimated that such things might be.</p>
+<p>Then she told him what the Master had written and what the
+Professor had written and what Michael had written, and what Nicky
+had said, and what she, Dorothea thought. Drayton smiled over the
+Master's and the Professor's letters, but when it came to Michael's
+letter he laughed aloud.</p>
+<p>"It's all very well for <i>us</i>. But Daddy and Mummy are
+breaking their hearts. Daddy says he's going down to Cambridge to
+see what really did happen."</p>
+<p>Again that clear look. She gathered that he disapproved of
+"Booster's" wife. He disapproved of so many things: of Women's
+Suffrage; of revolutions; of women who revolted; of anybody who
+revolted; of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela
+Blathwaite. It was putting it too mildly to say he disapproved of
+Rosalind Jervis; he detested her. He disapproved of Vera and of her
+going to see Vera; she remembered that he had even disapproved,
+long ago, of poor Ferdie, though he liked him. Evidently he
+disapproved of "Booster's" wife for the same reason that he
+disapproved of Vera. That was why he didn't say so.</p>
+<p>"I believe you think all the time I'm right," she said. "Would
+you go down if you were he?"</p>
+<p>"No. I wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+<p>"Because he won't get anything out of them. They can't give her
+away any more than Nicky can. Or than <i>you</i> can, Dorothy."</p>
+<p>"You mean I've done it already--to you. I <i>had</i> to, because
+of Nicky. I can't help it if you <i>do</i> think it was beastly of
+me."</p>
+<p>"My dear child--"</p>
+<p>He got up vehemently, as if his idea was to take her in his arms
+and stifle her outbreak that way. But something in her eyes, cold,
+unready, yet aware of him, repelled him.</p>
+<p>He thought: "It's too soon. She's all rigid. She isn't alive
+yet. That's not what she wired for." He thought: "I wish people
+wouldn't send their children to Newnham. It retards their
+development by ten years."</p>
+<p>And she thought: "No. I mustn't let him do that. For then he
+won't be able to go back on me when I tell him my opinions. It
+would be simply trapping him. Supposing--supposing--"</p>
+<p>She did not know that that instinctive renunciation was her
+answer to the question. Her honour would come first.</p>
+<p>"Of course. Of course you had to."</p>
+<p>"What would you do about it if you were Daddy?"</p>
+<p>"I should send them all to blazes."</p>
+<p>"No, but <i>really</i> do?"</p>
+<p>"I should do nothing. I should leave it. You'll find that before
+very long there'll be letters of apology and restitution."</p>
+<p>"Will you come down to the office with me and tell Daddy
+that?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, if you'll come to tea with me somewhere afterwards."</p>
+<p>(He really couldn't be expected to do all this for nothing.)</p>
+<p>She sent her mother to him while she put on her hat and coat.
+When she came down Frances was happy again.</p>
+<p>"You see, Mummy, I was right, after all."</p>
+<p>"You always were right, darling, all the time."</p>
+<p>For the life of her she couldn't help giving that little flick
+at her infallible daughter.</p>
+<p>"She <i>is</i> right--most of the time," said Drayton. His eyes
+covered and protected her.</p>
+<p>Anthony was in his office, sitting before the open doors of the
+cabinet where he kept his samples of rare and valuable woods. The
+polished slabs were laid before him on the table in rows, as he had
+arranged them to show to a customer: wine-coloured mahogany, and
+golden satinwood; ebony black as jet; tulip-wood mottled like fine
+tortoiseshell; coromandel wood, striped black and white like the
+coat of a civet cat; ghostly basswood, shining white on dead white;
+woods of clouded grain, and woods of shining grain, grain that
+showed like the slanting, splintered lines of hewn stone, like
+moss, like the veins of flowers, the fringes of birds' feathers,
+the striping and dappling of beasts; woods of exquisite grain where
+the life of the tree drew its own image in its own heart; woods
+whose surface was tender to the touch like a fine tissue; and
+sweet-smelling sandalwood and camphor-wood and cedar.</p>
+<p>Anthony loved his shining, polished slabs of wood. If a man must
+have a business, let it be timber. Timber was a clean and fine and
+noble thing. He had brought the working of his business to such a
+pitch of smooth perfection that his two elder sons, Michael and
+Nicholas, could catch up with it easily and take it in their
+stride.</p>
+<p>Now he was like a sick child that has ranged all its toys in
+front of it and finds no comfort in them.</p>
+<p>And, as he looked at them, the tulip-wood and the scented
+sandalwood and camphor-wood gave him an idea.</p>
+<p>The Master and the Professor had both advised him to send his
+son Nicholas out of England for a little while. "Let him travel for
+six months and get the whole miserable business out of his
+head."</p>
+<p>Nicky, when he gave up the Army, had told him flatly that he
+would rather die than spend his life sitting in a beastly office.
+Nicky had put it to him that timber meant trees, and trees meant
+forests; why, lots of the stuff they imported came from the
+Himalaya and the West Indies and Ceylon. He had reminded him that
+he was always saying a timber merchant couldn't know enough about
+the living tree. Why shouldn't he go into the places where the
+living trees grew and learn all about them? Why shouldn't he be a
+tree-expert? Since they were specializing in rare and foreign
+woods, why shouldn't he specialize in rare and foreign trees?</p>
+<p>And the slabs of tulip-wood and scented camphor-wood and
+sandalwood were saying to Anthony, "Why not?" Neither he nor
+Frances had wanted Nicky to go off to the West Indies and the
+Himalaya; but now, since clearly he must go off somewhere, why
+not?</p>
+<p>Drayton and Dorothy came in just as Anthony (still profoundly
+dejected) was saying to himself, "Reinstate him. Give him
+responsibility--curiosity--healthy interests. Get the whole
+miserable business out of his head."</p>
+<p>It seemed incredible, after what they had gone through, that
+Drayton should be standing there, telling him that there was
+nothing in it, that there never had been any miserable business,
+that it was all a storm in a hysterical woman's teacup. He blew the
+whole dirty nightmare to nothing with the laughter that was like
+Nicky's own laughter.</p>
+<p>Then Anthony and Drayton and Dorothy sat round the table,
+drafting letters to the Master and the Professor. Anthony, at
+Drayton's dictation, informed them that he regretted the step they
+had seen fit to take; that he knew his own son well enough to be
+pretty certain that there had been some misunderstanding;
+therefore, unless he received within three days a written
+withdrawal of the charge against his son Nicholas, he would be
+obliged to remove his son Michael from the Master's College.</p>
+<p>The idea of removing Michael was Anthony's own inspiration.</p>
+<p>Drayton's advice was that he should give Nicky his choice
+between Oxford and Germany, the big School of Forestry at
+Aschaffenburg. If he chose Germany, he would be well grounded; he
+could specialize and travel afterwards.</p>
+<p>"Now <i>that's</i> all over," Anthony said, "you two had better
+come and have tea with me somewhere."</p>
+<p>But there was something in their faces that made him consult his
+watch and find that "Oh dear me, no! he was afraid he couldn't." He
+had an appointment at five.</p>
+<p>When they were well out of sight he locked up his toys in his
+cabinet, left the appointment at five to Mr. Vereker, and went home
+to tell Frances about the letters he had written to Cambridge and
+the plans that had been made for Nicky's future.</p>
+<p>"He'll choose Germany," Anthony said. "But that can't be
+helped."</p>
+<p>Frances agreed that they could hardly have hit upon a better
+plan.</p>
+<p>So the affair of Nicky and "Booster's" wife was as if it had
+never been. And for that they thanked the blessed common sense and
+sanity of Captain Drayton.</p>
+<p>And yet Anthony's idea was wrecked by "Booster's" wife. It had
+come too late. Anthony had overlooked the fact that his son had
+seventeen hours' start of him. He was unaware of the existence of
+Nicky's own idea; and he had not allowed for the stiff logic of his
+position.</p>
+<p>When he drove down in his car to St. John's Wood to fetch Nicky,
+he found that he had left that afternoon for Chelsea, where, Vera
+told him, he had taken rooms.</p>
+<p>She gave him the address. It had no significance for
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>Nicky refused to be fetched back from his rooms in Chelsea. For
+he had not left his father's house in a huff; he had left it in his
+wisdom, to avoid the embarrassment of an incredible position. His
+position, as he pointed out to his father, had not changed. He was
+as big a blackguard to-day as he was yesterday; the only difference
+was, that to-morrow or the next day he would be a self-supporting
+blackguard.</p>
+<p>He wouldn't listen to his father's plan. It was a beautiful
+plan, but it would only mean spending more money on him. He'd be
+pretty good, he thought, at looking after machinery. He was going
+to try for a job as a chauffeur or foreman mechanic. He thought he
+knew where he could get one; but supposing he couldn't get it, if
+his father cared to take him on at the works for a bit he'd come
+like a shot; but he couldn't stay there, because it wouldn't be
+good enough.</p>
+<p>He was absolutely serious, and absolutely firm in the logic of
+his position. For he argued that, if he allowed himself to be taken
+back as though nothing had happened, this, more than anything he
+could well think of, would be giving Peggy away.</p>
+<p>He sent his love to his mother and Dorothy, and promised to come
+out and dine with them as soon as he had got his job.</p>
+<p>So Anthony drove back without him. But as he drove he smiled.
+And Frances smiled, too, when he told her.</p>
+<p>"There he is, the young monkey, and there he'll stay. It's
+magnificent, but of course he's an ass."</p>
+<p>"If you can't be an ass at twenty," said Frances, "when can you
+be?"</p>
+<p>They said it was so like Nicky. For all he knew to the contrary
+his career was ruined; but he didn't care. You couldn't make any
+impression on him. They wondered if anybody ever would.</p>
+<p>Dorothy wondered too.</p>
+<p>"What sort of rooms has he got, Anthony?" said Frances.</p>
+<p>"Very nice rooms, at the top of the house, looking over the
+river."</p>
+<p>"Darling Nicky, I shall go and see him. What are you thinking
+of, Dorothy?"</p>
+<p>Dorothy was thinking that Nicky's address at Chelsea was the
+address that Desmond had given her yesterday.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with
+the painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and
+see her. She could never bring herself to go to the St. John's Wood
+house that was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen's house than it
+was Vera's.</p>
+<p>The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back
+on Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with
+their liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged
+that frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen's society
+that otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.</p>
+<p>Vera understood that her husband's brother and sister-in-law
+could hardly be expected to condone her last aberration. Her
+attachment to Ferdie Cameron had been different. It was inevitable,
+and in a sense forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by
+Bartie's sheer impossibility. Besides, the knowledge of it had
+dawned on them so gradually and through so many stages of
+extenuating tragedy, that, even when it became an open certainty,
+the benefit of the long doubt remained. And there was Veronica.
+There was still Veronica. Even without Veronica Vera would have had
+to think of something far worse than Lawrence Stephen before
+Frances would have cast her off. Frances felt that it was not for
+her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree of Heaven.
+Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had Ferdie,
+could she have lived without him? For Frances nothing in the world
+had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her
+children; her children first, and Anthony after them. For Vera
+nothing in the world counted but her lover.</p>
+<p>"If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!" she
+would say.</p>
+<p>Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously,
+through the very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.</p>
+<p>Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made
+up for it by an incorruptible adoration of the living. And she had
+been made notorious chiefly through Stephen's celebrity, which was,
+you might say, a pure accident.</p>
+<p>Thus Frances made shelter for her friend. Only Vera must be made
+to understand that, though <i>she</i> was accepted Lawrence Stephen
+was not. He was the point at which toleration ceased.</p>
+<p>And Vera did understand. She understood that Frances and Anthony
+disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie's and
+Veronica's account than on Bartie's. Even family loyalty could not
+espouse Bartie's cause with any zest. For Bartie showed himself
+implacable. Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her
+so that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had
+refused. His idea was to assert himself by refusals. In that way he
+could still feel that he had power over her and a sort of
+possession. It was he who was scandalous. Even now neither Frances
+nor Anthony had a word to say for him.</p>
+<p>So Vera consented to be received surreptitiously, by herself,
+and without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn. It had hurt
+her; but Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so
+distinguished that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either,
+would ever have been received by him without Vera. She came,
+looking half cynical, half pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a
+little beaten after seventeen years of passion and danger, saying
+that she wasn't going to force Larry down their throats if they
+didn't like him; and she went away sustained by her sense of his
+distinction and <i>his</i> repudiations.</p>
+<p>And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances
+and Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn't. Michael
+and Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he
+knew; and he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be
+seen at the parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself
+distinction. Vera had never forgotten and never would forget what
+Anthony and Frances had done for her and Ferdie when they took
+Veronica. She wanted to make up, to pay back, to help their
+children as they had helped her child; to give the best she had,
+and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't possibly have done.
+Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was lamentable. In his
+family and in the dull round of their acquaintance there was not
+anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael; not
+anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old
+attitude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had
+promised her that he would help Michael.</p>
+<p>And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas
+and Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm,
+well-ordered sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral
+vortex that to her was the most redoubtable of all. She hid her
+fear, because in her wisdom she knew that to show fear was not the
+way to keep her children. She hid her strength because she knew
+that to show it was not the way. Her strength was in their love of
+her. She had only used it once when she had stopped Nicky from
+going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will never do
+that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a
+treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be
+bargained with. She tried to hold the balance even between their
+youth and their maturity.</p>
+<p>So Frances fought her fear.</p>
+<p>She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in
+spite of everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and
+she did not know that he had sensibilities and prejudices and
+scruples like her own, and that he and Vera distinguished very
+carefully between the people who would be good for Michael and
+Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who would not. She did not
+know that they both drew the line at Desmond.</p>
+<p>Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's
+fault that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet
+each other. She did not deny that it was in her house they
+<i>had</i> met; but she had not introduced them. Desmond had
+introduced herself, on the grounds that she knew Dorothy. Vera
+suspected that, from the first moment when she had seen him
+there--by pure accident--she had marked him down. Very likely she
+had wriggled into Dorothy's Suffrage meeting on purpose. She was
+capable of anything.</p>
+<p>Not that Vera thought there was any need for Frances to worry.
+It was most unlikely that Desmond's business with Nicky could be
+serious. For one thing she was too young herself to care for
+anybody as young as Nicky. For another she happened to be in the
+beginning, or the middle, certainly nowhere near the end of a
+tremendous affair with Headley Richards. As she was designing the
+dresses and the scenery for the new play he was putting on at the
+Independent Theatre, Vera argued very plausibly that the affair had
+only just started, and that Frances must allow it a certain time to
+run.</p>
+<p>"I hope to goodness that the Richards man will marry her."</p>
+<p>"My dear, how can he? He's married already to a nice little
+woman that he isn't half tired of yet. Desmond was determined to
+have him and she's got him; but he's only taken her in his stride,
+as you may say. I don't suppose he cares very much one way or
+another. But with Desmond it's a point of honour."</p>
+<p>"What's a point of honour?"</p>
+<p>"Why, to have him. Not to be left out. Besides, she always said
+she could take him from poor little Ginny Richards, and she's done
+it. That was another point of honour."</p>
+<p>With a calmness that was horrible to Frances Vera weighed her
+friend Desmond's case. To Frances it was as if she had never known
+Vera. Either Vera had changed or she had never known her. She had
+never known women, or men either, who discussed such performances
+with calmness. Vera herself hadn't made her infidelities a point of
+honour.</p>
+<p>These were the passions and the thoughts of Lawrence Stephen's
+and of Desmond's world; these were the things it took for granted.
+These people lived in a moral vortex; they whirled round and round
+with each other; they were powerless to resist the swirl. Not one
+of them had any other care than to love and to make love after the
+manner of the Vortex. This was their honour, not to be left out of
+it, not to be left out of the vortex, but to be carried away, to be
+sucked in, and whirl round and round with each other and the
+rest.</p>
+<p>The painter girl Desmond was horrible to Frances.</p>
+<p>And all the time her mind was busy with one question: "Do you
+think Nicky knows?"</p>
+<p>"I'm perfectly sure he doesn't."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps--if he did--"</p>
+<p>"No, my dear, that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe
+it. You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting
+into his head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And
+you'll be putting it into Desmond's head."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him
+alone." Those painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You
+couldn't take them seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything
+that Vera Harrison said she was. He didn't think, though, that the
+idea of making love to her would enter Nicky's head if they left
+him alone. Nicky's head had more important ideas in it.</p>
+<p>So they left him alone.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of
+Desmond. Too busy with his assistant manager's job at the Morss
+Motor Works; too busy with one of the little ideas to which he owed
+the sudden rise in his position: the little idea of making the
+Morss cars go faster; too busy with his big Idea which had nothing
+whatever to do with the Morss Company and their cars.</p>
+<p>His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a
+French engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the <i>forteresse
+mobile</i>, had become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality
+for his idea. It was a composite of the amoured train, the
+revolving turret, the tractor with caterpillar wheels and the
+motor-car. These things had welded themselves together gradually in
+Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge. The table in
+Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was now
+covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made
+them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of
+him, and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then
+for little ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was
+with him all day in the workshops and offices and showrooms,
+hovering like a formless spiritual presence among the wheeled
+forms. But in the evening it took shape and sound. It arose and
+moved, after its fashion, as he had conceived it, beautiful,
+monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image of the
+<i>forteresse mobile</i>, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost
+that stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the
+vision.</p>
+<p>But the image of Desmond was there.</p>
+<p>At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder
+when Desmond will have finished the drawings."</p>
+<p>The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond's
+caprice.</p>
+<p>The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before
+these could be fitted together and the permanent model of the
+Moving Fortress set up. The Moving Fortress itself waited upon
+Desmond.</p>
+<p>For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not
+draw his plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who
+understood engines to draw them. He was haunted, almost insanely,
+by the fear that somebody else would hit upon the idea of the
+Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so obvious that no gunner and no
+engineer could miss it. And the drawings Desmond made for him, the
+drawings in black and white, the drawings in grey wash, and the
+coloured drawings were perfect. Nicky, unskilled in everything but
+the inventing and building up of engines, did not know how perfect
+the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the
+extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the
+easels in her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he
+took Desmond into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on
+her.</p>
+<p>He didn't care. He liked Desmond. He couldn't help it if Drayton
+disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn't like her. She was, he said
+to himself, a ripping good sort. She might be frightfully clever;
+Nicky rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she
+never talked that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy's other
+friends talked. She let you think.</p>
+<p>It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn't like her and
+that Frank Drayton disapproved of her.</p>
+<p>"They wouldn't," said Nicky, "if they knew you." And he turned
+again to the subject of his Moving Fortress.</p>
+<p>For Desmond's intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was
+perfect, and her way of listening was perfect. She sat on the
+floor, on the orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience,
+embracing her knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms,
+while Nicky stamped up and down her studio and talked to her, like
+a monomaniac, about his Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to
+listen, because she didn't have to answer; she had only to look at
+him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of
+enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she liked his young
+na&iuml;vet&eacute; and monomania; she liked his face and all his
+gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.</p>
+<p>And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled
+eyes and in her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and
+became alive. It was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the
+secret held back in its long, subtle, serious, and slender lines.
+Desmond's sensuality was woven with so fine a web that you would
+have said it belonged less to her body than to her spirit and her
+mind.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early
+summer, when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent
+him motoring about the country on their business, he took Desmond
+with him and Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on
+the grass borders of the high roads and on the edges of the woods
+and moors, and Desmond painted her extraordinary pictures while
+Nicky lay on his back beside her with his face turned up to the sky
+and dreamed of flying machines.</p>
+<p>For he had done with his Moving Fortress. It only waited for
+Desmond to finish the last drawing.</p>
+<p>When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank
+Drayton before he sent them to the War Office.</p>
+<p>He lived for that moment of completion.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of
+nineteen-eleven Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased
+and flowered and ripened to its fulfilment. And in the early summer
+she found that things had happened as she had meant that they
+should happen.</p>
+<p>She had always meant it. She had always said, and she had always
+thought that women were no good unless they had the courage of
+their opinions; the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice
+that prevented them from getting what they wanted.</p>
+<p>Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked
+her in. Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought
+that by simply spinning round faster and faster she added her own
+energy to the whirl. It was not Dorothy's vortex, or the vortex of
+the fighting Suffrage woman. Desmond didn't care very much about
+the Suffrage; or about any kind of freedom but her own kind; or
+about anybody's freedom but her own. Maud Blackadder's idea of
+freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and physical insanity. Yet
+each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and Mrs. Blathwaite
+and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own particular
+swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century. If you had youth
+and life in you, you were in revolt.</p>
+<p>Desmond's theories were Dorothy's theories too; only that while
+Dorothy, as Rosalind had said, thought out her theories in her
+brain without feeling them, Desmond felt them with her whole being;
+and with her whole being, secret, subtle and absolutely relentless,
+she was bent on carrying them out.</p>
+<p>And in the summer, in the new season, Headley Richards decided
+that he had no further use for Desmond. The new play had run its
+course at the Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards
+had been disappointed. He put down the failure mainly to the
+queerness of the dresses and the scenery she had designed for him.
+Desmond's new art was too new; people weren't ready yet for that
+sort of thing. At the same time he discovered that he was really
+very much attached to his own wife Ginny, and when Ginny nobly
+offered to give him his divorce he had replied nobly that he didn't
+want one. And he left Desmond to face the music.</p>
+<p>Desmond's misery was acute; but it was not so hopeless as it
+would have been if she could have credited Ginny Richards with any
+permanent power of attraction for Headley. She knew he would come
+back to her. She knew the power of her own body. She held him by
+the tie that was never broken so long as it endured. He would never
+marry her; yet he would come back.</p>
+<p>But in the interval between these acts there was the music.</p>
+<p>And the first sound of the music, the changed intonations of her
+landlady, frightened Desmond; for though she was older than Nicky
+she was very young. And there were Desmond's people. You may forget
+that you have people and behave as if they weren't there; but, if
+they are there, sooner or later they will let you know it. An
+immense volume of sound and some terrifying orchestral effects were
+contributed by Desmond's people. So that the music was really very
+bad to bear.</p>
+<p>Desmond couldn't bear it. And in her fright she thought of
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>She knew that she hadn't a chance so long as he was absorbed in
+the Moving Fortress. But the model was finished and set up and she
+was at work on the last drawing. And no more ideas for engines were
+coming into Nicky's head. The Morss Company and Nicky himself were
+even beginning to wonder whether there ever would be any more.</p>
+<p>Then Nicky thought of Desmond. And he showed that he was
+thinking of her by sitting still and not talking when he was with
+her. She did not fill that emptiness and spaciousness of Nicky's
+head, but he couldn't get her out of it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>When Vera noticed the silence of the two she became uneasy, and
+judged that the time had come for discreet intervention.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said, "is it true that Desmond's been doing
+drawings for you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Nicky, "she's done any amount."</p>
+<p>"My dear boy, have you any idea of the amount you'll have to pay
+her?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't," said Nicky, "I wish I had. I hate asking her, and
+yet I suppose I'll have to."</p>
+<p>"Of course you'll have to. <i>She</i> won't hate it. She's got
+to earn her living as much as you have."</p>
+<p>"Has she? You don't mean to say she's hard up?"</p>
+<p>He had never thought of Desmond as earning her own living, still
+less as being hard up.</p>
+<p>"I only wish she were," said Vera, "for your sake."</p>
+<p>"Why on earth for my sake?"</p>
+<p>"Because <i>then</i>, my dear Nicky, you wouldn't have to pay so
+stiff a price."</p>
+<p>"I don't care," said Nicky, "how stiff the price is. I shall pay
+it."</p>
+<p>And Vera replied that Desmond, in her own queer way, really was
+a rather distinguished painter. "Pay her," she said. "Pay her for
+goodness sake and have done with it. And if she wants to give you
+things don't let her."</p>
+<p>"As if," said Nicky, "I should dream of letting her."</p>
+<p>And he went off to Chelsea to pay Desmond then and there.</p>
+<p>Vera thought that she had been rather clever. Nicky would dash
+in and do the thing badly. He would be very proud about it, and he
+would revolt from his dependence on Desmond, and he would show
+her--Vera hoped that he would show her--that he did not want to be
+under any obligation to her. And Desmond would be hurt and lose her
+temper. The hard look would get into her face and destroy its
+beauty, and she would say detestable things in a detestable voice,
+and a dreadful ugliness would come between them, and the impulse of
+Nicky's yet unborn passion would be checked, and the memory of that
+abominable half-hour would divide them for ever.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>But Vera herself had grown hard and clever. She had forgotten
+Nicky's tenderness, and she knew nothing at all about Desmond's
+fright. And, as it happened, neither Nicky nor Desmond did any of
+the things she thought they would do.</p>
+<p>Nicky was not impetuous. He found Desmond in her studio working
+on the last drawing of the Moving Fortress, with the finished model
+before her. That gave him his opening, and he approached shyly and
+tentatively.</p>
+<p>Desmond put on an air of complete absorption in her drawing; but
+she smiled. A pretty smile that lifted the corners of her mouth and
+made it quiver, and gave Nicky a queer and unexpected desire to
+kiss her.</p>
+<p>He went on wanting to know what his debt was--not that he could
+ever really pay it.</p>
+<p>"Oh, you foolish Nicky," Desmond said.</p>
+<p>He repeated himself over and over again, and each time she had
+an answer, and the answers had a cumulative effect.</p>
+<p>"There isn't any debt. You don't pay anything--"</p>
+<p>"I didn't do it for <i>that</i>, you silly boy."</p>
+<p>"What did I do it for? I did it for fun. You couldn't draw a
+thing like that for anything else. Look at it--"</p>
+<p>--"Well, if you want to be horrid and calculating about it,
+think of the lunches and the dinners and the theatre tickets and
+the flowers you've given <i>me</i>. Oh, and the gallons and gallons
+of petrol. How am I ever to pay you back again?"</p>
+<p>Thus she mocked him.</p>
+<p>"Can't you see how you're spoiling it all?"</p>
+<p>And then, passionately: "Oh, Nicky, please don't say it again.
+It hurts."</p>
+<p>She turned on him her big black looking-glass eyes washed
+bright, each with one tear that knew better than to fall just yet.
+He must see that she was holding herself well in hand. It would be
+no use letting herself go until he had forgotten his Moving
+Fortress. He was looking at the beastly thing now, instead of
+looking at her.</p>
+<p>"Are you thinking of another old engine?"</p>
+<p>"No," said Nicky. "I'm not thinking of anything."</p>
+<p>"Then you don't want me to do any more drawings?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Well then--I wonder whether you'd very much mind going
+away?"</p>
+<p>"Now?"</p>
+<p>"No. Not now. But soon. From here. Altogether."</p>
+<p>"Go? Altogether? Me? Why?"</p>
+<p>He was utterly astonished. He thought that he had offended
+Desmond past all forgiveness.</p>
+<p>"Because I came here to be alone. To work. And I can't work. And
+I want to be alone again."</p>
+<p>"Am I--spoiling it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. You're spoiling it damnably."</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry, Desmond. I didn't mean to. I thought--" But he
+hadn't the heart to say what he had thought.</p>
+<p>She looked at him and knew that the moment was coming.</p>
+<p>It had come.</p>
+<p>She turned away from the table where the Moving Fortress stood,
+threatening her with its mimic guns, and reminding Nicky of the
+things she most wanted him to forget. She withdrew to her crouching
+place at the other end of the studio, among the cushions.</p>
+<p>He followed her there with slow, thoughtful steps, steps full of
+brooding purpose and of half-unconscious meaning.</p>
+<p>"Nicky, I'm so unhappy. I didn't know it was possible for
+anybody to be so unhappy in this world."</p>
+<p>She began to cry quietly.</p>
+<p>"Desmond--what is it? What is it? Tell me. Why can't you tell
+me?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She thought, "It will be all right if he kisses me once. If he
+holds me in his arms once. Then I can tell him."</p>
+<p>For then he would know that he loved her. He was not quite sure
+now. She knew that he was not quite sure. She trusted to the power
+of her body to make him sure.</p>
+<p>Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor
+pitied it.</p>
+<p>He had kissed her. He had held her in his arms and kissed her
+more than once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow
+of his arm. She was weak and small. She was like some small, soft,
+helpless animal and she was hurt. Her sobbing and panting made her
+ribs feel fragile like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless
+animal under the pressure of his arms. And she was frightened.</p>
+<p>He couldn't stand the sight of suffering. He had never yet
+resisted the appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and
+pain. He could feel Desmond's heart going thump, thump, under the
+blue thing he called her pinafore. Her heart hurt him with its
+thumping.</p>
+<p>And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was
+smooth and sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf. And Desmond knew
+that he knew it. His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over
+the long, polished bands of her black hair; and he thought that he
+loved her. Desmond knew that he thought it.</p>
+<p>And still she waited. She said to herself, "It's no good his
+thinking it. I daren't tell him till he says it. Till he asks me to
+marry him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He had said it at last. And he had asked her to marry him. And
+then she had told him.</p>
+<p>And all that he said was, "I don't care." He said it to Desmond,
+and he said it to himself.</p>
+<p>The funny thing was that he did not care. He was as miserable as
+it was well possible to be, but he didn't really care. He was not
+even surprised. It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in
+the back of his head behind all the ideas.</p>
+<p>And yet he couldn't have known it all the time. Either it must
+have gone away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not
+to see it.</p>
+<p>She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her
+mouth and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief,
+controlling herself, crying quietly.</p>
+<p>She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn't love
+her. If he had loved her he would have cared intolerably. He didn't
+care about Headley Richards because he didn't care about Desmond
+any more. He was only puzzled.</p>
+<p>"Why did you do it?"</p>
+<p>"I can't think why. I must have been off my head. I didn't know
+what it was like. I didn't know. I thought it would be wonderful
+and beautiful. I thought he was wonderful and beautiful."</p>
+<p>"Poor little Desmond."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Nicky, do you think me a beast? Does it make you hate
+me?"</p>
+<p>"No. Of course it doesn't. The only awful thing is--"</p>
+<p>"What? Tell me."</p>
+<p>"Well--you see--"</p>
+<p>"You mean the baby? I know it's awful. You needn't tell me that,
+Nicky."</p>
+<p>He stared at her.</p>
+<p>"I mean it's so awful for <i>it</i>."</p>
+<p>She thought he had been thinking of himself and her.</p>
+<p>"Why should it be?"</p>
+<p>"Why? There isn't any why. It just is. I <i>know</i> it is."</p>
+<p>He was thinking of Veronica.</p>
+<p>"You see," he said simply, "that's why this sort of thing is
+such a rotten game. It's so hard on the kiddy. I suppose you didn't
+think of that. You couldn't have, or else you wouldn't--"</p>
+<p>He paused. There was one thing he had to know. He must get it
+out of her.</p>
+<p>"It hasn't made you feel that you don't want it?"</p>
+<p>"Oh--I don't know what I want--<i>now</i>. I don't know what it
+makes me feel!"</p>
+<p>"Don't let it, Desmond. Don't let it. It'll be all right. You
+won't feel like that when you've married me. Can't you see that
+<i>that's</i> the wonderful and beautiful part?"</p>
+<p>"<i>What</i> is?" she said in her tired drawl.</p>
+<p>"<i>It</i>--the poor kiddy."</p>
+<p>Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry
+Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Veronica's mother was the first to hear about it. Desmond told
+her.</p>
+<p>Veronica's mother was determined to stop it for the sake of
+everybody concerned.</p>
+<p>She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her
+one evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else.
+(Lawrence Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where
+Vera was not received; but sometimes, when the occasion was
+political, or otherwise important, he had to. That was her
+punishment, as Bartholomew had meant that it should be.)</p>
+<p>Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt's
+assaults and manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't do it; you simply mustn't."</p>
+<p>He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.</p>
+<p>"It isn't. It's the affair of everybody who cares for you."</p>
+<p>"Their caring isn't my affair," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.</p>
+<p>"It's absurd of you," she said, "to treat her as if she was an
+innocent child. She isn't a child, and she isn't innocent. She knew
+perfectly well what she was about. There's nothing she doesn't
+know. She meant it to happen, and she made it happen. She said she
+would. She meant you to marry her, and she's making you marry her.
+I daresay she said she would. She's as clever and determined as the
+devil. Neither you nor Headley Richards ever had a chance against
+her."</p>
+<p>"She hasn't got a dog's chance against all you people yelping at
+her now she's down. I should have thought--"</p>
+<p>"You mean <i>I</i>'ve no business to? That was different. I
+didn't take any other woman's husband, or any other woman's lover,
+Nicky."</p>
+<p>"If you had," said Nicky, "I wouldn't have interfered."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't interfere if I thought you cared <i>that</i> for
+Desmond. But you don't. You know you don't."</p>
+<p>"Of course I care for her."</p>
+<p>He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew
+that he was vulnerable.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Nicky dear, if you'd only waited--"</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+<p>His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched. "I
+don't know what I mean. Unless I mean that you're just a little
+young to marry anybody."</p>
+<p>"I don't care if I am. I don't <i>feel</i> young, I can tell
+you. Anyhow Desmond's years younger."</p>
+<p>"Desmond is twenty-three. You're twenty. It's Veronica who's
+years younger."</p>
+<p>"Veronica?"</p>
+<p>"She's sixteen. You don't imagine Desmond is as young as that,
+do you? Wait till she's twenty-five and you're twenty-two."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't do poor Desmond much good if I did. I could kill
+Headley Richards."</p>
+<p>"What for?"</p>
+<p>"For leaving her."</p>
+<p>Vera smiled. "That shows how much you care. You wouldn't have
+felt like killing him if he'd stuck to her. Why should you marry
+Headley Richards' mistress and take on his child? It's
+preposterous."</p>
+<p>"It isn't. If the other fellow's a brute it's all the more
+reason why I shouldn't be. I want to be some use in this rotten
+world where people are so damnably cruel to each other. And there's
+that unhappy kiddy. You've forgotten the kiddy."</p>
+<p>"Do you mean to say it's Desmond's child <i>you</i>'re thinking
+of?"</p>
+<p>"I can't understand any woman not thinking of it," said
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.</p>
+<p>Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.</p>
+<p>"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for
+your own children?"</p>
+<p>It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why
+don't you marry <i>her</i>?"</p>
+<p>"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.</p>
+<p>Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to
+marry Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards.
+"Nothing I said made the least impression on him."</p>
+<p>That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not
+strictly true. But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for
+remembering, she stuck to it that Desmond's affair would have made
+no impression on him if it had not been for that other absurd
+affair of the Professor's wife. And it would have been better,
+Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made love to all the
+married women in Cambridge than for him to marry Phyllis
+Desmond.</p>
+<p>These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence
+of Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the
+University.</p>
+<p>Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not
+been removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of
+apology and restitution came. But both apology and restitution came
+too late.</p>
+<p>For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.</p>
+<p>Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their
+house, one on each side of the fireplace. They had it all to
+themselves, except for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on
+the hearthrug at their feet. Frances's forehead and her upper lip
+were marked delicately with shallow, tender lines; Anthony's eyes
+had crow's-feet at their corners, pointing to grey hairs at his
+temples. To each other their faces were as they had been fifteen
+years ago. The flight of time was measured for them by the
+generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry. For
+still in secret they refused to think of their children as
+grown-up.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the
+Women's Franchise Union. They owed it to her magnanimity that they
+had one child remaining with them in the house. John was at
+Cheltenham; Veronica was in Dresden. Michael was in Germany, too,
+at that School of Forestry at Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant
+for Nicky. They couldn't bear to think where Nicky was.</p>
+<p>When Frances thought about her children now her mind went
+backwards. If only they hadn't grown-up; if only they could have
+stayed little for ever! In another four years even Don-Don would be
+grown-up--Don-Don who was such a long time getting older that at
+fourteen, only two years ago, he had been capable of sitting in her
+lap, a great long-legged, flumbering puppy, while mother and son
+rocked dangerously together in each other's arms, like two
+children, laughing together, mocking each other.</p>
+<p>She was going to be wiser with Don-Don than she had been with
+Nicky. She would be wiser with Michael when he came back from
+Germany. She would keep them both out of the Vortex, the horrible
+Vortex that Lawrence Stephen and Vera had let Nicky in for, the
+Vortex that seized on youth and forced it into a corrupt maturity.
+After Desmond's affair Anthony and Frances felt that to them the
+social circle inhabited by Vera and Lawrence Stephen would never be
+anything but a dirty hell.</p>
+<p>As for Veronica, the longer she stayed in Germany the
+better.</p>
+<p>Yet Frances knew that they had not sent Veronica to Dresden to
+prevent her mother from getting hold of her. When she remembered
+the fear she had had of the apple-tree house, she said to herself
+that Desmond was a judgment on her for sending little Veronica
+away.</p>
+<p>And yet it was the kindest thing they could have done for her.
+Veronica was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and
+studying music and the language. She had no idea that music and the
+language were mere blinds, and that she had been sent to the German
+family to keep her out of Nicky's way.</p>
+<p>They would have them all back again at Christmas. Frances
+counted the days. From to-night, the seventh of June, to December
+the twentieth was not much more than six months.</p>
+<p>To-night, the seventh of June, was Nicky's wedding-night. But
+they did not know that. Nicky had kept the knowledge from them, in
+his mercy, to save them the agony of deciding whether they would
+recognize the marriage or not. And as neither Frances nor Anthony
+had ever faced squarely the prospect of disaster to their children,
+they had turned their backs on Nicky's marriage and supported each
+other in the hope that at the last minute something would happen to
+prevent it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The ten o'clock post, and two letters from Germany. Not from
+Michael, not from Veronica. One from Frau Sch&auml;fer, the mother
+of the German family. It was all in German, and neither Anthony nor
+Frances could make out more than a word here and there. "Das
+s&uuml;sse, liebe M&auml;dchen" meant Veronica. But certain
+phrases: "traurige Nachrichten" ... "furchtbare Schw&auml;chheit"
+... "... eine entsetzliche Blutleere ..." terrified them, and they
+sent for Dorothy to translate.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was a good German scholar, but somehow she was not very
+fluent. She scowled over the letter.</p>
+<p>"What does it mean?" said Frances. "H&aelig;morhage?"</p>
+<p>"No. No. An&aelig;mia. Severe an&aelig;mia. Heart and stomach
+trouble."</p>
+<p>"But 'traurige Nachrichten' is 'bad news.' They're breaking it
+to us that she's dying."</p>
+<p>(It was unbearable to think of Nicky marrying Ronny; but it was
+more unbearable to think of Ronny dying.)</p>
+<p>"They don't say they're sending <i>us</i> bad news; they say
+they think Ronny must have had some. To account for her illness.
+Because they say she's been so happy with them."</p>
+<p>"But what bad news could she have had?"</p>
+<p>"Perhaps she knows about Nicky."</p>
+<p>"But nobody's told her, unless Vera has."</p>
+<p>"She hasn't. I know she hasn't. She didn't want her to
+know."</p>
+<p>"Well, then--"</p>
+<p>"Mummy, you don't <i>have</i> to tell Ronny things. She always
+knows them."</p>
+<p>"How on earth could she know a thing like that?"</p>
+<p>"She might. She sort of sees things--like Ferdie. She may have
+seen him with Desmond. You can't tell."</p>
+<p>"Do they say what the doctor thinks?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. He thinks it's worry and Heimweh--homesickness. They want
+us to send for her and take her back. Not let her have another
+term."</p>
+<p>Though Frances loved Veronica she was afraid of her coming back.
+For she was more than ever convinced that something would happen
+and that Nicky would not marry Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The other letter was even more difficult to translate or to
+understand when translated.</p>
+<p>The authorities at Aschaffenburg requested Herr Harrison to
+remove his son Michael from the School of Forestry. Michael after
+his first few weeks had done no good at the school. In view of the
+expense to Herr Harrison involved in his fees and maintenance, they
+could not honestly advise his entering upon another term. It would
+only be a deplorable throwing away of money on a useless scheme.
+His son Michael had no thoroughness, no practical ability, and no
+grasp whatever of theoretic detail. From Herr Harrison's point of
+view this was the more regrettable inasmuch as the young man had
+colossal decision and persistence and energy of his own. He was an
+indefatigable dreamer. Very likely--when his dreams had
+crystallized--a poet. But the idea Herr Harrison had had that his
+son Michael would make a man of business, or an expert in Forestry,
+was altogether fantastic and absurd. And from the desperate
+involutions of the final sentence Dorothy disentangled the clear
+fact that Michael's personal charm, combined with his hostility to
+discipline, his complete indifference to the aims of the
+authorities, and his utter lack of any sense of responsibility,
+made him a dangerous influence in any school.</p>
+<p>That was the end of Anthony's plans for Michael.</p>
+<p>The next morning Nicky wired from some village in Sussex:
+"Married yesterday.--NICKY."</p>
+<p>After that nothing seemed to matter. With Nicky gone from them
+they were glad to have Michael back again. Frances said they might
+be thankful for one thing--that there wasn't any German Peggy or
+any German Desmond in Michael's problem.</p>
+<p>And since both Michael and Veronica were to be removed at once,
+the simplest arrangement was that he should return to Dresden and
+bring her back with him.</p>
+<p>Frances had never been afraid for Michael.</p>
+<p>Michael knew that he had made havoc of his father's plans. He
+couldn't help that. His affair was far too desperate. And any other
+man but his father would have foreseen that the havoc was
+inevitable and would have made no plans. He knew he had been turned
+into the tree-travelling scheme that had been meant for Nicky,
+because, though Nicky had slipped out of it, his father simply
+couldn't bear to give up his idea. And no wonder, when the dear old
+thing had so few of them.</p>
+<p>He had been honest with his father about it; every bit as honest
+as Nicky had been. He had wanted to travel if he could go to China
+and Japan, just as Nicky had wanted to travel if he could go to
+places like the West Indies and the Himalaya. And he didn't mind
+trying to get the trees in when he was there. He was even prepared
+to accept Germany and the School for Forestry if Germany was the
+only way to China and Japan. But he had told his father not to mind
+if nothing came of it at the end of all the travelling. And his
+father had said he would take the risk. He preferred taking the
+risk to giving up his idea.</p>
+<p>And Michael had been honest with himself. He had told himself
+that he too must take some risks, and the chances were that a year
+or two in Germany wouldn't really hurt him. Things never did hurt
+you as much as you thought they would. He had thought that
+Cambridge would do all sorts of things to him, and Cambridge had
+not done anything to him at all. As for Oxford, it had given him
+nearly all the solitude and liberty he wanted, and more
+companionship than he was ever likely to want. At twenty-two
+Michael was no longer afraid of dying before he had finished his
+best work. In spite of both Universities he had done more or less
+what he had meant to do before he went to Germany. His work had not
+yet stood the test of time, but to make up for that he himself, in
+his uneasy passion for perfection, like Time, destroyed almost as
+much as he created. Still, after some pitiless eliminations, enough
+of his verse remained for one fine, thin book.</p>
+<p>It would be published if Lawrence Stephen approved of the
+selection.</p>
+<p>So, Michael argued, even if he died to-morrow there was no
+reason why he should not go to Germany to-day.</p>
+<p>He was too young to know that he acquiesced so calmly because
+his soul was for a moment appeased by accomplishment.</p>
+<p>He was too young to know that his soul had a delicate, profound
+and hidden life of its own, and that in secret it approached the
+crisis of transition. It was passing over from youth to maturity,
+like a sleep-walker, unconscious, enchanted, seeing its way without
+seeing it, safe only from the dangers of the passage if nobody
+touched it, and if it went alone.</p>
+<p>Michael had no idea of what Germany could and would do to his
+soul.</p>
+<p>Otherwise he might have listened to what Paris had to say by way
+of warning.</p>
+<p>For his father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to
+Germany, as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's
+point of view) was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old
+Pater be expected to know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no
+sort of way even to South Germany? He should have gone to Brussels,
+if he was ever, spiritually speaking, to get there at all.</p>
+<p>And neither Anthony nor Frances knew that Lawrence Stephen had
+plans for Michael.</p>
+<p>Michael went to Paris with his unpublished poems in his pocket
+and a letter of introduction from Stephen to Jules
+R&eacute;veillaud. He left it with revolution in his soul and the
+published poems of R&eacute;veillaud and his followers in his
+suit-case, straining and distending it so that it burst open of its
+own accord at the frontier.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen had said to him: "Before you write another line
+read R&eacute;veillaud and show him what you've written."</p>
+<p>Jules R&eacute;veillaud was ten years older than Michael, and he
+recognized the symptoms of the crisis. He could see what was
+happening and what had happened and would happen in Michael's soul.
+He said: "One third of each of your poems is good. And there are a
+few--the three last--which are all good."</p>
+<p>"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."</p>
+<p>"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is
+why they are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do
+not publish these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more
+experiments. And whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School
+of Forestry would be very bad for you. Why not," said
+R&eacute;veillaud, "stay where you are?"</p>
+<p>Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris
+with Jules R&eacute;veillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because
+his conscience kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a
+blackguard if he stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.</p>
+<p>In the train, going into Germany, he read R&eacute;veillaud's
+"Po&egrave;mes" and the "Po&egrave;mes" of the young men who
+followed him. He had read in Paris R&eacute;veillaud's "Critique de
+la Po&eacute;sie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he read his poems,
+he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with "la
+po&eacute;sie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had
+supposed, alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms,
+doing new things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other
+people, in a world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen,
+understood or cared for what he did, it was pure illusion. These
+young Frenchmen, with Jules R&eacute;veillaud at their head, were
+doing the same thing, making the same experiment, believing in the
+experiment, caring for nothing but the experiment, and carrying it
+farther than he had dreamed of carrying it. They were not so far
+ahead of him in time; R&eacute;veillaud himself had only two years'
+start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that he
+must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of
+rottenness, "la po&eacute;sie anglaise contemporaine."</p>
+<p>He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse"
+before he left England, after he had said he would go to Germany,
+even after the final arrangements had been made. His father had
+given him a month to "turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had
+turned completely round.</p>
+<p>He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what
+to think of them himself. But he could see, when once
+R&eacute;veillaud had pointed it out to him, that they were the
+stuff that counted.</p>
+<p>In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things
+that R&eacute;veillaud had said: "Nous avons tremp&eacute; la
+po&eacute;sie dans la peinture et la musique. Il faut la
+d&eacute;livrer par la sculpture. Chaque ligne, chaque vers, chaque
+po&egrave;me taill&eacute; en bloc, sans couleur, sans decor, sans
+rime."... "La sainte pauvresse du style
+d&eacute;pouill&eacute;."... "Il faut de la duret&eacute;, toujours
+de la duret&eacute;."</p>
+<p>He thought of R&eacute;veillaud's criticism, and his sudden
+startled spurt of admiration: "Mais! Vous l'avez trouv&eacute;e, la
+beaut&eacute; de la ligne droite."</p>
+<p>And R&eacute;veillaud's question: "Vraiment? Vous n'avez jamais
+lu un seul vers de mes po&egrave;mes? Alors, c'est
+&eacute;tonnant." And then: "C'est que la r&eacute;alit&eacute; est
+plus forte que nous."</p>
+<p>The revolting irony of it! After stumbling and fumbling for
+years by himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard
+Reality; trying not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary
+rottenness; and, suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had
+got it, so that, but for R&eacute;veillaud, he might easily have
+died in his ignorance; and then, in the incredible moment of
+realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on Paris, where he
+wanted to live, and on R&eacute;veillaud whom he wanted to know,
+and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off
+to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.</p>
+<p>He wondered if he could have done it if he had not loved his
+father? He wondered if his father would ever understand that it was
+the hardest thing he had ever yet done or could do?</p>
+<p>But the trees would be beautiful. He would rather like seeing
+the trees.</p>
+<p>Trees--</p>
+<p>He wondered whether he would ever care about a tree again.</p>
+<p>Trees--</p>
+<p>He wondered whether he would ever see a tree again, ever smell
+tree-sap, or hear the wind sounding in the ash-trees like a river
+and in the firs like a sea.</p>
+<p>Trees--</p>
+<p>He wondered whether any tree would ever come to life for him
+again.</p>
+<p>He looked on at the tree-felling. He saw slaughtered trees,
+trees that tottered, trees that staggered in each other's branches.
+He heard the scream and the shriek of wounded boughs, the creaking
+and crashing of the trunk, and the long hiss of branches falling,
+trailing through branches to the ground. He smelt the raw juice of
+broken leaves and the sharp tree dust in the saw pits. The trees
+died horrible deaths, in the forests under the axes of the woodmen,
+and in the schools under the tongues of the Professors, and in
+Michael's soul. The German Government was determined that he should
+know all about trees. Its officials, the Professors and
+instructors, were sorry if he didn't like it, but they were ordered
+by their Government and paid by their Government to impart this
+information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to
+his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they
+imparted it with all their might.</p>
+<p>Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg. Instead of
+despising him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a
+tree expert, they admired and respected him because he was a poet.
+The family he lived with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his
+fellow-boarders, Carl and Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel,
+and Hedwig and L&ouml;ttchen admired and respected him because he
+was a poet. When he walked with Ludwig in the great forests Michael
+chanted his poems, both in English and in German, till Ludwig's
+soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow, so that Ludwig
+actually shed tears in the forest. He said that if he had not done
+so he would have burst. Ludwig's emotions had nothing whatever to
+do with the forest or with Michael's poems, but he thought they
+had.</p>
+<p>Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was
+to show an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished
+his incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some
+superofficial wrote a letter to his father that gave him his
+liberty.</p>
+<p>The Henschels were sorry when he left. The students, Otto and
+Carl and Ludwig, implored him not to forget them. Hedwig and
+L&ouml;ttchen cried.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by
+Dresden to bring Veronica back. He wanted to be alone on the
+journey. He wanted to stop in Paris and see Jules
+R&eacute;veillaud. He was afraid that Ronny had grown into a
+tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.</p>
+<p>And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had
+grown up. Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker
+plait tied up with broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not
+yet seventeen.</p>
+<p>Ronny was tired. She did not want to talk. When he had tucked
+her up with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat
+still with her hands in her muff.</p>
+<p>"I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael," she said.</p>
+<p>She knew what he had been thinking. Her clear eyes gazed at him
+out of her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual
+maturity.</p>
+<p>"What can have happened to her?" he wondered.</p>
+<p>But she did not disturb his thoughts.</p>
+<p>Up till then Michael's thoughts had not done him any good. They
+had been bitter thoughts of the months he had been compelled to
+waste in Bavaria when every minute had an incomparable value;
+worrying, irritating thoughts of the scenes he would have to have
+with his father, who must be made to understand, once for all, that
+in future he meant to have every minute of his own life for his own
+work. He wondered how on earth he was to make his people see that
+his work justified his giving every minute to it. He had asked
+R&eacute;veillaud to give him a letter that he could show to his
+father. He was angry with his father beforehand, he was so certain
+that he wouldn't see.</p>
+<p>He had other thoughts now. Thoughts of an almond tree flowering
+in a white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting
+a thin shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the
+sting of white dust in an east wind; a drift of white dust against
+the wall.</p>
+<p>Thoughts of pine-trees falling in the forest, glad to fall. He
+thought: The pine forest makes itself a sea for the land wind, and
+the young pine tree is mad for the open sea. She gives her slender
+trunk with passion to the ax; for she thinks that she will be
+stripped naked, and that she will be planted in the ship's hold,
+and that she will carry the great main-sail. She thinks that she
+will rock and strain in the grip of the sea-wind, and that she will
+be whitened with the salt and the foam of the sea.</p>
+<p>She does not know that she will be sawn into planks and made
+into a coffin for the wife of the sexton and grave-digger of
+Aschaffenburg.</p>
+<p>Thoughts of Veronica in her incredible maturity, and of her
+eyes, shining in her dead white face, far back through deep
+crystal, and of the sense he got of her soul poised, steady and
+still, with wings vibrating.</p>
+<p>He wondered where it would come down.</p>
+<p>He thought: "Of course, Veronica's soul will come down like a
+wild pigeon into the ash-tree in our garden, and she will think
+that our ash-tree is a tree of Heaven."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Presently he roused himself to talk to her.</p>
+<p>"How is your singing getting on, Ronny?"</p>
+<p>"My singing voice has gone."</p>
+<p>"It'll come back again."</p>
+<p>"Not unless-"</p>
+<p>But he couldn't make her tell him what would bring it back.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>When Michael came to his father and mother to have it out with
+them his face had a hard, stubborn look. He was ready to fight
+them. He was so certain that he would have to fight. He had shown
+them Jules R&eacute;veillaud's letter.</p>
+<p>He said, "Look here, we've got to get it straight. It isn't any
+use going on like this. I'm afraid I wasn't very honest about
+Germany."</p>
+<p>"Weren't you?" said Anthony. "Let me see, I think you said you'd
+take it on your way to China and Japan."</p>
+<p>"Did I? I tried to be straight about it. I thought I was giving
+it a fair chance. But that was before I'd seen
+R&eacute;veillaud."</p>
+<p>"Well," said Anthony, "now that you have seen him, what is it
+exactly that you want to do?"</p>
+<p>Michael told him.</p>
+<p>"You can make it easy for me. Or you can make it hard. But you
+can't stop me."</p>
+<p>"What makes you think I want to stop you?"</p>
+<p>"Well--you want me to go into the business, though I told you
+years ago there was only one thing I should ever be any good at.
+And I see your point. I can't earn my living at it. That's where
+I'm had. Still, I think Lawrence Stephen will give me work, and I
+can rub along somehow."</p>
+<p>"Without my help, you mean?"</p>
+<p>"Well, yes. Why <i>should</i> you help me? You've wasted tons of
+money on me as it is. Nicky's earning his own living, and he's got
+a wife, too. Why not me?"</p>
+<p>"Because you can't do it, Michael."</p>
+<p>"I can. I don't mind roughing it. I could live on a hundred a
+year--or less, if I don't marry."</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't mean you to try. You needn't bother about what
+you can live on and what you can't live on. It was all settled last
+night. Your mother and I talked it over. We don't want you to go
+into the business. We don't want you to take work from Mr. Stephen.
+We want you to be absolutely free to do your own work, under the
+best possible conditions, whether it pays or not. Nothing in the
+world matters to us but your happiness. You're to have a hundred
+and fifty a year when you're living at home and two hundred and
+fifty when you're living abroad. I suppose you'll want to go abroad
+sometimes. I can't give you a bigger allowance, because I have to
+help Nicky--"</p>
+<p>Michael covered his face with his hands.</p>
+<p>"Oh--don't, Daddy. You do make me feel a rotten beast."</p>
+<p>"We should feel rottener beasts," said Frances, "if we stood in
+your way."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Michael (he was still incredulous), "you do
+care?"</p>
+<p>"Of course we care," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>"I don't mean for me--for <i>it</i>?"</p>
+<p>"My dear Mick," said Frances, "we care for It almost as much as
+we care for you. We're sorry about Germany though. Germany was one
+of your father's bad jokes."</p>
+<p>"Germany--a joke?"</p>
+<p>"Did you take it seriously? Oh, you silly Michael!"</p>
+<p>"But," said Michael, "how about Daddy's idea? He loved it."</p>
+<p>"I loved it," said Anthony, "but I've given it up."</p>
+<p>They knew that this was defeat, for Michael was top-dog. And it
+was also victory.</p>
+<p>They had lost Nicholas, or thought they had lost Nicholas, by
+opposing him. But Michael and Michael's affection they would have
+always.</p>
+<p>Besides, Anthony hadn't given up his idea. He had only
+transferred it--to his youngest son, John.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was five weeks since Nicholas's wedding-day and Desmond had
+quarrelled with him three times.</p>
+<p>First, because he had taken a flat in Aubrey Walk, with a studio
+inside it, instead of a house in Campden Hill Square with a studio
+outside it in the garden.</p>
+<p>Then, because he had refused to go into his father's
+business.</p>
+<p>Last of all, because of Captain Drayton and the Moving
+Fortress.</p>
+<p>Nicky had said that his father, who was paying his rent,
+couldn't afford the house with the studio in the garden; and
+Desmond said Nicky's father could afford it perfectly well if he
+liked. He said he had refused to go into his father's business for
+reasons which didn't concern her. Desmond pointed out that the
+consequences of his refusal were likely to concern her very much
+indeed. As for Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress, nobody but
+a supreme idiot would have done what Nicky did.</p>
+<p>But Nicky absolutely refused to discuss what he had done. Nobody
+but a cad and a rotter would have done anything else.</p>
+<p>In the matter of the Moving Fortress what had happened was
+this.</p>
+<p>The last of the drawings was not finished until Desmond had
+settled down in the flat in Aubrey Walk. You couldn't hurry
+Desmond. Nicky hadn't even waited to sign his name in the margins
+before he had packed the plans in his dispatch box and taken them
+to the works, and thence, hidden under a pile of Morss estimates,
+to Eltham. He couldn't rest till he had shown them to Frank
+Drayton. He could hardly wait till they had dined, and till
+Drayton, who thought he was on the track of a new and horrible
+explosive, had told him as much as he could about it.</p>
+<p>Nicky gave his whole mind to Drayton's new explosive in the hope
+that, when his turn came, Drayton would do as much for him.</p>
+<p>"You know," he said at last, "the old idea of the <i>forteresse
+mobile</i>?</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>He couldn't tell whether Drayton was going to be interested or
+not. He rather thought he wasn't.</p>
+<p>"It hasn't come to anything, <i>has</i> it?"</p>
+<p>Drayton smiled and his eyes glittered. He knew what that excited
+gleam in Drayton's eyes meant.</p>
+<p>"No," he said. "Not yet."</p>
+<p>And Nicky had an awful premonition of his doom.</p>
+<p>"Well," he said, "I believe there's something in it."</p>
+<p>"So do I, Nicky."</p>
+<p>Drayton went on. "I believe there's so much in it that--Look
+here, I don't know what put it into your head, and I'm not asking,
+but that idea's a dead secret. For God's sake don't talk about it.
+You mustn't breathe it, or it'll get into the air. And if it does
+my five years' work goes for nothing. Besides we don't want Germany
+to collar it."</p>
+<p>And then: "Don't look so scared, old chap. I was going to tell
+you about it when I'd got the plans drawn."</p>
+<p>He told him about it then and there.</p>
+<p>"Low on the ground like a racing-car--"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Revolving turret for the guns--no higher than
+<i>that</i>--"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Sort of armoured train. Only it mustn't run on rails. It's got
+to go everywhere, through anything, over anything, if it goes at
+all. It must turn in its own length. It must wade and burrow and
+climb, Nicky. It must have caterpillar wheels--"</p>
+<p>"By Jove, of course it must," said Nicky, as if the idea had
+struck him for the first time.</p>
+<p>"What have you got there?" said Drayton finally as Nicky rose
+and picked up his dispatch-box. "Anything interesting?</p>
+<p>"No," said Nicky. "Mostly estimates."</p>
+<p>For a long time afterwards he loathed the fields between Eltham
+and Kidbrooke, and the Mid-Kent line, and Charing Cross Station. He
+felt as a man feels when the woman he loves goes from him to
+another man. His idea had gone from him to Drayton.</p>
+<p>And that, he said to himself, was just like his luck, just like
+the jolly sells that happened to him when he was a kid.</p>
+<p>To be sure, there was such a thing as sharing. He had only to
+produce his plans and his finished model, and he and Drayton would
+go partners in the Moving Fortress. There was no reason why he
+shouldn't do it. Drayton had not even drawn his plans yet; he
+hadn't thought out the mechanical details.</p>
+<p>He thought, "I could go back now and tell him."</p>
+<p>But he did not go back. He knew that he would never tell him. If
+Drayton asked him to help him with the details he would work them
+out all over again with him; but he would never show his own
+finished plans or his own model.</p>
+<p>He didn't know whether it had been hard or easy for him to give
+up the Moving Fortress. He did it instinctively. There was--unless
+he had chosen to be a blackguard--nothing else for him to do.</p>
+<p>Besides, the Moving Fortress wasn't his idea. Drayton had had it
+first. Anybody might have had it. He hadn't spoken of it first; but
+that was nothing. The point was that he had had it first, and Nicky
+wasn't going to take it from him.</p>
+<p>It meant more to Drayton, who was in the Service, than it could
+possibly mean to him. He hadn't even got a profession.</p>
+<p>As he walked back through the fields to the station, he said to
+himself that he didn't really care. It was only one more jolly
+sell. He didn't like giving up his Moving Fortress; but it wouldn't
+end him. There was something in him that would go on.</p>
+<p>He would make another engine.</p>
+<p>He didn't care. There was something in him that would go on.</p>
+<p>"I can't see," Desmond had said, "why Captain Drayton should be
+allowed to walk off with your idea."</p>
+<p>"He's worked five years on it."</p>
+<p>"He hasn't worked it <i>out</i> yet, and you have. Can't you see
+"--her face was dark and hard with anger--"there's money in
+it?"</p>
+<p>"If there is, all the more reason why I shouldn't bag it."</p>
+<p>"And where do I come in?"</p>
+<p>"Not just here, I'm afraid. It isn't your business."</p>
+<p>"Not my business? When I did the drawings? You couldn't possibly
+have done them yourself."</p>
+<p>At that point Nicky refused to discuss the matter farther.</p>
+<p>And still Desmond brooded on her grievance. And still at
+intervals Desmond brought it up again.</p>
+<p>"There's stacks of money in your father's business--"</p>
+<p>"There's stacks of money in that Moving Fortress--"</p>
+<p>"You are a fool, Nicky, to throw it all away."</p>
+<p>He never answered her. He said to himself that Desmond was
+hysterical and had a morbid fancy.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>But it didn't end there.</p>
+<p>He had taken the drawings and the box that had the model of the
+Moving Fortress in it and buried them in the locker under the big
+north window in Desmond's studio.</p>
+<p>And there, three weeks later, Desmond found them. And she packed
+the model of the Moving Fortress and marked it "Urgent with Care,"
+and sent it to the War Office with a letter. She packed the
+drawings in a portfolio--having signed her own and Nicky's name on
+the margins--and sent them to Captain Drayton with a letter. She
+said she had no doubt she was doing an immoral thing; but she did
+it in fairness to Captain Drayton, for she was sure he would not
+like Nicky to make so great a sacrifice. Nicky, she said, was
+wrapped up in his Moving Fortress. It was his sweetheart, his baby.
+"He will never forgive me," she said, "as long as he lives. But I
+simply had to let you know. It means so much to him."</p>
+<p>For she thought, "Because Nicky's a fool, I needn't be one."</p>
+<p>Drayton came over the same evening after he had got the letter.
+He shouted with laughter.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," he said, "you filthy rotter, why on earth didn't you
+tell me?... It <i>was</i> Nickyish of you.... What if I did think
+of it first? I should have had to come to you for the details. It
+would have been jolly to have worked it out together.... Not a bit
+of it! Your wife's absolutely right. Good thing, after all, you
+married her.</p>
+<p>"By the way, she says there's a model. I want to see that model.
+Have you got it here?"</p>
+<p>Nicky went up into the studio to look for it. He couldn't find
+it in the locker where he'd left it. "Wherever is the damned
+thing?" he said.</p>
+<p>"The damned thing," said Desmond, "is where you should have sent
+it first of all--at the War Office. You're clever, Nicky, but you
+aren't quite clever enough."</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid," he said, "<i>you've</i> been a bit too clever,
+this time."</p>
+<p>Drayton agreed with him. It was, he said, about the worst thing
+that could possibly have happened.</p>
+<p>"She shouldn't have done that, Nicky. What on earth could have
+made her do it?"</p>
+<p>"Don't ask me," said Nicky, "what makes her do things."</p>
+<p>"It looks," Drayton meditated, "as if she didn't trust me. I'm
+afraid she's dished us. God knows whether we can ever get it
+back!"</p>
+<p>Desmond had a fit of hysterics when she realized how clever she
+had been.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Desmond's baby was born late in November of that year, and it
+died when it was two weeks old. It was as if she had not wanted it
+enough to give it life for long outside her body.</p>
+<p>For though Desmond had been determined to have a child, and had
+declared that she had a perfect right to have one if she chose, she
+did not care for it when it came. And when it died Nicky was
+sorrier than Desmond.</p>
+<p>He had not wanted to be a father to Headley Richards' child. And
+yet it was the baby and nothing but the baby that had let him in
+for marrying Desmond. So that, when it died, he felt that somehow
+things had tricked and sold him. As they had turned out he need not
+have married Desmond after all.</p>
+<p>She herself had pointed out the extreme futility of his
+behaviour, lest he should miss the peculiar irony of it. For when
+her fright and the cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented
+Nicky's having married her. She didn't really want anybody to marry
+her, and nobody but Nicky would have dreamed of doing it.</p>
+<p>She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and
+for a little while after she was content to lie stretched out among
+her cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her. But,
+when she got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that
+Desmond's weakness and pathos had come with the baby and had gone
+with it. The real Desmond was not weak, she was not pathetic. She
+was strong and hard and clever with a brutal cleverness. She didn't
+care how much he saw. He could see to the bottom of her nature, if
+he liked, and feel how hard it was. She had no more interest in
+deceiving him.</p>
+<p>She had no more interest in him at all.</p>
+<p>She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long
+fits, after long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard,
+passionless efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous
+and repulsive; but he did not say so. He was not aware of the
+extent to which Desmond imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones. He
+knew nothing about painting and he had got used to the things. He
+had got used to Desmond, slouching about the flat, in her sloping,
+slovenly grace, dressed in her queer square jacket and straight
+short skirt, showing her long delicate ankles, and her slender feet
+in their grey stockings and black slippers.</p>
+<p>He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched
+up on her cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a
+word, and watched him sullenly. Her long, slippered feet, thrust
+out, pointed at him, watching. Her long face watched him between
+the sleek bands of hair and the big black bosses plaited over her
+ears.</p>
+<p>The beauty of Desmond's face had gone to sleep again, stilled
+into hardness by the passing of her passion. A sort of ugliness was
+awake there, and it watched him.</p>
+<p>In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted
+with two-thirds of her power. Yet the third part still served to
+hold him, used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy. He
+resented it, resisted it over and over again; and over and over
+again it conquered resentment and resistance. It had something to
+do with her subtle, sloping lines, with her blackness and her
+sallow whiteness, with the delicate scent and the smoothness of her
+skin under the sliding hand. He couldn't touch her without still
+feeling a sort of pity, a sort of affection.</p>
+<p>But she could take and give caresses while she removed her soul
+from him in stubborn rancour.</p>
+<p>He couldn't understand that. It amazed him every time. He
+thought it horrible. For Nicky's memory was faithful. It still kept
+the impression of the Desmond he had married, the tender,
+frightened, helpless Desmond he had thought he loved. The Desmond
+he remembered reminded him of Veronica.</p>
+<p>And Desmond said to herself, "He's impossible. You can't make
+any impression on him. I might as well be married to a Moving
+Fortress."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Months passed. The War Office had not yet given up Nicky's model
+of the Moving Fortress. In the first month it was not aware of any
+letter or of any parcel or of any Mr. Nicholas Harrison. In the
+second month inquiries would be made and the results communicated
+to Captain Drayton. In the third month the War Office knew nothing
+of the matter referred to by Captain Drayton.</p>
+<p>Drayton hadn't a hope. "We can't get it back, Nicky," he
+said.</p>
+<p>"I can," said Nicky, "I can get it back out of my head."</p>
+<p>All through the winter of nineteen-eleven and the spring of
+nineteen-twelve they worked at it together. They owned that they
+were thus getting better results than either of them could have got
+alone. There were impossibilities about Nicky's model that a gunner
+would have seen at once, and there were faults in Drayton's plans
+that an engineer would not have made. Nicky couldn't draw the plans
+and Drayton couldn't build the models. They said it was fifty times
+better fun to work at it together.</p>
+<p>Nicky was happy.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Desmond watched them sombrely. She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the
+painter, laughed at them behind their backs. She said "How funny
+they are! Frank wouldn't hurt a fly and Nicky wouldn't say 'Bo!' to
+a goose if he thought it would frighten the goose, and yet they're
+only happy when they're inventing some horrible machine that'll
+kill thousands of people who never did them any harm." He said,
+"That's because they haven't any imagination."</p>
+<p>Nicky got up early and went to bed late to work at the Moving
+Fortress. The time between had to be given to the Works. The
+Company had paid him fairly well for all his patents in the hope of
+getting more of his ideas, and when they found that no ideas were
+forthcoming they took it out of him in labour. He was too busy and
+too happy to notice what Desmond was doing.</p>
+<p>One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is
+going about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?"</p>
+<p>"Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?"</p>
+<p>"Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason."</p>
+<p>"You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?"</p>
+<p>"You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond."</p>
+<p>"What do you think I ought to do about it?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing. She goes about with scores of people. It doesn't
+follow that there's anything in it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord, I should hope not! That beastly bounder. What
+<i>could</i> there be in it?"</p>
+<p>"He's a clever painter, Nicky. So's Desmond. There's that in
+it."</p>
+<p>"I've hardly a right to object to that, have I? It's not as if I
+were a clever painter myself."</p>
+<p>But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St.
+John's Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down
+the north side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the
+thing to shreds.</p>
+<p>There couldn't be anything in it.</p>
+<p>He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall
+lean body in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing
+tie. He could see his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric
+face with its seven fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the
+black moustache, the high, close-clipped side whiskers, the two
+forks of the black beard.</p>
+<p>There couldn't be anything in it.</p>
+<p>Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.</p>
+<p>And yet he never came home rather later than usual without
+saying to himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with
+her?"</p>
+<p>He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask
+himself that question.</p>
+<p>He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He
+wondered what other men did. It never occurred to him that at
+twenty-two he was young to be considering this problem.</p>
+<p>He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than
+Orde-Jones's face and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy
+to Orde-Jones's face and figure. He saw himself assaulting
+Orde-Jones with violence, dragging him out of Desmond's studio, and
+throwing him downstairs. He wondered what shapes that body and
+those legs and arms would take when they got to the bottom. Perhaps
+they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He would hang on to
+the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door of the studio
+and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there would be
+nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look an
+awful ass doing it. He saw himself standing in the room and looking
+at them, and saying, "I've no intention of interrupting you."
+Perhaps Desmond would answer, "You're not interrupting us. We've
+finished all we had to say." And <i>he</i> would walk out and leave
+them there. Not caring.</p>
+<p>He wondered if <i>he</i> would look an awful ass doing it.</p>
+<p>In the end, when it came, he hadn't to do any of these things.
+It happened very quietly and simply, early on a Sunday evening
+after he had got back from Eltham. He had dined with Drayton and
+his people on Saturday, and stayed, for once, over-night, risking
+it.</p>
+<p>Desmond was sitting on a cushion, on the floor, with her thin
+legs in their grey stockings slanting out in front of her. She
+propped her chin on her hands. Her thin, long face, between the
+great black ear-bosses, looked at him thoughtfully, without
+rancour.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said, "Alfred Orde-Jones slept with me last
+night."</p>
+<p>And he said, simply and quietly, "Very well, Desmond; then I
+shall leave you. You can keep the flat, and I or my father will
+make you an allowance. I shan't divorce you, but I won't live with
+you."</p>
+<p>"Why won't you divorce me?" she said.</p>
+<p>"Because I don't want to drag you through the dirt."</p>
+<p>She laughed quietly. "Dear Nicky," she said, "how sweet and like
+you. But don't let's have any more chivalrous idiocy. I don't want
+it. I never did." (She had forgotten that she had wanted it very
+badly once. But Nicky did not remind her of that time. No matter.
+She didn't want it now). "Let's look at the thing sensibly, without
+any rotten sentiment. We've had some good times together, and we've
+had some bad times. I'll admit that when you married me you saved
+me from a very bad time. That's no reason why we should go on
+giving each other worse times indefinitely. You seem to think I
+don't want you to divorce me. What else do you imagine Alfred came
+for last night? Why we've been trying for it for the last three
+months.</p>
+<p>"Of course, if you'll let <i>me</i> divorce <i>you</i> for
+desertion, it would be very nice of you. That," said Desmond, "is
+what decent people do."</p>
+<p>He went out and telephoned to his father. Then he left her and
+went back to his father's house.</p>
+<p>Desmond asked the servant to remember particularly that it was
+the fifteenth of June and that the master was going away and would
+not come back again.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>As Nicky walked up the hill and across the Heath, he wondered
+why it had happened, and why, now that it had happened, he cared so
+little. He could have understood it if he hadn't cared at all for
+Desmond. But he had cared in a sort of way. If she had cared at all
+for him he thought they might have made something of it, something
+enduring, perhaps, if they had had children of their own.</p>
+<p>He still couldn't think why it had happened. But he knew that,
+even if he had loved Desmond with passion, it wouldn't have been
+the end of him. The part of him that didn't care, that hadn't cared
+much when he lost his Moving Fortress, was the part that Desmond
+never would have cared for.</p>
+<p>He didn't know whether it was outside him and beyond him, bigger
+and stronger than he was, or whether it was deep inside, the most
+real part of him. Whatever happened or didn't happen it would go
+on.</p>
+<p>How could he have ended <i>here</i>, with poor little Desmond?
+There was something ahead of him, something that he felt to be
+tremendous and holy. He had always known it waited for him. He was
+going out to meet it; and because of it he didn't care.</p>
+<p>And after a year of Desmond he was glad to go back to his
+father's house; even though he knew that the thing that waited for
+him was not there.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony were happy again. After all, Heaven had
+manipulated their happiness with exquisite art and wisdom, letting
+Michael and Nicholas go from them for a little while that they
+might have them again more completely, and teaching them the art
+and wisdom that would keep them.</p>
+<p>Some day the children would marry; even Nicky might marry again.
+They would prepare now, by small daily self-denials, for the big
+renunciation that must come.</p>
+<p>Yet in secret they thought that Michael would never marry; that
+Nicky, made prudent by disaster, wasn't really likely to marry
+again. John would marry; and they would be happy in John's
+happiness and in John's children.</p>
+<p>And Nicky had not been home before he offered to his parents the
+spectacle of an outrageous gaiety. You would have said that life to
+Nicholas was an amusing game where you might win or lose, but
+either way it didn't matter. It was a rag, a sell. Even the
+preceedings, the involved and ridiculous proceedings of his
+divorce, amused him.</p>
+<p>It was undeniably funny that he should be supposed to have
+deserted Desmond.</p>
+<p>Frances wondered, again, whether Nicky really had any feelings,
+and whether things really made any impression on him.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was a quarter past five on a fine morning, early in July. On
+the stroke of the quarter Captain Frank Drayton's motor-car, after
+exceeding the speed limit along the forlorn highway of the
+Caledonian Road, drew up outside the main entrance of Holloway
+Gaol. Captain Frank Drayton was alone in his motor-car.</p>
+<p>He had the street all to himself till twenty past five, when he
+was joined by another motorist, also conspicuously alone in his
+car. Drayton tried hard to look as if the other man were not
+there.</p>
+<p>The other man tried even harder to look as if he were not there
+himself. He was the first to be aware of the absurdity of their
+competitive pretences. He looked at his watch and spoke.</p>
+<p>"I hope they'll be punctual with those doors. I was up at four
+o'clock."</p>
+<p>"I," said Drayton, "was up at three."</p>
+<p>"I'm waiting for my wife," said the other man.</p>
+<p>"I am <i>not</i>," said Drayton, and felt that he had
+scored.</p>
+<p>The other man's smile allowed him the point he made.</p>
+<p>"Yes, but my wife happens to be Lady Victoria Threlfall."</p>
+<p>The other man laughed as if he had made by far the better
+joke.</p>
+<p>Drayton recognized Mr. Augustin Threlfall, that Cabinet Minister
+made notorious by his encounters with the Women's Franchise Union.
+Last year Miss Maud Blackadder had stalked him in the Green Park
+and lamed him by a blow from her hunting-crop. This year his wife,
+Lady Victoria Threlfall, had headed the June raid on the House of
+Commons.</p>
+<p>And here he was at twenty minutes past five in the morning
+waiting to take her out of prison.</p>
+<p>And here was Drayton, waiting for Dorothea, who was not his wife
+yet.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow," said the Cabinet Minister, "we've done them out of
+their Procession."</p>
+<p>"What Procession?"</p>
+<p>All that Drayton knew about it was that, late last night, a
+friend he had in the Home Office had telephoned to him that the
+hour of Miss Dorothea Harrison's release would be five-thirty, not
+six-thirty as the papers had it.</p>
+<p>"The Procession," said the Cabinet Minister, "that was to have
+met 'em at six-thirty. A Car of Victory for Mrs. Blathwaite, and a
+bodyguard of thirteen young women on thirteen white horses. The
+girl who smashed my knee-cap is to be Joan of Arc and ride at the
+head of 'em. In armour. Fact. There's to be a banquet for 'em at
+the Imperial at nine. We can't stop <i>that</i>. And they'll
+process down the Embankment and down Pall Mall and Piccadilly at
+eleven; but they won't process here. We've let 'em out an hour too
+soon."</p>
+<p>A policeman came from the prison-yard. He blew a whistle. Four
+taxi-cabs crept round the corner furtively, driven by visibly
+hilarious chauffeurs.</p>
+<p>"The triumphant procession from Holloway," said the Cabinet
+Minister, "is you and me, sir, and those taxi-cabs."</p>
+<p>On the other side of the gates a woman laughed. The released
+prisoners were coming down the prison-yard.</p>
+<p>The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous
+glee. He was boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had
+done them out of the Car of Victory and the thirteen white
+horses.</p>
+<p>The prison-gates opened. The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised
+their caps.</p>
+<p>The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete came first. Then Lady Victoria Threlfall. Then
+Dorothea. Then sixteen other women.</p>
+<p>Drayton did not look at them. He did not see what happened when
+the Cabinet Minister met his wife. He did not see the sixteen other
+women. He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.</p>
+<p>She had no hat on. Her clothes were as the great raid had left
+them, a month ago. Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket,
+the three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining. Another
+three-cornered flap hung from her right knee. She carried her
+small, hawk-like head alert and high. Her face had the incomparable
+bloom of youth. Her eyes shone. They and her face showed no memory
+of the prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they
+showed no sense of Drayton's decency in coming to meet her, no
+sense of anything at all but of the queerness, the greatness and
+the glory of the world--of him, perhaps, as a part of it. She
+stepped into the car as if they had met by appointment for a run
+into the country. "I shan't hurt your car. I'm quite clean, though
+you mightn't think it. The cells were all right this time."</p>
+<p>He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy," he said, "do you want to go to that banquet?"</p>
+<p>"No, but I've got to. I must go through with it. I swore I'd do
+the thing completely or not at all."</p>
+<p>"It isn't till nine. We've three whole hours before we need
+start."</p>
+<p>"What are you going to do with me?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to take you home first. Then I suppose I shall have
+to drive you down to that beastly banquet."</p>
+<p>"That won't take three and a half hours. It's a heavenly
+morning. Can't we do something with it?"</p>
+<p>"What would you like to do?"</p>
+<p>"I'd like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall. I'm hungry.
+Then--Are you frightfully sleepy?"</p>
+<p>"Me? Oh, Lord, no."</p>
+<p>"Then let's go off somewhere into the country." They went.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the
+buns they had brought with them from the coffee-stall.</p>
+<p>"Did you ever smell anything like this lane? Did you ever eat
+anything like these buns? Did you ever drink anything like that
+divine coffee? If epicures had any imagination they'd go out and
+obstruct policemen and get put in prison for the sake of the
+sensations they'd have afterwards."</p>
+<p>"That reminds me," he said, "that I want to talk to you. No--but
+seriously."</p>
+<p>"I don't mind how seriously you talk if I may go on eating."</p>
+<p>"That's what I brought the buns for. So that I mayn't be
+interrupted. First of all I want to tell you that you haven't taken
+me in. Other people may be impressed with this Holloway business,
+but not me. I'm not moved, or touched, or even interested."</p>
+<p>"Still," she murmured, "you did get up at three o'clock in the
+morning."</p>
+<p>"If you think I got up at three o'clock in the morning to show
+my sympathy, you're mistaken."</p>
+<p>"Sympathy? I don't need your sympathy. It was worth it, Frank.
+There isn't anything on earth like coming out of prison. Unless it
+is going in."</p>
+<p>"That won't work, Dorothy, when I know why you went in. It
+wasn't to prove your principles. Your principles were against that
+sort of thing. It wasn't to get votes for women. You know as well
+as I do that you'll never get them that way. It wasn't to annoy Mr.
+Asquith. You knew Mr. Asquith wouldn't care a hang. It was to annoy
+me."</p>
+<p>"I wonder," she said dreamily, "if I shall <i>ever</i> be able
+to stop eating."</p>
+<p>"You can't take me in. I know too much about it. You said you
+were going to keep out of rows. You weren't going on that
+deputation because it meant a row. You went because I asked you not
+to go."</p>
+<p>"I did; and I should go again tomorrow for the same reason."</p>
+<p>"But it isn't a reason. It's not as if I'd asked you to go
+against your conscience. Your conscience hadn't anything to do with
+it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, hadn't it! I went because you'd no right to ask me not
+to."</p>
+<p>"If I'd had the right you'd have gone just the same."</p>
+<p>"What do you mean by the right?"</p>
+<p>"You know perfectly well what I mean."</p>
+<p>"Of course I do. You mean, and you meant that if I'd married you
+you'd have had the right, not just to ask me not to, but to prevent
+me. That was what I was out against. I'd be out against it tomorrow
+and the next day, and for as long as you keep up that
+attitude."</p>
+<p>"And yet--you said you loved me."</p>
+<p>"So I did. So I do. But I'm out against that too."</p>
+<p>"Good Lord, against what?"</p>
+<p>"Against your exploiting my love for your purposes."</p>
+<p>"My poor dear child, what do you suppose I wanted?"</p>
+<p>She had reached the uttermost limit of absurdity, and in that
+moment she became to him helpless and pathetic.</p>
+<p>"I knew there was going to be the most infernal row and I wanted
+to keep you out of it. Look here, you'd have thought me a rotter if
+I hadn't, wouldn't you?</p>
+<p>"Of course you would. And there's another thing. You weren't
+straight about it. You never told me you were going."</p>
+<p>"I never told you I wasn't."</p>
+<p>"I don't care, Dorothy; you weren't straight. You ought to have
+told me."</p>
+<p>"How could I tell you when I knew you'd only go trying to stop
+me and getting yourself arrested."</p>
+<p>"Not me. They wouldn't have touched me."</p>
+<p>"How was I to know that? If they had I should have dished you.
+And I'd have stayed away rather than do that. I didn't tell Michael
+or Nicky or Father for the same reason."</p>
+<p>"You'd have stayed at home rather than have dished me? Do you
+really mean that?"</p>
+<p>"Of course I mean it. And I meant it. It's you," she said, "who
+don't care."</p>
+<p>"How do you make that out?"</p>
+<p>He really wanted to know. He really wanted, if it were possible,
+to understand her.</p>
+<p>"I make it out this way. Here have I been through the adventure
+and the experience of my life. I was in the thick of the big raid;
+I was four weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don't care;
+you're not interested. You never said to yourself, 'Dorothy was in
+the big raid, I wonder what happened to her?' or 'Dorothy's in
+prison, I wonder how she's feeling?' You didn't care; you weren't
+interested.</p>
+<p>"If it had happened to you, I couldn't have thought of anything
+else, I couldn't have got it out of my head. I should have been
+wondering all the time what you were feeling; I couldn't have
+rested till I knew. It would have been as if I was in prison
+myself. And now, when I've come out, all you think of is how you
+can rag and score off me."</p>
+<p>She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane. Her
+hands were clasped round her knees. One knickerbockered knee
+protruded through the three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared
+across the road, a long, straight stare that took no heed of what
+she saw, the grey road, and the green bank on the other side,
+topped by its hedge of trees.</p>
+<p>Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of
+self-pity or reproach. It was as if she were making statements that
+had no emotional significance whatever.</p>
+<p>She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was
+sorest.</p>
+<p>"I wanted to tell you about it. I counted the days, the minutes
+till I could tell you; but you wouldn't listen. You don't want to
+hear."</p>
+<p>"I won't listen if it's about women's suffrage. And I don't want
+to hear if it's anything awful about you."</p>
+<p>"It is about me, but it isn't awful.</p>
+<p>"That's what I want to tell you.</p>
+<p>"But, first of all--about the raid. I didn't mean to be in it at
+all, as it happens. I meant to go with the deputation because you
+told me not to. You're right about that. But I meant to turn back
+as soon as the police stopped us, because I hate rows with the
+police, and because I don't believe in them, and because I told
+Angela Blathwaite I wasn't going in with her crowd any way. You
+see, she called me a coward before a lot of people and said I
+funked it. So I did. But I should have been a bigger coward if I'd
+gone against my own will, just because of what she said. That's how
+she collars heaps of women. They adore her and they're afraid of
+her. Sometimes they lie and tell her they're going in when their
+moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they're not going in at
+all. I don't adore her, and I'm not afraid of her, and I didn't
+lie.</p>
+<p>"So I went at the tail of the deputation where I could slip out
+when the row began. I swear I didn't mean to be in it. I funked it
+far too much. I didn't mind the police and I didn't mind the crowd.
+But I funked being with the women. When I saw their faces. You
+world have funked it.</p>
+<p>"And anyhow I don't like doing things in a beastly body.
+Ugh!</p>
+<p>"And then they began moving.</p>
+<p>"The police tried to stop them. And the crowd tried. The crowd
+began jeering at them. And still they moved. And the mounted police
+horses got excited, and danced about and reared a bit, and the
+crowd was in a funk then and barged into the women. That was rather
+awful.</p>
+<p>"I could have got away then if I'd chosen. There was a man close
+to me all the time who kept making spaces for me and telling me to
+slip through. I was just going to when a woman fell. Somewhere in
+the front of the deputation where the police were getting
+nasty.</p>
+<p>"Then I had to stay. I had to go on with them. I swear I wasn't
+excited or carried away in the least. Two women near me were
+yelling at the police. I hated them. But I felt I'd be an utter
+brute if I left them and got off safe. You see, it was an ugly
+crowd, and things were beginning to be jolly dangerous, and I'd
+funked it badly. Only the first minute. It went--the funk I
+mean--when I saw the woman go down. She fell sort of slanting
+through the crowd, and it was horrible. I couldn't have left them
+then any more than I could have left children in a burning
+house.</p>
+<p>"I thought of you."</p>
+<p>"You thought of me?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. I thought of you--how you'd have hated it. But I didn't
+care. I was sort of boosted up above caring. The funk had all gone
+and I was absolutely happy. Not insanely happy like some of the
+other women, but quietly, comfily happy.</p>
+<p>"After all, I didn't do anything you <i>need</i> have
+minded."</p>
+<p>"What <i>did</i> you do?" he said.</p>
+<p>"I just went on and stood still and refused to go back. I stuck
+my hands in my pockets so that I shouldn't let out at a policeman
+or anything (I knew you wouldn't like <i>that</i>). I may have
+pushed a bit now and then with my shoulders and my elbows; I can't
+remember. But I didn't make one sound. I was perfectly lady-like
+and perfectly dignified."</p>
+<p>"I suppose you <i>know</i> you haven't got a hat on?"</p>
+<p>"It didn't <i>come</i> off. I <i>took</i> it off and threw it to
+the crowd when the row began. It doesn't matter about your hair
+coming down if you haven't got a hat on, but if your hair's down
+and your hat's bashed in and all crooked you look a perfect
+idiot.</p>
+<p>"It wasn't a bad fight, you know, twenty-one women to I don't
+know how many policemen, and the front ones got right into the
+doorway of St. Stephen's. That was where they copped me.</p>
+<p>"But that, isn't the end of it.</p>
+<p>"The fight was only the first part of the adventure. The
+wonderful thing was what happened afterwards. In prison.</p>
+<p>"I didn't think I'd really <i>like</i> prison. That was another
+thing I funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the
+dirt, you know. And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And
+after the crowds of women, after the meetings and the speeches, the
+endless talking and the boredom, that cell was like heaven.</p>
+<p>"Thank God, it's always solitary confinement. The Government
+doesn't know that if they want to make prison a deterrent they'll
+shut us up together. You won't give the Home Secretary the tip,
+will you?</p>
+<p>"But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about.</p>
+<p>"It was something bigger, something tremendous. You'll not
+believe this part of it, but I was absolutely happy in that cell.
+It was a sort of deep-down unexcited happiness. I'm not a bit
+religious, but I <i>know</i> how the nuns feel in their cells when
+they've given up everything and shut themselves up with God. The
+cell was like a convent cell, you know, as narrow as that bit of
+shadow there is, and it had nice white-washed walls, and a
+planked-bed in the corner, and a window high, high up. There ought
+to have been a crucifix on the wall above the plank-bed, but there
+wasn't a crucifix. There was only a shiny black Bible on the
+chair.</p>
+<p>"Really Frank, if you're to be shut up for a month with just one
+book, it had better be the Bible. Isaiah's ripping. I can remember
+heaps of it: 'in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall
+be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there ...
+the redeemed shall walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall
+return with singing into Zion' ... 'They that wait upon the Lord
+shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as
+eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not
+faint.' I used to read like anything; and I thought of things. They
+sort of came to me.</p>
+<p>"That's what I wanted to tell you about. The things that came to
+me were so much bigger than the thing I went in for. I could see
+all along we weren't going to get it that way. And I knew we
+<i>were</i> going to get it some other way. I don't in the least
+know how, but it'll be some big, tremendous way that'll make all
+this fighting and fussing seem the rottenest game. That was one of
+the things I used to think about."</p>
+<p>"Then," he said, "you've given it up? You're corning out of
+it?"</p>
+<p>She looked at him keenly. "Are those still your conditions?"</p>
+<p>He hesitated one second before he answered firmly. "Yes, those
+are still my conditions. You still won't agree to them?"</p>
+<p>"I still won't agree. It's no use talking about it. You don't
+believe in freedom. We're incompatible. We don't stand for the same
+ideals."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord, what <i>does</i> that matter?"</p>
+<p>"It matters most awfully."</p>
+<p>"I should have thought," said Drayton, "it would have mattered
+more if I'd had revolting manners or an impediment in my speech or
+something."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't, <i>really</i>."</p>
+<p>"Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things. Did you
+ever once think about me, Dorothy?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I did. Have you ever read the Psalms? There's a jolly one
+that begins: 'Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my
+hands to war and my fingers to fight.' I used to think of you when
+I read that. I thought of you a lot.</p>
+<p>"That's what I was coming to. It was the queerest thing of all.
+Everything seemed ended when I went to prison. I knew you wouldn't
+care for me after what I'd done--you must really listen to this,
+Frank--I knew you couldn't and wouldn't marry me; and it somehow
+didn't matter. What I'd got hold of was bigger than that. I knew
+that all this Women's Suffrage business was only a part of it, a
+small, ridiculous part.</p>
+<p>"I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord. They were men, as well
+as women, Frank. And they were all free. They were all free because
+they were redeemed. And the funny thing was that you were part of
+it. You were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business.
+Everything was ended. And everything was begun; so that I knew you
+understood even when you didn't understand. It was really as if I'd
+got you tight, somehow; and I knew you couldn't go, even when you'd
+gone."</p>
+<p>"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."</p>
+<p>"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if
+you mean going.</p>
+<p>"What time is it?"</p>
+<p>"A quarter to eight."</p>
+<p>"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't
+make me late for that infernal banquet. You <i>are</i> going to
+drive me there?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with
+you."</p>
+<p>"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"</p>
+<p>He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it
+burnished and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the
+broad red, white and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union
+slanting across her breast.</p>
+<p>He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial
+Hotel, Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too
+much for speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there
+was that queer exaltation that had sustained her in prison.</p>
+<p>He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and
+Nicholas waited to receive her.</p>
+<p>Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated
+it, but they went in.</p>
+<p>Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red,
+white and blue ribbons.</p>
+<p>"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you
+through."</p>
+<p>"How can he when he feels like that about it?"</p>
+<p>"As if we didn't feel!"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the
+Banquet Hall to receive the prisoners.</p>
+<p>The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue
+of the Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned
+banners. The silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage
+Leagues and Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged
+along three walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and
+heroic colours, purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and
+royal blue, black, white and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure
+white, dead-black, orange and scarlet and magenta.</p>
+<p>From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent
+tables decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In
+the centre of the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the
+tricolour, were set like three thrones for the three leaders. They
+were flanked by nine other chairs on the right and nine on the left
+for the eighteen other prisoners.</p>
+<p>There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to
+the high table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged
+sound of rustling as the three hundred and fifty turned in their
+places.</p>
+<p>The twenty-one prisoners came in.</p>
+<p>A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself
+up in the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to
+their feet.</p>
+<p>And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a
+savage and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as
+of glass or thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as
+of children and of small, slender-throated animals were held
+together by ringing, vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins
+playing in the treble. And now a woman's voice started off on its
+own note and tore the delicate tissue of this sound with a solitary
+scream; and now a man's voice filled up a pause in the shrill
+hurrahing with a solitary boom.</p>
+<p>To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right
+hand, to Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among
+the crowd, that collective sound was frightful.</p>
+<p>From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one
+on each side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing
+them, she saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.</p>
+<p>It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The
+crowd was on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their
+high places.</p>
+<p>Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and
+seventy-nine women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of
+the Militant Women.</p>
+<blockquote>Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,<br>
+Our army moves from east to west.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+With flag and sword from south and north,<br>
+The sounding, shining hosts go forth.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+Do you not bear our marching feet,<br>
+From door to door, from street to street?<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Follow on! Follow on!</blockquote>
+<p>Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying,
+excited crowd.</p>
+<p>Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top
+of their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang
+from the back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently
+open; she sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever
+it might cost her and other people.</p>
+<p>Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its
+utmost, was overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang
+shrill and loud; her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a
+fantastic march. With one large, long hand raised she beat the
+measure of the music. Her head was thrown back; and on her face
+there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy rapture, exalted, half
+savage, not quite sane.</p>
+<p>Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.</p>
+<p>The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt
+again her old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion
+threatened her. She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for
+its hardness, its nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She
+tried to remember. Her soul, in its danger, tried to get back
+there. But the soul of the crowd in the hail below her swelled and
+heaved itself towards her, drawn by the Vortex. She felt the
+rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her breath: the Vortex was
+drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing almost got her.
+The sight of Emmeline saved her.</p>
+<p>She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the
+same awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at
+Emmeline she saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and
+hard and sane.</p>
+<p>She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers,
+Michael and Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of
+the herd-soul. The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as
+needles, tortured him. Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom.
+His fair, handsome face was set clear and hard. His yellow hair,
+with its hard edges, fitted his head like a cap of solid, polished
+metal. Weariness and disgust made a sort of cloud over his light
+green eyes. When Nicky looked at him Nicky's face twitched and
+twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as Michael hated it.</p>
+<p>She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they
+stuck it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria
+Threlfall were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from
+Blackfriars Bridge along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square
+and Pall Mall and Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and
+Nicholas would march beside them to hold up the poles of the
+standard which, after all, they were not strong enough to
+carry.</p>
+<p>She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same
+time she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison
+cell. She had told him the most real thing that had ever happened
+to her, and he had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would
+have listened. Michael would have cared intensely.</p>
+<p>She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The
+sword was between her and her lover.</p>
+<p>She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the
+Vortex, but between him and her vision which was more than either
+of them or than all this.</p>
+<p>She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in
+the hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her
+lover. She wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could
+have done as much, supposing they had had a choice?</p>
+<p>Then she looked at Veronica.</p>
+<p>Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was
+slender and beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin.
+Presently she would be marching in the Procession. She would carry
+a thin, tall pole, with a round olive wreath on the top of it, and
+a white dove sitting in the ring of the olive wreath. And she would
+look as if she was not in the Procession but in another place.</p>
+<p>When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane
+ecstasy and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of
+Veronica went alone in utter freedom.</p>
+<blockquote>Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,<br>
+And Love's our mighty battle-lord.<br>
+Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+And Justice is our flag unfurled,<br>
+The flaming flag that sweeps the world.<br>
+Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;<br>
+For Freedom we will fight and die.<br>
+Follow on! Follow on!</blockquote>
+<p>The Procession was over a mile long.</p>
+<p>It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge
+to Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and
+the Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside
+Cleopatra's Needle and the Sphinxes.</p>
+<p>Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to
+Northumberland Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and
+Societies and Leagues, of the trades and the professions and the
+arts, carrying their banners, the purple and the blue, the black,
+white and gold, the green, the orange and the scarlet and
+magenta.</p>
+<p>Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady
+Victoria Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense
+tricolour standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them.
+Behind the prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of
+young girls dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying
+a pole with the olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the
+obviousness of extreme innocence, the peace that follows victory.
+They were led by Veronica.</p>
+<p>She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because
+of her youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought
+that the Union had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged
+to Dorothea.</p>
+<p>From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the
+big red, white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady
+Victoria Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria,
+white and tense, would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation,
+hardly knowing where she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would
+go in pride, and in disdain for the proceedings in which her honour
+forced her to take part; she would have an awful knowledge of what
+she was doing and of where she was; she would drink every drop of
+the dreadful cup she had poured out for herself, hating it.</p>
+<p>Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she
+thought that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But
+she did not hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful
+and too big to hate, and her part in it was too little.</p>
+<p>She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the
+Procession. She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements,
+pressing closer and closer, pushed back continually by the police.
+Her soul was by itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the
+soul of the crowd and the soul of the Procession; only it was not
+proud; it was simply happy.</p>
+<p>The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the
+music sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the
+march.</p>
+<p>Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release,
+and the whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard
+music, to the rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.</p>
+<p>They went through what were once streets between walls of
+houses, and were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The
+visible aspect of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted.
+The houses stood farther back behind the walls of people; they were
+hung with people; a swarm of people clung like bees to the house
+walls.</p>
+<p>All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still
+and stationary world the Procession was the only thing that
+moved.</p>
+<p>She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was
+friendly.</p>
+<p>A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the
+cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign
+expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman
+was friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.</p>
+<p>Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary
+Procession should be allowed to fill the streets of a great
+capital, and that a body of the same police that arrested the
+insurgents should go with it to protect them, to clear their
+triumphal way before them, holding up the entire traffic of great
+thoroughfares that their bands and their banners and their
+regiments should go through. She said to herself "What a country!
+It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France, or
+anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in
+England."</p>
+<p>Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly.
+The band was playing the Marseillaise.</p>
+<p>And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down
+from its place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they
+played the Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the
+Procession to the ends of the world; she could march into battle to
+the Marseillaise; she could fight to that music and die.</p>
+<p>The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang
+the words of the Women's Marseillaise.</p>
+<p>And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another
+song. She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.</p>
+<blockquote>"'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl &uuml;ber mein Grab,<br>
+Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;<br>
+Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--<br>
+Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu sch&uuml;tzen!'"</blockquote>
+<p>The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn
+Hill.</p>
+<p>Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that
+they were there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the
+standard that they carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and
+front of the Procession, the purple and the blue, the gold and
+white, the green, the scarlet and orange and magenta standards
+rocked and staggered; they bent forwards; they were flung backwards
+as the west wind took them. But the red, white and blue standard
+that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her, steady and
+straight and high.</p>
+<p>And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the
+olive wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the
+ring of the wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine
+sounding in her soul.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Another year passed.</p>
+<p>Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in.
+Because of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children
+who had most hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide
+himself from her to the very end.</p>
+<p>Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and
+gone into his father's business for a while, to see whether he
+could stand it. John was going into the business too when he left
+Oxford. John was even looking forward to his partnership in what he
+called "the Pater's old tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get
+my hand well in. Won't we make it rip!"</p>
+<p>John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble.
+He had no genius for adventure. He would never strike out for
+himself any strange or dangerous line. He had settled down at
+Cheltenham; he had settled down at Oxford.</p>
+<p>And Dorothea had settled down.</p>
+<p>The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its
+revolution. Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it
+ran riot up and down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled
+stone ginger-beer bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers;
+it poured treacle into pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of
+Commons by the water-way, in barges, from which women, armed with
+megaphones, demanded the vote from infamous legislators drinking
+tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons and showered down
+propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show what violence it
+could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or two in a
+pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
+perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid
+followed by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering
+seriously the very painful but possible necessity of interfering
+with British sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in
+some drastic and terrifying way that would bring the men of England
+to their senses.</p>
+<p>And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the
+whirlwind. It would never suck her in. She worked now in the office
+of the Social Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for
+<i>The New Commonwealth</i> on Economics and the Marriage Laws.</p>
+<p>Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the
+revolution was all in Dorothea's brain.</p>
+<p>When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he
+was being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since
+Frances confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis
+Desmond she judged it to be terrible. She understood from Michael
+that it was <i>the</i> Vortex, the only one that really mattered,
+and the only one that would ever do anything.</p>
+<p>And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence
+Stephen.</p>
+<p>Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for
+Michael, she did not realize that they depended much more on
+Michael himself than on him. Stephen had said that if Michael was
+good enough he meant to help him. If his poems amounted to anything
+he would publish them in his <i>Review</i>. If any book of
+Michael's poems amounted to anything he would give a whole article
+to that book in his <i>Review</i>. If Michael's prose should ever
+amount to anything he would give him regular work on the
+<i>Review</i>.</p>
+<p>In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of
+the revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and
+his poems were beginning to appear, one after another, in the
+<i>Green Review</i>. He had brought out a volume of his experiments
+in the spring of that year; they were better than those that
+R&eacute;veillaud had approved of two years ago; and Lawrence
+Stephen had praised them in the <i>Green Review</i>.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he
+said, who would have had the courage either to publish them or to
+praise them.</p>
+<p>And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence
+Stephen she was afraid.</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.</p>
+<p>For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken
+Ferdinand Cameron's place.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love
+Ireland with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the
+beloved. It was a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of
+the spirit as to be compatible with permanent bodily absence from
+its object. Stephen's body had lived at ease in England (a country
+that he declared his spirit hated) ever since he had been old
+enough to choose a habitation for himself.</p>
+<p>He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been
+taken from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch
+and the English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for
+Irishmen to love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in
+London than in Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make
+havoc in his turn; he can harry the English, he can spite, and
+irritate and triumph and get his own back in a thousand ways.
+Living in England he would be a thorn in England's side.</p>
+<p>And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man
+of his talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an
+opportunist: but he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an
+obstinate idealism, one of those damned and solitary souls that
+only the north of Ireland produces in perfection. For the
+Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels like no other rebels on
+earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny as itself. Before
+he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the material comfort
+and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.</p>
+<p>He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton
+spinner settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled
+with this mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish
+blood of Antrim where his people married.</p>
+<p>Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would
+have been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
+inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with
+too wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary
+politics and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his
+own. And yet few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on
+the House of Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic
+politician he ran Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for
+England. Neither Nationalists nor Socialists believed in him; yet
+few men were more worthy of belief. In literature he had
+distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a novelist and an
+essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed not to do
+anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men of
+letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
+sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
+qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far
+contaminated by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes
+of art; yet there was no sense in which he had achieved
+popularity.</p>
+<p>Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he
+would, he fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had
+cast him out and England would none of him. He hated Catholicism
+and Protestantism alike, and Protestants and Catholics alike
+disowned him. To every Church and every sect he was a free thinker,
+destitute of all religion. Yet few men were more religious. His
+enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet on any one of his
+lines no man ever steered a straighter course.</p>
+<p>A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It
+would at any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he
+presented to two countries the disconcerting spectacle of a
+many-sided object moving with violence in a dead straight line. He
+moved so fast that to a stationary on-looker he was gone before one
+angle of him had been apprehended. It was for other people to turn
+and twist if any one of them was to get a complete all-round view
+of the amazing man.</p>
+<p>But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and
+suspicious brilliance.</p>
+<p>And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was
+not yet forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too
+young for men of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all
+England you could not have found a lonelier man.</p>
+<p>The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred
+relations of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married
+to Vera Harrison and yet he was not married. He was neither bound
+nor free.</p>
+<p>All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.</p>
+<p>And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something
+of the Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he
+loved Vera, after his manner, there were moments when Vera's
+capacity for everlasting passion left him tired and bored and
+cold.</p>
+<p>All his life <i>his</i> passions had been at the service of
+ideas. All his life he had looked for some great experience, some
+great satisfaction and consummation; and he had not found it.</p>
+<p>In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the
+opportunist was still waiting for his supreme opportunity.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.</p>
+<p>But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too
+steadily on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and
+weary gesture, to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had
+put his political failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as
+an artist or not at all." They judged him accordingly and their
+judgment was wrong.</p>
+<p>There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as
+he was in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the
+generation just behind him. To conservatives he passed for the
+leader of the revolution in contemporary art, and yet the
+revolution in contemporary art was happening without him. He was
+not the primal energy in the movement of the Vortex. In
+nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he was
+trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little
+farther than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was
+attracted to the young men of the Vortex because they were not of
+the generation that had rejected him, and because he hoped thus to
+prolong indefinitely his own youth. They were attracted to him
+because of his solitary distinction, his comparative poverty, and
+his unpopularity. A prosperous, well-established Stephen would have
+revolted them. He gave the revolutionaries the shelter of his
+<i>Review</i>, the support of his name, and the benefit of his
+bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in return a certain
+homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their merits and
+tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
+abominated.</p>
+<p>"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
+Swinburne."</p>
+<p>Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.</p>
+<p>He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew
+that the young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and
+because of his dealings with the past; because he refused to
+destroy the old gods when he made place for the new.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
+Stephen's study.</p>
+<p>He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half
+irritated, half affable affection.</p>
+<p>The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that
+house in St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera
+Harrison. They were at home there. Their books stood in his
+bookcase; they laid their manuscripts on his writing table and left
+them there; they claimed his empty spaces for the hanging of their
+pictures yet unsold.</p>
+<p>Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at
+the top of the house, and they talked.</p>
+<p>Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet
+them there, and to listen and to talk.</p>
+<p>To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were
+Austen Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young
+sculptor, and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton
+Ellis's disciples.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
+rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
+religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean
+and dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses,
+smooth and straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and
+a bitter, sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard
+drawn, while the lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and
+protested and recanted, was sceptical and sensitive and tender. His
+short, high nose had wide yet fastidious nostrils.</p>
+<p>It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
+affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes
+followed with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any
+moment he might escape her, might be off, God knew where.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the
+presence of his mistress and his friends.</p>
+<p>"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the
+future. I want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I
+believe in Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in
+Keats and Shelley and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more
+than you do, in their imitators. I believe in destroying their
+imitators. I do not believe in destroying them."</p>
+<p>"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They
+breed the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a
+stinking suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if
+we're to get rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new
+and clean. There isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So
+long as old masters are kow-towed to as masters people will go on
+imitating them. When a poet ceases to be a poet and becomes a
+centre of corruption, he must go."</p>
+<p>Michael said, "How about <i>us</i> when people imitate us? Have
+we got to go?"</p>
+<p>Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We
+haven't got to go."</p>
+<p>"I don't see how you get out of it."</p>
+<p>"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."</p>
+<p>There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George
+Wadham. It made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break
+it.</p>
+<p>"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.</p>
+<p>"Nobody, so far, <i>has</i> imitated Shakespeare, any more than
+they have <i>succeeded</i> in imitating me."</p>
+<p>There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton
+Ellis as the imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the
+forms adopted by his contemporaries.</p>
+<p>"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the
+Holy Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your
+sources."</p>
+<p>"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever
+does come down out of heaven. You <i>can</i> trace my sources,
+thank God, because they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream
+that swine like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary
+distinctions) "have made filthy with their paddling."</p>
+<p>He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised,
+Harrison, is absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then,
+supposing the revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because
+it's come. We <i>are</i> the revolution--the revolution means that
+we've made a clean sweep of the past. In the future no artist will
+want to imitate anybody. No artist will be allowed to exist unless
+he's prepared to be buried alive or burned alive rather than
+corrupt the younger generation with the processes and the products
+of his own beastly dissolution.</p>
+<p>"That's why violence is right.</p>
+<blockquote>"'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo<br>
+Sanguigno, stupra le albe,<br>
+irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,<br>
+fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,<br>
+fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,<br>
+fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'</blockquote>
+<p>"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right
+because it's necessary."</p>
+<p>"You mean it's necessary because it's right."</p>
+<p>Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
+flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of
+great strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair
+grow long and cultivating two beards instead of one.</p>
+<p>"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy
+must be got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy
+instead of standing still. The difference between Pastism and
+Futurism is the difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist
+art is simply art that has gone on, that, has left off being static
+and become dynamic. It expresses movement. Owen will tell you
+better than I can why it expresses movement."</p>
+<p>A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul
+Monier-Owen had curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes
+of a young wild animal roused in its lair.</p>
+<p>Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little
+distance he had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black
+panther, half cub, half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of
+his prominent eyes, his eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted
+slightly upwards and backwards. Under his slender, mournful nose
+his restless smile showed the white teeth of a young animal.</p>
+<p>Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded
+incessantly to any childish provocation, the intelligence of
+Monier-Owen watched in his calm and beautiful forehead and in his
+eyes.</p>
+<p>He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects
+directly as cutting across many planes. To do this you have to
+break up objects into the lines and masses that compose them, and
+project those lines and masses into space on any curve, at any
+angle, according to the planes you mean them to cross, otherwise
+the movements you mean them to express. The more planes intersected
+the more movement you get. By decomposing figures you compose
+movements. By decomposing groups of figures you compose groups of
+movement. Nothing but a cinema can represent objects as intact and
+as at the same time moving; and even the cinema only does this by a
+series of decompositions so minute as to escape the eye.</p>
+<p>"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park
+Corner. It can't be done unless you break up your objects as
+Mitchell breaks them up. You want to carve figures in the round,
+wrestling or dancing. It can't be done unless you dislocate their
+lines and masses as I dislocate them, so as to throw them all at
+once into those planes that the intact body could only have
+traversed one after another in a given time.</p>
+<p>"By taking time into account as well as space we produce
+rhythm.</p>
+<p>"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and
+the Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing
+of the sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point.
+They are supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do
+that, because arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and
+because the point of arrest is an artificial and arbitrary
+thing.</p>
+<p>"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact
+body which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which
+are in movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the
+figure and in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is
+immobility. If I wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by
+an absolute symmetry."</p>
+<p>"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're
+out against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism.
+If I draw a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat,
+pink woman and nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink
+woman is a work of Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm
+presenting as a reality what is only an appearance. The better the
+likeness the bigger the lie. But movement and rhythm are realities,
+not appearances. When I present rhythm and movement I've done
+something. I've made reality appear."</p>
+<p>He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the
+exhausted language by destroying its articulations. These he
+declared to be purely arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development
+of a spontaneous and individual style. By breaking up the rigid
+ties of syntax, you do more than create new forms of prose moving
+in perfect freedom, you deliver the creative spirit itself from the
+abominable contact with dead ideas. Association, fixed and
+eternalized by the structure of the language, is the tyranny that
+keeps down the live idea.</p>
+<p>"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin
+restored the innocence of the eye."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
+constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it
+dropped and broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a
+frenzied assault on the Old Masters, a storming of immortal
+strongholds, a tearing and scattering of the wing feathers of
+archangels; then, from this high adventure it sank to a perfunctory
+skirmishing among living eminences over forty, judged, by reason of
+their age, to be too contemptible for an attack in force. It
+rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute ineptitudes, the
+slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and ---- and ----";
+and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet, Edward
+Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the Vortex,
+and was setting up a small swirl of his own.</p>
+<p>Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed
+in Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than
+he believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed
+in Jules R&eacute;veillaud. They stood for all the realities and
+all the ideas and all the accomplishments to which he himself was
+devoted. He had no sort of qualms about the wholesale slaughter of
+the inefficient.</p>
+<p>But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his
+old horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
+unanimity. The vortex--<i>the</i> Vortex--was like the little
+vortex of school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen
+belonged to a herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying
+together, saying the same thing. Their very revolt against the Old
+Masters was a collective and not an individual revolt. Their chase
+was hottest when their quarry was one of the pack who had broken
+through and got away. They hated the fugitive, solitary private
+soul.</p>
+<p>And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he
+had the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great
+thing some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could
+get away from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had
+courage.</p>
+<p>Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he
+had a great longing to break loose and get away.</p>
+<p>He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They
+think they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see
+what's to come of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that
+for ever. I can't see what's coming. Yet something must come.
+<i>They</i> can't be the end."</p>
+<p>He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense
+Vortex. It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They
+will have helped to clear it."</p>
+<p>He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the
+Vortex, and of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the
+clean air.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>END OF PART II</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="PART_III"></a>PART III</h2>
+<h3><i>VICTORY</i></h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the
+British Isles because of the fine weather and the disturbances in
+the political atmosphere due to the fine weather.</p>
+<p>Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his
+family that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and
+that the mere off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the
+striker. And when Michael asked him contentiously what the weather
+had to do with Home Rule, he answered that it had everything to do
+with it by increasing parliamentary blood-pressure.</p>
+<p>"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how
+long the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to
+Mr. Redmond then."</p>
+<p>Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew
+that Home Rule had never been a part of practical politics and
+never would be.</p>
+<p>And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own
+views about the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they
+could have told Anthony what the answers were going to be; only
+they said it wasn't any good talking to Father; when he got an idea
+into his dear old head it stuck there.</p>
+<p>Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make
+some impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could
+get them out.</p>
+<p>Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children,
+had time for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent
+woman than the Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago,
+informed herself of the affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming
+of the <i>Times</i>. In the last four years the affairs of the
+nation had thrust themselves violently upon her attention. She had
+even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement as a vivid and vital
+affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the fighting and had gone
+to prison.</p>
+<p>Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the
+<i>Times</i>, had a sense of things about to happen if other things
+didn't happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any
+reason to complain that nothing happened.</p>
+<p>It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and
+Ireland were on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not
+so much by the head-lines in the papers as by the publication of
+her son Michael's insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green
+Review.</p>
+<p>For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly
+thirteen when he had said that civil war between England and
+Ireland would be glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it
+still. His poem was the green flag that he flew in the face of his
+family and of his country. Neither Frances nor Anthony would have
+been likely to forget the imminence of civil war (only that they
+didn't really believe in it), when from morning till night Michael
+talked and wrote of nothing else. In this Michael was not carried
+away by collective feeling; his dream of Ireland's freedom was a
+secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew shared it but Lawrence
+Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him hot and restless and
+intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish crisis when she
+said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own business. This
+excitement is very bad for Michael."</p>
+<p>And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that
+none of them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a
+week or two, Anthony and the boys would be out of it.</p>
+<p>Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour.
+There was, indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances
+in this particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was
+being disagreeably affected by the strike in the building
+trade.</p>
+<p>So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up
+his idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had
+even thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on
+the Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the
+spring of last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him
+that this extreme measure was unnecessary.</p>
+<p>And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy.
+For the children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were
+showing what was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant
+than ever. Michael and Dorothea had given up their allowances and
+declared their complete ability to support themselves. (They earned
+about fifty pounds a year each on an average.) She had expected
+this from Dorothy, but not from Michael. Nicholas was doing the
+chauffeur's work in his absence; and John showed eagerness to offer
+up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it on his father as his
+contribution to the family economies.</p>
+<p>Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter
+through Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's
+and Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her
+poor little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music
+teacher.</p>
+<p>There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike.
+Her mind refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She
+suspected Anthony of exaggerating his losses in order to draw out
+Dorothy and Michael and Nicholas and John, and wallow in their
+moral beauty. He, too, was arrogant. He was convinced that, though
+there might be girls like Dorothea, there were no boys like his
+three Sons. As for the strike in the building trade, strikes, as
+Anthony insisted, had happened before, and none of them had
+threatened for very long either Frances's peace of mind or
+Anthony's prosperity.</p>
+<p>The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs.
+Anthony Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year,
+on the twenty-fifth of July.</p>
+<p>Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of
+it.</p>
+<p>Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of
+those slight changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for
+regeneration and a change of heart. It marked the close of an
+epoch. Frances's life of exclusive motherhood had ended; she had
+become, or was at any rate trying to become, a social creature. Her
+Day had bored her terribly at first, when it didn't frighten her;
+she was only just beginning to get used to it; and still, at times,
+she had the air of not taking it seriously. It had been forced on
+her. Dorothea had decided that she must have a Day, like other
+people.</p>
+<p>She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come
+out in the spring of the year before, when the young men who met
+every Friday evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at
+Michael's father's house.</p>
+<p>Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this
+palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of
+wonderful, energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred
+the air about him and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their
+feet and of their voices, and of their laughter. And when the house
+was quiet and Anthony had Frances to himself he liked that,
+too.</p>
+<p>But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so
+often--if only I could have my children sometimes to myself!"</p>
+<p>It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and
+suckled them.</p>
+<p>There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted
+and diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd
+of tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves
+over the whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent
+happiness to the "Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and
+Louie and Emmeline and Edith Fleming, who figured as essential
+parts of the social event. She meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in
+the inconceivability of their absence on Frances's Bay, wondered
+more than ever why their daughter Rosalind found them so
+impossible. She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the office,
+and their wives and children, and Anthony's secretary, Miss Lathom.
+If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she soon
+would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and
+guileless faces.</p>
+<p>Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from
+India for good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more
+dangerous than his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was
+genuinely invalided, who had come back from California for the last
+time and would never be sent out anywhere again.</p>
+<p>Dorothea had said: "Let's kill them all off in one awful day."
+Frances had said: "Yes, but we must do it decently. We must be kind
+to them, poor dears!"</p>
+<p>Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to
+Uncle Morrie and Uncle Bartie. That was the only burden she had
+laid on her children. It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth
+constrained them. They had received so much, and they had been let
+off so much; not one of them had inherited the taint that made
+Maurice and Emmeline Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased
+and irresponsible. They could afford to be pitiful and
+merciful.</p>
+<p>And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to
+be pitiful and merciful herself. She could even afford to be
+grateful to the poor dears. She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and
+Bartie as scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose
+affliction left her children clean. She thought of them more and
+more in this sacred and sacrificial character. At fifty-two Frances
+could be gentle over the things that had worried and irritated her
+at thirty-three. Like Anthony she was still young and strong
+through the youth and strength of her children.</p>
+<p>And the poor dears were getting weak and old. Grannie was
+seventy-nine, and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was
+forty-nine, and he looked sixty. Every year Frances was more
+acutely aware of their pathos, their futility, their mortality.
+They would be broken and gone so soon and so utterly, leaving no
+name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only living in the
+memories of her children who would remain.</p>
+<p>And, with an awful sense of mortality surrounding them, her
+children had learned that they must be kind because the old people
+would be gone while they endured and remained.</p>
+<p>This Saturday being the last of the season, they had all come;
+not only the Flemings, but the Jervises and Verekers and Norrises,
+and Uncle Bartie. The fine weather alone would have brought
+them.</p>
+<p>Bartie, more morose and irritable than ever, sat under the tree
+of Heaven and watched the triumphal progress of the Day. He scowled
+darkly and sourly at each group in turn; at the young men in white
+flannels playing tennis; at Mr. and Mr. Jervis and the Verekers and
+Norrises; at the Flemings, old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline
+and Edith, and the disgraceful Maurice, all five of them useless
+pensioners on his brother's bounty; Maurice a thing of battered,
+sodden flesh hanging loose on brittle bone, a rickety prop for the
+irreproachable summer suit bought with Anthony's money. He scowled
+at the tables covered with fine white linen, and at the costly
+silver and old china, at the sandwiches and cakes and ices, and the
+piled-up fruits and the claret cup and champagne cup glowing and
+shining in the tall glass jugs, and at the pretty maidservants
+going to and fro in their accomplished service.</p>
+<p>Bartie wondered how on earth Anthony managed it. His wonder was
+a savage joy to Bartie.</p>
+<p>Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed
+it, and Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr.
+Vereker and Mr. Norris, who held that a strike was a downright
+serious matter, also wondered. But they were sustained by their
+immense belief in Mr. Anthony. Mr. Anthony knew what he was doing;
+he always had known. A strike might be serious while it lasted, but
+it didn't last. And Mr. Nicholas was in the business now, and Mr.
+John was coming into it next year, and Mr. Nicholas might be
+married again by that time; and the chances were that the firm of
+Harrison and Harrison would last long enough to provide for a young
+Vereker and a still younger Norris.</p>
+<p>In spite of the strike, Mr. and Mrs. Vereker and Mr. and Mrs.
+Norris, like Frances and Anthony, were extraordinarily cheerful
+that afternoon.</p>
+<p>So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.</p>
+<p>"I can't think why I feel so happy," said Mrs. Vereker to Mrs.
+Norris. She was looking at her son George.</p>
+<p>"Nor I, either," said Miss Lathom, who was trying suddenly to
+look at nothing in particular.</p>
+<p>Miss Lathom lied and Mrs. Vereker lied; they knew perfectly well
+why they were happy. Each knew that the other lied; each knew that
+the other knew she knew; and neither of them could have said why
+she found it so necessary to lie.</p>
+<p>And to Frances this happiness of Mrs. Vereker, and of young
+Vereker and Miss Lathom was significant and delightful, as if she
+had been personally responsible for it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and
+of something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up
+with Mr. and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind. She stared at the larkspurs
+as if they held the clue--Nicky's face appeared among the tall blue
+spires, Nicky's darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and
+yellow stripes--something to do with a White Cake--it must have
+been somebody's birthday. Now she had it--Mr. Jervis's cricket
+scarf. It was the day of Nicky's worst earache, the day when Mr.
+Vereker climbed the tree of Heaven--was it possible that Mr.
+Vereker had ever climbed that tree?--the day when Michael wouldn't
+go to the party--Rosalind's birthday.</p>
+<p>Eight candles burning for Rosalind. Why, it was nineteen years
+ago. Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only
+little boys. And look at them now!</p>
+<p>She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit,
+slender bodies of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously
+and well.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy is looking very handsome," Mrs. Jervis said. Yes,
+certainly Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before
+all things the male beauty of her sons. In Michael and Nicholas it
+had reached perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last,
+as Anthony's had lasted.</p>
+<p>She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many
+deaths, each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of
+babyhood, of childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of
+their young manhood would be with her for a long time. John would
+have it. John was only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had
+not hardened; his boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his
+mouth, and in his eyelids and the soft corners of his eyes; so that
+in John she could still see what Nicky had been.</p>
+<p>She had adored Anthony's body, as if she had foreseen that it
+would give her such sons as these; and in her children she had
+adored the small bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she
+foresaw the beauty of their manhood. These were the same bodies,
+the same faces that she had loved in them as children; nothing was
+blurred or twisted or overlaid.</p>
+<p>Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had
+foreseen him. Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other
+moments she was proud of his genius; but at this particular moment,
+sitting beside her friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was
+chiefly aware of his body.</p>
+<p>Michael's body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but
+austere and tranquil satisfaction. It was when she looked at her
+second son that something caught at her breath and held it. She saw
+him as the lover and bridegroom of Veronica. Her sense of his
+virility was terrible to her and delightful.</p>
+<p>Perhaps they were engaged already.</p>
+<p>And Frances was sorry for Mrs. Jervis, who had borne no sons,
+who had only borne one unattractive and unsatisfactory daughter.
+She used to be sorry for her because Rosalind was pink and fat and
+fluffy; she was sorry for her now because Rosalind was
+unsatisfactory. She was sorry for Mrs. Norris because her boy could
+never grow up like Michael or Nicholas or John. She was sorry for
+Mrs. Vereker because George, though he looked all right when he was
+by himself, became clumsy and common at once beside Michael and
+Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels; he played
+furiously and well; he played too furiously and too consciously
+well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp and
+excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang.</p>
+<p>Her arrogance nourished itself on these contrasts.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Jervis looked wistfully at the young men as they played.
+She looked still more wistfully at Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"What do you do," she said, "to keep your children with
+you?"</p>
+<p>"I do nothing," Frances said. "I don't try to keep them. I've
+never appealed to their feelings for my own purposes, or taken
+advantage of their affection, that's all.</p>
+<p>"They know that if they want to walk out of the house to-morrow,
+and stay out, they can. Nobody'll stop them."</p>
+<p>There was a challenging, reminiscent glint in Mr. Jervis's eyes,
+and his wife was significantly silent. Frances knew what they were
+thinking.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said, "walked out; but he came back again as soon
+as he was in trouble. Michael walks out and goes abroad every year;
+but he comes back again. Dorothy walks out, but she's never dreamed
+of not coming back again."</p>
+<p>"Of course, if you aren't afraid of taking risks," said Mr.
+Jervis.</p>
+<p>"I am afraid. But I've never shown it."</p>
+<p>"It's very strange that Dorothy hasn't married." Mrs. Jervis
+spoke. She derived comfort from the thought that Dorothy was
+eight-and-twenty and not married.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy," said Frances, "could marry to-morrow if she wanted
+to; but she doesn't want."</p>
+<p>She was sorry for her friend, but she really could not allow her
+that consolation.</p>
+<p>"Veronica is growing up very good-looking," said Mrs. Jervis
+then.</p>
+<p>But it was no use. Frances was aware that Veronica was grown up,
+and that she was good-looking, and that Nicky loved her; but Mrs.
+Jervis's shafts fell wide of all her vulnerable places. Frances was
+no longer afraid.</p>
+<p>"Veronica," she said, "is growing up very good." It was not the
+word she would have chosen, yet it was the only one she could think
+of as likely to convey to Mrs. Jervis what she wanted her to know,
+though it left her obtuseness without any sense of Veronica's
+mysterious quality.</p>
+<p>She herself had never tried to think of a word for it before;
+she was only driven to it now because she detected in her friend's
+tone a challenge and a warning. It was as if Rosalind's mother had
+said, extensively and with pointed reference to the facts:
+"Veronica is dangerous. Her mother has had adventures. She is
+grown-up and she is good-looking, and Nicky is susceptible to that
+sort of thing. If you don't look out he will be caught again. The
+only difference between Phyllis Desmond and Veronica is in their
+skins."</p>
+<p>So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs.
+Jervis should understand, once for all, that she was not in the
+least like her mother or like Phyllis Desmond.</p>
+<p>That was enough for Mrs. Jervis. But it was not enough for
+Frances, who found her mind wandering off from Rosalind's mother
+and looking for the word of words that would express her own
+meaning to her own satisfaction.</p>
+<p>Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation
+that flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs.
+Vereker and Mrs. Norris on her left.</p>
+<p>Veronica was good. But she was not wrapped up in other people's
+lives as Frances was wrapped up. She was wrapped up, not in
+herself, but in some life of her own that, as Frances made it out,
+had nothing in the world to do with anybody else's.</p>
+<p>And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were
+thinking, and what you were going to do, and what was happening to
+you. (She had really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky
+when Desmond made him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls
+that divide every soul from every other soul were made of some thin
+and porous stuff that let things through. And in this life of
+yours, for the moments that she shared it, she lived intensely,
+with uncanny delight and pain that were her own and not her
+own.</p>
+<p>And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile
+these extremes of penetration and detachment.</p>
+<p>She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that. He saw
+things. He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights.
+She supposed it was the Highland blood in both of them.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr.
+Bartholomew was better. Frances said he never would be better till
+chemists were forbidden to advertise and the <i>British Medical
+Journal</i> and <i>The Lancet</i> were suppressed. Bartie would
+read them; and they supplied him with all sorts of extraordinary
+diseases.</p>
+<p>She thought: Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and
+Veronica in her innermost life was happy. She had been happy when
+she came back from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky
+cared for her, before Nicky knew it himself.</p>
+<p>Supposing she had known it all the time? But that, Frances said
+to herself, was nonsense. If she had known as much as all that, why
+should she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of
+it? Unless--supposing--it had been his suffering that she had
+nearly died of?</p>
+<p>Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr.
+Maurice looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that
+Morrie hadn't been fit for anything since he was in South
+Africa.</p>
+<p>Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme
+sustained itself. She thought: Then, Nicky had suffered. And
+Veronica was the only one who knew. She knew more about Nicky than
+Nicky's mother. This thought was disagreeable to Frances.</p>
+<p>It was all nonsense. She didn't really believe that these things
+happened. Yet, why not? Michael said they happened. Even Dorothy,
+who didn't believe in God and immortality or anything, believed
+that.</p>
+<p>She gave it up; it was beyond her; it bothered her.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Seventy-nine her last birthday."</p>
+<p>Mrs. Norris had said that Mrs. Fleming was wonderful.</p>
+<p>Frances thought: "It's wonderful what Veronica does to
+them."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The sets had changed. Nicholas and a girl friend of Veronica's
+played against George Vereker and Miss Lathom; John, with Mr.
+Jervis for his handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The
+very young Norris fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to
+distinguish himself by catching some ball in full flight as it went
+"out." It was a pure and high ambition, for he knew he was so young
+and unimportant that only the eyes of God and of his mother watched
+him.</p>
+<p>Michael had dropped out of it. He sat beside Dorothy under the
+tree of Heaven and watched Veronica.</p>
+<p>"Veronica's wonderful," he said. "Did you see that?"</p>
+<p>Dorothy had seen.</p>
+<p>Veronica had kept Aunt Emmeline quiet all afternoon. She bad
+made Bartie eat an ice under the impression that it would be good
+for him. And now she had gone with Morrie to the table where the
+drinks were, and had taken his third glass of champagne cup from
+him and made him drink lemonade instead.</p>
+<p>"How does she do it?" said Michael.</p>
+<p>"I don't know. She doesn't know herself. I used to think I could
+manage people, but I'm not in it with Ronny. She ought to be a
+wardress in a lunatic asylum."</p>
+<p>"Now look at that!"</p>
+<p>Veronica had returned to the group formed by Grannie and the
+Aunties and some strangers. The eyes of the four Fleming women had
+looked after her as she went from them; they looked towards her now
+as if some great need, some great longing were appeased by her
+return.</p>
+<p>Grannie made a place by her side for the young girl; she took
+her arm, the young white arm, bare from the elbow in its short
+sleeve, and made it lie across her knees. From time to time
+Grannie's yellow, withered hand stroked the smooth, warm white arm,
+or held it. Emmeline and Edith squatted on the grass at Veronica's
+feet; their worn faces and the worn face of Louie looked at her.
+They hung on her, fascinated, curiously tranquillized, as if they
+drank from her youth.</p>
+<p>"It's funny," Dorothy said, "when you think how they used to
+hate her."</p>
+<p>"It's horrible," said Michael.</p>
+<p>He got up and took Veronica away.</p>
+<p>He was lying at her feet now on the grass in the far corner of
+the lawn under the terrace.</p>
+<p>"Why do you go to them?" he said.</p>
+<p>"Because they want me."</p>
+<p>"You mustn't go when they want you. You mustn't let them get
+hold of you."</p>
+<p>"They don't get hold of me--nothing gets hold of me. I want to
+help them. They say it does them good to have me with them."</p>
+<p>"I should think it did do them good! They feed on you, Ronny. I
+can see it by the way they look at you. You'll die of them if you
+don't give it up."</p>
+<p>"Give what up?"</p>
+<p>"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it?
+Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to
+have been dead years ago.</p>
+<p>"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can
+remember them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin
+sacrificed to them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're
+making them go on."</p>
+<p>"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael,
+when you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without
+being happy, without loving.</p>
+<p>"They used to hate me because I'm Vera's daughter. They don't
+hate me now."</p>
+<p>"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires.
+They'll suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of
+them.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a
+kid and Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky
+house they live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's
+ghost I funked. But I know now it wasn't. It was those four
+terrible women. They're ghosts. I thought you were afraid of
+ghosts."</p>
+<p>"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see
+how awful it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living
+people. Everybody afraid of them--not wanting them."</p>
+<p>"Michael--it would be better to be dead!"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its
+appearance and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's
+friends played singles with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting
+the partners offered them and disdaining inferior antagonists; they
+played, Ellis against Mitchell and Monier-Owen against
+Nicholas.</p>
+<p>They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.</p>
+<p>It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could
+not go on for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had
+done so much for Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of
+Michael's Poems had made an end of that old animosity a year ago.
+Practically, they had had to choose between Bartie and Lawrence
+Stephen as the turning point of honour. Michael had made them see
+that it was possible to overvalue Bartie; also that it was possible
+to pay too high a price for a consecrated moral attitude. In all
+his life the wretched Bartie had never done a thing for any of
+them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather extraordinary success
+absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made his father
+bankrupt he would owe his very means of livelihood to Lawrence
+Stephen.</p>
+<p>Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most
+frightfully to go on living in the same house with people who
+disliked him.</p>
+<p>If, Michael said, they chose to dissociate themselves altogether
+from their eldest son and his career, very well. They could go on
+ignoring and tacitly insulting Mr. Stephen. He could understand
+their taking a consistently wrong-headed line like that; but so
+long as they had any regard, either for him or his career, he
+didn't see how they could very well keep it up any longer. He was
+sorry, of course, that his career had let them in for Stephen if
+they didn't like him; but there it was.</p>
+<p>And beyond a doubt it was there.</p>
+<p>"You might vindicate Bartie gloriously," Michael said, "by
+turning me out of the house and disinheriting me. But would it be
+worth while? I'm not asking you to condone Stephen's conduct--if
+you can't condone it; I'm asking you either to acknowledge
+<i>or</i> repudiate your son's debts.</p>
+<p>"After all, if <i>he</i> can condone your beastly treatment of
+him--I wouldn't like him if he was the swine you think him."</p>
+<p>And Anthony had appealed to Michael's mother.</p>
+<p>To his "Well, Frances, what do you think? Ought we or oughtn't
+we?" she had replied: "I think we ought to stand solid behind
+Michael."</p>
+<p>It was Michael's life that counted, for it was going on into a
+great future. Bartie would pass and Michael would remain.</p>
+<p>Their nervous advances had ended in a complete surrender to
+Stephen's charm.</p>
+<p>Vera and Stephen seemed to think that the way to show the
+sincerity and sweetness of their reconciliation was to turn up as
+often as possible on Frances's Day. They arrived always at the same
+hour, a little late; they came by the road and the front door, so
+that when Bartie saw them coming he could retreat through the
+garden door and the lane. The Flemings and the Jervises retreated
+with him; and presently, when it had had a good look at the
+celebrities, the rest of the party followed.</p>
+<p>This Saturday Frances's Day dwindled and melted away and closed,
+after its manner; only Vera and Stephen lingered. They stayed on
+talking to Michael long after everybody else had gone.</p>
+<p>Stephen said he had come to say good-bye to Michael's people and
+to make a proposal to Michael himself. He was going to Ireland.</p>
+<p>Vera interrupted him with passion.</p>
+<p>"He isn't. He hasn't any proposal to make. He hasn't come to say
+good-bye."</p>
+<p>Her restless, unhappy eyes turned to him incessantly, as if,
+more than ever, she was afraid that he would escape her, that he
+would go off God knew where.</p>
+<p>God knew where he was going, but Vera did not believe that he
+was going to Ireland. He had talked about going to Ireland for
+years, and he had never gone.</p>
+<p>Stephen looked as if he did not see her; as if he did not even
+see Michael very distinctly.</p>
+<p>"I'm going," he said, "to Ireland on Monday week, the third of
+August. I mayn't come back for long enough. I may not come back at
+all."</p>
+<p>"That's the sort of thing he keeps on saying."</p>
+<p>"I may not come back <i>at all</i>. So I want you to take over
+the <i>Review</i> for me. Ellis and my secretary will show you how
+it stands. You'll know what to do. I can trust you not to let it
+down."</p>
+<p>"He doesn't mean what he says, Michael. He's only saying it to
+frighten me. He's been holding it over me for years.</p>
+<p>"<i>Say</i> you'll have nothing to do with it. <i>Say</i> you
+won't touch his old <i>Review</i>."</p>
+<p>"Could I go to Ireland for you?"</p>
+<p>"You couldn't."</p>
+<p>"Why not? What do you think you're going to do there?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to pull the Nationalists together, so that if there's
+civil war in Ireland, the Irish will have a chance to win. Thank
+God for Carson! He's given us the opportunity we wanted."</p>
+<p>"Tell him he's not to go, Michael. He won't listen to me, but
+he'll mind what you say."</p>
+<p>"I want to go instead of him."</p>
+<p>"You can't go instead of me. Nobody can go instead of me."</p>
+<p>"I can go with you."</p>
+<p>"You can't."</p>
+<p>"Larry, if you take Michael to Ireland, Anthony and Frances will
+never forgive you. <i>I</i>'ll never forgive you."</p>
+<p>"I'm not taking Michael to Ireland, I'm telling you. There's no
+reason why Michael should go to Ireland at all. It isn't <i>his</i>
+country."</p>
+<p>"You needn't rub <i>that</i> in," said Michael.</p>
+<p>"It isn't <i>yours</i>," said Vera. "Ireland doesn't want you.
+The Nationalists don't want you. You said yourself they've turned
+you out of Ireland. When you've lived in England all these years
+why should you go back to a place that doesn't want you?"</p>
+<p>"Because if Carson gets a free hand I see some chance of Ireland
+being a free country."</p>
+<p>Vera wailed and entreated. She said it showed how much he cared
+for her. It showed that he was tired of her. Why couldn't he say so
+and have done with it?</p>
+<p>"It's not," she said, "as if you could really do anything.
+You're a dreamer. Ireland has had enough of dreamers." And
+Stephen's eyes looked over her head, into the high branches of the
+tree of Heaven, as if he saw his dream shining clear through them
+like a moon.</p>
+<p>The opportunist could see nothing but his sublime
+opportunity.</p>
+<p>Michael went back with him to dine and talk it over. There was
+to be civil war in Ireland then?</p>
+<p>He thought: If only Lawrence would let him go with him. He
+wanted to go to Ireland. To join the Nationalists and fight for
+Ireland, fight for the freedom he was always dreaming
+about--<i>that</i> would be a fine thing. It would be a finer thing
+than writing poems about Ireland.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen went soberly and steadily through the affair of
+the <i>Review</i>, explaining things to Michael. He wanted this
+done, and this. And over and over again Michael's voice broke
+through his instructions. Why couldn't he go to Ireland instead of
+Lawrence? Or, if Lawrence wouldn't let him go instead of him, he
+might at least take him with him. He didn't want to stay at home
+editing the <i>Review</i>. Ellis or Mitchell or Monier-Owen would
+edit it better than he could. Even the wretched Wadham would edit
+it just as well. He wanted to go to Ireland and fight.</p>
+<p>But Lawrence wouldn't let him go. He wasn't going to have the
+boy's blood on his hands. His genius and his youth were too
+precious.</p>
+<p>Besides, Ireland was not his country.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>It was past ten o'clock. Frances was alone in the drawing-room.
+She sat by the open window and waited and watched.</p>
+<p>The quiet garden lay open to her sight. Only the inner end of
+the farther terrace, under the orchard wall, was hidden by a high
+screen of privet.</p>
+<p>It seemed hours to Frances since she had seen Nicky and Veronica
+go down the lawn on to the terrace.</p>
+<p>And then Anthony had gone out too. She was vexed with Anthony.
+She could see him sitting under his ash-tree, her tree of heaven;
+his white shirt-front gave out an oblong gleam like phosphorous in
+the darkness under the tree. She was watching to see that he didn't
+get up and go on to the terrace. Anthony had no business in the
+garden at all. He was catching cold in it. He had sneezed twice.
+She wanted Nicholas and Veronica to have the garden to themselves
+to-night, and the perfect stillness of the twilight to themselves,
+every tree and every little leaf and flower keeping quiet for them;
+and there was Anthony sneezing.</p>
+<p>She was restless and impatient, as if she carried the burden of
+their passion in her own heart.</p>
+<p>Presently she could bear it no longer. She got up and called to
+Anthony to come in. He came obediently. "What are you thinking of,"
+she said, "planting yourself out there and sneezing? I could see
+your shirt-front a mile off. It's indecent of you."</p>
+<p>"Why indecent?"</p>
+<p>"Because Nicky and Veronica are out there."</p>
+<p>"I don't see them."</p>
+<p>"Do you suppose they want you to see them?"</p>
+<p>She turned the electric light on full, to make darkness of their
+twilight out there.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky and Veronica talked together in the twilight, sitting on
+the seat under the orchard well behind the privet screen. They did
+not see Anthony sitting under the ash-tree, they did not hear him,
+they did not hear Frances calling to him to come in. They were
+utterly unaware of Frances and Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Ronny," he said, "did Michael say anything to you?"</p>
+<p>"When?"</p>
+<p>"This afternoon, when he made you come with him here?"</p>
+<p>"How do you mean, 'say anything'?"</p>
+<p>"You know what I mean."</p>
+<p>"<i>Mick</i>?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Did he ask you to marry him?"</p>
+<p>"No. He said a lot of funny things, but he didn't say that. He
+wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Why wouldn't he?"</p>
+<p>"Because--he just wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Well, he says he understands you."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Veronica conclusively, "of course he wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Yes; but he says <i>I</i> don't."</p>
+<p>"Dear Nicky, you understand me when nobody else does. You always
+did."</p>
+<p>"Yes, when we were kids. But supposing <i>now</i> I ever didn't,
+would it matter? You see, I'm stupid, and caring--caring
+awfully--might make me stupider. <i>Have</i> people got to
+understand each other?"</p>
+<p>To that she replied astonishingly, "Are you quite sure you
+understand about Ferdie?"</p>
+<p>"Ferdie?"</p>
+<p>"Yes." She turned her face full to him. "I don't know whether
+you know about it. <i>I</i> didn't till Mother told me the other
+day. I'm Ferdie's daughter.</p>
+<p>"Did you know?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord, yes. I've known it for--oh, simply ever so long."</p>
+<p>"Who told you?"</p>
+<p>"Dorothy, I think. But I guessed it because of something he said
+once about seeing ghosts."</p>
+<p>"I wonder if you know how I feel about it? I want you to
+understand that. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I'm proud. I'm
+<i>glad</i> I'm Ferdie's daughter, not Bartie's.... I'd take his
+name, so that everybody should know I was his daughter, only that I
+like Uncle Anthony's name best. I'm glad Mother loved him."</p>
+<p>"So am I, Ronny. I know I shouldn't have liked Bartie's
+daughter. Bartie's daughter wouldn't have been you."</p>
+<p>He took her in his arms and held her face against his face. And
+it was as if Desmond had never been.</p>
+<p>A little while ago he had hated Desmond because she had come
+before Veronica; she had taken what belonged to Veronica, the first
+tremor of his passion, the irrecoverable delight and surprise. And
+now he knew that, because he had not loved her, she had taken
+nothing.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"Do you love me?"</p>
+<p>"Do you love <i>me</i>?"</p>
+<p>"You know I love you."</p>
+<p>"You know. You know."</p>
+<p>What they said was new and wonderful to them as if nobody before
+them had ever thought of it.</p>
+<p>Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the
+birch-trees, and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in
+each other's arms and said the same thing in the same words: "Do
+you love me?" "You know I love you!" over and over, in voices
+drowsy and thick with love.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And
+that's that damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to
+wait goodness knows how long. Ages we may have to."</p>
+<p>"I'd wait all my life if I could have you in the last five
+seconds of it. And if I couldn't, I'd still wait."</p>
+<p>And presently Veronica remembered Michael.</p>
+<p>"Why did you ask me whether Mick had said anything?"</p>
+<p>"Because I thought you ought to know about it before
+you--Besides, if he <i>had</i>, we should have had to wait a bit
+before we told him."</p>
+<p>It seemed that there was nothing to prevent them marrying
+to-morrow if they liked. The strike, Anthony said, couldn't hit him
+as badly as all that.</p>
+<p>He and Frances sat up till long past midnight, talking about
+their plans, and the children's plans. It was all settled. The
+first week in August they would go down to Morfe for the shooting.
+They would stay there till the first week in September. Nicky and
+Veronica would be married the first week in October. And they would
+go to France and Belgium and Germany for their honeymoon.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+<br>
+<p>They did not go down to Morfe the first week in August for the
+shooting.</p>
+<p>Neither did Lawrence Stephen go to Ireland on Monday, the third.
+At the moment when he should have been receiving the
+congratulations of the Dublin Nationalists after his impassioned
+appeal for militant consolidation, Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward
+Carson were shaking hands dramatically in the House of Commons.
+Stephen's sublime opportunity, the civil war, had been snatched
+from him by the unforeseen.</p>
+<p>And there was no chance of Nicky and Veronica going to Belgium
+and France and Germany for their honeymoon.</p>
+<p>For within nine days of Frances's Day Germany had declared war
+on France and Russia, and was marching over the Belgian frontier on
+her way to Paris.</p>
+<p>Frances, aroused at last to realization of the affairs of
+nations, asked, like several million women, "What does it
+mean?"</p>
+<p>And Anthony, like several million men, answered, "It means
+Armageddon." Like several million people, they both thought he was
+saying something as original as it was impressive, something clear
+and final and descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative
+people went about saying it to each other. The sound of the word
+thrilled them, intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that
+was at the same time, in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them
+with a solemn and sombre passion. They said "Armageddon. It means
+Armageddon." Yet nobody knew and nobody asked or thought of asking
+what Armageddon meant.</p>
+<p>"Shall We come into it?" said Frances. She was thinking of the
+Royal Navy turning out to the last destroyer to save England from
+invasion; of the British Army most superfluously prepared to defend
+England from the invader, who, after all, could not invade; of
+Indian troops pouring into England if the worst came to the worst.
+She had the healthy British mind that refuses and always has
+refused to acknowledge the possibility of disaster. Yet she asked
+continually, "Would England be drawn in?" She was thankful that
+none of her sons had gone into the Army or the Navy. Whoever else
+was in, they would be out of it.</p>
+<p>At first Anthony said, "No. Of course England wouldn't be drawn
+in."</p>
+<p>Then, on the morning of England's ultimatum, the closing of the
+Stock Exchange and the Banks made him thoughtful, and he admitted
+that it looked as if England might be drawn in after all. The long
+day, without any business for him and Nicholas, disturbed him.
+There was a nasty, hovering smell of ruin in the air. But there was
+no panic. The closing of the Banks was only a wise precaution
+against panic. And by evening, as the tremendous significance of
+the ultimatum sank into him, he said definitively that England
+would not be drawn in.</p>
+<p>Then Drayton, whom they had not seen for months (since he had
+had his promotion) telephoned to Dorothy to come and dine with him
+at his club in Dover Street. Anthony missed altogether the
+significance of <i>that</i>.</p>
+<p>He had actually made for himself an after-dinner peace in which
+coffee could be drunk and cigarettes smoked as if nothing were
+happening to Europe.</p>
+<p>"England," he said, "will not be drawn in, because her ultimatum
+will stop the War. There won't be any Armageddon."</p>
+<p>"Oh, won't there!" said Michael. "And I can tell you there won't
+be much left of us after it's over."</p>
+<p>He had been in Germany and he knew. He carried himself with a
+sort of stern haughtiness, as one who knew better than any of them.
+And yet his words conveyed no picture to his brain, no definite
+image of anything at all.</p>
+<p>But in Nicholas's brain images gathered fast, one after another;
+they thickened; clear, vivid images with hard outlines. They came
+slowly but with order and precision. While the others talked he had
+been silent and very grave.</p>
+<p>"<i>Some</i> of us'll be left," he said. "But it'll take us all
+our time."</p>
+<p>Anthony looked thoughtfully at Nicholas. A sudden wave of
+realization beat up against his consciousness and receded.</p>
+<p>"Well," he said, "we shall know at midnight."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>An immense restlessness came over them.</p>
+<p>At a quarter-past eight Dorothy telephoned from her club in
+Grafton street. Frank had had to leave her suddenly. Somebody had
+sent for him. And if they wanted to see the sight of their lives
+they were to come into town at once. St. James's was packed with
+people from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace. It was like nothing on
+earth, and they mustn't miss it. She'd wait for them in Grafton
+Street till a quarter to nine, but not a minute later.</p>
+<p>Nicky got out his big four-seater Morss car. They packed
+themselves into it, all six of them somehow, and he drove them into
+London. They had a sense of doing something strange and memorable
+and historic. Dorothy, picked up at her club, showed nothing but a
+pleasurable excitement. She gave no further information about
+Frank. He had had to go off and see somebody. What did he think? He
+thought what he had always thought; only he wouldn't talk about
+it.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was not inclined to talk about it either. The Morss was
+caught in a line blocked at the bottom of Albemarle Street by two
+streams of cars, mixed with two streams of foot passengers, that
+poured steadily from Piccadilly into St. James's Street.</p>
+<p>Michael and Dorothy got out and walked. Nicholas gave up his
+place to Anthony and followed with Veronica.</p>
+<p>Their restlessness had been a part of the immense restlessness
+of the crowd. They were drawn, as the crowd was drawn; they went as
+the crowd went, up and down, restlessly, from Trafalgar Square and
+Whitehall to Buckingham Palace; from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall
+and Trafalgar Square. They drifted down Parliament Street to
+Westminster and back again. An hour ago the drifting, nebulous
+crowd had split, torn asunder between two attractions; its two
+masses had wheeled away, one to the east and the other to the west;
+they had gathered themselves together, one at each pole of the
+space it now traversed. The great meeting in Trafalgar Square
+balanced the multitude that had gravitated towards Buckingham
+Palace, to see the King and Queen come out on their balcony and
+show themselves to their people.</p>
+<p>And as the edges of the two masses gave way, each broke and
+scattered, and was mixed again with the other. Like a flood,
+confined and shaken, it surged and was driven back and surged again
+from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace, from Buckingham Palace to
+Whitehall. It looked for an outlet in the narrow channels of the
+side-streets, or spread itself over the flats of the Green Park,
+only to return restlessly upon itself, sucked back by the main
+current in the Mall.</p>
+<p>It was as if half London had met there for Bank Holiday. Part of
+this crowd was drunk; it was orgiastic; it made strange, fierce
+noises, like the noises of one enormous, mystically excited beast;
+here and there, men and women, with inflamed and drunken faces,
+reeled in each other's arms; they wore pink paper feathers in their
+hats. Some, only half intoxicated, flicked at each other with long
+streamers of pink and white paper, carried like scourges on small
+sticks. These were the inspired.</p>
+<p>But the great body of the crowd was sober. It went decorously in
+a long procession, young men with their sweethearts, friends,
+brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers with
+their children; none, or very few, went alone that night.</p>
+<p>It was an endless procession of faces; grave and thoughtful
+faces; uninterested, respectable faces; faces of unmoved integrity;
+excited faces; dreaming, wondering, bewildered faces; faces merely
+curious, or curiously exalted, slightly ecstatic, open-mouthed,
+fascinated by each other and by the movements and the lights;
+laughing, frivolous faces, and faces utterly vacant and
+unseeing.</p>
+<p>On every other breast there was a small Union Jack pinned; every
+other hand held and waggled a Union Jack. The Union Jack flew from
+the engine of every other automobile. In twelve hours, out of
+nowhere, thousands and thousands of flags sprang magically into
+being; as if for years London had been preparing for this day.</p>
+<p>And in and out of this crowd the train of automobiles with their
+flags dashed up and down the Mall for hours, appearing and
+disappearing. Intoxicated youths with inflamed faces, in full
+evening dress, squatted on the roofs of taxi-cabs or rode astride
+on the engines of their cars, waving flags.</p>
+<p>All this movement, drunken, orgiastic, somnambulistic,
+mysteriously restless, streamed up and down between two solemn and
+processional lines of lights, two solemn and processional lines of
+trees, lines that stretched straight from Whitehall to Buckingham
+Palace in a recurrent pattern of trees and lamps, dark trees,
+twilit trees, a lamp and a tree shining with a metallic unnatural
+green; and, at the end of the avenue, gilded gates and a
+golden-white fa&ccedil;ade.</p>
+<p>The crowd was drifting now towards the Palace. Michael and
+Dorothea, Nicholas and Veronica, went with it. In this eternal
+perambulation they met people that they knew; Stephen and Vera;
+Mitchell, Monier-Owen; Uncle Morrie and his sisters. Anthony,
+looking rather solemn, drove past them in his car. It was like
+impossible, grotesque encounters in a dream.</p>
+<p>Outside the Palace the crowd moved up and down without rest; it
+drifted and returned; it circled round and round the fountain. In
+the open spaces the intoxicated motor-cars and taxi-cabs darted and
+tore with the folly of moths and the fury of destroyers. They stung
+the air with their hooting. Flags, intoxicated flags, still hung
+from their engines. They came flying drunkenly out of the dark,
+like a trumpeting swarm of enormous insects, irresistibly,
+incessantly drawn to the lights of the Palace, hypnotized by the
+golden-white fa&ccedil;ade.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, Michael's soul revolted.</p>
+<p>"If this demented herd of swine is a great people going into a
+great war, God help us! Beasts--it's not as if <i>their</i> bloated
+skins were likely to be punctured."</p>
+<p>He called back over his shoulders to the others.</p>
+<p>"Let's get out of this. If we don't I shall be sick."</p>
+<p>He took Dorothy by her arm and shouldered his way out.</p>
+<p>The water had ceased playing in the fountain.</p>
+<p>Nicholas and Veronica stood by the fountain. The water in the
+basin was green like foul sea-water. The jetsam of the crowd
+floated there. A small child leaned over the edge of the basin and
+fished for Union Jacks in the filthy pool. Its young mother held it
+safe by the tilted edge of its petticoats. She looked up at them
+and smiled. They smiled back again and turned away.</p>
+<p>It was quiet on the south side by the Barracks. Small, sober
+groups of twos and threes strolled there, or stood with their faces
+pressed close against the railings, peering into the barrack yard.
+Motionless, earnest and attentive, they stared at the men in khaki
+moving about on the other side of the railings. They were silent,
+fascinated by the men in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing,
+they stared at them with an awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in
+khaki stared back, proud, self-conscious, as men who know that the
+hour is great and that it is their hour.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," Veronica said, "I wish Michael wouldn't say things like
+that."</p>
+<p>"He's dead right, Ronny. That isn't the way to take it, getting
+drunk and excited, and rushing about making silly asses of
+themselves. They <i>are</i> rather swine, you know."</p>
+<p>"Yes; but they're pathetic. Can't you see how pathetic they are?
+Nicky, I believe I love the swine--even the poor drunken ones with
+the pink paper feathers--just because they're English; because
+awful things are going to happen to them, and they don't know it.
+They're English."</p>
+<p>"You think God's made us all like that? He <i>hasn't</i>."</p>
+<p>They found Anthony in the Mall, driving up and down, looking for
+them. He had picked up Dorothy and Aunt Emmeline and Uncle
+Morrie.</p>
+<p>"We're going down to the Mansion House," he said, "to hear the
+Proclamation. Will you come?"</p>
+<p>But Veronica and Nicholas were tired of crowds, even of historic
+crowds. Anthony drove off with his car-load, and they went
+home.</p>
+<p>"I never saw Daddy so excited," Nicky said.</p>
+<p>But Anthony was not excited. He had never felt calmer or cooler
+in his life.</p>
+<p>He returned some time after midnight. By that time it had sunk
+into him. Germany <i>had</i> defied the ultimatum and England
+<i>had</i> declared war on Germany.</p>
+<p>He said it was only what was to be foreseen. He had known all
+the time that it would happen--really.</p>
+<p>The tension of the day of the ultimatum had this peculiar
+psychological effect that all over England people who had declared
+up to the last minute that there would be no War were saying the
+same thing as Anthony and believing it.</p>
+<p>Michael was disgusted with the event that had put an end to the
+Irish Revolution. It was in this form that he conceived his first
+grudge against the War.</p>
+<p>This emotion of his was like some empty space of horror opened
+up between him and Nicholas; Nicky being the only one of his family
+who was as yet aware of its existence.</p>
+<p>For the next three days, Nicholas, very serious and earnest,
+shut himself up in his workshop at the bottom of the orchard and
+laboured there, putting the last touches to the final, perfect,
+authoritative form of the Moving Fortress, the joint creation of
+his brain and Drayton's, the only experiment that had survived the
+repeated onslaughts of the Major's criticism. The new model was
+three times the size of the lost original; it was less like a
+battleship and more like a racing-car and a destroyer. It was his
+and Drayton's last word on the subject of armaments.</p>
+<p>It was going to the War Office, this time, addressed to the
+right person, and accompanied by all sorts of protective
+introductions, and Drayton blasting its way before it with his new
+explosive.</p>
+<p>In those three days Nick found an immense distraction in his
+Moving Fortress. It also served to blind his family to his real
+intentions. He knew that his real intentions could not be kept from
+them very long. Meanwhile the idea that he was working on something
+made them happy. When Frances saw him in his overalls she smiled
+and said: "Nicky's got <i>his</i> job, anyhow." John came and
+looked at him through the window of the workshop and laughed.</p>
+<p>"Good old Nicky," he said. "Doing his bit!"</p>
+<p>In those three days John went about with an air of agreeable
+excitement. Or you came upon him sitting in solitary places like
+the dining-room, lost in happy thought. Michael said of him that he
+was unctuous. He exuded a secret joy and satisfaction. John had
+acquired a sudden remarkable maturity. He shone on each member of
+his family with benevolence and affection, as if he were its
+protector and consoler, and about to confer on it some tremendous
+benefit.</p>
+<p>"Look at Don-Don," Michael said. "The bloodthirsty little brute.
+He's positively enjoying the War."</p>
+<p>"You might leave me alone," said Don-Don. "I shan't have it to
+enjoy for long."</p>
+<p>He was one of those who believed that the War would be over in
+four months.</p>
+<p>Michael, pledged to secrecy, came and looked at the Moving
+Fortress. He was interested and intelligent; he admired that
+efficiency of Nicky's that was so unlike his own.</p>
+<p>Yet, he wondered, after all, was it so unlike? He, too, was
+aiming at an art as clean and hard and powerful as Nicky's, as
+naked of all blazonry and decoration, an art which would attain its
+objective by the simplest, most perfect adjustment of means to
+ends.</p>
+<p>And Anthony was proud of that hidden wonder locked behind the
+door of the workshop in the orchard. He realized that his son
+Nicholas had taken part in a great and important thing. He was
+prouder of Nicholas than he had been of Michael.</p>
+<p>And Michael knew it.</p>
+<p>Nicky's brains could be used for the service of his country.</p>
+<p>But Michael's? Anthony said to himself that there wasn't any
+sense--any sense that he could endure to contemplate--in which
+Michael's brains could be of any use to his country. When Anthony
+thought of the mobilization of his family for national service,
+Michael and Michael's brains were a problem that he put behind him
+for the present and refused to contemplate. There would be time
+enough for Michael later.</p>
+<p>Anthony was perfectly well aware of his own one talent, the
+talent which had made "Harrison and Harrison" the biggest
+timber-importing firm in England. If there was one thing he
+understood it was organization. If there was one thing he could not
+tolerate it was waste of good material, the folly of forcing men
+and women into places they were not fit for. He had let his eldest
+son slip out of the business without a pang, or with hardly any
+pang. He had only taken Nicholas into it as an experiment. It was
+on John that he relied to inherit it and carry it farther.</p>
+<p>As a man of business he approved of the advertised formula:
+"Business as Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which
+England expected every man to do was to stay in the place he was
+most fitted for and to go where he was most wanted. Nothing but
+muddle and disaster could follow any departure from this rule.</p>
+<p>It was fitting that Frances and Veronica should do Red Cross
+work. It was fitting that Dorothy should help to organize the
+relief of the Belgium refugees. It was fitting that John should
+stay at home and carry on the business, and that he, Anthony,
+should enlist when he had settled John into his place. It was,
+above all, fitting that Nicky should devote himself to the
+invention and manufacture of armaments. He could not conceive
+anything more wantonly and scandalously wasteful than a system that
+could make any other use of Nicky's brains. He thanked goodness
+that, with a European War upon us, such a system, if it existed,
+would not be allowed to live a day.</p>
+<p>As for Michael, it might be fitting later--very much
+later--perhaps. If Michael wanted to volunteer for the Army then,
+and if it were necessary, he would have no right to stop him. But
+it would not be necessary. England was going to win this War on the
+sea and not on land. Michael was practically safe.</p>
+<p>And behind Frances's smile, and John's laughter, and Michael's
+admiration, and Anthony's pride there was the thought: "Whatever
+happens, Nicky will he safe."</p>
+<p>And the model of the Moving Fortress was packed up--Veronica and
+Nicky packed it--and it was sent under high protection to the War
+Office. And Nicky unlocked the door of his workshop and rested
+restlessly from his labour.</p>
+<p>And there was a call for recruits, and for still more
+recruits.</p>
+<p>Westminster Bridge became a highway for regiments marching to
+battle. The streets were parade-grounds for squad after squad of
+volunteers in civilian clothes, self-conscious and abashed under
+the eyes of the men in khaki.</p>
+<p>And Michael said: "This is the end of all the arts. Artists will
+not be allowed to exist except as agents for the recruiting
+sergeant. We're dished."</p>
+<p>That was the second grudge he had against the War. It killed the
+arts in the very hour of their renaissance. "Eccentricities" by
+Morton Ellis, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, and the "New
+Poems" of Michael Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell,
+were to have come out in September. But it was not conceivable that
+they should come out.</p>
+<p>At the first rumour of the ultimatum Michael and Ellis had given
+themselves up for lost.</p>
+<p>Li&eacute;ge fell and Namur was falling.</p>
+<p>And the call went on for recruits, and for still more recruits.
+And Nicky in five seconds had destroyed his mother's illusions and
+the whole fabric of his father's plans.</p>
+<p>It was one evening when they were in the drawing-room, sitting
+up after Veronica had gone to bed.</p>
+<p>"I hope you won't mind, Father," he said; "but I'm going to
+enlist to-morrow."</p>
+<p>He did not look at his father's face. He looked at his mother's.
+She was sitting opposite him on the couch beside Dorothy. John
+balanced himself on the head of the couch with his arm round his
+mother's shoulder. Every now and then he stooped down and rubbed
+his cheek thoughtfully against her hair.</p>
+<p>A slight tremor shook her sensitive, betraying upper lip; then
+she looked back at Nicholas and smiled.</p>
+<p>Dorothy set her mouth hard, unsmiling.</p>
+<p>Anthony had said nothing. He stared before him at Michael's
+foot, thrust out and tilted by the crossing of his knees. Michael's
+foot, with its long, arched instep, fascinated Anthony. He seemed
+to be thinking: "If I look at it long enough I may forget what
+Nicky has said."</p>
+<p>"I hope you won't mind, Father; but I'm enlisting too."</p>
+<p>John's voice was a light, high echo of Nicky's.</p>
+<p>With a great effort Anthony roused himself from his
+contemplation of Michael's foot.</p>
+<p>"I--can't--see--that my minding--or not minding--has
+anything--to do--with it."</p>
+<p>He brought his words out slowly and with separate efforts, as if
+they weighed heavily on his tongue. "We've got to consider what's
+best for the country all round, and I doubt if either of you is
+called upon to go."</p>
+<p>"Some of us have got to go," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Quite so. But I don't think it ought to be you, Nicky; or John,
+either."</p>
+<p>"I suppose," said Michael, "you mean it ought to be me."</p>
+<p>"I don't mean anything of the sort. One out of four's
+enough."</p>
+<p>"One out of four? Well then--"</p>
+<p>"That only leaves me to fight," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"I wasn't thinking of you, Michael. Or of Dorothy."</p>
+<p>They all looked at him where he sat, upright and noble, in his
+chair, and most absurdly young.</p>
+<p>Dorothy said under her breath: "Oh, you darling Daddy."</p>
+<p>"<i>You</i> won't be allowed to go, anyhow," said John to his
+father. "You needn't think it."</p>
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+<p>"Well--." He hadn't the heart to say: "Because you're too
+old."</p>
+<p>"Nicky's brains will be more use to the country than my old
+carcass."</p>
+<p>Nicky thought: "You're the very last of us that can be spared."
+But he couldn't say it. The thing was so obvious. All he said was:
+"It's out of the question, your going."</p>
+<p>"Old Nicky's out of the question, if you like," said John. "He's
+going to be married. He ought to be thinking of his wife and
+children."</p>
+<p>"Of course he ought," said Anthony. "Whoever goes first, it
+isn't Nicky."</p>
+<p>"You ought to think of Mummy, Daddy ducky; and you ought to
+think of <i>us</i>," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"I," said John, "haven't got anybody to think of. I'm not going
+to be married, and I haven't any children."</p>
+<p>"I haven't got a wife and children yet," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"You've got Veronica. You ought to think of her."</p>
+<p>"I am thinking of her. You don't suppose Veronica'd stop me if I
+wanted to go? Why, she wouldn't look at me if I didn't want to
+go."</p>
+<p>Suddenly he remembered Michael.</p>
+<p>"I mean," he said, "after my <i>saying</i> that I was
+going."</p>
+<p>Their eyes met. Michael's flickered. He knew that Nicky was
+thinking of him.</p>
+<p>"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.</p>
+<p>"Of course she knows. <i>You</i> aren't going to try to stop me,
+Mother?"</p>
+<p>"No," she said. "I'm not going to try to stop you--this
+time."</p>
+<p>She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would
+be safe now, with the Army in India."</p>
+<p>One by one they got up and said "Good night" to each other.</p>
+<p>But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.</p>
+<p>He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not
+enlisting. At any rate, <i>not yet</i>. Don't worry about Don and
+Daddy. They won't take Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his
+heart that he doesn't know about. He's going to be jolly well sold,
+poor chap. And they won't take the guv'nor because he's too old;
+though the dear old thing thinks he can bluff them into it because
+he doesn't look it.</p>
+<p>"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned,
+the War's a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the
+Army. You know how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now
+I'm going in and nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me
+out. Soon they'll all be as pleased as Punch about it.</p>
+<p>"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want
+to stick bayonets into German tummies, just <i>because</i> they're
+so large and oodgy. You'd think of that first and all the time and
+afterwards. And I shan't think of it at all.</p>
+<p>"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons
+that I can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect
+yourself if you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I
+stayed out."</p>
+<p>"I wonder," Michael said, "if you really see it."</p>
+<p>"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing
+chaps. You seem to think nobody can ever see anything except
+yourselves."</p>
+<p>When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really
+does see? Or if he made it all up?"</p>
+<p>They had not said to each other all that they had really meant.
+Of Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered
+vividly, "Not yet."</p>
+<p>Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up
+between him and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the
+two words: "Not yet."</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected;
+Anthony on account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur
+that he didn't know about.</p>
+<p>The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was
+under thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if
+he'd left it at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than
+most of 'em when he was stripped. But they'd given him so good an
+innings that the poor old thing got above himself, and spun them a
+yarn about his hair having gone grey from a recent shock. That
+dished him. They said they knew that sort of hair; they'd been
+seeing a lot of it lately.</p>
+<p>Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape,"
+and declared that if that was the way things were going to be
+managed it was a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He
+said the man who examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know
+his own rotten business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to
+tell him they didn't want him dropping down dead when he went into
+action, or fainting from sheer excitement after they'd been to the
+trouble and expense of training him. As if he'd be likely to do a
+damn silly thing like that. He'd never been excited in his life. It
+was enough to <i>give</i> him heart-disease.</p>
+<p>So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and
+joined the ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they
+learned to their disgust that, though they might possibly be
+accepted as volunteers for Home Service, their disabilities would
+keep them forever from the Front.</p>
+<p>At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business
+by a sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the
+War would be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the
+personal significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that
+its immediate message for him was that business must be attended
+to. He had not attended to it many days before he saw that his work
+for his country lay there under his hand, in his offices and his
+stackyards and factories. He sighed and sat down to it, and turned
+his back resolutely on the glamour of the Front. The particular
+business in hand had great issues and a fascination of its own.</p>
+<p>And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body
+and a brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and
+abstracted soul.</p>
+<p>And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through
+the first courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching
+in sun and wind and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high,
+breast high in earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his
+young, hard body harder every day.</p>
+<p>And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael
+widened.</p>
+<p>With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's
+entire family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized
+from Frances and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days
+there were few Red Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner
+or later they would be sent to the Front. Their only fear was that
+they might not be trained and ready when the moment of the summons
+came. Strong young girls hustled for the best places at the
+ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly women, twitching with nervous
+anxiety, contended with these remorseless ones and were pushed to
+the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained by their
+extraordinary illusion.</p>
+<p>Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity
+with bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if
+nobody else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of
+cerebral excitement, while still struggling to find each other's
+arteries, declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no
+earthly reason why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted
+the Emergency class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch
+triangular bandage round his neck, and volunteered as an
+instructor. He got mixed up with his bandages, and finally
+consented to the use of his person as a lay-figure for practical
+demonstrations while he waited for his orders to go to the
+Front.</p>
+<p>They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each
+other's hopes.</p>
+<p>For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings
+had ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a
+curious gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom
+(Michael's study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall,
+and there the queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and
+tender, showing Edith over and over again how to adjust a scalp
+bandage on Emmeline's head, and of Emmeline motionless for hours
+under Edie's little, clumsy, pinching fingers. It was thus, with
+small vibrations of tenderness and charity, that they responded to
+the vast rhythm of the War.</p>
+<p>And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence,
+pushed out her lower lip at them.</p>
+<p>"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit,
+you might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every
+woman in England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have
+enough socks for his Army."</p>
+<p>Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted
+conspicuously, as a protest against bandage practice; giving to her
+soft and gentle action an air of energy inimical to her three
+unmarried daughters. And not even Louie had the heart to tell her
+that all her knitting had to be unravelled overnight, to save the
+wool.</p>
+<p>"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting
+khaki!"</p>
+<p>Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal
+affair, as if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other
+women were interfering with them.</p>
+<p>Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all
+the men. The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and
+her followers received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain
+from violence during the period of the War. And instantly, in the
+first week of war, the Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies
+(already organized and disciplined by seven years' methodical
+resistance) presented their late enemy, the Government, with an
+instrument of national service made to its hand and none the worse
+because originally devised for its torture and embarassment.</p>
+<p>The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a
+sound into the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all
+over England and went into uniform.</p>
+<p>And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches
+and puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a
+motor-ambulance as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that
+Anthony had given to it. Dorothea really had a chance of being sent
+to Belgium before the end of the month. Meanwhile she convoyed
+Belgian refugees from Cannon Street Station.</p>
+<p>She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon
+Street Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the
+horror and misery of Belgium poured and was congested.</p>
+<p>Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending
+all of her life that counted there; as if for years she had been
+familiar with the scene.</p>
+<p>Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the
+blurred transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long
+roof, that was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a
+greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps,
+opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By
+night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like
+moons, lit again to a ghastly, ruinous life.</p>
+<p>The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing
+under the immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of
+carriages packed tight with packages, with, enormous bundles; human
+heads appearing, here and there, above the swollen curves of the
+bundles; human bodies emerging in the struggle to bring forth the
+bundles through the narrow doors.</p>
+<p>For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding
+wounds and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this
+one incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon
+Street Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the
+sequences of which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of
+men, women and children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they
+were staggering under those bundles along their straight, flat
+roads between the everlasting rows of poplars; their towns and
+villages flamed and smoked behind them; some of them, goaded like
+tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at their backs--yesterday.
+And this morning they were here, brave and gay, smiling at Dorothea
+as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their small children
+in her arms.</p>
+<p>And they were still proud of themselves.</p>
+<p>A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a
+large pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other
+a cage with a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and
+smiled, proud of herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A
+Belgium boy carried a paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He
+grinned at Dorothea, proud of himself because he had saved his
+grandfather. A young Flemish peasant woman pushed back the shawl
+that covered her baby's face to show her how pretty he was; she
+laughed because she had borne him and saved him.</p>
+<p>And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women
+and girls idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in
+trying to throw himself into a moving train because he thought his
+lost mother was in it. The ring screening the agony of a woman
+giving birth to her child on the platform. A death in the train;
+stiff, upturned feet at the end of a stretcher that the
+police-ambulance carried away.</p>
+<p>And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in
+perfect safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety
+was hard and bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had
+a monstrous longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the
+shells burst, and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the
+straight, flat roads between the poplars where the refugees had
+gone, so that her nerves and flesh should know and feel their
+suffering and their danger. She was not feeling anything now except
+the shame of her immunity.</p>
+<p>She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I
+were dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."</p>
+<p>Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were
+in Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could
+walk."</p>
+<p>Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians,
+because it was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate,
+were safe. Her father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not
+in it--yet; though of course he would be in it some time. She tried
+not to think too much about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next
+six months. And Frank was safe. Frank was training recruits. He had
+told her he might be kept indefinitely at that infernal job. But
+for that he would be fighting now. He wanted her to be sorry for
+him; and she was sorry for him. And she was glad too.</p>
+<p>One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till
+dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she
+found him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting
+for her by himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the
+schoolroom.</p>
+<p>"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait
+up here."</p>
+<p>She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur
+of dust on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her
+face and hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her
+car.</p>
+<p>He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was
+the first time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and
+puttees, the loose felt hat turned up at one side, its funny,
+boyish chin-strap, the dust and dirt of her; and he smiled. His
+smile had none of the cynical derision which had once greeted her
+appearances as a militant suffragist.</p>
+<p>"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe
+me now."</p>
+<p>"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.</p>
+<p>"Not <i>yet</i>--worse luck."</p>
+<p>"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas,
+or what?"</p>
+<p>"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair
+off?"</p>
+<p>"They might. They might do anything. This is a most
+extraordinary war."</p>
+<p>"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."</p>
+<p>"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in
+him.</p>
+<p>"What did you think?"</p>
+<p>"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like
+business. Do you really mean it? Are you really going to
+Flanders?"</p>
+<p>"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this
+if she wasn't going <i>some</i>where?"</p>
+<p>He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And
+then: "It makes you look about eighteen."</p>
+<p>"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."</p>
+<p>"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that
+you're not eighteen? You're eight and twenty."</p>
+<p>"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you
+did, you wouldn't say so."</p>
+<p>"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made
+a pretty mess of each other's lives."</p>
+<p>"Have I made a mess of <i>your</i> life?'</p>
+<p>"A beastly mess."</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known.
+You know I wouldn't.</p>
+<p>"But one doesn't know things."</p>
+<p>"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully
+well; but not the things that matter."</p>
+<p>"Well--but what could I do?" she said.</p>
+<p>"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married
+me. And we would have had three years of each other."</p>
+<p>"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't
+manage it."</p>
+<p>"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.</p>
+<p>"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I
+get leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three
+days."</p>
+<p>"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three
+days--No, it wasn't worth while.</p>
+<p>"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck
+doesn't change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change.
+So, you see, it's got to be one thing or another."</p>
+<p>And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not
+worth while?</p>
+<p>"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There
+really isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what
+you like and do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I
+shan't care if you'll only marry me."</p>
+<p>"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love
+me. You never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all
+that."</p>
+<p>"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine
+years--ten years?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go
+off and get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for
+me or not.</p>
+<p>"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my
+face--filthy--you mustn't--"</p>
+<p>"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't
+care."</p>
+<p>The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He
+laughed. He said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a
+scrimmage, and she keeps it on <i>now</i>!"</p>
+<p>She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of
+a Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face,
+over her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped
+her shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender
+body fast to him, straight against his own straightness, till the
+passion and the youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.</p>
+<p>He said to himself, "She <i>shall</i> come alive. She
+<i>shall</i> feel. She <i>shall want</i> me. I'll make her. I
+should have thought of this ten years ago."</p>
+<p>Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and
+hands. And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing
+something happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him
+now--to-night."</p>
+<p>Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he
+knew what she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor
+Dorothy, who had made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive
+so late.</p>
+<p>She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me
+if he knew."</p>
+<p>Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at
+her?</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her
+face and hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever
+would be.</p>
+<p>"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if
+there was anything that could have prevented it."</p>
+<p>"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't
+matter--that it made no difference to you what I did. But, you see,
+it made all the difference. And there we were."</p>
+<p>"It didn't--really."</p>
+<p>She shook her head. "We thought it did."</p>
+<p>"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from
+Holloway?</p>
+<p>"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk
+about it. I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear
+of you."</p>
+<p>"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that
+we seemed to go wrong.</p>
+<p>"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could
+stand going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying
+that I didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in
+prison or wondered what you were feeling? <i>That's</i> what put me
+off. It hurt so atrociously that I couldn't say anything.</p>
+<p>"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about
+nothing else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with
+thinking.</p>
+<p>"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't
+true. I was listening like anything."</p>
+<p>"Darling--what did I tell you?"</p>
+<p>"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your
+adventure, or something."</p>
+<p>"My adventure?"</p>
+<p>"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I
+couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's
+beyond me now."</p>
+<p>"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"</p>
+<p>"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something
+big and important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to
+bother me. I kept on trying to get it, and not getting it."</p>
+<p>"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully
+big and important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had
+happened to somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."</p>
+<p>"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of
+that business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."</p>
+<p>"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the
+War."</p>
+<p>"You're not swallowed up."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps I shall be."</p>
+<p>"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you
+to know that I understand what you were driving at. It was this
+way, wasn't it? You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You
+couldn't keep out of it any more than I can keep out of this
+War."</p>
+<p>"You couldn't stay out just for me any more than I can stay out
+for just you."</p>
+<p>"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way
+you were in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."</p>
+<p>"How clever of you," she said, "to see it!"</p>
+<p>"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a
+war on. We've both had to pay for my stupidity."</p>
+<p>"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see,
+or risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow, we've got this evening."</p>
+<p>"We haven't. I've got to drive Belgians from nine till past
+midnight."</p>
+<p>"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married
+in. I say--how about to-morrow evening?"</p>
+<p>"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know
+who'll drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married
+in, too."</p>
+<p>She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out.
+If he is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."</p>
+<p>It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch
+at their happiness and secure it, before their hour came.</p>
+<p>She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the
+British line was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of
+course it would recover. We always began like that. We went back to
+go forwards faster, when we got into our stride.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The next evening, Thursday, the girl she knew drove for
+Dorothea.</p>
+<p>When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her
+with two frocks over her arm.</p>
+<p>"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell
+whether to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if
+it mattered more than anything. More than anything on earth."</p>
+<p>Frances considered it--Dorothea in her uniform, and the white
+frock and the blue frock.</p>
+<p>"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose
+to you in that get-up--"</p>
+<p>"Can't you see that I want to make up for <i>that</i> and for
+all the things he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only
+I was as beautiful as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."</p>
+<p>"My dear--my dear--"</p>
+<p>Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as
+Nicky with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up
+Dorothy in khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and
+blue frocks, made Frances want to cry.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy
+that he couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only
+have one hour to give her.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony looked at each other. But Dorothy looked at
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>"What's the matter, Ronny? You look simply awful."</p>
+<p>"Do I? My head's splitting. I think I'll go and lie down."</p>
+<p>"You'd better."</p>
+<p>"Go straight to bed," said Frances. "and let Nanna bring you
+some hot soup."</p>
+<p>But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to
+take herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.</p>
+<p>"Well," said Anthony, "if she's going to worry herself sick
+about Nicky now--"</p>
+<p>Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.</p>
+<p>It was nine o'clock.</p>
+<p>At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought:
+"Supposing he hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely.
+If he hadn't got leave he would have said so when he
+telephoned.</p>
+<p>The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would
+hold her in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be
+afraid, and she would be afraid, and he would let her go.</p>
+<p>The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud
+and quick on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room
+to them, holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes
+shone with excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that
+narrowed his eyes and jerked his mouth slightly crooked.</p>
+<p>They all spoke at once. "You've got leave?" "<i>He's</i> got it
+all right." "What kept you?" "You <i>have</i> got leave?"</p>
+<p>His eyes still shone; his mouth still jerked, laughing.</p>
+<p>"Well, no," he said. "That's what I haven't got. In fact, I'm
+lucky to be here at all."</p>
+<p>Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat
+down on the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his
+spoon, and smiling as if at something pleasant that he knew,
+something that he would tell them presently when Nanna left the
+room.</p>
+<p>The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening
+intently for the click of the latch.</p>
+<p>"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off
+till you come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then
+they say they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that
+day.</p>
+<p>"Twelve hours isn't much notice to give a fellow."</p>
+<p>He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was
+speaking to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions
+about trains and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if
+he were not conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat,
+slowly stirring his coffee without drinking it. The vibration of
+her nerves made his answers sound muffled and far-off.</p>
+<p>She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing
+from her minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable
+longing to be alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what
+she had felt yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in
+yesterday, and refused to move on into to-day.</p>
+<p>Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they
+stopped talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would
+be the end.</p>
+<p>Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup
+he had not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea
+that for a moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small
+sound. She saw her mother take the cup from him and set it on the
+table.</p>
+<p>One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they
+were guilty, and left her alone with him.</p>
+<p>It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He
+sat there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance.
+He seemed to be wondering how she was going to take it.</p>
+<p>He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to
+make her want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left
+it."</p>
+<p>And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.</p>
+<p>She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be
+ready to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness
+he required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes
+implored her to put away from her.</p>
+<p>There was something more.</p>
+<p>He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is
+hard luck on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard
+for me." (She could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He
+knew she was brave; he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he
+knew he hadn't got to say the obvious things.</p>
+<p>There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her
+with the power and sweetness of first passion; but without its
+fear. She no longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her
+as he had held her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it
+vibrated to an intenser rhythm.</p>
+<p>She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that
+they were seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more
+than they. When realization passed it would endure.</p>
+<p>Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it,
+to say to each other what it was they felt and saw.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He said, "I shall have to go soon."</p>
+<p>And she said, "I know. Is there anything I can do?"</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd go and see my mother some time. She'd like
+it."</p>
+<p>"I should love to go and see her. What else?"</p>
+<p>"Well--I've no business to ask you, but I wish you'd give it
+up."</p>
+<p>"I'll give anything up. But what?"</p>
+<p>"That ambulance of yours that's going to get into the firing
+line."</p>
+<p>"Oh--"</p>
+<p>"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the
+hardest and most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it
+easier for us to win the War. You can't expect us to fight so
+comfy, and to be killed so comfy, if we know our womenkind are
+being pounded to bits in the ground we've just cleared. If I
+thought <i>you</i> were knocking about anywhere there--"</p>
+<p>"It would make it too hard?"</p>
+<p>"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much
+time to think about it, but when I did--"</p>
+<p>"You'd think 'She might have spared me <i>that</i>.'"</p>
+<p>"Yes. And you might think of your people. It's bad enough for
+them, Nicky going."</p>
+<p>"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and
+where he'll be. That was natural."</p>
+<p>"It's also natural that we should like to find you here when we
+come back."</p>
+<p>"I was thinking of those Belgian women, and the babies--and
+England; so safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."</p>
+<p>"I know. Leaving the children in the burning house?"</p>
+<p>(She had said that once and he had remembered.)</p>
+<p>"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you
+to take the hardest job, really."</p>
+<p>"It isn't; if it's what you want most."</p>
+<p>He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and
+they were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous
+thing.</p>
+<p>"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about
+it. I want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."</p>
+<p>"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it's
+<i>your</i> War, too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"</p>
+<p>"I know," she said.</p>
+<p>And then: "Have you got all your things?"</p>
+<p>"Somebody's got 'em."</p>
+<p>"I haven't given you anything. You must have my
+wrist-watch."</p>
+<p>She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.</p>
+<p>"My wrist's a whopper."</p>
+<p>"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's
+phosphorous," she said. "You can see the time by it in the
+dark."</p>
+<p>"I've nothing for <i>you</i>. Except--" he fumbled in his
+pockets--"I say--here's the wedding-ring."</p>
+<p>They laughed.</p>
+<p>"What more could you want?" she said.</p>
+<p>He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he
+stooped and kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But
+it was not like yesterday.</p>
+<p>Suddenly his face stiffened. "Tell them," he said, "that I'm
+going."</p>
+<p>The British were retreating from Mons.</p>
+<p>The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like
+the travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There
+was no end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no
+end to the German people. And there was no news of British
+reinforcements, or rumour of reinforcements.</p>
+<p>"They come on like waves. Like waves," said Dorothea, reading
+from the papers.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't read about it if I were you, darling," said
+Frances.</p>
+<p>"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we
+don't."</p>
+<p>Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given
+way before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the
+retreat from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been
+sent.</p>
+<p>Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve
+hours' notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any
+sense in it. They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here,
+safe; and the least we could do for <i>them</i> was to trust them,
+and not believe any tales of their retreating.</p>
+<p>And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By
+wire? By letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to
+wait at home, listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the
+knock, the ringing of the bell.</p>
+<p>She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the
+message came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child
+for me that my son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from
+Mons. And ask her to come and see me; but not just yet."</p>
+<p>She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter
+from his Colonel.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into
+Cannon Street Station.</p>
+<p>Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium.
+But she could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts
+that turned it into something more terrible than grief. They came
+to her regularly, beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and
+should have slept, worn out with her hard day's driving.</p>
+<p>She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we
+might have had together. All those years--like a fool--over that
+silly suffrage.</p>
+<p>"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him
+like a brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom.
+And he's died for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last
+things he remembered. He said 'It's <i>your</i> War--it's the
+biggest fight for freedom.' And he's killed in it.</p>
+<p>"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for
+one night.</p>
+<p>"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked
+it. I was a coward. He got nothing."</p>
+<p>His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an
+illusion that prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging
+it towards a contact that was never reached. Death had no power
+over this illusion. She could not see Drayton's face, dead among
+the dead.</p>
+<p>Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality
+that they had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as
+if she had dreamed it or made it up.</p>
+<p>Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking.
+The Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of
+September, and it would take her car with it and a new driver.</p>
+<p>Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.</p>
+<p>"If I could only help you."</p>
+<p>"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up
+and leave the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to
+Veronica; but more often she hid away somewhere by herself.</p>
+<p>Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her.
+She'll go to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now
+it's Veronica."</p>
+<p>But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to
+Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd
+been killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the
+retreat. He couldn't have had five hours' fighting.</p>
+<p>"And to be killed--Retreating.</p>
+<p>"He got nothing out of it but agony."</p>
+<p>Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You
+don't know what he may have got in the last minute of it."</p>
+<p>"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going
+out to Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet
+getting me. But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.</p>
+<p>"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"</p>
+<p>"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you,
+more alive."</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were
+enclosed with it, one from Drayton's mother and one from
+Drayton:</p>
+<p>"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he
+must have known that he would not come back."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular
+bequest. But I want you to see that my memory is fairly good."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three
+cigarette-lighters for markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July
+5th, 1912."</p>
+<p>The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah
+xxxv. and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:</p>
+<p>"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war
+and my fingers to fight."...</p>
+<p>"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk
+there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...</p>
+<p>... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;
+they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be
+weary; they shall walk and not faint."</p>
+<p>And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet
+and powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold
+again on the Reality they had seen and felt together.</p>
+<p>The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it
+lasted she was at peace.</p>
+<p>But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of
+remorse for all that she had wasted.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had
+ceased to feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in
+vain for them. They did not believe that it had saved Paris.</p>
+<p>Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was
+no more Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were
+only a question of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there
+would be no more France. They were face to face with the further
+possibility of there being no more England.</p>
+<p>In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances
+were changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before
+the War, Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she
+would, after careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I
+like England. But I dislike the English people. They are narrow and
+hypocritical and conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs."
+At the time of the Boer War, beyond thinking that the British ought
+to win, and that they would win, and feeling a little spurt as of
+personal satisfaction when they did win, she had had no
+consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for loving it, she
+loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of mild,
+cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her
+house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as
+well talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once
+sat in peace under the tree of Heaven with her <i>Times</i>
+newspaper, and flicked the affairs of the nation from her as less
+important than the stitching on her baby's frock, now talked and
+thought and dreamed of nothing else. She was sad, not because her
+son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling week by week, but
+because England was in danger; she was worried, not because Lord
+Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son Michael,
+but because she had found that the race was to the swift and the
+battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent
+sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she
+left her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City
+with Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office,
+receiving, packing, and sending off great cases of food and
+clothing to the Belgian soldiers.</p>
+<p>Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all
+well under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the
+Government persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber
+that swelled and shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and
+because officials wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them
+what he knew about timber, and because the head of a department had
+talked to <i>him</i> about private firms and profiteering. As if
+any man with three sons under twenty-seven would want to make a
+profit out of the War; and as if they couldn't cut down everybody's
+profits if they took the trouble. They might cut his to the last
+cent so long as we had gun-carriages that would carry guns and
+rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was talking about and they
+didn't.</p>
+<p>And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who
+had once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness,
+loved it now. She thought and said that if there were a few men
+like Anthony at the head of departments we should win the War. We
+were losing it for want of precisely that specialized knowledge and
+that power of organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud
+of him, not because he was her husband and the father of her
+children, but because he was a man who could help England. They
+were both proud of Michael and Nicholas and John, not because they
+were their sons, but because they were men who could fight for
+England.</p>
+<p>They found that they loved England with a secret, religious,
+instinctive love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man
+might stand and fight for, became, mysteriously and magically,
+dearer to them than their home. They loved England more than their
+own life or the lives of their children. Long ago they had realized
+that fathers do not beget children nor mothers bear them merely to
+gratify themselves. Now, in September and October, they were
+realizing that children are not begotten and born for their own
+profit and pleasure either.</p>
+<p>When they sat together after the day's work they found
+themselves saying the most amazing things to each other.</p>
+<p>Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better.
+I shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had
+been pleasant to him.</p>
+<p>And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of
+three, we ought to send them all."</p>
+<p>"Positively," said Anthony. "I believe I'd let Dorothy go out
+now if she insisted."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, I think we might be allowed to keep Dorothy."</p>
+<p>She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I
+grudged giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if
+he went out to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how
+splendid it was of him."</p>
+<p>"I wish poor Dorothy could feel that way about Drayton."</p>
+<p>"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was
+his profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."</p>
+<p>He did not remind her that Frank's free will had counted in his
+choice of a profession.</p>
+<p>"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count
+more than the whole Army put together."</p>
+<p>They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing
+that sooner or later they must speak of it.</p>
+<p>Frances was the braver of the two. She spoke first.</p>
+<p>"There's Michael. I don't know what to make of him. He doesn't
+seem to want to go."</p>
+<p>That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably
+in secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something
+must be done about Michael.</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd say something to him, Anthony."</p>
+<p>"I would if I were going myself. But how can I?"</p>
+<p>"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you
+were young enough."</p>
+<p>"I can't say anything. You'll have to."</p>
+<p>"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky
+is the only one of us who has any right to."</p>
+<p>"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her
+way."</p>
+<p>"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."</p>
+<p>But in the end she did say something.</p>
+<p>She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding
+himself away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she
+thought, "as if he were ashamed of himself."</p>
+<p>Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious
+beauty of his young face; at the thick masses of his hair that
+would not stay as they were brushed back, but fell over his
+forehead; it was still yellow, and shining as it shone when he was
+a little boy.</p>
+<p>He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of
+verse on the white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came
+in lest she should see them. That hurt her.</p>
+<p>"Michael," she said, "I wonder if you <i>ever</i> realize that
+we are at war."</p>
+<p>"The War isn't a positive obsession to me, if that's what you
+mean."</p>
+<p>"It isn't what I mean. Only--that when other people are doing so
+much--</p>
+<p>"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."</p>
+<p>"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If
+George Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."</p>
+<p>"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason,
+when so much more has been done for you than was ever done for
+him?"</p>
+<p>"It's no use trying to get at me."</p>
+<p>"England's fighting for her life," said Frances.</p>
+<p>"So's Germany.</p>
+<p>"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker
+hates Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear
+old Frau Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and
+Carl, and make Hedwig and L&ouml;ttchen cry."</p>
+<p>"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George
+and Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."</p>
+<p>"Bayonetting isn't my business."</p>
+<p>"Your own safety is. How can you bear to let other men fight for
+you?"</p>
+<p>"They're not fighting for <i>me</i>, Mother. You ask them if
+they are, and see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God
+knows what; but they're no more fighting for me than they're
+fighting for Aunt Emmeline."</p>
+<p>"They <i>are</i> fighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting
+for everything that's weak and defenceless."</p>
+<p>"Well, then, they're not fighting for me. I'm not weak and
+defenceless," said Michael.</p>
+<p>"All the more shame for you, then."</p>
+<p>He smiled, acknowledging her score.</p>
+<p>"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the
+opening for a repartee. It was quite a nice one."</p>
+<p>"If," she said, "you were only <i>doing</i> something. But you
+go on with your own things as though nothing had happened."</p>
+<p>"I <i>am</i> doing something. I'm keeping sane. And I'm keeping
+sanity alive in other people."</p>
+<p>"Much you care for other people," said Frances as she left the
+room.</p>
+<p>But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him
+again. She went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his
+room.</p>
+<p>"<i>Well?</i>" he said.</p>
+<p>"It's no use. He won't go."</p>
+<p>And Frances, quite suddenly and to her own surprise, burst into
+tears.</p>
+<p>He drew her to him, and she clung to him, sobbing softly.</p>
+<p>"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's
+as obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."</p>
+<p>He pressed her tighter to him. He loved her in her unfamiliar
+weakness, crying and clinging to him.</p>
+<p>"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm
+glad he didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to
+him, I couldn't bear to be the one who made him go."</p>
+<p>After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.</p>
+<p>They were silent.</p>
+<p>"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.</p>
+<p>But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.</p>
+<p>"He must know that <i>public</i> feeling's pretty strong against
+him. To say nothing of <i>my</i> feeling and <i>your</i>
+feeling."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his
+father and his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't
+bear to look at Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him,
+he kept out of her way as much as possible.</p>
+<p>As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he
+against it.</p>
+<p>But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of
+these antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant
+to go. Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had
+always offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul.
+From his very first encounters with the collective soul and its
+emotions they had seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were
+loathsome. Collective emotion might be on the side of the
+archangels or on the side of devils and of swine; its mass was what
+made it dangerous, a thing that challenged the resistance of the
+private soul But in his worst dreams of what it could do to him
+Michael had never imagined anything more appalling than the
+collective patriotism of the British and their Allies, this rushing
+together of the souls of four countries to make one monstrous
+soul.</p>
+<p>And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this
+moment, was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of
+the War, the awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his
+real self and from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no
+doubt, a fine emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got
+you; it got you and you were done for. He was determined that it
+shouldn't get him. They couldn't see--and that was Michael's
+grievance--that his resistance was his strength and not his
+weakness.</p>
+<p>Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not
+realize that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the
+same entity as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the
+party, who had wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of
+nothing so much as of forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted
+to remember." He was Michael who refused to stay at school another
+term, and who talked about shooting himself because he had to go
+with his class and do what the other fellows were doing. He
+objected to being suddenly required to feel patriotic because other
+people were feeling patriotic, to think that Germany was in the
+wrong because other people thought that Germany was in the wrong,
+to fight because other people were fighting.</p>
+<p>Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.</p>
+<p>He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the
+assumption that he resented. There was a peculiarly British
+hypocrisy and unfairness and tyranny about it all.</p>
+<p>It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to
+fight. He had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight
+any day in a cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a
+cause that had not been messed about so much by other people. Other
+people had not put pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact
+they had tried to stop him. Michael was also aware that in the
+matter of Ireland his emotions, though shared by considerable
+numbers of the Irish people, were not shared by his family or by
+many people whom he knew; to all intents and purposes he had them
+to himself.</p>
+<p>It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and
+mother, for they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the
+more he would seem to them to be a shirker.</p>
+<p>He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff,
+reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's
+silence when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their
+eyes--his mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the
+unspoken question: "Why don't you go and get killed--for
+England--like other people?"</p>
+<p>Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible,
+palpable; he knew where he was with them. What he could not stand
+was that empty spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him
+where he was most vulnerable--in his imagination.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.</p>
+<p>It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion,
+and your religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored
+Beauty as the supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else;
+if you lived, impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive;
+and for no other end, how could you consent to take part in this
+bloody business? That would be the last betrayal, the most cowardly
+surrender.</p>
+<p>And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one
+of the leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the
+world, of all the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>For Michael, even more than Ellis, had given himself up as
+lost.</p>
+<p>And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect.
+When the young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed
+it with a calm, high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on,
+without pay, without praise, without any sort of recognition. Any
+fool could fight; but, if you were an artist, your honour bound you
+to ignore the material contest, to refuse, even to your country,
+the surrender of the highest that you knew. They believed with the
+utmost fervour and sincerity that they defied Germany more
+effectually, because more spiritually, by going on and producing
+fine things with imperturbability than if they went out against the
+German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they were
+restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.</p>
+<p>They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly,
+on Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease
+(but rather less than more) in Stephen's study.</p>
+<p>They had asked each other: "Are <i>you</i> going to fight for
+your country?"</p>
+<p>And Ellis had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country;
+and Mitchell had said he hadn't got a country, so there was no
+point in his fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could
+show him a country that cared for the arts before anything he'd
+fight for it; but that England was very far from being that
+country.</p>
+<p>And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.</p>
+<p>And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not
+listening to what was said.</p>
+<p>And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral.
+Michael said to himself that he could stand these massed war
+emotions if they were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and
+Rheims Cathedral who had never cared a damn about either before the
+War.</p>
+<p>Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired
+whether Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims
+Cathedral?</p>
+<p>Michael shrugged his shoulders. "Why bother," he said, "about
+Rheims Cathedral and Louvain? From your point of view it's all
+right. If Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the
+enemy's artillery they've got to go. They didn't happen to be in
+the way of ours, that's all."</p>
+<p>Michael's mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its
+malady. He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of
+the Allies and to justify the acts of Germany.</p>
+<p>"It's up to the French to defend Paris. And what have we got to
+do with Alsace-Lorraine? As if every inteligent Frenchman didn't
+know that Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt. No. I'm not
+pro-German. I simply see things as they are."</p>
+<p>"I think," Frances would say placably, "we'd better not talk
+about the War."</p>
+<p>He would remind them that it was not his subject.</p>
+<p>And John laughed at him. "Poor old Nick hates the War because
+it's dished him. He knows his poems can't come out till it's
+over."</p>
+<p>As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.</p>
+<p>After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris. As Stephen
+pointed out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael. In
+magnificent defiance of the enemy, the "New Poems" of Michael
+Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as
+forthcoming in October; and Morton Ellis's "Eccentricities," with
+illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month.
+Even Wadham's poems would come out some time, perhaps next
+spring.</p>
+<p>Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War
+Office as posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the
+morale of the Allied Armies. "If England could afford to publish
+Michael--"</p>
+<p>Michael's family made no comment on the appearance of his poems.
+The book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for
+weeks. When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none
+of his people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or
+hold it in their hands. It seemed to Michael that they were
+conscious of it all the time, and that they turned their faces away
+from it pointedly. They hated it. They hated him for having written
+it.</p>
+<p>He remembered that it had been different when his first book had
+come out two years ago. They had read that; they had snatched at
+all the reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was
+that they had missed.</p>
+<p>They had taken each other aside, and it had been:</p>
+<p>"Anthony, do you understand Michael's poems?"</p>
+<p>"Dorothy, do you understand Michael's poems?"</p>
+<p>"Nicky, do you understand Michael's poems?"</p>
+<p>He remembered his mother's apology for not understanding them:
+"Darling, I <i>do</i> see that they're very beautiful." He
+remembered how he had wished that they would give up the struggle
+and leave his poems alone. They were not written for them. He had
+been amused and irritated when he had seen his father holding the
+book doggedly in front of him, his poor old hands twitching with
+embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was looking at him.</p>
+<p>And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was
+sensitive to the least quiver of his mother's upper lip.</p>
+<p>Veronica's were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did
+not hunt him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.</p>
+<p>Veronica had been rejected too. She was not strong enough to
+nurse in the hospitals. She was only strong enough to work from
+morning to night, packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the
+Belgian soldiers. She wanted Michael to be sorry for her because
+she couldn't be a nurse. Rosalind Jervis was a nurse. But he was
+not sorry. He said he would very much rather she didn't do anything
+that Rosalind did.</p>
+<p>"So would Nicky," he said.</p>
+<p>And then: "Veronica, do <i>you</i> think I ought to enlist?"</p>
+<p>The thought was beginning to obsess him.</p>
+<p>"No," she said; "you're different.</p>
+<p>"I know how you feel about it. Nicky's heart and soul are in the
+War. If he's killed it can only kill his body. <i>Your</i> soul
+isn't in it. It would kill your soul."</p>
+<p>"It's killing it now, killing everything I care for."</p>
+<p>"Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can't
+kill."</p>
+<p>That was one Sunday evening in October. They were standing
+together on the long terrace under the house wall. Before them, a
+little to the right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree
+rose over the garden. The curved and dipping branches swayed and
+swung in a low wind that moved like quiet water.</p>
+<p>"Michael," she said, "do look what's happening to that
+tree."</p>
+<p>"I see," he said.</p>
+<p>It made him sad to look at the tree; it made him sad to look at
+Veronica--because both the tree and Veronica were beautiful.</p>
+<p>"When I was a little girl I used to sit and look and look at
+that tree till it changed and got all thin and queer and began to
+move towards me.</p>
+<p>"I never knew whether it had really happened or not; I don't
+know now--or whether it was the tree or me. It was as if by looking
+and looking you could make the tree more real and more alive."</p>
+<p>Michael remembered something.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy says you saw Ferdie the night he died."</p>
+<p>"So I did. But that's not the same thing. I didn't have to look
+and look. I just saw him. I <i>sort</i> of saw Frank that last
+night--when the call came--only sort of--but I knew he was going to
+be killed.</p>
+<p>"I didn't see him nearly so distinctly as I saw Nicky-"</p>
+<p>"Nicky? You didn't see him--as you saw Ferdie?"</p>
+<p>"No, no, no! it was ages ago--in Germany--before he married. I
+saw him with Desmond."</p>
+<p>"Have you ever seen me?"</p>
+<p>"Not yet. That's because you don't want me as they did."</p>
+<p>"Don't I! Don't I!"</p>
+<p>And she said again: "Not yet."</p>
+<p>Nicky had had leave for Christmas. He had come and gone.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony were depressed; they were beginning to be
+frightened.</p>
+<p>For Nicky had finished his training. He might be sent out any
+day.</p>
+<p>Nicky had had some moments of depression. Nothing had been heard
+of the Moving Fortress. Again, the War Office had given no sign of
+having received it. It was hard luck, he said, on Drayton.</p>
+<p>And John was depressed after he had gone.</p>
+<p>"They'd much better have taken me," he said.</p>
+<p>"What's the good of sending the best brains in the Army to get
+pounded? There's Drayton. He ought to have been in the Ordnance.
+He's killed.</p>
+<p>"And here's Nicky. Nicky ought to be in the engineers or the
+gunners or the Royal Flying Corps; but he's got to stand in the
+trenches and be pounded.</p>
+<p>"Lot they care about anybody's brains. Drayton could have told
+Kitchener that we can't win this war without high-explosive shells.
+So could Nicky.</p>
+<p>"You bet they've stuck all those plans and models in the
+sanitary dust-bin behind the War Office back door. It's enough to
+make Nicky blow his brains out."</p>
+<p>"Nicky doesn't care, really," Veronica said. "He just leaves
+things--and goes on."</p>
+<p>That night, after the others had gone to bed, Michael stayed
+behind with his father.</p>
+<p>"It must look to you," he said, "as if I ought to have gone
+instead of Nicky."</p>
+<p>"I don't say so, Michael. And I'm sure Nicky wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"No, but you both think it. You see, if I went I shouldn't be
+any good at it. Not the same good as Nicky. He wants to go and I
+don't. Can't you see it's different?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Anthony, "I see. I've seen it for some time."</p>
+<p>And Michael remembered the night in August when his brother came
+to him in his room.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Beauty--the Forlorn Hope of God--if he cared for it supremely,
+why was he pursued and tormented by the thought of the space
+between him and Nicky?</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Michael had gone to Stephen's house.</p>
+<p>He was no longer at his ease there. It seemed to him that
+Lawrence's eyes followed him too; not with hatred, but with a
+curious meditative wonder.</p>
+<p>To-night Stephen said to him, "Did you know that
+R&eacute;veillaud's killed?"</p>
+<p>"Killed? Killed? I didn't even know he was fighting."</p>
+<p>Lawrence laughed. "What did you suppose he was doing?"</p>
+<p>"No--but how?"</p>
+<p>"Out with the patrol and shot down. There you are--"</p>
+<p>He shoved the <i>Times</i> to him, pointing to the extract from
+<i>Le Matin</i>: "It is with regret that we record the death of M.
+Jules R&eacute;veillaud, the brilliant young poet and critic--"</p>
+<p>Michael stared at the first three lines; something in his mind
+prevented him from going on to the rest, as if he did not care to
+read about R&eacute;veillaud and know how he died.</p>
+<p>"It is with regret that we record the death. It is with regret
+that we record--with regret--"</p>
+<p>Then he read on, slowly and carefully, to the end. It was a long
+paragraph.</p>
+<p>"To think," he said at last, "that this revolting thing should
+have happened to him."</p>
+<p>"His death?"</p>
+<p>"No--<i>this</i>. The <i>Matin</i> never mentioned
+R&eacute;veillaud before. None of the big papers, none of the big
+reviews noticed his existence except to sneer at him. He goes out
+and gets killed like any little bourgeois, and the swine plaster
+him all over with their filthy praise. He'd rather they'd spat on
+him."</p>
+<p>He meditated fiercely. "Well--he couldn't help it. He was
+conscripted."</p>
+<p>"You think he wouldn't have gone of his own accord?"</p>
+<p>"I'm certain he wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"And I'm certain he would."</p>
+<p>"I wish to God we'd got conscription here. I'd rather the
+Government commandeered my body than stand this everlasting
+interference with my soul."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Lawrence, "you'll not be surprised at my
+enlisting."</p>
+<p>"You're not--"</p>
+<p>"I am. I'd have been in the first week if I'd known what to do
+about Vera."</p>
+<p>"But--it's--it's not sane."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps not. But it's Irish."</p>
+<p>"Irish? I can understand ordinary Irishmen rushing into a
+European row for the row's sake, just because they haven't got a
+civil war to mess about in. But you--of all Irishmen--why on earth
+should <i>you</i> be in it?"</p>
+<p>"Because I want to be in it."</p>
+<p>"I thought," said Michael, "you were to have been a thorn in
+England's side?"</p>
+<p>"So I was. So I am. But not at this minute. My grandmother was a
+hard Ulster woman and I hated her. But I wouldn't be a thorn in my
+grandmother's side if the old lady was assaulted by a brutal
+voluptuary, and I saw her down and fighting for her honour.</p>
+<p>"I've been a thorn in England's side all my life. But it's
+nothing to the thorn I'll be if I'm killed fighting for her."</p>
+<p>"Why--why--if you want to fight in the civil war
+afterwards?"</p>
+<p>"Why? Because I'm one of the few Irishmen who can reason
+straight. I was going into the civil war last year because it was a
+fight for freedom. I'm going into this War this year because it's a
+bigger fight for a bigger freedom.</p>
+<p>"You can't have a free Ireland without a free England, any more
+than you can have religious liberty without political liberty. If
+the Orangemen understood anything at all about it they'd see it was
+the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners that'll help them to put down
+Catholicism in Ireland."</p>
+<p>"You think it matters to Ireland whether Germany licks us or we
+lick Germany?"</p>
+<p>"I think it matters to the whole world."</p>
+<p>"What's changed you?" said Michael.</p>
+<p>He was angry with Lawrence. He thought: "He hasn't any excuse
+for failing us. He hasn't been conscripted."</p>
+<p>"Nothing's changed me. But supposing it didn't matter to the
+whole world, or even to Europe, and supposing the Allies were
+beaten in the end, you and I shouldn't be beaten, once we'd
+stripped ourselves, stripped our souls clean, and gone in.</p>
+<p>"Victory, Michael--victory is a state of mind."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity.</p>
+<p>He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he
+had said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not
+making it easy now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered
+about him, fluttering with anxiety.</p>
+<p>When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>Veronica said, "You must let him go."</p>
+<p>"I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's
+over age. He's no more fit than I am."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to, sooner or later."</p>
+<p>"Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let
+them come and take him."</p>
+<p>"It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll
+tear at you if you keep him."</p>
+<p>"He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his
+tearing. I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded,
+paralysed, broken to pieces."</p>
+<p>"You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully."</p>
+<p>"I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once.
+But he came back. He can't really do without me."</p>
+<p>"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and
+what he wants most."</p>
+<p>"<i>I</i> used to be what he wanted most."</p>
+<p>"Well--it's his honour now."</p>
+<p>"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy.
+They're men and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a
+woman.</p>
+<p>"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep
+him--they say you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the
+way you go on!"</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have
+kept Nicky for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him.
+She wants Michael to go."</p>
+<p>"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are
+lying. Either they don't care--they're just <i>lumps</i>, with no
+hearts and no nerves in them--or they lie.</p>
+<p>"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each
+other, like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael
+sick."</p>
+<p>"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut
+about and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling
+and sentimentalizing--</p>
+<p>"Lying--lying--lying."</p>
+<p>"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie,
+if it sends them off happy?"</p>
+<p>"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever
+happened to us. I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my
+life."</p>
+<p>"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up.
+You were a miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you
+look as if every drop of blood was drained out of your body in your
+teens. If that's your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself.
+It seems to be all you've got."</p>
+<p>"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it <i>would</i>
+have been all I've got."</p>
+<p>Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as
+she really was. The child was not a child any more. She was a
+woman, astonishingly and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful,
+lucid eyes took her in; they neither weighed her nor measured her,
+but judged her, off-hand with perfect accuracy.</p>
+<p>"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still,
+you can thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle
+Anthony."</p>
+<p>Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's
+your beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're
+keeping him for."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She knew; and Lawrence knew.</p>
+<p>That night he told her that if he hadn't wanted to enlist he'd
+be driven to it to get away from her.</p>
+<p>And she was frightened and held her tongue.</p>
+<p>Then she got desperate. She did things. She intrigued behind his
+back to keep him; and he found her out.</p>
+<p>He came to her, furious.</p>
+<p>"You needn't lie about it," he said. "I know what you've done.
+You've been writing letters and getting at people. You've told the
+truth about my age and you've lied about my health. You've even
+gone round cadging for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press
+Bureau and the Intelligence Department, and God only knows whether
+I'm supposed to have put you up to it."</p>
+<p>"I took care of that, Larry."</p>
+<p>"You? You'd no right to interfere with my affairs."</p>
+<p>"Hadn't I? Not after living with you seven years?"</p>
+<p>"If you'd lived with me seven centuries you'd have had no right
+to try to keep a man back from the Army."</p>
+<p>"I'm trying to keep a man's brain for my country."</p>
+<p>"You lie. It's my body you're trying to keep for yourself. As
+you did when I was going to Ireland."</p>
+<p>"Oh, then--I tried to stop you from being a traitor to England.
+They'd have hanged you, my dear, for that."</p>
+<p>"Traitor? It's women like you that are the traitors. My God, if
+there was a Government in this country that could govern, you'd be
+strung up in a row, all of you, and hanged."</p>
+<p>"No wonder you think you're cut out for a soldier. You're cruel
+enough."</p>
+<p>"<i>You're</i> cruel. I'd rather be hanged than live with you a
+day longer after what you've done. A Frenchman shot his <i>wife</i>
+the other day for less than that."</p>
+<p>"What was 'less than that'?" she said.</p>
+<p>"She crawled after him to the camp, like a bitch.</p>
+<p>"He sent her away and she came again and again. He <i>had</i> to
+shoot her."</p>
+<p>"Was there nothing to be said for her?"</p>
+<p>"There was. She knew it was a big risk and she took it.
+<i>You</i> knew you were safe while you slimed my honour."</p>
+<p>"She loved him, and he shot her, and you think that's a fine
+thing. <i>How</i> she must have loved him!"</p>
+<p>"Men don't want to be loved that way. That's the mistake you
+women will make."</p>
+<p>"It's the way you've taught us. I should like to know what other
+way you ever want us to love you?"</p>
+<p>"The way Veronica loves Nicky, and Dorothy loved Drayton and
+Frances loves Anthony."</p>
+<p>"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."</p>
+<p>"Men's lives aren't ruined that way. And not all women's."</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow, if she'd loved him she'd have married him. And
+Frances loves her children better than Anthony, and Anthony knows
+it."</p>
+<p>"Veronica, then."</p>
+<p>"Veronica doesn't know what passion is. The poor child's
+an&aelig;mic."</p>
+<p>"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have
+more passion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."</p>
+<p>"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her
+eyelashes instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."</p>
+<p>He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.</p>
+<p>"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the
+Front. It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and
+pose as heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and
+mistresses--they're tired of because the poor things aren't young
+or pretty any longer."</p>
+<p>She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her.
+"I'm old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and
+uglier. And I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How
+<i>can</i> I keep you when I'm old and ugly?"</p>
+<p>He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always
+worked in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained
+with crying.</p>
+<p>"That's how--by getting older.</p>
+<p>"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were
+when I first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm
+sure I love you."</p>
+<p>She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.</p>
+<p>"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they
+believe you; but not me."</p>
+<p>"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were
+married to me I should have enlisted months ago.</p>
+<p>"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm
+sick and tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with
+it. I'd rather be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house
+of yours."</p>
+<p>"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it
+now?"</p>
+<p>"Everything. Those damned lime-trees all round it. And that
+damned white wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.</p>
+<p>"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.</p>
+<p>"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.</p>
+<p>"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and
+Orde-Jones, drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and
+Michael and Ellis are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade
+themselves that funk's the divinest thing in God's universe.</p>
+<p>"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my
+life--the one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from
+it."</p>
+<p>They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the
+next. And Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to
+train it upwards in the way she hated.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the
+moustache stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He
+was another man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she
+hated him or not.</p>
+<p>But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best
+gown to do honour to his khaki.</p>
+<p>She said, "It'll be like living with another man."</p>
+<p>"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.</p>
+<p>And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her
+passion for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to
+violence, to perversity.</p>
+<p>And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out
+of her reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where
+he was stationed.</p>
+<p>"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot
+me?"</p>
+<p>"I might shoot <i>myself</i>. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear
+from me again."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.</p>
+<p>She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent,
+till she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he
+had gone she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a
+sort of peace. She told herself that she would rather he were
+killed soon than that she should be tortured any longer with
+suspense.</p>
+<p>"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind.
+That would end it."</p>
+<p>And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers
+for fear lest she should see his name in the lists.</p>
+<p>But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement,
+and died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.</p>
+<p>The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before
+he died. She gave details and a message.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to
+forgive him and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought
+it would be (he means the fighting) only much more so--all except
+this last bit.</p>
+<p>"He wants you to tell Michael and Dicky?--Nicky?--that. He says:
+'It's odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'</p>
+<p>"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go
+to the War.)"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"8.30. It is all over.</p>
+<p>"He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his
+love."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Vera said to herself: "He didn't. She made that up."</p>
+<p>She hated the Red Cross woman who had been with Lawrence and had
+seen so much; who had dared to tell her what he meant and to make
+up messages.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Nicholas had applied for a commission, and he had got it, and
+Frances was glad.</p>
+<p>She had been proud of him because he had chosen the ranks
+instead of the Officers' Training Corps; but she persisted in the
+belief that, when it came to the trenches, second lieutenants stood
+a better chance. "For goodness' sake," Nicholas had said, "don't
+tell her that they're over the parapet first."</p>
+<p>That was in December. In February he got a week's leave--sudden,
+unforeseen and special leave. It had to be broken to her this time
+that leave as special as that meant war-leave.</p>
+<p>She said, "Well, if it does, I shall have him for six whole
+days." She had learned how to handle time, how to prolong the
+present, drawing it out minute by minute; thus her happiness,
+stretched to the snapping point, vibrated.</p>
+<p>She had a sense of its vibration now, as she looked at Nicholas.
+It was the evening of the day he had come home, and they were all
+in the drawing-room together. He was standing before her, straight
+and tall, on the hearthrug, where he had lifted the Persian cat,
+Timmy, out of his sleep and was holding him against his breast.
+Timmy spread himself there, softly and heavily, hanging on to
+Nicky's shoulder by his claws; he butted Nicky's chin with his
+head, purring.</p>
+<p>"I don't know how I'm to tear myself away from Timmy. I should
+like to wear him alive as a waistcoat. Or hanging on my shoulder
+like a cape, with his tail curled tight round my neck. He'd look
+uncommonly <i>chic</i> with all his khaki patches."</p>
+<p>"Why don't you take him with you?" Anthony said.</p>
+<p>"'Cos he's Ronny's cat."</p>
+<p>"He isn't. I've given him to you," Veronica said.</p>
+<p>"When?"</p>
+<p>"Now, this minute. To sleep on your feet and keep you warm."</p>
+<p>Frances listened and thought: "What children--what babies they
+are, after all." If only this minute could be stretched out
+farther.</p>
+<p>"I mustn't," Nicky said. "I should spend hours in dalliance; and
+if a shell got him it would ruin my morale."</p>
+<p>Timmy, unhooked from Nicky's shoulder, lay limp in his arms. He
+lay on his back, in ecstasy, his legs apart, showing the soft,
+cream-white fur of his stomach. Nicky rubbed his face against the
+soft, cream-white fur.</p>
+<p>"I say, what a heavenly death it would be to die--smothered in
+Timmies."</p>
+<p>"Nicky, you're a beastly sensualist. That's what's the matter
+with you," John said. And they all laughed.</p>
+<p>The minute broke, stretched to its furthest.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances was making plans now for Nicky's week. There were things
+they could do, plays they could see, places they could go to.
+Anthony would let them have the big car as much as they wanted. For
+you could stretch time out by filling it; you could multiply the
+hours by what they held.</p>
+<p>"Ronny and I are going to get married to-morrow," Nicky said.
+"We settled it that we would at once, if I got war-leave. It's the
+best thing to do."</p>
+<p>"Of course," Frances said, "it's the best thing to do."</p>
+<p>But she had not allowed for it, nor for the pain it gave her.
+That pain shocked her. It was awful to think that, after all her
+surrenders, Nicky's happiness could give her pain. It meant that
+she had never let go her secret hold. She had been a hypocrite to
+herself.</p>
+<p>Nicky was talking on about it, excitedly, as he used to talk on
+about his pleasures when he was a child.</p>
+<p>If Dad'll let us have the racing car, we'll go down to Morfe. We
+can do it in a day."</p>
+<p>"My dear boy," Anthony said, "don't you know I've lent the house
+to the Red Cross, and let the shooting?"</p>
+<p>"I don't care. There's the little house in the village we can
+have. And Harker and his wife can look after us."</p>
+<p>"Harker gone to the War, and his wife's looking after his
+brother's children somewhere. And I've put two Belgian refugees
+into it."</p>
+<p>"<i>They</i> can look after us," said Nicky. "We'll stay three
+days, run back, and have one day at home before I sail."</p>
+<p>Frances gave up her play with time. She was beaten.</p>
+<p>And still she thought: "At least I shall have him one whole
+day."</p>
+<p>And then she looked across the room to Michael, as if Michael's
+face had signalled to her. His clear, sun-burnt skin showed
+blotches of white where the blood had left it. A light sweat was on
+his forehead. When their eyes met, he shifted his position to give
+himself an appearance of ease.</p>
+<p>Michael had not reckoned on his brother's marriage, either. It
+was when he asked himself: "On what, then, <i>had</i> he been
+reckoning?" that the sweat broke out on his forehead.</p>
+<p>He had not reckoned on anything. But the sudden realization of
+what he might have reckoned on made him sick. He couldn't bear to
+think of Ronny married. And yet again, he couldn't bear to think of
+Nicky not marrying her. If he had had a hold on her he would have
+let her go. In this he knew himself to be sincere. He had had no
+hold on her, and to talk about letting her go was idiotic; still,
+there was a violent pursuit and possession by the mind--and
+Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy, that psychic assault and
+outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual surrender of her was
+so perfect that his very imagination gave her up to Nicky.</p>
+<p>He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing
+could take their three days from them, even when the War had done
+its worst.</p>
+<p>And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she
+think I was reckoning on that?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead
+Town Hall, before the Registrar.</p>
+<p>They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying
+and circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky
+said, whole handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals,
+with a clear run before him, he let out the racing car to its top
+speed on the Great North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed
+like some immense, nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all
+its weight were purged from it by speed. It flew up and down the
+hills of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat
+country round Peterborough and Grantham, a country of silver green
+and emerald green grass and purple fallow land and bright red
+houses; and so on to the great plain of York, and past Reyburn up
+towards the bare hill country netted with grey stone walls.</p>
+<p>Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road.</p>
+<p>It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed
+enormous and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen
+moon. Other hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous,
+stood piled up in front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale.</p>
+<p>Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was
+as if, ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that
+incredibly high, immense obstruction. They were thrilled,
+mysteriously, as before the image of monstrous and omnipotent
+disaster. Then the dale widened; it made way for them and saved
+them.</p>
+<p>The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a
+coronet and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights
+of the village below, the village they were making for, showed as
+if dropped out of the pattern on the hill.</p>
+<p>One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage
+chamber. Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch
+to receive them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage
+torches. The old woman held her light low down, lighting the
+flagstone of the threshold. The old man lifted his high, showing
+the lintel of the door. It was so low that Nicholas had to stoop to
+go in.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>In the morning they read the date cut in the wall above the
+porch: 1665.</p>
+<p>The house was old and bent and grey. Its windows were narrow
+slits in the stone mullions. It crouched under the dipping boughs
+of the ash-tree that sheltered it. Inside there was just room for
+Veronica to stand up. Nicholas had to stoop or knock his head
+against the beams. It had only four rooms, two for Nicholas and
+Veronica, and two for Jean and Suzanne. And it was rather dark.</p>
+<p>But it pleased them. They said it was their apple-tree-house
+grown up because they were grown up, and keeping strict
+proportions. You had to crawl into it, and you were only really
+comfortable sitting or lying down. So they sat outside it, watching
+old Suzanne through the window as she moved about the house place,
+cooking Belgian food for them, and old Jean as he worked in the
+garden.</p>
+<p>Veronica loved Jean and Suzanne. She had found out all about
+them the first morning.</p>
+<p>"Only think, Nicky. They're from Termonde, and their house was
+burnt behind them as they left it. They saw horrors, and their son
+was killed in the War.</p>
+<p>"Yet they're happy and at peace. Almost as if they'd forgotten.
+He'll plant flowers in his garden."</p>
+<p>"They're old, Ronny. And perhaps they were tired already when it
+happened."</p>
+<p>"Yes, that must be it. They're old and tired."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And now it was the last adventure of their last day. They were
+walking on the slope of Renton Moor that looks over Rathdale
+towards Greffington Edge. The light from the west poured itself in
+vivid green down the valley below them, broke itself into purple on
+Karva Hill to the north above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle
+blue and violet from the stone rampart of the Edge.</p>
+<p>Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources
+of the country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge,
+on Sarrack Moor. The raking lines of the hills were straight as if
+they had been measured with a ruler and then planed.</p>
+<p>"Ronny," he said at last, "we've licked 'em in the first round,
+you and I. The beastly Boche can't do us out of these three
+days."</p>
+<p>"No. We've been absolutely happy. And we'll never forget it.
+Never."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps it was a bit rough on Dad and Mummy, our carting
+ourselves up here, away from them. But, you see, they don't really
+mind. They're feeling about it now just as we feel about it. I knew
+they would."</p>
+<p>There had been a letter from Frances saying she was glad they'd
+gone. She was so happy thinking how happy they were.</p>
+<p>"They're angels, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"Aren't they? Simply angels. That's the rotten part of it. I
+wish--</p>
+<p>"I wish I could tell them what I think of them. But you can't,
+somehow. It sticks in your throat, that sort of thing."</p>
+<p>"You needn't," she said; "they know all right."</p>
+<p>She thought: "This is what he wants me to tell them
+about--afterwards."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but--I must have hurt them--hurt them horribly--lots of
+times. I wish I hadn't.</p>
+<p>"But" he went on, "they're funny, you know. Dad actually thought
+it idiotic of us to do this. He said it would only make it harder
+for us when I had to go. They don't see that it's just piling it
+on--going from one jolly adventure to another.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on
+you; because the rest of it's all my show."</p>
+<p>"But it isn't all your show, Nicky darling. It's mine, and it's
+theirs--because we haven't grudged you your adventure."</p>
+<p>"That's exactly how I want you to feel about it."</p>
+<p>"And they're assuming that I shan't come back. Which, if you
+come to think of it, is pretty big cheek. They talk, and they
+think, as though nobody ever got through. Whereas I've every
+intention of getting through and of coming back. I'm the sort of
+chap who does get through, who does come back."</p>
+<p>"And even if I wasn't, if they studied statistics they'd see
+that it's a thousand chances to one against the Boches getting
+me--just me out of all the other chaps. As if I was so jolly
+important.</p>
+<p>"No; don't interrupt. Let's get this thing straight while we
+can. Supposing--just supposing I didn't get through--didn't come
+back--supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to
+think of <i>that</i>, not as a clumsy accident, but just another
+awfully interesting thing I'd done.</p>
+<p>"Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you
+took the thing as a shock instead of--of what it probably really
+is, and went and got cut up about it, you might start the little
+beggar with a sort of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that
+it would be jumpy all its life.</p>
+<p>"It ought," said Nicky, "to sit in its little house all quiet
+and comfy till it's time for it to come out."</p>
+<p>He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might
+be, what probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted
+more than anything, next to Veronica.</p>
+<p>"It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy."</p>
+<p>"If <i>that</i> came off all right," he said, "it would make it
+up to Mother no end."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't make it up to me."</p>
+<p>"You don't know what it would do," he said.</p>
+<p>She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but
+you."</p>
+<p>"That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of
+kin--the one they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way;
+it'll only make him madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid
+of you or Mummy or Dad, or Michael being told first."</p>
+<p>"It doesn't matter a bit who's <i>told</i> first. I shall
+<i>know</i> first," she said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't
+kill either me or the baby. If a shock could kill me I should have
+died long ago."</p>
+<p>"When?"</p>
+<p>"When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear
+it any longer, something happened."</p>
+<p>"What?"</p>
+<p>"I don't know. I don't know what it <i>is</i> now; I only know
+what it does. It always happens--always--when you want it awfully.
+And when you're quiet and give yourself up to it."</p>
+<p>"It'll happen again."</p>
+<p>He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite
+interested; puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if
+something had come between him and her.</p>
+<p>"You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so
+that when things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to
+happen to Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she
+was absolutely happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came
+to her. And, Nicky, they were the same queer things that came to
+me. It was like something getting through to her."</p>
+<p>"I say--did you ever do it to me?"</p>
+<p>"Only once, when you wanted it awfully."</p>
+<p>"When? When?"</p>
+<p>Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her
+trail.</p>
+<p>"When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it
+didn't matter, it wasn't the end."</p>
+<p>"But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself.
+It looks as if it worked, then?"</p>
+<p>"It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with
+<i>you</i> it would always come; because you're more <i>me</i> than
+other people; I mean I care more for you."</p>
+<p>She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother
+about me, Nicky. If <i>the</i> most awful thing happened, and you
+didn't come back, It would come."</p>
+<p>"I wish I knew what It was," he said.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's
+God."</p>
+<p>"That's why <i>they're</i> so magnificently brave--Dorothy and
+Aunt Frances and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't
+know it's there; even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and
+still they go on bearing and bearing; and they were glad to give
+you up."</p>
+<p>"I know," he said; "lots of people <i>say</i> they're glad, but
+they really <i>are</i> glad."</p>
+<p>He meditated.</p>
+<p>"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's
+praying or something; and if you're going to turn it on to me,
+Ronny, I wish you'd be careful; because it seems to me that if
+there's anything in it at all, there might be hitches. I mean to
+say, you might work it just enough to keep me from being killed but
+not enough to keep my legs from being blown off. Or the Boches
+might get me fair enough and you might bring me back, all paralysed
+and idiotic.</p>
+<p>"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I
+thought about it. Luckily one doesn't think."</p>
+<p>"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than
+I tried before."</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"</p>
+<p>"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin
+with, I won't believe that you're not going to get through.</p>
+<p>"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't
+believe you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to
+something else. It doesn't end him.'"</p>
+<p>He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it,
+made a pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention
+to.</p>
+<p>Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind
+talking about it?" she said.</p>
+<p>"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I
+believe in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling,
+that you go on. You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't
+care. They used to think I was trying to be funny when I said I
+didn't care. But I really didn't. Things, most things, don't much
+matter, because there's always something else. You go on to it.</p>
+<p>"I care for <i>you</i>. <i>You</i> matter most awfully; and my
+people; but most of all you. You always have mattered to me more
+than anything, since the first time I heard you calling out to me
+to come and sit on your bed because you were frightened. You always
+will matter.</p>
+<p>"But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make
+me <i>think</i> she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her
+because she was going to have a baby. And <i>that</i> was because I
+remembered you and the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would
+have kept me straight with women if nothing else did.</p>
+<p>"Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying
+you till Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too
+late.</p>
+<p>"That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Nicky.</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The
+cottage belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>"Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?"</p>
+<p>"I think he'd give it to you if you asked him."</p>
+<p>"For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll
+give it to me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where
+it's all quiet and you'd never know there was a war at all--even
+the Belgians have forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look
+at that hill, because it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I
+simply won't think of anything that isn't straight and beautiful.
+And I shall get strong. Then the baby will be straight and
+beautiful and strong, too.</p>
+<p>"I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like
+you."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little
+things that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and
+she, to be on the edge of something great, something satisfying and
+revealing. It was to come in a look or a word; and both would
+remember it afterwards for ever.</p>
+<p>In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline,
+and Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say
+good-bye. And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited
+and happy, as he had gone off on his wedding journey. And between
+Frances and her son the great thing remained unsaid.</p>
+<p>Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine
+sand.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>February 27th,
+1915.</i><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you
+all for the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long
+way, that's been seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it
+because it "looked as if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It
+makes me feel as if I <i>was</i> Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs,
+rampant, clawing at the Boches. Just think of the effect if he got
+up over the parapet!</p>
+<p>The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't
+think what else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those
+tubes of chutney are a good idea.</p>
+<p>No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no
+English and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to
+himself, you simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old
+Mick could send himself out by himself against the whole German
+Army he'd manage to put in some first rate fancy work in the second
+or two before they got him. He'd be quite capable of going off and
+doing grisly things that would make me faint with funk, if he was
+by himself, with nothing but the eye of God to look at him. And
+<i>then</i> he'd rather God wasn't there. He always <i>was</i>
+afraid of having a crowd with him.</p>
+<p>The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were
+you two, I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he
+is the youngest.</p>
+<p>And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest
+curtain fire there <i>are</i> holes; there are more holes than
+there is stuff; and the chances are I shall be where a hole is.</p>
+<p>Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight
+for you like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's
+going to get you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of
+personal resentment which must be the worst part of the business.
+Bits of shells that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew
+all about before and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted
+out in the open, the peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is
+it more than the peculiar awfulness of being run over by express
+trains let loose about the sky? Tell Don that when shrapnel empties
+itself over your head like an old tin pail, you might feel injured,
+but the big shell has a most disarming air of not being able to
+help itself, of not looking for anybody in particular. It's so
+innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it any day than
+fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe.</p>
+<p>That's an answer to his question.</p>
+<p>And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action.
+Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I
+told her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but
+Stephen was absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than
+anything you could have imagined. I'm not speaking only for
+myself.</p>
+<p>There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between
+your parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it
+too--when you're afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before
+you get there. But it doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply
+swinging you on to them, and that swing makes up for all the rotten
+times put together. You needn't be sorry for us. It's waste of
+pity.</p>
+<p>I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us.
+But I'm not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NICKY.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; May,
+1915.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;B.E.F.,
+FRANCE</blockquote>
+<p>My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when
+you loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you
+needn't do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the
+papers more or less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith
+is saying or what Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's
+motives are. Personally, I should say he was simply trying, like
+most of us, to save his country. Looks like it. But you can tell
+him from me, if he gets them to send us enough shells out <i>in
+time</i> we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow that sort of
+thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much better
+than you, if you don't mind my saying so.</p>
+<p>What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the
+last sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my
+billet for one of his <i>worst</i> jokes. And I like to hear about
+Morrie going on the bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if
+it really is anxiety about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd
+leave off thinking about me, poor old thing.</p>
+<p>More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's
+looking and what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot,
+and she may tell you things she won't tell the others. That's why
+I'm glad you're there and not here.</p>
+<p>And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel
+about it. I think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were
+a "putrid Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes
+me like religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about
+religion to say, but it seems near enough for a first shot. And
+when you say it doesn't take you that way, that you haven't "got"
+it, I can see that that expresses a fairly understandable state of
+mind. Of course, I know it isn't funk. If you'd happened to think
+of the Ultimatum first, instead of the Government, you'd have been
+in at the start, before me.</p>
+<p>Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never
+can tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those
+of us who are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a
+long way. There's no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the
+finish; so that the patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to
+join up will be jolly well sold, poor devils. Take me, for
+instance. If I'd got what I wanted and been out in Flanders in
+1914, ten to one I should have been in the retreat from Mons, like
+Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have given my head to have
+gone to Gallipoli; but <i>now</i>, well, I'm just as glad I'm not
+mixed up in that affair.</p>
+<p>Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you
+can get out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to
+win the War. At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the
+Rhine, while all the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash
+on the way there. So if you're going to be converted let's hope
+you'll be converted quick.</p>
+<p>If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight
+away. There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a
+Tommy. For instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your
+brother Tommies. I slept for three months next to a beastly
+blighter who used to come in drunk and tread on my face and be ill
+all over me.</p>
+<p>Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything
+that's happened out here. But that's because at home your mind
+isn't adjusted to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise
+to me every time. I <i>couldn't</i> get used to him. Whereas out
+here everything's shifted in the queerest way. Your mind shifts.
+You funk your first and your second sight, say, of a bad stretcher
+case; but when it comes to the third and the fourth you don't funk
+at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit surprised. It's all in
+the picture, and you're in the picture too. There's a sort of
+horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly dream which
+doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the
+beastliness.</p>
+<p>No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what
+d'you think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run
+over the other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian
+at that. There were two or three women round it, crying and
+gesticulating. It looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath
+of blood. That made me sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the
+picture. I hadn't bargained for him.</p>
+<p>Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa--do you remember how
+he <i>would</i> tell us about them?--weren't in it with the things
+that happened here. Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do,
+apparently on their own, are simply unbelievable--what the war
+correspondents call "fantastic postures." But I haven't got to the
+point when I can slap my thighs, and roar with laughter--if they
+happen to be Germans.</p>
+<p>In between, the boredom is so awful that I've heard some of our
+men say they'd rather have things happening. And, of course, we're
+all hoping that when those shells come along there won't be quite
+so much "between."</p>
+<p>Love to Ronny and Mother and all of them.--Your very
+affectionate,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NICHOLAS.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; June 1st,
+1915.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>My Darling Ronny,--Yes, I think all your letters must have come,
+because you've answered everything. You always tell me just what I
+want to know. When I see the fat envelopes coming I know they're
+going to be chock-full of the things I've happened to be thinking
+about. Don't let's ever forget to put the dates, because I make out
+that I've always dreamed about you, too, the nights you've
+written.</p>
+<p>And so the Aunties are working in the War Hospital Supply
+Dep&ocirc;t? It's frightfully funny what Dorothy says about their
+enjoying the War and feeling so important. Don't let her grudge it
+them, though; it's all the enjoyment, or importance, they're ever
+had in their lives, poor dears. But I shall know, if a swab bursts
+in my inside, that it's Auntie Edie's. As for Auntie Emmeline's, I
+can't even imagine what they'd be like--monstrosities--or little
+babies injured at birth. Aunt Louie's would be well-shaped and
+firm, but erring a little on the hard side, don't you think?</p>
+<p>That reminds me, I suppose I may tell you now since it's been in
+the papers, that we've actually got Moving Fortresses out here. I
+haven't seen them yet, but a fellow who has thinks they must be
+uncommonly like Drayton's and my thing. I suspect, from what he
+says, they're a bit better, though. We hadn't got the rocking-horse
+idea.</p>
+<p>It's odd--this time last year I should have gone off my head
+with agony at the mere thought of anybody getting in before us; and
+now I don't care a bit. I do mind rather for Drayton's sake, though
+I don't suppose he cares, either. The great thing is that it's been
+done, and done better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the
+Germans had got on to them, and trotted them out first, and one of
+our own guns had potted him or me, <i>that</i> would have been a
+jolly sell.</p>
+<p>What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the
+awful thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the
+base hospital on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock,
+and--<i>he never came back again</i>. It doesn't matter, because
+the weather's so warm now that I don't want him. But I'm sorry
+because you all gave him to me and it looks as if I hadn't cared
+for him. But I did....</p>
+<blockquote>June 10th.</blockquote>
+<p>Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather
+suddenly. I wish I could tell you <i>what</i>, but we mustn't let
+on what happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still,
+there are all the other things I couldn't say anything about at the
+time.</p>
+<p>If you <i>must</i> know, I've been up "over the top" three times
+now since I came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all
+right.</p>
+<p>Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's
+been like that every time (except that I've got over the queer
+funky feeling half-way through). It'll be like that again next
+time, I know. Because now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't
+tell Dorothy this, because she'd think it was all rot--but when
+you're up first out of the trench and stand alone on the parapet,
+it's absolute happiness. And the charge is--well, it's simply
+heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till then; I certainly
+hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three days we had
+together.</p>
+<p>That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something
+rotten about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out
+that this gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's
+trying for) is nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks
+that's all there is in it, he doesn't know much about war, or love
+either. Though I'm bound to say there's a clever chap in my
+battalion who thinks the same thing. He says he feels the ecstasy,
+or whatever it is, all right, just the same as I do; but that it's
+simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the top--a hidden lust for
+killing, and the hidden memory of having killed, he called it. He's
+always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had been drunk.</p>
+<p>And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but
+"a ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give
+mine to a funny chap who <i>knows</i> he's going to have
+collywobbles as soon as he gets out into the open.</p>
+<p>But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it,
+because they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of
+being killed. <i>That</i>--when you realize it--well, it's like the
+thing you told me about that you said you thought must be God
+because it's so real. I didn't understand it then, but I do now.
+You're bang up against reality--you're going clean into it--and the
+sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while one half of you is
+feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill and doing its
+best to keep on <i>this</i> side reality. But I've been near enough
+to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come
+out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick.
+<i>He</i>'d write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's
+a sin that I should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't
+do anything with it.</p>
+<p>Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your
+loving,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NICKY.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and
+Dorothy and Mother. It would save them half the misery they're
+probably going through.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the
+garden, weeding the delphinium border.</p>
+<p>It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was
+digging in the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering
+green peas and fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came
+through the open door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace
+with the piled up baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came,
+Veronica could time it by the striking of the clock heard through
+the open doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and
+then, almost on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious
+happiness.</p>
+<p>Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity
+made each small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged
+at the weeds, and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the
+palms of her hand smoothed over the places where they had been. She
+thought of old Jean and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at
+Renton, and of that tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest
+thing she had ever seen.</p>
+<p>And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the
+half-hour, not out of herself or out of her thoughts, but
+mysteriously and from somewhere a long way off.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through
+the door with her basket, and it was then that she saw
+Nicholas.</p>
+<p>He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised
+between her and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested
+in the act of looking back to see if she were following him. His
+eyes shone, vivid and blue, as they always shone when he was happy.
+He smiled at her, but with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to
+her, but with no sound.</p>
+<p>Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her
+heart was still; it beat steadily.</p>
+<p>She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust
+itself between them, and he was gone.</p>
+<p>And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had
+seen her when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of
+the sun.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>The young men had gone--Morton Ellis, who had said he was damned
+if he'd fight for his country; and Austin Mitchell who had said he
+hadn't got a country; and Monier-Owen, who had said that England
+was not a country you could fight for. George Wadham had gone long
+ago. That, Michael said, was to be expected. Even a weak gust could
+sweep young Wadham off his feet--and he had been fairly carried
+away. He could no more resist the vortex of the War than he could
+resist the vortex of the arts.</p>
+<p>Michael had two pitiful memories of the boy: one of young Wadham
+swaggering into Stephen's room in uniform (the first time he had it
+on), flushed and pleased with himself and talking excitedly about
+the "Great Game"; and one of young Wadham returned from the Front,
+mature and hard, not talking about the "Great Game" at all, and
+wincing palpably when other people talked; a young Wadham who, they
+said, ought to be arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act as a
+quencher of war-enthusiasms.</p>
+<p>The others had gone later, one by one, each with his own
+gesture: Mitchell and Monier-Owen when Stephen went; Ellis the day
+after Stephen's death. It had taken Stephen's death to draw
+him.</p>
+<p>Only Michael remained.</p>
+<p>He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going
+would inspire him to follow them. It, and Stephen's death, merely
+intensified the bitterness he felt towards the War. He was more
+than ever determined to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to
+his Forlorn Hope. If they fell back, all the more reason why be
+should go on.</p>
+<p>And, while he waited for the moment of vision, he continued
+Stephen's work on the <i>Green Review</i>. Stephen had left it to
+him when he went out. Michael tried to be faithful to the tradition
+he thus inherited; but gradually Stephen's spirit disappeared from
+the <i>Review</i> and its place was taken by the clear, hard,
+unbreakable thing that was Michael's mind.</p>
+<p>And Michael knew that he was beginning to make himself felt.</p>
+<p>But Stephen's staff, such as it was, and nearly all his
+contributors had gone to the War, one after another, and Michael
+found himself taking all their places. He began to feel a strain,
+which he took to be the strain of overwork, and he went down to
+Renton to recover.</p>
+<p>That was on the Tuesday that followed Veronica's Sunday.</p>
+<p>He thought that down there he would get away from everything
+that did him harm: from his father's and mother's eyes; from his
+sister's proud, cold face; and from his young brother's smile; and
+from Veronica's beauty that saddened him; and from the sense of
+Nicky's danger that brooded as a secret obsession over the house.
+He would fill up the awful empty space. He thought: "For a whole
+fortnight I shall get away from this infernal War."</p>
+<p>But he did not get away from it. On every stage of the journey
+down he encountered soldiers going to the Front. He walked in the
+Park at Darlington between his trains, and wounded soldiers waited
+for him on every seat, shuffled towards him round every turning,
+hobbled after him on their crutches down every path. Their eyes
+looked at him with a shrewd hostility. He saw the young Yorkshire
+recruits drinking in the open spaces. Sergeants' eyes caught and
+measured him, appraising his physique. Behind and among them he saw
+Drayton's, and R&eacute;veillaud's, and Stephen's eyes; and young
+Wadham's eyes, strange and secretive and hard.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>At Reyburn Michael's train was switched off to a side platform
+in the open. Before he left Darlington, a thin, light rain had
+begun to fall from a shred of blown cloud; and at Reyburn the burst
+mass was coming down. The place was full of the noise of rain. The
+drops tapped on the open platform and hissed as the wind drove them
+in a running stream. They drummed loudly on the station roof. But
+these sounds went out suddenly, covered by the trampling of
+feet.</p>
+<p>A band of Highlanders with their bagpipes marched into the
+station. They lined up solemnly along the open platform with their
+backs to Michael's train and their faces to the naked rails on the
+other side. Higher up Michael could see the breast of an engine; it
+was backing, backing, towards the troop-train that waited under the
+cover of the roof. He could hear the clank of the coupling and the
+recoil. At that sound the band had their mouths to their bagpipes
+and their fingers ready on the stops. Two or three officers hurried
+down from the station doors and stood ready.</p>
+<p>The train came on slowly, packed with men; men who thrust their
+heads and shoulders through the carriage windows, and knelt on the
+seats, and stood straining over each other's backs to look out; men
+whose faces were scarlet with excitement; men with open mouths
+shouting for joy.</p>
+<p>The officers saluted as it passed. It halted at the open
+platform, and suddenly the pipers began to play.</p>
+<p>Michael got out of his train and watched.</p>
+<p>Solemnly, in the grey evening of the rain, with their faces set
+in a sort of stern esctasy, the Highlanders played to their
+comrades. Michael did not know whether their tune was sad or gay.
+It poured itself into one mournful, savage, sacred cry of
+salutation and valediction. When it stopped the men shouted; there
+were voices that barked hoarsely and broke; voices that roared;
+young voices that screamed, strung up by the skirling of the
+bagpipes. The pipers played to them again.</p>
+<p>And suddenly Michael was overcome. Pity shook him and grief and
+an intolerable yearning, and shame. For one instant his soul rose
+up above the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he
+cowered under it, stripped and beaten. He clenched his fists,
+hating this emotion that stung him to tears and tore at his heart
+and at the hardness of his mind.</p>
+<p>As the troop-train moved slowly out of the station the pipers,
+piping more and more shrilly, swung round and marched beside it to
+the end of the platform. The band ceased abruptly, and the men
+answered with shout after shout of violent joy; they reared up
+through the windows, straining for the last look--and were
+gone.</p>
+<p>Michael turned to the porter who lifted his luggage from the
+rack. "What regiment are they?" he said.</p>
+<p>"Camerons, sir. Going to the Front."</p>
+<p>The clear, uncanny eyes of Veronica's father pursued him
+now.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>At last he had got away from it.</p>
+<p>In Rathdale, at any rate, there was peace. The hills and their
+pastures, and the flat river fields were at peace. And in the
+villages of Morfe and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few
+men had gone from them. The rest were tied to the land, and they
+were more absorbed in the hay-harvest than in the War. Even the old
+Belgians in Veronica's cottage were at peace. They had
+forgotten.</p>
+<p>For three days Michael himself had peace.</p>
+<p>He went up to Veronica's hill and sat on it; and thought how for
+hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was
+not a soul whom he knew. In all his life he had never been more by
+himself.</p>
+<p>This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael's mind. So
+far from having got away from the War he had never been more
+conscious of it than he was now. What he had got away from was
+other people's consciousness. From the beginning the thing that
+threatened him had been, not the War but this collective
+war-spirit, clamouring for his private soul.</p>
+<p>For the first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found
+himself thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity,
+about the War. He had really known, half the time, that it was the
+greatest War of Independence that had ever been. As for his old
+hatred of the British Empire, he had seen long ago that there was
+no such thing, in the continental sense of Empire; there was a
+unique thing, the rule, more good than bad, of an imperial people.
+He had seen that the strength of the Allies was in exact proportion
+to the strength and the enlightenment of their democracies.
+Reckoning by decades, there could be no deadlock in the struggle;
+the deadlock meant a ten years' armistice and another war. He could
+not help seeing these things. His objection to occupying his mind
+with them had been that they were too easy.</p>
+<p>Now that he could look at it by himself he saw how the War might
+take hold of you like a religion. It was the Great War of
+Redemption. And redemption meant simply thousands and millions of
+men in troop-ships and troop-trains coming from the ends of the
+world to buy the freedom of the world with their bodies. It meant
+that the very fields he was looking over, and this beauty of the
+hills, those unused ramparts where no batteries were hid, and the
+small, silent villages, Morfe and Renton, were bought now with
+their bodies.</p>
+<p>He wondered how at this moment any sane man could be a Pacifist.
+And, wondering, he felt a reminiscent sting of grief and yearning.
+But he refused, resolutely, to feel any shame.</p>
+<p>His religion also was good; and, anyhow, you didn't choose your
+religion; it chose you.</p>
+<p>And on Saturday the letters came: John's letter enclosing the
+wire from the War Office, and the letter that Nicky's Colonel had
+written to Anthony.</p>
+<p>Nicky was killed.</p>
+<p>Michael took in the fact, and the date (it was last Sunday).
+There were some official regrets, but they made no impression on
+him. John's letter made no impression on him. Last Sunday Nicky was
+killed.</p>
+<p>He had not even unfolded the Colonel's letter yet. The close
+black lines showed through the thin paper. Their closeness repelled
+him. He did not want to know how his brother had died; at least not
+yet. He was afraid of the Colonel's letter. He felt that by simply
+not reading it he could put off the unbearable turn of the
+screw.</p>
+<p>He was shivering with cold. He drew up his chair to the wide,
+open hearth-place where there was no fire; he held out his hands
+over it. The wind swept down the chimney and made him colder; and
+he felt sick.</p>
+<p>He had been sitting there about an hour when Suzanne came in and
+asked him if he would like a little fire. He heard himself saying,
+"No, thank you," in a hard voice. The idea of warmth and comfort
+was disagreeable to him. Suzanne asked him then if he had had bad
+news? And he heard himself saying: "Yes," and Suzanne trying,
+trying very gently, to persuade him that it was perhaps only that
+Monsieur Nicky was wounded?</p>
+<p>"No? <i>Then</i>," said the old woman, "he is killed." And she
+began to cry.</p>
+<p>Michael couldn't stand that. He got up and opened the door into
+the outer room, and she passed through before him, sobbing and
+whimpering. Her voice came to him through the closed door in a
+sharp cry telling Jean that Monsieur Nicky was dead, and Jean's
+voice came, hushing her.</p>
+<p>Then he heard the feet of the old man shuffling across the
+kitchen floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and
+through the windows at the back of the room, he saw, without
+heeding, as the Belgians passed and went up into the fields
+together, weeping, leaving him alone.</p>
+<p>They had remembered.</p>
+<p>It was then that Michael read the Colonel's letter, and learned
+the manner of his brother's death: "... About a quarter past four
+o'clock in the afternoon his battalion was being pressed back, when
+he rallied his men and led them in as gallant an attack as was ever
+made by so small a number in this War. He was standing on the
+enemy's parapet when he was shot through the heart and fell. By a
+quarter to five the trench was stormed and taken, owing to his
+personal daring and impetus and to the affection and confidence he
+inspired.... We hear it continually said of our officers and men
+that 'they're all the same,' and I daresay as far as pluck goes
+they are. But, if I may say so, we all felt that your son had
+something that we haven't got...."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael lay awake in the bed that had been his brother's
+marriage bed. The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him.
+For three nights the room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had
+never gone from it. They had compelled him to think of them. They
+had lain where he lay, falling asleep in each other's arms.</p>
+<p>The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them
+had in no way troubled him. It had been simply there like some
+exquisite atmosphere, intensifying his peace. He had had the same
+feeling he always had when Veronica was with him. He had liked to
+lie with his head on their pillow, to touch what they had touched,
+to look at the same things in the same room, to go in and out
+through the same doors over the same floors, remembering their
+hands and feet and eyes, and saying to himself: "They did this and
+this"; or, "That must have pleased them."</p>
+<p>It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine
+why it was not.</p>
+<p>And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of
+Nicky and Veronica together. The room had emptied itself of its own
+memory and significance. He was aware of nothing but the bare,
+spiritual space between him and Nicky. He lay contemplating it
+steadily and without any horror.</p>
+<p>He thought: "This ends it. Of course I shall go out now. I might
+have known that this would end it. <i>He</i> knew."</p>
+<p>He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night
+in August. He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed,
+half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.</p>
+<p>Nicky had taken it for granted even then that he would go out
+some time. He remembered how he had said, "Not yet."</p>
+<p>He thought: "Of course; this must have been what he meant."</p>
+<p>And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time
+appeased.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>It was morning.</p>
+<p>Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as
+he struggled to wake.</p>
+<p>Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came
+clear out of this drowning.</p>
+<p>Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last Sunday. He knew that.
+But that wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed
+on--</p>
+<p>Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be
+killed too. And because he was going out, and because he would be
+killed, he was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should
+have thought he would have felt it. He had been let off that.</p>
+<p>He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do,
+feeling a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and
+R&eacute;veillaud and Lawrence had gone out, and they had been
+killed. Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen were going out and they
+would certainly be killed. Wadham had gone out and young Vereker,
+and they also would be killed.</p>
+<p>Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.</p>
+<p>His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without
+concern. It was aware that his going depended on his own will. But
+never in all his life had he brought so little imagination to the
+act of willing.</p>
+<p>He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast.
+He accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or
+concern.</p>
+<p>Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other
+things: "I know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know
+how you cared for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not
+bear it, Michael, if we were not so proud of him."</p>
+<p>He answered this letter at once. He wrote: "I couldn't bear it
+either, if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now."</p>
+<p>As he signed himself, "Your loving Michael," he thought: "That
+settles it." Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it
+he would have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night
+had settled it; that his resolution had been absolutely
+self-determined and absolutely irrevocable then, and that his
+signature gave it no more sanctity or finality than it had already.
+If he was conscript, he was conscript to his own will.</p>
+<p>He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the
+post did not leave Renton for another five hours.</p>
+<p>It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the
+letter-box that shook him into realization of what he had done and
+of what was before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to
+write that letter and to post it. By those two slight acts, not
+dreadful nor difficult in themselves, he had put it out of his
+power to withdraw from the one supremely difficult and dreadful
+act. A second ago, while the letter was still in his hands, he
+could have backed out, because he had not given any pledge. Now he
+would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly for the first
+time what it was that he would have to go through.</p>
+<p>He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along
+the top for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and
+seeing nothing before him but his own act and what must come
+afterwards. By to-morrow, or the next day at the latest, he would
+have enlisted; by six months, at the latest, three months if he had
+what they called "luck," he would be in the trenches, fighting and
+killing, not because he chose, but because he would be told to
+fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that letter to his
+mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.</p>
+<p>And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying
+that he didn't funk it.</p>
+<p>Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked
+looking on at fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn't
+think he would really mind that so much. It would come--it must
+come--as a relief from the horrors he would have to see before it
+came. Nicky had said that they were unbelievable; he had seemed to
+think you couldn't imagine them if you hadn't seen them. But
+Michael could. He had only to think of them to see them now. He
+could make war-pictures for himself, in five minutes, every bit as
+terrifying as the things they said happened under fire. Any fool,
+if he chose to think about it, could see what must happen. Only
+people didn't think. They rushed into it without seeing anything;
+and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it,
+before and during and afterwards and all the time.</p>
+<p>Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that
+the others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very
+well to say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as
+their phrase was, "Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far
+as he was concerned, the end of beauty and of the making of beauty,
+and of everything worth caring for; but it was also the beginning
+of a life that Michael dreaded more than fighting and killing and
+being killed: a life of boredom, of obscene ugliness, of revolting
+contacts, of intolerable subjection. For of course he was going
+into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he could feel the
+heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed beside and
+around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he could
+smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.</p>
+<p>Of course he was going through with it; only--this was the
+thought his mind turned round and round on in horror at itself--he
+funked it. He funked it so badly that he would really rather die
+than go through with it. When he was actually killed that would be
+his second death; months before it could happen he would have known
+all about it; he would have been dead and buried and alive again in
+hell.</p>
+<p>What shocked Michael was his discovering, not that he funked it
+now, which was natural, almost permissible, but that he had funked
+it all the time. He could see now that, since the War began, he had
+been struggling to keep out of it. His mind had fought every
+suggestion that he should go in. It had run to cover, like a mad,
+frightened animal before the thoughts that hunted it down. Funk,
+pure funk, had been at the bottom of all he had said and thought
+and done since August, nineteen-fourteen; his attitude to the War,
+his opinion of the Allies, and of the Government and of its conduct
+of the War, all his wretched criticisms and disparagements--what
+had they been but the very subterfuges of funk?</p>
+<p>His mother had known it; his father had known it; and Dorothy
+and John. It was not conceivable that Nicky did not know it.</p>
+<p>That was what had made the horror of the empty space that
+separated them.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen had certainly known it.</p>
+<p>He could not understand his not knowing it himself, not seeing
+that he struggled. Yet he must have seen that Nicky's death would
+end it. Anyhow, it <i>was</i> ended; if not last night, then this
+morning when he posted the letter.</p>
+<p>But he was no longer appeased by this certainty of his. He was
+going out all right. But merely going out was not enough. What
+counted was the state of mind in which you went. Lawrence had said,
+"Victory--Victory is a state of mind."</p>
+<p>Well--it was a state that came naturally to Nicky, and did not
+come naturally to him. It was all very well for Nicky: he had
+wanted to go. He had gone out victorious before victory. Michael
+would go beaten before defeat.</p>
+<p>He thought: "If this is volunteering, give me compulsion." All
+the same he was going.</p>
+<p>All morning and afternoon, as he walked and walked, his thoughts
+went the same round. And in the evening they began again, but on a
+new track. He thought: "It's all very well to say I'm going; but
+how <i>can</i> I go?" He had Lawrence Stephen's work to do;
+Lawrence's Life and Letters were in his hands. How could he
+possibly go and leave Lawrence dead and forgotten? This view seemed
+to him to be sanity and common sense.</p>
+<p>As his mind darted up this turning it was driven back. He saw
+Lawrence Stephen smiling at him as he had smiled at him when
+R&eacute;veillaud died. Lawrence would have wanted him to go more
+than anything. He would have chosen to be dead and forgotten rather
+than keep him.</p>
+<p>At night these thoughts left him. He began to think of Nicky and
+of his people. His father and mother would never be happy again.
+Nicky had been more to them than he was, or even John. He had been
+more to Dorothy. It was hard on Dorothy to lose Nicky and Drayton
+too.</p>
+<p>He thought of Nicky and Veronica. Poor little Ronny, what would
+she do without Nicky? He thought of Veronica, sitting silent in the
+train, and looking at him with her startling look of spiritual
+maturity. He thought of Veronica singing to him over and over
+again:</p>
+<blockquote>"London Bridge is broken down--<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+"Build it up with gold so fine--<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+"Build it up with stones so strong-"</blockquote>
+<p>He thought of Veronica running about the house and crying,
+"Where's Nicky? I want him."</p>
+<p>Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in
+the morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of
+Renton Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way
+as yesterday. The images were, if anything, more crowded and more
+horrible; but they had lost their hold. He was tired of looking at
+them.</p>
+<p>About five o'clock he turned abruptly and went back to the
+village the same way by which he came.</p>
+<p>And as he swung down the hill road in sight of Renton, suddenly
+there was a great clearance in his soul.</p>
+<p>When he went into the cottage he found Veronica there waiting
+for him. She sat with her hands lying in her lap, and she had the
+same look he had seen when she was in the train.</p>
+<p>"Ronny--"</p>
+<p>She stood up to greet him, as if it had been she who was staying
+there and he who had incredibly arrived.</p>
+<p>"They told me you wouldn't be long," she said.</p>
+<p>"I? You haven't come because you were ill or anything?"</p>
+<p>She smiled and shook her head. "No. Not for anything like
+that."</p>
+<p>"I didn't write, Ronny. I couldn't."</p>
+<p>"I know." Their eyes met, measuring each other's grief. "That's
+why I came. I couldn't bear to leave you to it."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"I'd have come before, Michael, if you'd wanted me."</p>
+<p>They were sitting together now, on the settle by the
+hearth-place.</p>
+<p>"I can't understand your being able to think of me," he
+said.</p>
+<p>"Because of Nicky? If I haven't got Nicky it's all the more
+reason why I should think of his people."</p>
+<p>He looked up. "I say--how are they? Mother and Father?"</p>
+<p>"They're very brave.</p>
+<p>"It's worse for them than it is for me," she said. "What they
+can't bear is your going."</p>
+<p>"Mother got my letter, then?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. This morning."</p>
+<p>"What did she say?"</p>
+<p>"She said: 'Oh, no. <i>Not</i> Michael.'</p>
+<p>"It was a good thing you wrote, though. Your letter made her
+cry. It made even Dorothy cry. They hadn't been able to,
+before."</p>
+<p>"I should have thought if they could stand Nicky's going--"</p>
+<p>"That was different. They know it was different."</p>
+<p>"Do you suppose <i>I</i> don't know how different it was? They
+mean I funked it and Nicky didn't."</p>
+<p>"They mean that Nicky got what he wanted when he went, and that
+there was nothing else he could have done so well, except flying,
+or engineering."</p>
+<p>"It comes to the same thing, Nicky simply wasn't afraid."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Michael, he <i>was</i> afraid."</p>
+<p>"What <i>of</i>?"</p>
+<p>"He was most awfully afraid of seeing suffering."</p>
+<p>"Well, so am I. And I'm afraid of suffering myself too. I'm
+afraid of the whole blessed thing from beginning to end."</p>
+<p>"That's because you keep on seeing the whole blessed thing from
+beginning to end. Nicky only saw little bits of it. The bits he
+liked. Machine-guns working beautifully, and shells dropping in the
+right places, and trenches being taken.</p>
+<p>"And then, remember--Nicky hadn't so much to give up."</p>
+<p>"He had you."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no. He knew that was the way to keep me."</p>
+<p>"Ronny--if Nicky had been like me could he have kept you?"</p>
+<p>She considered it.</p>
+<p>"Yes--if he could have been himself too."</p>
+<p>"He couldn't, you see. He never could have felt like that."</p>
+<p>"I don't say He could."</p>
+<p>"Well--the awful thing is 'feeling like that.'"</p>
+<p>"And the magnificent thing is 'feeling like that,' and going all
+the same. Everybody knows that but you, Michael."</p>
+<p>"Yes," he said. "I'm <i>going</i>. But I'm not going to lie
+about it and say I don't funk it. Because I do."</p>
+<p>"You don't <i>really</i>."</p>
+<p>"I own I didn't the first night--the night I knew Nicky was
+killed. Because I couldn't think of anything else <i>but</i>
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>"It was after I'd written to Mother that it came on. Because I
+knew then I couldn't back out of it. That's what I can't get
+over--my having to do that--to clinch it--because I was
+afraid."</p>
+<p>"My dear, my dear, thousands of men do that every day for the
+same reason, only they don't find themselves out; and if they did
+they wouldn't care. You're finding yourself out all the time, and
+killing yourself with caring."</p>
+<p>"Of course I care. Can't you see it proves that I never meant to
+go at all?"</p>
+<p>"It proves that you knew you'd have to go through hell first and
+you were determined that even hell shouldn't keep you back."</p>
+<p>"Ronny--that's what it <i>has</i> been. Simply hell. It's been
+inconceivable. Nothing--absolutely nothing out there could be as
+bad. It went on all yesterday and to-day--till you came."</p>
+<p>"I know, Michael. That's why I came."</p>
+<p>"To get me out of it?"</p>
+<p>"To get you out of it.</p>
+<p>"It's all over," she said.</p>
+<p>"It may come back--out there."</p>
+<p>"It won't. Out there you'll be happy. I saw Nicky on Sunday--the
+minute before he was killed, Michael. And he was happy."</p>
+<p>"He would be." He was silent for a long time.</p>
+<p>"Ronny. Did Nicky know I funked it?"</p>
+<p>"Never! He knew you wouldn't keep out. All he minded was your
+missing any of it."</p>
+<p>She got up and put on her hat. "I must go. It's getting late.
+Will you walk up to Morfe with me? I'm sleeping there. In the
+hotel."</p>
+<p>"No, I say--I'm not going to let you turn out for me.
+<i>I</i>'ll sleep at the hotel."</p>
+<p>She smiled at him with a sort of wonder, as if she thought: "Has
+he forgotten, so soon?" And he remembered.</p>
+<p>"I can't stop here," she said. "That would be more than even
+<i>I</i> can bear."</p>
+<p>He thought: "She's gone through hell herself, to get me out of
+it."</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;May, 1916.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER,--Yes, "Captain," please. (I can
+hardly believe it myself, but it is so.) It was thundering good
+luck getting into dear old Nicky's regiment. The whole thing's
+incredible. But promotion's nothing. Everybody's getting it like
+lightning now. You're no sooner striped than you're starred.</p>
+<p>I'm glad I resisted the Adjutant and worked up from the ranks. I
+own it was a bit beastly at the time--quite as beastly as Nicky
+said it would be; but it was worth while going through with it,
+especially living in the trenches as a Tommy. There's nothing like
+it for making you know your men. You can tell exactly what's going
+to bother them, and what isn't. You've got your finger on the pulse
+of their morale--not that it's jumpier than yours; it isn't--and
+their knowing that they haven't got to stand anything that you
+haven't stood gives you no end of a pull. Honestly, I don't believe
+I could have faced them if it wasn't for that. So that <i>your</i>
+morale's the better for it as well as theirs. You know, if you're
+shot down this minute it won't matter. The weediest Tommy in your
+Company can "carry on."</p>
+<p><i>We</i>'re a funny crowd in my billet all risen from the ranks
+except my Senior. John would love us. There's a chap who writes
+short stories and goes out very earnestly among the corpses to find
+copy; and there's another who was in the publishing business and
+harks back to it, now and then, in a dreamy nostalgic way, and
+rather as if he wanted to rub it into us writing chaps what he
+<i>could</i> do for us, only he wouldn't; and there's a tailor who
+swears he could tell a mile off where my tunic came from; and a
+lawyer's clerk who sticks his cigarette behind his ear. (We used to
+wonder what he'd do with his revolver till we saw what he did with
+it.) They all love thinking of what they've been and telling you
+about it. I almost wish I'd gone into Daddy's business. Then
+perhaps I'd know what it feels like to go straight out of a shop or
+an office into the most glorious Army in history.</p>
+<p>I forgot the Jew pawnbroker at least we <i>think</i> he's a
+pawnbroker--who's always inventing things; stupendous and
+impossible things. His last idea was machine-howitzers fourteen
+feet high, that take in shells exactly as a machine-gun takes in
+bullets. He says "You'll see them in the next War." When you ask
+him how he's going to transport and emplace and hide his
+machine-howitzers, he looks dejected, and says "I never thought of
+<i>that</i>," and has another idea at once, even more
+impossible.</p>
+<p>That reminds me. I've seen the "Tanks" (Nicky's Moving
+Fortresses) in action. I'd give my promotion if only he could have
+seen them too. We mustn't call them Fortresses any more--they're
+most violently for attack. As far as I can make out Nicky's and
+Drayton's thing was something between these and the French ones;
+otherwise one might have wondered whether their plans and models
+really did go where John says they did! I wish I could believe that
+Nicky and Drayton really <i>had</i> had a hand in it.</p>
+<p>I'm most awfully grieved to hear that young Vereker's reported
+missing. Do you remember how excited he used to be dashing about
+the lawn at tennis, and how Alice Lathom used to sit and look at
+him, and jump if you brought her her tea too suddenly? Let's hope
+we'll have finished up this damned War before they get little
+Norris.</p>
+<p>Love to Dorothy and Don and Ronny.--Your loving, MICK.</p>
+<p>When Frances read that letter she said, "I wonder if he really
+is all right. He says very little about himself."</p>
+<p>And Anthony said, "Then you may be sure he is."</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;May 31st, 1916.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad Mummy and Father have got all my
+letters. They won't mind my writing to you this time. It really
+<i>is</i> your turn now. Thanks for Wadham's "Poems" (I wish they'd
+been Ellis's). It's a shame to laugh at Waddy--but--he <i>has</i>
+spread himself over Flanders, hasn't he? Like the inundations round
+Ypres.</p>
+<p>I'm most awfully touched at Dad and Mummy wanting to publish
+mine. Here they all are--just as I wrote them, in our billet, at
+night or in the early morning, when the others were sleeping and I
+wasn't. I don't know whether they're bad or good; I haven't had
+time to think about them. It all seems so incredibly far away. Even
+last week seems far away. You go on so fast here.</p>
+<p>I'd like Ellis and Monier-Owen to see them and to weed out the
+bad ones. But you mustn't ask them to do anything. They haven't
+time, either. I think you and Dorothy and Dad will manage it all
+right among you. If you don't I shan't much care.</p>
+<p>Of course I'm glad that they've taken you on at the Hampstead
+Hospital, if it makes you happier to nurse. And I'm glad Dad put
+his foot down on your going to Vera. She gave you up to my people
+and she can't take you back now. I'm sorry for her though; so is
+he.</p>
+<p>Have I had any adventures "by myself"? Only two. (I've given up
+what Mother calls my "not wanting to go to the party.") One came
+off in "No Man's Land" the other night. I went out with a "party"
+and came back by myself--unless you count a damaged Tommy hanging
+on to me. It began in pleasurable excitement and ended in some
+perturbation, for I had to get him in under cover somehow, and my
+responsibility weighed on me--so did he. The other was ages ago in
+a German trench. I was by myself, because I'd gone in too quick,
+and the "party" behind me took the wrong turning. I did manage to
+squeeze a chilly excitement out of going on alone. Then I bumped up
+against a fat German officer and his revolver. That really was an
+exquisite moment, and I was beast enough to be glad I had it all to
+myself. It meant a bag of fifteen prisoners--all my own. But that
+was nothing; they'd have surrendered to a mouse. There was no
+reason why they shouldn't, because I'd fired first and there was no
+more officer to play up to.</p>
+<p>But the things you don't do by yourself are a long way the best.
+Nothing--not even poetry--can beat an infantry charge when you're
+leading it. That's because of your men. It feels as if you were
+drawing them all up after you. Of course you aren't. They're coming
+on their own, and you're simply nothing, only a little unimportant
+part of them--even when you're feeling as if you were God
+Almighty.</p>
+<p>I'm afraid it <i>does</i> look awfully as if young Vereker were
+killed. They may hear, you know, in some roundabout way--through
+the Red Cross, or some of his men. I've written to them.</p>
+<p>Love to everybody. Certainly you may kiss Nanna for me, if she'd
+like it. I wish I liked Waddy more--when you've given him to
+me.--Always your affectionate,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MICHAEL.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.--I don't sound pleased about the publication; but I am. I
+can't get over their wanting to do it. I thought they didn't
+care.</p>
+<p>Ronny--I've been such a beast to them--when Father tried to read
+my stuff--bless him!--and couldn't, I used to wish to God he'd
+leave it alone. And now I'd give anything to see his dear old paws
+hanging on to it and twitching with fright, and his eyes slewing
+round to see if I'm looking at him.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;June 14th, 1916.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad you like them, and I'm glad Father
+thinks he "understands Michael's poems" this time, and I'm glad
+they've made Mother and Dorothy feel happier about me--BUT--they
+must get it out of their heads that they're my "message," or any
+putrescent thing of that sort. The bare idea of writing a message,
+or of being supposed to write a message, makes me sick. I know it's
+beastly of me, but, really I'd rather they weren't published at
+all, if there's the smallest chance of their being taken that
+way.</p>
+<p>But if Ellis is doing the introduction there isn't the smallest
+chance. Thank God for Ellis.</p>
+<p>There--I've let off all my beastliness.</p>
+<p>And now I'll try to answer your letter. Yes; the "ecstasy" in
+the last two poems <i>is</i> Nicky's ecstasy. And as Ellis says it
+strikes him as absolutely real, I take it that some of Nicky's
+"reality" has got through. It's hard on Ellis that he has to take
+<i>his</i> ecstasy from me, instead of coming out and getting it
+for himself.</p>
+<p>But you and Nicky and Lawrence are right. It <i>is</i>
+absolutely real. I mean it has to do with absolute reality. With
+God. It hasn't anything to do with having courage, or not having
+courage; it's another state of mind altogether. It isn't what
+Nicky's man said it was--you're not ashamed of it the next day. It
+isn't excitement; you're not excited. It isn't a tingling of your
+nerves; they don't tingle. It's all curiously quiet and steady. You
+remember when you saw Nicky--how everything stood still? And how
+two times were going on, and you and Nicky were in one time, and
+Mother was in the other? Well--it's like that. Your body and its
+nerves aren't in it at all. Your body may be moving violently, with
+other bodies moving violently round it; but <i>you</i>'re
+still.</p>
+<p>But suppose it is your nerves. Why should they tingle at just
+that particular moment, the moment that makes <i>animals</i>
+afraid? Why should you be so extraordinarily happy? Why should the
+moment of extreme danger be always the "exquisite" moment? Why not
+the moment of safety?</p>
+<p>Doesn't it look as if danger were the point of contact with
+reality, and death the closest point? You're through. Actually you
+lay hold on eternal life, and you know it.</p>
+<p>Another thing--it always comes with that little shock of
+recognition. It's happened before, and when you get near to it
+again you know what it is. You keep on wanting to get near it,
+wanting it to happen again. You may lose it the next minute, but
+you know. Lawrence knew what it was. Nicky knew.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<blockquote>June 19th.</blockquote>
+<p>I'm coming back to it--after that interruption--because I want
+to get the thing clear. I have to put it down as I feel it; there's
+no other way. But they mustn't think it's something that only
+Lawrence and Nicky and I feel. The men feel it too, even when they
+don't know what it is. And some of them <i>do</i> know.</p>
+<p>Of course we shall be accused of glorifying War and telling lies
+about it. Well--there's a Frenchman who has told the truth, piling
+up all the horrors, faithfully, remorselessly, magnificently. But
+he seems to think people oughtn't to write about this War at all
+unless they show up the infamy of it, as a deterrent, so that no
+Government can ever start another one. It's a sort of literary
+"frightfulness." But who is he trying to frighten? Does he imagine
+that France, or England, or Russia or Belgium, or Serbia, will want
+to start another war when this is over? And does he suppose that
+Germany--if we don't beat her--will be deterred by his
+frightfulness? Germany's arrogance will be satisfied when she knows
+she's made a Frenchman feel like that about it.</p>
+<p>He's got his truth all right. As Morrie would say: "That's War."
+But a peaceful earthquake can do much the same thing. And if
+<i>our</i> truth--what <i>we</i>'ve seen--isn't War, at any rate
+it's what we've got out of it, it's our "glory," our spiritual
+compensation for the physical torture, and there would be a sort of
+infamy in trying to take it from us. It isn't the French
+Government, or the British that's fighting Germany; it's we--all of
+us. To insist on the world remembering nothing but these horrors is
+as if men up to their knees in the filth they're clearing away
+should complain of each other for standing in it and splashing it
+about.</p>
+<p>The filth of War--and the physical torture--Good God! As if the
+world was likely to forget it. Any more than we're likely to forget
+what <i>we</i> know.</p>
+<p>You remember because you've known it before and it all hangs
+together. It's not as if danger were the only point of contact with
+reality. You get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition,
+and the same utter satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing. At
+least to me it's like that. You know what Nicky thought it was
+like. You know what it was like when you used to sit looking and
+looking at Mother's "tree of Heaven."</p>
+<p>It's odd, Ronny, to have gone all your life trying to get
+reality, trying to get new beauty, trying to get utter
+satisfaction; to have funked coming out here because you thought it
+was all obscene ugliness and waste and frustration, and then to
+come out, and to find what you wanted.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<blockquote>June 25th.</blockquote>
+<p>I wrote all that, while I could, because I want to make them see
+it. It's horrible that Dorothy should think that Drayton's dead and
+that Mother should think that Nicky's dead, when they wouldn't, if
+they really knew. If they don't believe Lawrence or me, can't they
+believe Nicky? I'm only saying what he said. But I can't write to
+them about it because they make me shy, and I'm afraid they'll
+think I'm only gassing, or "making poetry"--as if poetry wasn't the
+most real thing there is!</p>
+<p>If anybody can make them see it, you can.--Always your
+affectionate,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MICHAEL.</blockquote>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>XXV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Anthony was going into the house to take back the key of the
+workshop.</p>
+<p>He had locked the door of the workshop a year ago, after Nicky's
+death, and had not opened it again until to-day. This afternoon in
+the orchard he had seen that the props of the old apple-tree were
+broken and he had thought that he would like to make new ones, and
+the wood was in the workshop.</p>
+<p>Everything in there was as it had been when Nicky finished with
+his Moving Fortress. The brass and steel filings lay in a heap
+under the lathe, the handle was tilted at the point where he had
+left it; pits in the saw-dust showed where his feet had stood. His
+overalls hung over the bench where he had slipped them off.</p>
+<p>Anthony had sat down on the bench and had looked at these things
+with remembrance and foreboding. He thought of Nicky and of Nicky's
+pleasure and excitement over the unpacking of his first lathe--the
+one he had begged for for his birthday--and of his own pleasure and
+excitement as he watched his boy handling it and showing him so
+cleverly how it worked. It stood there still in the corner. Nicky
+had given it to Veronica. He had taught her how to use it. And
+Anthony thought of Veronica when she was little; he saw Nicky
+taking care of her, teaching her to run and ride and play games.
+And he remembered what Veronica's mother had said to him and
+Frances: "Wait till Nicky has children of his own."</p>
+<p>He thought of John. John had volunteered three times and had
+been three times rejected. And now conscription had got him. He had
+to appear before the Board of Examiners that afternoon. He might be
+rejected again. But the standard was not so exacting as it had
+been--John might be taken.</p>
+<p>He thought of his business--John's business and his, and
+Bartie's. Those big Government contracts had more than saved them.
+They were making tons of money out of the War. Even when the
+Government cut down their profits; even when they had given more
+than half they made to the War funds, the fact remained that they
+were living on the War. Bartie, without a wife or children, was
+appallingly rich.</p>
+<p>If John were taken. If John were killed--</p>
+<p>If Michael died--</p>
+<p>Michael had been reported seriously wounded.</p>
+<p>He had thought then of Michael. And he had not been able to bear
+thinking any more. He had got up and left the workshop, locking the
+door behind him, forgetting what he had gone in for; and he had
+taken the key back to the house. He kept it in what his children
+used to call the secret drawer of his bureau. It lay there with
+Nicky's last letter of June, 1915, and a slab of coromandel
+wood.</p>
+<p>It was when he was going into the house with the key that John
+met him.</p>
+<p>"Have they taken you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>John's face was hard and white. They went together into
+Anthony's room.</p>
+<p>"It's what you wanted," Anthony said.</p>
+<p>"Of course it's what I wanted. I want it more than ever now.</p>
+<p>"The wire's come, Father. Mother opened it."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>It was five days now since they had heard that Michael had died
+of his wounds. Frances was in Michael's room. She was waiting for
+Dorothea and Veronica to help her to find his papers. It was eight
+o'clock in the evening, and they had to be sorted and laid out
+ready for Morton Ellis to look over them to-morrow. To-morrow
+Morton Ellis would come, and he would take them away.</p>
+<p>The doors of Michael's and of Nicky's rooms were always kept
+shut; Frances knew that, if she were to open the door on the other
+side of the corridor and look in, every thing in Nicky's room would
+welcome her with tenderness even while it inflicted its unique and
+separate wound. But Michael's room was bare and silent. He had
+cleared everything away out of her sight last year before he went.
+The very books on the shelves repudiated her; reminded her that she
+had never understood him, that he had always escaped her. His room
+kept his secret, and she felt afraid and abashed in it, knowing
+herself an intruder. Presently all that was most precious in it
+would be taken from her and given over to a stranger whom he had
+never liked.</p>
+<p>Her mind turned and fastened on one object--the stiff, naked
+wooden chair standing in its place before the oak table by the
+window. She remembered how she had come to Michael there and found
+him writing at his table, and how she had talked to him as though
+he had been a shirker and a coward.</p>
+<p>She had borne Nicky's death. But she could not bear Michael's.
+She stood there in his room, staring, hypnotized by her memory. She
+heard Dorothea come in and go out again. And then Veronica came
+in.</p>
+<p>She turned to Veronica to help her.</p>
+<p>She clung to Veronica and was jealous of her. Veronica had not
+come between her and Nicky as long as he was alive, but now that he
+was dead she came between them. She came between her and Michael
+too. Michael's mind had always been beyond her; she could only
+reach it through Veronica and through Veronica's secret. Her mind
+clutched at Veronica's secret, and flung it away as useless, and
+returned, clutching at it again.</p>
+<p>It was as if Veronica held the souls of Michael and Nicholas in
+her hands. She offered her the souls of her dead sons. She was the
+mediator between her and their souls.</p>
+<p>"I could bear it, Veronica, if I hadn't made him go. I came to
+him, here, in this room, and bullied him till he went. I said
+horrible things to him--that he must have remembered.</p>
+<p>"He wasn't like Nicky--it was infinitely worse for him. And I
+was cruel to him. I had no pity. I drove him out--to be killed.</p>
+<p>"And I simply cannot bear it."</p>
+<p>"But--he didn't go then. He waited till--till he was free. If
+anybody could have made him, Nicky could. But it wasn't even Nicky.
+It was himself."</p>
+<p>"If he'd been killed as Nicky was--but to die like that, in the
+hospital--of those horrible wounds."</p>
+<p>"He was leading a charge, just as Nicky was. And you know he was
+happy, just as Nicky was. Every line he's written shows that he was
+happy."</p>
+<p>"It only shows that they were both full of life, that they loved
+their life and wanted to live.</p>
+<p>"It's no use, Ronny, you're saying you know they're there. I
+don't. I'd give anything to believe it. And yet it wouldn't be a
+bit of good if I did. I don't <i>want</i> them all changed into
+something spiritual that I shouldn't know if it was there. I want
+their bodies with me just as they used to be. I want to hear them
+and touch them, and see them come in in their old clothes.</p>
+<p>"To see Nicky standing on the hearthrug with Timmy in his arms.
+I want things like that, Ronny. Even if you're right, it's all
+clean gone."</p>
+<p>Her lips tightened.</p>
+<p>"I'm talking as if I was, the only one. But I know it's worse
+for you, Ronny. I <i>had</i> them all those years. And I've got
+Anthony. You've had nothing but your poor three days."</p>
+<p>Veronica thought: "How can I tell her that I've got more than
+she thinks? It's awful that I should have what she hasn't." She was
+ashamed and beaten before this irreparable, mortal grief.</p>
+<p>"And it's worse," Frances said, "for the wretched mothers whose
+sons haven't fought."</p>
+<p>For her pride rose in her again--the pride that uplifted her
+supernaturally when Nicky died.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't think I grudge them. I don't. I don't even grudge
+John."</p>
+<p>The silence of Michael's room sank into them, it weighed on
+their hearts and they were afraid of each other's voices. Frances
+was glad when Dorothy came and they could begin their work
+there.</p>
+<p>But Michael had not left them much to do. They found his papers
+all in one drawer of his writing-table, sorted and packed and
+labelled, ready for Morton Ellis to take away. One sealed envelope
+lay in a place by itself. Frances thought: "He didn't want any of
+us to touch his things."</p>
+<p>Then she saw Veronica's name on the sealed envelope. She was
+glad when Veronica left them and went to her hospital.</p>
+<p>And when she was gone she wanted her back again.</p>
+<p>"I wish I hadn't spoken that way to Veronica," she said.</p>
+<p>"She won't mind. She knows you couldn't help it."</p>
+<p>"I could, Dorothy, if I wasn't jealous of her. I mean I'm
+jealous of her certainty. If I had it, too, I shouldn't be
+jealous."</p>
+<p>"She wants you to have it. She's trying to give it you.</p>
+<p>"Mother--how do we know she isn't right? Nicky said she was. And
+Michael said Nicky was right.</p>
+<p>"If it had been only Nicky--<i>he</i> might have got it from
+Veronica. But Michael never got things from anybody. And you
+<i>do</i> know things in queer ways. Even I do. At least I did
+once--when I was in prison. I knew something tremendous was going
+to happen. I saw it, or felt it, or something. I won't swear I knew
+it was the War. I don't suppose I did. But I knew Frank was all
+mixed up with it. And it was the most awfully real thing. You
+couldn't go back on it, or get behind it. It was as if I'd seen
+that he and Lawrence and Nicky and Michael and all of them would
+die in it to save the whole world. Like Christ, only that they
+really <i>did</i> die and the whole world <i>was</i> saved. There
+was nothing futile about it."</p>
+<p>"Well--?"</p>
+<p>"Well, <i>they</i> might see their real thing the same way--in a
+flash. Aren't they a thousand times more likely to know than we
+are? What right have we--sitting here safe--to say it isn't when
+they say it is?"</p>
+<p>"But--if there's anything in it--why can't I see it as well as
+you and Veronica? After all, I'm their mother."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps that's why it takes you longer, Mummy. You think of
+their bodies more than we do, because they were part of your body.
+Their souls, or whatever it is, aren't as real to you just at
+first."</p>
+<p>"I see," said Frances, bitterly. "You've only got to be a
+mother, and give your children your flesh and blood, to be sure of
+their souls going from you and somebody else getting them."</p>
+<p>"That's the price you pay for being mothers."</p>
+<p>"Was Frank's soul ever more real to <i>you</i>, Dorothy?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. It was once--for just one minute. The night he went away.
+That's another queer thing that happened."</p>
+<p>"It didn't satisfy you, darling, did it?"</p>
+<p>"Of course it didn't satisfy me. I want more and more of it. Not
+just flashes."</p>
+<p>"You say it's the price we pay for being mothers. Yet if
+Veronica had had a child--"</p>
+<p>"You needn't be so sorry for Veronica."</p>
+<p>"I'm not. It's you I'm sorriest for. You've had nothing. From
+beginning to end you had nothing.</p>
+<p>"I might at least have seen that you had it in the
+beginning."</p>
+<p>"<i>You</i>, Mummy?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Me. You <i>shall</i> have it now. Unless you want to leave
+me."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't leave you for the world, Mummy ducky. Only you must
+let me work always and all the time."</p>
+<p>"Let you? I'll let you do what you like, my dear."</p>
+<p>"You always have let me, haven't you?"</p>
+<p>"It was the least I could do."</p>
+<p>"Poor Mummy, did you think you had to make up because you cared
+for them more than me?"</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said Frances, thoughtfully, "if I did."</p>
+<p>"Of course. Of course you did. Who wouldn't?"</p>
+<p>"I never meant you to know it, Dorothy."</p>
+<p>"Of course I knew it. I must have known it ever since Michael
+was born. I knew you couldn't help it. You had to. Even when I was
+a tiresome kid I knew you had to. It was natural."</p>
+<p>"Natural or unnatural, many girls have hated their mothers for
+less. You've been very big and generous.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps--if you'd been little and weak--but you were always
+such an independent thing. I used to think you didn't want me."</p>
+<p>"I wanted you a lot more than you thought. But, you see, I've
+learned to do without."</p>
+<p>She thought: "It's better she should have it straight."</p>
+<p>"If you'd think less about me, Mother," she said, "and more
+about Father--"</p>
+<p>"Father?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Father isn't independent--though he looks it. He wants you
+awfully. He always has wanted you. And he hasn't learned to do
+without."</p>
+<p>"Where is he?"</p>
+<p>"He's sitting out there in the garden, all by himself, in the
+dark, under the tree."</p>
+<p>Frances went to him there.</p>
+<p>"I wondered whether you would come to me," he said.</p>
+<p>"I was doing something for Michael."</p>
+<p>"Is it done?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. It's done."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Five months passed. It was November now.</p>
+<p>In the lane by the side door, Anthony was waiting in his car.
+Rain was falling, hanging from the trees and falling. Every now and
+then he looked at his watch.</p>
+<p>He had still a quarter of an hour before he need start. But he
+was not going back into the house. They were all in there saying
+good-bye to John: old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and
+Edith. And Maurice. And his brother Bartie.</p>
+<p>The door in the garden wall opened and they came out: the four
+women in black--the black they still wore for Michael--and the two
+men.</p>
+<p>They all walked slowly up the lane. Anthony could see Bartie's
+shoulders hunched irritably against the rain. He could see Morrie
+carrying his sodden, quivering body with care and an exaggerated
+sobriety. He saw Grannie, going slowly, under the umbrella, very
+upright and conscious of herself as wonderful and outlasting.</p>
+<p>He got down and cranked up his engine.</p>
+<p>Then he sat sternly in his car and waited, with his hands on the
+steering-wheel, ready.</p>
+<p>The engine throbbed, impatient for the start.</p>
+<p>John came out very quickly and took his seat beside his father.
+And the car went slowly towards the high road.</p>
+<p>Uncle Morrie stood waiting for it by the gate at the top of the
+lane. As it passed through he straightened himself and put up his
+hand in a crapulous salute.</p>
+<p>The young man smiled at him, saluted, and was gone</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13883 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Tree of Heaven, by May Sinclair
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Tree of Heaven
+
+Author: May Sinclair
+
+Release Date: October 27, 2004  [eBook #13883]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREE OF HEAVEN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+THE TREE OF HEAVEN
+
+by
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+Author of _The Belfry_, _The Three Sisters_, etc.
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+PEACE
+
+
+
+I
+
+Frances Harrison was sitting out in the garden under the tree that her
+husband called an ash-tree, and that the people down in her part of the
+country called a tree of Heaven.
+
+It was warm under the tree, and Frances might have gone to sleep there
+and wasted an hour out of the afternoon, if it hadn't been for
+the children.
+
+Dorothy, Michael and Nicholas were going to a party, and Nicky was
+excited. She could hear Old Nanna talking to Michael and telling him to
+be a good boy. She could hear young Mary-Nanna singing to Baby John.
+Baby John was too young himself to go to parties; so to make up for that
+he was riding furiously on Mary-Nanna's knee to the tune of the
+"Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major!"
+
+It was Nicky's first party. That was why he was excited.
+
+He had asked her for the third time what it would be like; and for the
+third time she had told him. There would be dancing and a Magic Lantern,
+and a Funny Man, and a Big White Cake covered with sugar icing and
+Rosalind's name on it in pink sugar letters and eight little pink wax
+candles burning on the top for Rosalind's birthday. Nicky's eyes shone
+as she told him.
+
+Dorothy, who was nine years old, laughed at Nicky.
+
+"Look at Nicky," she said, "how excited he is!"
+
+And every time she laughed at him his mother kissed him.
+
+"I don't care," said Nicky. "I don't care if I am becited!"
+
+And for the fifth time he asked, "When will it be time to go?"
+
+"Not for another hour and a half, my sweetheart."
+
+"How long," said Nicky, "is an hour and a half?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances had a tranquil nature and she never worried. But as she sat
+under her tree of Heaven a thought came that made a faint illusion of
+worry for her mind. She had forgotten to ask Grannie and Auntie Louie
+and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie to tea.
+
+She had come to think of them like that in relation to her children
+rather than to her or to each other.
+
+It was a Tuesday, and they had not been there since Friday. Perhaps, she
+thought, I'd better send over for them now. Especially as it's such a
+beautiful afternoon. Supposing I sent Michael?
+
+And yet, supposing Anthony came home early? He was always kind to her
+people, but that was the very reason why she oughtn't to let them spoil
+a beautiful afternoon for him. It could not be said that any of them
+was amusing.
+
+She could still hear Mary-Nanna singing her song about the
+Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major. She could still hear Old Nanna talking to
+Michael and telling him to be a good boy. That could only end in Michael
+being naughty. To avert naughtiness or any other disaster from her
+children was the end of Frances's existence.
+
+So she called Michael to come to her. He came, running like a little
+dog, obediently.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael was glad that he had been sent across the Heath to Grannie's
+house with a message. It made him feel big and brave. Besides, it would
+put off the moment when Mary-Nanna would come for him, to make him ready
+for the party. He was not sure that he wanted to go to it.
+
+Michael did not much like going to Grannie's house either. In all the
+rooms there was a queer dark-greenness and creepiness. It smelt of
+bird-cages and elder bushes and of Grandpapa's funeral. And when you had
+seen Auntie Edie's Senegal wax-bills, and the stuffed fish, and the
+inside of Auntie Louie's type-writer there was nothing else to see.
+
+His mother said that Grandpapa's funeral was all over, and that the
+green creepiness came from the green creepers. But Michael knew it
+didn't. She only said things like that to make you feel nice and comfy
+when you were going to bed. Michael knew very well that they had put
+Grandpapa into the drawing-room and locked the door so that the funeral
+men shouldn't get at him and take him away too soon. And Auntie Louie
+had kept the key in her pocket.
+
+Funerals meant taking people away.
+
+Old Nanna wouldn't let him talk about it; but Mary-Nanna had told him
+that was what funerals meant. All the same, as he went up the flagged
+path, he took care not to look through the black panes of the window
+where the elder bush was, lest he should see Grandpapa's coffin standing
+in the place where the big table used to be, and Grandpapa lying inside
+it wrapped in a white sheet.
+
+Michael's message was that Mummy sent her love, and would Grannie and
+Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie come to tea? She was
+going to have tea in the garden, and would they please come early? As
+early as possible. That was the part he was not to forget.
+
+The queer thing was that when Michael went to see Grannie and the
+Aunties in Grannie's house he saw four old women. They wore black
+dresses that smelt sometimes of something sweet and sometimes like your
+fingers when you get ink on them. The Aunties looked cross; and Auntie
+Emmeline smelt as if she had been crying. He thought that perhaps they
+had not been able to stop crying since Grandpapa's funeral. He thought
+that was why Auntie Louie's nose was red and shiny and Auntie Edie's
+eyelids had pink edges instead of lashes. In Grannie's house they never
+let you do anything. They never did anything themselves. They never
+wanted to do anything; not even to talk. He thought it was because they
+knew that Grandpapa was still there all the time.
+
+But outside it the Aunties were not so very old. They rode bicycles. And
+when they came to Michael's Father's house they forgot all about
+Grandpapa's funeral and ran about and played tennis like Michael's
+mother and Mrs. Jervis, and they talked a lot.
+
+Michael's mother was Grannie's child. To see how she could be a child
+you had only to think of her in her nightgown with her long brown hair
+plaited in a pigtail hanging down her back and tied with a blue ribbon.
+But he couldn't see how the three Aunties could be Grannie's other
+children. They were bigger than Grannie and they had grey hair. Grannie
+was a little thing; she was white and dry; and she had hair like hay.
+Besides, she hardly ever took any notice of them except to make a face
+at Auntie Emmeline or Auntie Edie now and then. She did it with her head
+a little on one side, pushing out her underlip and drawing it
+back again.
+
+Grannie interested Michael; but more when he thought about her than when
+she was actually there. She stood for him as the mark and measure of
+past time. To understand how old Grannie was you had to think backwards;
+this way: Once there was a time when there was no Michael; but there was
+Mummy and there was Daddy. And once there was a time when there was no
+Mummy and no Daddy; but there was Grannie and there was Grandpapa. Now
+there was no Grandpapa. But he couldn't think back far enough to get to
+the time when there was no Grannie.
+
+Michael thought that being Grannie must feel like being God.
+
+Before he came to the black window pane and the elder bush he had to run
+down the slopes and jump the gullies on his side of the Heath, and cross
+the West Road, and climb the other slope to Grannie's side. And it was
+not till you got to the row of elms on Judge's Walk that you had to go
+carefully because of the funeral.
+
+He stood there on the ridge of the Walk and looked back to his own side.
+There were other houses there; but he knew his father's house by the
+tree of Heaven in the garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The garden stood on a high, flat promontory jutting out into the Heath.
+A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like fortifications on a
+breastwork, enclosed it on three sides. From the flagged terrace at the
+bottom of the garden you looked down, through the tops of the
+birch-trees that rose against the rampart, over the wild places of the
+Heath. There was another flagged terrace at the other end of the garden.
+The house rose sheer from its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and
+flat-fronted, with the white wings of its storm shutters spread open,
+row on row. It barred the promontory from the mainland. And at the back
+of it, beyond its kitchen garden and its courtyard, a fringe of Heath
+still parted it from the hill road that went from "Jack Straw's Castle"
+to "The Bull and Bush." You reached it by a lane that led from the road
+to the Heath.
+
+The house belonged to the Heath and the open country. It was aware of
+nothing but the Heath and the open country between it and Harrow on the
+Hill. It had the air of all the old houses of Hampstead, the wonderful
+air of not acknowledging the existence of Bank Holidays. It was lifted
+up high above the town; shut in; utterly secluded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anthony Harrison considered that he had done well when he acquired West
+End House for his wife Frances, and for his children, Dorothea, Michael,
+Nicholas and John.
+
+Frances had said that, if he was thinking of her, he needn't buy a big
+place, because she didn't want one. But he might buy it for the children
+if he liked. Anthony had said that she had no idea of what she mightn't
+want, once she began to give her mind to it, and that he would like to
+think of her living in it after he was gone. Not that he had any
+intention of going; he was only thirty-six (not much older than Frances)
+and incurably healthy. But since his wife's attention had become
+absorbed in the children--to the exclusion of every other interest--he
+was always trying to harrow her by the suggestion. And Frances only
+laughed at him and told him that he was a silly old thing, and that he
+needn't think he was going to get round her that way.
+
+There was no other way open for Anthony; unless he were to go bankrupt
+or get pneumonia or peritonitis. Frances would have been the first to
+acknowledge that illness or misfortune constituted a claim. And the only
+things he ever did get were loud, explosive colds in his head which made
+him a mark for derision. His business was so sound that not even a
+revolution or a European war could shake it. And his appearance was
+incompatible with his pretensions to pathos.
+
+It would have paid him better to have been small and weedy, or
+lamentably fat, or to have had a bald place coming, or crow's feet
+pointing to grey hairs; for then there might have been a chance for him.
+But Anthony's body was well made, slender and tall. He had blue eyes and
+black-brown hair, and the look of an amiable hawk, alert, fiercely
+benevolent. Frances couldn't see any pathos in the kind of figure she
+happened to admire most, the only kind she would have tolerated in a
+husband. And if she _had_ seen any pathos in it she wouldn't have
+married it. Pathos, she said, was all very well in a father, or a
+brother, or a friend, but in choosing a husband you had to think of your
+children; and she had wanted boys that would look like Michael and
+Nicholas and John.
+
+"Don't you mean," Anthony had said, "boys that will look like me?"
+
+"I mean," she had answered, "exactly what I say. You needn't be so
+arrogant."
+
+_Her_ arrogance had been beyond all bearing since John, the third son,
+had been born.
+
+And it was Frances, after all, who had made him buy West End House for
+her own reasons. Both the day nursery and the night nursery had windows
+to the south. It was the kind of house she had always dreamed of living
+in, and of Michael, or Nicky living in after she and Anthony were gone.
+It was not more than seven minutes' walk from the bottom of the lane to
+the house where her people lived. She had to think about the old people
+when the poor dears had come up to London in order to be thought about.
+And it had white storm shutters and a tree of Heaven in the garden.
+
+And, because they had both decided that they would have that house
+whatever happened, they began to argue and to tease each other. Anthony
+had said it was all right, only the tree of Heaven wasn't a tree of
+Heaven; it was a common ash. He was one of the biggest timber merchants
+in the country and he ought to know. Frances said she mightn't know
+much, but she did know that was the kind of tree the people down in her
+part of the country called a tree of Heaven. Anthony said he couldn't
+help that. It didn't matter what they called it. It was a common ash.
+
+Then she told him he had no poetry in his composition. She had always
+dreamed of having a tree of Heaven in her garden; and he was destroying
+her dream. He replied that he didn't want to destroy her dream, but the
+tree really _was_ an ash. You could tell by the bark, and by the leaves
+and by the number and the shape of the leaflets. And anyhow, that was
+the first he'd heard about her dream.
+
+"You don't know," said Frances, "what goes on inside me."
+
+She said that if any of the children developed an imagination he needn't
+think _he_ had anything to do with it.
+
+"I shan't," said Anthony. "I wouldn't have anything to do with it if I
+could. Facts are good enough for me. The children must be brought up to
+realize facts."
+
+An ash-tree was a fact and a tree of Heaven was a fancy; unless by any
+chance she meant _ailanthus glandulosa_. (He knew she didn't.) If she
+wanted to know, the buds of the ash were black like ebony. The buds of
+the tree of Heaven were rose-red, like--like bad mahogany. Wait till the
+spring and look at the buds.
+
+Frances waited till the spring and looked at the buds, and, sure enough,
+they were black like ebony.
+
+Anthony also said that if they were choosing a house for the children,
+it was no earthly use to think about the old people. For the old people
+would go and the children would remain.
+
+As if to show how right he was, Grandpapa had died early in that summer
+of 'ninety-five, one month after they had moved into West End House.
+That still left Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie
+Edie for Anthony to look after.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was thinking of them now. She hoped that they would come early in
+time to see the children. She also hoped that they would go early, so
+that she and Anthony might have their three sets of tennis before
+dinner in peace.
+
+There would be no peace if Louie and Edie wanted to play too. The one
+thing that Anthony could not stand was people wanting to do things they
+couldn't do, and spoiling them for those who could. He used to say that
+the sight of Louie anywhere near the tennis court put him off
+his stroke.
+
+Again, the faint illusion of worry was created by the thought that this
+dreadful thing might happen, that Louie and Edie might want to play and
+that Anthony would be put off his stroke and be annoyed, and that his
+annoyance, his just and legitimate annoyance, would spoil the
+perfection of the afternoon. And as she played with the illusion it made
+more real her tranquillity, her incredible content.
+
+Her hands were busy now putting decorative stitches into a frock for
+John. She had pushed aside a novel by George Moore and a volume of
+Ibsen's plays. She disliked Ibsen and disapproved of George Moore. Her
+firm, tight little character defended itself against every form of
+intellectual disturbance. A copy of the _Times_ had fallen from her lap
+to her feet. Jane, the cat, had found it there, and, purring loudly, had
+trodden it down into a bed, and now lay on it, asleep. Frances had
+informed herself of the affairs of the nation.
+
+At the bottom of her mind was the conviction (profound, because
+unconscious) that the affairs of the nation were not to be compared for
+interest with her own affairs, and an attitude of condescension, as if
+she honoured the _Times_ by reading it and the nation by informing
+herself of its affairs; also the very distinct impression that evening
+papers were more attractive than morning papers. She would have admitted
+that they owed their attraction to the circumstance that Anthony brought
+them home with him in his pocket, and that in the evening she was not
+obliged to inform herself of what might be happening. Anthony was
+certain to inform her.
+
+Not that anything ever did happen. Except strikes; and even then, no
+sooner did the features of the strike begin to get dramatic than they
+were instantly submerged in the flood of conversation that was let loose
+over them. Mrs. Anthony pitied the poor editors and reporters while
+Parliament was sitting. She saw them as rather silly, violent and
+desperate men, yet pathetic in their silliness, violence and
+desperation, snatching at divorces, and breach of promise cases, and
+fires in paraffin shops, as drowning men snatch at straws.
+
+Her imagination refused to picture any end to this state of things.
+There would just be more speeches and more strikes, and still more
+speeches, going on for ever and ever at home; while foreign affairs and
+the British Empire went on for ever and ever too, with no connection
+between the two lines of sequence, and no likeness, except that both
+somehow went on and on.
+
+That was Anthony's view of England's parliament and of her imperial
+policy; and it was Mrs. Anthony's. Politics, Anthony said, had become
+static; and he assured Frances that there was no likelihood that they
+would ever become dynamic again--ever.
+
+Anthony's view of politics was Mrs. Anthony's view of life.
+
+Nothing ever really happened. Things did not change; they endured; they
+went on. At least everything that really mattered endured and went on.
+So that everything that really mattered could--if you were given to
+looking forward--be foreseen. A strike--a really bad one--might
+conceivably affect Anthony's business, for a time; but not all the
+strikes in the world, not all the silly speeches, not all the meddling
+and muddling of politicians could ever touch one of those
+enduring things.
+
+Frances believed in permanence because, in secret, she abhorred the
+thought of change. And she abhorred the thought of change because, at
+thirty-three, she had got all the things she wanted. But only for the
+last ten years out of the thirty-three. Before that (before she was Mrs.
+Anthony), wanting things, letting it be known that you wanted them, had
+meant not getting them. So that it was incredible how she had contrived
+to get them all. She had not yet left off being surprised at her own
+happiness. It was not like things you take for granted and are not aware
+of. Frances was profoundly aware of it. Her happiness was a solid,
+tangible thing. She knew where it resided, and what it was made of, and
+what terms she held it on. It depended on her; on her truth, her love,
+her loyalty; it was of the nature of a trust. But there was no illusion
+about it. It was the reality.
+
+She denied that she was arrogant, for she had not taken one of them for
+granted, not even Dorothy; though a little arrogance might have been
+excusable in a woman who had borne three sons and only one daughter
+before she was thirty-two. Whereas Grannie's achievement had been four
+daughters, four superfluous women, of whom Anthony had married one and
+supported three.
+
+To be sure there was Maurice. But he was worse than superfluous,
+considering that most of the time Anthony was supporting Maurice, too.
+
+She had only known one serious anxiety--lest her flesh and blood should
+harbour any of the blood and flesh left over after Morrie was made. She
+had married Anthony to drive out Morrie from the bodies and souls of her
+children. She meant that, through her and Anthony, Morrie should go, and
+Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas and John should remain.
+
+As Frances looked at the four children, her mouth tightened itself so as
+to undo the ruinous adoration of her eyes. She loved their slender
+bodies, their pure, candid faces, their thick, straight hair that parted
+solidly from the brush, clean-cut and shining like sheets of polished
+metal, brown for Dorothy, black-brown for Nicholas, red gold for Michael
+and white gold for John. She was glad that they were all made like that;
+slender and clear and hard, and that their very hair was a thing of
+clean surfaces and definite edges. She disliked the blurred outlines of
+fatness and fuzziness and fluffiness. The bright solidity of their forms
+helped her to her adored illusion, the illusion of their childhood as
+going on, lasting for ever and ever.
+
+They would be the nicest looking children at Mrs. Jervis's party. They
+would stand out solid from the fluffiness and fuzziness and fatness of
+the others. She saw people looking at them. She heard them saying: "Who
+are the two little boys in brown linen?"--"They are Michael and Nicholas
+Harrison." The Funny Man came and said: "Hello! I didn't expect to see
+you here!" It was Michael and Nicholas he didn't expect to see; and the
+noise in the room was Nicky's darling laughter.
+
+Music played. Michael and Nicholas danced to the music. It was Michael's
+body and Nicky's that kept for her the pattern of the dance, their feet
+that beat out its measure. Sitting under the tree of Heaven Frances
+could see Mrs. Jervis's party. It shimmered and clustered in a visionary
+space between the tree and the border of blue larkspurs on the other
+side of the lawn. The firm figures of Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy
+held it together, kept it from being shattered amongst the steep blue
+spires of the larkspurs. When it was all over they would still hold it
+together, so that people would know that it had really happened and
+remember having been there. They might even remember that Rosalind had
+had a birthday.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances had just bestowed this life after death on Mrs. Jervis's party
+when she heard Michael saying he didn't want to go to it.
+
+He had no idea why he didn't want to go except that he didn't.
+
+"What'?" said Frances. "Not when Nicky and Dorothy are going?"
+
+He shook his head. He was mournful and serious.
+
+"And there's going to be a Magic Lantern"--
+
+"I know."
+
+"And a Funny Man"--
+
+"I know."
+
+"And a Big White Cake with sugar icing and Rosalind's name on it in pink
+letters, and eight candles--"
+
+"I know, Mummy." Michael's under lip began to shake.
+
+"I thought it was only little baby boys that were silly and shy."
+
+Michael was not prepared to contest the statement. He saw it was the
+sort of thing that in the circumstances she was bound to say. All the
+same his under lip would have gone on shaking if he hadn't stopped it.
+
+"I thought you were a big boy," said Frances.
+
+"So I _was_, yesterday. To-day isn't yesterday, Mummy."
+
+"If John--John was asked to a beautiful party _he_ wouldn't be afraid to
+go."
+
+As soon as Michael's under lip had stopped shaking his eyelids began.
+You couldn't stop your eyelids.
+
+"It's not _afraid_, exactly," he said.
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"It's sort--sort of forgetting things."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"I don't know, Mummy. I think--it's pieces of me that I want to
+remember. At a party I can't feel all of myself at once--like I do now."
+
+She loved his strange thoughts as she loved his strange beauty, his
+reddish yellow hair, his light hazel eyes that were not hers and not
+Anthony's.
+
+"What will you do, sweetheart, all afternoon, without Nicky and Dorothy
+and Mary-Nanna?"
+
+"I don't want Nicky and Dorothy and Mary-Nanna. I want Myself. I want to
+play with Myself."
+
+She thought: "Why shouldn't he? What right have I to say these things to
+him and make him cry, and send him to stupid parties that he doesn't
+want to go to? After all, he's only a little boy."
+
+She thought of Michael, who was seven, as if he were younger than
+Nicholas, who was only five.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky was different. You could never tell what Michael would take it
+into his head to think. You could never tell what Nicky would take it
+into his head to do. There was no guile in Michael. But sometimes there
+was guile in Nicky. Frances was always on the look out for
+Nicky's guile.
+
+So when Michael remarked that Grannie and the Aunties would be there
+immediately and Nicky said, "Mummy, I think my ear is going to ache,"
+her answer was--"You won't have to stay more than a minute, darling."
+
+For Nicky lived in perpetual fear that his Auntie Louie might kiss at
+him.
+
+Dorothy saw her mother's profound misapprehension and she hastened to
+put it right.
+
+"It isn't Auntie Louie, Mummy. His ear is really aching."
+
+And still Frances went on smiling. She knew, and Nicky knew that, if a
+little boy could establish the fact of earache, he was absolved from all
+social and family obligations for as long as his affliction lasted. He
+wouldn't have to stand still and pretend he liked it while he was being
+kissed at.
+
+Frances kept her mouth shut when she smiled, as if she were trying not
+to. It was her upper lip that got the better of her. The fine, thin
+edges of it quivered and twitched and curled. You would have said the
+very down was sensitive to her thought's secret and iniquitous play. Her
+smile mocked other people's solemnities, her husband's solemnity, and
+the solemnity (no doubt inherited) of her son Michael; it mocked the
+demureness and the gravity of her face.
+
+She had brought her face close to Nicky's; and it was as if her mouth
+had eyes in it to see if there were guile in him.
+
+"Are you a little humbug?" she said.
+
+Nicky loved his mother's face. It never got excited or did silly things
+like other people's faces. It never got red and shiny like Auntie
+Louie's face, or hot and rough like Auntie Emmeline's, or wet and mizzly
+like Auntie Edie's. The softness and whiteness and dryness of his
+mother's face were delightful to Nicky. So was her hair. It was cold,
+with a funny sort of coldness that made your fingers tingle when you
+touched it; and it smelt like the taste of Brazil nuts.
+
+Frances saw the likeness of her smile quiver on Nicky's upper lip. It
+broke and became Nicky's smile that bared his little teeth and curled up
+the corners of his blue eyes. (His blue eyes and black brown hair were
+Anthony's.) It wasn't reasonable to suppose that Nicky had earache when
+he could smile like that.
+
+"I'm afraid," she said, "you're a little humbug. Run to the terrace and
+see if Grannie and the Aunties are coming."
+
+He ran. It was half a child's run and half a full-grown boy's.
+
+Then Mrs. Anthony addressed her daughter.
+
+"Why did you say his ear's aching when it isn't?"
+
+"Because," said Dorothy, "it _is_ aching."
+
+She was polite and exquisite and obstinate, like Anthony.
+
+"Nicky ought to know his own ear best. Go and tell him he's not to stand
+on the top of the wall. And if they're coming wave to them, to show
+you're glad to see them."
+
+"But--Mummy--I'm not."
+
+She knew it was dreadful before she said it. But she had warded off
+reproof by nuzzling against her mother's cheek as it tried to turn away
+from her. She saw her mother's upper lip moving, twitching. The
+sensitive down stirred on it like a dark smudge, a dust that quivered.
+Her own mouth, pushed forward, searching, the mouth of a nuzzling puppy,
+remained grave and tender. She was earnest and imperturbable in her
+truthfulness. "Whether you're glad or not you must go," said Frances.
+She meant to be obeyed.
+
+Dorothy went. Her body was obedient. For as yet she had her mother's
+body and her face, her blunted oval, the straight nose with the fine,
+tilted nostrils, her brown eyes, her solid hair, brown on the top and
+light underneath, and on the curve of the roll above her little ears.
+Frances had watched the appearance of those details with an anxiety that
+would have surprised her if she had been aware of it. She wanted to see
+herself in the bodies of her sons and in the mind of her daughter. But
+Dorothy had her father's mind. You couldn't move it. What she had said
+once she stuck to for ever, like Anthony to his ash-tree. As if sticking
+to a thing for ever could make it right once. And Dorothy had formed the
+habit of actually being right, like Anthony, nine times out of ten.
+Frances foresaw that this persistence, this unreasoning rectitude,
+might, in time, become annoying in a daughter. There were moments when
+she was almost perturbed by the presence of this small, mysterious
+organism, mixed up of her body and her husband's mind.
+
+But in secret she admired her daughter's candour, her downrightness and
+straightforwardness, her disdain of conventions and hypocrisies. Frances
+was not glad, she knew she was not glad, any more than Dorothy was glad,
+to see her mother and her sisters. She only pretended. In secret she was
+afraid of every moment she would have to live with them. She had lived
+with them too long. She foresaw what would happen this afternoon, how
+they would look, what they would say and do, and with what gestures. It
+would be like the telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that
+you know every word of.
+
+She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she had only
+asked them to come early in order that they might go early and leave her
+to her happiness.
+
+She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and Dorothy
+were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought that she
+wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if they were
+coming early. It struck her that this was sad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope under the
+Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the sallow grass and
+the yellow clay of the Heath.
+
+"How little they look," Michael said.
+
+Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them
+pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was the
+difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always would
+be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never would be
+sorry for being what she was. She seemed to be saying, already, in her
+clearness and hardness, "What I am I am, and you can't change me." The
+utmost you could wring from her was that she couldn't help it.
+
+Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black came
+nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the garden and
+the lane.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the lane to
+the tree of Heaven.
+
+She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace,
+advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really belonging to
+each other, as if they had been strangers associated by some accident.
+It had grown on them in their efforts to carry off the embarrassment of
+appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie carried it off best. Sharp
+and rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never lent itself to any group. But for
+her black gown she really might not have belonged.
+
+Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was only
+sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was wrapped
+up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed, fascinated by
+her sacred sense of bereavement. She moved as if hypnotized by her
+own sorrow.
+
+To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of mystic
+hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she suspected them
+of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if they could. But to
+her one married daughter and to her grand-children she was soft and
+gentle. So that, when they happened to be all together, her moods
+changed so rapidly that she seemed a creature of unaccountable caprice.
+One minute her small, white, dry face quivered with softness and
+gentleness, and the next it stiffened, or twitched with the inimical,
+disapproving look it had for Louie and Emmeline and Edith.
+
+The children lifted up their pure, impassive faces to be kissed at. Old
+Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother's knee. Dorothy
+and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party. Michael forgot all
+about playing with himself. He stayed where he was, drawn by the
+spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties. Grannie was clucking and chuckling
+to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled to her own babies long ago.
+Her under lip made itself wide and full; it worked with an in and out
+movement very funny and interesting to Michael. The movement meant that
+Grannie chuckled under protest of memories that were sacred to
+Grandpapa.
+
+"Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo--tchoo! Chuckaboo! Beautiful boy!" said Grannie.
+
+Auntie Louie looked at her youngest nephew. She smiled her downward,
+sagging smile, wrung from a virginity sadder than Grannie's grief. She
+spoke to Baby John.
+
+"You really are rather a nice boy," Auntie Louie said.
+
+But Edie, the youngest Auntie, was kneeling on the grass before him,
+bringing her face close to his. Baby John's new and flawless face was
+cruel to Auntie Edie's. So was his look of dignity and wisdom.
+
+"Oh, she says you're only rather nice," said Auntie Edie. "And you're
+the beautifullest, sweetest, darlingest that ever was. Wasn't she a
+nasty Auntie Louie? Ten little pink toes. And _there_ he goes. Five
+little tootsies to each of his footsies."
+
+She hid herself behind the _Times_ disturbing Jane.
+
+"Where's John-John?" she cried. "Where's he gone to? Can anybody tell me
+where to find John-John? Where's John-John? Peep-_bo_--there he is!
+John-John, look at Auntie Edie. Oh, he won't pay any attention to
+poor me."
+
+Baby John was playing earnestly with Grannie's watch-chain.
+
+"You might leave the child alone," said Grannie. "Can't you see he
+doesn't want you?"
+
+Auntie Edie made a little pouting face, like a scolded, pathetic child.
+Nobody ever did want Auntie Edie.
+
+And all the time Auntie Emmy was talking to Frances very loud and fast.
+
+"Frances, I do think your garden's too beautiful for words. How clever
+of you to think of clearing away the old flower-beds. I hate flower-beds
+on a lawn. Yet I don't suppose I should have had the strength of mind to
+get rid of them if it bad been me."
+
+As she talked Auntie Emmy opened her eyes very wide; her eyebrows
+jerked, the left one leaping up above the right; she thrust out her chin
+at you and her long, inquiring nose. Her thin face was the play of
+agitated nerve-strings that pulled it thus into perpetual, restless
+movements; and she made vague gestures with her large, bony hands. Her
+tongue went tick-tack, like a clock. Anthony said you-could hear Emmy's
+tongue striking the roof of her-mouth all thee time.
+
+"And putting those delphiniums all together like that--Massing the
+blues. Anthony? I _do_ think Anthony has perfect taste. I adore
+delphiniums."
+
+Auntie Emmy was behaving as if neither Michael nor Baby John was there.
+
+"Don't you think John-John's too beautiful for words?" said Frances.
+"Don't you like him a little bit too?"
+
+Auntie Emmy winced as if Frances had flicked something in her face.
+
+"Of course I like him too. Why shouldn't I?"
+
+"I don't think you _do_, Auntie Emmy," Michael said.
+
+Auntie Emmy considered him as for the first time.
+
+"What do you know about it?" she said.
+
+"I can tell by the funny things your face does."
+
+"I thought," said Frances, "you wanted to play by yourself."
+
+"So I do," said Michael.
+
+"Well then, go and play."
+
+He went and to a heavenly place that he knew of. But as he played with
+Himself there he thought: "Auntie Emmy doesn't tell the truth. I think
+it is because she isn't happy."
+
+Michael kept his best things to himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I suppose you're happy," said Grannie, "now you've got the poor child
+sent away."
+
+Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as much as to
+say she was helpless under her mother's stupidity.
+
+"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good for him
+to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."
+
+It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her sisters.
+
+"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it yourself."
+
+When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put her word
+in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the peace.
+
+Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her babies
+in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight of other people's babies
+was too much for Emmy. She could never be prepared for Emmy's moments.
+
+"It's all very well," Auntie Louie went on; "but I should like to hear
+of somebody admiring Dorothy. I don't see where Dorothy comes in."
+
+Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie's favourite.
+If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared that she was
+sure she wasn't.
+
+And again Frances knew what Louie meant--that she loved her three sons,
+Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her one daughter,
+Dorothea, with critical affection. That was the sort of thing that Louie
+was always saying and thinking about people, and nobody ever paid the
+slightest attention to what Louie said or thought. Frances told herself
+that if there was one emotion that she was more free from than another
+it was sex jealousy.
+
+The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given up
+Dorothy to Anthony. It was natural that he should care most for the
+little girl.
+
+Louie said that was easy--when she knew perfectly well that Anthony
+didn't. Like Frances he cared most for his three sons. She was leaving
+Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael and Nicholas
+to her.
+
+"You might just as well say," Frances said, "that I'm in love with
+John-John. Poor little Don-Don!"
+
+"I might," said Louie, "just as well."
+
+Grannie said she was sure she didn't understand what they were talking
+about and that Louie had some very queer ideas in her head.
+
+"Louie," she said, "knows more than I do."
+
+Frances thought: Was Grannie really stupid? Was she really innocent? Was
+she not, rather, clever, chock-full of the secret wisdom and the secret
+cruelty of sex?
+
+Frances was afraid of her thoughts. They came to her not like thoughts,
+but like quick rushes of her blood, partly confusing her. She did not
+like that.
+
+She thought: Supposing Grannie knew all the time that Emmy was unhappy,
+and took a perverse pleasure in her knowledge? Supposing she was not
+really soft and gentle? She could be soft and gentle to her, because of
+her children and because of Anthony. She respected Anthony because he
+was well-off and efficient and successful, and had supported her ever
+since Grandpapa had gone bankrupt. She was proud of Frances because she
+was Anthony's wife, who had had three sons and only one daughter.
+
+Grannie behaved as if her grandchildren were her own children, as if she
+had borne three Sons and only one daughter, instead of four daughters
+and only one son. Still, Frances was the vehicle of flesh and blood that
+carried on her flesh and blood in Michael and Nicholas and John. She
+respected Frances.
+
+But Frances could remember a time when she had been unmarried like her
+sisters, and when Grannie had turned on her, too, that look that was
+half contempt and half hostility or displeasure. Grannie had not wanted
+her to marry Anthony, any more than she would have wanted Louie or
+Emmeline or Edith to marry anybody, supposing anybody had wanted to
+marry them. And Frances and Anthony had defied her. They had insisted on
+marrying each other. Frances knew that if there had been no Anthony, her
+mother would have despised her in secret, as in secret she despised
+Emmeline and Edith. She despised them more than Louie, because, poor
+things, they wanted, palpably, to be married, whereas Louie didn't, or
+said she didn't. In her own way, Louie had defied her mother. She had
+bought a type-writer and a bicycle with her own earnings, and by
+partially supporting herself she had defied Anthony, the male
+benefactor, Louie's manner intimated that there was nothing Frances had
+that she wanted. She had resources in herself, and Frances had none.
+
+Frances persuaded herself that she admired and respected Louie. She knew
+that she, Frances, was only admired and respected because she had
+succeeded where her three sisters had failed. She was even afraid that,
+in moments of exasperation, Grannie used her and Anthony and the
+children to punish Emmy and Edie for their failure. The least she could
+do was to stand between them and Grannie.
+
+It was possible that if Grannie had been allowed to ignore them and give
+her whole attention to Frances or Michael or Baby John, she could have
+contrived to be soft and gentle for an afternoon. But neither Louie nor
+Emmeline, nor even Edith, would consent to be ignored. They refused to
+knuckle under, to give in. Theirs was a perpetual struggle to achieve an
+individuality in the teeth of circumstances that had denied them any.
+Frances acknowledged that they were right, that in the same
+circumstances she would have done the same.
+
+In their different ways and by different methods they claimed attention.
+They claimed it incessantly, Louie, the eldest, by an attitude of
+assurance and superiority so stiff and hard that it seemed invulnerable;
+Emmy by sudden jerky enthusiasms, exaltations, intensities; Edie by an
+exaggerated animation, a false excitement. Edie would drop from a
+childish merriment to a childish pathos, when she would call herself
+"Poor me," and demand pity for being tired, for missing a train, for
+cold feet, for hair coming down.
+
+There would be still more animation, and still more enthusiasm when
+Anthony came home.
+
+Frances prided herself on her power of foreseeing things. She foresaw
+that Anthony would come home early for his game. She foresaw the funny,
+nervous agony of his face when he appeared on the terrace and caught
+sight of Grannie and the three Aunties, and the elaborate and exquisite
+politeness with which he would conceal from them his emotion. She
+foresaw that she would say to Annie, "When the master comes tell him
+we're having tea in the garden, under the tree of--under the ash-tree"
+(for after all, he was the master, and discipline must be maintained).
+She foresaw the very gestures of his entrance, the ironically solemn bow
+that he would make to her, far-off, from the terrace; she even foresaw
+the kind of joke that, for the life of him, he would not be able to
+help making. She was so made that she could live happily in this world
+of small, foreseen things.
+
+
+
+III
+
+And it all happened as she had foreseen.
+
+Anthony came home early, because it was a fine afternoon. He made the
+kind of joke that calamity always forced from him, by some perversion of
+his instincts.
+
+"When is an ash-tree not an ash-tree? When it's a tree of Heaven."
+
+He was exquisitely polite to Grannie and the Aunties, and his manner to
+Frances, which she openly complained of, was, he said, what a woman
+brought on herself when she reserved her passion for her children, her
+sentiment for trees of Heaven, and her mockery for her devoted husband.
+
+"I suppose we can have some tennis _now_," said Auntie Louie.
+
+"Certainly," said Anthony, "we can, and we shall." He tried not to look
+at Frances.
+
+And Auntie Edie became automatically animated.
+
+"I can't serve for nuts, but I can run. Who's going to play with _me_?"
+
+"I am," said Anthony. He was perfect.
+
+The game of tennis had an unholy and terrible attraction for Auntie
+Louie and Auntie Edie. Neither of them could play. But, whereas Auntie
+Louie thought that she could play and took tennis seriously, Auntie Edie
+knew that she couldn't and took it as a joke.
+
+Auntie Louie stood tall and rigid and immovable. She planted herself,
+like a man, close up to the net, where Anthony wanted to be, and where
+he should have been; but Auntie Louie said she was no good if you put
+her to play back; she couldn't be expected to take every ball he missed.
+
+When Auntie Louie called out "Play!" she meant to send a nervous shudder
+through her opponents, shattering their morale. She went through all the
+gestures of an annihilating service that for some reason never happened.
+She said the net was too low and that spoiled her eye. And when she
+missed her return it was because Anthony had looked at her and put her
+off. Still Aunt Louie's attitude had this advantage that it kept her
+quiet in one place where Anthony could dance round and round her.
+
+But Auntie Edie played in little nervous runs and slides and rushes; she
+flung herself, with screams of excitement, against the ball, her partner
+and the net; and she brandished her racket in a dangerous manner. The
+oftener she missed the funnier it was to Auntie Edie. She had been
+pretty when she was young, and seventeen years ago her cries and tumbles
+and collisions had been judged amusing; and Auntie Edie thought they
+were amusing still. Anthony had never had the heart to undeceive her. So
+that when Anthony was there Auntie Edie still went about setting a
+standard of gaiety for other people to live up to; and still she was
+astonished that they never did, that other people had no sense
+of humour.
+
+Therefore Frances was glad when Anthony told her that he had asked Mr.
+Parsons, the children's tutor, and young Norris and young Vereker from
+the office to come round for tennis at six, and that dinner must be put
+off till half-past eight.
+
+All was well. The evening would be sacred to Anthony and the young men.
+The illusion of worry passed, and Frances's real world of happiness
+stood firm.
+
+And as Frances's mind, being a thoroughly healthy mind, refused to
+entertain any dreary possibility for long together, so it was simply
+unable to foresee downright calamity, even when it had been pointed out
+to her. For instance, that Nicky should really have chosen the day of
+the party for an earache, the worst earache he had ever had.
+
+He appeared at tea-time, carried in Mary-Nanna's arms, and with his head
+tied up in one of Mr. Jervis's cricket scarves. As he approached his
+family he tried hard not to look pathetic.
+
+And at the sight of her little son her whole brilliant world of
+happiness was shattered around Frances.
+
+"Nicky darling," she said, "why _didn't_ you tell me it was really
+aching?"
+
+"I didn't know," said Nicky.
+
+He never did know the precise degree of pain that distinguished the
+beginning of a genuine earache from that of a sham one, and he felt that
+to palm off a sham earache on his mother for a real one, was somehow a
+sneaky thing to do. And while his ear went on stabbing him, Nicky did
+his best to explain.
+
+"You see, I never know whether it's aching or whether it's only going to
+ache. It began a little, teeny bit when the Funny Man made me laugh.
+And I didn't see the Magic Lantern, and I didn't have any of Rosalind's
+cake. It came on when I was biting the sugar off. And it was aching in
+both ears at once. It was," said Nicky, "a jolly sell for me."
+
+At that moment Nicky's earache jabbed upwards at his eyelids and cut
+them, and shook tears out of them. But Nicky's mouth refused to take any
+part in the performance, though he let his father carry him upstairs.
+And, as he lay on the big bed in his mother's room, he said he thought
+he could bear it if he had Jane-Pussy to lie beside him, and his
+steam-engine.
+
+Anthony went back into the garden to fetch Jane. He spent an hour
+looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house and through
+the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He looked for Jane in
+the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under the rhubarb, and on the
+scullery roof, and in the water butt. It was just possible that on a day
+of complete calamity Jane should have slithered off the scullery roof
+into the water-butt. The least he could do was to find Jane, since Nicky
+wanted her.
+
+And in the end it turned out that Jane had been captured in her sleep,
+treacherously, by Auntie Emmy. And she had escaped, maddened with terror
+of the large, nervous, incessantly caressing hands. She had climbed into
+the highest branch of the tree of Heaven, and crouched there,
+glaring, unhappy.
+
+"Damn the cat!" said Anthony to himself. (It was not Jane he meant.)
+
+He was distressed, irritated, absurdly upset, because he would have to
+go back to Nicky without Jane, because he couldn't get Nicky what
+he wanted.
+
+In that moment Anthony loved Nicky more than any of them. He loved him
+almost more than Frances. Nicky's earache ruined the fine day.
+
+He confided in young Vereker. "I wouldn't bother," he said, "if the
+little chap wasn't so plucky about it."
+
+"Quite so, sir," said young Vereker.
+
+It was young Mr. Vereker who found Jane, who eventually recaptured her.
+Young Mr. Vereker made himself glorious by climbing up, at the risk of
+his neck and in his new white flannels, into the high branches of the
+tree of Heaven, to bring Jane down.
+
+And when Anthony thanked him he said, "Don't mention it, sir. It's only
+a trifle," though it was, as Mr. Norris said, palpable that the flannels
+were ruined. Still, if he hadn't found that confounded cat, they would
+never, humanly speaking, have had their tennis.
+
+The Aunties did not see Mr. Vereker climbing into the tree of Heaven.
+They did not see him playing with Mr. Parsons and Anthony and Mr.
+Norris. For as soon as the three young men appeared, and Emmeline and
+Edith began to be interested and emphatic, Grannie said that as they
+wouldn't see anything more of Frances and the children, it was no good
+staying any longer, and they'd better be getting back. It was as if she
+knew that they were going to enjoy themselves and was determined to
+prevent it.
+
+Frances went with them to the bottom of the lane. She stood there till
+the black figures had passed, one by one, through the white posts on to
+the Heath, till, in the distance, they became small again and harmless
+and pathetic.
+
+Then she went back to her room where Nicky lay in the big bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky lay in the big bed with Jane on one side of him and his
+steam-engine on the other, and a bag of hot salt against each ear. Now
+and then a thin wall of sleep slid between him and his earache.
+
+Frances sat by the open window and looked out into the garden where
+Anthony and Norris played, quietly yet fiercely, against Vereker and
+Parsons. Frances loved the smell of fresh grass that the balls and the
+men's feet struck from the lawn; she loved the men's voices subdued to
+Nicky's sleep, and the sound of their padding feet, the thud of the
+balls on the turf, the smacking and thwacking of the rackets. She loved
+every movement of Anthony's handsome, energetic body; she loved the
+quick, supple bodies of the young men, the tense poise and earnest
+activity of their adolescence. But it was not Vereker or Parsons or
+Norris that she loved or that she saw. It was Michael, Nicholas and John
+whose adolescence was foreshadowed in those athletic forms wearing white
+flannels; Michael, Nicky and John, in white flannels, playing fiercely.
+When young Vereker drew himself to his full height, when his young body
+showed lean and slender as he raised his arms for his smashing service,
+it was not young Vereker, but Michael, serious and beautiful. When young
+Parsons leaped high into the air and thus returned Anthony's facetious
+sky-scraper on the volley, that was Nicky. When young Norris turned and
+ran at the top of his speed, and overtook the ball on its rebound from
+the base line where young Vereker had planted it, when, as by a miracle,
+he sent it backwards over his own head, paralysing Vereker and Parsons
+with sheer astonishment, that was John.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her vision passed. She was leaning over Nicky now, Nicky so small in the
+big bed. Nicky had moaned.
+
+"Does it count if I make that little noise, Mummy? It sort of lets the
+pain out."
+
+"No, my lamb, it doesn't count. Is the pain very bad?"
+
+"Yes, Mummy, awful. It's going faster and faster. And it bizzes. And
+when it doesn't bizz, it thumps." He paused--"I think--p'raps--I could
+bear it better if I sat on your knee."
+
+Frances thought she could bear it better too. It would be good for Nicky
+that he should grow into beautiful adolescence and a perfect manhood;
+but it was better for her that he should be a baby still, that she
+should have him on her knee and hold him close to her; that she should
+feel his adorable body press quivering against her body, and the heat of
+his earache penetrating her cool flesh. For now she was lost to herself
+and utterly absorbed in Nicky. And her agony became a sort of ecstasy,
+as if, actually, she bore his pain.
+
+It was Anthony who could not stand it. Anthony had come in on his way to
+his dressing-room. As he looked at Nicky his handsome, hawk-like face
+was drawn with a dreadful, yearning, ineffectual pity. Frances had
+discovered that her husband could both be and look pathetic. He had
+wanted her to be sorry for him and she was sorry for him, because his
+male pity was all agony; there was no ecstasy in it of any sort at all.
+Nicky was far more her flesh and blood than he was Anthony's.
+
+Nicky stirred in his mother's lap. He raised his head. And when he saw
+that queer look on his father's face he smiled at it. He had to make the
+smile himself, for it refused to come of its own accord. He made it
+carefully, so that it shouldn't hurt him. But he made it so well that it
+hurt Frances and Anthony.
+
+"I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does," Frances said in her
+pride.
+
+"If he can bear it, _I_ can't," said Anthony. And he stalked into his
+dressing-room and shut the door on himself.
+
+"Daddy minds more than you do," said Frances.
+
+At that Nicky sat up. His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned with the
+fever of his earache.
+
+"I don't mind," he said. "Really and truly I don't mind. I don't care if
+my ear _does_ ache.
+
+"It's my eyes is crying, not me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner, Nicky sent
+for his father and mother. Something had happened.
+
+Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt most
+awfully. And when it had done cracking his earache had gone away. And
+Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind's party and Michael a
+tin train. And Michael had given him the train and he wouldn't take the
+trumpet instead. Oughtn't Michael to have had the trumpet?
+
+And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night nursery, he
+called them back again.
+
+"It was a jolly sell for me, wasn't it?" said Nicky. And he laughed.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever happened, and
+something was generally happening to him, he didn't care. When he scaled
+the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it gave way under his assault
+and threw him down the steps on to the gravel walk, he picked himself
+up, displaying a forehead that was a red abrasion filled in with yellow
+gravel and the grey dust of the smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't
+care. I liked it," before anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna
+stepped on his train and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I
+don't care. I shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't
+care came to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be
+life's last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen,
+would ever take him at a disadvantage.
+
+Two years passed and he was just the same.
+
+Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was adorable.
+
+But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when you had
+to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment by first
+admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a better one when
+it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him have any cake for
+tea after he had tested the resilience of the new tyres on his father's
+bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it would have been more to
+the purpose if they had taken his steam-engine from him for a week.
+
+"You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it," said Nicky.
+
+Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of Mutton
+Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't gone in
+after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to bed at four
+o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother came to tuck him up
+and say Good-night, she found him sitting up, smiling and ready.
+
+"Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit of good
+sending me to bed."
+
+"I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost
+suspected Nicky of insincerity.
+
+"So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things. You
+see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've 'vented three
+things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle stand still with
+Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of bottles; and a thing to
+make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't a punishment, is it, Mummy?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years passed and
+Nicky was still the same.
+
+And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John were not
+the same.
+
+For the awful thing about your children was that they were always dying.
+Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child Dorothy was dead and in
+her place was a strange big girl. The child Michael was dead and in his
+place was a strange big boy. And Frances mourned over the passing of
+each age. You could no more bring back that unique loveliness of two
+years old, of five years old, of seven, than you could bring back the
+dead. Even John-John was not a baby any more; he spoke another language
+and had other feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's
+knee. Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more
+wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and she
+wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on, at the
+same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies and the mother
+of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and women is to be born.
+
+Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.
+
+Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she wanted them
+to?
+
+There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make no
+impression on him.
+
+There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and showed
+that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare,
+extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not
+by anything solid and continuous. There was a softness in Michael that
+distressed and a hardness that perplexed her. You could make an
+impression on Michael--far too easily--and the impression stayed. You
+couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory was terrible. And he had secret
+ways. He was growing more and more sensitive, more and more wrapped up
+in Himself. Supposing Michael became a morbid egoist, like Anthony's
+brother, Bartholomew?
+
+And there was Dorothy. She went her own way more than ever, with the
+absolute conviction that it was the right way. Nothing could turn her.
+At thirteen her body was no longer obedient. Dorothy was not going to be
+her mother's companion, or her father's, either; she was Rosalind
+Jervis's companion. She seemed to care more about little fat, fluffy
+Rosalind than about any of them except Nicky. Dorothy was interested in
+Michael; she respected his queer thoughts. It was as if she recognized
+some power in him that could beat her somewhere some day, and was humble
+before a thing her cleverness had failed to understand. But it was Nicky
+that she adored, not Michael; and she was bad for Nicky. She encouraged
+his naughtiness because it amused her.
+
+Frances foresaw that a time would come, a little later, when Nicky and
+Dorothy would be companions, not Nicky and his mother.
+
+In the evenings, coming home from the golf-links, Frances and Anthony
+discussed their children.
+
+Frances said, "You can't make any impression on Nicky. There seems to be
+no way that you can get at him."
+
+Anthony thought there was a way. It was a way he had not tried yet, that
+he did not want to try. But, if he could only bring himself to it, he
+judged that he could make a distinct impression.
+
+"What the young rascal wants is a thorough good spanking," said Anthony.
+
+Nicky said so too.
+
+The first time he got it Nicky's criticism was that it wasn't a bad idea
+if his father could have pulled it off all right. But he said, "It's no
+good if you do it through the cloth. And it's no good unless you _want_
+to hurt me, Daddy. And you don't want. And even if you did want, badly
+enough to try and hurt, supposing you spanked ever so hard, you couldn't
+hurt as much as my earache. And I can bear that."
+
+"He's top dog again, you see," said Frances, not without a secret
+satisfaction.
+
+"Oh, is he?" said Anthony. "I don't propose to be downed by Nicky."
+
+Every instinct in him revolted against spanking Nicky. But when
+Williams, the groom, showed him a graze on each knee of the pony he had
+bought for Frances and the children, Anthony determined that, this time,
+Nicky should have a serious spanking.
+
+"Which of them took Roger out?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know, sir," said Williams.
+
+But Anthony knew. He lay in wait for Nicky by the door that led from the
+stable yard into the kitchen garden.
+
+Nicky was in the strawberry bed.
+
+"Was it you who took Roger out this afternoon?"
+
+Nicky did not answer promptly. His mouth was still full of strawberries.
+
+"What if I did?" he said at last, after manifest reflection.
+
+"If you did? Why, you let him down on Golders Hill and cut his knees."
+
+"Holly Mount," said Nicky.
+
+"Holly Mount or Golders Hill, it's all the same to you, you young
+monkey."
+
+"It isn't, Daddy. Holly Mount's much the worst. It's an awful hill."
+
+"That," said Anthony, "is why you're forbidden to ride down it. You've
+_got_ to be spanked for this, Nicky."
+
+"Have I? All right. Don't look so unhappy, Daddy."
+
+Anthony did much better this time. Nicky (though he shook with laughter)
+owned it very handsomely. And Anthony had handicapped himself again by
+doing it through the cloth. He drew the line at shaming Nicky.
+(Yet--_could_ you have shamed his indomitable impudence?)
+
+But he had done it. He had done it ruthlessly, while the strawberries
+were still wet on Nicky's mouth.
+
+And when it was all over Michael, looking for his father, came into the
+school-room where these things happened. He said he was awfully sorry,
+but he'd taken Roger out, and Roger had gone down on his knees and
+cut himself.
+
+No, it wasn't on Holly Mount, it was at the turn of the road on the hill
+past the "Spaniards."
+
+Anthony paid no attention to Michael. He turned on Michael's brother.
+
+"Nicky, what did you do it for?"
+
+"For a rag, of course. I knew you'd feel such a jolly fool when you
+found it wasn't me."
+
+"You see, Daddy," he explained later, "you might have known I wouldn't
+have let Roger down. But wasn't it a ripping sell?"
+
+"What are you to do," said Anthony, "with a boy like that?"
+
+Frances had an inspiration. "Do nothing," she said. Her tranquillity
+refused to be troubled for long together.
+
+"Nicky's right. It's no good trying to punish him. After all, _why_
+punish Nicky? It isn't as if he was really naughty. He never does unkind
+things, or mean things. And he's truthful."
+
+"Horribly truthful. They all are," said Anthony.
+
+"Well, then, what does Nicky do?"
+
+"He does dangerous things."
+
+"He forgets."
+
+"Nothing more dangerous than forgetting. We must punish him to make him
+remember."
+
+"But it doesn't make him remember. It only makes him think us fools."
+
+"You know what it means?" said Anthony. "We shall have to send him to
+school."
+
+"Not yet," said Frances.
+
+School was the thing in the future that she dreaded. Nicky was only
+nine, and they were all getting on well with Mt. Parsons. Anthony knew
+that to send Nicky to school now would be punishing Frances, not Nicky.
+The little fiend would only grin in their faces if they told him he was
+going to school.
+
+It was no use trying to make impressions on Nicky. He was as hard as
+nails. He would never feel things.
+
+Perhaps, Frances thought, it was just as well.
+
+
+
+V
+
+"I do think it was nice of Jane," said Nicky, "to have Jerry."
+
+"And I do think it was nice of me," said Dorothy, "to give him to you."
+
+Jane was Dorothy's cat; therefore her kittens were Dorothy's.
+
+"I wouldn't have given him to just anybody."
+
+"I know," said Nicky.
+
+"I might have kept him. He's the nicest kitten Jane ever had."
+
+"I know," said Nicky. "It _was_ nice of you."
+
+"I might want him back again."
+
+"I--know."
+
+Nicky was quiet and serious, almost humble, as if he went in the fear of
+losing Jerry. Nobody but Jerry and Dorothy saw Nicky in that mood.
+
+Not that he was really afraid. Nothing could take Jerry from him. If
+Dorothy could have taken him back again she wouldn't have, not even if
+she had really wanted him. Dorothy wasn't cruel, and she was
+only ragging.
+
+But certainly he was Jane's nicest kitten. Jane was half-Persian, white
+with untidy tabby patterns on her. Jerry was black all over. Whatever
+attitude he took, his tight, short fur kept the outlines of his figure
+firm and clear, whether he arched his back and jumped sideways, or
+rolled himself into a cushion, or squatted with haunches spread and
+paws doubled in under his breast, or sat bolt upright with his four legs
+straight like pillars, and his tail curled about his feet. Jerry's coat
+shone like black looking-glass, and the top of his head smelt sweet,
+like a dove's breast.
+
+And he had yellow eyes. Mary-Nanna said they would turn green some day.
+But Nicky didn't believe it. Mary-Nanna was only ragging. Jerry's eyes
+would always be yellow.
+
+Mr. Parsons declared that Nicky sat for whole hours meditating on Jerry,
+as if in this way he could make him last longer.
+
+Jerry's life was wonderful to Nicky. Once he was so small that his body
+covered hardly the palm of your hand; you could see his skin; it felt
+soft and weak through the thin fur, sleeked flat and wet where Jane had
+licked it. His eyes were buttoned up tight. Then they opened. He crawled
+feebly on the floor after Jane, or hung on to her little breasts,
+pressing out the milk with his clever paws. Then Jerry got older.
+Sometimes he went mad and became a bat or a bird, and flew up the
+drawing-room curtains as if his legs were wings.
+
+Nicky said that Jerry could turn himself into anything he pleased; a
+hawk, an owl, a dove, a Himalayan bear, a snake, a flying squirrel, a
+monkey, a rabbit, a panther, and a little black lamb of God.
+
+Jerry was a cat now; he was two years old.
+
+Jerry's fixed idea seemed to be that he was a very young cat, and that
+he must be nursed continually, and that nobody but Nicky must nurse him.
+Mr. Parsons found that Nicky made surprising progress in his Latin and
+Greek that year. What had baffled Mr. Parsons up till now had been
+Nicky's incapacity for sitting still. But he would sit still enough when
+Jerry was on his knee, pressed tight between the edge of the desk and
+Nicky's stomach, so that knowledge entered into Nicky through Jerry when
+there was no other way.
+
+Nicky would even sit still in the open air to watch Jerry as he stalked
+bees in the grass, or played by himself, over and over again, his own
+enchanted game. He always played it in the same way. He started from the
+same clump in the border, to run in one long careening curve across the
+grass; at the same spot in the lawn he bounded sideways and gave the
+same little barking grunt and dashed off into the bushes. When you tried
+to catch him midway he stood on his hind legs and bowed to you
+slantwise, waving his forepaws, or rushed like lightning up the tree of
+Heaven, and climbed into the highest branches and clung there, looking
+down at you. His yellow eyes shone through the green leaves; they
+quivered; they played; they mocked you with some challenge, some charm,
+secret and divine and savage.
+
+"The soul of Nicky is in that cat," Frances said.
+
+Jerry knew that he was Nicky's cat. When other people caught him he
+scrabbled over their shoulders with his claws and got away from them.
+When Nicky caught him he lay quiet and heavy in his arms, pressing down
+and spreading his soft body. Nicky's sense of touch had been hardened by
+violent impacts and collisions, by experiments with jack-knives and saws
+and chisels and gouges, and by struggling with the material of his
+everlasting inventions. Through communion with Jerry it became tender
+and sensitive again. It delighted in the cat's throbbing purr and the
+thrill of his feet, as Jerry, serious and earnest, padded down his bed
+on Nicky's knee.
+
+"I like him best, though," said Nicky, "when he's sleepy and at the same
+time bitesome."
+
+"You mustn't let him bite you," Frances said.
+
+"I don't mind," said Nicky. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't like me."
+
+Jerry had dropped off to sleep with his jaws closing drowsily on Nicky's
+arm. When it moved his hind legs kicked at it and tore.
+
+"He's dreaming when he does that," said Nicky. "He thinks he's a panther
+and I'm buffaloes."
+
+Mr. Parsons laughed at him. "Nicky and his cat!" he said. Nicky didn't
+care. Mr. Parsons was always ragging him.
+
+The tutor preferred dogs himself. He couldn't afford any of the
+expensive breeds; but that summer he was taking care of a Russian
+wolfhound for a friend of his. When Mr. Parsons ran with Michael and
+Nicky round the Heath, the great borzoi ran before them with long leaps,
+head downwards, setting an impossible pace. Michael and Dorothy adored
+Boris openly. Nicky, out of loyalty to Jerry, stifled a secret
+admiration. For Mr. Parsons held that a devotion to a cat was
+incompatible with a proper feeling for a dog, whence Nicky had inferred
+that any feeling for a dog must do violence to the nobler passion.
+
+Mr. Parsons tried to wean Nicky from what he pretended to regard as his
+unmanly weakness. "Wait, Nicky," he said, "till you've got a dog of
+your own."
+
+"I don't want a dog of my own," said Nicky. "I don't want anything but
+Jerry." Boris, he said, was not clever, like Jerry. He had a silly face.
+
+"Think so?" said Mr. Parsons. "Look at his jaws. They could break
+Jerry's back with one snap."
+
+"_Could_ he, Daddy?"
+
+They were at tea on the lawn, and Boris had gone to sleep under Mr.
+Parsons' legs with his long muzzle on his forepaws.
+
+"He could," said Anthony, "if he caught him."
+
+"But he couldn't catch him. Jerry'd be up a tree before Boris could look
+at him."
+
+"If you want Jerry to shin up trees you must keep his weight down."
+
+Nicky laughed. He knew that Boris could never catch Jerry. His father
+was only ragging him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky was in the schoolroom, bowed over his desk. He was doing an
+imposition, the second aorist of the abominable verb [Greek: erchomai],
+written out five and twenty times. (Luckily he could do the last fifteen
+times from memory.)
+
+Nicky had been arguing with Mr. Parsons. Mr. Parsons had said that the
+second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] was not [Greek: êrchon].
+
+Nicky had said, "I can't help it. If it's not [Greek: êrchon] it ought
+to be."
+
+Mr. Parsons had replied: "The verb [Greek: erchomai] is irregular." And
+Nicky had retorted, in effect, that no verb had any business to be as
+irregular as all that. Mr. Parsons had then suggested that Nicky might
+know more about the business of irregular verbs if he wrote out the
+second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] five and twenty times after tea. As
+it was a particularly fine afternoon, an imposition was, Nicky admitted,
+a score for Mr. Parsons and a jolly good sell for _him_.
+
+Mr. Parsons had not allowed him to have Jerry on his knee, or even in
+the room; and this, Nicky owned further, was but just. It wouldn't have
+been nearly so good a punishment if he had had Jerry with him.
+
+Nicky, bowed over his desk, struggled for the perfect legibility which
+Mr. Parsons had insisted on, as otherwise the imposition would do him
+more harm than good. He was in for it, and the thing must be done
+honourably if it was done at all. He had only looked out of the windows
+twice to make sure that Boris was asleep under Mr. Parsons' legs. And
+once he had left the room to see where Jerry was. He had found him in
+the kitchen garden, sitting on a bed of fresh-grown mustard and cress,
+ruining it. He sat like a lamb, his forepaws crossed, his head tilted
+slightly backwards. His yellow eyes gazed at Nicky with a sweet and
+mournful innocence.
+
+Nicky did not hear the voices in the garden.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, sir," Mr. Parsons was saying. "I can't think how it
+could have happened." Mr. Parsons' voice was thick and his face was very
+red. "I could have sworn the door was shut."
+
+"Johnnie opened it," said Anthony. He seemed to have caught, suddenly,
+one of his bad colds and to be giving it to Mr. Parsons. They were both
+in their shirtsleeves, and Anthony carried something in his arms which
+he had covered with his coat.
+
+The borzoi stood in front of them. His face had a look of foolish
+ecstasy. He stared at Mr. Parsons, and as he stared he panted. There was
+a red smear on his white breast; his open jaws still dripped a pink
+slaver. It sprayed the ground in front of them, jerked out with
+his panting.
+
+"Get away, you damned brute," said Mr. Parsons.
+
+Boris abashed himself; he stretched out his fore legs towards Mr.
+Parsons, shook his raised haunches, lifted up his great saw-like muzzle,
+and rolled into one monstrous cry a bark, a howl, a yawn.
+
+Nicky heard it, and he looked out of the schoolroom window. He saw the
+red smear on the white curly breast. He saw his father in his shirt
+sleeves, carrying something in his arms that he had covered with
+his coat.
+
+Under the tree of Heaven Dorothy and Michael, crouching close against
+their mother, cried quietly. Frances was crying, too; for it was she who
+would have to tell Nicky.
+
+Dorothy tried to console him.
+
+"Jerry's eyes would have turned green, if he had lived, Nicky. They
+would, really."
+
+"I wouldn't have minded. They'd have been Jerry's eyes."
+
+"But he wouldn't have looked like Jerry."
+
+"I wouldn't have cared what he looked like. He'd have _been_ Jerry."
+
+"I'll give you Jane, Nicky, and all the kittens she ever has, if that
+would make up."
+
+"It wouldn't. You don't seem to understand that it's Jerry I want. I
+wish you wouldn't talk about him."
+
+"Very well," said Dorothy, "I won't."
+
+Then Grannie tried. She recommended a holy resignation. God, she said,
+had given Jerry to Nicky, and God had taken him away.
+
+"He didn't give him me, and he'd no right to take him. Dorothy wouldn't
+have done it. She was only ragging. But when God does things," said
+Nicky savagely, "it isn't a rag."
+
+He hated Grannie, and he hated Mr. Parsons, and he hated God. But he
+loved Dorothy who had given him Jerry.
+
+Night after night Frances held him in her arms at bed-time while Nicky
+said the same thing. "If--if I could stop seeing him. But I keep on
+seeing him. When he sat on the mustard and cress. And when he bit me
+with his sleep-bites. And when he looked at me out of the tree of
+Heaven. Then I hear that little barking grunt he used to make when he
+was playing with himself--when he dashed off into the bushes.
+
+"And I can't _bear_ it."
+
+Night after night Nicky cried himself to sleep.
+
+For the awful thing was that it had been all his fault. If he had kept
+Jerry's weight down Boris couldn't have caught him.
+
+"Daddy said so, Mummy."
+
+Over and over again Frances said, "It wasn't your fault. It was
+Don-Don's. He left the door open. Surely you can forgive Don-Don?" Over
+and over again Nicky said, "I do forgive him."
+
+But it was no good. Nicky became first supernaturally subdued and
+gentle, then ill. They had to take him away from home, away from the
+sight of the garden, and away from Mr. Parsons, forestalling the
+midsummer holidays by two months.
+
+Nicky at the seaside was troublesome and happy, and they thought he had
+forgotten. But on the first evening at Hampstead, as Frances kissed him
+Good-night, he said: "Shall I have to see Mr. Parsons to-morrow?"
+
+Frances said: "Yes. Of course."
+
+"I'd rather not."
+
+"Nonsense, you must get over that."
+
+"I--can't, Mummy."
+
+"Oh, Nicky, can't you forgive poor Mr. Parsons? When he was so unhappy?"
+
+Nicky meditated.
+
+"Do you think," he said at last, "he really minded?"
+
+"I'm sure he did."
+
+"As much as you and Daddy?"
+
+"Quite as much."
+
+"Then," said Nicky, "I'll forgive him."
+
+But, though he forgave John and Mr. Parsons and even God, who, to do him
+justice, did not seem to have been able to help it, Nicky did not
+forgive himself.
+
+Yet Frances never could think why the sight of mustard and cress made
+Nicky sick. Neither did Mr. Parsons, nor any schoolmaster who came after
+him understand why, when Nicky knew all the rest of the verb [Greek:
+erchomai] by heart he was unable to remember the second aorist.
+
+He excellent memory, but there was always a gap in it just there.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+In that peace and tranquillity where nothing ever happened, Jerry's
+violent death would have counted as an event, a date to reckon by; but
+for three memorable things that happened, one after another, in the
+summer and autumn of 'ninety-nine: the return of Frances's brother,
+Maurice Fleming, from Australia where Anthony had sent him two years
+ago, on the express understanding that he was to stay there; the
+simultaneous arrival of Anthony's brother, Bartholomew, and his family;
+and the outbreak of the Boer War.
+
+The return of Morrie was not altogether unforeseen, and Bartholomew had
+announced his coming well beforehand, but who could have dreamed that at
+the end of the nineteenth century England would be engaged in a War that
+really _was_ a War? Frances, with the _Times_ in her hands, supposed
+that that meant more meddling and muddling of stupid politicians, and
+that it would mean more silly speeches in Parliament, and copy, at last,
+for foolish violent, pathetic and desperate editors, and breach of
+promise cases, divorces and fires in paraffin shops reduced to momentary
+insignificance.
+
+But as yet there was no war, nor any appearance that sensible people
+interpreted as a sign of war at the time of Morrie's return. It stood
+alone, as other past returns, the return from Bombay, the return from
+Canada, the return from Cape Colony, had stood, in its sheer awfulness.
+To Frances it represented the extremity of disaster.
+
+They might have known what was coming by Grannie's behaviour. One day,
+the day when the Australian mail arrived, she had subsided suddenly into
+a state of softness and gentleness. She approached her son-in-law with
+an air of sorrowful deprecation; she showed a certain deference to her
+daughter Louie; she was soft and gentle even with Emmeline and Edith.
+
+Mrs. Fleming broke the news to Louie who broke it to Frances who in her
+turn broke it to Anthony. That was the procedure they invariably
+adopted.
+
+"I wonder," Grannie said, "what he can be coming back for!" Each time
+she affected astonishment and incredulity, as if Morrie's coming back
+were, not a recurrence that crushed you with its flatness and staleness,
+but a thing that must interest Louie because of its utter un-likeliness.
+
+"I wonder," said Louie, "why he hasn't come before. What else did you
+expect?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," said Grannie helplessly. "Go and tell Frances."
+
+Louie went. And because she knew that the burden of Morrie would fall
+again on Frances's husband she was disagreeable with Frances.
+
+"It's all very well for you," she said. "You haven't got to live with
+him. You haven't got to sleep in the room next him. You don't know what
+it's like."
+
+"I do know," said Frances. "I remember. You'll have to bear it."
+
+"You haven't had to bear it for fourteen years."
+
+"You'll have to bear it," Frances repeated, "till Anthony sends him out
+again. That's all it amounts to."
+
+She waited till the children were in bed and she was alone with Anthony.
+
+"Something awful's happened," she said, and paused hoping he would
+guess.
+
+"I don't know how to tell you."
+
+"Don't tell me if it's that Nicky's been taking my new bike to pieces."
+
+"It isn't Nicky--It's Maurice."
+
+Anthony got up and cleared his pipe, thoroughly and deliberately. She
+wondered whether he had heard.
+
+"I'd no business to have married you--to have let you in for him."
+
+"Why? What's he been up to now?"
+
+"He's coming home."
+
+"So," said Anthony, "is Bartholomew. I'd no business to have let you in
+for _him_."
+
+"Don't worry, Frances. If Morrie comes home he'll be sent out again,
+that's all."
+
+"At your expense."
+
+"I don't grudge any expense in sending Morrie out. Nor in keeping him
+out."
+
+"Yes. But this time it's different. It's worse."
+
+"Why worse?"
+
+"Because of the children. They're older now than they were last time.
+They'll understand."
+
+"What if they do? They must learn," Anthony said, "to realize facts."
+
+They realized them rather sooner than he had expected. Nobody but Louie
+had allowed for the possibility of Morrie's sailing by the same steamer
+as his letter; and Louie had argued that, if he had done so, he was
+bound either to have arrived before the letter or to have sent a wire.
+Therefore they had at least a clear five days of peace before them.
+Anthony thought he had shown wisdom when, the next morning which was a
+Wednesday, he sent Grannie and the Aunties to Eastbourne for a week, so
+that they shouldn't worry Frances, and when on Thursday he made her go
+with him for a long day in the country, to take her mind off Morrie.
+
+They came back at nine in the evening and found Dorothy, Michael and
+Nicholas sitting up for them. Michael and Nicky were excited, but
+Dorothy looked grown-up and important.
+
+"Uncle Morrie's come," they said.
+
+"Dorothy saw him first--"
+
+"Nicky let him in--"
+
+"He hadn't got a hat on."
+
+"We kept him in the schoolroom till Nanna could come and put him to
+bed."
+
+"He was crying because he'd been to Grannie's house and there wasn't
+anybody there--"
+
+"And because he'd lost the love-birds he'd brought for Auntie Emmy--"
+
+"And because he couldn't remember which of us was dead."
+
+"No, Mummy, nobody's seen him but us and Nanna."
+
+"Nanna's with him now."
+
+Uncle Morrie never accounted, even to himself, for the time he had spent
+between the arrival of his ship at Tilbury on Sunday morning and that
+Saturday afternoon. Neither could he remember what had become of his
+luggage or whether he had ever had any. Only the County Council man,
+going his last rounds in the farthest places of the Heath, came upon a
+small bundle tied in a blue handkerchief, a cap belonging to E.D.
+Boulger, of the S.S. _Arizona_, a cage of love-birds, and a distinct
+impression of a recumbent human form, on the grass together, under a
+young birch tree.
+
+In the stuffy little house behind the Judge's Walk the four women lived
+now under male protection. When they crossed the Heath they had no
+longer any need to borrow Anthony from Frances; they had a man of their
+own. To make room for him Auntie Louie and her type-writer were turned
+out of their own place, and Auntie Louie had to sleep in Grannie's bed,
+a thing she hated. To make room for the type-writer the grey parrot was
+turned out of the dining-room into the drawing-room. And as Maurice
+couldn't stand either the noise of the type-writer or the noises of the
+parrot he found both the dining-room and the drawing-room uninhabitable.
+
+Day after day Dorothy and Michael and Nicky, on the terrace, looked out
+for his coming. (Only extreme distance made Uncle Morrie's figure small
+and harmless and pathetic.) Day after day he presented himself with an
+air of distinction and assurance, flushed, and a little battered, but
+still handsome, wearing a spruce grey suit and a panama hat bought with
+Anthony's money. Sheep-farming in Australia--he had infinitely preferred
+the Cape Mounted Police--had ruined Maurice's nerves. He was good for
+nothing but to lounge in Anthony's garden, to ride his horses--it was
+his riding that had got him into the Cape Mounted Police--to sit at his
+table and drink his wines, and, when there was no more wine for him, to
+turn into Jack Straw's Castle for a pick-me-up on his way home.
+
+And before July was out three others were added to the garden group:
+Bartholomew and Vera and Veronica. And after them a fourth, Vera's
+friend, Captain Ferdinand Cameron, home on sick leave before anybody
+expected him.
+
+Frances's tree of Heaven sheltered them all.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Bartholomew, Anthony's brother, lived in Bombay and looked after his
+business for him in the East. He had something the matter with him, and
+he had come home to look after his own health. At least, Bartholomew's
+health was what he was supposed to be looking after; but Dorothy had
+heard her father say that Bartie had come home to look after Vera.
+
+Vera was Bartie's wife and Veronica's mother. Before she became Mrs.
+Bartholomew Harrison she had been Frances's schoolfellow and her dearest
+friend. Frances Fleming had been her bridesmaid and had met Anthony for
+the first time at Vera's wedding, when he had fallen in love with her;
+and she had fallen in love with him when they stayed together in
+Bartholomew's house, before Bartholomew took Vera to Bombay.
+
+Bartie had not been married ten months before he wanted to get Vera out
+of England; and Vera had not been in India for ten weeks before he
+wanted her to go back. They were always coming backwards and forwards,
+but they never came together. Vera would be sent home first, and then
+Bartie would come over in a great hurry and take her out again.
+
+Twelve years after their marriage Veronica was born at Simla, and the
+coming and going ceased for three years. Then Bartie sent them both
+home. That time Vera had refused to travel farther westward than
+Marseilles. She was afraid of damp and cold, and she had got the ship's
+doctor to order her to the Riviera. She and Veronica had been living for
+two years in a small villa at Agaye.
+
+This summer she had come to England. She was no longer afraid of damp
+and cold. And Bartie followed her.
+
+Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera, though it was
+more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera looked the same.
+Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her face had still the
+same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell. And if these things had
+changed Frances would still have known her by her forehead that looked
+so broad because her eyebrows and her eyes were so long, and by her
+fine, unfinished, passionate mouth, by her pointed chin and by her ways.
+
+But though her brother-in-law's ways had always been more or less
+disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the renewed
+encounter with Bartholomew. Bartie was long and grey, and lean even when
+you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt. He wore a white scarf
+about his throat, for his idea was that he had cancer in it. Cancer made
+you look grey. He, too, had the face of a hawk, of a tired and irritable
+hawk. It drooped between his hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above
+the scarf as if he were too tired or too irritable to hold it up. He
+behaved to Vera and Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into
+cancer of the throat, they who tired and irritated him.
+
+Vera talked to him as you might talk to a sick child whose peevishness
+prolongs, unreasonably, its pain. Bartie's manner almost amounted to a
+public repudiation of her. The whole house vibrated to the shutting of
+his door at Good-night time. Yet when Bartie came down in the morning,
+late, and more morose than ever, Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some
+visionary image of the poor thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for
+one minute in his cancer. It was an excuse for the shutting of his door.
+
+She kept out of his way as much as possible; yet, when they were
+together they watched each other. They watched; Bartie openly with
+sudden dartings and swoopings of his hawk's eyes; Vera furtively. Her
+eyes were so large and long that, without turning her head, or any
+visible movement, they could hold his image.
+
+But for Captain Cameron Vera's eyes had a full, open gaze. Spread wide
+apart under her wide forehead they were like dark moth's wings; they
+hovered, rested, flickering, vibrating to the fine tips of
+their corners.
+
+Whatever had been the matter with him in India, Captain Cameron had
+recovered. His keen, fair, Highland face made Bartie's face look
+terrible. Ferdie was charming; not more charming to Bartie's wife than
+he was to Frances; not more charming to Frances than to her sisters; so
+that even Louie unbent, and Emmeline and Edith fell in love with him. He
+flirted with Frances under Anthony's nose; and with the Aunties under
+Grannie's nose. The corners of Vera's mouth followed the tilt of her
+long eyes' corners as she saw him do it.
+
+You could not think of Vera as the children's Auntie, or as Bartie's
+wife, or as Veronica's mother.
+
+Veronica was a very little girl who sang songs and was afraid of
+ghosts.
+
+She slept in her mother's room, and so never could be put to bed till
+half-past seven, or till her mother was dressed to the last hook of her
+gown, the last hairpin, the last touch of powder (adhesive without
+bismuth), and the last shadow drawn fine about her eyelashes. When Vera
+beautiful in a beautiful gown, came trailing into the room where
+everybody waited for her, Veronica hid herself behind Uncle Anthony's
+big chair. When her father told her to come out of that and say
+good-night and be quick about it, she came slowly (she was not in the
+least afraid of Bartie), showing herself bit by bit, honey-coloured
+hair, eyebrows dark under her gold, very dark against her white;
+sorrowful, transparent, lucid eyes. A little girl with a straight white
+face. A little, slender girl in a straight white frock. She stood by
+Anthony's chair, spinning out the time, smiling at him with her childish
+wavering mouth, a smile that would not spread, that never went higher
+than the tip of her white nose, that left her lucid, transparent eyes
+still sorrowful.
+
+She knew that Anthony would take her on his knee, and that she could sit
+there with her head tucked under his chin, smiling at him, prolonging
+her caresses, till Vera told him to put her down and let her go.
+
+Bartie growled: "Did you hear your mother telling you to say
+Good-night?"
+
+"Yes. But I must kiss Uncle Anthony first. Properly. Once on his mouth.
+Once--on his nose. And once--on--his--eyes. And--once--on--his dear
+little--ears."
+
+After that, Veronica went slowly from chair to chair, lingering at each,
+sitting first on Frances's lap, then on Vera's, spinning out her
+caresses, that spun out the time and stretched it farther and farther
+between her and the unearthly hour ahead of her.
+
+But at her father's chair she did not linger for a single instant. She
+slipped her hand into his hand that dropped it as if it had hurt him;
+she touched his forehead with her small mouth, pushed out, absurdly, to
+keep her face as far as possible from his. For, though she was not
+afraid of Bartie, he was not nice either to sit on or to kiss.
+
+Half-way across the room she lingered.
+
+"I haven't sung 'London Bridge is broken down.' Don't you want me to
+sing it?"
+
+"No, darling. We want you to go to bed."
+
+"I'm going, Mummy."
+
+And at the door she turned and looked at them with her sorrowful, lucid,
+transparent eyes.
+
+Then she went, leaving the door open behind her. She left it open on
+purpose, so that she might hear their voices, and look down into the
+room on her way upstairs. Besides, she always hoped that somebody would
+call her back again.
+
+She lingered at the foot of the stairs till Bartie got up and shut the
+door on her. She lingered at the turn of the stairs and on the landing.
+But nobody ever called her back again.
+
+And nobody but Nicky knew what she was afraid of.
+
+Veronica was sitting up in the cot that used to be Nicky's when he was
+little. Nicky, rather cold in his pyjamas, sat on the edge of it beside
+her. A big, yellow, tremendous moon hung in the sky outside the window,
+behind a branch of the tree of Heaven, and looked at them.
+
+Veronica crouched sideways on her pillow in a corner of the cot, her
+legs doubled up tight under her tiny body, her shoulders hunched
+together, and her thin arms hanging before her straight to her lap. Her
+honey coloured hair was parted and gathered into two funny plaits, that
+stuck out behind her ear. Her head was tilted slightly backwards to rest
+against the rail of the cot. She looked at Nicky and her look reminded
+him of something, he couldn't remember what.
+
+"Were you ever afraid, Nicky?" she said.
+
+Nicky searched his memory for some image encircled by an atmosphere of
+terror, and found there a white hound with red smears on his breast and
+a muzzle like two saws.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I was once."
+
+A lamb--a white lamb--was what Veronica looked like. And Jerry bad
+looked at him like that when he found him sitting on the mustard and
+cress the day Boris killed him.
+
+"Afraid--what of?"
+
+"I don't know that it was 'of' exactly."
+
+"Would you be afraid of a ghost, now, if you saw one?"
+
+"I expect I jolly well should, if I _really_ saw one."
+
+"Being afraid of ghosts doesn't count, does it?"
+
+"No, of course it doesn't. You aren't afraid as long as I'm here, are
+you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I shall stay, then, till you go to sleep."
+
+Night after night he heard her calling to him, "Nicky, I'm frightened."
+Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that floor before
+midnight. Night after night he got up and came to her and stayed beside
+her till she went to sleep.
+
+Once he said, "If it was Michael he could tell you stories."
+
+"I don't _want_ Michael. I want you."
+
+In the day-time she went about looking for him. "Where's Nicky?" she
+said. "I want him."
+
+"Nicky's in the schoolroom. You can't have him."
+
+"But--I _want_ him."
+
+"Can't be helped. You must do without him."
+
+"Will he be very long?"
+
+"Yes, ever so long. Run away like a good little girl and play with
+Don-Don."
+
+She knew that they told her to play with Don-Don, because she was a
+little girl. If only she could grow big quick and be the same age
+as Nicky.
+
+Instead of running away and playing with Don-Don, Ronny went away by
+herself into the apple-tree house, to wait for Nicky.
+
+The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of the
+kitchen garden. The apple-tree had had no apples on it for years. It was
+so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched out two great boughs
+like twisted arms, and was propped up by a wooden post under each
+armpit. The breast of its trunk rested on a cross-beam. The posts and
+the cross-beam were the doorway of the house, and the branches were its
+roof and walls. Anthony had given it to Veronica to live in, and
+Veronica had given it to Nicky. It was Nicky's and Ronny's house. The
+others were only visitors who were not expected to stay. There was room
+enough for them both to stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the
+middle, and to lie flat at the far end.
+
+"What more," said Nicky, "do you want?"
+
+He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he played
+with Bonny in the apple-tree house.
+
+"I don't care a ram if they do," he said. But nobody ever did, not even
+Mr. Parsons.
+
+Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and Bonny
+sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled unwillingly. But
+her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all. Nicky wondered why.
+
+"Is it," said Dorothy one morning, "that Ronny doesn't look as if she
+was Uncle Bartie's daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as if he wasn't
+Ronny's father?"
+
+However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she brought it out
+as if it had been the result of long and mature consideration.
+
+"Or is it," said Vera, "that I don't look as if I were Ronny's mother?"
+
+Her eyes had opened all their length to take in Dorothy.
+
+"No. I think it is that Uncle Bartie looks--"
+
+Frances rushed in. "It doesn't matter, my dear, what you think."
+
+"It will some day," said Dorothy.
+
+It was perhaps the best thing she could have said, as showing that she
+was more interested in the effect she would produce some day than in the
+sensation she had created there and then.
+
+"May I go round to Rosalind's after lessons?"
+
+"You may."
+
+"And may I stay to lunch if they ask me?"
+
+"You may stay as long as they care to have you. Stay to tea, stay to
+dinner, if you like."
+
+Dorothy knew by the behaviour of her mother's face that she had scored
+somewhere, somehow. She also knew that she was in disgrace and yet not
+in disgrace; which, if you came to think of it, was a funny thing.
+
+About this time Frances began to notice a symptom in herself. She was
+apt to resent it when Vera discussed her children with her. One late
+afternoon she and Anthony were alone with Vera. Captain Cameron had not
+come round that day, and Bartie had gone into town to consult either his
+solicitor or a specialist. He was always consulting one or the other.
+
+"You're wrong, you two," said Vera. "You think Michael's tender and
+Nicky's hard and unimpressionable. Michael's hard. You won't have to
+bother about Michael's feelings."
+
+"Michael's feelings," said Frances, "are probably what I shall have to
+bother about more than anything."
+
+"You needn't. For one thing, they'll be so unlike your feelings that you
+won't know whether they're feelings at all. You won't even know whether
+he's having them or not. Nicky's the one you'll have to look out for.
+He'll go all the howlers."
+
+"I don't think that Nicky'll be very susceptible. He hasn't shown any
+great signs so far."
+
+"Hasn't he! Nicky's susceptibility is something awful."
+
+"My dear Vera, you say yourself you don't care about children and that
+you don't understand them."
+
+"No more I do," said Vera. "But I understand men."
+
+"Do you understand Veronica?"
+
+"Of course I don't. I said men. Veronica's a girl. Besides, I'm
+Veronica's mother."
+
+"Nicky," said Anthony, "is not much more than nine."
+
+"You keep on thinking of him as a child--a child--nothing but a child.
+Wait till Nicky has children of his own. Then you'll know."
+
+"They would be rather darlings, Nicky's children," Frances said.
+
+"So would Veronica's."
+
+"Ver-onica?"
+
+You needn't be frightened. Nicky's affection for Ronny is purely
+paternal."
+
+"I'm not frightened," said Frances. But she left the room. She did not
+care for the turn the talk had taken. Besides, she wanted Vera to see
+that she was not afraid to leave her alone with Anthony.
+
+"I'm glad Frances has gone," said Vera, "because I want to talk to you.
+You'd never have known each other if it hadn't been for me. She couldn't
+have married you. It was I who saw you both through."
+
+He assented.
+
+"And you said if there was ever anything you could do for me--You
+haven't by any chance forgotten?"
+
+"I have not."
+
+"Well, if anything should happen to me--"
+
+"But, my dear girl, what _should_ happen to you?"
+
+"Things _do_ happen, Anthony."
+
+"Yes, but how about Bartie?"
+
+"That's it. Supposing we separated."
+
+"Good Heavens, you're not contemplating _that_, are you?"
+
+"I'm not contemplating anything. But Bartie isn't very easy to live
+with, is he?"
+
+"No, he's not. He never was. All the same--"
+
+Bartie was impossible. Between the diseases he had and thought he hadn't
+and the diseases he hadn't and thought he had, he made life miserable
+for himself and other people. He was a jealous egoist; he had the morbid
+coldness of the neurotic, and Vera was passionate. She ought never to
+have married him. All the same--"
+
+"All the same I shall stick to Bartie as long as it's possible. And as
+long as it's possible Bartie'll stick to me. But, if anything happens I
+want you to promise that you'll take Ronny."
+
+"You must get Frances to promise."
+
+"She'll do anything you ask her to, Anthony."
+
+When Frances came into the room again Vera was crying.
+
+And so Frances promised.
+
+     "'London Bridge is broken down
+     (_Ride over My Lady Leigh_!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with stones so strong--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine'"--
+
+It was twenty to eight and Ronny had not so much as begun to say Good
+night. She was singing her sons to spin out the time.
+
+     "'London Bridge--'"
+
+"That'll do, Ronny, it's time you were in bed."
+
+There was no need for her to linger and draw out her caresses, no need
+to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's request, had had
+her cot moved up into the night nursery.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie out to
+this time, when the Boer War came and solved his problem.
+
+Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South Africa, to
+enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.
+
+Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders,
+solving, perhaps, another problem.
+
+"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.
+
+Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was what
+Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't come back?
+Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances hated problems when
+they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems when they
+bothered Frances.
+
+And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went on.
+
+"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."
+
+"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.
+
+Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said, "what else
+could he do? His only chance was to go away and do something so jolly
+plucky that _we_'re ashamed of ourselves, and never to come back again
+to spoil it. You don't want him to spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"
+
+Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to
+realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging over
+them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over them. It
+hung over a country that, except once when it had conveniently swallowed
+up Morrie, they had never thought about and could not care for, a
+landscape that they could not see. The war was not even part of that
+landscape; it refused to move over it in any traceable course. It simply
+hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another. It was not
+their fault. They tried to see it. They bought the special editions of
+the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of
+the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the
+printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and
+Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial; it was
+all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very
+blood of it ran grey.
+
+It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the open wings
+of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of Heaven were real; so
+were Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow on the Hill; morning and noon and
+night were real, and getting up and dressing and going to bed; most real
+of all the sight and sound and touch of her husband and her children.
+
+Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances carried
+about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she could attach the
+rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an immense slender muzzle,
+tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out Maurice.
+
+Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.
+
+"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy said he
+ought to be shut up somewhere."
+
+"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."
+
+"Or drink, ducky."
+
+"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"
+
+"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I shouldn't
+mind whether he came back or didn't. _You_'re cruel. You ought to think
+of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edie."
+
+"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle Morrie."
+
+She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had been, as
+a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two years younger
+than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted, who contrived,
+nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to want by crying for
+them, though everybody else went without. And in the grown-up Morrie's
+place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky.
+
+For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.
+
+"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss
+it."
+
+Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and Nicky,
+mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High Street with
+flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a Pro-Boer and flew no
+flags. All these things irritated Maurice.
+
+He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all the
+chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in hospital
+throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had missed the sortie
+of his squadron and the taking of the guns for which Ferdie Cameron got
+his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come back in the middle of the war
+with nothing but a bullet wound in his left leg to prove that he had
+taken part in it.
+
+The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only depressed
+him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence broke down the
+sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a period of sobriety
+beyond its natural limits.
+
+For there were two kinds of drinking: great drinking that came seldom
+and was the only thing that counted, and ordinary drinking that, though
+it went on most of the time, brought no satisfaction and didn't count at
+all. And there were two states of drunkenness to correspond: one intense
+and vivid, without memory, transcending all other states; and one that
+was no more remarkable than any other. Before the war Morrie's great
+drinking came seldom, by fits and bursts and splendid unlasting
+uprushes; after the war the two states tended to approach till they
+merged in one continual sickly soaking. And while other important and
+outstanding things, and things that he really wanted to remember,
+disappeared in the poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he
+never for one moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not
+Anthony, his brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded.
+
+He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the war. He
+was furious with Frances and Anthony. Not realizing the war meant not
+realizing what he had been through. He swore by some queer God of his
+that he would make them realize it. The least they could do for him was
+to listen to what he had to say.
+
+"You people here don't know what war is. You think it's all glory and
+pluck, and dashing out and blowing up the enemy's guns, and the British
+flag flying, and wounded pipers piping all the time and not caring a
+damn. Nobody caring a damn.
+
+"And it isn't. It's dirt and funk and stinks and more funk all the time.
+It's lying out all night on the beastly veldt, and going to sleep and
+getting frozen, and waking up and finding you've got warm again because
+your neighbour's inside's been fired out on the top of you. You get
+wounded when the stretcher-bearers aren't anywhere about, and you crawl
+over to the next poor devil and lie back to back with him to keep warm.
+And just when you've dropped off to sleep you wake up shivering, because
+he's died of a wound he didn't know he'd got.
+
+"You'll find a chap lying on his back all nice and comfy, and when you
+start to pick him up you can't lift him because his head's glued to the
+ground. You try a bit, gently, and the flesh gives way like rotten
+fruit, and the bone like a cup you've broken and stuck together without
+any seccotine, and you heave up a body with half a head on it. And all
+the brains are in the other half, the one that's glued down. That's war.
+
+"Huh!" He threw out his breath with a jerk of contempt. It seemed to him
+that neither Frances nor Anthony was listening to him. They were not
+looking at him. They didn't want to listen; they didn't want to look at
+him. He couldn't touch them; he couldn't evoke one single clear image in
+their minds; there was no horror he could name that would sting them to
+vision, to realization. They had not been there.
+
+Dorothy and Michael and Nicky were listening. The three kids had
+imagination; they could take it in. They stared as if he had brought
+those horrors into the room. But even they missed the reality of it.
+They saw everything he meant them to see, except him. It was as if they
+were in the conspiracy to keep him out of it.
+
+He glared at Frances and Anthony. What was the good of telling them, of
+trying to make them realize it? If they'd only given some sign, made
+some noise or some gesture, or looked at him, he might have spared them.
+But the stiff, averted faces of Frances and Anthony annoyed him.
+
+"And if you're a poor wretched Tommy like me, you'll have to sweat in a
+brutal sun, hauling up cases of fizz from the railway up country to
+Headquarters, with a thirst on you that frizzles your throat. You see
+the stuff shining and spluttering, and you go mad. You could kill the
+man if you were to see him drink it, when you know there's nothing for
+_you_ but a bucket of green water with typhoid germs swimming about in
+it. That's war.
+
+"You think you're lucky if you're wounded and get bumped down in a
+bullock wagon thirty miles to the base hospital. But the best thing you
+can do then is to pop off. For if you get better they make you hospital
+orderly. And the hospital orderly has to clean up all the muck of the
+butcher's shop from morning to night. When you're so sick you can't
+stand you get your supper, dry bread and bully beef. The bully beef
+reminds you of things, and the bread--well, the bread's all nice and
+white on the top. But when you turn it over on the other side--it's red.
+That's war."
+
+Frances looked at him. He thought: "At last she's turned; at last I've
+touched her; she can realize that."
+
+"Morrie dear, it must have been awful," she said. "It's _too_ awful. I
+don't mind your telling me and Anthony about it; but I'd rather you did
+it when the children aren't in the room."
+
+"Is that all you think about? The children? The children. You don't care
+a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn what happens to me
+or anybody else. What does it matter who's wounded or who's killed, as
+long as it isn't one of your own kids?
+
+"I'm simply trying to tell you what war _is_. It's dirt and stink and
+funk. That's all it is. And there's precious little glory in it, Nicky."
+
+"If the Boers won there would be glory," Michael said.
+
+"Not even if the Boers won," said Maurice.
+
+"Certainly not if the Boers won," said Anthony.
+
+"You'll say next there'd be no glory if there was war between England
+and Ireland and the Irish won. And yet there would be glory."
+
+"Would there? Go and read history and don't talk rot."
+
+"I have read it," said Michael.
+
+Frances thought: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why should
+he? He's barely thirteen. I can't think where he gets these ideas from.
+But he'll grow out of them."
+
+It was not Maurice that she saw in Maurice's war-pictures. But he had
+made them realize what war was; and they vowed that as long as they
+lived not one of their sons should have anything to do with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the spring of nineteen-one Anthony sent Maurice out to California.
+The Boer War was ended.
+
+Another year, and the vision of war passed from Frances as if it had
+never been.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Michael was unhappy.
+
+The almond trees flowered in front of the white houses in the strange
+white streets.
+
+White squares, white terraces, white crescents; at the turn of the roads
+the startling beauty of the trees covered with pink blossoms, hot
+against the hot white walls.
+
+After the pink blossoms, green leaves and a strange white heat
+everywhere. You went, from pavements burning white, down long avenues
+grey-white under the shadows of the limes.
+
+A great Promenade going down like a long green tunnel, from the big
+white Hotel at the top to the High Street at the bottom of the basin
+where the very dregs of the heat sank and thickened.
+
+Promenade forbidden for no earthly reason that Michael could see, except
+that it was beautiful. Hotel where his father gave him dinner on his
+last day of blessed life, telling him to choose what he liked best, as
+the condemned criminal chooses his last meal on the day they hang him.
+
+Cleeve Hill and Battledown and Birdlip, and the long rampart of
+Leckhampton, a thin, curling bristle of small trees on the edge of it;
+forms that made an everlasting pattern on his mind; forms that haunted
+him at night and tempted and tormented him all day. Memory which it
+would have been better for him if he had not had, of the raking open
+country over the top, of broad white light and luminous blue shadows, of
+white roads switchbacking through the sheep pastures; fields of bright
+yellow mustard in flower on the lower hills; then, rectangular fir
+plantations and copses of slender beech trees in the hollows. Somewhere,
+far-off, the Severn, faint and still, like a river in a dream.
+
+Memory of the round white town in the round pit of the valley, shining,
+smoking through the thick air and the white orchard blossoms; memory
+saturated by a smell that is like no other smell on earth, the delicate
+smell of the Midland limestone country, the smell of clean white dust,
+and of grass drying in the sun and of mustard flowers.
+
+Michael was in Cheltenham.
+
+It was a matter of many unhappinesses, not one unhappiness. A sudden
+intolerable unhappiness, the flash and stab of the beauty of the
+almond-flowers, seen in passing and never seized, beauty which it would
+have been better for him if he had not seen; the knowledge, which he
+ought never to have had, that this beauty had to die, was killed because
+he had not seized it, when, if he could but have held it for one minute,
+it would have been immortal. A vague, light unhappiness that came
+sometimes, could not for the life of him think why, from the sight of
+his own body stripped, and from the feeling of his own muscles. There
+was sadness for him in his very strength. A long, aching unhappiness
+that came with his memory of the open country over the tops of the
+hills, which, in their incredible stupidity and cruelty, they had let
+him see. A quick, lacerating unhappiness when he thought of his mother,
+and of the garden on the Heath, and the high ridge of the Spaniards'
+Road, and London below it, immense and beautiful.
+
+The unhappiness of never being by himself.
+
+He was afraid of the herd. It was with him night and day. He was afraid
+of the thoughts, the emotions that seized it, swaying, moving the
+multitude of undeveloped souls as if they had been one monstrous,
+dominating soul. He was afraid of their voices, when they chanted, sang
+and shouted together. He loathed their slang even when he used it. He
+disliked the collective, male odour of the herd, the brushing against
+him of bodies inflamed with running, the steam of their speed rising
+through their hot sweaters; and the smell of dust and ink and
+india-rubber and resinous wood in the warm class-rooms.
+
+Michael was at school.
+
+The thing he had dreaded, that had hung over him, threatening him for
+years before it happened, had happened. Nothing could have prevented it;
+their names had been down for Cheltenham long ago; first his, then
+Nicky's. Cheltenham, because Bartie and Vera lived there, and because it
+had a college for girls, and Dorothy, who wanted to go to Roedean, had
+been sent to Cheltenham, because of Bartie and Vera and for no other
+reason. First Dorothy; then, he, Michael; then, the next term, Nicky.
+And Nicky had been sent (a whole year before his time) because of
+Michael, in the hope that Michael would settle down better if he had his
+brother with him. It didn't seem reasonable.
+
+Not that either Dorothy or Nicky minded when they got there. All that
+Nicky minded was not being at Hampstead. Being at Cheltenham he did not
+mind at all. He rather liked it, since Major Cameron had come to stay
+just outside it--on purpose to annoy Bartie--and took them out riding.
+Even Michael did not mind Cheltenham more than any other place his
+people might have chosen. He was not unreasonable. All he asked was to
+be let alone, and to have room to breathe and get ahead in. As it was,
+he had either to go with the school mass, or waste energy in resisting
+its poisonous impact.
+
+He had chosen resistance.
+
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DEAREST MOTHER:
+
+I've put Sunday on this letter, though it's really Friday, because I'm
+supposed to be writing it on Sunday when the other fellows are writing.
+That's the beastly thing about this place, you're expected to do
+everything when the other fellows are doing it, whether you want to or
+not, as if the very fact that they're doing it too didn't make you
+hate it.
+
+I'm writing now because I simply must. If I waited till Sunday I
+mightn't want to, and anyhow I shouldn't remember a single thing I meant
+to say. Even now Johnson minor's digging his skinny elbows into one side
+of me, and Hartley major's biting the feathers off his pen and spitting
+them out again on the other. But they're only supposed to be doing Latin
+verse, so it doesn't matter so much. What I mean is it's as if their
+beastly minds kept on leaking into yours till you're all mixed up with
+them. That's why I asked Daddy to take me away next term. You see--it's
+more serious than he thinks--it is, really. You've no idea what it's
+like. You've got to swot every blessed thing the other fellows swot
+even if you can't do it, and whether it's going to be any good to you or
+not. Why, you're expected to sleep when they're sleeping, even if the
+chap next you snores. Daddy _might_ remember that it's Nicky who likes
+mathematics, not me. It's all very well for Nicky when he wants to go
+into the Army all the time. There are things _I_ want to do. I want to
+write and I'm going to write. Daddy can't keep me off it. And I don't
+believe he'd want to if he understood. There's nothing else in the world
+I'll ever be any good at.
+
+And there are things I want to know. I want to know Greek and Latin and
+French and German and Italian and Spanish, and Old French and Russian
+and Chinese and Japanese, oh, and Provençal, and every blessed language
+that has or has had a literature. I can learn languages quite fast. Do
+you suppose I've got a chance of knowing one of them--really
+knowing--even if I had the time? Not much. And that's where being here's
+so rotten. They waste your time as if it was theirs, not yours. They've
+simply no notion of the value of it. They seem to think time doesn't
+matter because you're young. Fancy taking three months over a Greek play
+you can read in three hours. That'll give you some idea.
+
+It all comes of being in a beastly form and having to go with the other
+fellows. Say they're thirty fellows in your form, and twenty-nine stick;
+you've got to stick with them, if it's terms and terms. They can't do it
+any other way. It's _because_ I'm young, Mummy, that I mind so awfully.
+Supposing I died in ten years' time, or even fifteen? It simply makes me
+hate everybody.
+
+Love to Daddy and Don.
+
+     Your loving MICK.
+
+P.S.-I don't mean that Hartley major isn't good at Latin verse. He is.
+He can lick me into fits when he's bitten _all_ the feathers off.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Tuesday_.
+
+DARLING MUMMY:
+
+Daddy _doesn't_ understand. You only think he does because you like him.
+It's all rot what he says about esprit de corps, the putridest rot,
+though I know he doesn't mean it.
+
+And he's wrong about gym, and drill and games and all that. I don't mind
+gym, and I don't mind drill, and I like games. I'm fairly good at most
+of them--except footer. All the fellows say I'm fairly good--otherwise I
+don't suppose they'd stick me for a minute. I don't even mind Chapel.
+You see, when it's only your body doing what the other chaps do, it
+doesn't seem to matter. If esprit de corps _was_ esprit de corps it
+would be all right. But it's esprit d'esprit. And it's absolutely
+sickening the things they can do to your mind. I can't stand another
+term of it.
+
+     Always your loving
+          MICK.
+P.S.-How do you know I shan't be dead in ten or
+fifteen years' time? It's enough to make me.
+
+P.P.S.-It's all very well for Daddy to talk--_he_ doesn't want to learn
+Chinese.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Thursday_.
+
+DEAR FATHER:
+
+All right. Have it your own way. Only I shall kill myself. You needn't
+tell Mother that--though it won't matter so much as she'll very likely
+think. And perhaps then you won't try and stop Nicky going into the Army
+as you've stopped me.
+
+I don't care a "ram", as Nicky would say, whether you bury me or cremate
+me; only you might give my Theocritus to old Parsons, and my revolver
+to Nicky if it doesn't burst. He'd like it.
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+P.S.--If Parsons would rather have my _Æschylus_ he can, or both.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DARLING MUMMY:
+
+It's your turn for a letter. Do you think Daddy'd let me turn the
+hen-house into a workshop next holidays, as there aren't any hens? And
+would he give me a proper lathe for turning steel and brass and stuff
+for my next birthday I'm afraid it'll cost an awful lot; but he could
+take it out of my other birthdays, I don't mind how many so long as I
+can have the lathe this one.
+
+This place isn't half bad once you get used to it. I like the fellows,
+and all the masters are really jolly decent, though I wish we had old
+Parsons here instead of the one we have to do Greek for. He's an awful
+chap to make you swot.
+
+I don't know what you mean about Mick being seedy. He's as fit as fit.
+You should see him when he's stripped. But he hates the place like
+poison half the time. He can't stand being with a lot of fellows. He's a
+rum chap because they all like him no end, the masters and the fellows,
+though they think he's funny, all except Hartley major, but he's such a
+measly little blighter that he doesn't count.
+
+We had a ripping time last Saturday. Bartie went up to town, and Major
+Cameron took Dorothy and Ronny and Vera and me and Mick to Birdlip in
+his dog-cart, only Mick and me had to bike because there wasn't room
+enough. However we grabbed the chains behind and the dog-cart pulled us
+up the hills like anything, and we could talk to Dorothy and Ronny
+without having to yell at each other. He did us jolly well at tea
+afterwards.
+
+Dorothy rode my bike stridelegs coming back, so that I could sit in the
+dog-cart. She said she'd get a jolly wigging if she was seen. We shan't
+know till Monday.
+
+You know, Mummy, that kid Ronny's having a rotten time, what with Bartie
+being such a beast and Vera chumming up with Ferdie and going off to
+country houses where he is. I really think she'd better come to us for
+the holidays. Then I could teach her to ride. Bartie won't let her learn
+here, though Ferdie'd gone and bought a pony for her. That was to spite
+Ferdie. He's worse than ever, if you can imagine that, and he's got
+three more things the matter with him.
+
+I must stop now.
+
+Love to Dad and Don and Nanna. Next year I'm to go into physics and
+stinks--that's chemistry.
+
+Your loving NICKY.
+
+     THE LEAS. PARABOLA ROAD.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DEAREST MUMMY:
+
+I'm awfully sorry you don't like my last term's school report. I know it
+wasn't what it ought to have been. I have to hold myself in so as to
+keep in the same class with Rosalind when we're moved up after
+Midsummer. But as she's promised me faithfully she'll let herself rip
+next term, you'll see it'll be all right at Xmas. We'll both be in I A
+the Midsummer after, and we can go in for our matic, together. I wish
+you'd arrange with Mrs. Jervis for both of us to be at Newnham at the
+same time. Tell her Rosalind's an awful slacker if I'm not there to keep
+her up to the mark. No--don't tell her that. Tell her _I'm_ a slacker if
+she isn't there.
+
+I was amused by your saying it was decent of Bartie to have us so often.
+He only does it because things are getting so tight between him and
+Vera that he's glad of anything that relaxes the strain a bit. Even us.
+He's snappier than ever with Ronny. I can't think how the poor kid
+stands it.
+
+You know that ripping white serge coat and skirt you sent me? Well, the
+skirt's not nearly long enough. It doesn't matter a bit though, because
+I can keep it for hockey. It's nice having a mother who _can_ choose
+clothes. You should see the last blouse Mrs. Jervis got for Rosalind.
+She's burst out of _all_ the seams already. You could have heard
+her doing it.
+
+Much love to you and Daddy and Don-Don. I can't send any to Mr. Parsons
+now my hair's up. But you might tell him I'm going in strong for
+Sociology and Economics.--
+
+     Your loving
+          DOROTHY.
+
+P.S.--Vera asked me if I thought you'd take her and Ronny in at
+Midsummer. I said of course you would--like a shot.
+
+
+     LANSDOWN LODGE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Friday._
+
+MY DEAREST FRANCES:
+
+I hope you got my two wires in time. You needn't come down, either of
+you. And you needn't worry about Mick. Ferdie went round and talked to
+him like a fa--I mean a big brother, and the revolver (bless his heart!)
+is at present reposing at the bottom of my glove-box.
+
+All the same we both think you'd better take him away at Midsummer. He
+says he can stick it till then, but not a day longer. Poor Mick! He has
+the most mysterious troubles.
+
+I daresay it's the Cheltenham climate as much as anything. It doesn't
+suit me or Bonny either, and it's simply killing Ferdie by inches. I
+suppose that's why Bartie makes us stay here--in the hope--
+
+Oh! my dear, I'm worried out of my life about him. He's never got over
+that fever he had in South Africa. He's looking ghastly.
+
+And the awful thing is that I can't do a thing for him. Not a thing.
+Unless--
+
+You haven't forgotten the promise you made me two years ago, have you?
+
+Dorothy seemed to think you could put Bonny and me up--again!--at
+Midsummer. Can you? And if poor Ferdie wants to come and see us, you
+won't turn him off your door-mat, will you?
+
+     Your lovingest
+          "VERA."
+
+Frances said, "Poor Vera! She even makes poor Mick an excuse for seeing
+Ferdie."
+
+
+
+X
+
+Three more years passed and Frances had fulfilled her promise. She had
+taken Veronica.
+
+The situation had become definite. Bartie had delivered his ultimatum.
+Either Vera must give up Major Cameron, signing a written pledge in the
+presence of three witnesses, Frances, Anthony and Bartie's solicitor,
+that she would neither see him nor write to him, nor hold any sort or
+manner of communication with him, direct or indirect, or he would obtain
+a judicial separation. It was to be clearly understood by both of them
+that he would not, in any circumstances, divorce her. Bartie knew that a
+divorce was what they wanted, what they had been playing for, and he was
+not going to make things easy for them; he was going to make things hard
+and bitter and shameful He had based his ultimatum on the calculation
+that Vera would not have the courage of her emotions; that even her
+passion would surrender when she found that it had no longer the
+protection of her husband's house and name. Besides Vera was expensive,
+and Cameron was a spendthrift on an insufficient income; he could not
+possibly afford her. If Bartie's suspicions were correct, the thing had
+been going on for the last twelve years, and if in twelve years' time
+they had not forced his hand that was because they had counted the cost,
+and decided that, as Frances had put it, the "game was not worth the
+scandal."
+
+For when suspicion became unendurable he had consulted Anthony who
+assured him that Frances, who ought to know, was convinced that there
+was nothing in it except incompatibility, for which Bartie was
+superlatively responsible.
+
+Anthony's manner did not encourage confidence, and he gathered that his
+own more sinister interpretation would be dismissed with contemptuous
+incredulity. Anthony was under his wife's thumb and Frances had been
+completely bamboozled by her dearest friend. Still, when once their eyes
+were opened, he reckoned on the support of Anthony and Frances. It was
+inconceivable, that, faced with a public scandal, his brother and his
+sister-in-law would side with Vera.
+
+It was a game where Bartie apparently held all the cards. And his trump
+card was Veronica.
+
+He was not going to keep Veronica without Vera. That had been tacitly
+understood between them long ago. If Vera went to Cameron she could not
+take Veronica with her without openly confirming Bartie's worst
+suspicion.
+
+And yet all these things, so inconceivable to Bartie, happened. When it
+came to the stabbing point the courage of Vera's emotions was such that
+she defied her husband and his ultimatum, and went to Cameron. By that
+time Ferdie was so ill that she would have been ashamed of herself if
+she had not gone. And though Anthony's house was not open to the unhappy
+lovers, Frances and Anthony had taken Veronica.
+
+Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie came over
+to West End House when they heard that it had been decided. It was
+time, they said, that somebody should protest, that somebody should
+advise Frances for her own good and for the good of her children.
+
+They had always detested and distrusted Vera Harrison; they had always
+known what would happen. The wonder was it had not happened before. But
+why Frances should make it easy for her, why Frances should shoulder
+Vera Harrison's responsibilities, and burden herself with that child,
+and why Anthony should give his consent to such a proceeding, was more
+than they could imagine.
+
+Once Frances had stood up for the three Aunties, against Grannie; now
+Grannie and the three Aunties were united against Frances.
+
+"Frances, you're a foolish woman."
+
+"My folly is my own affair and Anthony's."
+
+"You'll have to pay for it some day."
+
+"You might have thought of your own children first."
+
+"I did. I thought, How would I like _them_ to be forsaken like poor
+Ronny?"
+
+"You should have thought of the boys. Michael's growing up; so is
+Nicky."
+
+"Nicky is fifteen; Ronny is eleven, if you call that growing up."
+
+"That's all very well, but when Nicky is twenty-one and Ronny is
+seventeen what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm not going to turn Ronny out of doors for fear Nicky should fall in
+love with her, if that's what you mean."
+
+"It _is_ what I mean, now you've mentioned it."
+
+"He's less likely to fall in love with her if I bring them up as
+brother and sister."
+
+"You might think of Anthony. Bartholomew's wife leaves him for another
+man, and you aid and abet her by taking her child, relieving her of her
+one responsibility."
+
+"Bartie's wife leaves him, and we help Bartie by taking care of his
+child--who is _our niece_, not yours."
+
+"My dear Frances, that attitude isn't going to deceive anybody. If you
+don't think of Anthony and your children, you might think of us. We
+don't want to be mixed up in this perfectly horrible affair."
+
+"How are you mixed up in it?"
+
+"Well, after all, Frances, we are the family. We are your sisters and
+your mother and your children's grand-mother and aunts."
+
+"Then," said Frances with decision, "you must try to bear it. You must
+take the rough with the smooth, as Anthony and I do."
+
+And as soon as she had said it she was sorry. It struck her for the
+first time that her sisters were getting old. It was no use for Auntie
+Louie, more red and more rigid than ever, to defy the imminence of her
+forty-ninth birthday. Auntie Emmy's gestures, her mouthings and
+excitement, only drew attention to the fact that she was forty-seven.
+And Edie, why, even poor little Auntie Edie was forty-five. Grannie, dry
+and wiry, hardly looked older than Auntie Edie.
+
+They left her, going stiffly, in offence. And again the unbearable
+pathos of them smote her. The poor Aunties. She was a brute to hurt
+them. She still thought of them as Auntie Louie, Auntie Emmy, Auntie
+Edie. It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed upon them a colour and
+vitality that, but for her and for her children, they would not have
+had. They were helpless, tiresome, utterly inefficient. In all their
+lives they had never done anything vigorous or memorable. They were
+doomed to go out before her children; when they were gone they would be
+gone altogether. Neither Auntie Louie, nor Auntie Emmy, nor Auntie Edie
+would leave any mark or sign of herself. But her children gave them
+titles by which they would be remembered after they were gone. It was as
+if she had bestowed on them a little of her own enduring life.
+
+It was absurd and pathetic that they should think that they were the
+Family.
+
+But however sorry she was for them she could not allow them to dictate
+to her in matters that concerned her and Anthony alone. If they were so
+worried, about the scandal, why hadn't they the sense to see that the
+only way to meet it was to give it the lie by taking Ronny, by behaving
+as if Ronny were unquestionably Bartie's daughter and their niece? They
+were bound to do it, if not for Vera's sake, for the dear little girl's
+sake. And that was what Vera had been thinking of; that was why she had
+trusted them.
+
+But her three sisters had always disliked Vera. They disliked her
+because, while they went unmarried, Vera, not content with the one man
+who was her just and legal portion, had taken another man whom she had
+no right to. And Auntie Emmeline had been in love with Ferdie.
+
+Still, there was a certain dreadful truth in their reproaches; and it
+stung. Frances said to herselv that she had not been wise. She had done
+a risky thing in taking Ronny. It was not fair to her children, to
+Michael and Nicholas and John. She was afraid. She had been afraid when
+Vera had talked to her about Nicky and Veronica; and when she had seen
+Veronica and Nicky playing together in the apple-tree house; and when
+she had heard Ronny's voice outside the schoolroom door crying, "Where's
+Nicky? I want him. Will he be very long?"
+
+Supposing Veronica should go on wanting Nicky, and supposing Nicky--
+
+Frances was so worried that, when Dorothy came striding across the lawn
+to ask her what the matter was, and what on earth Grannie and the
+Aunties had been gassing about all that time, she told her.
+
+Dorothy was nineteen. And Dorothy at nineteen, tall and upright, was
+Anthony's daughter. Her face and her whole body had changed; they were
+Anthony's face and body made feminine. Her little straight nose had now
+a short high bridge; her brown eyes were keen and alert; she had his
+hawk's look. She put her arm in Frances's, protecting her, and they
+walked up and down the terrace path, discussing it. In the distance
+Grannie and the Aunties could be seen climbing the slope of the Heath to
+Judges' Walk. They were not, Dorothy protested, pathetic; they were
+simply beastly. She hated them for worrying her mother.
+
+"They think I oughtn't to have taken Ronny. They think Nicky'll want to
+marry her."
+
+"But Ronny's a kid--"
+
+"When she's not a kid."
+
+"He won't, Mummy ducky, he won't. She'll be a kid for ages. Nicky'll
+have married somebody else before she's got her hair up."
+
+"Then Ronny'll fall in love with _him_, and get her little heart
+broken."
+
+"She won't, Mummy, she won't. They only talk like that because they
+think Ferdie's Ronny's father."
+
+"Dorothy!"
+
+Frances, in horror, released herself from that protecting arm. The
+horror came, not from the fact, but from her daughter's knowledge of it.
+
+"Poor Mummy, didn't you know? That's why Bartie hates her."
+
+"It isn't true."
+
+"What's the good of that as long as Bartie thinks it is?" said Dorothy.
+
+     "London Bridge is broken down
+     (_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)"
+
+Veronica was in the drawing-room, singing "London Bridge."
+
+Michael, in all the beauty of his adolescence, lay stretched out on the
+sofa, watching her. Her small, exquisite, childish face between the
+plaits of honey-coloured hair, her small, childish face thrilled him
+with a singular delight and sadness. She was so young and so small, and
+at the same time so perfect that Michael could think of her as looking
+like that for ever, not growing up into a tiresome, bouncing, fluffy
+flapper like Rosalind Jervis.
+
+Aunt Louie and Aunt Emmeline said that Rosalind was in love with him.
+Michael thought that was beastly of them and he hoped it wasn't true.
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine'"--
+
+Veronica was happy; for she knew herself to be a cause of happiness.
+Like Frances once, she was profoundly aware of her own happiness, and
+for the same reason. It was, if you came to think of it, incredible. It
+had been given to her, suddenly, when she was not looking for it, after
+she had got used to unhappiness.
+
+As long as she could remember Veronica had been aware of herself. Aware
+of herself, chiefly, not as a cause of happiness, but as a cause of
+embarrassment and uncertainty and trouble to three people, her father,
+her mother and Ferdie, just as they were causes of embarrassment and
+trouble and uncertainty to her. They lived in a sort of violent mystery
+that she, incomprehensibly, was mixed up with. As long as she could
+remember, her delicate, childish soul had quivered with the vibration of
+their incomprehensible and tiresome passions. You could never tell what
+any of them really wanted, though among them they managed to create an
+atmosphere of most devastating want. Only one thing she knew
+definitely--that they didn't want _her_.
+
+She was altogether out of it except as a meaningless counter in their
+incomprehensible, grown-up game. Her father didn't want her; her mother
+didn't want her very much; and though now and then Ferdie (who wasn't
+any relation at all) behaved as if he wanted her, _his_ wanting only
+made the other two want her less than ever.
+
+There had been no peace or quietness or security in her little life of
+eleven years. Their places (and they had had so many of them!) had never
+had any proper place for her. She seemed to have spent most of her time
+in being turned out of one room because her father had come into it, and
+out of another because her mother wanted to be alone in it with Ferdie.
+And nobody, except Ferdie sometimes, when they let him, ever wanted to
+be alone in any room with her. She was so tired of the rooms where she
+was obliged to be always alone with herself or with the servants, though
+the servants were always kind.
+
+Now, in Uncle Anthony's house, there was always peace and quietness and
+an immense security. She knew that, having taken her, they wouldn't
+give her up.
+
+She was utterly happy.
+
+And the house, with its long, wainscoted rooms, its whiteness and
+darkness, with its gay, clean, shining chintzes, the delicate, faded
+rose stuffs, the deep blue and purple and green stuffs, and the blue and
+white of the old china, and its furniture of curious woods, the golden,
+the golden-brown, the black and the wine-coloured, bought by Anthony in
+many countries, the round concave mirrors, the pictures and the old
+bronzes, all the things that he had gathered together and laid up as
+treasure for his Sons; and the garden on the promontory, with its
+buttressed walls and its green lawn, its flower borders, and its tree of
+Heaven, saturated with memories, became for her, as they had become for
+Frances, the sanctuary, crowded with visible and tangible symbols, of
+the Happiness she adored.
+
+"Sing it again, Ronny."
+
+She sang it again.
+
+     "'London Bridge is broken down'"--
+
+It was funny of Michael to like the silly, childish song; but if he
+wanted it he should have it. Veronica would have given any of them
+anything they wanted. There was nothing that she had ever wanted that
+they had not given to her.
+
+She had wanted to be strong, to be able to run and ride, to play tennis
+and cricket and hockey, and Nicky had shown her how. She had wanted
+books of her own, and Auntie Frances, and Uncle Anthony and Dorothy and
+Michael had given her books, and Nicky had made her a bookcase. Her room
+(it was all her own) was full of treasures. She had wanted to learn to
+sing and play properly, and Uncle Anthony had given her masters. She had
+wanted people to love her music, and they loved it. She had wanted a
+big, grown-up sister like Dorothy, and they had given her Dorothy; and
+she had wanted a little brother of her own age, and they had given her
+John. John had a look of Nicky. His golden white hair was light brown
+now; his fine, wide mouth had Nicky's impudence, even when, like
+Frances, he kept it shut to smile her unwilling, twitching, mocking
+smile. She had wanted a father and mother like Frances and Anthony; and
+they had given her themselves.
+
+And she had wanted to live in the same house with Nicky always.
+
+So if Michael wanted her to sing "London Bridge" to him twenty times
+over, she would sing it, provided Nicky didn't ask her to do anything
+else at the same time. For she wanted to do most for Nicky, always.
+
+And yet she was aware of something else that was not happiness. It was
+not a thing you could name or understand, or seize, or see; you were
+simply aware of it, as you were aware of ghosts in your room at night.
+Like the ghosts, it was not always there; but when it was there
+you knew.
+
+It felt sometimes as if Auntie Frances was afraid of her; as if she,
+Veronica, was a ghost.
+
+And Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I am not good. She thinks
+I'll worry her. But I shan't."
+
+That was before the holidays. Now that they had come and Nicky was back,
+"it" seemed to her something to do with Nicky; and Veronica said to
+herself, "She is afraid I'll get in his way and worry him, because he's
+older. But I shan't."
+
+As if she had not been taught and trained not to get in older people's
+ways and worry them. And as if she wasn't growing older every
+minute herself!
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine--
+     (_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with stones so strong'"--
+
+She had her back to the door and to the mirror that reflected it, yet
+she knew that Nicky had come in.
+
+"That's the song you used to sing at bed-time when you were frightened,"
+he said.
+
+She was sitting now in the old hen-house that was Nicky's workshop,
+watching him as he turned square bars of brass into round bars with his
+lathe. She had plates of steel to polish, and pieces of wood to rub
+smooth with glass-paper. There were sheets of brass and copper, and bars
+and lumps of steel, and great poles and planks of timber reared up round
+the walls of the workshop. The metal filings fell from Nicky's lathe
+into sawdust that smelt deliciously.
+
+The workshop was nicer than the old apple-tree house, because there were
+always lots of things to do in it for Nicky.
+
+"Nicky," she said suddenly, "do you believe in ghosts?"
+
+"Well--" Nicky caught his bar as it fell from the lathe and examined it
+critically.
+
+"You remember when I was afraid of ghosts, and you used to come and sit
+with me till I went to sleep?"
+
+"Rather."
+
+"Well--there _are_ ghosts. I saw one last night. It came into the room
+just after I got into bed."
+
+"You _can_ see them," Nicky said. "Ferdie's seen heaps. It runs in his
+family. He told me."
+
+"He never told _me_."
+
+"Rather not. He was afraid you'd be frightened."
+
+"Well, I wasn't frightened. Not the least little bit."
+
+"I shall tell him that. He wanted most awfully to know whether you saw
+them too."
+
+"_Me_? But Nicky--it was Ferdie I saw. He stood by the door and looked
+at me. Like he does, you know."
+
+The next morning Frances had a letter of two lines from Veronica's
+mother:
+
+     "Ferdie died last evening at half past eight.
+
+     "He wants you to keep Ronny.
+
+          "VERA."
+
+It was not till years later that Veronica knew that "He wanted most
+awfully to know whether you saw them too" meant "He wanted most awfully
+to know whether you really were his daughter."
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE VORTEX
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Three years passed. It was the autumn of nineteen-ten. Anthony's house
+was empty for the time being of all its children except Dorothea.
+
+Michael was in the beginning of his last year at Cambridge. Nicholas was
+in his second year. He had taken up mathematics and theoretical
+mechanics. In the long vacation, when the others went into the country,
+he stayed behind to work in the engineering sheds of the Morss Motor
+Company. John was at Cheltenham. Veronica was in Dresden.
+
+Dorothea had left Newnham a year ago, having taken a first-class in
+Economics.
+
+As Anthony came home early one evening in October, he found a group of
+six strange women in the lane, waiting outside his garden door in
+attitudes of conspiracy.
+
+Four of them, older women, stood together in a close ring. The two
+others, young girls, hung about near, but a little apart from the ring,
+as if they desired not to identify themselves with any state of mind
+outside their own. By their low sibilant voices, the daring sidelong
+sortie of their bright eyes, their gestures, furtive and irrepressible,
+you gathered that there was unanimity on one point. All six considered
+themselves to have been discovered.
+
+At Anthony's approach they moved away, with slow, casual steps, passed
+through the posts at the bottom of the lane and plunged down the steep
+path, as if under the impression that the nature of the ground covered
+their retreat. They bobbed up again, one after the other, when the lane
+was clear.
+
+The first to appear was a tall, handsome, bad-tempered-looking girl. She
+spoke first.
+
+"It's a damned shame of them to keep us waiting like this."
+
+She propped herself up against Anthony's wall and smouldered there in
+her dark, sullen beauty.
+
+"We were here at six sharp."
+
+"When they know we were told not to let on where we meet."
+
+"We're led into a trap," said a grey-haired woman.
+
+"I say, who is Dorothea Harrison?"
+
+"She's the girl who roped Rosalind in. She's all right."
+
+"Yes, but are her people all right?"
+
+"Rosalind knows them."
+
+The grey-haired woman spoke again.
+
+"Well, if you think this lane is a good place for a secret meeting, I
+don't. Are you aware that the yard of `Jack Straw's Castle' is behind
+that wall? What's to prevent them bringing up five or six coppers and
+planting them there? Why, they've only got to post one 'tee at the top
+of the lane, and another at the bottom, and we're done. Trapped. I call
+it rotten."
+
+"It's all right. Here they are."
+
+Dorothea Harrison and Rosalind Jervis came down the lane at a leisured
+stride, their long coats buttoned up to their chins and their hands in
+their pockets. Their I gestures were devoid of secrecy or any guile.
+Each had a joyous air of being in command, of being able to hold up the
+whole adventure at her will, or let it rip.
+
+Rosalind Jervis was no longer a bouncing, fluffy flapper. In three years
+she had shot up into the stature of command. She slouched, stooping a
+little from the shoulders, and carried her pink face thrust forward, as
+if leaning from a platform to address an audience. From this salience
+her small chin retreated delicately into her pink throat.
+
+"Is Miss Maud Blackadder here?" she said, marshalling her six.
+
+The handsome girl detached herself slowly from Anthony's wall.
+
+"What's the point," she said, "of keeping us hanging about like this--"
+
+"Till _all_ our faces are known to the police--"
+
+"There's a johnnie gone in there who can swear to _me_. Why didn't you
+two turn up before?" said the handsome girl.
+
+"Because," said Dorothea, "that johnnie was my father. He was pounding
+on in front of us all up East Heath Road. If we'd got here sooner I
+should have had to introduce you."
+
+She looked at the six benevolently, indulgently. They might have been
+children whose behaviour amused her. It was as if she had said, "I
+avoided that introduction, not because it would have been dangerous and
+indiscreet, but because it would have spoiled your fun for you."
+
+She led the way into the garden and the house and through the hall into
+the schoolroom. There they found eleven young girls who had come much
+too soon, and mistaking the arrangements, had rung the bell and allowed
+themselves to be shown in.
+
+The schoolroom had been transformed into a sort of meeting hall. The big
+oblong table had been drawn across one end of it. Behind it were chairs
+for the speakers, before it were three rows of chairs where the eleven
+young girls sat scattered, expectant.
+
+The six stood in the free space in front of the table and looked at
+Rosalind with significance.
+
+"This," said Rosalind, "is our hostess, Miss Dorothea Harrison. Dorothy,
+I think you've met Mrs. Eden, our Treasurer. This is our secretary, Miss
+Valentina Gilchrist; Miss Ethel Farmer; Miss Winifred Burstall--"
+
+Dorothy greeted in turn Mrs. Eden, a pretty, gentle woman with a face of
+dreaming tragedy (it was she who had defended Rosalind outside the
+gate); Miss Valentina Gilchrist, a middle-aged woman who displayed a
+large grey pompadour above a rosy face with turned-back features which,
+when she was not excited, had an incredulous quizzical expression (Miss
+Gilchrist was the one who had said they had been led into a trap); Miss
+Ethel Farmer, fair, attenuated, scholastic, wearing pince-nez with an
+air of not seeing you; and Miss Winifred Burstall, weather-beaten, young
+at fifty, wearing pince-nez with an air of seeing straight through you
+to the other side.
+
+Rosalind went on. "Miss Maud Blackadder--"
+
+Miss Blackadder's curt bow accused Rosalind of wasting time in
+meaningless formalities.
+
+"Miss--" Rosalind was at a loss.
+
+The other girl, the youngest of the eight, came forward, holding out a
+slender, sallow-white hand. She was the one who had hung with Miss
+Blackadder in the background.
+
+"Desmond," she said. "Phyllis Desmond."
+
+She shrugged her pretty shoulders and smiled slightly, as much as to
+say, "She forgets what she ought to remember, but it doesn't matter."
+
+Phyllis Desmond was beautiful. But for the moment her beauty was asleep,
+stilled into hardness. Dorothy saw a long, slender, sallow-white face,
+between sleek bands of black hair; black eyes, dulled as if by a subtle
+film, like breath on a black looking-glass; a beautiful slender mouth,
+pressed tight, holding back the secret of its sensual charm.
+
+Dorothy thought she had seen her before, but she couldn't remember
+where.
+
+Rosalind Jervis looked at her watch with a businesslike air; paper and
+pencils were produced; coats were thrown on the little school-desks and
+benches in the corner where Dorothy and her brothers had sat at their
+lessons with Mr. Parsons some twelve years ago; and the eight gathered
+about the big table, Rosalind taking the presidential chair (which had
+once been Mr. Parsons' chair) in the centre between Miss Gilchrist and
+Miss Blackadder.
+
+Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer looked at each other and Miss Burstall
+spoke.
+
+"We understood that this was to be an informal meeting. Before we begin
+business I should like to ask one question. I should like to know what
+we are and what we are here for?"
+
+"We, Mrs. Eden, Miss Valentina Gilchrist, Miss Maud Blackadder and
+myself," said Rosalind in the tone of one dealing reasonably with an
+unreasonable person, "are the Committee of the North Hampstead Branch of
+the Women's Franchise Union. Miss Gilchrist is our secretary, I am the
+President and Miss Blackadder is--er--the Committee."
+
+"By whom elected? This," said Miss Burstall, "is most irregular."
+
+Rosalind went on: "We are here to appoint a vice-president, to elect
+members of the Committee and enlist subscribers to the Union. These
+things will take time."
+
+"_We_ were punctual," said Miss Farmer.
+
+Rosalind did not even look at her. The moment had come to address the
+meeting.
+
+"I take it that we are all agreed as to the main issue, that we have not
+come here to convert each other, that we all want Women's Franchise,
+that we all mean to have it, that we are all prepared to work for it,
+and, if necessary, to fight for it, to oppose the Government that
+withholds it by every means in our power--"
+
+"By every constitutional means," Miss Burstall amended, and was told by
+Miss Gilchrist that, if she desired proceedings to be regular, she must
+not interrupt the Chairwoman.
+
+"--To oppose the Government that refuses us the vote, whatever
+Government it may be, regardless of party, by _every means in
+our power_."
+
+Rosalind's sentences were punctuated by a rhythmic sound of tapping.
+Miss Maud Blackadder, twisted sideways on the chair she had pushed
+farther and farther back from the table, so as to bring herself
+completely out of line with the other seven, from time to time,
+rhythmically, twitching with impatience, struck her own leg with her own
+walking-stick.
+
+Rosalind perorated. "If we differ, we differ, not as to our end, but
+solely as to the means we, personally and individually, are prepared to
+employ." She looked round. "Agreed."
+
+"Not agreed," said Dorothy and Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer all at
+once.
+
+"I will now call on Miss Maud Blackadder to speak. She will explain to
+those of you who are strangers" (she glanced comprehensively at the
+eleven young girls) "the present program of the Union."
+
+"I protest," said Miss Burstall. "There has been confusion."
+
+"There really _has_, Rosalind," said Dorothy. "You _must_ get it
+straight. You can't start all at sixes and sevens. I protest too."
+
+"We all three protest," said Miss Farmer, frowning and blinking in an
+agony of protest.
+
+"Silence, if you please, for the Chairwoman," said Miss Gilchrist.
+
+"May we not say one word?"
+
+"You may," said Rosalind, "in your turn. I now call on Miss Blackadder
+to speak."
+
+At the sound of her own name Miss Blackadder jumped to her feet. The
+walking-stick fell to the floor with a light clatter and crash,
+preluding her storm. She jerked out her words at a headlong pace, as if
+to make up for the time the others had wasted in futilities.
+
+"I am not going to say much, I am not going to take up your time. Too
+much time has been lost already. I am not a speaker, I am not a writer,
+I am not an intellectual woman, and if you ask me what I am and what I
+am here for, and what I am doing in the Union, and what the Union is
+doing with me, and what possible use I, an untrained girl, can be to you
+clever women" (she looked tempestuously at Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer
+who did not flinch), "I will tell you. I am a fighter. I am here to
+enlist volunteers. I am the recruiting sergeant for this district. That
+is the use my leaders, who should be _your_ leaders, are making
+of _me_."
+
+Her head was thrown back, her body swayed, rocked from side to side with
+the violent rhythm of her speech.
+
+"If you ask me why they have chosen _me_ I will tell you. It's because I
+know what I want and because I know how to get what I want.
+
+"I know what I want. Oh, yes, you think that's nothing; you all think
+you know what you want. But do you? _Do_ you?"
+
+"Of course we do!"
+
+"We want the vote!"
+
+"Nothing but the vote!"
+
+"_Nothing but?_ Are you quite sure of that? Can you even say you want it
+till you know whether there are things you want more?"
+
+"What are you driving at?"
+
+"You'll soon see what I'm driving at. I drive straight. And I ride
+straight. And I don't funk my fences.
+
+"Well--say you all want the vote. Do you know how much you want it? Do
+you know how much you want to pay for it? Do you know what you're
+prepared to give up for it? Because, if you don't know _that_, you don't
+know how much you want it."
+
+"We want it as much as you do, I imagine."
+
+"You want it as much as I do? Good. _Then_ you're going to pay the price
+whatever the price is. _Then_ you're ready to give up everything else,
+your homes and your families and your friends and your incomes. Until
+you're enfranchised you are not going to own any _man_ as father, or
+brother or husband" (her voice rang with a deeper and stronger
+vibration) "or lover, or friend. And the man who does not agree with
+you, the man who refuses you the vote, the man who opposes your efforts
+to get the vote, the man who, whether he agrees with you or not, _will
+not help you to get it_, you count as your enemy. That is wanting the
+vote. That is wanting it as much as I do.
+
+"You women--are you prepared to go against your men? To give up your
+men?"
+
+There were cries of "Rather!" from two of the eleven young girls who had
+come too soon.
+
+Miss Burstall shook her head and murmured, "Hopeless confusion of
+thought. If _this_ is what it's going to be like, Heaven help us!"
+
+"You really _are_ getting a bit mixed," said Dorothy.
+
+"We protest--"
+
+"Protest then; protest as much as you like. Then we shall know where we
+are; then we shall get things straight; then we can begin. You all want
+the vote. Some of you don't know how much, but at least you know you
+want it. Nobody's confused about that. Do you know how you're going to
+get it? Tell me that."
+
+Lest they should spoil it all by telling her Miss Blackadder increased
+her vehement pace. "You don't because you can't and _I_ will tell you.
+You won't get it by talking about it or by writing about it, or by
+sitting down and thinking about it, you'll get it by coming in with me,
+coming in with the Women's Franchise Union, and fighting for it.
+Fighting women, not talkers--not writers--not thinkers are what we
+want!" She sat down, heaving a little with the ground-swell of her
+storm, amid applause in which only Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer did not
+join. She was now looking extraordinarily handsome.
+
+Rosalind bent over and whispered something in her ear. She rose to her
+feet again, flushed, smiling at them, triumphant.
+
+"Our Chairwoman has reminded me that I came here to tell you what the
+program of our Union is. And I can tell you in six words. It's
+Hell-for-leather, and it's Neck-or-nothing!"
+
+"Now," said Rosalind sweetly, bowing towards Miss Burstall, "it's your
+turn. We should like to know what you have to say."
+
+Miss Burstall did not rise and in the end Dorothea spoke.
+
+"My friend, Miss Rosalind Jervis, assumed that we were all agreed, not
+only as to our aims, but as to our policy. She has not yet discriminated
+between constitutional and unconstitutional means. When we protested,
+she quashed our protest. We took exception to the phrase 'every means in
+our power,' because that would commit us to all sorts of
+unconstitutional things. It is in my power to squirt water into the back
+of the Prime Minister's neck, or to land a bomb in the small of his
+back, or in the centre of the platform at his next public meeting. We
+were left to conclude that the only differences between us would concern
+our choice of the squirt or the bomb. As some of us here might equally
+object to using the bomb or the squirt, I submit that either our protest
+should have been allowed or our agreement should not have been taken for
+granted at the start.
+
+"Again, Miss Maud Blackadder, in her sporting speech, her heroic speech,
+has not cleared the question. She has appealed to us to come in, without
+counting the cost; but she has said nothing to convince us that when our
+account at our bank is overdrawn, and we have declared war on all our
+male friends and relations, and have left our comfortable homes, and are
+all camping out on the open Heath--I repeat, she has said nothing to
+convince us that the price we shall have paid is going to get us the
+thing we want.
+
+"She says that fighters are wanted, and not talkers and writers and
+thinkers. Are we not then to fight with our tongues and with our brains?
+Is she leaving us anything but our bare fists? She has told us that she
+rides straight and that she doesn't funk her fences; but she has not
+told us what sort of country she is going to ride over, nor where the
+fences are, not what Hell-for-leather and Neck-or-nothing means.
+
+"We want meaning; we want clearness and precision. We have not been
+given it yet.
+
+"I would let all this pass if Miss Blackadder were not your
+colour-sergeant. Is it fair to call for volunteers, for raw recruits,
+and not tell them precisely and clearly what services will be required
+of them? How many" (Dorothy glanced at the eleven) "realize that the
+leaders of your Union, Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, and Mrs. Blathwaite, and
+Miss Angela Blathwaite, demand from its members blind, unquestioning
+obedience?"
+
+Maud Blackadder jumped up.
+
+"I protest. I, too, have the right to protest. Miss Harrison calls me to
+order. She tells me to be clear and precise. Will she be good enough to
+be clear and precise herself? Will she say whether she is with us or
+against us? If she is not with us she is against us. Let her explain her
+position."
+
+She sat down; and Rosalind rose.
+
+"Miss Harrison," she said, "will explain her position to the Committee
+later. This is an open meeting till seven. It is now five minutes to.
+Will any of you here"--she held the eleven with her eyes--"who were not
+present at the meeting in the Town Hall last Monday, hold up your hands.
+No hands. Then you must all be aware of the object and the policy and
+the rules of the Women's Franchise Union. Its members pledge themselves
+to help, as far as they can, the object of the Union; to support the
+decisions of their leaders; to abstain from public and private criticism
+of those decisions and of any words or actions of their leaders; and to
+obey orders--not blindly or unquestioningly, but within the terms of
+their undertakings.
+
+"Those of you who wish to join us will please write your names and
+addresses on the slips of white paper, stating what kind of work you are
+willing to do and the amount of your subscription, if you subscribe, and
+hand your slips to the Secretary at the door, as you go out."
+
+Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer went out. Miss Blackadder
+counted--"One--two--"
+
+Eight of the eleven young girls signed and handed in the white slips at
+the door, and went out.
+
+"Three--four--"
+
+Miss Blackadder reckoned that Dorothea Harrison's speech had cost her
+five recruits. Her own fighting speech had carried the eleven in a
+compact body to her side: Dorothea's speech had divided and scattered
+them again.
+
+Miss Blackadder hurled her personality at the heads of audiences in the
+certainty that it would hit them hard. That was what she was there for.
+She knew that the Women's Franchise union relied on her to wring from
+herself the utmost spectacular effect. And she did it every time. She
+never once missed fire. And Dorothea Harrison had come down on the top
+of her triumph and destroyed the effect of all her fire. She had
+corrupted five recruits. And, supposing there was a secret program, she
+had betrayed the women of the Union to fourteen outsiders, by giving it
+away. Treachery or no treachery, Dorothea Harrison would have to pay
+for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everybody had gone except the members of the Committee and Phyllis
+Desmond who waited for her friend, Maud Blackadder.
+
+Dorothy remembered Phyllis Desmond now; she was that art-student girl
+that Vera knew. She had seen her at Vera's house.
+
+They had drawn round the table again. Miss Blackadder and Miss Gilchrist
+conferred in whispers.
+
+"Before we go," said Rosalind, "I propose that we ask Miss Dorothea
+Harrison to be our Vice-President."
+
+Miss Gilchrist nodded to Miss Blackadder who rose. It was her moment.
+
+"And _I_ propose," she said, "that before we invite Miss Harrison to be
+anything we ask her to define her position--clearly and precisely."
+
+She made a sign, and the Secretary was on her feet.
+
+"And first we must ask Miss Harrison to explain _how_ she became
+possessed of the secret policy of the Union which has never been
+discussed at any open meeting and is unknown to members of the General
+Committee."
+
+"Then," said Dorothy, "there _is_ a secret policy?"
+
+"You seem to know it. We have the right to ask _how_ you know? Unless
+you invented it."
+
+Dorothy faced them. It was inconceivable that it should have happened,
+that she should be standing there, in the old schoolroom of her father's
+house, while two strange women worried her. She knew that her back was
+to the wall and that the Blackadder girl had been on the watch for the
+last half-hour to get her knife into her. (Odd, for she had admired the
+Blackadder girl and her fighting gestures.) It was inconceivable that
+she should have to answer to that absurd committee for her honour. It
+was inconceivable that Rosalind, her friend, should not help her.
+
+Yet it had happened. With all her platform eloquence Rosalind couldn't,
+for the life of her, get out one heroic, defending word. From the moment
+when the Gilchrist woman had pounced, Rosalind had simply sat and
+stared, like a rabbit, like a fish, her mouth open for the word that
+would not come. Rosalind was afraid to stand up for her. It was
+dreadful, and it was funny to see Rosalind looking like that, and to
+realize the extent of her weakness and her obstinacy.
+
+Yet Rosalind had not changed. She was still the school-girl slacker who
+could never do a stroke of work until somebody had pushed her into it,
+who could never leave off working until stopped by the same hand that
+had set her going. Her power to go, and to let herself rip, and the
+weakness that made her depend on Dorothy to start her were the qualities
+that attracted Dorothy to Rosalind from the beginning. But now she was
+the tool of the fighting Suffrage Women. Or if she wasn't a tool, she
+was a machine; her brain was a rapid, docile, mechanical apparatus for
+turning out bad imitations of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and the two
+Blathwaites. Her air of casual command, half-swagger, half-slouch, her
+stoop and the thrusting forward of her face, were copied sedulously from
+an admired model.
+
+Dorothy found her pitiable. She was hypnotized by the Blathwaites who
+worked her and would throw her away when she was of no more use. She
+hadn't the strength to resist the pull and the grip and the drive of
+other people. She couldn't even hold out against Valentina Gilchrist and
+Maud Blackadder. Rosalind would always be caught and spun round by any
+movement that was strong enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex.
+
+That was Dorothy's fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled the
+slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of the
+Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught and sucked
+down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go on whirling,
+under the impression that her movements made it move.
+
+The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She liked the
+feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat up against
+the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and
+swerve away before the thing got her.
+
+For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael
+had been afraid of the little vortex of school. She was afraid of the
+herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices
+skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and
+the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge
+of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the
+collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many
+as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the
+clearness and hardness of her soul. It was her soul they wanted, these
+women of the Union, the Blathwaites and the Palmerston-Swetes, and
+Rosalind, and the Blackadder girl and the Gilchrist woman; they ran out
+after her like a hungry pack yelping for her soul; and she was not going
+to throw it to them. She would fight for freedom, but not in their way
+and not at their bidding.
+
+She was her brother Michael, refusing to go to the party; refusing to
+run with the school herd, holding out for his private soul against other
+people who kept him from remembering. Only Michael did not hold out. He
+ran away. She would stay, on the edge of the vortex, fascinated by its
+danger, and resisting.
+
+But as she looked at them, at Rosalind with her open mouth, at the
+Blackadder girl who was scowling horribly, and at Valentina Gilchrist,
+sceptical and quizzical, she laughed. The three had been trying to rush
+her, and because they couldn't rush her they were questioning her
+honour. She had asked them plainly for a plain meaning, and their idea
+of apt repartee was to pretend to question her honour.
+
+Perhaps they really did question it. She didn't care. She loathed their
+excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't care. It was she who
+had drawn them and led them on to this display of incomparable idiocy.
+Like her brother Nicholas she found that adversity was extremely funny;
+and she laughed.
+
+She was no longer Michael, she was Nicky, not caring, delighting in her
+power to fool them.
+
+"You think," she said, "I'd no business to find out?"
+
+"Your knowledge would certainly have been mysterious," said the
+Secretary; "unless at least two confidences had been betrayed. Supposing
+there had been any secret policy."
+
+"Well, you see, I don't know it; and I didn't invent it; and I didn't
+find it out--precisely. Your secret policy is the logical conclusion of
+your present policy. I deduced it; that's all. Anybody could have done
+the same. Does that satisfy you? (They won't love me any better for
+making them look fools!)"
+
+"Thank you," said Miss Gilchrist. "We only wanted to be sure."
+
+The dinner-bell rang as Dorothy was defining her position.
+
+"I'll work for you; I'll speak for you; I'll write for you; I'll fight
+for you. I'll make hay of every Government meeting, if I can get in
+without lying and sneaking for it. I'll go to prison for you, if I can
+choose my own crime. But I won't give up my liberty of speech and
+thought and action. I won't pledge myself to obey your orders. I won't
+pledge myself not to criticize policy I disapprove of. I won't come on
+your Committee, and I won't join your Union. Is that clear and
+precise enough?"
+
+Somebody clapped and somebody said, "Hear, Hear!" And somebody said, "Go
+it, Dorothy!"
+
+It was Anthony and Frances and Captain Drayton, who paused outside the
+door on their way to the dining-room, and listened, basely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were all going now. Dorothy stood at the door, holding it open for
+them, glad that it was all over.
+
+Only Phyllis Desmond, the art-student, lingered. Dorothy reminded her
+that they had met at her aunt Vera Harrison's house.
+
+The art-student smiled. "I wondered when you were going to remember."
+
+"I did, but they all called you Desmond. That's what put me out."
+
+"Everybody calls me Desmond. You had a brother or something with you,
+hadn't you?"
+
+"I might have had two. Which? Michael's got green eyes and yellow hair.
+Nicky's got blue eyes and black hair."
+
+"It was Nicky--nice name--then."
+
+Desmond's beauty stirred in its sleep. The film of air was lifted from
+her black eyes.
+
+"I'm dining with Mrs. Harrison to-night," she said.
+
+"You'll be late then."
+
+"It doesn't matter. Lawrence Stephen's never there till after eight. She
+won't dine without him."
+
+Dorothy stiffened. She did not like that furtive betrayal of Vera and
+Lawrence Stephen.
+
+"I wish you'd come and see me at my rooms in Chelsea. And bring your
+brother. Not the green and yellow one. The blue and black one."
+
+Dorothy took the card on which Desmond had scribbled an address. But she
+did not mean to go and see her. She wasn't sure that she liked Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Rosalind stayed on to dine with Dorothy's family. She was no longer
+living with her own family, for Mrs. Jervis was hostile to Women's
+Franchise. She had rooms off the Strand, not far from the headquarters
+of the Union.
+
+Frances looked a little careworn. She had been sent for to Grannie's
+house to see what could be done with Aunt Emmeline, and had found, as
+usual, that nothing could be done with her. In the last three years the
+second Miss Fleming had become less and less enthusiastic, and more and
+more emphatic, till she ceased from enthusiasm altogether and carried
+emphasis beyond the bounds of sanity. She had become, as Frances put it,
+extremely tiresome.
+
+It was not accurate to say, as Mrs. Fleming did, that you never knew
+when Emmeline would start a nervous crisis; for as a matter of fact you
+could time her to a minute. It was her habit to wait till her family was
+absorbed in some urgent affair that diverted attention from her case,
+and then to break out alarmingly. Dorothy was generally sent for to
+bring her round; but to-day it was Dorothy who had important things on
+hand. Aunt Emmeline had scented the Suffrage meeting from afar, and had
+made arrangements beforehand for a supreme crisis that would take all
+the shine out of Dorothy's affair.
+
+When Frances said that Aunt Emmy had been tiresome again, Dorothy knew
+what she meant. For Aunt Emmy's idea was that her sisters persecuted
+her; that Edie was jealous of her and hated her; that Louie had always
+trampled on her and kept her under; that Frances had used her influence
+with Grannie to spoil all her chances one after another. It was all
+Frances's fault that Vera Harrison had come between her and Major
+Cameron; Frances had encouraged Vera in her infamous intrigue; and
+between them they had wrecked two lives. And they had killed
+Major Cameron.
+
+Since Ferdie's death Emmeline Fleming had lived most of the time in a
+sort of dream in which it seemed to her that these things had
+really happened.
+
+This afternoon she had been more than usually tiresome. She had simply
+raved.
+
+"You should have brought her round to the meeting," said Dorothy, "and
+let her rave there. I'd back Aunt Emmeline against Maud Blackadder. I
+wish, Rosalind, you'd leave off making faces and kicking my shins. You
+needn't worry any more, Mummy ducky. I'm going to rope them all into
+the Suffrage Movement. Aunt Edie can distribute literature, Aunt Louie
+can interrupt like anything, and Aunt Emmeline can shout and sing."
+
+"I think, Dorothy," said Rosalind with weak bitterness, "that you might
+have stuck by me."
+
+The two were walking down East Heath Road to the tram-lines where the
+motor buses started for Charing Cross.
+
+"It was you who dragged me into it, and the least you could do was to
+stick. Why didn't you keep quiet instead of forcing our hands?"
+
+"I couldn't keep quiet. I'll go with you straight or I won't go with you
+at all."
+
+"You know what's the matter with you? It's your family. You'll never be
+any good to us, you'll never be any good to yourself till you've chucked
+them and got away. For years--ever since you've been born--you've simply
+been stewing there in the family juice until you're soaked with it. You
+oughtn't to be living at home. You ought to be on your own--like me."
+
+"You're talking rot, Rosalind. If my people were like yours I'd have to
+chuck them, I suppose; but they're not. They're angels."
+
+"That's why they're so dangerous. They couldn't influence you if they
+weren't angels."
+
+"They don't influence me the least little bit. I'd like to see them try.
+They're much too clever. They know I'd be off like a shot if they did.
+Why, they let me do every mortal thing I please--turn the schoolroom
+into a meeting hall for your friends to play the devil in. That
+Blackadder girl was yelling the house down, yet they didn't say
+anything. And your people aren't as bad as you make out, you know. You
+couldn't live on your own if your father didn't give you an allowance. I
+like Mrs. Jervis."
+
+"Because she likes you."
+
+"Well, that's a reason. It isn't the reason why I like my own mother,
+because she doesn't like me so very much. That's why she lets me do what
+I like. She doesn't care enough to stop me. She only really cares for
+Dad and John and Nicky and Michael."
+
+Rosalind looked fierce and stubborn.
+
+"That's what's the matter with all of you," she said.
+
+"What is?"
+
+"Caring like that. It's all sex. Sex instinct, sex feeling. Maud's
+right. It's what we're up against all the time."
+
+Dorothy said to herself, "That's what's the matter with Rosalind, if she
+only knew it."
+
+Rosalind loved Michael and Michael detested her, and Nicky didn't like
+her very much. She always looked fierce and stubborn when she heard
+Michael's name.
+
+Rosalind went on. "When it comes to sex you don't revolt. You sit down."
+
+"I do revolt. I'm revolting now. I go much farther than you do. I think
+the marriage laws are rotten; I think divorce ought to be for
+incompatibility. I think love isn't love and can't last unless it's
+free. I think marriage ought to be abolished--not yet, perhaps, but when
+we've become civilized. It will be. It's bound to be. As it is, I think
+every woman has a right to have a baby if she wants one. If Emmeline
+had had a baby, she wouldn't be devastating us now."
+
+"That's what you think, but it isn't what you feel. It's all thinking
+with you, Dorothy. The revolt goes on in your brain. You'll never do
+anything. It isn't that you haven't the courage to go against your men.
+You haven't the will. You don't want to."
+
+"Why should I? What do they do? Father and Michael and Nicky don't
+interfere with me any more than Mother does."
+
+"You know I'm not thinking of them. They don't really matter."
+
+"Who are you thinking of then? Frank Drayton? You needn't!"
+
+It was mean of Rosalind to hit below the belt like that, when she knew
+that _she_ was safe. Michael had never been brought against her and
+never would be. It was disgusting of her to imply that Dorothy's state
+of mind was palpable, when her own (though sufficiently advertised by
+her behaviour) had received from Michael's sister the consecration of
+silence as a secret, tragic thing.
+
+They had reached the tram-lines.
+
+At the sight of the Charing Cross `bus Rosalind assumed an air of
+rollicking, adventurous travel.
+
+"My hat! What an evening! I shall have a ripping ride down. Don't say
+there's no room on the top. Cheer up, Dorothy!"
+
+Which showed that Rosalind Jervis was a free woman, suggested that life
+had richer thrills than marrying Dorothy's brother Michael, and fixed
+the detested imputation securely on her friend.
+
+Dorothy watched her as she swung herself on to the footboard and up the
+stair of the motor bus. There was room on the top. Rosalind, in fact,
+had the top all to herself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Dorothy crossed the Heath again in the twilight she saw something
+white on the terrace of her father's house. Her mother was waiting
+for her.
+
+She thought at first that Aunt Emmeline had gone off her head and that
+she had been sent for to keep her quiet. She gloried in their dependence
+on her. But no, that wasn't likely. Her mother was just watching for her
+as she used to watch for her and the boys when they were little and had
+been sent across the Heath to Grannie's house with a message.
+
+And at the sight and memory of her mother Dorothy felt a childish, sick
+dissatisfaction with herself and with her day, and an absurd longing for
+the tranquillity and safety of the home whose chief drawback lately had
+been that it was too tranquil and too safe. She could almost have told
+her mother how they had all gone for her, and how Rosalind had turned
+out rotten, and how beastly it had all been. Almost, but not quite.
+Dorothy had grown up, and she was there to protect and not to be
+protected. However agreeable it might have been to confide in her
+mother, it wouldn't have done.
+
+Frances met her at the garden door. She had been crying.
+
+"Nicky's come home," she said.
+
+"Nicky?"
+
+"He's been sent down."
+
+"Whatever for?"
+
+"Darling, I can't possibly tell you."
+
+But in the end she did.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Up till now Frances had taken a quiet interest in Women's Suffrage. It
+had got itself into the papers and thus become part of the affairs of
+the nation. The names of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and
+Angela Blathwaite had got into the papers, where Frances hoped and
+prayed that the name of Dorothea Harrison might not follow them. The
+spectacle of a frantic Government at grips with the Women's Franchise
+Union had not yet received the head-lines accorded to the reports of
+divorce and breach of promise cases and fires in paraffin shops; still,
+it was beginning to figure, and if Frances's _Times_ ignored it, there
+were other papers that Dorothy brought home.
+
+But for Frances the affairs of the nation sank into insignificance
+beside Nicky's Cambridge affair.
+
+There could be no doubt that Nicky's affair was serious. You could not,
+Anthony said, get over the letters, the Master's letter and the
+Professor's letter and Michael's. They had arrived one hour after Nicky,
+Nicky so changed from his former candour that he refused to give any
+account of himself beyond the simple statement that he had been sent
+down. They'd know, he had said, soon enough why.
+
+And soon enough they did know.
+
+To be sure no details could be disentangled from the discreet
+ambiguities of the Master and the Professor. But Michael's letter was
+more explicit. Nicky had been sent down because old "Booster" had got
+it into his head that Nicky had been making love to "Booster's" wife
+when she didn't want to be made love to, and nothing could get it out of
+"Booster's" head.
+
+Michael was bound to stand up for his brother, and it was clear to
+Anthony that so grave a charge could hardly have been brought without
+some reason. The tone of the letters, especially the Professor's, was
+extraordinarily restrained. That was what made the thing stand out in
+its sheer awfulness. The Professor, although, according to Michael, he
+conceived himself to be profoundly injured, wrote sorrowfully, in
+consideration of Nicky's youth.
+
+There was one redeeming circumstance, the Master and the Professor both
+laid stress on it: Anthony's son had not attempted to deny it.
+
+"There must," Frances said wildly, "be some terrible mistake."
+
+But Nicky cut the ground from under the theory of the terrible mistake
+by continuing in his refusal to deny it.
+
+"What sort of woman," said Anthony, "is the Professor's wife?"
+
+"Oh, awfully decent," said Nicky.
+
+"You had no encouragement, then, no provocation?"
+
+"She's awfully fascinating," said Nicky.
+
+Then Frances had another thought. It seemed to her that Nicky was
+evading.
+
+"Are you sure you're not screening somebody else?"
+
+"Screening somebody else? Do you mean some other fellow?"
+
+"Yes. I'm not asking you to give the name, Nicky."
+
+"I swear I'm not. Why should I be? I can't think why you're all making
+such a fuss about it. I don't mean poor old 'Booster.' He's got some
+cause, if you like."
+
+"But what was it you did--really did, Nicky?"
+
+"You've read the letters, Mother."
+
+Nicky's adolescence seemed to die and pass from him there and then; and
+she saw a stubborn, hard virility that frightened and repelled her,
+forcing her to believe that it might have really happened.
+
+To Frances the awfulness of it was beyond belief. And the pathos of her
+belief in Nicky was unbearable to Anthony. There were the letters.
+
+"I think, dear," Anthony said, "you'd better leave us."
+
+"Mayn't I stay?" It was as if she thought that by staying she could
+bring Nicky's youth back to life again.
+
+"No," said Anthony.
+
+She went, and Nicky opened the door for her. His hard, tight man's face
+looked at her as if it had been she who had sinned and he who suffered,
+intolerably, for her sin. The click of the door as he shut it
+stabbed her.
+
+"It's a damnable business, father. We'd better not talk about it."
+
+But Anthony would talk about it. And when he had done talking all that
+Nicky had to say was: "You know as well as I do that these
+things happen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For Nicky had thought it out very carefully beforehand in the train.
+What else could he say? He couldn't tell them that "Booster's" poor
+little wife had lost her head and made hysterical love to him, and had
+been so frightened at what she had done that she had made him promise on
+his word of honour that, whatever happened, he wouldn't give her away to
+anybody, not even to his own people.
+
+He supposed that either Peggy had given herself away, or that poor old
+"Booster" had found her out. He supposed that, having found her out,
+there was no other line that "Booster" could have taken. Anyhow, there
+was no other line that _he_ could take; because, in the world where
+these things happened, being found out would be fifty times worse for
+Peggy than it would be for him.
+
+He tried to recall the scene in the back drawing-room where she had
+asked him so often to have tea with her alone. The most vivid part was
+the end of it, after he had given his promise. Peggy had broken down and
+put her head on his shoulder and cried like anything. And it was at that
+moment that Nicky thought of "Booster," and how awful and yet how funny
+it would be if he walked into the room and saw him there. He had tried
+hard not to think what "Booster's" face would look like; he had tried
+hard not to laugh as long as Peggy's head was on his shoulder, for fear
+of hurting her feelings; but when she took it off he did give one
+half-strangled snort; for it really was the rummest thing that had ever
+happened to him.
+
+He didn't know, and he couldn't possibly have guessed, that as soon as
+the door had shut on him Peggy's passion had turned to rage and utter
+detestation of Nicky (for she had heard the snort); and that she had
+gone straight to her husband's study and put her head on _his_ shoulder,
+and cried, and told him a lie; and that it was Peggy's lie and not the
+Professor's imagination that had caused him to be sent down. And even if
+Peggy had not been Lord Somebody's daughter and related to all sorts of
+influential people she would still have been capable of turning every
+male head in the University. For she was a small, gentle woman with
+enchanting manners and the most beautiful and pathetic eyes, and she had
+not yet been found out. Therefore it was more likely that an
+undergraduate with a face like Nicky's should lose his head than that a
+woman with a face like Peggy's should, for no conceivable reason, tell a
+lie. So that, even if Nicky's word of honour had not been previously
+pledged to his accuser, it would have had no chance against any
+statement that she chose to make. And even if he had known that she had
+lied, he couldn't very well have given it against poor pretty Peggy who
+had lost her head and got frightened.
+
+As Nicky packed up his clothes and his books he said, "I don't care if I
+am sent down. It would have been fifty times worse for her than it
+is for me."
+
+He had no idea how bad it was, nor how much worse it was going to be.
+For it ended in his going that night from his father's house to the
+house in St. John's Wood where Vera and Mr. Lawrence Stephen lived.
+
+And it was there that he met Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky congratulated himself on having pulled it off so well. At the
+same time he was a little surprised at the ease with which he had taken
+his father and mother in. He might have understood it if he had known
+that Vera had been before him, and that she had warned them long ago
+that this was precisely the sort of thing they would have to look out
+for. And as no opinion ever uttered on the subject of their children was
+likely to be forgotten by Frances and Anthony, when this particular
+disaster came they were more prepared for it than they would have
+believed possible.
+
+But there were two members of his family whom Nicky had failed
+altogether to convince, Michael and Dorothy. Michael luckily, Nicky said
+to himself, was not on the spot, and his letter had no weight against
+the letters of the Master and the Professor, and on this also Nicky had
+calculated. He reckoned without Dorothy, judging it hardly likely that
+she would be allowed to know anything about it. Nobody, not even
+Frances, was yet aware of Dorothy's importance.
+
+And Dorothy, because of her importance, blamed herself for all that
+happened afterwards. If she had not had that damned Suffrage meeting,
+Rosalind would not have stayed to dinner; if Rosalind had not stayed to
+dinner she would not have gone with her to the tram-lines; if she had
+not gone with her to the tram-lines she would have been at home to stop
+Nicky from going to St. John's Wood. As it was, Nicky had reached the
+main road at the top of the lane just as Dorothy was entering it from
+the bottom.
+
+At first Frances did not want Dorothy to see her father. He was most
+horribly upset and must not be disturbed. But Dorothy insisted. Her
+father had the letters, and she must see the letters.
+
+"I may understand them better than you or Daddy," she said. "You see,
+Mummy, I know these Cambridge people. They're awful asses, some
+of them."
+
+And though her mother doubted whether attendance at the Professor's
+lectures would give Dorothy much insight into the affair, she had her
+way. Anthony was too weak to resist her. He pushed the letters towards
+her without a word. He would rather she had been left out of it. And yet
+somehow the sight of her, coming in, so robust and undismayed and
+competent, gave him a sort of comfort.
+
+Dorothy did not agree with Michael. There was more in it than the
+Professor's imagination. The Professor, she said, hadn't got any
+imagination; you could tell from the way he lectured. But she did not
+believe one word of the charge against her brother. Something had
+happened and Nicky was screening somebody.
+
+"I'll bet you anything you like," said Dorothy, "it's 'Booster's' wife.
+She's made him give his word."
+
+Dorothy was sure that "Booster's" wife was a bad lot.
+
+"Nicky said she was awfully decent."
+
+"He'd _have_ to. He couldn't do it by halves."
+
+"They couldn't have sent him down, unless they'd sifted the thing to the
+bottom."
+
+"I daresay they've sifted all they could, the silly asses."
+
+She could have killed them for making her father suffer. The sight of
+his drawn face hurt her abominably. She had never seen him like that.
+She wasn't half so sorry for her mother who was sustained by a secret,
+ineradicable faith in Nicky. Why couldn't he have faith in Nicky too?
+Was it because he was a man and knew that these things happened?
+
+"Daddy--being sent down isn't such an awful calamity. It isn't going to
+blast his career or anything. It's always touch and go. _I_ might have
+been sent down any day. I should have been if they'd known about me half
+what they don't know about Nicky. Why can't you take it as a rag? You
+bet _he_ does."
+
+Anthony removed himself from her protecting hand. He got up and went to
+bed.
+
+But he did not sleep there. Neither he nor Frances slept. And he came
+down in the morning looking worse than ever.
+
+Dorothy thought, "It must be awful to have children if it makes you feel
+like that." She thought, "It's a lucky thing they're not likely to cut
+up the same way about me." She thought again, "It must be awful to have
+children." She thought of the old discussions in her room at Newnham,
+about the woman's right to the child, and free union, and easy divorce,
+and the abolition of the family. Her own violent and revolutionary
+speeches (for which she liked to think she might have been sent down)
+sounded faint and far-off and irrelevant. She did not really want to
+abolish Frances and Anthony. And yet, if they had been abolished, as
+part of the deplorable institution of parentage, it would have been
+better for them; for then they would not be suffering as they did.
+
+It must be awful to have children. But perhaps they knew that it was
+worth it.
+
+And as her thoughts travelled that way they were overtaken all of a
+sudden by an idea. She did not stop to ask herself what business her
+idea had in that neighbourhood. She went down first thing after
+breakfast and sent off two wires; one to Captain Drayton at Croft House,
+Eltham; one to the same person at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
+
+"Can I see you? It's about Nicky.
+
+"DOROTHY HARRISON."
+
+Wires to show that she was impersonal and businesslike, and that her
+business was urgent. "Can I see you?" to show that he was not being
+invited to see _her_. "It's about Nicky" to justify the whole
+proceeding. "Dorothy Harrison" because "Dorothy" by itself was too much.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as she had sent off her wires Dorothy felt a sense of happiness
+and well-being. She had no grounds for happiness; far otherwise; her
+great friendship with Rosalind Jervis was disintegrating bit by bit
+owing to Rosalind's behaviour; the fiery Suffrage meeting had turned
+into dust and ashes; her darling Nicky was in a nasty scrape; her father
+and mother were utterly miserable; yet she was happy.
+
+Half-way home her mind began to ask questions of its own accord.
+
+"Supposing you had to choose between the Suffrage and Frank Drayton?"
+
+"But I haven't got to."
+
+"You might have. You know you might any minute. You know he hates it.
+And supposing--"
+
+But Dorothy refused to give any answer.
+
+His wire came within the next half hour.
+
+"Coming three sharp. FRANK."
+
+Her sense of well-being increased almost to exaltation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He arrived with punctuality at three o'clock. (He was in the gunners and
+had a job at Woolwich.) She found him standing on the hearth-rug in the
+drawing-room. He had blown his nose when he heard her coming, and
+that meant that he was nervous. She caught him stuffing his
+pocket-handkerchief (a piece of damning evidence) into his
+breast-pocket.
+
+With her knowledge of his nervousness her exaltation ceased as if it had
+not been. At the sight of him it was as if the sentence hidden somewhere
+in her mind--"You'll have to choose. You know you'll have to"--escaping
+thought and language, had expressed itself in one suffocating pang.
+Unless Nicky's affair staved off the dreadful moment.
+
+"Were you frightfully busy?"
+
+"No, thank goodness."
+
+The luck she had had! Of course, if he had been busy he couldn't
+possibly have come.
+
+She could look at him now without a tightening in her throat. She liked
+to look at him. He was made all of one piece. She liked his square face
+and short fine hair, both the colour of light-brown earth; his eyes, the
+colour of light brown earth under clear water; eyes that looked small
+because they were set so deep. She liked their sudden narrowing and
+their deep wrinkles when he smiled. She liked his jutting chin, and the
+fine, rather small mouth that jerked his face slightly crooked when he
+laughed. She liked that slender crookedness that made it a face
+remarkable and unique among faces. She liked his brains. She liked all
+that she had ever seen or heard of him.
+
+Vera had told them that once, at an up-country station in India, he had
+stopped a mutiny in a native battery by laughing in the men's faces.
+Somebody that Ferdie knew had been with him and saw it happen. The men
+broke into his office where he was sitting, vulnerably, in his
+shirt-sleeves. They had brought knives with them, beastly native things,
+and they had their hands on the handles, ready. They screamed and
+gesticulated with excitement. And Frank Drayton leaned back in his
+office chair and looked at them, and burst out laughing, because, he
+said, they made such funny faces. When they got to fingering their
+knives, he tilted back his chair and rocked with laughter. His sudden,
+incredible mirth frightened them and stopped the mutiny. She could see
+him, she could see his face jerked crooked with delight.
+
+That was the sort of thing that Nicky would have done. She loved him for
+that. She loved him because he was like Nicky.
+
+She was not able to recall the process of the states that flowered in
+that mysterious sense of well-being and exaltation. A year ago Frank
+Drayton had been only "that nice man we used to meet at Cheltenham."
+First of all he had been Ferdie's and Vera's friend. Then he became
+Nicky's friend; the only one who took a serious interest in his
+inventions and supported him when he wanted to go into the Army and
+consoled him when he was frustrated. Then he had become the friend of
+the family. Now he was recognized as more particularly Dorothea's
+friend.
+
+At Cheltenham he had been home on leave; and it was not until this year
+that he had got his job at Woolwich teaching gunnery, while he waited
+for a bigger job in the Ordnance Department. Ferdie Cameron had always
+said that Frank Drayton would be worth watching. He would be part of the
+brains of the Army some day. Nicky watched him. His brains and their
+familiarity with explosives and the machinery of warfare had been his
+original attraction for Nicky. But it was Dorothea who watched him most.
+
+She plunged abruptly into Nicky's affair, giving names and lineage. "You
+know all sorts of people, do you know anything about her?"
+
+He looked at her clearly, without smiling. Then he said "Yes. I know a
+good bit about her. Is that what's wrong with Nicky?"
+
+"Not exactly. But he's been sent down."
+
+His wry smile intimated that such things might be.
+
+Then she told him what the Master had written and what the Professor had
+written and what Michael had written, and what Nicky had said, and what
+she, Dorothea thought. Drayton smiled over the Master's and the
+Professor's letters, but when it came to Michael's letter he
+laughed aloud.
+
+"It's all very well for _us_. But Daddy and Mummy are breaking their
+hearts. Daddy says he's going down to Cambridge to see what really
+did happen."
+
+Again that clear look. She gathered that he disapproved of "Booster's"
+wife. He disapproved of so many things: of Women's Suffrage; of
+revolutions; of women who revolted; of anybody who revolted; of Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite. It was
+putting it too mildly to say he disapproved of Rosalind Jervis; he
+detested her. He disapproved of Vera and of her going to see Vera; she
+remembered that he had even disapproved, long ago, of poor Ferdie,
+though he liked him. Evidently he disapproved of "Booster's" wife for
+the same reason that he disapproved of Vera. That was why he didn't
+say so.
+
+"I believe you think all the time I'm right," she said. "Would you go
+down if you were he?"
+
+"No. I wouldn't."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because he won't get anything out of them. They can't give her away any
+more than Nicky can. Or than _you_ can, Dorothy."
+
+"You mean I've done it already--to you. I _had_ to, because of Nicky. I
+can't help it if you _do_ think it was beastly of me."
+
+"My dear child--"
+
+He got up vehemently, as if his idea was to take her in his arms and
+stifle her outbreak that way. But something in her eyes, cold, unready,
+yet aware of him, repelled him.
+
+He thought: "It's too soon. She's all rigid. She isn't alive yet.
+That's not what she wired for." He thought: "I wish people wouldn't send
+their children to Newnham. It retards their development by ten years."
+
+And she thought: "No. I mustn't let him do that. For then he won't be
+able to go back on me when I tell him my opinions. It would be simply
+trapping him. Supposing--supposing--"
+
+She did not know that that instinctive renunciation was her answer to
+the question. Her honour would come first.
+
+"Of course. Of course you had to."
+
+"What would you do about it if you were Daddy?"
+
+"I should send them all to blazes."
+
+"No, but _really_ do?"
+
+"I should do nothing. I should leave it. You'll find that before very
+long there'll be letters of apology and restitution."
+
+"Will you come down to the office with me and tell Daddy that?"
+
+"Yes, if you'll come to tea with me somewhere afterwards."
+
+(He really couldn't be expected to do all this for nothing.)
+
+She sent her mother to him while she put on her hat and coat. When she
+came down Frances was happy again.
+
+"You see, Mummy, I was right, after all."
+
+"You always were right, darling, all the time."
+
+For the life of her she couldn't help giving that little flick at her
+infallible daughter.
+
+"She _is_ right--most of the time," said Drayton. His eyes covered and
+protected her.
+
+Anthony was in his office, sitting before the open doors of the cabinet
+where he kept his samples of rare and valuable woods. The polished slabs
+were laid before him on the table in rows, as he had arranged them to
+show to a customer: wine-coloured mahogany, and golden satinwood; ebony
+black as jet; tulip-wood mottled like fine tortoiseshell; coromandel
+wood, striped black and white like the coat of a civet cat; ghostly
+basswood, shining white on dead white; woods of clouded grain, and woods
+of shining grain, grain that showed like the slanting, splintered lines
+of hewn stone, like moss, like the veins of flowers, the fringes of
+birds' feathers, the striping and dappling of beasts; woods of exquisite
+grain where the life of the tree drew its own image in its own heart;
+woods whose surface was tender to the touch like a fine tissue; and
+sweet-smelling sandalwood and camphor-wood and cedar.
+
+Anthony loved his shining, polished slabs of wood. If a man must have a
+business, let it be timber. Timber was a clean and fine and noble thing.
+He had brought the working of his business to such a pitch of smooth
+perfection that his two elder sons, Michael and Nicholas, could catch up
+with it easily and take it in their stride.
+
+Now he was like a sick child that has ranged all its toys in front of it
+and finds no comfort in them.
+
+And, as he looked at them, the tulip-wood and the scented sandalwood and
+camphor-wood gave him an idea.
+
+The Master and the Professor had both advised him to send his son
+Nicholas out of England for a little while. "Let him travel for six
+months and get the whole miserable business out of his head."
+
+Nicky, when he gave up the Army, had told him flatly that he would
+rather die than spend his life sitting in a beastly office. Nicky had
+put it to him that timber meant trees, and trees meant forests; why,
+lots of the stuff they imported came from the Himalaya and the West
+Indies and Ceylon. He had reminded him that he was always saying a
+timber merchant couldn't know enough about the living tree. Why
+shouldn't he go into the places where the living trees grew and learn
+all about them? Why shouldn't he be a tree-expert? Since they were
+specializing in rare and foreign woods, why shouldn't he specialize in
+rare and foreign trees?
+
+And the slabs of tulip-wood and scented camphor-wood and sandalwood were
+saying to Anthony, "Why not?" Neither he nor Frances had wanted Nicky to
+go off to the West Indies and the Himalaya; but now, since clearly he
+must go off somewhere, why not?
+
+Drayton and Dorothy came in just as Anthony (still profoundly
+dejected) was saying to himself, "Reinstate him. Give him
+responsibility--curiosity--healthy interests. Get the whole miserable
+business out of his head."
+
+It seemed incredible, after what they had gone through, that Drayton
+should be standing there, telling him that there was nothing in it, that
+there never had been any miserable business, that it was all a storm in
+a hysterical woman's teacup. He blew the whole dirty nightmare to
+nothing with the laughter that was like Nicky's own laughter.
+
+Then Anthony and Drayton and Dorothy sat round the table, drafting
+letters to the Master and the Professor. Anthony, at Drayton's
+dictation, informed them that he regretted the step they had seen fit to
+take; that he knew his own son well enough to be pretty certain that
+there had been some misunderstanding; therefore, unless he received
+within three days a written withdrawal of the charge against his son
+Nicholas, he would be obliged to remove his son Michael from the
+Master's College.
+
+The idea of removing Michael was Anthony's own inspiration.
+
+Drayton's advice was that he should give Nicky his choice between Oxford
+and Germany, the big School of Forestry at Aschaffenburg. If he chose
+Germany, he would be well grounded; he could specialize and travel
+afterwards.
+
+"Now _that's_ all over," Anthony said, "you two had better come and have
+tea with me somewhere."
+
+But there was something in their faces that made him consult his watch
+and find that "Oh dear me, no! he was afraid he couldn't." He had an
+appointment at five.
+
+When they were well out of sight he locked up his toys in his cabinet,
+left the appointment at five to Mr. Vereker, and went home to tell
+Frances about the letters he had written to Cambridge and the plans that
+had been made for Nicky's future.
+
+"He'll choose Germany," Anthony said. "But that can't be helped."
+
+Frances agreed that they could hardly have hit upon a better plan.
+
+So the affair of Nicky and "Booster's" wife was as if it had never been.
+And for that they thanked the blessed common sense and sanity of
+Captain Drayton.
+
+And yet Anthony's idea was wrecked by "Booster's" wife. It had come too
+late. Anthony had overlooked the fact that his son had seventeen hours'
+start of him. He was unaware of the existence of Nicky's own idea; and
+he had not allowed for the stiff logic of his position.
+
+When he drove down in his car to St. John's Wood to fetch Nicky, he
+found that he had left that afternoon for Chelsea, where, Vera told him,
+he had taken rooms.
+
+She gave him the address. It had no significance for Anthony.
+
+Nicky refused to be fetched back from his rooms in Chelsea. For he had
+not left his father's house in a huff; he had left it in his wisdom, to
+avoid the embarrassment of an incredible position. His position, as he
+pointed out to his father, had not changed. He was as big a blackguard
+to-day as he was yesterday; the only difference was, that to-morrow or
+the next day he would be a self-supporting blackguard.
+
+He wouldn't listen to his father's plan. It was a beautiful plan, but it
+would only mean spending more money on him. He'd be pretty good, he
+thought, at looking after machinery. He was going to try for a job as a
+chauffeur or foreman mechanic. He thought he knew where he could get
+one; but supposing he couldn't get it, if his father cared to take him
+on at the works for a bit he'd come like a shot; but he couldn't stay
+there, because it wouldn't be good enough.
+
+He was absolutely serious, and absolutely firm in the logic of his
+position. For he argued that, if he allowed himself to be taken back as
+though nothing had happened, this, more than anything he could well
+think of, would be giving Peggy away.
+
+He sent his love to his mother and Dorothy, and promised to come out and
+dine with them as soon as he had got his job.
+
+So Anthony drove back without him. But as he drove he smiled. And
+Frances smiled, too, when he told her.
+
+"There he is, the young monkey, and there he'll stay. It's magnificent,
+but of course he's an ass."
+
+"If you can't be an ass at twenty," said Frances, "when can you be?"
+
+They said it was so like Nicky. For all he knew to the contrary his
+career was ruined; but he didn't care. You couldn't make any impression
+on him. They wondered if anybody ever would.
+
+Dorothy wondered too.
+
+"What sort of rooms has he got, Anthony?" said Frances.
+
+"Very nice rooms, at the top of the house, looking over the river."
+
+"Darling Nicky, I shall go and see him. What are you thinking of,
+Dorothy?"
+
+Dorothy was thinking that Nicky's address at Chelsea was the address
+that Desmond had given her yesterday.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with the
+painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and see her.
+She could never bring herself to go to the St. John's Wood house that
+was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen's house than it was Vera's.
+
+The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back on
+Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with their
+liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged that
+frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen's society that
+otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.
+
+Vera understood that her husband's brother and sister-in-law could
+hardly be expected to condone her last aberration. Her attachment to
+Ferdie Cameron had been different. It was inevitable, and in a sense
+forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by Bartie's sheer
+impossibility. Besides, the knowledge of it had dawned on them so
+gradually and through so many stages of extenuating tragedy, that, even
+when it became an open certainty, the benefit of the long doubt
+remained. And there was Veronica. There was still Veronica. Even without
+Veronica Vera would have had to think of something far worse than
+Lawrence Stephen before Frances would have cast her off. Frances felt
+that it was not for her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree
+of Heaven. Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had
+Ferdie, could she have lived without him? For Frances nothing in the
+world had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her
+children; her children first, and Anthony after them. For Vera nothing
+in the world counted but her lover.
+
+"If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!" she would
+say.
+
+Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously, through the
+very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.
+
+Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made up for
+it by an incorruptible adoration of the living. And she had been made
+notorious chiefly through Stephen's celebrity, which was, you might say,
+a pure accident.
+
+Thus Frances made shelter for her friend. Only Vera must be made to
+understand that, though _she_ was accepted Lawrence Stephen was not. He
+was the point at which toleration ceased.
+
+And Vera did understand. She understood that Frances and Anthony
+disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie's and
+Veronica's account than on Bartie's. Even family loyalty could not
+espouse Bartie's cause with any zest. For Bartie showed himself
+implacable. Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her so
+that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had refused.
+His idea was to assert himself by refusals. In that way he could still
+feel that he had power over her and a sort of possession. It was he who
+was scandalous. Even now neither Frances nor Anthony had a word to
+say for him.
+
+So Vera consented to be received surreptitiously, by herself, and
+without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn. It had hurt her; but
+Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so distinguished
+that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either, would ever have
+been received by him without Vera. She came, looking half cynical, half
+pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a little beaten after seventeen
+years of passion and danger, saying that she wasn't going to force Larry
+down their throats if they didn't like him; and she went away sustained
+by her sense of his distinction and _his_ repudiations.
+
+And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances and
+Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn't. Michael and
+Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he knew; and
+he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be seen at the
+parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself distinction. Vera
+had never forgotten and never would forget what Anthony and Frances had
+done for her and Ferdie when they took Veronica. She wanted to make up,
+to pay back, to help their children as they had helped her child; to
+give the best she had, and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't
+possibly have done. Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was
+lamentable. In his family and in the dull round of their acquaintance
+there was not anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael;
+not anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old
+attitude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had promised
+her that he would help Michael.
+
+And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas and
+Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm, well-ordered
+sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral vortex that to her was
+the most redoubtable of all. She hid her fear, because in her wisdom she
+knew that to show fear was not the way to keep her children. She hid her
+strength because she knew that to show it was not the way. Her strength
+was in their love of her. She had only used it once when she had stopped
+Nicky from going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will
+never do that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a
+treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be bargained
+with. She tried to hold the balance even between their youth and
+their maturity.
+
+So Frances fought her fear.
+
+She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in spite of
+everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and she did not know
+that he had sensibilities and prejudices and scruples like her own, and
+that he and Vera distinguished very carefully between the people who
+would be good for Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who
+would not. She did not know that they both drew the line at Desmond.
+
+Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's fault
+that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet each other.
+She did not deny that it was in her house they _had_ met; but she had
+not introduced them. Desmond had introduced herself, on the grounds that
+she knew Dorothy. Vera suspected that, from the first moment when she
+had seen him there--by pure accident--she had marked him down. Very
+likely she had wriggled into Dorothy's Suffrage meeting on purpose. She
+was capable of anything.
+
+Not that Vera thought there was any need for Frances to worry. It was
+most unlikely that Desmond's business with Nicky could be serious. For
+one thing she was too young herself to care for anybody as young as
+Nicky. For another she happened to be in the beginning, or the middle,
+certainly nowhere near the end of a tremendous affair with Headley
+Richards. As she was designing the dresses and the scenery for the new
+play he was putting on at the Independent Theatre, Vera argued very
+plausibly that the affair had only just started, and that Frances must
+allow it a certain time to run.
+
+"I hope to goodness that the Richards man will marry her."
+
+"My dear, how can he? He's married already to a nice little woman that
+he isn't half tired of yet. Desmond was determined to have him and she's
+got him; but he's only taken her in his stride, as you may say. I don't
+suppose he cares very much one way or another. But with Desmond it's a
+point of honour."
+
+"What's a point of honour?"
+
+"Why, to have him. Not to be left out. Besides, she always said she
+could take him from poor little Ginny Richards, and she's done it. That
+was another point of honour."
+
+With a calmness that was horrible to Frances Vera weighed her friend
+Desmond's case. To Frances it was as if she had never known Vera. Either
+Vera had changed or she had never known her. She had never known women,
+or men either, who discussed such performances with calmness. Vera
+herself hadn't made her infidelities a point of honour.
+
+These were the passions and the thoughts of Lawrence Stephen's and of
+Desmond's world; these were the things it took for granted. These people
+lived in a moral vortex; they whirled round and round with each other;
+they were powerless to resist the swirl. Not one of them had any other
+care than to love and to make love after the manner of the Vortex. This
+was their honour, not to be left out of it, not to be left out of the
+vortex, but to be carried away, to be sucked in, and whirl round and
+round with each other and the rest.
+
+The painter girl Desmond was horrible to Frances.
+
+And all the time her mind was busy with one question: "Do you think
+Nicky knows?"
+
+"I'm perfectly sure he doesn't."
+
+"Perhaps--if he did--"
+
+"No, my dear, that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe it.
+You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting into his
+head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And you'll be
+putting it into Desmond's head."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him alone." Those
+painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You couldn't take them
+seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything that Vera Harrison said
+she was. He didn't think, though, that the idea of making love to her
+would enter Nicky's head if they left him alone. Nicky's head had more
+important ideas in it.
+
+So they left him alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of Desmond. Too
+busy with his assistant manager's job at the Morss Motor Works; too busy
+with one of the little ideas to which he owed the sudden rise in his
+position: the little idea of making the Morss cars go faster; too busy
+with his big Idea which had nothing whatever to do with the Morss
+Company and their cars.
+
+His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a French
+engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the _forteresse mobile_, had
+become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality for his idea. It was a
+composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with
+caterpillar wheels and the motor-car. These things had welded themselves
+together gradually in Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge.
+The table in Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was
+now covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made
+them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him,
+and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little
+ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day
+in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless
+spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took
+shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had
+conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image
+of the _forteresse mobile_, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost that
+stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the vision.
+
+But the image of Desmond was there.
+
+At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder when
+Desmond will have finished the drawings."
+
+The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond's caprice.
+
+The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before these
+could be fitted together and the permanent model of the Moving Fortress
+set up. The Moving Fortress itself waited upon Desmond.
+
+For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not draw his
+plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who understood engines to
+draw them. He was haunted, almost insanely, by the fear that somebody
+else would hit upon the idea of the Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so
+obvious that no gunner and no engineer could miss it. And the drawings
+Desmond made for him, the drawings in black and white, the drawings in
+grey wash, and the coloured drawings were perfect. Nicky, unskilled in
+everything but the inventing and building up of engines, did not know
+how perfect the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the
+extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the easels in
+her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he took Desmond
+into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on her.
+
+He didn't care. He liked Desmond. He couldn't help it if Drayton
+disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn't like her. She was, he said to
+himself, a ripping good sort. She might be frightfully clever; Nicky
+rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she never talked
+that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy's other friends talked. She
+let you think.
+
+It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn't like her and that
+Frank Drayton disapproved of her.
+
+"They wouldn't," said Nicky, "if they knew you." And he turned again to
+the subject of his Moving Fortress.
+
+For Desmond's intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was perfect,
+and her way of listening was perfect. She sat on the floor, on the
+orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience, embracing her
+knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms, while Nicky stamped up
+and down her studio and talked to her, like a monomaniac, about his
+Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have
+to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at
+him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she
+liked his young naïveté and monomania; she liked his face and all his
+gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.
+
+And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled eyes and in
+her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It
+was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its
+long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven
+with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body
+than to her spirit and her mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early summer,
+when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent him motoring
+about the country on their business, he took Desmond with him and
+Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on the grass borders
+of the high roads and on the edges of the woods and moors, and Desmond
+painted her extraordinary pictures while Nicky lay on his back beside
+her with his face turned up to the sky and dreamed of flying machines.
+
+For he had done with his Moving Fortress. It only waited for Desmond to
+finish the last drawing.
+
+When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank Drayton
+before he sent them to the War Office.
+
+He lived for that moment of completion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of nineteen-eleven
+Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased and flowered and
+ripened to its fulfilment. And in the early summer she found that things
+had happened as she had meant that they should happen.
+
+She had always meant it. She had always said, and she had always thought
+that women were no good unless they had the courage of their opinions;
+the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice that prevented them
+from getting what they wanted.
+
+Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked her in.
+Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought that by simply
+spinning round faster and faster she added her own energy to the whirl.
+It was not Dorothy's vortex, or the vortex of the fighting Suffrage
+woman. Desmond didn't care very much about the Suffrage; or about any
+kind of freedom but her own kind; or about anybody's freedom but her
+own. Maud Blackadder's idea of freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and
+physical insanity. Yet each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and
+Mrs. Blathwaite and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own
+particular swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century. If you had
+youth and life in you, you were in revolt.
+
+Desmond's theories were Dorothy's theories too; only that while Dorothy,
+as Rosalind had said, thought out her theories in her brain without
+feeling them, Desmond felt them with her whole being; and with her whole
+being, secret, subtle and absolutely relentless, she was bent on
+carrying them out.
+
+And in the summer, in the new season, Headley Richards decided that he
+had no further use for Desmond. The new play had run its course at the
+Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards had been
+disappointed. He put down the failure mainly to the queerness of the
+dresses and the scenery she had designed for him. Desmond's new art was
+too new; people weren't ready yet for that sort of thing. At the same
+time he discovered that he was really very much attached to his own wife
+Ginny, and when Ginny nobly offered to give him his divorce he had
+replied nobly that he didn't want one. And he left Desmond to face
+the music.
+
+Desmond's misery was acute; but it was not so hopeless as it would have
+been if she could have credited Ginny Richards with any permanent power
+of attraction for Headley. She knew he would come back to her. She knew
+the power of her own body. She held him by the tie that was never broken
+so long as it endured. He would never marry her; yet he would come back.
+
+But in the interval between these acts there was the music.
+
+And the first sound of the music, the changed intonations of her
+landlady, frightened Desmond; for though she was older than Nicky she
+was very young. And there were Desmond's people. You may forget that you
+have people and behave as if they weren't there; but, if they are there,
+sooner or later they will let you know it. An immense volume of sound
+and some terrifying orchestral effects were contributed by Desmond's
+people. So that the music was really very bad to bear.
+
+Desmond couldn't bear it. And in her fright she thought of Nicky.
+
+She knew that she hadn't a chance so long as he was absorbed in the
+Moving Fortress. But the model was finished and set up and she was at
+work on the last drawing. And no more ideas for engines were coming into
+Nicky's head. The Morss Company and Nicky himself were even beginning to
+wonder whether there ever would be any more.
+
+Then Nicky thought of Desmond. And he showed that he was thinking of her
+by sitting still and not talking when he was with her. She did not fill
+that emptiness and spaciousness of Nicky's head, but he couldn't get her
+out of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Vera noticed the silence of the two she became uneasy, and judged
+that the time had come for discreet intervention.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "is it true that Desmond's been doing drawings for
+you?"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky, "she's done any amount."
+
+"My dear boy, have you any idea of the amount you'll have to pay her?"
+
+"I haven't," said Nicky, "I wish I had. I hate asking her, and yet I
+suppose I'll have to."
+
+"Of course you'll have to. _She_ won't hate it. She's got to earn her
+living as much as you have."
+
+"Has she? You don't mean to say she's hard up?"
+
+He had never thought of Desmond as earning her own living, still less as
+being hard up.
+
+"I only wish she were," said Vera, "for your sake."
+
+"Why on earth for my sake?"
+
+"Because _then_, my dear Nicky, you wouldn't have to pay so stiff a
+price."
+
+"I don't care," said Nicky, "how stiff the price is. I shall pay it."
+
+And Vera replied that Desmond, in her own queer way, really was a rather
+distinguished painter. "Pay her," she said. "Pay her for goodness sake
+and have done with it. And if she wants to give you things don't
+let her."
+
+"As if," said Nicky, "I should dream of letting her."
+
+And he went off to Chelsea to pay Desmond then and there.
+
+Vera thought that she had been rather clever. Nicky would dash in and do
+the thing badly. He would be very proud about it, and he would revolt
+from his dependence on Desmond, and he would show her--Vera hoped that
+he would show her--that he did not want to be under any obligation to
+her. And Desmond would be hurt and lose her temper. The hard look would
+get into her face and destroy its beauty, and she would say detestable
+things in a detestable voice, and a dreadful ugliness would come between
+them, and the impulse of Nicky's yet unborn passion would be checked,
+and the memory of that abominable half-hour would divide them for ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Vera herself had grown hard and clever. She had forgotten Nicky's
+tenderness, and she knew nothing at all about Desmond's fright. And, as
+it happened, neither Nicky nor Desmond did any of the things she thought
+they would do.
+
+Nicky was not impetuous. He found Desmond in her studio working on the
+last drawing of the Moving Fortress, with the finished model before her.
+That gave him his opening, and he approached shyly and tentatively.
+
+Desmond put on an air of complete absorption in her drawing; but she
+smiled. A pretty smile that lifted the corners of her mouth and made it
+quiver, and gave Nicky a queer and unexpected desire to kiss her.
+
+He went on wanting to know what his debt was--not that he could ever
+really pay it.
+
+"Oh, you foolish Nicky," Desmond said.
+
+He repeated himself over and over again, and each time she had an
+answer, and the answers had a cumulative effect.
+
+"There isn't any debt. You don't pay anything--"
+
+"I didn't do it for _that_, you silly boy."
+
+"What did I do it for? I did it for fun. You couldn't draw a thing like
+that for anything else. Look at it--"
+
+--"Well, if you want to be horrid and calculating about it, think of the
+lunches and the dinners and the theatre tickets and the flowers you've
+given _me_. Oh, and the gallons and gallons of petrol. How am I ever to
+pay you back again?"
+
+Thus she mocked him.
+
+"Can't you see how you're spoiling it all?"
+
+And then, passionately: "Oh, Nicky, please don't say it again. It
+hurts."
+
+She turned on him her big black looking-glass eyes washed bright, each
+with one tear that knew better than to fall just yet. He must see that
+she was holding herself well in hand. It would be no use letting herself
+go until he had forgotten his Moving Fortress. He was looking at the
+beastly thing now, instead of looking at her.
+
+"Are you thinking of another old engine?"
+
+"No," said Nicky. "I'm not thinking of anything."
+
+"Then you don't want me to do any more drawings?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well then--I wonder whether you'd very much mind going away?"
+
+"Now?"
+
+"No. Not now. But soon. From here. Altogether."
+
+"Go? Altogether? Me? Why?"
+
+He was utterly astonished. He thought that he had offended Desmond past
+all forgiveness.
+
+"Because I came here to be alone. To work. And I can't work. And I want
+to be alone again."
+
+"Am I--spoiling it?"
+
+"Yes. You're spoiling it damnably."
+
+"I'm sorry, Desmond. I didn't mean to. I thought--" But he hadn't the
+heart to say what he had thought.
+
+She looked at him and knew that the moment was coming.
+
+It had come.
+
+She turned away from the table where the Moving Fortress stood,
+threatening her with its mimic guns, and reminding Nicky of the things
+she most wanted him to forget. She withdrew to her crouching place at
+the other end of the studio, among the cushions.
+
+He followed her there with slow, thoughtful steps, steps full of
+brooding purpose and of half-unconscious meaning.
+
+"Nicky, I'm so unhappy. I didn't know it was possible for anybody to be
+so unhappy in this world."
+
+She began to cry quietly.
+
+"Desmond--what is it? What is it? Tell me. Why can't you tell me?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She thought, "It will be all right if he kisses me once. If he holds me
+in his arms once. Then I can tell him."
+
+For then he would know that he loved her. He was not quite sure now. She
+knew that he was not quite sure. She trusted to the power of her body to
+make him sure.
+
+Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor pitied
+it.
+
+He had kissed her. He had held her in his arms and kissed her more than
+once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow of his arm.
+She was weak and small. She was like some small, soft, helpless animal
+and she was hurt. Her sobbing and panting made her ribs feel fragile
+like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless animal under the pressure of
+his arms. And she was frightened.
+
+He couldn't stand the sight of suffering. He had never yet resisted the
+appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and pain. He could feel
+Desmond's heart going thump, thump, under the blue thing he called her
+pinafore. Her heart hurt him with its thumping.
+
+And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was smooth and
+sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf. And Desmond knew that he knew it.
+His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over the long, polished
+bands of her black hair; and he thought that he loved her. Desmond knew
+that he thought it.
+
+And still she waited. She said to herself, "It's no good his thinking
+it. I daren't tell him till he says it. Till he asks me to marry him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had said it at last. And he had asked her to marry him. And then she
+had told him.
+
+And all that he said was, "I don't care." He said it to Desmond, and he
+said it to himself.
+
+The funny thing was that he did not care. He was as miserable as it was
+well possible to be, but he didn't really care. He was not even
+surprised. It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in the back
+of his head behind all the ideas.
+
+And yet he couldn't have known it all the time. Either it must have gone
+away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not to see it.
+
+She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her mouth
+and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief, controlling herself,
+crying quietly.
+
+She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn't love her. If
+he had loved her he would have cared intolerably. He didn't care about
+Headley Richards because he didn't care about Desmond any more. He was
+only puzzled.
+
+"Why did you do it?"
+
+"I can't think why. I must have been off my head. I didn't know what it
+was like. I didn't know. I thought it would be wonderful and beautiful.
+I thought he was wonderful and beautiful."
+
+"Poor little Desmond."
+
+"Oh, Nicky, do you think me a beast? Does it make you hate me?"
+
+"No. Of course it doesn't. The only awful thing is--"
+
+"What? Tell me."
+
+"Well--you see--"
+
+"You mean the baby? I know it's awful. You needn't tell me that, Nicky."
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"I mean it's so awful for _it_."
+
+She thought he had been thinking of himself and her.
+
+"Why should it be?"
+
+"Why? There isn't any why. It just is. I _know_ it is."
+
+He was thinking of Veronica.
+
+"You see," he said simply, "that's why this sort of thing is such a
+rotten game. It's so hard on the kiddy. I suppose you didn't think of
+that. You couldn't have, or else you wouldn't--"
+
+He paused. There was one thing he had to know. He must get it out of
+her.
+
+"It hasn't made you feel that you don't want it?"
+
+"Oh--I don't know what I want--_now_. I don't know what it makes me
+feel!"
+
+"Don't let it, Desmond. Don't let it. It'll be all right. You won't feel
+like that when you've married me. Can't you see that _that's_ the
+wonderful and beautiful part?"
+
+"_What_ is?" she said in her tired drawl.
+
+"_It_--the poor kiddy."
+
+Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Veronica's mother was the first to hear about it. Desmond told her.
+
+Veronica's mother was determined to stop it for the sake of everybody
+concerned.
+
+She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her one
+evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else. (Lawrence
+Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where Vera was not
+received; but sometimes, when the occasion was political, or otherwise
+important, he had to. That was her punishment, as Bartholomew had meant
+that it should be.)
+
+Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt's assaults and
+manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.
+
+"You mustn't do it; you simply mustn't."
+
+He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.
+
+"It isn't. It's the affair of everybody who cares for you."
+
+"Their caring isn't my affair," said Nicky.
+
+And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.
+
+"It's absurd of you," she said, "to treat her as if she was an innocent
+child. She isn't a child, and she isn't innocent. She knew perfectly
+well what she was about. There's nothing she doesn't know. She meant it
+to happen, and she made it happen. She said she would. She meant you to
+marry her, and she's making you marry her. I daresay she said she would.
+She's as clever and determined as the devil. Neither you nor Headley
+Richards ever had a chance against her."
+
+"She hasn't got a dog's chance against all you people yelping at her now
+she's down. I should have thought--"
+
+"You mean _I_'ve no business to? That was different. I didn't take any
+other woman's husband, or any other woman's lover, Nicky."
+
+"If you had," said Nicky, "I wouldn't have interfered."
+
+"I wouldn't interfere if I thought you cared _that_ for Desmond. But you
+don't. You know you don't."
+
+"Of course I care for her."
+
+He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew that he
+was vulnerable.
+
+"Oh, Nicky dear, if you'd only waited--"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched. "I don't
+know what I mean. Unless I mean that you're just a little young to
+marry anybody."
+
+"I don't care if I am. I don't _feel_ young, I can tell you. Anyhow
+Desmond's years younger."
+
+"Desmond is twenty-three. You're twenty. It's Veronica who's years
+younger."
+
+"Veronica?"
+
+"She's sixteen. You don't imagine Desmond is as young as that, do you?
+Wait till she's twenty-five and you're twenty-two."
+
+"It wouldn't do poor Desmond much good if I did. I could kill Headley
+Richards."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"For leaving her."
+
+Vera smiled. "That shows how much you care. You wouldn't have felt like
+killing him if he'd stuck to her. Why should you marry Headley Richards'
+mistress and take on his child? It's preposterous."
+
+"It isn't. If the other fellow's a brute it's all the more reason why I
+shouldn't be. I want to be some use in this rotten world where people
+are so damnably cruel to each other. And there's that unhappy kiddy.
+You've forgotten the kiddy."
+
+"Do you mean to say it's Desmond's child _you_'re thinking of?"
+
+"I can't understand any woman not thinking of it," said Nicky.
+
+He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.
+
+Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.
+
+"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for your own
+children?"
+
+It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why don't
+you marry _her_?"
+
+"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.
+
+Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry
+Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards. "Nothing I said
+made the least impression on him."
+
+That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true.
+But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to
+it that Desmond's affair would have made no impression on him if it had
+not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor's wife. And it
+would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made
+love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry
+Phyllis Desmond.
+
+These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of
+Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.
+
+Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not been
+removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of apology and
+restitution came. But both apology and restitution came too late.
+
+For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.
+
+Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their house,
+one on each side of the fireplace. They had it all to themselves, except
+for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on the hearthrug at their
+feet. Frances's forehead and her upper lip were marked delicately with
+shallow, tender lines; Anthony's eyes had crow's-feet at their corners,
+pointing to grey hairs at his temples. To each other their faces were as
+they had been fifteen years ago. The flight of time was measured for
+them by the generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry.
+For still in secret they refused to think of their children as grown-up.
+
+Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the Women's
+Franchise Union. They owed it to her magnanimity that they had one child
+remaining with them in the house. John was at Cheltenham; Veronica was
+in Dresden. Michael was in Germany, too, at that School of Forestry at
+Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant for Nicky. They couldn't bear to
+think where Nicky was.
+
+When Frances thought about her children now her mind went backwards. If
+only they hadn't grown-up; if only they could have stayed little for
+ever! In another four years even Don-Don would be grown-up--Don-Don who
+was such a long time getting older that at fourteen, only two years
+ago, he had been capable of sitting in her lap, a great long-legged,
+flumbering puppy, while mother and son rocked dangerously together in
+each other's arms, like two children, laughing together, mocking
+each other.
+
+She was going to be wiser with Don-Don than she had been with Nicky. She
+would be wiser with Michael when he came back from Germany. She would
+keep them both out of the Vortex, the horrible Vortex that Lawrence
+Stephen and Vera had let Nicky in for, the Vortex that seized on youth
+and forced it into a corrupt maturity. After Desmond's affair Anthony
+and Frances felt that to them the social circle inhabited by Vera and
+Lawrence Stephen would never be anything but a dirty hell.
+
+As for Veronica, the longer she stayed in Germany the better.
+
+Yet Frances knew that they had not sent Veronica to Dresden to prevent
+her mother from getting hold of her. When she remembered the fear she
+had had of the apple-tree house, she said to herself that Desmond was a
+judgment on her for sending little Veronica away.
+
+And yet it was the kindest thing they could have done for her. Veronica
+was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and studying music and
+the language. She had no idea that music and the language were mere
+blinds, and that she had been sent to the German family to keep her out
+of Nicky's way.
+
+They would have them all back again at Christmas. Frances counted the
+days. From to-night, the seventh of June, to December the twentieth was
+not much more than six months.
+
+To-night, the seventh of June, was Nicky's wedding-night. But they did
+not know that. Nicky had kept the knowledge from them, in his mercy, to
+save them the agony of deciding whether they would recognize the
+marriage or not. And as neither Frances nor Anthony had ever faced
+squarely the prospect of disaster to their children, they had turned
+their backs on Nicky's marriage and supported each other in the hope
+that at the last minute something would happen to prevent it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ten o'clock post, and two letters from Germany. Not from Michael,
+not from Veronica. One from Frau Schäfer, the mother of the German
+family. It was all in German, and neither Anthony nor Frances could make
+out more than a word here and there. "Das süsse, liebe Mädchen" meant
+Veronica. But certain phrases: "traurige Nachrichten" ... "furchtbare
+Schwächheit" ... "... eine entsetzliche Blutleere ..." terrified them,
+and they sent for Dorothy to translate.
+
+Dorothy was a good German scholar, but somehow she was not very fluent.
+She scowled over the letter.
+
+"What does it mean?" said Frances. "Hæmorhage?"
+
+"No. No. Anæmia. Severe anæmia. Heart and stomach trouble."
+
+"But 'traurige Nachrichten' is 'bad news.' They're breaking it to us
+that she's dying."
+
+(It was unbearable to think of Nicky marrying Ronny; but it was more
+unbearable to think of Ronny dying.)
+
+"They don't say they're sending _us_ bad news; they say they think
+Ronny must have had some. To account for her illness. Because they say
+she's been so happy with them."
+
+"But what bad news could she have had?"
+
+"Perhaps she knows about Nicky."
+
+"But nobody's told her, unless Vera has."
+
+"She hasn't. I know she hasn't. She didn't want her to know."
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+"Mummy, you don't _have_ to tell Ronny things. She always knows them."
+
+"How on earth could she know a thing like that?"
+
+"She might. She sort of sees things--like Ferdie. She may have seen him
+with Desmond. You can't tell."
+
+"Do they say what the doctor thinks?"
+
+"Yes. He thinks it's worry and Heimweh--homesickness. They want us to
+send for her and take her back. Not let her have another term."
+
+Though Frances loved Veronica she was afraid of her coming back. For she
+was more than ever convinced that something would happen and that Nicky
+would not marry Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The other letter was even more difficult to translate or to understand
+when translated.
+
+The authorities at Aschaffenburg requested Herr Harrison to remove his
+son Michael from the School of Forestry. Michael after his first few
+weeks had done no good at the school. In view of the expense to Herr
+Harrison involved in his fees and maintenance, they could not honestly
+advise his entering upon another term. It would only be a deplorable
+throwing away of money on a useless scheme. His son Michael had no
+thoroughness, no practical ability, and no grasp whatever of theoretic
+detail. From Herr Harrison's point of view this was the more regrettable
+inasmuch as the young man had colossal decision and persistence and
+energy of his own. He was an indefatigable dreamer. Very likely--when
+his dreams had crystallized--a poet. But the idea Herr Harrison had had
+that his son Michael would make a man of business, or an expert in
+Forestry, was altogether fantastic and absurd. And from the desperate
+involutions of the final sentence Dorothy disentangled the clear fact
+that Michael's personal charm, combined with his hostility to
+discipline, his complete indifference to the aims of the authorities,
+and his utter lack of any sense of responsibility, made him a dangerous
+influence in any school.
+
+That was the end of Anthony's plans for Michael.
+
+The next morning Nicky wired from some village in Sussex: "Married
+yesterday.--NICKY."
+
+After that nothing seemed to matter. With Nicky gone from them they were
+glad to have Michael back again. Frances said they might be thankful for
+one thing--that there wasn't any German Peggy or any German Desmond in
+Michael's problem.
+
+And since both Michael and Veronica were to be removed at once, the
+simplest arrangement was that he should return to Dresden and bring her
+back with him.
+
+Frances had never been afraid for Michael.
+
+Michael knew that he had made havoc of his father's plans. He couldn't
+help that. His affair was far too desperate. And any other man but his
+father would have foreseen that the havoc was inevitable and would have
+made no plans. He knew he had been turned into the tree-travelling
+scheme that had been meant for Nicky, because, though Nicky had slipped
+out of it, his father simply couldn't bear to give up his idea. And no
+wonder, when the dear old thing had so few of them.
+
+He had been honest with his father about it; every bit as honest as
+Nicky had been. He had wanted to travel if he could go to China and
+Japan, just as Nicky had wanted to travel if he could go to places like
+the West Indies and the Himalaya. And he didn't mind trying to get the
+trees in when he was there. He was even prepared to accept Germany and
+the School for Forestry if Germany was the only way to China and Japan.
+But he had told his father not to mind if nothing came of it at the end
+of all the travelling. And his father had said he would take the risk.
+He preferred taking the risk to giving up his idea.
+
+And Michael had been honest with himself. He had told himself that he
+too must take some risks, and the chances were that a year or two in
+Germany wouldn't really hurt him. Things never did hurt you as much as
+you thought they would. He had thought that Cambridge would do all sorts
+of things to him, and Cambridge had not done anything to him at all. As
+for Oxford, it had given him nearly all the solitude and liberty he
+wanted, and more companionship than he was ever likely to want. At
+twenty-two Michael was no longer afraid of dying before he had finished
+his best work. In spite of both Universities he had done more or less
+what he had meant to do before he went to Germany. His work had not yet
+stood the test of time, but to make up for that he himself, in his
+uneasy passion for perfection, like Time, destroyed almost as much as he
+created. Still, after some pitiless eliminations, enough of his verse
+remained for one fine, thin book.
+
+It would be published if Lawrence Stephen approved of the selection.
+
+So, Michael argued, even if he died to-morrow there was no reason why he
+should not go to Germany to-day.
+
+He was too young to know that he acquiesced so calmly because his soul
+was for a moment appeased by accomplishment.
+
+He was too young to know that his soul had a delicate, profound and
+hidden life of its own, and that in secret it approached the crisis of
+transition. It was passing over from youth to maturity, like a
+sleep-walker, unconscious, enchanted, seeing its way without seeing it,
+safe only from the dangers of the passage if nobody touched it, and if
+it went alone.
+
+Michael had no idea of what Germany could and would do to his soul.
+
+Otherwise he might have listened to what Paris had to say by way of
+warning.
+
+For his father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to Germany,
+as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's point of view)
+was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old Pater be expected to
+know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no sort of way even to South
+Germany? He should have gone to Brussels, if he was ever, spiritually
+speaking, to get there at all.
+
+And neither Anthony nor Frances knew that Lawrence Stephen had plans for
+Michael.
+
+Michael went to Paris with his unpublished poems in his pocket and a
+letter of introduction from Stephen to Jules Réveillaud. He left it with
+revolution in his soul and the published poems of Réveillaud and his
+followers in his suit-case, straining and distending it so that it burst
+open of its own accord at the frontier.
+
+Lawrence Stephen had said to him: "Before you write another line read
+Réveillaud and show him what you've written."
+
+Jules Réveillaud was ten years older than Michael, and he recognized the
+symptoms of the crisis. He could see what was happening and what had
+happened and would happen in Michael's soul. He said: "One third of each
+of your poems is good. And there are a few--the three last--which are
+all good."
+
+"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."
+
+"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is why they
+are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do not publish
+these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more experiments. And
+whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School of Forestry would be
+very bad for you. Why not," said Réveillaud, "stay where you are?"
+
+Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris with
+Jules Réveillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because his conscience
+kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a blackguard if he
+stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.
+
+In the train, going into Germany, he read Réveillaud's "Poèmes" and the
+"Poèmes" of the young men who followed him. He had read in Paris
+Réveillaud's "Critique de la Poésie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he
+read his poems, he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with
+"la poésie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had supposed,
+alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms, doing new
+things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other people, in a
+world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen, understood or cared for
+what he did, it was pure illusion. These young Frenchmen, with Jules
+Réveillaud at their head, were doing the same thing, making the same
+experiment, believing in the experiment, caring for nothing but the
+experiment, and carrying it farther than he had dreamed of carrying it.
+They were not so far ahead of him in time; Réveillaud himself had only
+two years' start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that
+he must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of rottenness,
+"la poésie anglaise contemporaine."
+
+He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse" before he
+left England, after he had said he would go to Germany, even after the
+final arrangements had been made. His father had given him a month to
+"turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had turned completely round.
+
+He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what to
+think of them himself. But he could see, when once Réveillaud had
+pointed it out to him, that they were the stuff that counted.
+
+In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things that
+Réveillaud had said: "Nous avons trempé la poésie dans la peinture et la
+musique. Il faut la délivrer par la sculpture. Chaque ligne, chaque
+vers, chaque poème taillé en bloc, sans couleur, sans decor, sans
+rime."... "La sainte pauvresse du style dépouillé."... "Il faut de la
+dureté, toujours de la dureté."
+
+He thought of Réveillaud's criticism, and his sudden startled spurt of
+admiration: "Mais! Vous l'avez trouvée, la beauté de la ligne droite."
+
+And Réveillaud's question: "Vraiment? Vous n'avez jamais lu un seul vers
+de mes poèmes? Alors, c'est étonnant." And then: "C'est que la réalité
+est plus forte que nous."
+
+The revolting irony of it! After stumbling and fumbling for years by
+himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard Reality; trying
+not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary rottenness; and,
+suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had got it, so that, but for
+Réveillaud, he might easily have died in his ignorance; and then, in the
+incredible moment of realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on
+Paris, where he wanted to live, and on Réveillaud whom he wanted to
+know, and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off
+to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.
+
+He wondered if he could have done it if he had not loved his father? He
+wondered if his father would ever understand that it was the hardest
+thing he had ever yet done or could do?
+
+But the trees would be beautiful. He would rather like seeing the trees.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether he would ever care about a tree again.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether he would ever see a tree again, ever smell tree-sap,
+or hear the wind sounding in the ash-trees like a river and in the firs
+like a sea.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether any tree would ever come to life for him again.
+
+He looked on at the tree-felling. He saw slaughtered trees, trees that
+tottered, trees that staggered in each other's branches. He heard the
+scream and the shriek of wounded boughs, the creaking and crashing of
+the trunk, and the long hiss of branches falling, trailing through
+branches to the ground. He smelt the raw juice of broken leaves and the
+sharp tree dust in the saw pits. The trees died horrible deaths, in the
+forests under the axes of the woodmen, and in the schools under the
+tongues of the Professors, and in Michael's soul. The German Government
+was determined that he should know all about trees. Its officials, the
+Professors and instructors, were sorry if he didn't like it, but they
+were ordered by their Government and paid by their Government to impart
+this information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to
+his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they imparted it
+with all their might.
+
+Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg. Instead of despising
+him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a tree expert, they
+admired and respected him because he was a poet. The family he lived
+with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his fellow-boarders, Carl and
+Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel, and Hedwig and Löttchen admired
+and respected him because he was a poet. When he walked with Ludwig in
+the great forests Michael chanted his poems, both in English and in
+German, till Ludwig's soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow,
+so that Ludwig actually shed tears in the forest. He said that if he had
+not done so he would have burst. Ludwig's emotions had nothing whatever
+to do with the forest or with Michael's poems, but he thought they had.
+
+Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was to show
+an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished his
+incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some superofficial
+wrote a letter to his father that gave him his liberty.
+
+The Henschels were sorry when he left. The students, Otto and Carl and
+Ludwig, implored him not to forget them. Hedwig and Löttchen cried.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by Dresden
+to bring Veronica back. He wanted to be alone on the journey. He wanted
+to stop in Paris and see Jules Réveillaud. He was afraid that Ronny had
+grown into a tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.
+
+And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had grown up.
+Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker plait tied up with
+broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not yet seventeen.
+
+Ronny was tired. She did not want to talk. When he had tucked her up
+with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat still with her
+hands in her muff.
+
+"I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael," she said.
+
+She knew what he had been thinking. Her clear eyes gazed at him out of
+her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual maturity.
+
+"What can have happened to her?" he wondered.
+
+But she did not disturb his thoughts.
+
+Up till then Michael's thoughts had not done him any good. They had been
+bitter thoughts of the months he had been compelled to waste in Bavaria
+when every minute had an incomparable value; worrying, irritating
+thoughts of the scenes he would have to have with his father, who must
+be made to understand, once for all, that in future he meant to have
+every minute of his own life for his own work. He wondered how on earth
+he was to make his people see that his work justified his giving every
+minute to it. He had asked Réveillaud to give him a letter that he could
+show to his father. He was angry with his father beforehand, he was so
+certain that he wouldn't see.
+
+He had other thoughts now. Thoughts of an almond tree flowering in a
+white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting a thin
+shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the sting of
+white dust in an east wind; a drift of white dust against the wall.
+
+Thoughts of pine-trees falling in the forest, glad to fall. He thought:
+The pine forest makes itself a sea for the land wind, and the young pine
+tree is mad for the open sea. She gives her slender trunk with passion
+to the ax; for she thinks that she will be stripped naked, and that she
+will be planted in the ship's hold, and that she will carry the great
+main-sail. She thinks that she will rock and strain in the grip of the
+sea-wind, and that she will be whitened with the salt and the foam
+of the sea.
+
+She does not know that she will be sawn into planks and made into a
+coffin for the wife of the sexton and grave-digger of Aschaffenburg.
+
+Thoughts of Veronica in her incredible maturity, and of her eyes,
+shining in her dead white face, far back through deep crystal, and of
+the sense he got of her soul poised, steady and still, with wings
+vibrating.
+
+He wondered where it would come down.
+
+He thought: "Of course, Veronica's soul will come down like a wild
+pigeon into the ash-tree in our garden, and she will think that our
+ash-tree is a tree of Heaven."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently he roused himself to talk to her.
+
+"How is your singing getting on, Ronny?"
+
+"My singing voice has gone."
+
+"It'll come back again."
+
+"Not unless-"
+
+But he couldn't make her tell him what would bring it back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Michael came to his father and mother to have it out with them his
+face had a hard, stubborn look. He was ready to fight them. He was so
+certain that he would have to fight. He had shown them Jules
+Réveillaud's letter.
+
+He said, "Look here, we've got to get it straight. It isn't any use
+going on like this. I'm afraid I wasn't very honest about Germany."
+
+"Weren't you?" said Anthony. "Let me see, I think you said you'd take it
+on your way to China and Japan."
+
+"Did I? I tried to be straight about it. I thought I was giving it a
+fair chance. But that was before I'd seen Réveillaud."
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "now that you have seen him, what is it exactly
+that you want to do?"
+
+Michael told him.
+
+"You can make it easy for me. Or you can make it hard. But you can't
+stop me."
+
+"What makes you think I want to stop you?"
+
+"Well--you want me to go into the business, though I told you years ago
+there was only one thing I should ever be any good at. And I see your
+point. I can't earn my living at it. That's where I'm had. Still, I
+think Lawrence Stephen will give me work, and I can rub along somehow."
+
+"Without my help, you mean?"
+
+"Well, yes. Why _should_ you help me? You've wasted tons of money on me
+as it is. Nicky's earning his own living, and he's got a wife, too.
+Why not me?"
+
+"Because you can't do it, Michael."
+
+"I can. I don't mind roughing it. I could live on a hundred a year--or
+less, if I don't marry."
+
+"Well, I don't mean you to try. You needn't bother about what you can
+live on and what you can't live on. It was all settled last night. Your
+mother and I talked it over. We don't want you to go into the business.
+We don't want you to take work from Mr. Stephen. We want you to be
+absolutely free to do your own work, under the best possible conditions,
+whether it pays or not. Nothing in the world matters to us but your
+happiness. You're to have a hundred and fifty a year when you're living
+at home and two hundred and fifty when you're living abroad. I suppose
+you'll want to go abroad sometimes. I can't give you a bigger allowance,
+because I have to help Nicky--"
+
+Michael covered his face with his hands.
+
+"Oh--don't, Daddy. You do make me feel a rotten beast."
+
+"We should feel rottener beasts," said Frances, "if we stood in your
+way."
+
+"Then," said Michael (he was still incredulous), "you do care?"
+
+"Of course we care," said Anthony.
+
+"I don't mean for me--for _it_?"
+
+"My dear Mick," said Frances, "we care for It almost as much as we care
+for you. We're sorry about Germany though. Germany was one of your
+father's bad jokes."
+
+"Germany--a joke?"
+
+"Did you take it seriously? Oh, you silly Michael!"
+
+"But," said Michael, "how about Daddy's idea? He loved it."
+
+"I loved it," said Anthony, "but I've given it up."
+
+They knew that this was defeat, for Michael was top-dog. And it was also
+victory.
+
+They had lost Nicholas, or thought they had lost Nicholas, by opposing
+him. But Michael and Michael's affection they would have always.
+
+Besides, Anthony hadn't given up his idea. He had only transferred
+it--to his youngest son, John.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+It was five weeks since Nicholas's wedding-day and Desmond had
+quarrelled with him three times.
+
+First, because he had taken a flat in Aubrey Walk, with a studio inside
+it, instead of a house in Campden Hill Square with a studio outside it
+in the garden.
+
+Then, because he had refused to go into his father's business.
+
+Last of all, because of Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress.
+
+Nicky had said that his father, who was paying his rent, couldn't afford
+the house with the studio in the garden; and Desmond said Nicky's father
+could afford it perfectly well if he liked. He said he had refused to go
+into his father's business for reasons which didn't concern her. Desmond
+pointed out that the consequences of his refusal were likely to concern
+her very much indeed. As for Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress,
+nobody but a supreme idiot would have done what Nicky did.
+
+But Nicky absolutely refused to discuss what he had done. Nobody but a
+cad and a rotter would have done anything else.
+
+In the matter of the Moving Fortress what had happened was this.
+
+The last of the drawings was not finished until Desmond had settled down
+in the flat in Aubrey Walk. You couldn't hurry Desmond. Nicky hadn't
+even waited to sign his name in the margins before he had packed the
+plans in his dispatch box and taken them to the works, and thence,
+hidden under a pile of Morss estimates, to Eltham. He couldn't rest till
+he had shown them to Frank Drayton. He could hardly wait till they had
+dined, and till Drayton, who thought he was on the track of a new and
+horrible explosive, had told him as much as he could about it.
+
+Nicky gave his whole mind to Drayton's new explosive in the hope that,
+when his turn came, Drayton would do as much for him.
+
+"You know," he said at last, "the old idea of the _forteresse mobile_?
+
+"Yes."
+
+He couldn't tell whether Drayton was going to be interested or not. He
+rather thought he wasn't.
+
+"It hasn't come to anything, _has_ it?"
+
+Drayton smiled and his eyes glittered. He knew what that excited gleam
+in Drayton's eyes meant.
+
+"No," he said. "Not yet."
+
+And Nicky had an awful premonition of his doom.
+
+"Well," he said, "I believe there's something in it."
+
+"So do I, Nicky."
+
+Drayton went on. "I believe there's so much in it that--Look here, I
+don't know what put it into your head, and I'm not asking, but that
+idea's a dead secret. For God's sake don't talk about it. You mustn't
+breathe it, or it'll get into the air. And if it does my five years'
+work goes for nothing. Besides we don't want Germany to collar it."
+
+And then: "Don't look so scared, old chap. I was going to tell you
+about it when I'd got the plans drawn."
+
+He told him about it then and there.
+
+"Low on the ground like a racing-car--"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky.
+
+"Revolving turret for the guns--no higher than _that_--"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky.
+
+"Sort of armoured train. Only it mustn't run on rails. It's got to go
+everywhere, through anything, over anything, if it goes at all. It must
+turn in its own length. It must wade and burrow and climb, Nicky. It
+must have caterpillar wheels--"
+
+"By Jove, of course it must," said Nicky, as if the idea had struck him
+for the first time.
+
+"What have you got there?" said Drayton finally as Nicky rose and picked
+up his dispatch-box. "Anything interesting?
+
+"No," said Nicky. "Mostly estimates."
+
+For a long time afterwards he loathed the fields between Eltham and
+Kidbrooke, and the Mid-Kent line, and Charing Cross Station. He felt as
+a man feels when the woman he loves goes from him to another man. His
+idea had gone from him to Drayton.
+
+And that, he said to himself, was just like his luck, just like the
+jolly sells that happened to him when he was a kid.
+
+To be sure, there was such a thing as sharing. He had only to produce
+his plans and his finished model, and he and Drayton would go partners
+in the Moving Fortress. There was no reason why he shouldn't do it.
+Drayton had not even drawn his plans yet; he hadn't thought out the
+mechanical details.
+
+He thought, "I could go back now and tell him."
+
+But he did not go back. He knew that he would never tell him. If Drayton
+asked him to help him with the details he would work them out all over
+again with him; but he would never show his own finished plans or his
+own model.
+
+He didn't know whether it had been hard or easy for him to give up the
+Moving Fortress. He did it instinctively. There was--unless he had
+chosen to be a blackguard--nothing else for him to do.
+
+Besides, the Moving Fortress wasn't his idea. Drayton had had it first.
+Anybody might have had it. He hadn't spoken of it first; but that was
+nothing. The point was that he had had it first, and Nicky wasn't going
+to take it from him.
+
+It meant more to Drayton, who was in the Service, than it could possibly
+mean to him. He hadn't even got a profession.
+
+As he walked back through the fields to the station, he said to himself
+that he didn't really care. It was only one more jolly sell. He didn't
+like giving up his Moving Fortress; but it wouldn't end him. There was
+something in him that would go on.
+
+He would make another engine.
+
+He didn't care. There was something in him that would go on.
+
+"I can't see," Desmond had said, "why Captain Drayton should be allowed
+to walk off with your idea."
+
+"He's worked five years on it."
+
+"He hasn't worked it _out_ yet, and you have. Can't you see "--her face
+was dark and hard with anger--"there's money in it?"
+
+"If there is, all the more reason why I shouldn't bag it."
+
+"And where do I come in?"
+
+"Not just here, I'm afraid. It isn't your business."
+
+"Not my business? When I did the drawings? You couldn't possibly have
+done them yourself."
+
+At that point Nicky refused to discuss the matter farther.
+
+And still Desmond brooded on her grievance. And still at intervals
+Desmond brought it up again.
+
+"There's stacks of money in your father's business--"
+
+"There's stacks of money in that Moving Fortress--"
+
+"You are a fool, Nicky, to throw it all away."
+
+He never answered her. He said to himself that Desmond was hysterical
+and had a morbid fancy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But it didn't end there.
+
+He had taken the drawings and the box that had the model of the Moving
+Fortress in it and buried them in the locker under the big north window
+in Desmond's studio.
+
+And there, three weeks later, Desmond found them. And she packed the
+model of the Moving Fortress and marked it "Urgent with Care," and sent
+it to the War Office with a letter. She packed the drawings in a
+portfolio--having signed her own and Nicky's name on the margins--and
+sent them to Captain Drayton with a letter. She said she had no doubt
+she was doing an immoral thing; but she did it in fairness to Captain
+Drayton, for she was sure he would not like Nicky to make so great a
+sacrifice. Nicky, she said, was wrapped up in his Moving Fortress. It
+was his sweetheart, his baby. "He will never forgive me," she said, "as
+long as he lives. But I simply had to let you know. It means so much
+to him."
+
+For she thought, "Because Nicky's a fool, I needn't be one."
+
+Drayton came over the same evening after he had got the letter. He
+shouted with laughter.
+
+"Nicky," he said, "you filthy rotter, why on earth didn't you tell
+me?... It _was_ Nickyish of you.... What if I did think of it first? I
+should have had to come to you for the details. It would have been jolly
+to have worked it out together.... Not a bit of it! Your wife's
+absolutely right. Good thing, after all, you married her.
+
+"By the way, she says there's a model. I want to see that model. Have
+you got it here?"
+
+Nicky went up into the studio to look for it. He couldn't find it in the
+locker where he'd left it. "Wherever is the damned thing?" he said.
+
+"The damned thing," said Desmond, "is where you should have sent it
+first of all--at the War Office. You're clever, Nicky, but you aren't
+quite clever enough."
+
+"I'm afraid," he said, "_you've_ been a bit too clever, this time."
+
+Drayton agreed with him. It was, he said, about the worst thing that
+could possibly have happened.
+
+"She shouldn't have done that, Nicky. What on earth could have made her
+do it?"
+
+"Don't ask me," said Nicky, "what makes her do things."
+
+"It looks," Drayton meditated, "as if she didn't trust me. I'm afraid
+she's dished us. God knows whether we can ever get it back!"
+
+Desmond had a fit of hysterics when she realized how clever she had
+been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desmond's baby was born late in November of that year, and it died when
+it was two weeks old. It was as if she had not wanted it enough to give
+it life for long outside her body.
+
+For though Desmond had been determined to have a child, and had declared
+that she had a perfect right to have one if she chose, she did not care
+for it when it came. And when it died Nicky was sorrier than Desmond.
+
+He had not wanted to be a father to Headley Richards' child. And yet it
+was the baby and nothing but the baby that had let him in for marrying
+Desmond. So that, when it died, he felt that somehow things had tricked
+and sold him. As they had turned out he need not have married Desmond
+after all.
+
+She herself had pointed out the extreme futility of his behaviour, lest
+he should miss the peculiar irony of it. For when her fright and the
+cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented Nicky's having married
+her. She didn't really want anybody to marry her, and nobody but Nicky
+would have dreamed of doing it.
+
+She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and for a
+little while after she was content to lie stretched out among her
+cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her. But, when she
+got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that Desmond's weakness
+and pathos had come with the baby and had gone with it. The real Desmond
+was not weak, she was not pathetic. She was strong and hard and clever
+with a brutal cleverness. She didn't care how much he saw. He could see
+to the bottom of her nature, if he liked, and feel how hard it was. She
+had no more interest in deceiving him.
+
+She had no more interest in him at all.
+
+She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long fits, after
+long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard, passionless
+efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous and repulsive; but
+he did not say so. He was not aware of the extent to which Desmond
+imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones. He knew nothing about painting
+and he had got used to the things. He had got used to Desmond, slouching
+about the flat, in her sloping, slovenly grace, dressed in her queer
+square jacket and straight short skirt, showing her long delicate
+ankles, and her slender feet in their grey stockings and black slippers.
+
+He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched up on her
+cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a word, and
+watched him sullenly. Her long, slippered feet, thrust out, pointed at
+him, watching. Her long face watched him between the sleek bands of hair
+and the big black bosses plaited over her ears.
+
+The beauty of Desmond's face had gone to sleep again, stilled into
+hardness by the passing of her passion. A sort of ugliness was awake
+there, and it watched him.
+
+In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted with
+two-thirds of her power. Yet the third part still served to hold him,
+used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy. He resented it,
+resisted it over and over again; and over and over again it conquered
+resentment and resistance. It had something to do with her subtle,
+sloping lines, with her blackness and her sallow whiteness, with the
+delicate scent and the smoothness of her skin under the sliding hand. He
+couldn't touch her without still feeling a sort of pity, a sort of
+affection.
+
+But she could take and give caresses while she removed her soul from him
+in stubborn rancour.
+
+He couldn't understand that. It amazed him every time. He thought it
+horrible. For Nicky's memory was faithful. It still kept the impression
+of the Desmond he had married, the tender, frightened, helpless Desmond
+he had thought he loved. The Desmond he remembered reminded him
+of Veronica.
+
+And Desmond said to herself, "He's impossible. You can't make any
+impression on him. I might as well be married to a Moving Fortress."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Months passed. The War Office had not yet given up Nicky's model of the
+Moving Fortress. In the first month it was not aware of any letter or of
+any parcel or of any Mr. Nicholas Harrison. In the second month
+inquiries would be made and the results communicated to Captain Drayton.
+In the third month the War Office knew nothing of the matter referred to
+by Captain Drayton.
+
+Drayton hadn't a hope. "We can't get it back, Nicky," he said.
+
+"I can," said Nicky, "I can get it back out of my head."
+
+All through the winter of nineteen-eleven and the spring of
+nineteen-twelve they worked at it together. They owned that they were
+thus getting better results than either of them could have got alone.
+There were impossibilities about Nicky's model that a gunner would have
+seen at once, and there were faults in Drayton's plans that an engineer
+would not have made. Nicky couldn't draw the plans and Drayton couldn't
+build the models. They said it was fifty times better fun to work at
+it together.
+
+Nicky was happy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desmond watched them sombrely. She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the painter,
+laughed at them behind their backs. She said "How funny they are! Frank
+wouldn't hurt a fly and Nicky wouldn't say 'Bo!' to a goose if he
+thought it would frighten the goose, and yet they're only happy when
+they're inventing some horrible machine that'll kill thousands of people
+who never did them any harm." He said, "That's because they haven't any
+imagination."
+
+Nicky got up early and went to bed late to work at the Moving Fortress.
+The time between had to be given to the Works. The Company had paid him
+fairly well for all his patents in the hope of getting more of his
+ideas, and when they found that no ideas were forthcoming they took it
+out of him in labour. He was too busy and too happy to notice what
+Desmond was doing.
+
+One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is going
+about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?"
+
+"Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?"
+
+"Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason."
+
+"You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?"
+
+"You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond."
+
+"What do you think I ought to do about it?"
+
+"Nothing. She goes about with scores of people. It doesn't follow that
+there's anything in it."
+
+"Oh, Lord, I should hope not! That beastly bounder. What _could_ there
+be in it?"
+
+"He's a clever painter, Nicky. So's Desmond. There's that in it."
+
+"I've hardly a right to object to that, have I? It's not as if I were a
+clever painter myself."
+
+But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St. John's
+Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down the north
+side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing
+to shreds.
+
+There couldn't be anything in it.
+
+He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall lean body
+in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie. He could see
+his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric face with its seven
+fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the black moustache, the high,
+close-clipped side whiskers, the two forks of the black beard.
+
+There couldn't be anything in it.
+
+Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.
+
+And yet he never came home rather later than usual without saying to
+himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with her?"
+
+He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask himself
+that question.
+
+He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He wondered what
+other men did. It never occurred to him that at twenty-two he was young
+to be considering this problem.
+
+He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face
+and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face
+and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging
+him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered
+what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when they got
+to the bottom. Perhaps they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He
+would hang on to the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door
+of the studio and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there
+would be nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look
+an awful ass doing it. He saw himself standing in the room and looking
+at them, and saying, "I've no intention of interrupting you." Perhaps
+Desmond would answer, "You're not interrupting us. We've finished all
+we had to say." And _he_ would walk out and leave them there.
+Not caring.
+
+He wondered if _he_ would look an awful ass doing it.
+
+In the end, when it came, he hadn't to do any of these things. It
+happened very quietly and simply, early on a Sunday evening after he had
+got back from Eltham. He had dined with Drayton and his people on
+Saturday, and stayed, for once, over-night, risking it.
+
+Desmond was sitting on a cushion, on the floor, with her thin legs in
+their grey stockings slanting out in front of her. She propped her chin
+on her hands. Her thin, long face, between the great black ear-bosses,
+looked at him thoughtfully, without rancour.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "Alfred Orde-Jones slept with me last night."
+
+And he said, simply and quietly, "Very well, Desmond; then I shall leave
+you. You can keep the flat, and I or my father will make you an
+allowance. I shan't divorce you, but I won't live with you."
+
+"Why won't you divorce me?" she said.
+
+"Because I don't want to drag you through the dirt."
+
+She laughed quietly. "Dear Nicky," she said, "how sweet and like you.
+But don't let's have any more chivalrous idiocy. I don't want it. I
+never did." (She had forgotten that she had wanted it very badly once.
+But Nicky did not remind her of that time. No matter. She didn't want it
+now). "Let's look at the thing sensibly, without any rotten sentiment.
+We've had some good times together, and we've had some bad times. I'll
+admit that when you married me you saved me from a very bad time.
+That's no reason why we should go on giving each other worse times
+indefinitely. You seem to think I don't want you to divorce me. What
+else do you imagine Alfred came for last night? Why we've been trying
+for it for the last three months.
+
+"Of course, if you'll let _me_ divorce _you_ for desertion, it would be
+very nice of you. That," said Desmond, "is what decent people do."
+
+He went out and telephoned to his father. Then he left her and went back
+to his father's house.
+
+Desmond asked the servant to remember particularly that it was the
+fifteenth of June and that the master was going away and would not come
+back again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Nicky walked up the hill and across the Heath, he wondered why it had
+happened, and why, now that it had happened, he cared so little. He
+could have understood it if he hadn't cared at all for Desmond. But he
+had cared in a sort of way. If she had cared at all for him he thought
+they might have made something of it, something enduring, perhaps, if
+they had had children of their own.
+
+He still couldn't think why it had happened. But he knew that, even if
+he had loved Desmond with passion, it wouldn't have been the end of him.
+The part of him that didn't care, that hadn't cared much when he lost
+his Moving Fortress, was the part that Desmond never would have
+cared for.
+
+He didn't know whether it was outside him and beyond him, bigger and
+stronger than he was, or whether it was deep inside, the most real part
+of him. Whatever happened or didn't happen it would go on.
+
+How could he have ended _here_, with poor little Desmond? There was
+something ahead of him, something that he felt to be tremendous and
+holy. He had always known it waited for him. He was going out to meet
+it; and because of it he didn't care.
+
+And after a year of Desmond he was glad to go back to his father's
+house; even though he knew that the thing that waited for him was
+not there.
+
+Frances and Anthony were happy again. After all, Heaven had manipulated
+their happiness with exquisite art and wisdom, letting Michael and
+Nicholas go from them for a little while that they might have them again
+more completely, and teaching them the art and wisdom that would
+keep them.
+
+Some day the children would marry; even Nicky might marry again. They
+would prepare now, by small daily self-denials, for the big renunciation
+that must come.
+
+Yet in secret they thought that Michael would never marry; that Nicky,
+made prudent by disaster, wasn't really likely to marry again. John
+would marry; and they would be happy in John's happiness and in
+John's children.
+
+And Nicky had not been home before he offered to his parents the
+spectacle of an outrageous gaiety. You would have said that life to
+Nicholas was an amusing game where you might win or lose, but either way
+it didn't matter. It was a rag, a sell. Even the preceedings, the
+involved and ridiculous proceedings of his divorce, amused him.
+
+It was undeniably funny that he should be supposed to have deserted
+Desmond.
+
+Frances wondered, again, whether Nicky really had any feelings, and
+whether things really made any impression on him.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+It was a quarter past five on a fine morning, early in July. On the
+stroke of the quarter Captain Frank Drayton's motor-car, after exceeding
+the speed limit along the forlorn highway of the Caledonian Road, drew
+up outside the main entrance of Holloway Gaol. Captain Frank Drayton was
+alone in his motor-car.
+
+He had the street all to himself till twenty past five, when he was
+joined by another motorist, also conspicuously alone in his car. Drayton
+tried hard to look as if the other man were not there.
+
+The other man tried even harder to look as if he were not there himself.
+He was the first to be aware of the absurdity of their competitive
+pretences. He looked at his watch and spoke.
+
+"I hope they'll be punctual with those doors. I was up at four o'clock."
+
+"I," said Drayton, "was up at three."
+
+"I'm waiting for my wife," said the other man.
+
+"I am _not_," said Drayton, and felt that he had scored.
+
+The other man's smile allowed him the point he made.
+
+"Yes, but my wife happens to be Lady Victoria Threlfall."
+
+The other man laughed as if he had made by far the better joke.
+
+Drayton recognized Mr. Augustin Threlfall, that Cabinet Minister made
+notorious by his encounters with the Women's Franchise Union. Last year
+Miss Maud Blackadder had stalked him in the Green Park and lamed him by
+a blow from her hunting-crop. This year his wife, Lady Victoria
+Threlfall, had headed the June raid on the House of Commons.
+
+And here he was at twenty minutes past five in the morning waiting to
+take her out of prison.
+
+And here was Drayton, waiting for Dorothea, who was not his wife yet.
+
+"Anyhow," said the Cabinet Minister, "we've done them out of their
+Procession."
+
+"What Procession?"
+
+All that Drayton knew about it was that, late last night, a friend he
+had in the Home Office had telephoned to him that the hour of Miss
+Dorothea Harrison's release would be five-thirty, not six-thirty as the
+papers had it.
+
+"The Procession," said the Cabinet Minister, "that was to have met 'em
+at six-thirty. A Car of Victory for Mrs. Blathwaite, and a bodyguard of
+thirteen young women on thirteen white horses. The girl who smashed my
+knee-cap is to be Joan of Arc and ride at the head of 'em. In armour.
+Fact. There's to be a banquet for 'em at the Imperial at nine. We can't
+stop _that_. And they'll process down the Embankment and down Pall Mall
+and Piccadilly at eleven; but they won't process here. We've let 'em out
+an hour too soon."
+
+A policeman came from the prison-yard. He blew a whistle. Four taxi-cabs
+crept round the corner furtively, driven by visibly hilarious
+chauffeurs.
+
+"The triumphant procession from Holloway," said the Cabinet Minister,
+"is you and me, sir, and those taxi-cabs."
+
+On the other side of the gates a woman laughed. The released prisoners
+were coming down the prison-yard.
+
+The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous glee. He was
+boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had done them out of
+the Car of Victory and the thirteen white horses.
+
+The prison-gates opened. The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised their
+caps.
+
+The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete came first. Then Lady Victoria Threlfall. Then
+Dorothea. Then sixteen other women.
+
+Drayton did not look at them. He did not see what happened when the
+Cabinet Minister met his wife. He did not see the sixteen other women.
+He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.
+
+She had no hat on. Her clothes were as the great raid had left them, a
+month ago. Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket, the
+three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining. Another
+three-cornered flap hung from her right knee. She carried her small,
+hawk-like head alert and high. Her face had the incomparable bloom of
+youth. Her eyes shone. They and her face showed no memory of the
+prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they showed no sense
+of Drayton's decency in coming to meet her, no sense of anything at all
+but of the queerness, the greatness and the glory of the world--of him,
+perhaps, as a part of it. She stepped into the car as if they had met by
+appointment for a run into the country. "I shan't hurt your car. I'm
+quite clean, though you mightn't think it. The cells were all right
+this time."
+
+He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.
+
+"Dorothy," he said, "do you want to go to that banquet?"
+
+"No, but I've got to. I must go through with it. I swore I'd do the
+thing completely or not at all."
+
+"It isn't till nine. We've three whole hours before we need start."
+
+"What are you going to do with me?"
+
+"I'm going to take you home first. Then I suppose I shall have to drive
+you down to that beastly banquet."
+
+"That won't take three and a half hours. It's a heavenly morning. Can't
+we do something with it?"
+
+"What would you like to do?"
+
+"I'd like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall. I'm hungry. Then--Are you
+frightfully sleepy?"
+
+"Me? Oh, Lord, no."
+
+"Then let's go off somewhere into the country." They went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the buns they
+had brought with them from the coffee-stall.
+
+"Did you ever smell anything like this lane? Did you ever eat anything
+like these buns? Did you ever drink anything like that divine coffee? If
+epicures had any imagination they'd go out and obstruct policemen and
+get put in prison for the sake of the sensations they'd have
+afterwards."
+
+"That reminds me," he said, "that I want to talk to you. No--but
+seriously."
+
+"I don't mind how seriously you talk if I may go on eating."
+
+"That's what I brought the buns for. So that I mayn't be interrupted.
+First of all I want to tell you that you haven't taken me in. Other
+people may be impressed with this Holloway business, but not me. I'm not
+moved, or touched, or even interested."
+
+"Still," she murmured, "you did get up at three o'clock in the morning."
+
+"If you think I got up at three o'clock in the morning to show my
+sympathy, you're mistaken."
+
+"Sympathy? I don't need your sympathy. It was worth it, Frank. There
+isn't anything on earth like coming out of prison. Unless it is
+going in."
+
+"That won't work, Dorothy, when I know why you went in. It wasn't to
+prove your principles. Your principles were against that sort of thing.
+It wasn't to get votes for women. You know as well as I do that you'll
+never get them that way. It wasn't to annoy Mr. Asquith. You knew Mr.
+Asquith wouldn't care a hang. It was to annoy me."
+
+"I wonder," she said dreamily, "if I shall _ever_ be able to stop
+eating."
+
+"You can't take me in. I know too much about it. You said you were going
+to keep out of rows. You weren't going on that deputation because it
+meant a row. You went because I asked you not to go."
+
+"I did; and I should go again tomorrow for the same reason."
+
+"But it isn't a reason. It's not as if I'd asked you to go against your
+conscience. Your conscience hadn't anything to do with it."
+
+"Oh, hadn't it! I went because you'd no right to ask me not to."
+
+"If I'd had the right you'd have gone just the same."
+
+"What do you mean by the right?"
+
+"You know perfectly well what I mean."
+
+"Of course I do. You mean, and you meant that if I'd married you you'd
+have had the right, not just to ask me not to, but to prevent me. That
+was what I was out against. I'd be out against it tomorrow and the next
+day, and for as long as you keep up that attitude."
+
+"And yet--you said you loved me."
+
+"So I did. So I do. But I'm out against that too."
+
+"Good Lord, against what?"
+
+"Against your exploiting my love for your purposes."
+
+"My poor dear child, what do you suppose I wanted?"
+
+She had reached the uttermost limit of absurdity, and in that moment she
+became to him helpless and pathetic.
+
+"I knew there was going to be the most infernal row and I wanted to keep
+you out of it. Look here, you'd have thought me a rotter if I hadn't,
+wouldn't you?
+
+"Of course you would. And there's another thing. You weren't straight
+about it. You never told me you were going."
+
+"I never told you I wasn't."
+
+"I don't care, Dorothy; you weren't straight. You ought to have told
+me."
+
+"How could I tell you when I knew you'd only go trying to stop me and
+getting yourself arrested."
+
+"Not me. They wouldn't have touched me."
+
+"How was I to know that? If they had I should have dished you. And I'd
+have stayed away rather than do that. I didn't tell Michael or Nicky or
+Father for the same reason."
+
+"You'd have stayed at home rather than have dished me? Do you really
+mean that?"
+
+"Of course I mean it. And I meant it. It's you," she said, "who don't
+care."
+
+"How do you make that out?"
+
+He really wanted to know. He really wanted, if it were possible, to
+understand her.
+
+"I make it out this way. Here have I been through the adventure and the
+experience of my life. I was in the thick of the big raid; I was four
+weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don't care; you're not
+interested. You never said to yourself, 'Dorothy was in the big raid, I
+wonder what happened to her?' or 'Dorothy's in prison, I wonder how
+she's feeling?' You didn't care; you weren't interested.
+
+"If it had happened to you, I couldn't have thought of anything else, I
+couldn't have got it out of my head. I should have been wondering all
+the time what you were feeling; I couldn't have rested till I knew. It
+would have been as if I was in prison myself. And now, when I've come
+out, all you think of is how you can rag and score off me."
+
+She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane. Her hands were
+clasped round her knees. One knickerbockered knee protruded through the
+three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared across the road, a long,
+straight stare that took no heed of what she saw, the grey road, and
+the green bank on the other side, topped by its hedge of trees.
+
+Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of self-pity
+or reproach. It was as if she were making statements that had no
+emotional significance whatever.
+
+She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was sorest.
+
+"I wanted to tell you about it. I counted the days, the minutes till I
+could tell you; but you wouldn't listen. You don't want to hear."
+
+"I won't listen if it's about women's suffrage. And I don't want to hear
+if it's anything awful about you."
+
+"It is about me, but it isn't awful.
+
+"That's what I want to tell you.
+
+"But, first of all--about the raid. I didn't mean to be in it at all, as
+it happens. I meant to go with the deputation because you told me not
+to. You're right about that. But I meant to turn back as soon as the
+police stopped us, because I hate rows with the police, and because I
+don't believe in them, and because I told Angela Blathwaite I wasn't
+going in with her crowd any way. You see, she called me a coward before
+a lot of people and said I funked it. So I did. But I should have been a
+bigger coward if I'd gone against my own will, just because of what she
+said. That's how she collars heaps of women. They adore her and they're
+afraid of her. Sometimes they lie and tell her they're going in when
+their moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they're not going in at
+all. I don't adore her, and I'm not afraid of her, and I didn't lie.
+
+"So I went at the tail of the deputation where I could slip out when the
+row began. I swear I didn't mean to be in it. I funked it far too much.
+I didn't mind the police and I didn't mind the crowd. But I funked being
+with the women. When I saw their faces. You world have funked it.
+
+"And anyhow I don't like doing things in a beastly body. Ugh!
+
+"And then they began moving.
+
+"The police tried to stop them. And the crowd tried. The crowd began
+jeering at them. And still they moved. And the mounted police horses got
+excited, and danced about and reared a bit, and the crowd was in a funk
+then and barged into the women. That was rather awful.
+
+"I could have got away then if I'd chosen. There was a man close to me
+all the time who kept making spaces for me and telling me to slip
+through. I was just going to when a woman fell. Somewhere in the front
+of the deputation where the police were getting nasty.
+
+"Then I had to stay. I had to go on with them. I swear I wasn't excited
+or carried away in the least. Two women near me were yelling at the
+police. I hated them. But I felt I'd be an utter brute if I left them
+and got off safe. You see, it was an ugly crowd, and things were
+beginning to be jolly dangerous, and I'd funked it badly. Only the first
+minute. It went--the funk I mean--when I saw the woman go down. She fell
+sort of slanting through the crowd, and it was horrible. I couldn't have
+left them then any more than I could have left children in a
+burning house.
+
+"I thought of you."
+
+"You thought of me?"
+
+"Yes. I thought of you--how you'd have hated it. But I didn't care. I
+was sort of boosted up above caring. The funk had all gone and I was
+absolutely happy. Not insanely happy like some of the other women, but
+quietly, comfily happy.
+
+"After all, I didn't do anything you _need_ have minded."
+
+"What _did_ you do?" he said.
+
+"I just went on and stood still and refused to go back. I stuck my hands
+in my pockets so that I shouldn't let out at a policeman or anything (I
+knew you wouldn't like _that_). I may have pushed a bit now and then
+with my shoulders and my elbows; I can't remember. But I didn't make one
+sound. I was perfectly lady-like and perfectly dignified."
+
+"I suppose you _know_ you haven't got a hat on?"
+
+"It didn't _come_ off. I _took_ it off and threw it to the crowd when
+the row began. It doesn't matter about your hair coming down if you
+haven't got a hat on, but if your hair's down and your hat's bashed in
+and all crooked you look a perfect idiot.
+
+"It wasn't a bad fight, you know, twenty-one women to I don't know how
+many policemen, and the front ones got right into the doorway of St.
+Stephen's. That was where they copped me.
+
+"But that, isn't the end of it.
+
+"The fight was only the first part of the adventure. The wonderful thing
+was what happened afterwards. In prison.
+
+"I didn't think I'd really _like_ prison. That was another thing I
+funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the dirt, you know.
+And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And after the crowds of
+women, after the meetings and the speeches, the endless talking and the
+boredom, that cell was like heaven.
+
+"Thank God, it's always solitary confinement. The Government doesn't
+know that if they want to make prison a deterrent they'll shut us up
+together. You won't give the Home Secretary the tip, will you?
+
+"But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about.
+
+"It was something bigger, something tremendous. You'll not believe this
+part of it, but I was absolutely happy in that cell. It was a sort of
+deep-down unexcited happiness. I'm not a bit religious, but I _know_ how
+the nuns feel in their cells when they've given up everything and shut
+themselves up with God. The cell was like a convent cell, you know, as
+narrow as that bit of shadow there is, and it had nice white-washed
+walls, and a planked-bed in the corner, and a window high, high up.
+There ought to have been a crucifix on the wall above the plank-bed, but
+there wasn't a crucifix. There was only a shiny black Bible on
+the chair.
+
+"Really Frank, if you're to be shut up for a month with just one book,
+it had better be the Bible. Isaiah's ripping. I can remember heaps of
+it: 'in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with
+reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall
+walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall return with singing into
+Zion' ... 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they
+shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary;
+they shall walk, and not faint.' I used to read like anything; and I
+thought of things. They sort of came to me.
+
+"That's what I wanted to tell you about. The things that came to me were
+so much bigger than the thing I went in for. I could see all along we
+weren't going to get it that way. And I knew we _were_ going to get it
+some other way. I don't in the least know how, but it'll be some big,
+tremendous way that'll make all this fighting and fussing seem the
+rottenest game. That was one of the things I used to think about."
+
+"Then," he said, "you've given it up? You're corning out of it?"
+
+She looked at him keenly. "Are those still your conditions?"
+
+He hesitated one second before he answered firmly. "Yes, those are still
+my conditions. You still won't agree to them?"
+
+"I still won't agree. It's no use talking about it. You don't believe in
+freedom. We're incompatible. We don't stand for the same ideals."
+
+"Oh, Lord, what _does_ that matter?"
+
+"It matters most awfully."
+
+"I should have thought," said Drayton, "it would have mattered more if
+I'd had revolting manners or an impediment in my speech or something."
+
+"It wouldn't, _really_."
+
+"Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things. Did you ever once
+think about me, Dorothy?"
+
+"Yes, I did. Have you ever read the Psalms? There's a jolly one that
+begins: 'Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to
+war and my fingers to fight.' I used to think of you when I read that. I
+thought of you a lot.
+
+"That's what I was coming to. It was the queerest thing of all.
+Everything seemed ended when I went to prison. I knew you wouldn't care
+for me after what I'd done--you must really listen to this, Frank--I
+knew you couldn't and wouldn't marry me; and it somehow didn't matter.
+What I'd got hold of was bigger than that. I knew that all this Women's
+Suffrage business was only a part of it, a small, ridiculous part.
+
+"I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord. They were men, as well as
+women, Frank. And they were all free. They were all free because they
+were redeemed. And the funny thing was that you were part of it. You
+were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business. Everything was
+ended. And everything was begun; so that I knew you understood even when
+you didn't understand. It was really as if I'd got you tight, somehow;
+and I knew you couldn't go, even when you'd gone."
+
+"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."
+
+"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if you mean
+going.
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"A quarter to eight."
+
+"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't make me
+late for that infernal banquet. You _are_ going to drive me there?"
+
+"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with you."
+
+"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"
+
+He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it burnished
+and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the broad red, white
+and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union slanting across
+her breast.
+
+He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial Hotel,
+Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too much for
+speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there was that queer
+exaltation that had sustained her in prison.
+
+He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and Nicholas
+waited to receive her.
+
+Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated it, but
+they went in.
+
+Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red, white and
+blue ribbons.
+
+"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you through."
+
+"How can he when he feels like that about it?"
+
+"As if we didn't feel!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall
+to receive the prisoners.
+
+The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue of the
+Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned banners. The
+silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage Leagues and
+Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged along three
+walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and heroic colours,
+purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and royal blue, black, white
+and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure white, dead-black, orange and
+scarlet and magenta.
+
+From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent tables
+decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In the centre of
+the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the tricolour, were set
+like three thrones for the three leaders. They were flanked by nine
+other chairs on the right and nine on the left for the eighteen other
+prisoners.
+
+There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to the high
+table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged sound of rustling
+as the three hundred and fifty turned in their places.
+
+The twenty-one prisoners came in.
+
+A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself up in
+the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to their feet.
+
+And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a savage
+and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as of glass or
+thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of
+small, slender-throated animals were held together by ringing,
+vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins playing in the treble. And
+now a woman's voice started off on its own note and tore the delicate
+tissue of this sound with a solitary scream; and now a man's voice
+filled up a pause in the shrill hurrahing with a solitary boom.
+
+To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right hand, to
+Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among the crowd, that
+collective sound was frightful.
+
+From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one on each
+side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing them, she
+saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.
+
+It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The crowd was
+on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their high places.
+
+Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and seventy-nine
+women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of the
+Militant Women.
+
+     Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,
+     Our army moves from east to west.
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     With flag and sword from south and north,
+     The sounding, shining hosts go forth.
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     Do you not bear our marching feet,
+     From door to door, from street to street?
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying, excited
+crowd.
+
+Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top of
+their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang from the
+back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently open; she
+sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever it might cost
+her and other people.
+
+Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its utmost, was
+overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang shrill and loud;
+her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a fantastic march. With one
+large, long hand raised she beat the measure of the music. Her head was
+thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy
+rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane.
+
+Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.
+
+The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her
+old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion threatened her.
+She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its
+nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her
+soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd
+in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by
+the Vortex. She felt the rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her
+breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing
+almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.
+
+She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the same
+awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at Emmeline she
+saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and hard and sane.
+
+She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and
+Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul.
+The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as needles, tortured him.
+Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom. His fair, handsome face was
+set clear and hard. His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his
+head like a cap of solid, polished metal. Weariness and disgust made a
+sort of cloud over his light green eyes. When Nicky looked at him
+Nicky's face twitched and twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as
+Michael hated it.
+
+She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they stuck
+it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria Threlfall
+were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from Blackfriars Bridge
+along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall and
+Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and Nicholas would march
+beside them to hold up the poles of the standard which, after all, they
+were not strong enough to carry.
+
+She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same time
+she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison cell. She
+had told him the most real thing that had ever happened to her, and he
+had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would have listened. Michael
+would have cared intensely.
+
+She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The sword
+was between her and her lover.
+
+She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the Vortex,
+but between him and her vision which was more than either of them or
+than all this.
+
+She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in the
+hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her lover. She
+wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could have done as
+much, supposing they had had a choice?
+
+Then she looked at Veronica.
+
+Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was slender and
+beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin. Presently she would be
+marching in the Procession. She would carry a thin, tall pole, with a
+round olive wreath on the top of it, and a white dove sitting in the
+ring of the olive wreath. And she would look as if she was not in the
+Procession but in another place.
+
+When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane ecstasy
+and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of Veronica went
+alone in utter freedom.
+
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,
+     And Love's our mighty battle-lord.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     And Justice is our flag unfurled,
+     The flaming flag that sweeps the world.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;
+     For Freedom we will fight and die.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+The Procession was over a mile long.
+
+It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge to
+Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and the
+Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside Cleopatra's
+Needle and the Sphinxes.
+
+Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to Northumberland
+Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and Societies and Leagues,
+of the trades and the professions and the arts, carrying their banners,
+the purple and the blue, the black, white and gold, the green, the
+orange and the scarlet and magenta.
+
+Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady Victoria
+Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense tricolour
+standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them. Behind the
+prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of young girls
+dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying a pole with the
+olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the obviousness of extreme
+innocence, the peace that follows victory. They were led by Veronica.
+
+She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because of her
+youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought that the Union
+had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged to Dorothea.
+
+From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the big red,
+white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady Victoria
+Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria, white and tense,
+would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation, hardly knowing where
+she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would go in pride, and in disdain
+for the proceedings in which her honour forced her to take part; she
+would have an awful knowledge of what she was doing and of where she
+was; she would drink every drop of the dreadful cup she had poured out
+for herself, hating it.
+
+Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she thought
+that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But she did not
+hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful and too big to
+hate, and her part in it was too little.
+
+She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the Procession.
+She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements, pressing closer
+and closer, pushed back continually by the police. Her soul was by
+itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the soul of the crowd
+and the soul of the Procession; only it was not proud; it was
+simply happy.
+
+The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the music
+sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the march.
+
+Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release, and the
+whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard music, to the
+rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.
+
+They went through what were once streets between walls of houses, and
+were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The visible aspect
+of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted. The houses stood
+farther back behind the walls of people; they were hung with people; a
+swarm of people clung like bees to the house walls.
+
+All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still and
+stationary world the Procession was the only thing that moved.
+
+She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was friendly.
+
+A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the
+cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign
+expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman was
+friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.
+
+Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary Procession
+should be allowed to fill the streets of a great capital, and that a
+body of the same police that arrested the insurgents should go with it
+to protect them, to clear their triumphal way before them, holding up
+the entire traffic of great thoroughfares that their bands and their
+banners and their regiments should go through. She said to herself "What
+a country! It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France,
+or anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in England."
+
+Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly. The band
+was playing the Marseillaise.
+
+And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down from its
+place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they played the
+Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the Procession to the
+ends of the world; she could march into battle to the Marseillaise; she
+could fight to that music and die.
+
+The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang the
+words of the Women's Marseillaise.
+
+And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another song.
+She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.
+
+     "'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab,
+     Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;
+      Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--
+      Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schützen!'"
+
+The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn Hill.
+
+Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that they were
+there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the standard that they
+carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and front of the Procession,
+the purple and the blue, the gold and white, the green, the scarlet and
+orange and magenta standards rocked and staggered; they bent forwards;
+they were flung backwards as the west wind took them. But the red, white
+and blue standard that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her,
+steady and straight and high.
+
+And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the olive
+wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the ring of the
+wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine sounding in
+her soul.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Another year passed.
+
+Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in. Because
+of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children who had most
+hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide himself from her to
+the very end.
+
+Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and gone into
+his father's business for a while, to see whether he could stand it.
+John was going into the business too when he left Oxford. John was even
+looking forward to his partnership in what he called "the Pater's old
+tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get my hand well in. Won't we
+make it rip!"
+
+John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble. He had no
+genius for adventure. He would never strike out for himself any strange
+or dangerous line. He had settled down at Cheltenham; he had settled
+down at Oxford.
+
+And Dorothea had settled down.
+
+The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution.
+Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and
+down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer
+bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into
+pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in
+barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from
+infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons
+and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show
+what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or
+two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
+perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed
+by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering seriously the
+very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British
+sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in some drastic and
+terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.
+
+And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind. It
+would never suck her in. She worked now in the office of the Social
+Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for _The New
+Commonwealth_ on Economics and the Marriage Laws.
+
+Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the revolution
+was all in Dorothea's brain.
+
+When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was
+being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances
+confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged
+it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it was _the_ Vortex,
+the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever
+do anything.
+
+And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.
+
+Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she
+did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on
+him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help
+him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his
+_Review_. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would
+give a whole article to that book in his _Review_. If Michael's prose
+should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on
+the _Review_.
+
+In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the
+revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems
+were beginning to appear, one after another, in the _Green Review_. He
+had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year;
+they were better than those that Réveillaud had approved of two years
+ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in the _Green Review_.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he said, who
+would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.
+
+And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence Stephen she
+was afraid.
+
+"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.
+
+For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand
+Cameron's place.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland
+with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was
+a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be
+compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's
+body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit
+hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation
+for himself.
+
+He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken
+from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the
+English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to
+love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in
+Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn;
+he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get
+his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn
+in England's side.
+
+And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his
+talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but
+he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one
+of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland
+produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels
+like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny
+as itself. Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the
+material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.
+
+He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner
+settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled with this
+mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim
+where his people married.
+
+Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have
+been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
+inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too
+wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary politics
+and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own. And yet
+few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on the House of
+Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic politician he ran
+Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists
+nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief.
+In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a
+novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed
+not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men
+of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
+sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
+qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated
+by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there
+was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.
+
+Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he would, he
+fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and
+England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike,
+and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and
+every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men
+were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet
+on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.
+
+A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It would at
+any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he presented to two
+countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with
+violence in a dead straight line. He moved so fast that to a stationary
+on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended. It
+was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a
+complete all-round view of the amazing man.
+
+But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious
+brilliance.
+
+And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet
+forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men
+of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all England you could not
+have found a lonelier man.
+
+The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations
+of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison
+and yet he was not married. He was neither bound nor free.
+
+All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.
+
+And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the
+Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera,
+after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for
+everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.
+
+All his life _his_ passions had been at the service of ideas. All his
+life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction
+and consummation; and he had not found it.
+
+In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was
+still waiting for his supreme opportunity.
+
+Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.
+
+But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily
+on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture,
+to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had put his political
+failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as an artist or not at
+all." They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.
+
+There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was
+in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just
+behind him. To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution
+in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was
+happening without him. He was not the primal energy in the movement of
+the Vortex. In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he
+was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther
+than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was attracted to the
+young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had
+rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own
+youth. They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction,
+his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity. A prosperous,
+well-established Stephen would have revolted them. He gave the
+revolutionaries the shelter of his _Review_, the support of his name,
+and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in
+return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their
+merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
+abominated.
+
+"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
+Swinburne."
+
+Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.
+
+He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew that the
+young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his
+dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when
+he made place for the new.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
+Stephen's study.
+
+He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated,
+half affable affection.
+
+The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that house in
+St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera Harrison. They
+were at home there. Their books stood in his bookcase; they laid their
+manuscripts on his writing table and left them there; they claimed his
+empty spaces for the hanging of their pictures yet unsold.
+
+Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at the top
+of the house, and they talked.
+
+Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet them there,
+and to listen and to talk.
+
+To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were Austen
+Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young sculptor,
+and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton Ellis's disciples.
+
+Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
+rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
+religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean and
+dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses, smooth and
+straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and a bitter,
+sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard drawn, while the
+lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and protested and recanted, was
+sceptical and sensitive and tender. His short, high nose had wide yet
+fastidious nostrils.
+
+It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
+affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes followed
+with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he
+might escape her, might be off, God knew where.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of
+his mistress and his friends.
+
+"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I
+want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in
+Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley
+and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their
+imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in
+destroying them."
+
+"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They breed
+the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a stinking
+suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if we're to get
+rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new and clean. There
+isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So long as old masters are
+kow-towed to as masters people will go on imitating them. When a poet
+ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go."
+
+Michael said, "How about _us_ when people imitate us? Have we got to
+go?"
+
+Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't
+got to go."
+
+"I don't see how you get out of it."
+
+"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."
+
+There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It
+made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.
+
+"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.
+
+"Nobody, so far, _has_ imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have
+_succeeded_ in imitating me."
+
+There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the
+imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by
+his contemporaries.
+
+"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy
+Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."
+
+"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does
+come down out of heaven. You _can_ trace my sources, thank God, because
+they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine
+like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions)
+"have made filthy with their paddling."
+
+He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised, Harrison, is
+absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then, supposing the
+revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because it's come. We
+_are_ the revolution--the revolution means that we've made a clean sweep
+of the past. In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody. No
+artist will be allowed to exist unless he's prepared to be buried alive
+or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the
+processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.
+
+"That's why violence is right.
+
+     "'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo
+     Sanguigno, stupra le albe,
+     irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,
+     fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,
+     fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,
+     fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'
+
+"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right because it's
+necessary."
+
+"You mean it's necessary because it's right."
+
+Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
+flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of great
+strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair grow long
+and cultivating two beards instead of one.
+
+"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy must be
+got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy instead of
+standing still. The difference between Pastism and Futurism is the
+difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist art is simply art that
+has gone on, that, has left off being static and become dynamic. It
+expresses movement. Owen will tell you better than I can why it
+expresses movement."
+
+A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul Monier-Owen had
+curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes of a young wild animal
+roused in its lair.
+
+Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little distance he
+had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black panther, half cub,
+half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of his prominent eyes, his
+eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted slightly upwards and backwards.
+Under his slender, mournful nose his restless smile showed the white
+teeth of a young animal.
+
+Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded incessantly
+to any childish provocation, the intelligence of Monier-Owen watched in
+his calm and beautiful forehead and in his eyes.
+
+He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as
+cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into
+the lines and masses that compose them, and project those lines and
+masses into space on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes
+you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to
+express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By
+decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of
+figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can
+represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the
+cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to
+escape the eye.
+
+"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It
+can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitchell breaks them
+up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It
+can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and masses as I dislocate
+them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact
+body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.
+
+"By taking time into account as well as space we produce rhythm.
+
+"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the
+Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the
+sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are
+supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because
+arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of
+arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.
+
+"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body
+which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in
+movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and
+in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I
+wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."
+
+"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out
+against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw
+a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and
+nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of
+Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality
+what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.
+But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present
+rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."
+
+He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted
+language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely
+arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and
+individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more
+than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver
+the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas.
+Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is
+the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.
+
+"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the
+innocence of the eye."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
+constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and
+broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on
+the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and
+scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high
+adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences
+over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for
+an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute
+ineptitudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and
+---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet,
+Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the
+Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.
+
+Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in
+Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than he
+believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules
+Réveillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all
+the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of
+qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.
+
+But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old
+horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
+unanimity. The vortex--_the_ Vortex--was like the little vortex of
+school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a
+herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the
+same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective
+and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry
+was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the
+fugitive, solitary private soul.
+
+And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had
+the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing
+some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away
+from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.
+
+Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a
+great longing to break loose and get away.
+
+He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think
+they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come
+of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't
+see what's coming. Yet something must come. _They_ can't be the end."
+
+He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.
+It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have
+helped to clear it."
+
+He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and
+of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+VICTORY
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles
+because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political
+atmosphere due to the fine weather.
+
+Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his family
+that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and that the mere
+off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the striker. And when
+Michael asked him contentiously what the weather had to do with Home
+Rule, he answered that it had everything to do with it by increasing
+parliamentary blood-pressure.
+
+"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how long
+the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to Mr.
+Redmond then."
+
+Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew that Home
+Rule had never been a part of practical politics and never would be.
+
+And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own views about
+the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they could have told
+Anthony what the answers were going to be; only they said it wasn't any
+good talking to Father; when he got an idea into his dear old head it
+stuck there.
+
+Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make some
+impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could get
+them out.
+
+Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children, had time
+for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent woman than the
+Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago, informed herself of the
+affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming of the _Times_. In the last
+four years the affairs of the nation had thrust themselves violently
+upon her attention. She had even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement
+as a vivid and vital affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the
+fighting and had gone to prison.
+
+Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the
+_Times_, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn't
+happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any reason to
+complain that nothing happened.
+
+It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and Ireland were
+on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the
+head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael's
+insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green Review.
+
+For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly thirteen
+when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be
+glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still. His poem was the
+green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country.
+Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the
+imminence of civil war (only that they didn't really believe in it),
+when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else.
+In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of
+Ireland's freedom was a secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew
+shared it but Lawrence Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him
+hot and restless and intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish
+crisis when she said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own
+business. This excitement is very bad for Michael."
+
+And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of
+them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two,
+Anthony and the boys would be out of it.
+
+Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour. There was,
+indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this
+particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was being
+disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.
+
+So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his
+idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had even
+thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the
+Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of
+last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme
+measure was unnecessary.
+
+And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy. For the
+children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what
+was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever. Michael
+and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete
+ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year
+each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from
+Michael. Nicholas was doing the chauffeur's work in his absence; and
+John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it
+on his father as his contribution to the family economies.
+
+Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through
+Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's and
+Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her poor
+little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.
+
+There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike. Her mind
+refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of
+exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and
+Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was
+arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like
+Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in
+the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before,
+and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of
+mind or Anthony's prosperity.
+
+The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony
+Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the
+twenty-fifth of July.
+
+Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of it.
+
+Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of those slight
+changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a
+change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of
+exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate
+trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at
+first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get
+used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it
+seriously. It had been forced on her. Dorothea had decided that she must
+have a Day, like other people.
+
+She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come out in the
+spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday
+evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at Michael's
+father's house.
+
+Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this
+palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful,
+energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred the air about him
+and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices,
+and of their laughter. And when the house was quiet and Anthony had
+Frances to himself he liked that, too.
+
+But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so often--if only
+I could have my children sometimes to myself!"
+
+It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and suckled them.
+
+There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted and
+diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd of
+tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves over the
+whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent happiness to the
+"Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and
+Edith Fleming, who figured as essential parts of the social event. She
+meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in the inconceivability of their absence
+on Frances's Bay, wondered more than ever why their daughter Rosalind
+found them so impossible. She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the
+office, and their wives and children, and Anthony's secretary, Miss
+Lathom. If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she
+soon would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and
+guileless faces.
+
+Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from India for
+good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more dangerous than
+his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was genuinely invalided,
+who had come back from California for the last time and would never be
+sent out anywhere again.
+
+Dorothea had said: "Let's kill them all off in one awful day." Frances
+had said: "Yes, but we must do it decently. We must be kind to them,
+poor dears!"
+
+Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to Uncle
+Morrie and Uncle Bartie. That was the only burden she had laid on her
+children. It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth constrained
+them. They had received so much, and they had been let off so much; not
+one of them had inherited the taint that made Maurice and Emmeline
+Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased and irresponsible. They
+could afford to be pitiful and merciful.
+
+And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to be
+pitiful and merciful herself. She could even afford to be grateful to
+the poor dears. She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and Bartie as
+scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose affliction left her
+children clean. She thought of them more and more in this sacred and
+sacrificial character. At fifty-two Frances could be gentle over the
+things that had worried and irritated her at thirty-three. Like Anthony
+she was still young and strong through the youth and strength of
+her children.
+
+And the poor dears were getting weak and old. Grannie was seventy-nine,
+and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was forty-nine, and he
+looked sixty. Every year Frances was more acutely aware of their pathos,
+their futility, their mortality. They would be broken and gone so soon
+and so utterly, leaving no name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only
+living in the memories of her children who would remain.
+
+And, with an awful sense of mortality surrounding them, her children had
+learned that they must be kind because the old people would be gone
+while they endured and remained.
+
+This Saturday being the last of the season, they had all come; not only
+the Flemings, but the Jervises and Verekers and Norrises, and Uncle
+Bartie. The fine weather alone would have brought them.
+
+Bartie, more morose and irritable than ever, sat under the tree of
+Heaven and watched the triumphal progress of the Day. He scowled darkly
+and sourly at each group in turn; at the young men in white flannels
+playing tennis; at Mr. and Mr. Jervis and the Verekers and Norrises; at
+the Flemings, old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith, and
+the disgraceful Maurice, all five of them useless pensioners on his
+brother's bounty; Maurice a thing of battered, sodden flesh hanging
+loose on brittle bone, a rickety prop for the irreproachable summer
+suit bought with Anthony's money. He scowled at the tables covered with
+fine white linen, and at the costly silver and old china, at the
+sandwiches and cakes and ices, and the piled-up fruits and the claret
+cup and champagne cup glowing and shining in the tall glass jugs, and at
+the pretty maidservants going to and fro in their accomplished service.
+
+Bartie wondered how on earth Anthony managed it. His wonder was a savage
+joy to Bartie.
+
+Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed it, and
+Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr. Vereker and Mr.
+Norris, who held that a strike was a downright serious matter, also
+wondered. But they were sustained by their immense belief in Mr.
+Anthony. Mr. Anthony knew what he was doing; he always had known. A
+strike might be serious while it lasted, but it didn't last. And Mr.
+Nicholas was in the business now, and Mr. John was coming into it next
+year, and Mr. Nicholas might be married again by that time; and the
+chances were that the firm of Harrison and Harrison would last long
+enough to provide for a young Vereker and a still younger Norris.
+
+In spite of the strike, Mr. and Mrs. Vereker and Mr. and Mrs. Norris,
+like Frances and Anthony, were extraordinarily cheerful that afternoon.
+
+So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.
+
+"I can't think why I feel so happy," said Mrs. Vereker to Mrs. Norris.
+She was looking at her son George.
+
+"Nor I, either," said Miss Lathom, who was trying suddenly to look at
+nothing in particular.
+
+Miss Lathom lied and Mrs. Vereker lied; they knew perfectly well why
+they were happy. Each knew that the other lied; each knew that the other
+knew she knew; and neither of them could have said why she found it so
+necessary to lie.
+
+And to Frances this happiness of Mrs. Vereker, and of young Vereker and
+Miss Lathom was significant and delightful, as if she had been
+personally responsible for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and of
+something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up with Mr.
+and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind. She stared at the larkspurs as if they
+held the clue--Nicky's face appeared among the tall blue spires, Nicky's
+darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and yellow
+stripes--something to do with a White Cake--it must have been somebody's
+birthday. Now she had it--Mr. Jervis's cricket scarf. It was the day of
+Nicky's worst earache, the day when Mr. Vereker climbed the tree of
+Heaven--was it possible that Mr. Vereker had ever climbed that
+tree?--the day when Michael wouldn't go to the party--Rosalind's
+birthday.
+
+Eight candles burning for Rosalind. Why, it was nineteen years ago.
+Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only little boys.
+And look at them now!
+
+She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit, slender bodies
+of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously and well.
+
+"Dorothy is looking very handsome," Mrs. Jervis said. Yes, certainly
+Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before all things the
+male beauty of her sons. In Michael and Nicholas it had reached
+perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last, as Anthony's
+had lasted.
+
+She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many deaths,
+each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of babyhood, of
+childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of their young
+manhood would be with her for a long time. John would have it. John was
+only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had not hardened; his
+boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his mouth, and in his eyelids
+and the soft corners of his eyes; so that in John she could still see
+what Nicky had been.
+
+She had adored Anthony's body, as if she had foreseen that it would give
+her such sons as these; and in her children she had adored the small
+bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she foresaw the beauty of their
+manhood. These were the same bodies, the same faces that she had loved
+in them as children; nothing was blurred or twisted or overlaid.
+
+Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had foreseen
+him. Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other moments she was
+proud of his genius; but at this particular moment, sitting beside her
+friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was chiefly aware of his body.
+
+Michael's body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but austere
+and tranquil satisfaction. It was when she looked at her second son that
+something caught at her breath and held it. She saw him as the lover
+and bridegroom of Veronica. Her sense of his virility was terrible to
+her and delightful.
+
+Perhaps they were engaged already.
+
+And Frances was sorry for Mrs. Jervis, who had borne no sons, who had
+only borne one unattractive and unsatisfactory daughter. She used to be
+sorry for her because Rosalind was pink and fat and fluffy; she was
+sorry for her now because Rosalind was unsatisfactory. She was sorry for
+Mrs. Norris because her boy could never grow up like Michael or Nicholas
+or John. She was sorry for Mrs. Vereker because George, though he looked
+all right when he was by himself, became clumsy and common at once
+beside Michael and Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels;
+he played furiously and well; he played too furiously and too
+consciously well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp
+and excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang.
+
+Her arrogance nourished itself on these contrasts.
+
+Mrs. Jervis looked wistfully at the young men as they played. She looked
+still more wistfully at Dorothy.
+
+"What do you do," she said, "to keep your children with you?"
+
+"I do nothing," Frances said. "I don't try to keep them. I've never
+appealed to their feelings for my own purposes, or taken advantage of
+their affection, that's all.
+
+"They know that if they want to walk out of the house to-morrow, and
+stay out, they can. Nobody'll stop them."
+
+There was a challenging, reminiscent glint in Mr. Jervis's eyes, and his
+wife was significantly silent. Frances knew what they were thinking.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "walked out; but he came back again as soon as he
+was in trouble. Michael walks out and goes abroad every year; but he
+comes back again. Dorothy walks out, but she's never dreamed of not
+coming back again."
+
+"Of course, if you aren't afraid of taking risks," said Mr. Jervis.
+
+"I am afraid. But I've never shown it."
+
+"It's very strange that Dorothy hasn't married." Mrs. Jervis spoke. She
+derived comfort from the thought that Dorothy was eight-and-twenty and
+not married.
+
+"Dorothy," said Frances, "could marry to-morrow if she wanted to; but
+she doesn't want."
+
+She was sorry for her friend, but she really could not allow her that
+consolation.
+
+"Veronica is growing up very good-looking," said Mrs. Jervis then.
+
+But it was no use. Frances was aware that Veronica was grown up, and
+that she was good-looking, and that Nicky loved her; but Mrs. Jervis's
+shafts fell wide of all her vulnerable places. Frances was no
+longer afraid.
+
+"Veronica," she said, "is growing up very good." It was not the word she
+would have chosen, yet it was the only one she could think of as likely
+to convey to Mrs. Jervis what she wanted her to know, though it left her
+obtuseness without any sense of Veronica's mysterious quality.
+
+She herself had never tried to think of a word for it before; she was
+only driven to it now because she detected in her friend's tone a
+challenge and a warning. It was as if Rosalind's mother had said,
+extensively and with pointed reference to the facts: "Veronica is
+dangerous. Her mother has had adventures. She is grown-up and she is
+good-looking, and Nicky is susceptible to that sort of thing. If you
+don't look out he will be caught again. The only difference between
+Phyllis Desmond and Veronica is in their skins."
+
+So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs. Jervis
+should understand, once for all, that she was not in the least like her
+mother or like Phyllis Desmond.
+
+That was enough for Mrs. Jervis. But it was not enough for Frances, who
+found her mind wandering off from Rosalind's mother and looking for the
+word of words that would express her own meaning to her own
+satisfaction.
+
+Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation that
+flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs. Vereker
+and Mrs. Norris on her left.
+
+Veronica was good. But she was not wrapped up in other people's lives as
+Frances was wrapped up. She was wrapped up, not in herself, but in some
+life of her own that, as Frances made it out, had nothing in the world
+to do with anybody else's.
+
+And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were thinking,
+and what you were going to do, and what was happening to you. (She had
+really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky when Desmond made
+him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls that divide every soul
+from every other soul were made of some thin and porous stuff that let
+things through. And in this life of yours, for the moments that she
+shared it, she lived intensely, with uncanny delight and pain that were
+her own and not her own.
+
+And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile these
+extremes of penetration and detachment.
+
+She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that. He saw things.
+He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights. She supposed
+it was the Highland blood in both of them.
+
+Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr. Bartholomew was
+better. Frances said he never would be better till chemists were
+forbidden to advertise and the _British Medical Journal_ and _The
+Lancet_ were suppressed. Bartie would read them; and they supplied him
+with all sorts of extraordinary diseases.
+
+She thought: Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and Veronica
+in her innermost life was happy. She had been happy when she came back
+from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky cared for her,
+before Nicky knew it himself.
+
+Supposing she had known it all the time? But that, Frances said to
+herself, was nonsense. If she had known as much as all that, why should
+she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of it?
+Unless--supposing--it had been his suffering that she had nearly
+died of?
+
+Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr. Maurice
+looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that Morrie hadn't
+been fit for anything since he was in South Africa.
+
+Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme
+sustained itself. She thought: Then, Nicky had suffered. And Veronica
+was the only one who knew. She knew more about Nicky than Nicky's
+mother. This thought was disagreeable to Frances.
+
+It was all nonsense. She didn't really believe that these things
+happened. Yet, why not? Michael said they happened. Even Dorothy, who
+didn't believe in God and immortality or anything, believed that.
+
+She gave it up; it was beyond her; it bothered her.
+
+"Yes. Seventy-nine her last birthday."
+
+Mrs. Norris had said that Mrs. Fleming was wonderful.
+
+Frances thought: "It's wonderful what Veronica does to them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sets had changed. Nicholas and a girl friend of Veronica's played
+against George Vereker and Miss Lathom; John, with Mr. Jervis for his
+handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The very young Norris
+fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to distinguish himself by catching
+some ball in full flight as it went "out." It was a pure and high
+ambition, for he knew he was so young and unimportant that only the eyes
+of God and of his mother watched him.
+
+Michael had dropped out of it. He sat beside Dorothy under the tree of
+Heaven and watched Veronica.
+
+"Veronica's wonderful," he said. "Did you see that?"
+
+Dorothy had seen.
+
+Veronica had kept Aunt Emmeline quiet all afternoon. She bad made Bartie
+eat an ice under the impression that it would be good for him. And now
+she had gone with Morrie to the table where the drinks were, and had
+taken his third glass of champagne cup from him and made him drink
+lemonade instead.
+
+"How does she do it?" said Michael.
+
+"I don't know. She doesn't know herself. I used to think I could manage
+people, but I'm not in it with Ronny. She ought to be a wardress in a
+lunatic asylum."
+
+"Now look at that!"
+
+Veronica had returned to the group formed by Grannie and the Aunties and
+some strangers. The eyes of the four Fleming women had looked after her
+as she went from them; they looked towards her now as if some great
+need, some great longing were appeased by her return.
+
+Grannie made a place by her side for the young girl; she took her arm,
+the young white arm, bare from the elbow in its short sleeve, and made
+it lie across her knees. From time to time Grannie's yellow, withered
+hand stroked the smooth, warm white arm, or held it. Emmeline and Edith
+squatted on the grass at Veronica's feet; their worn faces and the worn
+face of Louie looked at her. They hung on her, fascinated, curiously
+tranquillized, as if they drank from her youth.
+
+"It's funny," Dorothy said, "when you think how they used to hate her."
+
+"It's horrible," said Michael.
+
+He got up and took Veronica away.
+
+He was lying at her feet now on the grass in the far corner of the lawn
+under the terrace.
+
+"Why do you go to them?" he said.
+
+"Because they want me."
+
+"You mustn't go when they want you. You mustn't let them get hold of
+you."
+
+"They don't get hold of me--nothing gets hold of me. I want to help
+them. They say it does them good to have me with them."
+
+"I should think it did do them good! They feed on you, Ronny. I can see
+it by the way they look at you. You'll die of them if you don't give
+it up."
+
+"Give what up?"
+
+"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it?
+Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to have
+been dead years ago.
+
+"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can remember
+them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin sacrificed to
+them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're making them go on."
+
+"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael, when
+you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without being happy,
+without loving.
+
+"They used to hate me because I'm Vera's daughter. They don't hate me
+now."
+
+"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires. They'll
+suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of them.
+
+"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a kid and
+Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky house they
+live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's ghost I funked. But
+I know now it wasn't. It was those four terrible women. They're ghosts.
+I thought you were afraid of ghosts."
+
+"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see how awful
+it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living people. Everybody
+afraid of them--not wanting them."
+
+"Michael--it would be better to be dead!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its appearance
+and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's friends played singles
+with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting the partners offered them
+and disdaining inferior antagonists; they played, Ellis against Mitchell
+and Monier-Owen against Nicholas.
+
+They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.
+
+It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could not go on
+for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had done so much for
+Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of Michael's Poems had made an
+end of that old animosity a year ago. Practically, they had had to
+choose between Bartie and Lawrence Stephen as the turning point of
+honour. Michael had made them see that it was possible to overvalue
+Bartie; also that it was possible to pay too high a price for a
+consecrated moral attitude. In all his life the wretched Bartie had
+never done a thing for any of them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather
+extraordinary success absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made
+his father bankrupt he would owe his very means of livelihood to
+Lawrence Stephen.
+
+Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most frightfully to
+go on living in the same house with people who disliked him.
+
+If, Michael said, they chose to dissociate themselves altogether from
+their eldest son and his career, very well. They could go on ignoring
+and tacitly insulting Mr. Stephen. He could understand their taking a
+consistently wrong-headed line like that; but so long as they had any
+regard, either for him or his career, he didn't see how they could very
+well keep it up any longer. He was sorry, of course, that his career had
+let them in for Stephen if they didn't like him; but there it was.
+
+And beyond a doubt it was there.
+
+"You might vindicate Bartie gloriously," Michael said, "by turning me
+out of the house and disinheriting me. But would it be worth while? I'm
+not asking you to condone Stephen's conduct--if you can't condone it;
+I'm asking you either to acknowledge _or_ repudiate your son's debts.
+
+"After all, if _he_ can condone your beastly treatment of him--I
+wouldn't like him if he was the swine you think him."
+
+And Anthony had appealed to Michael's mother.
+
+To his "Well, Frances, what do you think? Ought we or oughtn't we?" she
+had replied: "I think we ought to stand solid behind Michael."
+
+It was Michael's life that counted, for it was going on into a great
+future. Bartie would pass and Michael would remain.
+
+Their nervous advances had ended in a complete surrender to Stephen's
+charm.
+
+Vera and Stephen seemed to think that the way to show the sincerity and
+sweetness of their reconciliation was to turn up as often as possible on
+Frances's Day. They arrived always at the same hour, a little late; they
+came by the road and the front door, so that when Bartie saw them
+coming he could retreat through the garden door and the lane. The
+Flemings and the Jervises retreated with him; and presently, when it had
+had a good look at the celebrities, the rest of the party followed.
+
+This Saturday Frances's Day dwindled and melted away and closed, after
+its manner; only Vera and Stephen lingered. They stayed on talking to
+Michael long after everybody else had gone.
+
+Stephen said he had come to say good-bye to Michael's people and to make
+a proposal to Michael himself. He was going to Ireland.
+
+Vera interrupted him with passion.
+
+"He isn't. He hasn't any proposal to make. He hasn't come to say
+good-bye."
+
+Her restless, unhappy eyes turned to him incessantly, as if, more than
+ever, she was afraid that he would escape her, that he would go off God
+knew where.
+
+God knew where he was going, but Vera did not believe that he was going
+to Ireland. He had talked about going to Ireland for years, and he had
+never gone.
+
+Stephen looked as if he did not see her; as if he did not even see
+Michael very distinctly.
+
+"I'm going," he said, "to Ireland on Monday week, the third of August. I
+mayn't come back for long enough. I may not come back at all."
+
+"That's the sort of thing he keeps on saying."
+
+"I may not come back _at all_. So I want you to take over the _Review_
+for me. Ellis and my secretary will show you how it stands. You'll know
+what to do. I can trust you not to let it down."
+
+"He doesn't mean what he says, Michael. He's only saying it to frighten
+me. He's been holding it over me for years.
+
+"_Say_ you'll have nothing to do with it. _Say_ you won't touch his old
+_Review_."
+
+"Could I go to Ireland for you?"
+
+"You couldn't."
+
+"Why not? What do you think you're going to do there?"
+
+"I'm going to pull the Nationalists together, so that if there's civil
+war in Ireland, the Irish will have a chance to win. Thank God for
+Carson! He's given us the opportunity we wanted."
+
+"Tell him he's not to go, Michael. He won't listen to me, but he'll mind
+what you say."
+
+"I want to go instead of him."
+
+"You can't go instead of me. Nobody can go instead of me."
+
+"I can go with you."
+
+"You can't."
+
+"Larry, if you take Michael to Ireland, Anthony and Frances will never
+forgive you. _I_'ll never forgive you."
+
+"I'm not taking Michael to Ireland, I'm telling you. There's no reason
+why Michael should go to Ireland at all. It isn't _his_ country."
+
+"You needn't rub _that_ in," said Michael.
+
+"It isn't _yours_," said Vera. "Ireland doesn't want you. The
+Nationalists don't want you. You said yourself they've turned you out of
+Ireland. When you've lived in England all these years why should you go
+back to a place that doesn't want you?"
+
+"Because if Carson gets a free hand I see some chance of Ireland being a
+free country."
+
+Vera wailed and entreated. She said it showed how much he cared for her.
+It showed that he was tired of her. Why couldn't he say so and have
+done with it?
+
+"It's not," she said, "as if you could really do anything. You're a
+dreamer. Ireland has had enough of dreamers." And Stephen's eyes looked
+over her head, into the high branches of the tree of Heaven, as if he
+saw his dream shining clear through them like a moon.
+
+The opportunist could see nothing but his sublime opportunity.
+
+Michael went back with him to dine and talk it over. There was to be
+civil war in Ireland then?
+
+He thought: If only Lawrence would let him go with him. He wanted to go
+to Ireland. To join the Nationalists and fight for Ireland, fight for
+the freedom he was always dreaming about--_that_ would be a fine thing.
+It would be a finer thing than writing poems about Ireland.
+
+Lawrence Stephen went soberly and steadily through the affair of the
+_Review_, explaining things to Michael. He wanted this done, and this.
+And over and over again Michael's voice broke through his instructions.
+Why couldn't he go to Ireland instead of Lawrence? Or, if Lawrence
+wouldn't let him go instead of him, he might at least take him with him.
+He didn't want to stay at home editing the _Review_. Ellis or Mitchell
+or Monier-Owen would edit it better than he could. Even the wretched
+Wadham would edit it just as well. He wanted to go to Ireland and fight.
+
+But Lawrence wouldn't let him go. He wasn't going to have the boy's
+blood on his hands. His genius and his youth were too precious.
+
+Besides, Ireland was not his country.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was past ten o'clock. Frances was alone in the drawing-room. She sat
+by the open window and waited and watched.
+
+The quiet garden lay open to her sight. Only the inner end of the
+farther terrace, under the orchard wall, was hidden by a high screen
+of privet.
+
+It seemed hours to Frances since she had seen Nicky and Veronica go down
+the lawn on to the terrace.
+
+And then Anthony had gone out too. She was vexed with Anthony. She could
+see him sitting under his ash-tree, her tree of heaven; his white
+shirt-front gave out an oblong gleam like phosphorous in the darkness
+under the tree. She was watching to see that he didn't get up and go on
+to the terrace. Anthony had no business in the garden at all. He was
+catching cold in it. He had sneezed twice. She wanted Nicholas and
+Veronica to have the garden to themselves to-night, and the perfect
+stillness of the twilight to themselves, every tree and every little
+leaf and flower keeping quiet for them; and there was Anthony sneezing.
+
+She was restless and impatient, as if she carried the burden of their
+passion in her own heart.
+
+Presently she could bear it no longer. She got up and called to Anthony
+to come in. He came obediently. "What are you thinking of," she said,
+"planting yourself out there and sneezing? I could see your shirt-front
+a mile off. It's indecent of you."
+
+"Why indecent?"
+
+"Because Nicky and Veronica are out there."
+
+"I don't see them."
+
+"Do you suppose they want you to see them?"
+
+She turned the electric light on full, to make darkness of their
+twilight out there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky and Veronica talked together in the twilight, sitting on the seat
+under the orchard well behind the privet screen. They did not see
+Anthony sitting under the ash-tree, they did not hear him, they did not
+hear Frances calling to him to come in. They were utterly unaware of
+Frances and Anthony.
+
+"Ronny," he said, "did Michael say anything to you?"
+
+"When?"
+
+"This afternoon, when he made you come with him here?"
+
+"How do you mean, 'say anything'?"
+
+"You know what I mean."
+
+"_Mick_?"
+
+"Yes. Did he ask you to marry him?"
+
+"No. He said a lot of funny things, but he didn't say that. He
+wouldn't."
+
+"Why wouldn't he?"
+
+"Because--he just wouldn't."
+
+"Well, he says he understands you."
+
+"Then," said Veronica conclusively, "of course he wouldn't."
+
+"Yes; but he says _I_ don't."
+
+"Dear Nicky, you understand me when nobody else does. You always did."
+
+"Yes, when we were kids. But supposing _now_ I ever didn't, would it
+matter? You see, I'm stupid, and caring--caring awfully--might make me
+stupider. _Have_ people got to understand each other?"
+
+To that she replied astonishingly, "Are you quite sure you understand
+about Ferdie?"
+
+"Ferdie?"
+
+"Yes." She turned her face full to him. "I don't know whether you know
+about it. _I_ didn't till Mother told me the other day. I'm
+Ferdie's daughter.
+
+"Did you know?"
+
+"Oh, Lord, yes. I've known it for--oh, simply ever so long."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Dorothy, I think. But I guessed it because of something he said once
+about seeing ghosts."
+
+"I wonder if you know how I feel about it? I want you to understand
+that. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I'm proud. I'm _glad_ I'm Ferdie's
+daughter, not Bartie's.... I'd take his name, so that everybody should
+know I was his daughter, only that I like Uncle Anthony's name best. I'm
+glad Mother loved him."
+
+"So am I, Ronny. I know I shouldn't have liked Bartie's daughter.
+Bartie's daughter wouldn't have been you."
+
+He took her in his arms and held her face against his face. And it was
+as if Desmond had never been.
+
+A little while ago he had hated Desmond because she had come before
+Veronica; she had taken what belonged to Veronica, the first tremor of
+his passion, the irrecoverable delight and surprise. And now he knew
+that, because he had not loved her, she had taken nothing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"Do you love _me_?"
+
+"You know I love you."
+
+"You know. You know."
+
+What they said was new and wonderful to them as if nobody before them
+had ever thought of it.
+
+Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the birch-trees,
+and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in each other's arms and
+said the same thing in the same words: "Do you love me?" "You know I
+love you!" over and over, in voices drowsy and thick with love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And that's that
+damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to wait goodness knows
+how long. Ages we may have to."
+
+"I'd wait all my life if I could have you in the last five seconds of
+it. And if I couldn't, I'd still wait."
+
+And presently Veronica remembered Michael.
+
+"Why did you ask me whether Mick had said anything?"
+
+"Because I thought you ought to know about it before you--Besides, if he
+_had_, we should have had to wait a bit before we told him."
+
+It seemed that there was nothing to prevent them marrying to-morrow if
+they liked. The strike, Anthony said, couldn't hit him as badly as
+all that.
+
+He and Frances sat up till long past midnight, talking about their
+plans, and the children's plans. It was all settled. The first week in
+August they would go down to Morfe for the shooting. They would stay
+there till the first week in September. Nicky and Veronica would be
+married the first week in October. And they would go to France and
+Belgium and Germany for their honeymoon.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+They did not go down to Morfe the first week in August for the shooting.
+
+Neither did Lawrence Stephen go to Ireland on Monday, the third. At the
+moment when he should have been receiving the congratulations of the
+Dublin Nationalists after his impassioned appeal for militant
+consolidation, Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson were shaking hands
+dramatically in the House of Commons. Stephen's sublime opportunity, the
+civil war, had been snatched from him by the unforeseen.
+
+And there was no chance of Nicky and Veronica going to Belgium and
+France and Germany for their honeymoon.
+
+For within nine days of Frances's Day Germany had declared war on France
+and Russia, and was marching over the Belgian frontier on her way
+to Paris.
+
+Frances, aroused at last to realization of the affairs of nations,
+asked, like several million women, "What does it mean?"
+
+And Anthony, like several million men, answered, "It means Armageddon."
+Like several million people, they both thought he was saying something
+as original as it was impressive, something clear and final and
+descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative people went about
+saying it to each other. The sound of the word thrilled them,
+intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that was at the same time,
+in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them with a solemn and sombre
+passion. They said "Armageddon. It means Armageddon." Yet nobody knew
+and nobody asked or thought of asking what Armageddon meant.
+
+"Shall We come into it?" said Frances. She was thinking of the Royal
+Navy turning out to the last destroyer to save England from invasion; of
+the British Army most superfluously prepared to defend England from the
+invader, who, after all, could not invade; of Indian troops pouring into
+England if the worst came to the worst. She had the healthy British mind
+that refuses and always has refused to acknowledge the possibility of
+disaster. Yet she asked continually, "Would England be drawn in?" She
+was thankful that none of her sons had gone into the Army or the Navy.
+Whoever else was in, they would be out of it.
+
+At first Anthony said, "No. Of course England wouldn't be drawn in."
+
+Then, on the morning of England's ultimatum, the closing of the Stock
+Exchange and the Banks made him thoughtful, and he admitted that it
+looked as if England might be drawn in after all. The long day, without
+any business for him and Nicholas, disturbed him. There was a nasty,
+hovering smell of ruin in the air. But there was no panic. The closing
+of the Banks was only a wise precaution against panic. And by evening,
+as the tremendous significance of the ultimatum sank into him, he said
+definitively that England would not be drawn in.
+
+Then Drayton, whom they had not seen for months (since he had had his
+promotion) telephoned to Dorothy to come and dine with him at his club
+in Dover Street. Anthony missed altogether the significance of _that_.
+
+He had actually made for himself an after-dinner peace in which coffee
+could be drunk and cigarettes smoked as if nothing were happening
+to Europe.
+
+"England," he said, "will not be drawn in, because her ultimatum will
+stop the War. There won't be any Armageddon."
+
+"Oh, won't there!" said Michael. "And I can tell you there won't be much
+left of us after it's over."
+
+He had been in Germany and he knew. He carried himself with a sort of
+stern haughtiness, as one who knew better than any of them. And yet his
+words conveyed no picture to his brain, no definite image of anything
+at all.
+
+But in Nicholas's brain images gathered fast, one after another; they
+thickened; clear, vivid images with hard outlines. They came slowly but
+with order and precision. While the others talked he had been silent and
+very grave.
+
+"_Some_ of us'll be left," he said. "But it'll take us all our time."
+
+Anthony looked thoughtfully at Nicholas. A sudden wave of realization
+beat up against his consciousness and receded.
+
+"Well," he said, "we shall know at midnight."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An immense restlessness came over them.
+
+At a quarter-past eight Dorothy telephoned from her club in Grafton
+street. Frank had had to leave her suddenly. Somebody had sent for him.
+And if they wanted to see the sight of their lives they were to come
+into town at once. St. James's was packed with people from Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace. It was like nothing on earth, and they mustn't miss
+it. She'd wait for them in Grafton Street till a quarter to nine, but
+not a minute later.
+
+Nicky got out his big four-seater Morss car. They packed themselves into
+it, all six of them somehow, and he drove them into London. They had a
+sense of doing something strange and memorable and historic. Dorothy,
+picked up at her club, showed nothing but a pleasurable excitement. She
+gave no further information about Frank. He had had to go off and see
+somebody. What did he think? He thought what he had always thought; only
+he wouldn't talk about it.
+
+Dorothy was not inclined to talk about it either. The Morss was caught
+in a line blocked at the bottom of Albemarle Street by two streams of
+cars, mixed with two streams of foot passengers, that poured steadily
+from Piccadilly into St. James's Street.
+
+Michael and Dorothy got out and walked. Nicholas gave up his place to
+Anthony and followed with Veronica.
+
+Their restlessness had been a part of the immense restlessness of the
+crowd. They were drawn, as the crowd was drawn; they went as the crowd
+went, up and down, restlessly, from Trafalgar Square and Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace; from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall and Trafalgar
+Square. They drifted down Parliament Street to Westminster and back
+again. An hour ago the drifting, nebulous crowd had split, torn asunder
+between two attractions; its two masses had wheeled away, one to the
+east and the other to the west; they had gathered themselves together,
+one at each pole of the space it now traversed. The great meeting in
+Trafalgar Square balanced the multitude that had gravitated towards
+Buckingham Palace, to see the King and Queen come out on their balcony
+and show themselves to their people.
+
+And as the edges of the two masses gave way, each broke and scattered,
+and was mixed again with the other. Like a flood, confined and shaken,
+it surged and was driven back and surged again from Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace, from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall. It looked for an
+outlet in the narrow channels of the side-streets, or spread itself over
+the flats of the Green Park, only to return restlessly upon itself,
+sucked back by the main current in the Mall.
+
+It was as if half London had met there for Bank Holiday. Part of this
+crowd was drunk; it was orgiastic; it made strange, fierce noises, like
+the noises of one enormous, mystically excited beast; here and there,
+men and women, with inflamed and drunken faces, reeled in each other's
+arms; they wore pink paper feathers in their hats. Some, only half
+intoxicated, flicked at each other with long streamers of pink and white
+paper, carried like scourges on small sticks. These were the inspired.
+
+But the great body of the crowd was sober. It went decorously in a long
+procession, young men with their sweethearts, friends, brothers and
+sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers with their children;
+none, or very few, went alone that night.
+
+It was an endless procession of faces; grave and thoughtful faces;
+uninterested, respectable faces; faces of unmoved integrity; excited
+faces; dreaming, wondering, bewildered faces; faces merely curious, or
+curiously exalted, slightly ecstatic, open-mouthed, fascinated by each
+other and by the movements and the lights; laughing, frivolous faces,
+and faces utterly vacant and unseeing.
+
+On every other breast there was a small Union Jack pinned; every other
+hand held and waggled a Union Jack. The Union Jack flew from the engine
+of every other automobile. In twelve hours, out of nowhere, thousands
+and thousands of flags sprang magically into being; as if for years
+London had been preparing for this day.
+
+And in and out of this crowd the train of automobiles with their flags
+dashed up and down the Mall for hours, appearing and disappearing.
+Intoxicated youths with inflamed faces, in full evening dress, squatted
+on the roofs of taxi-cabs or rode astride on the engines of their cars,
+waving flags.
+
+All this movement, drunken, orgiastic, somnambulistic, mysteriously
+restless, streamed up and down between two solemn and processional lines
+of lights, two solemn and processional lines of trees, lines that
+stretched straight from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace in a recurrent
+pattern of trees and lamps, dark trees, twilit trees, a lamp and a tree
+shining with a metallic unnatural green; and, at the end of the avenue,
+gilded gates and a golden-white façade.
+
+The crowd was drifting now towards the Palace. Michael and Dorothea,
+Nicholas and Veronica, went with it. In this eternal perambulation they
+met people that they knew; Stephen and Vera; Mitchell, Monier-Owen;
+Uncle Morrie and his sisters. Anthony, looking rather solemn, drove
+past them in his car. It was like impossible, grotesque encounters in
+a dream.
+
+Outside the Palace the crowd moved up and down without rest; it drifted
+and returned; it circled round and round the fountain. In the open
+spaces the intoxicated motor-cars and taxi-cabs darted and tore with the
+folly of moths and the fury of destroyers. They stung the air with their
+hooting. Flags, intoxicated flags, still hung from their engines. They
+came flying drunkenly out of the dark, like a trumpeting swarm of
+enormous insects, irresistibly, incessantly drawn to the lights of the
+Palace, hypnotized by the golden-white façade.
+
+Suddenly, Michael's soul revolted.
+
+"If this demented herd of swine is a great people going into a great
+war, God help us! Beasts--it's not as if _their_ bloated skins were
+likely to be punctured."
+
+He called back over his shoulders to the others.
+
+"Let's get out of this. If we don't I shall be sick."
+
+He took Dorothy by her arm and shouldered his way out.
+
+The water had ceased playing in the fountain.
+
+Nicholas and Veronica stood by the fountain. The water in the basin was
+green like foul sea-water. The jetsam of the crowd floated there. A
+small child leaned over the edge of the basin and fished for Union Jacks
+in the filthy pool. Its young mother held it safe by the tilted edge of
+its petticoats. She looked up at them and smiled. They smiled back again
+and turned away.
+
+It was quiet on the south side by the Barracks. Small, sober groups of
+twos and threes strolled there, or stood with their faces pressed close
+against the railings, peering into the barrack yard. Motionless,
+earnest and attentive, they stared at the men in khaki moving about on
+the other side of the railings. They were silent, fascinated by the men
+in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing, they stared at them with an
+awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in khaki stared back, proud,
+self-conscious, as men who know that the hour is great and that it is
+their hour.
+
+"Nicky," Veronica said, "I wish Michael wouldn't say things like that."
+
+"He's dead right, Ronny. That isn't the way to take it, getting drunk
+and excited, and rushing about making silly asses of themselves. They
+_are_ rather swine, you know."
+
+"Yes; but they're pathetic. Can't you see how pathetic they are? Nicky,
+I believe I love the swine--even the poor drunken ones with the pink
+paper feathers--just because they're English; because awful things are
+going to happen to them, and they don't know it. They're English."
+
+"You think God's made us all like that? He _hasn't_."
+
+They found Anthony in the Mall, driving up and down, looking for them.
+He had picked up Dorothy and Aunt Emmeline and Uncle Morrie.
+
+"We're going down to the Mansion House," he said, "to hear the
+Proclamation. Will you come?"
+
+But Veronica and Nicholas were tired of crowds, even of historic crowds.
+Anthony drove off with his car-load, and they went home.
+
+"I never saw Daddy so excited," Nicky said.
+
+But Anthony was not excited. He had never felt calmer or cooler in his
+life.
+
+He returned some time after midnight. By that time it had sunk into him.
+Germany _had_ defied the ultimatum and England _had_ declared war
+on Germany.
+
+He said it was only what was to be foreseen. He had known all the time
+that it would happen--really.
+
+The tension of the day of the ultimatum had this peculiar psychological
+effect that all over England people who had declared up to the last
+minute that there would be no War were saying the same thing as Anthony
+and believing it.
+
+Michael was disgusted with the event that had put an end to the Irish
+Revolution. It was in this form that he conceived his first grudge
+against the War.
+
+This emotion of his was like some empty space of horror opened up
+between him and Nicholas; Nicky being the only one of his family who was
+as yet aware of its existence.
+
+For the next three days, Nicholas, very serious and earnest, shut
+himself up in his workshop at the bottom of the orchard and laboured
+there, putting the last touches to the final, perfect, authoritative
+form of the Moving Fortress, the joint creation of his brain and
+Drayton's, the only experiment that had survived the repeated onslaughts
+of the Major's criticism. The new model was three times the size of the
+lost original; it was less like a battleship and more like a racing-car
+and a destroyer. It was his and Drayton's last word on the subject of
+armaments.
+
+It was going to the War Office, this time, addressed to the right
+person, and accompanied by all sorts of protective introductions, and
+Drayton blasting its way before it with his new explosive.
+
+In those three days Nick found an immense distraction in his Moving
+Fortress. It also served to blind his family to his real intentions. He
+knew that his real intentions could not be kept from them very long.
+Meanwhile the idea that he was working on something made them happy.
+When Frances saw him in his overalls she smiled and said: "Nicky's got
+_his_ job, anyhow." John came and looked at him through the window of
+the workshop and laughed.
+
+"Good old Nicky," he said. "Doing his bit!"
+
+In those three days John went about with an air of agreeable excitement.
+Or you came upon him sitting in solitary places like the dining-room,
+lost in happy thought. Michael said of him that he was unctuous. He
+exuded a secret joy and satisfaction. John had acquired a sudden
+remarkable maturity. He shone on each member of his family with
+benevolence and affection, as if he were its protector and consoler, and
+about to confer on it some tremendous benefit.
+
+"Look at Don-Don," Michael said. "The bloodthirsty little brute. He's
+positively enjoying the War."
+
+"You might leave me alone," said Don-Don. "I shan't have it to enjoy for
+long."
+
+He was one of those who believed that the War would be over in four
+months.
+
+Michael, pledged to secrecy, came and looked at the Moving Fortress. He
+was interested and intelligent; he admired that efficiency of Nicky's
+that was so unlike his own.
+
+Yet, he wondered, after all, was it so unlike? He, too, was aiming at an
+art as clean and hard and powerful as Nicky's, as naked of all blazonry
+and decoration, an art which would attain its objective by the simplest,
+most perfect adjustment of means to ends.
+
+And Anthony was proud of that hidden wonder locked behind the door of
+the workshop in the orchard. He realized that his son Nicholas had taken
+part in a great and important thing. He was prouder of Nicholas than he
+had been of Michael.
+
+And Michael knew it.
+
+Nicky's brains could be used for the service of his country.
+
+But Michael's? Anthony said to himself that there wasn't any sense--any
+sense that he could endure to contemplate--in which Michael's brains
+could be of any use to his country. When Anthony thought of the
+mobilization of his family for national service, Michael and Michael's
+brains were a problem that he put behind him for the present and refused
+to contemplate. There would be time enough for Michael later.
+
+Anthony was perfectly well aware of his own one talent, the talent which
+had made "Harrison and Harrison" the biggest timber-importing firm in
+England. If there was one thing he understood it was organization. If
+there was one thing he could not tolerate it was waste of good material,
+the folly of forcing men and women into places they were not fit for. He
+had let his eldest son slip out of the business without a pang, or with
+hardly any pang. He had only taken Nicholas into it as an experiment.
+It was on John that he relied to inherit it and carry it farther.
+
+As a man of business he approved of the advertised formula: "Business as
+Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which England expected
+every man to do was to stay in the place he was most fitted for and to
+go where he was most wanted. Nothing but muddle and disaster could
+follow any departure from this rule.
+
+It was fitting that Frances and Veronica should do Red Cross work. It
+was fitting that Dorothy should help to organize the relief of the
+Belgium refugees. It was fitting that John should stay at home and carry
+on the business, and that he, Anthony, should enlist when he had settled
+John into his place. It was, above all, fitting that Nicky should devote
+himself to the invention and manufacture of armaments. He could not
+conceive anything more wantonly and scandalously wasteful than a system
+that could make any other use of Nicky's brains. He thanked goodness
+that, with a European War upon us, such a system, if it existed, would
+not be allowed to live a day.
+
+As for Michael, it might be fitting later--very much later--perhaps. If
+Michael wanted to volunteer for the Army then, and if it were necessary,
+he would have no right to stop him. But it would not be necessary.
+England was going to win this War on the sea and not on land. Michael
+was practically safe.
+
+And behind Frances's smile, and John's laughter, and Michael's
+admiration, and Anthony's pride there was the thought: "Whatever
+happens, Nicky will he safe."
+
+And the model of the Moving Fortress was packed up--Veronica and Nicky
+packed it--and it was sent under high protection to the War Office. And
+Nicky unlocked the door of his workshop and rested restlessly from
+his labour.
+
+And there was a call for recruits, and for still more recruits.
+
+Westminster Bridge became a highway for regiments marching to battle.
+The streets were parade-grounds for squad after squad of volunteers in
+civilian clothes, self-conscious and abashed under the eyes of the
+men in khaki.
+
+And Michael said: "This is the end of all the arts. Artists will not be
+allowed to exist except as agents for the recruiting sergeant.
+We're dished."
+
+That was the second grudge he had against the War. It killed the arts in
+the very hour of their renaissance. "Eccentricities" by Morton Ellis,
+with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, and the "New Poems" of Michael
+Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to have come out
+in September. But it was not conceivable that they should come out.
+
+At the first rumour of the ultimatum Michael and Ellis had given
+themselves up for lost.
+
+Liége fell and Namur was falling.
+
+And the call went on for recruits, and for still more recruits. And
+Nicky in five seconds had destroyed his mother's illusions and the whole
+fabric of his father's plans.
+
+It was one evening when they were in the drawing-room, sitting up after
+Veronica had gone to bed.
+
+"I hope you won't mind, Father," he said; "but I'm going to enlist
+to-morrow."
+
+He did not look at his father's face. He looked at his mother's. She was
+sitting opposite him on the couch beside Dorothy. John balanced himself
+on the head of the couch with his arm round his mother's shoulder. Every
+now and then he stooped down and rubbed his cheek thoughtfully
+against her hair.
+
+A slight tremor shook her sensitive, betraying upper lip; then she
+looked back at Nicholas and smiled.
+
+Dorothy set her mouth hard, unsmiling.
+
+Anthony had said nothing. He stared before him at Michael's foot, thrust
+out and tilted by the crossing of his knees. Michael's foot, with its
+long, arched instep, fascinated Anthony. He seemed to be thinking: "If I
+look at it long enough I may forget what Nicky has said."
+
+"I hope you won't mind, Father; but I'm enlisting too."
+
+John's voice was a light, high echo of Nicky's.
+
+With a great effort Anthony roused himself from his contemplation of
+Michael's foot.
+
+"I--can't--see--that my minding--or not minding--has anything--to
+do--with it."
+
+He brought his words out slowly and with separate efforts, as if they
+weighed heavily on his tongue. "We've got to consider what's best for
+the country all round, and I doubt if either of you is called upon
+to go."
+
+"Some of us have got to go," said Nicky.
+
+"Quite so. But I don't think it ought to be you, Nicky; or John,
+either."
+
+"I suppose," said Michael, "you mean it ought to be me."
+
+"I don't mean anything of the sort. One out of four's enough."
+
+"One out of four? Well then--"
+
+"That only leaves me to fight," said Dorothy.
+
+"I wasn't thinking of you, Michael. Or of Dorothy."
+
+They all looked at him where he sat, upright and noble, in his chair,
+and most absurdly young.
+
+Dorothy said under her breath: "Oh, you darling Daddy."
+
+"_You_ won't be allowed to go, anyhow," said John to his father. "You
+needn't think it."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well--." He hadn't the heart to say: "Because you're too old."
+
+"Nicky's brains will be more use to the country than my old carcass."
+
+Nicky thought: "You're the very last of us that can be spared." But he
+couldn't say it. The thing was so obvious. All he said was: "It's out of
+the question, your going."
+
+"Old Nicky's out of the question, if you like," said John. "He's going
+to be married. He ought to be thinking of his wife and children."
+
+"Of course he ought," said Anthony. "Whoever goes first, it isn't
+Nicky."
+
+"You ought to think of Mummy, Daddy ducky; and you ought to think of
+_us_," said Dorothy.
+
+"I," said John, "haven't got anybody to think of. I'm not going to be
+married, and I haven't any children."
+
+"I haven't got a wife and children yet," said Nicky.
+
+"You've got Veronica. You ought to think of her."
+
+"I am thinking of her. You don't suppose Veronica'd stop me if I wanted
+to go? Why, she wouldn't look at me if I didn't want to go."
+
+Suddenly he remembered Michael.
+
+"I mean," he said, "after my _saying_ that I was going."
+
+Their eyes met. Michael's flickered. He knew that Nicky was thinking of
+him.
+
+"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.
+
+"Of course she knows. _You_ aren't going to try to stop me, Mother?"
+
+"No," she said. "I'm not going to try to stop you--this time."
+
+She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would be safe
+now, with the Army in India."
+
+One by one they got up and said "Good night" to each other.
+
+But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.
+
+He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not enlisting. At
+any rate, _not yet_. Don't worry about Don and Daddy. They won't take
+Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his heart that he doesn't know
+about. He's going to be jolly well sold, poor chap. And they won't take
+the guv'nor because he's too old; though the dear old thing thinks he
+can bluff them into it because he doesn't look it.
+
+"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned, the War's
+a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the Army. You know
+how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now I'm going in and
+nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me out. Soon they'll all
+be as pleased as Punch about it.
+
+"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want to stick
+bayonets into German tummies, just _because_ they're so large and oodgy.
+You'd think of that first and all the time and afterwards. And I shan't
+think of it at all.
+
+"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons that I
+can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect yourself if
+you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I stayed out."
+
+"I wonder," Michael said, "if you really see it."
+
+"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing chaps. You
+seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves."
+
+When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really does see?
+Or if he made it all up?"
+
+They had not said to each other all that they had really meant. Of
+Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered vividly,
+"Not yet."
+
+Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up between him
+and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the two words:
+"Not yet."
+
+
+
+XX
+
+It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on
+account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn't
+know about.
+
+The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was under
+thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if he'd left it
+at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than most of 'em when he
+was stripped. But they'd given him so good an innings that the poor old
+thing got above himself, and spun them a yarn about his hair having gone
+grey from a recent shock. That dished him. They said they knew that sort
+of hair; they'd been seeing a lot of it lately.
+
+Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape," and
+declared that if that was the way things were going to be managed it was
+a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He said the man who
+examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know his own rotten
+business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to tell him they didn't
+want him dropping down dead when he went into action, or fainting from
+sheer excitement after they'd been to the trouble and expense of
+training him. As if he'd be likely to do a damn silly thing like that.
+He'd never been excited in his life. It was enough to _give_ him
+heart-disease.
+
+So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the
+ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they learned to their
+disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for
+Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.
+
+At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business by a
+sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the War would
+be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal
+significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate
+message for him was that business must be attended to. He had not
+attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay
+there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories.
+He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the
+glamour of the Front. The particular business in hand had great issues
+and a fascination of its own.
+
+And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a
+brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and
+abstracted soul.
+
+And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through the first
+courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind
+and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in
+earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder
+every day.
+
+And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael widened.
+
+With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's entire
+family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances
+and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red
+Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be
+sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained
+and ready when the moment of the summons came. Strong young girls
+hustled for the best places at the ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly
+women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless
+ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained
+by their extraordinary illusion.
+
+Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with
+bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if nobody
+else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral
+excitement, while still struggling to find each other's arteries,
+declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no earthly reason
+why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency
+class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage
+round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor. He got mixed up with
+his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a
+lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders
+to go to the Front.
+
+They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each other's
+hopes.
+
+For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had
+ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a curious
+gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael's
+study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the
+queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith
+over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline's head,
+and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie's little, clumsy,
+pinching fingers. It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and
+charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.
+
+And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out
+her lower lip at them.
+
+"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you
+might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every woman in
+England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have enough socks
+for his Army."
+
+Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted conspicuously, as a
+protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action
+an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even
+Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be
+unravelled overnight, to save the wool.
+
+"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting khaki!"
+
+Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as
+if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were
+interfering with them.
+
+Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men.
+The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers
+received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during
+the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the
+Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and
+disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late
+enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to
+its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture
+and embarassment.
+
+The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into
+the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and
+went into uniform.
+
+And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and
+puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance
+as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it.
+Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of
+the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon
+Street Station.
+
+She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street
+Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery
+of Belgium poured and was congested.
+
+Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of
+her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with
+the scene.
+
+Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred
+transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that
+was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light,
+filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes,
+hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and
+large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a
+ghastly, ruinous life.
+
+The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the
+immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of carriages packed tight
+with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and
+there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in
+the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.
+
+For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding wounds
+and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this one
+incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon Street
+Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the sequences of
+which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of men, women and
+children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they were staggering under
+those bundles along their straight, flat roads between the everlasting
+rows of poplars; their towns and villages flamed and smoked behind them;
+some of them, goaded like tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at
+their backs--yesterday. And this morning they were here, brave and gay,
+smiling at Dorothea as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their
+small children in her arms.
+
+And they were still proud of themselves.
+
+A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a large
+pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other a cage with
+a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and smiled, proud of
+herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A Belgium boy carried a
+paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He grinned at Dorothea, proud of
+himself because he had saved his grandfather. A young Flemish peasant
+woman pushed back the shawl that covered her baby's face to show her how
+pretty he was; she laughed because she had borne him and saved him.
+
+And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women and girls
+idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in trying to throw
+himself into a moving train because he thought his lost mother was in
+it. The ring screening the agony of a woman giving birth to her child on
+the platform. A death in the train; stiff, upturned feet at the end of a
+stretcher that the police-ambulance carried away.
+
+And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect
+safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and
+bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous
+longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the shells burst,
+and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads
+between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and
+flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger. She was not
+feeling anything now except the shame of her immunity.
+
+She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I were
+dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."
+
+Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were in
+Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could walk."
+
+Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians, because it
+was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate, were safe. Her
+father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not in it--yet; though
+of course he would be in it some time. She tried not to think too much
+about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next six months. And Frank was
+safe. Frank was training recruits. He had told her he might be kept
+indefinitely at that infernal job. But for that he would be fighting
+now. He wanted her to be sorry for him; and she was sorry for him. And
+she was glad too.
+
+One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till
+dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she found
+him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting for her by
+himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.
+
+"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait up here."
+
+She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust
+on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and
+hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.
+
+He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was the first
+time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose
+felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust
+and dirt of her; and he smiled. His smile had none of the cynical
+derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant
+suffragist.
+
+"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe me now."
+
+"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.
+
+"Not _yet_--worse luck."
+
+"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas, or
+what?"
+
+"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair off?"
+
+"They might. They might do anything. This is a most extraordinary war."
+
+"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."
+
+"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in him.
+
+"What did you think?"
+
+"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like business.
+Do you really mean it? Are you really going to Flanders?"
+
+"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she
+wasn't going _some_where?"
+
+He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And then:
+"It makes you look about eighteen."
+
+"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."
+
+"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that you're not
+eighteen? You're eight and twenty."
+
+"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you did,
+you wouldn't say so."
+
+"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made a
+pretty mess of each other's lives."
+
+"Have I made a mess of _your_ life?'
+
+"A beastly mess."
+
+"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known. You know
+I wouldn't.
+
+"But one doesn't know things."
+
+"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully well; but
+not the things that matter."
+
+"Well--but what could I do?" she said.
+
+"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married me. And
+we would have had three years of each other."
+
+"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't manage
+it."
+
+"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.
+
+"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I get
+leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three days."
+
+"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three
+days--No, it wasn't worth while.
+
+"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn't
+change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change. So, you see,
+it's got to be one thing or another."
+
+And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not worth
+while?
+
+"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There really
+isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what you like and
+do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I shan't care if
+you'll only marry me."
+
+"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love me. You
+never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all that."
+
+"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine years--ten
+years?"
+
+"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go off and
+get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.
+
+"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my
+face--filthy--you mustn't--"
+
+"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't care."
+
+The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He
+said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she
+keeps it on _now_!"
+
+She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a
+Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over
+her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her
+shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast
+to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the
+youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.
+
+He said to himself, "She _shall_ come alive. She _shall_ feel. She
+_shall want_ me. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten
+years ago."
+
+Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands.
+And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing something
+happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him
+now--to-night."
+
+Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what
+she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had
+made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.
+
+She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me if he
+knew."
+
+Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and
+hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.
+
+"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there
+was anything that could have prevented it."
+
+"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it
+made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the
+difference. And there we were."
+
+"It didn't--really."
+
+She shook her head. "We thought it did."
+
+"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?
+
+"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it.
+I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."
+
+"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that we seemed
+to go wrong.
+
+"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand
+going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I
+didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or
+wondered what you were feeling? _That's_ what put me off. It hurt so
+atrociously that I couldn't say anything.
+
+"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about nothing
+else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.
+
+"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't true. I
+was listening like anything."
+
+"Darling--what did I tell you?"
+
+"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your adventure, or
+something."
+
+"My adventure?"
+
+"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I
+couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's
+beyond me now."
+
+"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"
+
+"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something big and
+important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to bother me. I kept
+on trying to get it, and not getting it."
+
+"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully big and
+important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had happened to
+somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."
+
+"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of that
+business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."
+
+"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the War."
+
+"You're not swallowed up."
+
+"Perhaps I shall be."
+
+"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you to know
+that I understand what you were driving at. It was this way, wasn't it?
+You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You couldn't keep out of
+it any more than I can keep out of this War."
+
+"You couldn't stay out just for me any more than I can stay out for just
+you."
+
+"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way you were
+in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."
+
+"How clever of you," she said, "to see it!"
+
+"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a war on.
+We've both had to pay for my stupidity."
+
+"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see, or
+risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."
+
+"Well, anyhow, we've got this evening."
+
+"We haven't. I've got to drive Belgians from nine till past midnight."
+
+"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married in. I
+say--how about to-morrow evening?"
+
+"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know who'll
+drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married in, too."
+
+She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out. If he
+is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."
+
+It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch at their
+happiness and secure it, before their hour came.
+
+She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the British line
+was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of course it would
+recover. We always began like that. We went back to go forwards faster,
+when we got into our stride.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next evening, Thursday, the girl she knew drove for Dorothea.
+
+When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her with two
+frocks over her arm.
+
+"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell whether
+to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if it mattered
+more than anything. More than anything on earth."
+
+Frances considered it--Dorothea in her uniform, and the white frock and
+the blue frock.
+
+"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose to you
+in that get-up--"
+
+"Can't you see that I want to make up for _that_ and for all the things
+he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only I was as beautiful
+as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."
+
+"My dear--my dear--"
+
+Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as Nicky
+with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up Dorothy in
+khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and blue frocks, made
+Frances want to cry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy that he
+couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only have one hour
+to give her.
+
+Frances and Anthony looked at each other. But Dorothy looked at
+Veronica.
+
+"What's the matter, Ronny? You look simply awful."
+
+"Do I? My head's splitting. I think I'll go and lie down."
+
+"You'd better."
+
+"Go straight to bed," said Frances. "and let Nanna bring you some hot
+soup."
+
+But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to take
+herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "if she's going to worry herself sick about Nicky
+now--"
+
+Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.
+
+It was nine o'clock.
+
+At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought: "Supposing he
+hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely. If he hadn't got
+leave he would have said so when he telephoned.
+
+The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would hold her
+in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be afraid, and
+she would be afraid, and he would let her go.
+
+The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud and quick
+on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room to them,
+holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes shone with
+excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that narrowed his eyes and
+jerked his mouth slightly crooked.
+
+They all spoke at once. "You've got leave?" "_He's_ got it all right."
+"What kept you?" "You _have_ got leave?"
+
+His eyes still shone; his mouth still jerked, laughing.
+
+"Well, no," he said. "That's what I haven't got. In fact, I'm lucky to
+be here at all."
+
+Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat down on
+the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his spoon, and smiling
+as if at something pleasant that he knew, something that he would tell
+them presently when Nanna left the room.
+
+The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening intently
+for the click of the latch.
+
+"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off till you
+come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then they say
+they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that day.
+
+"Twelve hours isn't much notice to give a fellow."
+
+He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was speaking
+to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions about trains
+and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if he were not
+conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat, slowly stirring his
+coffee without drinking it. The vibration of her nerves made his answers
+sound muffled and far-off.
+
+She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing from her
+minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable longing to be
+alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what she had felt
+yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in yesterday, and
+refused to move on into to-day.
+
+Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they stopped
+talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would be the end.
+
+Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup he had
+not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea that for a
+moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small sound. She saw
+her mother take the cup from him and set it on the table.
+
+One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they were
+guilty, and left her alone with him.
+
+It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He sat
+there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance. He seemed
+to be wondering how she was going to take it.
+
+He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to make her
+want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left it."
+
+And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.
+
+She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be ready
+to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness he
+required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes implored
+her to put away from her.
+
+There was something more.
+
+He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is hard luck
+on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard for me." (She
+could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He knew she was brave;
+he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he knew he hadn't got to say
+the obvious things.
+
+There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her with the
+power and sweetness of first passion; but without its fear. She no
+longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her as he had held
+her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it vibrated to an
+intenser rhythm.
+
+She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that they were
+seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more than they. When
+realization passed it would endure.
+
+Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it, to say to
+each other what it was they felt and saw.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He said, "I shall have to go soon."
+
+And she said, "I know. Is there anything I can do?"
+
+"I wish you'd go and see my mother some time. She'd like it."
+
+"I should love to go and see her. What else?"
+
+"Well--I've no business to ask you, but I wish you'd give it up."
+
+"I'll give anything up. But what?"
+
+"That ambulance of yours that's going to get into the firing line."
+
+"Oh--"
+
+"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the hardest and
+most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it easier for us to win
+the War. You can't expect us to fight so comfy, and to be killed so
+comfy, if we know our womenkind are being pounded to bits in the ground
+we've just cleared. If I thought _you_ were knocking about
+anywhere there--"
+
+"It would make it too hard?"
+
+"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much time to
+think about it, but when I did--"
+
+"You'd think 'She might have spared me _that_.'"
+
+"Yes. And you might think of your people. It's bad enough for them,
+Nicky going."
+
+"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and where
+he'll be. That was natural."
+
+"It's also natural that we should like to find you here when we come
+back."
+
+"I was thinking of those Belgian women, and the babies--and England; so
+safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."
+
+"I know. Leaving the children in the burning house?"
+
+(She had said that once and he had remembered.)
+
+"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you to take
+the hardest job, really."
+
+"It isn't; if it's what you want most."
+
+He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and they
+were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous thing.
+
+"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about it. I
+want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."
+
+"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it's _your_ War,
+too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"
+
+"I know," she said.
+
+And then: "Have you got all your things?"
+
+"Somebody's got 'em."
+
+"I haven't given you anything. You must have my wrist-watch."
+
+She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.
+
+"My wrist's a whopper."
+
+"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's phosphorous," she
+said. "You can see the time by it in the dark."
+
+"I've nothing for _you_. Except--" he fumbled in his pockets--"I
+say--here's the wedding-ring."
+
+They laughed.
+
+"What more could you want?" she said.
+
+He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he stooped and
+kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But it was not like
+yesterday.
+
+Suddenly his face stiffened. "Tell them," he said, "that I'm going."
+
+The British were retreating from Mons.
+
+The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like the
+travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There was no
+end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no end to the
+German people. And there was no news of British reinforcements, or
+rumour of reinforcements.
+
+"They come on like waves. Like waves," said Dorothea, reading from the
+papers.
+
+"I wouldn't read about it if I were you, darling," said Frances.
+
+"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we don't."
+
+Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way
+before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat
+from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.
+
+Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours'
+notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it.
+They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least
+we could do for _them_ was to trust them, and not believe any tales of
+their retreating.
+
+And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By
+letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home,
+listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing
+of the bell.
+
+She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message
+came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child for me that my
+son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to
+come and see me; but not just yet."
+
+She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter from
+his Colonel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into Cannon Street
+Station.
+
+Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she
+could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned
+it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly,
+beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept,
+worn out with her hard day's driving.
+
+She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have
+had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.
+
+"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a
+brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died
+for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered.
+He said 'It's _your_ War--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's
+killed in it.
+
+"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for one
+night.
+
+"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was
+a coward. He got nothing."
+
+His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that
+prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a
+contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion.
+She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.
+
+Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they
+had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had
+dreamed it or made it up.
+
+Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The
+Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and
+it would take her car with it and a new driver.
+
+Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.
+
+"If I could only help you."
+
+"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave
+the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more
+often she hid away somewhere by herself.
+
+Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go
+to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's
+Veronica."
+
+But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to
+Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been
+killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He
+couldn't have had five hours' fighting.
+
+"And to be killed--Retreating.
+
+"He got nothing out of it but agony."
+
+Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know
+what he may have got in the last minute of it."
+
+"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to
+Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me.
+But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.
+
+"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"
+
+"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you, more
+alive."
+
+"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with
+it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:
+
+"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must
+have known that he would not come back."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I
+want you to see that my memory is fairly good."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for
+markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."
+
+The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah xxxv.
+and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:
+
+"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my
+fingers to fight."...
+
+"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and
+the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...
+
+... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall
+mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they
+shall walk and not faint."
+
+And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet and
+powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold again on the
+Reality they had seen and felt together.
+
+The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it lasted
+she was at peace.
+
+But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of remorse
+for all that she had wasted.
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had ceased to
+feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in vain for them.
+They did not believe that it had saved Paris.
+
+Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was no more
+Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were only a question
+of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there would be no more
+France. They were face to face with the further possibility of there
+being no more England.
+
+In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances were
+changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before the War,
+Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she would, after
+careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I like England. But I
+dislike the English people. They are narrow and hypocritical and
+conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs." At the time of the Boer
+War, beyond thinking that the British ought to win, and that they would
+win, and feeling a little spurt as of personal satisfaction when they
+did win, she had had no consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for
+loving it, she loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of
+mild, cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her
+house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as well
+talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once sat in
+peace under the tree of Heaven with her _Times_ newspaper, and flicked
+the affairs of the nation from her as less important than the stitching
+on her baby's frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else.
+She was sad, not because her son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling
+week by week, but because England was in danger; she was worried, not
+because Lord Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son
+Michael, but because she had found that the race was to the swift and
+the battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent
+sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she left
+her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City with
+Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office, receiving,
+packing, and sending off great cases of food and clothing to the
+Belgian soldiers.
+
+Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all well
+under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the Government
+persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber that swelled and
+shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and because officials
+wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them what he knew about
+timber, and because the head of a department had talked to _him_ about
+private firms and profiteering. As if any man with three sons under
+twenty-seven would want to make a profit out of the War; and as if they
+couldn't cut down everybody's profits if they took the trouble. They
+might cut his to the last cent so long as we had gun-carriages that
+would carry guns and rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was
+talking about and they didn't.
+
+And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who had
+once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it
+now. She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at
+the head of departments we should win the War. We were losing it for
+want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of
+organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud of him, not
+because he was her husband and the father of her children, but because
+he was a man who could help England. They were both proud of Michael and
+Nicholas and John, not because they were their sons, but because they
+were men who could fight for England.
+
+They found that they loved England with a secret, religious, instinctive
+love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man might stand and
+fight for, became, mysteriously and magically, dearer to them than their
+home. They loved England more than their own life or the lives of their
+children. Long ago they had realized that fathers do not beget children
+nor mothers bear them merely to gratify themselves. Now, in September
+and October, they were realizing that children are not begotten and born
+for their own profit and pleasure either.
+
+When they sat together after the day's work they found themselves saying
+the most amazing things to each other.
+
+Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better. I
+shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had been
+pleasant to him.
+
+And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of three,
+we ought to send them all."
+
+"Positively," said Anthony. "I believe I'd let Dorothy go out now if she
+insisted."
+
+"Oh, no, I think we might be allowed to keep Dorothy."
+
+She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I grudged
+giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if he went out
+to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how splendid it was
+of him."
+
+"I wish poor Dorothy could feel that way about Drayton."
+
+"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was his
+profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."
+
+He did not remind her that Frank's free will had counted in his choice
+of a profession.
+
+"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count more than
+the whole Army put together."
+
+They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing that sooner
+or later they must speak of it.
+
+Frances was the braver of the two. She spoke first.
+
+"There's Michael. I don't know what to make of him. He doesn't seem to
+want to go."
+
+That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably in
+secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something must be
+done about Michael.
+
+"I wish you'd say something to him, Anthony."
+
+"I would if I were going myself. But how can I?"
+
+"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you were young
+enough."
+
+"I can't say anything. You'll have to."
+
+"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky is the
+only one of us who has any right to."
+
+"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her way."
+
+"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."
+
+But in the end she did say something.
+
+She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding himself
+away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she thought, "as if he
+were ashamed of himself."
+
+Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious beauty of his
+young face; at the thick masses of his hair that would not stay as they
+were brushed back, but fell over his forehead; it was still yellow, and
+shining as it shone when he was a little boy.
+
+He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of verse on the
+white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came in lest she
+should see them. That hurt her.
+
+"Michael," she said, "I wonder if you _ever_ realize that we are at
+war."
+
+"The War isn't a positive obsession to me, if that's what you mean."
+
+"It isn't what I mean. Only--that when other people are doing so much--
+
+"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."
+
+"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If George
+Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."
+
+"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason, when so
+much more has been done for you than was ever done for him?"
+
+"It's no use trying to get at me."
+
+"England's fighting for her life," said Frances.
+
+"So's Germany.
+
+"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker hates
+Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear old Frau
+Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and Carl, and make
+Hedwig and Löttchen cry."
+
+"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George and
+Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."
+
+"Bayonetting isn't my business."
+
+"Your own safety is. How can you bear to let other men fight for you?"
+
+"They're not fighting for _me_, Mother. You ask them if they are, and
+see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God knows what; but
+they're no more fighting for me than they're fighting for Aunt
+Emmeline."
+
+"They _are_ fighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting for everything
+that's weak and defenceless."
+
+"Well, then, they're not fighting for me. I'm not weak and defenceless,"
+said Michael.
+
+"All the more shame for you, then."
+
+He smiled, acknowledging her score.
+
+"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the opening for
+a repartee. It was quite a nice one."
+
+"If," she said, "you were only _doing_ something. But you go on with
+your own things as though nothing had happened."
+
+"I _am_ doing something. I'm keeping sane. And I'm keeping sanity alive
+in other people."
+
+"Much you care for other people," said Frances as she left the room.
+
+But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him again. She
+went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his room.
+
+"_Well?_" he said.
+
+"It's no use. He won't go."
+
+And Frances, quite suddenly and to her own surprise, burst into tears.
+
+He drew her to him, and she clung to him, sobbing softly.
+
+"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's as
+obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."
+
+He pressed her tighter to him. He loved her in her unfamiliar weakness,
+crying and clinging to him.
+
+"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm glad he
+didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to him, I couldn't
+bear to be the one who made him go."
+
+After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.
+
+They were silent.
+
+"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.
+
+But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.
+
+"He must know that _public_ feeling's pretty strong against him. To say
+nothing of _my_ feeling and _your_ feeling."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his father and
+his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't bear to look at
+Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her
+way as much as possible.
+
+As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he against
+it.
+
+But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these
+antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go.
+Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had always
+offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul. From his very
+first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had
+seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective
+emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils
+and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that
+challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of
+what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more
+appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their
+Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one
+monstrous soul.
+
+And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment,
+was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the
+awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and
+from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine
+emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you
+and you were done for. He was determined that it shouldn't get him. They
+couldn't see--and that was Michael's grievance--that his resistance was
+his strength and not his weakness.
+
+Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize
+that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the same entity
+as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the party, who had
+wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of
+forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted to remember." He was
+Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about
+shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the
+other fellows were doing. He objected to being suddenly required to feel
+patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that
+Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was
+in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.
+
+Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.
+
+He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that
+he resented. There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and
+tyranny about it all.
+
+It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to fight. He
+had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight any day in a
+cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a cause that had not
+been messed about so much by other people. Other people had not put
+pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact they had tried to stop
+him. Michael was also aware that in the matter of Ireland his emotions,
+though shared by considerable numbers of the Irish people, were not
+shared by his family or by many people whom he knew; to all intents and
+purposes he had them to himself.
+
+It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and mother, for
+they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the more he would
+seem to them to be a shirker.
+
+He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff,
+reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's silence
+when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their eyes--his
+mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the unspoken question:
+"Why don't you go and get killed--for England--like other people?"
+
+Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible, palpable; he
+knew where he was with them. What he could not stand was that empty
+spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him where he was most
+vulnerable--in his imagination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.
+
+It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion, and your
+religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored Beauty as the
+supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else; if you lived,
+impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive; and for no other end,
+how could you consent to take part in this bloody business? That would
+be the last betrayal, the most cowardly surrender.
+
+And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one of the
+leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the world, of all
+the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For Michael, even more than Ellis, had given himself up as lost.
+
+And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect. When the
+young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed it with a calm,
+high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on, without pay, without
+praise, without any sort of recognition. Any fool could fight; but, if
+you were an artist, your honour bound you to ignore the material
+contest, to refuse, even to your country, the surrender of the highest
+that you knew. They believed with the utmost fervour and sincerity that
+they defied Germany more effectually, because more spiritually, by going
+on and producing fine things with imperturbability than if they went out
+against the German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they
+were restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.
+
+They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly, on
+Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease (but rather
+less than more) in Stephen's study.
+
+They had asked each other: "Are _you_ going to fight for your country?"
+
+And Ellis had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country; and
+Mitchell had said he hadn't got a country, so there was no point in his
+fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could show him a country
+that cared for the arts before anything he'd fight for it; but that
+England was very far from being that country.
+
+And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.
+
+And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not listening to
+what was said.
+
+And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral. Michael
+said to himself that he could stand these massed war emotions if they
+were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral who
+had never cared a damn about either before the War.
+
+Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired whether
+Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral?
+
+Michael shrugged his shoulders. "Why bother," he said, "about Rheims
+Cathedral and Louvain? From your point of view it's all right. If
+Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the enemy's artillery
+they've got to go. They didn't happen to be in the way of ours,
+that's all."
+
+Michael's mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its malady.
+He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of the Allies and
+to justify the acts of Germany.
+
+"It's up to the French to defend Paris. And what have we got to do with
+Alsace-Lorraine? As if every inteligent Frenchman didn't know that
+Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt. No. I'm not pro-German. I simply
+see things as they are."
+
+"I think," Frances would say placably, "we'd better not talk about the
+War."
+
+He would remind them that it was not his subject.
+
+And John laughed at him. "Poor old Nick hates the War because it's
+dished him. He knows his poems can't come out till it's over."
+
+As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.
+
+After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris. As Stephen pointed
+out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael. In magnificent
+defiance of the enemy, the "New Poems" of Michael Harrison, with
+illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as forthcoming in
+October; and Morton Ellis's "Eccentricities," with illustrations by
+Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month. Even Wadham's poems
+would come out some time, perhaps next spring.
+
+Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War Office as
+posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the morale of the
+Allied Armies. "If England could afford to publish Michael--"
+
+Michael's family made no comment on the appearance of his poems. The
+book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for weeks.
+When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none of his
+people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or hold it in
+their hands. It seemed to Michael that they were conscious of it all the
+time, and that they turned their faces away from it pointedly. They
+hated it. They hated him for having written it.
+
+He remembered that it had been different when his first book had come
+out two years ago. They had read that; they had snatched at all the
+reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was that they
+had missed.
+
+They had taken each other aside, and it had been:
+
+"Anthony, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+"Dorothy, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+"Nicky, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+He remembered his mother's apology for not understanding them: "Darling,
+I _do_ see that they're very beautiful." He remembered how he had wished
+that they would give up the struggle and leave his poems alone. They
+were not written for them. He had been amused and irritated when he had
+seen his father holding the book doggedly in front of him, his poor old
+hands twitching with embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was
+looking at him.
+
+And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was
+sensitive to the least quiver of his mother's upper lip.
+
+Veronica's were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did not hunt
+him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.
+
+Veronica had been rejected too. She was not strong enough to nurse in
+the hospitals. She was only strong enough to work from morning to night,
+packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the Belgian soldiers. She
+wanted Michael to be sorry for her because she couldn't be a nurse.
+Rosalind Jervis was a nurse. But he was not sorry. He said he would very
+much rather she didn't do anything that Rosalind did.
+
+"So would Nicky," he said.
+
+And then: "Veronica, do _you_ think I ought to enlist?"
+
+The thought was beginning to obsess him.
+
+"No," she said; "you're different.
+
+"I know how you feel about it. Nicky's heart and soul are in the War. If
+he's killed it can only kill his body. _Your_ soul isn't in it. It would
+kill your soul."
+
+"It's killing it now, killing everything I care for."
+
+"Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can't kill."
+
+That was one Sunday evening in October. They were standing together on
+the long terrace under the house wall. Before them, a little to the
+right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree rose over the garden.
+The curved and dipping branches swayed and swung in a low wind that
+moved like quiet water.
+
+"Michael," she said, "do look what's happening to that tree."
+
+"I see," he said.
+
+It made him sad to look at the tree; it made him sad to look at
+Veronica--because both the tree and Veronica were beautiful.
+
+"When I was a little girl I used to sit and look and look at that tree
+till it changed and got all thin and queer and began to move towards me.
+
+"I never knew whether it had really happened or not; I don't know
+now--or whether it was the tree or me. It was as if by looking and
+looking you could make the tree more real and more alive."
+
+Michael remembered something.
+
+"Dorothy says you saw Ferdie the night he died."
+
+"So I did. But that's not the same thing. I didn't have to look and
+look. I just saw him. I _sort_ of saw Frank that last night--when the
+call came--only sort of--but I knew he was going to be killed.
+
+"I didn't see him nearly so distinctly as I saw Nicky-"
+
+"Nicky? You didn't see him--as you saw Ferdie?"
+
+"No, no, no! it was ages ago--in Germany--before he married. I saw him
+with Desmond."
+
+"Have you ever seen me?"
+
+"Not yet. That's because you don't want me as they did."
+
+"Don't I! Don't I!"
+
+And she said again: "Not yet."
+
+Nicky had had leave for Christmas. He had come and gone.
+
+Frances and Anthony were depressed; they were beginning to be
+frightened.
+
+For Nicky had finished his training. He might be sent out any day.
+
+Nicky had had some moments of depression. Nothing had been heard of the
+Moving Fortress. Again, the War Office had given no sign of having
+received it. It was hard luck, he said, on Drayton.
+
+And John was depressed after he had gone.
+
+"They'd much better have taken me," he said.
+
+"What's the good of sending the best brains in the Army to get pounded?
+There's Drayton. He ought to have been in the Ordnance. He's killed.
+
+"And here's Nicky. Nicky ought to be in the engineers or the gunners or
+the Royal Flying Corps; but he's got to stand in the trenches and
+be pounded.
+
+"Lot they care about anybody's brains. Drayton could have told Kitchener
+that we can't win this war without high-explosive shells. So
+could Nicky.
+
+"You bet they've stuck all those plans and models in the sanitary
+dust-bin behind the War Office back door. It's enough to make Nicky blow
+his brains out."
+
+"Nicky doesn't care, really," Veronica said. "He just leaves things--and
+goes on."
+
+That night, after the others had gone to bed, Michael stayed behind with
+his father.
+
+"It must look to you," he said, "as if I ought to have gone instead of
+Nicky."
+
+"I don't say so, Michael. And I'm sure Nicky wouldn't."
+
+"No, but you both think it. You see, if I went I shouldn't be any good
+at it. Not the same good as Nicky. He wants to go and I don't. Can't you
+see it's different?"
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "I see. I've seen it for some time."
+
+And Michael remembered the night in August when his brother came to him
+in his room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beauty--the Forlorn Hope of God--if he cared for it supremely, why was
+he pursued and tormented by the thought of the space between him
+and Nicky?
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Michael had gone to Stephen's house.
+
+He was no longer at his ease there. It seemed to him that Lawrence's
+eyes followed him too; not with hatred, but with a curious
+meditative wonder.
+
+To-night Stephen said to him, "Did you know that Réveillaud's killed?"
+
+"Killed? Killed? I didn't even know he was fighting."
+
+Lawrence laughed. "What did you suppose he was doing?"
+
+"No--but how?"
+
+"Out with the patrol and shot down. There you are--"
+
+He shoved the _Times_ to him, pointing to the extract from _Le Matin_:
+"It is with regret that we record the death of M. Jules Réveillaud, the
+brilliant young poet and critic--"
+
+Michael stared at the first three lines; something in his mind prevented
+him from going on to the rest, as if he did not care to read about
+Réveillaud and know how he died.
+
+"It is with regret that we record the death. It is with regret that we
+record--with regret--"
+
+Then he read on, slowly and carefully, to the end. It was a long
+paragraph.
+
+"To think," he said at last, "that this revolting thing should have
+happened to him."
+
+"His death?"
+
+"No--_this_. The _Matin_ never mentioned Réveillaud before. None of the
+big papers, none of the big reviews noticed his existence except to
+sneer at him. He goes out and gets killed like any little bourgeois, and
+the swine plaster him all over with their filthy praise. He'd rather
+they'd spat on him."
+
+He meditated fiercely. "Well--he couldn't help it. He was conscripted."
+
+"You think he wouldn't have gone of his own accord?"
+
+"I'm certain he wouldn't."
+
+"And I'm certain he would."
+
+"I wish to God we'd got conscription here. I'd rather the Government
+commandeered my body than stand this everlasting interference with
+my soul."
+
+"Then," said Lawrence, "you'll not be surprised at my enlisting."
+
+"You're not--"
+
+"I am. I'd have been in the first week if I'd known what to do about
+Vera."
+
+"But--it's--it's not sane."
+
+"Perhaps not. But it's Irish."
+
+"Irish? I can understand ordinary Irishmen rushing into a European row
+for the row's sake, just because they haven't got a civil war to mess
+about in. But you--of all Irishmen--why on earth should _you_ be in it?"
+
+"Because I want to be in it."
+
+"I thought," said Michael, "you were to have been a thorn in England's
+side?"
+
+"So I was. So I am. But not at this minute. My grandmother was a hard
+Ulster woman and I hated her. But I wouldn't be a thorn in my
+grandmother's side if the old lady was assaulted by a brutal voluptuary,
+and I saw her down and fighting for her honour.
+
+"I've been a thorn in England's side all my life. But it's nothing to
+the thorn I'll be if I'm killed fighting for her."
+
+"Why--why--if you want to fight in the civil war afterwards?"
+
+"Why? Because I'm one of the few Irishmen who can reason straight. I was
+going into the civil war last year because it was a fight for freedom.
+I'm going into this War this year because it's a bigger fight for a
+bigger freedom.
+
+"You can't have a free Ireland without a free England, any more than you
+can have religious liberty without political liberty. If the Orangemen
+understood anything at all about it they'd see it was the Nationalists
+and the Sinn Feiners that'll help them to put down Catholicism
+in Ireland."
+
+"You think it matters to Ireland whether Germany licks us or we lick
+Germany?"
+
+"I think it matters to the whole world."
+
+"What's changed you?" said Michael.
+
+He was angry with Lawrence. He thought: "He hasn't any excuse for
+failing us. He hasn't been conscripted."
+
+"Nothing's changed me. But supposing it didn't matter to the whole
+world, or even to Europe, and supposing the Allies were beaten in the
+end, you and I shouldn't be beaten, once we'd stripped ourselves,
+stripped our souls clean, and gone in.
+
+"Victory, Michael--victory is a state of mind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity.
+
+He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he had
+said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not making it easy
+now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered about him,
+fluttering with anxiety.
+
+When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for Veronica.
+
+Veronica said, "You must let him go."
+
+"I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's over age.
+He's no more fit than I am."
+
+"You'll have to, sooner or later."
+
+"Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let them
+come and take him."
+
+"It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll tear at you
+if you keep him."
+
+"He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his tearing.
+I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded, paralysed, broken
+to pieces."
+
+"You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully."
+
+"I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once. But he
+came back. He can't really do without me."
+
+"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and what he
+wants most."
+
+"_I_ used to be what he wanted most."
+
+"Well--it's his honour now."
+
+"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy. They're men
+and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a woman.
+
+"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep him--they say
+you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the way you go on!"
+
+"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have kept Nicky
+for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him. She wants
+Michael to go."
+
+"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are lying.
+Either they don't care--they're just _lumps_, with no hearts and no
+nerves in them--or they lie.
+
+"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each other,
+like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael sick."
+
+"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut about
+and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and
+sentimentalizing--
+
+"Lying--lying--lying."
+
+"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it
+sends them off happy?"
+
+"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever happened to us.
+I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my life."
+
+"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up. You were a
+miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you look as if every
+drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens. If that's
+your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself. It seems to be all
+you've got."
+
+"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it _would_ have been
+all I've got."
+
+Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really
+was. The child was not a child any more. She was a woman, astonishingly
+and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in;
+they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with
+perfect accuracy.
+
+"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still, you can
+thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony."
+
+Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's your
+beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're keeping
+him for."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She knew; and Lawrence knew.
+
+That night he told her that if he hadn't wanted to enlist he'd be driven
+to it to get away from her.
+
+And she was frightened and held her tongue.
+
+Then she got desperate. She did things. She intrigued behind his back to
+keep him; and he found her out.
+
+He came to her, furious.
+
+"You needn't lie about it," he said. "I know what you've done. You've
+been writing letters and getting at people. You've told the truth about
+my age and you've lied about my health. You've even gone round cadging
+for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press Bureau and the
+Intelligence Department, and God only knows whether I'm supposed to have
+put you up to it."
+
+"I took care of that, Larry."
+
+"You? You'd no right to interfere with my affairs."
+
+"Hadn't I? Not after living with you seven years?"
+
+"If you'd lived with me seven centuries you'd have had no right to try
+to keep a man back from the Army."
+
+"I'm trying to keep a man's brain for my country."
+
+"You lie. It's my body you're trying to keep for yourself. As you did
+when I was going to Ireland."
+
+"Oh, then--I tried to stop you from being a traitor to England. They'd
+have hanged you, my dear, for that."
+
+"Traitor? It's women like you that are the traitors. My God, if there
+was a Government in this country that could govern, you'd be strung up
+in a row, all of you, and hanged."
+
+"No wonder you think you're cut out for a soldier. You're cruel enough."
+
+"_You're_ cruel. I'd rather be hanged than live with you a day longer
+after what you've done. A Frenchman shot his _wife_ the other day for
+less than that."
+
+"What was 'less than that'?" she said.
+
+"She crawled after him to the camp, like a bitch.
+
+"He sent her away and she came again and again. He _had_ to shoot her."
+
+"Was there nothing to be said for her?"
+
+"There was. She knew it was a big risk and she took it. _You_ knew you
+were safe while you slimed my honour."
+
+"She loved him, and he shot her, and you think that's a fine thing.
+_How_ she must have loved him!"
+
+"Men don't want to be loved that way. That's the mistake you women will
+make."
+
+"It's the way you've taught us. I should like to know what other way you
+ever want us to love you?"
+
+"The way Veronica loves Nicky, and Dorothy loved Drayton and Frances
+loves Anthony."
+
+"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."
+
+"Men's lives aren't ruined that way. And not all women's."
+
+"Well, anyhow, if she'd loved him she'd have married him. And Frances
+loves her children better than Anthony, and Anthony knows it."
+
+"Veronica, then."
+
+"Veronica doesn't know what passion is. The poor child's anæmic."
+
+"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have more
+passion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."
+
+"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her eyelashes
+instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."
+
+He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.
+
+"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the Front.
+It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and pose as
+heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and mistresses--they're tired
+of because the poor things aren't young or pretty any longer."
+
+She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her. "I'm
+old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and uglier. And
+I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How _can_ I keep you when
+I'm old and ugly?"
+
+He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always worked
+in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained with crying.
+
+"That's how--by getting older.
+
+"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were when I
+first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm sure I
+love you."
+
+She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.
+
+"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they believe
+you; but not me."
+
+"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were married to
+me I should have enlisted months ago.
+
+"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm sick and
+tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with it. I'd rather
+be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house of yours."
+
+"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it now?"
+
+"Everything. Those damned lime-trees all round it. And that damned white
+wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.
+
+"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.
+
+"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.
+
+"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones,
+drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis
+are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk's
+the divinest thing in God's universe.
+
+"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my life--the
+one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from it."
+
+They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the next. And
+Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to train it upwards in
+the way she hated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the moustache
+stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He was another
+man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she hated him or not.
+
+But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best gown to
+do honour to his khaki.
+
+She said, "It'll be like living with another man."
+
+"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.
+
+And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her passion
+for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to violence, to
+perversity.
+
+And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out of her
+reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where he was
+stationed.
+
+"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot me?"
+
+"I might shoot _myself_. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear from me
+again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.
+
+She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent, till
+she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he had gone
+she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a sort of peace.
+She told herself that she would rather he were killed soon than that she
+should be tortured any longer with suspense.
+
+"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind. That
+would end it."
+
+And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers for fear
+lest she should see his name in the lists.
+
+But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement, and
+died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.
+
+The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before he died.
+She gave details and a message.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to forgive him
+and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought it would be (he
+means the fighting) only much more so--all except this last bit.
+
+"He wants you to tell Michael and Dicky?--Nicky?--that. He says: 'It's
+odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'
+
+"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go to the
+War.)"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"8.30. It is all over.
+
+"He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his love."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Vera said to herself: "He didn't. She made that up."
+
+She hated the Red Cross woman who had been with Lawrence and had seen so
+much; who had dared to tell her what he meant and to make up messages.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+Nicholas had applied for a commission, and he had got it, and Frances
+was glad.
+
+She had been proud of him because he had chosen the ranks instead of the
+Officers' Training Corps; but she persisted in the belief that, when it
+came to the trenches, second lieutenants stood a better chance. "For
+goodness' sake," Nicholas had said, "don't tell her that they're over
+the parapet first."
+
+That was in December. In February he got a week's leave--sudden,
+unforeseen and special leave. It had to be broken to her this time that
+leave as special as that meant war-leave.
+
+She said, "Well, if it does, I shall have him for six whole days." She
+had learned how to handle time, how to prolong the present, drawing it
+out minute by minute; thus her happiness, stretched to the snapping
+point, vibrated.
+
+She had a sense of its vibration now, as she looked at Nicholas. It was
+the evening of the day he had come home, and they were all in the
+drawing-room together. He was standing before her, straight and tall, on
+the hearthrug, where he had lifted the Persian cat, Timmy, out of his
+sleep and was holding him against his breast. Timmy spread himself
+there, softly and heavily, hanging on to Nicky's shoulder by his claws;
+he butted Nicky's chin with his head, purring.
+
+"I don't know how I'm to tear myself away from Timmy. I should like to
+wear him alive as a waistcoat. Or hanging on my shoulder like a cape,
+with his tail curled tight round my neck. He'd look uncommonly _chic_
+with all his khaki patches."
+
+"Why don't you take him with you?" Anthony said.
+
+"'Cos he's Ronny's cat."
+
+"He isn't. I've given him to you," Veronica said.
+
+"When?"
+
+"Now, this minute. To sleep on your feet and keep you warm."
+
+Frances listened and thought: "What children--what babies they are,
+after all." If only this minute could be stretched out farther.
+
+"I mustn't," Nicky said. "I should spend hours in dalliance; and if a
+shell got him it would ruin my morale."
+
+Timmy, unhooked from Nicky's shoulder, lay limp in his arms. He lay on
+his back, in ecstasy, his legs apart, showing the soft, cream-white fur
+of his stomach. Nicky rubbed his face against the soft, cream-white fur.
+
+"I say, what a heavenly death it would be to die--smothered in Timmies."
+
+"Nicky, you're a beastly sensualist. That's what's the matter with you,"
+John said. And they all laughed.
+
+The minute broke, stretched to its furthest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances was making plans now for Nicky's week. There were things they
+could do, plays they could see, places they could go to. Anthony would
+let them have the big car as much as they wanted. For you could stretch
+time out by filling it; you could multiply the hours by what they held.
+
+"Ronny and I are going to get married to-morrow," Nicky said. "We
+settled it that we would at once, if I got war-leave. It's the best
+thing to do."
+
+"Of course," Frances said, "it's the best thing to do."
+
+But she had not allowed for it, nor for the pain it gave her. That pain
+shocked her. It was awful to think that, after all her surrenders,
+Nicky's happiness could give her pain. It meant that she had never let
+go her secret hold. She had been a hypocrite to herself.
+
+Nicky was talking on about it, excitedly, as he used to talk on about
+his pleasures when he was a child.
+
+If Dad'll let us have the racing car, we'll go down to Morfe. We can do
+it in a day."
+
+"My dear boy," Anthony said, "don't you know I've lent the house to the
+Red Cross, and let the shooting?"
+
+"I don't care. There's the little house in the village we can have. And
+Harker and his wife can look after us."
+
+"Harker gone to the War, and his wife's looking after his brother's
+children somewhere. And I've put two Belgian refugees into it."
+
+"_They_ can look after us," said Nicky. "We'll stay three days, run
+back, and have one day at home before I sail."
+
+Frances gave up her play with time. She was beaten.
+
+And still she thought: "At least I shall have him one whole day."
+
+And then she looked across the room to Michael, as if Michael's face
+had signalled to her. His clear, sun-burnt skin showed blotches of white
+where the blood had left it. A light sweat was on his forehead. When
+their eyes met, he shifted his position to give himself an appearance
+of ease.
+
+Michael had not reckoned on his brother's marriage, either. It was when
+he asked himself: "On what, then, _had_ he been reckoning?" that the
+sweat broke out on his forehead.
+
+He had not reckoned on anything. But the sudden realization of what he
+might have reckoned on made him sick. He couldn't bear to think of Ronny
+married. And yet again, he couldn't bear to think of Nicky not marrying
+her. If he had had a hold on her he would have let her go. In this he
+knew himself to be sincere. He had had no hold on her, and to talk about
+letting her go was idiotic; still, there was a violent pursuit and
+possession by the mind--and Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy,
+that psychic assault and outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual
+surrender of her was so perfect that his very imagination gave her up
+to Nicky.
+
+He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing could
+take their three days from them, even when the War had done its worst.
+
+And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she think I
+was reckoning on that?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead Town
+Hall, before the Registrar.
+
+They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying and
+circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky said, whole
+handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals, with a clear run
+before him, he let out the racing car to its top speed on the Great
+North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed like some immense,
+nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all its weight were purged
+from it by speed. It flew up and down the hills of Hertfordshire and
+Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat country round Peterborough and
+Grantham, a country of silver green and emerald green grass and purple
+fallow land and bright red houses; and so on to the great plain of York,
+and past Reyburn up towards the bare hill country netted with grey
+stone walls.
+
+Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road.
+
+It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed enormous
+and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen moon. Other
+hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous, stood piled up in
+front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale.
+
+Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was as if,
+ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that incredibly high,
+immense obstruction. They were thrilled, mysteriously, as before the
+image of monstrous and omnipotent disaster. Then the dale widened; it
+made way for them and saved them.
+
+The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a coronet
+and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights of the village
+below, the village they were making for, showed as if dropped out of the
+pattern on the hill.
+
+One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage chamber.
+Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch to receive
+them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage torches. The old
+woman held her light low down, lighting the flagstone of the threshold.
+The old man lifted his high, showing the lintel of the door. It was so
+low that Nicholas had to stoop to go in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning they read the date cut in the wall above the porch: 1665.
+
+The house was old and bent and grey. Its windows were narrow slits in
+the stone mullions. It crouched under the dipping boughs of the ash-tree
+that sheltered it. Inside there was just room for Veronica to stand up.
+Nicholas had to stoop or knock his head against the beams. It had only
+four rooms, two for Nicholas and Veronica, and two for Jean and Suzanne.
+And it was rather dark.
+
+But it pleased them. They said it was their apple-tree-house grown up
+because they were grown up, and keeping strict proportions. You had to
+crawl into it, and you were only really comfortable sitting or lying
+down. So they sat outside it, watching old Suzanne through the window as
+she moved about the house place, cooking Belgian food for them, and old
+Jean as he worked in the garden.
+
+Veronica loved Jean and Suzanne. She had found out all about them the
+first morning.
+
+"Only think, Nicky. They're from Termonde, and their house was burnt
+behind them as they left it. They saw horrors, and their son was killed
+in the War.
+
+"Yet they're happy and at peace. Almost as if they'd forgotten. He'll
+plant flowers in his garden."
+
+"They're old, Ronny. And perhaps they were tired already when it
+happened."
+
+"Yes, that must be it. They're old and tired."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now it was the last adventure of their last day. They were walking
+on the slope of Renton Moor that looks over Rathdale towards Greffington
+Edge. The light from the west poured itself in vivid green down the
+valley below them, broke itself into purple on Karva Hill to the north
+above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle blue and violet from the
+stone rampart of the Edge.
+
+Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources of the
+country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge, on Sarrack
+Moor. The raking lines of the hills were straight as if they had been
+measured with a ruler and then planed.
+
+"Ronny," he said at last, "we've licked 'em in the first round, you and
+I. The beastly Boche can't do us out of these three days."
+
+"No. We've been absolutely happy. And we'll never forget it. Never."
+
+"Perhaps it was a bit rough on Dad and Mummy, our carting ourselves up
+here, away from them. But, you see, they don't really mind. They're
+feeling about it now just as we feel about it. I knew they would."
+
+There had been a letter from Frances saying she was glad they'd gone.
+She was so happy thinking how happy they were.
+
+"They're angels, Nicky."
+
+"Aren't they? Simply angels. That's the rotten part of it. I wish--
+
+"I wish I could tell them what I think of them. But you can't, somehow.
+It sticks in your throat, that sort of thing."
+
+"You needn't," she said; "they know all right."
+
+She thought: "This is what he wants me to tell them about--afterwards."
+
+"Yes, but--I must have hurt them--hurt them horribly--lots of times. I
+wish I hadn't.
+
+"But" he went on, "they're funny, you know. Dad actually thought it
+idiotic of us to do this. He said it would only make it harder for us
+when I had to go. They don't see that it's just piling it on--going from
+one jolly adventure to another.
+
+"I'm afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on you;
+because the rest of it's all my show."
+
+"But it isn't all your show, Nicky darling. It's mine, and it's
+theirs--because we haven't grudged you your adventure."
+
+"That's exactly how I want you to feel about it."
+
+"And they're assuming that I shan't come back. Which, if you come to
+think of it, is pretty big cheek. They talk, and they think, as though
+nobody ever got through. Whereas I've every intention of getting through
+and of coming back. I'm the sort of chap who does get through, who does
+come back."
+
+"And even if I wasn't, if they studied statistics they'd see that it's a
+thousand chances to one against the Boches getting me--just me out of
+all the other chaps. As if I was so jolly important.
+
+"No; don't interrupt. Let's get this thing straight while we can.
+Supposing--just supposing I didn't get through--didn't come
+back--supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to think
+of _that_, not as a clumsy accident, but just another awfully
+interesting thing I'd done.
+
+"Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you took
+the thing as a shock instead of--of what it probably really is, and went
+and got cut up about it, you might start the little beggar with a sort
+of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that it would be jumpy
+all its life.
+
+"It ought," said Nicky, "to sit in its little house all quiet and comfy
+till it's time for it to come out."
+
+He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might be, what
+probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted more than
+anything, next to Veronica.
+
+"It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy."
+
+"If _that_ came off all right," he said, "it would make it up to Mother
+no end."
+
+"It wouldn't make it up to me."
+
+"You don't know what it would do," he said.
+
+She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but you."
+
+"That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of kin--the one
+they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way; it'll only make him
+madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid of you or Mummy or Dad, or
+Michael being told first."
+
+"It doesn't matter a bit who's _told_ first. I shall _know_ first," she
+said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't kill either me or the baby.
+If a shock could kill me I should have died long ago."
+
+"When?"
+
+"When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear it any
+longer, something happened."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't know what it _is_ now; I only know what it does.
+It always happens--always--when you want it awfully. And when you're
+quiet and give yourself up to it."
+
+"It'll happen again."
+
+He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite interested;
+puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if something had come
+between him and her.
+
+"You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so that when
+things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to happen to
+Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she was absolutely
+happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came to her. And, Nicky,
+they were the same queer things that came to me. It was like something
+getting through to her."
+
+"I say--did you ever do it to me?"
+
+"Only once, when you wanted it awfully."
+
+"When? When?"
+
+Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her trail.
+
+"When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it didn't
+matter, it wasn't the end."
+
+"But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself. It looks
+as if it worked, then?"
+
+"It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with _you_ it would
+always come; because you're more _me_ than other people; I mean I care
+more for you."
+
+She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother about me,
+Nicky. If _the_ most awful thing happened, and you didn't come back, It
+would come."
+
+"I wish I knew what It was," he said.
+
+"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's God."
+
+"That's why _they're_ so magnificently brave--Dorothy and Aunt Frances
+and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't know it's there;
+even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and still they go on bearing
+and bearing; and they were glad to give you up."
+
+"I know," he said; "lots of people _say_ they're glad, but they really
+_are_ glad."
+
+He meditated.
+
+"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's praying or
+something; and if you're going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you'd
+be careful; because it seems to me that if there's anything in it at
+all, there might be hitches. I mean to say, you might work it just
+enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from
+being blown off. Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might
+bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic.
+
+"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I thought
+about it. Luckily one doesn't think."
+
+"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than I tried
+before."
+
+"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"
+
+"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin with, I
+won't believe that you're not going to get through.
+
+"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't believe
+you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to something
+else. It doesn't end him.'"
+
+He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a
+pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to.
+
+Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind talking about
+it?" she said.
+
+"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I believe
+in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling, that you go on.
+You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't care. They used to
+think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn't care. But I really
+didn't. Things, most things, don't much matter, because there's always
+something else. You go on to it.
+
+"I care for _you_. _You_ matter most awfully; and my people; but most of
+all you. You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the
+first time I heard you calling out to me to come and sit on your bed
+because you were frightened. You always will matter.
+
+"But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make me
+_think_ she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her because she
+was going to have a baby. And _that_ was because I remembered you and
+the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would have kept me straight
+with women if nothing else did.
+
+"Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying you till
+Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too late.
+
+"That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby."
+
+"Yes, Nicky.
+
+"I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The cottage
+belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?"
+
+"I think he'd give it to you if you asked him."
+
+"For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll give it to
+me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where it's all quiet
+and you'd never know there was a war at all--even the Belgians have
+forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look at that hill, because
+it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I simply won't think of anything
+that isn't straight and beautiful. And I shall get strong. Then the baby
+will be straight and beautiful and strong, too.
+
+"I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little things
+that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and she, to be on
+the edge of something great, something satisfying and revealing. It was
+to come in a look or a word; and both would remember it afterwards
+for ever.
+
+In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline, and
+Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say good-bye.
+And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited and happy, as he
+had gone off on his wedding journey. And between Frances and her son the
+great thing remained unsaid.
+
+Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine sand.
+
+
+     _February 27th, 1915._
+          B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you all for
+the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long way, that's been
+seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it because it "looked as
+if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It makes me feel as if I
+_was_ Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs, rampant, clawing at the Boches.
+Just think of the effect if he got up over the parapet!
+
+The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't think what
+else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those tubes of chutney are
+a good idea.
+
+No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no English
+and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to himself, you
+simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old Mick could send
+himself out by himself against the whole German Army he'd manage to put
+in some first rate fancy work in the second or two before they got him.
+He'd be quite capable of going off and doing grisly things that would
+make me faint with funk, if he was by himself, with nothing but the eye
+of God to look at him. And _then_ he'd rather God wasn't there. He
+always _was_ afraid of having a crowd with him.
+
+The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were you two,
+I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he is
+the youngest.
+
+And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest curtain
+fire there _are_ holes; there are more holes than there is stuff; and
+the chances are I shall be where a hole is.
+
+Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight for you
+like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's going to get
+you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of personal
+resentment which must be the worst part of the business. Bits of shells
+that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew all about before
+and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted out in the open, the
+peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is it more than the peculiar
+awfulness of being run over by express trains let loose about the sky?
+Tell Don that when shrapnel empties itself over your head like an old
+tin pail, you might feel injured, but the big shell has a most disarming
+air of not being able to help itself, of not looking for anybody in
+particular. It's so innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it
+any day than fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe.
+
+That's an answer to his question.
+
+And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action.
+Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I told
+her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but Stephen was
+absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than anything you could
+have imagined. I'm not speaking only for myself.
+
+There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between your
+parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it too--when you're
+afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before you get there. But it
+doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply swinging you on to them, and
+that swing makes up for all the rotten times put together. You needn't
+be sorry for us. It's waste of pity.
+
+I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us. But I'm
+not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving,
+
+     NICKY.
+
+               May, 1915.
+          B.E.F., FRANCE
+
+My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when you
+loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you needn't
+do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the papers more or
+less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith is saying or what
+Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's motives are. Personally, I
+should say he was simply trying, like most of us, to save his country.
+Looks like it. But you can tell him from me, if he gets them to send us
+enough shells out _in time_ we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow
+that sort of thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much
+better than you, if you don't mind my saying so.
+
+What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the last
+sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my billet for
+one of his _worst_ jokes. And I like to hear about Morrie going on the
+bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if it really is anxiety
+about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd leave off thinking about me,
+poor old thing.
+
+More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's looking and
+what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot, and she may tell
+you things she won't tell the others. That's why I'm glad you're there
+and not here.
+
+And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel about it. I
+think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were a "putrid
+Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes me like
+religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say,
+but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't
+take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that
+expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it
+isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead
+of the Government, you'd have been in at the start, before me.
+
+Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never can
+tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those of us who
+are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a long way. There's
+no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the finish; so that the
+patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to join up will be jolly well
+sold, poor devils. Take me, for instance. If I'd got what I wanted and
+been out in Flanders in 1914, ten to one I should have been in the
+retreat from Mons, like Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have
+given my head to have gone to Gallipoli; but _now_, well, I'm just as
+glad I'm not mixed up in that affair.
+
+Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you can get
+out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to win the War.
+At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the Rhine, while all
+the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash on the way there. So
+if you're going to be converted let's hope you'll be converted quick.
+
+If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight away.
+There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a Tommy. For
+instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your brother Tommies. I
+slept for three months next to a beastly blighter who used to come in
+drunk and tread on my face and be ill all over me.
+
+Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything that's
+happened out here. But that's because at home your mind isn't adjusted
+to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise to me every time.
+I _couldn't_ get used to him. Whereas out here everything's shifted in
+the queerest way. Your mind shifts. You funk your first and your second
+sight, say, of a bad stretcher case; but when it comes to the third and
+the fourth you don't funk at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit
+surprised. It's all in the picture, and you're in the picture too.
+There's a sort of horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly
+dream which doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the
+beastliness.
+
+No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what d'you
+think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run over the
+other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian at that.
+There were two or three women round it, crying and gesticulating. It
+looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath of blood. That made me
+sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the picture. I hadn't
+bargained for him.
+
+Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa--do you remember how he
+_would_ tell us about them?--weren't in it with the things that happened
+here. Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do, apparently on
+their own, are simply unbelievable--what the war correspondents call
+"fantastic postures." But I haven't got to the point when I can slap my
+thighs, and roar with laughter--if they happen to be Germans.
+
+In between, the boredom is so awful that I've heard some of our men say
+they'd rather have things happening. And, of course, we're all hoping
+that when those shells come along there won't be quite so much
+"between."
+
+Love to Ronny and Mother and all of them.--Your very affectionate,
+
+     NICHOLAS.
+
+
+          June 1st, 1915.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+My Darling Ronny,--Yes, I think all your letters must have come, because
+you've answered everything. You always tell me just what I want to know.
+When I see the fat envelopes coming I know they're going to be
+chock-full of the things I've happened to be thinking about. Don't let's
+ever forget to put the dates, because I make out that I've always
+dreamed about you, too, the nights you've written.
+
+And so the Aunties are working in the War Hospital Supply Depôt? It's
+frightfully funny what Dorothy says about their enjoying the War and
+feeling so important. Don't let her grudge it them, though; it's all the
+enjoyment, or importance, they're ever had in their lives, poor dears.
+But I shall know, if a swab bursts in my inside, that it's Auntie
+Edie's. As for Auntie Emmeline's, I can't even imagine what they'd be
+like--monstrosities--or little babies injured at birth. Aunt Louie's
+would be well-shaped and firm, but erring a little on the hard side,
+don't you think?
+
+That reminds me, I suppose I may tell you now since it's been in the
+papers, that we've actually got Moving Fortresses out here. I haven't
+seen them yet, but a fellow who has thinks they must be uncommonly like
+Drayton's and my thing. I suspect, from what he says, they're a bit
+better, though. We hadn't got the rocking-horse idea.
+
+It's odd--this time last year I should have gone off my head with agony
+at the mere thought of anybody getting in before us; and now I don't
+care a bit. I do mind rather for Drayton's sake, though I don't suppose
+he cares, either. The great thing is that it's been done, and done
+better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the Germans had got on to
+them, and trotted them out first, and one of our own guns had potted him
+or me, _that_ would have been a jolly sell.
+
+What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the awful
+thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the base hospital
+on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock, and--_he never came
+back again_. It doesn't matter, because the weather's so warm now that I
+don't want him. But I'm sorry because you all gave him to me and it
+looks as if I hadn't cared for him. But I did....
+
+     June 10th.
+
+Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather
+suddenly. I wish I could tell you _what_, but we mustn't let on what
+happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still, there are all
+the other things I couldn't say anything about at the time.
+
+If you _must_ know, I've been up "over the top" three times now since I
+came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all right.
+
+Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's been like
+that every time (except that I've got over the queer funky feeling
+half-way through). It'll be like that again next time, I know. Because
+now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't tell Dorothy this, because
+she'd think it was all rot--but when you're up first out of the trench
+and stand alone on the parapet, it's absolute happiness. And the charge
+is--well, it's simply heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till
+then; I certainly hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three
+days we had together.
+
+That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something rotten
+about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this
+gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's trying for) is
+nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks that's all there is in
+it, he doesn't know much about war, or love either. Though I'm bound to
+say there's a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing. He
+says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same
+as I do; but that it's simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the
+top--a hidden lust for killing, and the hidden memory of having killed,
+he called it. He's always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had
+been drunk.
+
+And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but "a
+ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give mine to a
+funny chap who _knows_ he's going to have collywobbles as soon as he
+gets out into the open.
+
+But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it, because
+they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of being killed.
+_That_--when you realize it--well, it's like the thing you told me about
+that you said you thought must be God because it's so real. I didn't
+understand it then, but I do now. You're bang up against reality--you're
+going clean into it--and the sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while
+one half of you is feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill
+and doing its best to keep on _this_ side reality. But I've been near
+enough to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come
+out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick. _He_'d
+write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's a sin that I
+should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't do anything
+with it.
+
+Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your loving,
+
+     NICKY.
+
+P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and Dorothy and
+Mother. It would save them half the misery they're probably
+going through.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the garden,
+weeding the delphinium border.
+
+It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was digging in
+the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering green peas and
+fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came through the open
+door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace with the piled up
+baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to Veronica.
+
+It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came, Veronica
+could time it by the striking of the clock heard through the open
+doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and then, almost
+on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious happiness.
+
+Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity made each
+small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged at the weeds,
+and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the palms of her hand
+smoothed over the places where they had been. She thought of old Jean
+and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at Renton, and of that
+tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest thing she had ever seen.
+
+And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the half-hour, not
+out of herself or out of her thoughts, but mysteriously and from
+somewhere a long way off.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through the door
+with her basket, and it was then that she saw Nicholas.
+
+He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised between her
+and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested in the act of
+looking back to see if she were following him. His eyes shone, vivid and
+blue, as they always shone when he was happy. He smiled at her, but
+with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to her, but with no sound.
+
+Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her heart was
+still; it beat steadily.
+
+She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust itself
+between them, and he was gone.
+
+And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had seen her
+when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of the sun.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+The young men had gone--Morton Ellis, who had said he was damned if he'd
+fight for his country; and Austin Mitchell who had said he hadn't got a
+country; and Monier-Owen, who had said that England was not a country
+you could fight for. George Wadham had gone long ago. That, Michael
+said, was to be expected. Even a weak gust could sweep young Wadham off
+his feet--and he had been fairly carried away. He could no more resist
+the vortex of the War than he could resist the vortex of the arts.
+
+Michael had two pitiful memories of the boy: one of young Wadham
+swaggering into Stephen's room in uniform (the first time he had it on),
+flushed and pleased with himself and talking excitedly about the "Great
+Game"; and one of young Wadham returned from the Front, mature and hard,
+not talking about the "Great Game" at all, and wincing palpably when
+other people talked; a young Wadham who, they said, ought to be arrested
+under the Defence of the Realm Act as a quencher of war-enthusiasms.
+
+The others had gone later, one by one, each with his own gesture:
+Mitchell and Monier-Owen when Stephen went; Ellis the day after
+Stephen's death. It had taken Stephen's death to draw him.
+
+Only Michael remained.
+
+He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going would
+inspire him to follow them. It, and Stephen's death, merely intensified
+the bitterness he felt towards the War. He was more than ever determined
+to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to his Forlorn Hope. If they
+fell back, all the more reason why be should go on.
+
+And, while he waited for the moment of vision, he continued Stephen's
+work on the _Green Review_. Stephen had left it to him when he went out.
+Michael tried to be faithful to the tradition he thus inherited; but
+gradually Stephen's spirit disappeared from the _Review_ and its place
+was taken by the clear, hard, unbreakable thing that was Michael's mind.
+
+And Michael knew that he was beginning to make himself felt.
+
+But Stephen's staff, such as it was, and nearly all his contributors had
+gone to the War, one after another, and Michael found himself taking all
+their places. He began to feel a strain, which he took to be the strain
+of overwork, and he went down to Renton to recover.
+
+That was on the Tuesday that followed Veronica's Sunday.
+
+He thought that down there he would get away from everything that did
+him harm: from his father's and mother's eyes; from his sister's proud,
+cold face; and from his young brother's smile; and from Veronica's
+beauty that saddened him; and from the sense of Nicky's danger that
+brooded as a secret obsession over the house. He would fill up the awful
+empty space. He thought: "For a whole fortnight I shall get away from
+this infernal War."
+
+But he did not get away from it. On every stage of the journey down he
+encountered soldiers going to the Front. He walked in the Park at
+Darlington between his trains, and wounded soldiers waited for him on
+every seat, shuffled towards him round every turning, hobbled after him
+on their crutches down every path. Their eyes looked at him with a
+shrewd hostility. He saw the young Yorkshire recruits drinking in the
+open spaces. Sergeants' eyes caught and measured him, appraising his
+physique. Behind and among them he saw Drayton's, and Réveillaud's, and
+Stephen's eyes; and young Wadham's eyes, strange and secretive and hard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Reyburn Michael's train was switched off to a side platform in the
+open. Before he left Darlington, a thin, light rain had begun to fall
+from a shred of blown cloud; and at Reyburn the burst mass was coming
+down. The place was full of the noise of rain. The drops tapped on the
+open platform and hissed as the wind drove them in a running stream.
+They drummed loudly on the station roof. But these sounds went out
+suddenly, covered by the trampling of feet.
+
+A band of Highlanders with their bagpipes marched into the station. They
+lined up solemnly along the open platform with their backs to Michael's
+train and their faces to the naked rails on the other side. Higher up
+Michael could see the breast of an engine; it was backing, backing,
+towards the troop-train that waited under the cover of the roof. He
+could hear the clank of the coupling and the recoil. At that sound the
+band had their mouths to their bagpipes and their fingers ready on the
+stops. Two or three officers hurried down from the station doors and
+stood ready.
+
+The train came on slowly, packed with men; men who thrust their heads
+and shoulders through the carriage windows, and knelt on the seats, and
+stood straining over each other's backs to look out; men whose faces
+were scarlet with excitement; men with open mouths shouting for joy.
+
+The officers saluted as it passed. It halted at the open platform, and
+suddenly the pipers began to play.
+
+Michael got out of his train and watched.
+
+Solemnly, in the grey evening of the rain, with their faces set in a
+sort of stern esctasy, the Highlanders played to their comrades. Michael
+did not know whether their tune was sad or gay. It poured itself into
+one mournful, savage, sacred cry of salutation and valediction. When it
+stopped the men shouted; there were voices that barked hoarsely and
+broke; voices that roared; young voices that screamed, strung up by the
+skirling of the bagpipes. The pipers played to them again.
+
+And suddenly Michael was overcome. Pity shook him and grief and an
+intolerable yearning, and shame. For one instant his soul rose up above
+the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he cowered under it,
+stripped and beaten. He clenched his fists, hating this emotion that
+stung him to tears and tore at his heart and at the hardness of
+his mind.
+
+As the troop-train moved slowly out of the station the pipers, piping
+more and more shrilly, swung round and marched beside it to the end of
+the platform. The band ceased abruptly, and the men answered with shout
+after shout of violent joy; they reared up through the windows,
+straining for the last look--and were gone.
+
+Michael turned to the porter who lifted his luggage from the rack. "What
+regiment are they?" he said.
+
+"Camerons, sir. Going to the Front."
+
+The clear, uncanny eyes of Veronica's father pursued him now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last he had got away from it.
+
+In Rathdale, at any rate, there was peace. The hills and their pastures,
+and the flat river fields were at peace. And in the villages of Morfe
+and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few men had gone from
+them. The rest were tied to the land, and they were more absorbed in the
+hay-harvest than in the War. Even the old Belgians in Veronica's cottage
+were at peace. They had forgotten.
+
+For three days Michael himself had peace.
+
+He went up to Veronica's hill and sat on it; and thought how for
+hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was not a
+soul whom he knew. In all his life he had never been more by himself.
+
+This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael's mind. So far
+from having got away from the War he had never been more conscious of it
+than he was now. What he had got away from was other people's
+consciousness. From the beginning the thing that threatened him had
+been, not the War but this collective war-spirit, clamouring for his
+private soul.
+
+For the first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found himself
+thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity, about the War.
+He had really known, half the time, that it was the greatest War of
+Independence that had ever been. As for his old hatred of the British
+Empire, he had seen long ago that there was no such thing, in the
+continental sense of Empire; there was a unique thing, the rule, more
+good than bad, of an imperial people. He had seen that the strength of
+the Allies was in exact proportion to the strength and the enlightenment
+of their democracies. Reckoning by decades, there could be no deadlock
+in the struggle; the deadlock meant a ten years' armistice and another
+war. He could not help seeing these things. His objection to occupying
+his mind with them had been that they were too easy.
+
+Now that he could look at it by himself he saw how the War might take
+hold of you like a religion. It was the Great War of Redemption. And
+redemption meant simply thousands and millions of men in troop-ships and
+troop-trains coming from the ends of the world to buy the freedom of the
+world with their bodies. It meant that the very fields he was looking
+over, and this beauty of the hills, those unused ramparts where no
+batteries were hid, and the small, silent villages, Morfe and Renton,
+were bought now with their bodies.
+
+He wondered how at this moment any sane man could be a Pacifist. And,
+wondering, he felt a reminiscent sting of grief and yearning. But he
+refused, resolutely, to feel any shame.
+
+His religion also was good; and, anyhow, you didn't choose your
+religion; it chose you.
+
+And on Saturday the letters came: John's letter enclosing the wire from
+the War Office, and the letter that Nicky's Colonel had written
+to Anthony.
+
+Nicky was killed.
+
+Michael took in the fact, and the date (it was last Sunday). There were
+some official regrets, but they made no impression on him. John's letter
+made no impression on him. Last Sunday Nicky was killed.
+
+He had not even unfolded the Colonel's letter yet. The close black lines
+showed through the thin paper. Their closeness repelled him. He did not
+want to know how his brother had died; at least not yet. He was afraid
+of the Colonel's letter. He felt that by simply not reading it he could
+put off the unbearable turn of the screw.
+
+He was shivering with cold. He drew up his chair to the wide, open
+hearth-place where there was no fire; he held out his hands over it. The
+wind swept down the chimney and made him colder; and he felt sick.
+
+He had been sitting there about an hour when Suzanne came in and asked
+him if he would like a little fire. He heard himself saying, "No, thank
+you," in a hard voice. The idea of warmth and comfort was disagreeable
+to him. Suzanne asked him then if he had had bad news? And he heard
+himself saying: "Yes," and Suzanne trying, trying very gently, to
+persuade him that it was perhaps only that Monsieur Nicky was wounded?
+
+"No? _Then_," said the old woman, "he is killed." And she began to cry.
+
+Michael couldn't stand that. He got up and opened the door into the
+outer room, and she passed through before him, sobbing and whimpering.
+Her voice came to him through the closed door in a sharp cry telling
+Jean that Monsieur Nicky was dead, and Jean's voice came, hushing her.
+
+Then he heard the feet of the old man shuffling across the kitchen
+floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and through the
+windows at the back of the room, he saw, without heeding, as the
+Belgians passed and went up into the fields together, weeping, leaving
+him alone.
+
+They had remembered.
+
+It was then that Michael read the Colonel's letter, and learned the
+manner of his brother's death: "... About a quarter past four o'clock in
+the afternoon his battalion was being pressed back, when he rallied his
+men and led them in as gallant an attack as was ever made by so small a
+number in this War. He was standing on the enemy's parapet when he was
+shot through the heart and fell. By a quarter to five the trench was
+stormed and taken, owing to his personal daring and impetus and to the
+affection and confidence he inspired.... We hear it continually said of
+our officers and men that 'they're all the same,' and I daresay as far
+as pluck goes they are. But, if I may say so, we all felt that your son
+had something that we haven't got...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael lay awake in the bed that had been his brother's marriage bed.
+The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him. For three nights the
+room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had never gone from it. They had
+compelled him to think of them. They had lain where he lay, falling
+asleep in each other's arms.
+
+The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them had in no
+way troubled him. It had been simply there like some exquisite
+atmosphere, intensifying his peace. He had had the same feeling he
+always had when Veronica was with him. He had liked to lie with his head
+on their pillow, to touch what they had touched, to look at the same
+things in the same room, to go in and out through the same doors over
+the same floors, remembering their hands and feet and eyes, and saying
+to himself: "They did this and this"; or, "That must have pleased them."
+
+It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine why it
+was not.
+
+And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of Nicky and
+Veronica together. The room had emptied itself of its own memory and
+significance. He was aware of nothing but the bare, spiritual space
+between him and Nicky. He lay contemplating it steadily and without
+any horror.
+
+He thought: "This ends it. Of course I shall go out now. I might have
+known that this would end it. _He_ knew."
+
+He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night in
+August. He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed,
+half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.
+
+Nicky had taken it for granted even then that he would go out some time.
+He remembered how he had said, "Not yet."
+
+He thought: "Of course; this must have been what he meant."
+
+And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time appeased.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was morning.
+
+Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as he
+struggled to wake.
+
+Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came clear out
+of this drowning.
+
+Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last Sunday. He knew that. But that
+wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed on--
+
+Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be killed
+too. And because he was going out, and because he would be killed, he
+was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should have thought he
+would have felt it. He had been let off that.
+
+He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do, feeling
+a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and Réveillaud and Lawrence
+had gone out, and they had been killed. Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen were going out and they would certainly be killed. Wadham
+had gone out and young Vereker, and they also would be killed.
+
+Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.
+
+His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without concern. It
+was aware that his going depended on his own will. But never in all his
+life had he brought so little imagination to the act of willing.
+
+He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast. He
+accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or concern.
+
+Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other things: "I
+know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know how you cared
+for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not bear it, Michael, if
+we were not so proud of him."
+
+He answered this letter at once. He wrote: "I couldn't bear it either,
+if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now."
+
+As he signed himself, "Your loving Michael," he thought: "That settles
+it." Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it he would
+have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night had settled it;
+that his resolution had been absolutely self-determined and absolutely
+irrevocable then, and that his signature gave it no more sanctity or
+finality than it had already. If he was conscript, he was conscript to
+his own will.
+
+He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the post did
+not leave Renton for another five hours.
+
+It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the letter-box
+that shook him into realization of what he had done and of what was
+before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to write that letter
+and to post it. By those two slight acts, not dreadful nor difficult in
+themselves, he had put it out of his power to withdraw from the one
+supremely difficult and dreadful act. A second ago, while the letter was
+still in his hands, he could have backed out, because he had not given
+any pledge. Now he would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly
+for the first time what it was that he would have to go through.
+
+He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along the top
+for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and seeing nothing
+before him but his own act and what must come afterwards. By to-morrow,
+or the next day at the latest, he would have enlisted; by six months, at
+the latest, three months if he had what they called "luck," he would be
+in the trenches, fighting and killing, not because he chose, but because
+he would be told to fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that
+letter to his mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.
+
+And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying that he
+didn't funk it.
+
+Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked looking on at
+fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn't think he would
+really mind that so much. It would come--it must come--as a relief from
+the horrors he would have to see before it came. Nicky had said that
+they were unbelievable; he had seemed to think you couldn't imagine them
+if you hadn't seen them. But Michael could. He had only to think of them
+to see them now. He could make war-pictures for himself, in five
+minutes, every bit as terrifying as the things they said happened under
+fire. Any fool, if he chose to think about it, could see what must
+happen. Only people didn't think. They rushed into it without seeing
+anything; and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it,
+before and during and afterwards and all the time.
+
+Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that the
+others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very well to
+say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as their phrase was,
+"Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far as he was concerned,
+the end of beauty and of the making of beauty, and of everything worth
+caring for; but it was also the beginning of a life that Michael dreaded
+more than fighting and killing and being killed: a life of boredom, of
+obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection. For
+of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he
+could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed
+beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he
+could smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.
+
+Of course he was going through with it; only--this was the thought his
+mind turned round and round on in horror at itself--he funked it. He
+funked it so badly that he would really rather die than go through with
+it. When he was actually killed that would be his second death; months
+before it could happen he would have known all about it; he would have
+been dead and buried and alive again in hell.
+
+What shocked Michael was his discovering, not that he funked it now,
+which was natural, almost permissible, but that he had funked it all the
+time. He could see now that, since the War began, he had been struggling
+to keep out of it. His mind had fought every suggestion that he should
+go in. It had run to cover, like a mad, frightened animal before the
+thoughts that hunted it down. Funk, pure funk, had been at the bottom of
+all he had said and thought and done since August, nineteen-fourteen;
+his attitude to the War, his opinion of the Allies, and of the
+Government and of its conduct of the War, all his wretched criticisms
+and disparagements--what had they been but the very subterfuges
+of funk?
+
+His mother had known it; his father had known it; and Dorothy and John.
+It was not conceivable that Nicky did not know it.
+
+That was what had made the horror of the empty space that separated
+them.
+
+Lawrence Stephen had certainly known it.
+
+He could not understand his not knowing it himself, not seeing that he
+struggled. Yet he must have seen that Nicky's death would end it.
+Anyhow, it _was_ ended; if not last night, then this morning when he
+posted the letter.
+
+But he was no longer appeased by this certainty of his. He was going out
+all right. But merely going out was not enough. What counted was the
+state of mind in which you went. Lawrence had said, "Victory--Victory is
+a state of mind."
+
+Well--it was a state that came naturally to Nicky, and did not come
+naturally to him. It was all very well for Nicky: he had wanted to go.
+He had gone out victorious before victory. Michael would go beaten
+before defeat.
+
+He thought: "If this is volunteering, give me compulsion." All the same
+he was going.
+
+All morning and afternoon, as he walked and walked, his thoughts went
+the same round. And in the evening they began again, but on a new track.
+He thought: "It's all very well to say I'm going; but how _can_ I go?"
+He had Lawrence Stephen's work to do; Lawrence's Life and Letters were
+in his hands. How could he possibly go and leave Lawrence dead and
+forgotten? This view seemed to him to be sanity and common sense.
+
+As his mind darted up this turning it was driven back. He saw Lawrence
+Stephen smiling at him as he had smiled at him when Réveillaud died.
+Lawrence would have wanted him to go more than anything. He would have
+chosen to be dead and forgotten rather than keep him.
+
+At night these thoughts left him. He began to think of Nicky and of his
+people. His father and mother would never be happy again. Nicky had been
+more to them than he was, or even John. He had been more to Dorothy. It
+was hard on Dorothy to lose Nicky and Drayton too.
+
+He thought of Nicky and Veronica. Poor little Ronny, what would she do
+without Nicky? He thought of Veronica, sitting silent in the train, and
+looking at him with her startling look of spiritual maturity. He thought
+of Veronica singing to him over and over again:
+
+     "London Bridge is broken down--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "Build it up with gold so fine--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "Build it up with stones so strong--"
+
+He thought of Veronica running about the house and crying, "Where's
+Nicky? I want him."
+
+Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in the
+morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of Renton
+Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way as yesterday.
+The images were, if anything, more crowded and more horrible; but they
+had lost their hold. He was tired of looking at them.
+
+About five o'clock he turned abruptly and went back to the village the
+same way by which he came.
+
+And as he swung down the hill road in sight of Renton, suddenly there
+was a great clearance in his soul.
+
+When he went into the cottage he found Veronica there waiting for him.
+She sat with her hands lying in her lap, and she had the same look he
+had seen when she was in the train.
+
+"Ronny--"
+
+She stood up to greet him, as if it had been she who was staying there
+and he who had incredibly arrived.
+
+"They told me you wouldn't be long," she said.
+
+"I? You haven't come because you were ill or anything?"
+
+She smiled and shook her head. "No. Not for anything like that."
+
+"I didn't write, Ronny. I couldn't."
+
+"I know." Their eyes met, measuring each other's grief. "That's why I
+came. I couldn't bear to leave you to it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'd have come before, Michael, if you'd wanted me."
+
+They were sitting together now, on the settle by the hearth-place.
+
+"I can't understand your being able to think of me," he said.
+
+"Because of Nicky? If I haven't got Nicky it's all the more reason why I
+should think of his people."
+
+He looked up. "I say--how are they? Mother and Father?"
+
+"They're very brave.
+
+"It's worse for them than it is for me," she said. "What they can't bear
+is your going."
+
+"Mother got my letter, then?"
+
+"Yes. This morning."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"She said: 'Oh, no. _Not_ Michael.'
+
+"It was a good thing you wrote, though. Your letter made her cry. It
+made even Dorothy cry. They hadn't been able to, before."
+
+"I should have thought if they could stand Nicky's going--"
+
+"That was different. They know it was different."
+
+"Do you suppose _I_ don't know how different it was? They mean I funked
+it and Nicky didn't."
+
+"They mean that Nicky got what he wanted when he went, and that there
+was nothing else he could have done so well, except flying, or
+engineering."
+
+"It comes to the same thing, Nicky simply wasn't afraid."
+
+"Yes, Michael, he _was_ afraid."
+
+"What _of_?"
+
+"He was most awfully afraid of seeing suffering."
+
+"Well, so am I. And I'm afraid of suffering myself too. I'm afraid of
+the whole blessed thing from beginning to end."
+
+"That's because you keep on seeing the whole blessed thing from
+beginning to end. Nicky only saw little bits of it. The bits he liked.
+Machine-guns working beautifully, and shells dropping in the right
+places, and trenches being taken.
+
+"And then, remember--Nicky hadn't so much to give up."
+
+"He had you."
+
+"Oh, no. He knew that was the way to keep me."
+
+"Ronny--if Nicky had been like me could he have kept you?"
+
+She considered it.
+
+"Yes--if he could have been himself too."
+
+"He couldn't, you see. He never could have felt like that."
+
+"I don't say He could."
+
+"Well--the awful thing is 'feeling like that.'"
+
+"And the magnificent thing is 'feeling like that,' and going all the
+same. Everybody knows that but you, Michael."
+
+"Yes," he said. "I'm _going_. But I'm not going to lie about it and say
+I don't funk it. Because I do."
+
+"You don't _really_."
+
+"I own I didn't the first night--the night I knew Nicky was killed.
+Because I couldn't think of anything else _but_ Nicky.
+
+"It was after I'd written to Mother that it came on. Because I knew then
+I couldn't back out of it. That's what I can't get over--my having to do
+that--to clinch it--because I was afraid."
+
+"My dear, my dear, thousands of men do that every day for the same
+reason, only they don't find themselves out; and if they did they
+wouldn't care. You're finding yourself out all the time, and killing
+yourself with caring."
+
+"Of course I care. Can't you see it proves that I never meant to go at
+all?"
+
+"It proves that you knew you'd have to go through hell first and you
+were determined that even hell shouldn't keep you back."
+
+"Ronny--that's what it _has_ been. Simply hell. It's been inconceivable.
+Nothing--absolutely nothing out there could be as bad. It went on all
+yesterday and to-day--till you came."
+
+"I know, Michael. That's why I came."
+
+"To get me out of it?"
+
+"To get you out of it.
+
+"It's all over," she said.
+
+"It may come back--out there."
+
+"It won't. Out there you'll be happy. I saw Nicky on Sunday--the minute
+before he was killed, Michael. And he was happy."
+
+"He would be." He was silent for a long time.
+
+"Ronny. Did Nicky know I funked it?"
+
+"Never! He knew you wouldn't keep out. All he minded was your missing
+any of it."
+
+She got up and put on her hat. "I must go. It's getting late. Will you
+walk up to Morfe with me? I'm sleeping there. In the hotel."
+
+"No, I say--I'm not going to let you turn out for me. _I_'ll sleep at
+the hotel."
+
+She smiled at him with a sort of wonder, as if she thought: "Has he
+forgotten, so soon?" And he remembered.
+
+"I can't stop here," she said. "That would be more than even _I_ can
+bear."
+
+He thought: "She's gone through hell herself, to get me out of it."
+
+          May, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER,--Yes, "Captain," please. (I can hardly
+believe it myself, but it is so.) It was thundering good luck getting
+into dear old Nicky's regiment. The whole thing's incredible. But
+promotion's nothing. Everybody's getting it like lightning now. You're
+no sooner striped than you're starred.
+
+I'm glad I resisted the Adjutant and worked up from the ranks. I own it
+was a bit beastly at the time--quite as beastly as Nicky said it would
+be; but it was worth while going through with it, especially living in
+the trenches as a Tommy. There's nothing like it for making you know
+your men. You can tell exactly what's going to bother them, and what
+isn't. You've got your finger on the pulse of their morale--not that
+it's jumpier than yours; it isn't--and their knowing that they haven't
+got to stand anything that you haven't stood gives you no end of a pull.
+Honestly, I don't believe I could have faced them if it wasn't for that.
+So that _your_ morale's the better for it as well as theirs. You know,
+if you're shot down this minute it won't matter. The weediest Tommy in
+your Company can "carry on."
+
+_We_'re a funny crowd in my billet all risen from the ranks except my
+Senior. John would love us. There's a chap who writes short stories and
+goes out very earnestly among the corpses to find copy; and there's
+another who was in the publishing business and harks back to it, now and
+then, in a dreamy nostalgic way, and rather as if he wanted to rub it
+into us writing chaps what he _could_ do for us, only he wouldn't; and
+there's a tailor who swears he could tell a mile off where my tunic came
+from; and a lawyer's clerk who sticks his cigarette behind his ear. (We
+used to wonder what he'd do with his revolver till we saw what he did
+with it.) They all love thinking of what they've been and telling you
+about it. I almost wish I'd gone into Daddy's business. Then perhaps I'd
+know what it feels like to go straight out of a shop or an office into
+the most glorious Army in history.
+
+I forgot the Jew pawnbroker at least we _think_ he's a pawnbroker--who's
+always inventing things; stupendous and impossible things. His last idea
+was machine-howitzers fourteen feet high, that take in shells exactly as
+a machine-gun takes in bullets. He says "You'll see them in the next
+War." When you ask him how he's going to transport and emplace and hide
+his machine-howitzers, he looks dejected, and says "I never thought of
+_that_," and has another idea at once, even more impossible.
+
+That reminds me. I've seen the "Tanks" (Nicky's Moving Fortresses) in
+action. I'd give my promotion if only he could have seen them too. We
+mustn't call them Fortresses any more--they're most violently for
+attack. As far as I can make out Nicky's and Drayton's thing was
+something between these and the French ones; otherwise one might have
+wondered whether their plans and models really did go where John says
+they did! I wish I could believe that Nicky and Drayton really _had_ had
+a hand in it.
+
+I'm most awfully grieved to hear that young Vereker's reported missing.
+Do you remember how excited he used to be dashing about the lawn at
+tennis, and how Alice Lathom used to sit and look at him, and jump if
+you brought her her tea too suddenly? Let's hope we'll have finished up
+this damned War before they get little Norris.
+
+Love to Dorothy and Don and Ronny.--Your loving, MICK.
+
+When Frances read that letter she said, "I wonder if he really is all
+right. He says very little about himself."
+
+And Anthony said, "Then you may be sure he is."
+
+          May 31st, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad Mummy and Father have got all my letters. They
+won't mind my writing to you this time. It really _is_ your turn now.
+Thanks for Wadham's "Poems" (I wish they'd been Ellis's). It's a shame
+to laugh at Waddy--but--he _has_ spread himself over Flanders, hasn't
+he? Like the inundations round Ypres.
+
+I'm most awfully touched at Dad and Mummy wanting to publish mine. Here
+they all are--just as I wrote them, in our billet, at night or in the
+early morning, when the others were sleeping and I wasn't. I don't know
+whether they're bad or good; I haven't had time to think about them. It
+all seems so incredibly far away. Even last week seems far away. You go
+on so fast here.
+
+I'd like Ellis and Monier-Owen to see them and to weed out the bad ones.
+But you mustn't ask them to do anything. They haven't time, either. I
+think you and Dorothy and Dad will manage it all right among you. If you
+don't I shan't much care.
+
+Of course I'm glad that they've taken you on at the Hampstead Hospital,
+if it makes you happier to nurse. And I'm glad Dad put his foot down on
+your going to Vera. She gave you up to my people and she can't take you
+back now. I'm sorry for her though; so is he.
+
+Have I had any adventures "by myself"? Only two. (I've given up what
+Mother calls my "not wanting to go to the party.") One came off in "No
+Man's Land" the other night. I went out with a "party" and came back by
+myself--unless you count a damaged Tommy hanging on to me. It began in
+pleasurable excitement and ended in some perturbation, for I had to get
+him in under cover somehow, and my responsibility weighed on me--so did
+he. The other was ages ago in a German trench. I was by myself, because
+I'd gone in too quick, and the "party" behind me took the wrong turning.
+I did manage to squeeze a chilly excitement out of going on alone. Then
+I bumped up against a fat German officer and his revolver. That really
+was an exquisite moment, and I was beast enough to be glad I had it all
+to myself. It meant a bag of fifteen prisoners--all my own. But that was
+nothing; they'd have surrendered to a mouse. There was no reason why
+they shouldn't, because I'd fired first and there was no more officer to
+play up to.
+
+But the things you don't do by yourself are a long way the best.
+Nothing--not even poetry--can beat an infantry charge when you're
+leading it. That's because of your men. It feels as if you were drawing
+them all up after you. Of course you aren't. They're coming on their
+own, and you're simply nothing, only a little unimportant part of
+them--even when you're feeling as if you were God Almighty.
+
+I'm afraid it _does_ look awfully as if young Vereker were killed. They
+may hear, you know, in some roundabout way--through the Red Cross, or
+some of his men. I've written to them.
+
+Love to everybody. Certainly you may kiss Nanna for me, if she'd like
+it. I wish I liked Waddy more--when you've given him to me.--Always your
+affectionate,
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+P.S.--I don't sound pleased about the publication; but I am. I can't get
+over their wanting to do it. I thought they didn't care.
+
+Ronny--I've been such a beast to them--when Father tried to read my
+stuff--bless him!--and couldn't, I used to wish to God he'd leave it
+alone. And now I'd give anything to see his dear old paws hanging on to
+it and twitching with fright, and his eyes slewing round to see if I'm
+looking at him.
+
+          June 14th, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad you like them, and I'm glad Father thinks he
+"understands Michael's poems" this time, and I'm glad they've made
+Mother and Dorothy feel happier about me--BUT--they must get it out of
+their heads that they're my "message," or any putrescent thing of that
+sort. The bare idea of writing a message, or of being supposed to write
+a message, makes me sick. I know it's beastly of me, but, really I'd
+rather they weren't published at all, if there's the smallest chance of
+their being taken that way.
+
+But if Ellis is doing the introduction there isn't the smallest chance.
+Thank God for Ellis.
+
+There--I've let off all my beastliness.
+
+And now I'll try to answer your letter. Yes; the "ecstasy" in the last
+two poems _is_ Nicky's ecstasy. And as Ellis says it strikes him as
+absolutely real, I take it that some of Nicky's "reality" has got
+through. It's hard on Ellis that he has to take _his_ ecstasy from me,
+instead of coming out and getting it for himself.
+
+But you and Nicky and Lawrence are right. It _is_ absolutely real. I
+mean it has to do with absolute reality. With God. It hasn't anything to
+do with having courage, or not having courage; it's another state of
+mind altogether. It isn't what Nicky's man said it was--you're not
+ashamed of it the next day. It isn't excitement; you're not excited. It
+isn't a tingling of your nerves; they don't tingle. It's all curiously
+quiet and steady. You remember when you saw Nicky--how everything stood
+still? And how two times were going on, and you and Nicky were in one
+time, and Mother was in the other? Well--it's like that. Your body and
+its nerves aren't in it at all. Your body may be moving violently, with
+other bodies moving violently round it; but _you_'re still.
+
+But suppose it is your nerves. Why should they tingle at just that
+particular moment, the moment that makes _animals_ afraid? Why should
+you be so extraordinarily happy? Why should the moment of extreme danger
+be always the "exquisite" moment? Why not the moment of safety?
+
+Doesn't it look as if danger were the point of contact with reality, and
+death the closest point? You're through. Actually you lay hold on
+eternal life, and you know it.
+
+Another thing--it always comes with that little shock of recognition.
+It's happened before, and when you get near to it again you know what it
+is. You keep on wanting to get near it, wanting it to happen again. You
+may lose it the next minute, but you know. Lawrence knew what it was.
+Nicky knew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     June 19th.
+
+I'm coming back to it--after that interruption--because I want to get
+the thing clear. I have to put it down as I feel it; there's no other
+way. But they mustn't think it's something that only Lawrence and Nicky
+and I feel. The men feel it too, even when they don't know what it is.
+And some of them _do_ know.
+
+Of course we shall be accused of glorifying War and telling lies about
+it. Well--there's a Frenchman who has told the truth, piling up all the
+horrors, faithfully, remorselessly, magnificently. But he seems to think
+people oughtn't to write about this War at all unless they show up the
+infamy of it, as a deterrent, so that no Government can ever start
+another one. It's a sort of literary "frightfulness." But who is he
+trying to frighten? Does he imagine that France, or England, or Russia
+or Belgium, or Serbia, will want to start another war when this is over?
+And does he suppose that Germany--if we don't beat her--will be deterred
+by his frightfulness? Germany's arrogance will be satisfied when she
+knows she's made a Frenchman feel like that about it.
+
+He's got his truth all right. As Morrie would say: "That's War." But a
+peaceful earthquake can do much the same thing. And if _our_ truth--what
+_we_'ve seen--isn't War, at any rate it's what we've got out of it, it's
+our "glory," our spiritual compensation for the physical torture, and
+there would be a sort of infamy in trying to take it from us. It isn't
+the French Government, or the British that's fighting Germany; it's
+we--all of us. To insist on the world remembering nothing but these
+horrors is as if men up to their knees in the filth they're clearing
+away should complain of each other for standing in it and splashing
+it about.
+
+The filth of War--and the physical torture--Good God! As if the world
+was likely to forget it. Any more than we're likely to forget what
+_we_ know.
+
+You remember because you've known it before and it all hangs together.
+It's not as if danger were the only point of contact with reality. You
+get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition, and the same utter
+satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing. At least to me it's like
+that. You know what Nicky thought it was like. You know what it was like
+when you used to sit looking and looking at Mother's "tree of Heaven."
+
+It's odd, Ronny, to have gone all your life trying to get reality,
+trying to get new beauty, trying to get utter satisfaction; to have
+funked coming out here because you thought it was all obscene ugliness
+and waste and frustration, and then to come out, and to find what
+you wanted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     June 25th.
+
+I wrote all that, while I could, because I want to make them see it.
+It's horrible that Dorothy should think that Drayton's dead and that
+Mother should think that Nicky's dead, when they wouldn't, if they
+really knew. If they don't believe Lawrence or me, can't they believe
+Nicky? I'm only saying what he said. But I can't write to them about it
+because they make me shy, and I'm afraid they'll think I'm only gassing,
+or "making poetry"--as if poetry wasn't the most real thing there is!
+
+If anybody can make them see it, you can.--Always your affectionate,
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Anthony was going into the house to take back the key of the workshop.
+
+He had locked the door of the workshop a year ago, after Nicky's death,
+and had not opened it again until to-day. This afternoon in the orchard
+he had seen that the props of the old apple-tree were broken and he had
+thought that he would like to make new ones, and the wood was in
+the workshop.
+
+Everything in there was as it had been when Nicky finished with his
+Moving Fortress. The brass and steel filings lay in a heap under the
+lathe, the handle was tilted at the point where he had left it; pits in
+the saw-dust showed where his feet had stood. His overalls hung over the
+bench where he had slipped them off.
+
+Anthony had sat down on the bench and had looked at these things with
+remembrance and foreboding. He thought of Nicky and of Nicky's pleasure
+and excitement over the unpacking of his first lathe--the one he had
+begged for for his birthday--and of his own pleasure and excitement as
+he watched his boy handling it and showing him so cleverly how it
+worked. It stood there still in the corner. Nicky had given it to
+Veronica. He had taught her how to use it. And Anthony thought of
+Veronica when she was little; he saw Nicky taking care of her, teaching
+her to run and ride and play games. And he remembered what Veronica's
+mother had said to him and Frances: "Wait till Nicky has children of
+his own."
+
+He thought of John. John had volunteered three times and had been three
+times rejected. And now conscription had got him. He had to appear
+before the Board of Examiners that afternoon. He might be rejected
+again. But the standard was not so exacting as it had been--John
+might be taken.
+
+He thought of his business--John's business and his, and Bartie's. Those
+big Government contracts had more than saved them. They were making tons
+of money out of the War. Even when the Government cut down their
+profits; even when they had given more than half they made to the War
+funds, the fact remained that they were living on the War. Bartie,
+without a wife or children, was appallingly rich.
+
+If John were taken. If John were killed--
+
+If Michael died--
+
+Michael had been reported seriously wounded.
+
+He had thought then of Michael. And he had not been able to bear
+thinking any more. He had got up and left the workshop, locking the door
+behind him, forgetting what he had gone in for; and he had taken the key
+back to the house. He kept it in what his children used to call the
+secret drawer of his bureau. It lay there with Nicky's last letter of
+June, 1915, and a slab of coromandel wood.
+
+It was when he was going into the house with the key that John met him.
+
+"Have they taken you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+John's face was hard and white. They went together into Anthony's room.
+
+"It's what you wanted," Anthony said.
+
+"Of course it's what I wanted. I want it more than ever now.
+
+"The wire's come, Father. Mother opened it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was five days now since they had heard that Michael had died of his
+wounds. Frances was in Michael's room. She was waiting for Dorothea and
+Veronica to help her to find his papers. It was eight o'clock in the
+evening, and they had to be sorted and laid out ready for Morton Ellis
+to look over them to-morrow. To-morrow Morton Ellis would come, and he
+would take them away.
+
+The doors of Michael's and of Nicky's rooms were always kept shut;
+Frances knew that, if she were to open the door on the other side of the
+corridor and look in, every thing in Nicky's room would welcome her with
+tenderness even while it inflicted its unique and separate wound. But
+Michael's room was bare and silent. He had cleared everything away out
+of her sight last year before he went. The very books on the shelves
+repudiated her; reminded her that she had never understood him, that he
+had always escaped her. His room kept his secret, and she felt afraid
+and abashed in it, knowing herself an intruder. Presently all that was
+most precious in it would be taken from her and given over to a stranger
+whom he had never liked.
+
+Her mind turned and fastened on one object--the stiff, naked wooden
+chair standing in its place before the oak table by the window. She
+remembered how she had come to Michael there and found him writing at
+his table, and how she had talked to him as though he had been a shirker
+and a coward.
+
+She had borne Nicky's death. But she could not bear Michael's. She stood
+there in his room, staring, hypnotized by her memory. She heard Dorothea
+come in and go out again. And then Veronica came in.
+
+She turned to Veronica to help her.
+
+She clung to Veronica and was jealous of her. Veronica had not come
+between her and Nicky as long as he was alive, but now that he was dead
+she came between them. She came between her and Michael too. Michael's
+mind had always been beyond her; she could only reach it through
+Veronica and through Veronica's secret. Her mind clutched at Veronica's
+secret, and flung it away as useless, and returned, clutching at
+it again.
+
+It was as if Veronica held the souls of Michael and Nicholas in her
+hands. She offered her the souls of her dead sons. She was the mediator
+between her and their souls.
+
+"I could bear it, Veronica, if I hadn't made him go. I came to him,
+here, in this room, and bullied him till he went. I said horrible things
+to him--that he must have remembered.
+
+"He wasn't like Nicky--it was infinitely worse for him. And I was cruel
+to him. I had no pity. I drove him out--to be killed.
+
+"And I simply cannot bear it."
+
+"But--he didn't go then. He waited till--till he was free. If anybody
+could have made him, Nicky could. But it wasn't even Nicky. It was
+himself."
+
+"If he'd been killed as Nicky was--but to die like that, in the
+hospital--of those horrible wounds."
+
+"He was leading a charge, just as Nicky was. And you know he was happy,
+just as Nicky was. Every line he's written shows that he was happy."
+
+"It only shows that they were both full of life, that they loved their
+life and wanted to live.
+
+"It's no use, Ronny, you're saying you know they're there. I don't. I'd
+give anything to believe it. And yet it wouldn't be a bit of good if I
+did. I don't _want_ them all changed into something spiritual that I
+shouldn't know if it was there. I want their bodies with me just as they
+used to be. I want to hear them and touch them, and see them come in in
+their old clothes.
+
+"To see Nicky standing on the hearthrug with Timmy in his arms. I want
+things like that, Ronny. Even if you're right, it's all clean gone."
+
+Her lips tightened.
+
+"I'm talking as if I was, the only one. But I know it's worse for you,
+Ronny. I _had_ them all those years. And I've got Anthony. You've had
+nothing but your poor three days."
+
+Veronica thought: "How can I tell her that I've got more than she
+thinks? It's awful that I should have what she hasn't." She was ashamed
+and beaten before this irreparable, mortal grief.
+
+"And it's worse," Frances said, "for the wretched mothers whose sons
+haven't fought."
+
+For her pride rose in her again--the pride that uplifted her
+supernaturally when Nicky died.
+
+"You mustn't think I grudge them. I don't. I don't even grudge John."
+
+The silence of Michael's room sank into them, it weighed on their hearts
+and they were afraid of each other's voices. Frances was glad when
+Dorothy came and they could begin their work there.
+
+But Michael had not left them much to do. They found his papers all in
+one drawer of his writing-table, sorted and packed and labelled, ready
+for Morton Ellis to take away. One sealed envelope lay in a place by
+itself. Frances thought: "He didn't want any of us to touch his things."
+
+Then she saw Veronica's name on the sealed envelope. She was glad when
+Veronica left them and went to her hospital.
+
+And when she was gone she wanted her back again.
+
+"I wish I hadn't spoken that way to Veronica," she said.
+
+"She won't mind. She knows you couldn't help it."
+
+"I could, Dorothy, if I wasn't jealous of her. I mean I'm jealous of her
+certainty. If I had it, too, I shouldn't be jealous."
+
+"She wants you to have it. She's trying to give it you.
+
+"Mother--how do we know she isn't right? Nicky said she was. And Michael
+said Nicky was right.
+
+"If it had been only Nicky--_he_ might have got it from Veronica. But
+Michael never got things from anybody. And you _do_ know things in queer
+ways. Even I do. At least I did once--when I was in prison. I knew
+something tremendous was going to happen. I saw it, or felt it, or
+something. I won't swear I knew it was the War. I don't suppose I did.
+But I knew Frank was all mixed up with it. And it was the most awfully
+real thing. You couldn't go back on it, or get behind it. It was as if
+I'd seen that he and Lawrence and Nicky and Michael and all of them
+would die in it to save the whole world. Like Christ, only that they
+really _did_ die and the whole world _was_ saved. There was nothing
+futile about it."
+
+"Well--?"
+
+"Well, _they_ might see their real thing the same way--in a flash.
+Aren't they a thousand times more likely to know than we are? What right
+have we--sitting here safe--to say it isn't when they say it is?"
+
+"But--if there's anything in it--why can't I see it as well as you and
+Veronica? After all, I'm their mother."
+
+"Perhaps that's why it takes you longer, Mummy. You think of their
+bodies more than we do, because they were part of your body. Their
+souls, or whatever it is, aren't as real to you just at first."
+
+"I see," said Frances, bitterly. "You've only got to be a mother, and
+give your children your flesh and blood, to be sure of their souls going
+from you and somebody else getting them."
+
+"That's the price you pay for being mothers."
+
+"Was Frank's soul ever more real to _you_, Dorothy?"
+
+"Yes. It was once--for just one minute. The night he went away. That's
+another queer thing that happened."
+
+"It didn't satisfy you, darling, did it?"
+
+"Of course it didn't satisfy me. I want more and more of it. Not just
+flashes."
+
+"You say it's the price we pay for being mothers. Yet if Veronica had
+had a child--"
+
+"You needn't be so sorry for Veronica."
+
+"I'm not. It's you I'm sorriest for. You've had nothing. From beginning
+to end you had nothing.
+
+"I might at least have seen that you had it in the beginning."
+
+"_You_, Mummy?"
+
+"Yes. Me. You _shall_ have it now. Unless you want to leave me."
+
+"I wouldn't leave you for the world, Mummy ducky. Only you must let me
+work always and all the time."
+
+"Let you? I'll let you do what you like, my dear."
+
+"You always have let me, haven't you?"
+
+"It was the least I could do."
+
+"Poor Mummy, did you think you had to make up because you cared for them
+more than me?"
+
+"I wonder," said Frances, thoughtfully, "if I did."
+
+"Of course. Of course you did. Who wouldn't?"
+
+"I never meant you to know it, Dorothy."
+
+"Of course I knew it. I must have known it ever since Michael was born.
+I knew you couldn't help it. You had to. Even when I was a tiresome kid
+I knew you had to. It was natural."
+
+"Natural or unnatural, many girls have hated their mothers for less.
+You've been very big and generous.
+
+"Perhaps--if you'd been little and weak--but you were always such an
+independent thing. I used to think you didn't want me."
+
+"I wanted you a lot more than you thought. But, you see, I've learned to
+do without."
+
+She thought: "It's better she should have it straight."
+
+"If you'd think less about me, Mother," she said, "and more about
+Father--"
+
+"Father?"
+
+"Yes. Father isn't independent--though he looks it. He wants you
+awfully. He always has wanted you. And he hasn't learned to do without."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"He's sitting out there in the garden, all by himself, in the dark,
+under the tree."
+
+Frances went to him there.
+
+"I wondered whether you would come to me," he said.
+
+"I was doing something for Michael."
+
+"Is it done?"
+
+"Yes. It's done."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Five months passed. It was November now.
+
+In the lane by the side door, Anthony was waiting in his car. Rain was
+falling, hanging from the trees and falling. Every now and then he
+looked at his watch.
+
+He had still a quarter of an hour before he need start. But he was not
+going back into the house. They were all in there saying good-bye to
+John: old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith. And Maurice.
+And his brother Bartie.
+
+The door in the garden wall opened and they came out: the four women in
+black--the black they still wore for Michael--and the two men.
+
+They all walked slowly up the lane. Anthony could see Bartie's shoulders
+hunched irritably against the rain. He could see Morrie carrying his
+sodden, quivering body with care and an exaggerated sobriety. He saw
+Grannie, going slowly, under the umbrella, very upright and conscious of
+herself as wonderful and outlasting.
+
+He got down and cranked up his engine.
+
+Then he sat sternly in his car and waited, with his hands on the
+steering-wheel, ready.
+
+The engine throbbed, impatient for the start.
+
+John came out very quickly and took his seat beside his father. And the
+car went slowly towards the high road.
+
+Uncle Morrie stood waiting for it by the gate at the top of the lane. As
+it passed through he straightened himself and put up his hand in a
+crapulous salute.
+
+The young man smiled at him, saluted, and was gone
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Tree of Heaven, by May Sinclair</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Tree of Heaven</p>
+<p>Author: May Sinclair</p>
+<p>Release Date: October 27, 2004  [eBook #13883]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREE OF HEAVEN***</p>
+<br><br><h3>E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner,<br>
+            and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h3><br><br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>THE<br>
+TREE OF HEAVEN</h1>
+<br>
+<h4>BY</h4>
+<h3>MAY SINCLAIR</h3>
+<h5>Author of<br>
+<i>The Belfry</i>, <i>The Three Sisters</i>, etc.</h5>
+<br>
+<h4>1918</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<center><b>Contents</b><br>
+<br>
+<a href="#PART_I">Part 1</a>: [<a href="#I">1</a>] [<a href=
+"#II">2</a>] [<a href="#III">3</a>] [<a href="#IV">4</a>] [<a href=
+"#V">5</a>] [<a href="#VI">6</a>] [<a href="#VII">7</a>] [<a href=
+"#VIII">8</a>] [<a href="#IX">9</a>] [<a href="#X">10</a>]<br>
+<a href="#PART_II">Part 2</a>: [<a href="#XI">11</a>] [<a href=
+"#XII">12</a>] [<a href="#XIII">13</a>] [<a href="#XIV">14</a>]
+[<a href="#XV">15</a>] [<a href="#XVI">16</a>] [<a href=
+"#XVII">17</a>]<br>
+<a href="#PART_III">Part 3</a>: [<a href="#XVIII">18</a>] [<a href=
+"#XIX">19</a>] [<a href="#XX">20</a>] [<a href="#XXI">21</a>]
+[<a href="#XXII">22</a>] [<a href="#XXIII">23</a>] [<a href=
+"#XXIV">24</a>]</center>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>THE TREE OF HEAVEN</h1>
+<h2><a name="PART_I">PART I</a></h2>
+<h3><i>PEACE</i></h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="I"></a>I</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Frances Harrison was sitting out in the garden under the tree
+that her husband called an ash-tree, and that the people down in
+her part of the country called a tree of Heaven.</p>
+<p>It was warm under the tree, and Frances might have gone to sleep
+there and wasted an hour out of the afternoon, if it hadn't been
+for the children.</p>
+<p>Dorothy, Michael and Nicholas were going to a party, and Nicky
+was excited. She could hear Old Nanna talking to Michael and
+telling him to be a good boy. She could hear young Mary-Nanna
+singing to Baby John. Baby John was too young himself to go to
+parties; so to make up for that he was riding furiously on
+Mary-Nanna's knee to the tune of the "Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major!"</p>
+<p>It was Nicky's first party. That was why he was excited.</p>
+<p>He had asked her for the third time what it would be like; and
+for the third time she had told him. There would be dancing and a
+Magic Lantern, and a Funny Man, and a Big White Cake covered with
+sugar icing and Rosalind's name on it in pink sugar letters and
+eight little pink wax candles burning on the top for Rosalind's
+birthday. Nicky's eyes shone as she told him.</p>
+<p>Dorothy, who was nine years old, laughed at Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Look at Nicky," she said, "how excited he is!"</p>
+<p>And every time she laughed at him his mother kissed him.</p>
+<p>"I don't care," said Nicky. "I don't care if I am becited!"</p>
+<p>And for the fifth time he asked, "When will it be time to
+go?"</p>
+<p>"Not for another hour and a half, my sweetheart."</p>
+<p>"How long," said Nicky, "is an hour and a half?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances had a tranquil nature and she never worried. But as she
+sat under her tree of Heaven a thought came that made a faint
+illusion of worry for her mind. She had forgotten to ask Grannie
+and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie to tea.</p>
+<p>She had come to think of them like that in relation to her
+children rather than to her or to each other.</p>
+<p>It was a Tuesday, and they had not been there since Friday.
+Perhaps, she thought, I'd better send over for them now. Especially
+as it's such a beautiful afternoon. Supposing I sent Michael?</p>
+<p>And yet, supposing Anthony came home early? He was always kind
+to her people, but that was the very reason why she oughtn't to let
+them spoil a beautiful afternoon for him. It could not be said that
+any of them was amusing.</p>
+<p>She could still hear Mary-Nanna singing her song about the
+Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major. She could still hear Old Nanna talking to
+Michael and telling him to be a good boy. That could only end in
+Michael being naughty. To avert naughtiness or any other disaster
+from her children was the end of Frances's existence.</p>
+<p>So she called Michael to come to her. He came, running like a
+little dog, obediently.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael was glad that he had been sent across the Heath to
+Grannie's house with a message. It made him feel big and brave.
+Besides, it would put off the moment when Mary-Nanna would come for
+him, to make him ready for the party. He was not sure that he
+wanted to go to it.</p>
+<p>Michael did not much like going to Grannie's house either. In
+all the rooms there was a queer dark-greenness and creepiness. It
+smelt of bird-cages and elder bushes and of Grandpapa's funeral.
+And when you had seen Auntie Edie's Senegal wax-bills, and the
+stuffed fish, and the inside of Auntie Louie's type-writer there
+was nothing else to see.</p>
+<p>His mother said that Grandpapa's funeral was all over, and that
+the green creepiness came from the green creepers. But Michael knew
+it didn't. She only said things like that to make you feel nice and
+comfy when you were going to bed. Michael knew very well that they
+had put Grandpapa into the drawing-room and locked the door so that
+the funeral men shouldn't get at him and take him away too soon.
+And Auntie Louie had kept the key in her pocket.</p>
+<p>Funerals meant taking people away.</p>
+<p>Old Nanna wouldn't let him talk about it; but Mary-Nanna had
+told him that was what funerals meant. All the same, as he went up
+the flagged path, he took care not to look through the black panes
+of the window where the elder bush was, lest he should see
+Grandpapa's coffin standing in the place where the big table used
+to be, and Grandpapa lying inside it wrapped in a white sheet.</p>
+<p>Michael's message was that Mummy sent her love, and would
+Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie come
+to tea? She was going to have tea in the garden, and would they
+please come early? As early as possible. That was the part he was
+not to forget.</p>
+<p>The queer thing was that when Michael went to see Grannie and
+the Aunties in Grannie's house he saw four old women. They wore
+black dresses that smelt sometimes of something sweet and sometimes
+like your fingers when you get ink on them. The Aunties looked
+cross; and Auntie Emmeline smelt as if she had been crying. He
+thought that perhaps they had not been able to stop crying since
+Grandpapa's funeral. He thought that was why Auntie Louie's nose
+was red and shiny and Auntie Edie's eyelids had pink edges instead
+of lashes. In Grannie's house they never let you do anything. They
+never did anything themselves. They never wanted to do anything;
+not even to talk. He thought it was because they knew that
+Grandpapa was still there all the time.</p>
+<p>But outside it the Aunties were not so very old. They rode
+bicycles. And when they came to Michael's Father's house they
+forgot all about Grandpapa's funeral and ran about and played
+tennis like Michael's mother and Mrs. Jervis, and they talked a
+lot.</p>
+<p>Michael's mother was Grannie's child. To see how she could be a
+child you had only to think of her in her nightgown with her long
+brown hair plaited in a pigtail hanging down her back and tied with
+a blue ribbon. But he couldn't see how the three Aunties could be
+Grannie's other children. They were bigger than Grannie and they
+had grey hair. Grannie was a little thing; she was white and dry;
+and she had hair like hay. Besides, she hardly ever took any notice
+of them except to make a face at Auntie Emmeline or Auntie Edie now
+and then. She did it with her head a little on one side, pushing
+out her underlip and drawing it back again.</p>
+<p>Grannie interested Michael; but more when he thought about her
+than when she was actually there. She stood for him as the mark and
+measure of past time. To understand how old Grannie was you had to
+think backwards; this way: Once there was a time when there was no
+Michael; but there was Mummy and there was Daddy. And once there
+was a time when there was no Mummy and no Daddy; but there was
+Grannie and there was Grandpapa. Now there was no Grandpapa. But he
+couldn't think back far enough to get to the time when there was no
+Grannie.</p>
+<p>Michael thought that being Grannie must feel like being God.</p>
+<p>Before he came to the black window pane and the elder bush he
+had to run down the slopes and jump the gullies on his side of the
+Heath, and cross the West Road, and climb the other slope to
+Grannie's side. And it was not till you got to the row of elms on
+Judge's Walk that you had to go carefully because of the
+funeral.</p>
+<p>He stood there on the ridge of the Walk and looked back to his
+own side. There were other houses there; but he knew his father's
+house by the tree of Heaven in the garden.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The garden stood on a high, flat promontory jutting out into the
+Heath. A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like
+fortifications on a breastwork, enclosed it on three sides. From
+the flagged terrace at the bottom of the garden you looked down,
+through the tops of the birch-trees that rose against the rampart,
+over the wild places of the Heath. There was another flagged
+terrace at the other end of the garden. The house rose sheer from
+its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and flat-fronted, with the
+white wings of its storm shutters spread open, row on row. It
+barred the promontory from the mainland. And at the back of it,
+beyond its kitchen garden and its courtyard, a fringe of Heath
+still parted it from the hill road that went from "Jack Straw's
+Castle" to "The Bull and Bush." You reached it by a lane that led
+from the road to the Heath.</p>
+<p>The house belonged to the Heath and the open country. It was
+aware of nothing but the Heath and the open country between it and
+Harrow on the Hill. It had the air of all the old houses of
+Hampstead, the wonderful air of not acknowledging the existence of
+Bank Holidays. It was lifted up high above the town; shut in;
+utterly secluded.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Anthony Harrison considered that he had done well when he
+acquired West End House for his wife Frances, and for his children,
+Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas and John.</p>
+<p>Frances had said that, if he was thinking of her, he needn't buy
+a big place, because she didn't want one. But he might buy it for
+the children if he liked. Anthony had said that she had no idea of
+what she mightn't want, once she began to give her mind to it, and
+that he would like to think of her living in it after he was gone.
+Not that he had any intention of going; he was only thirty-six (not
+much older than Frances) and incurably healthy. But since his
+wife's attention had become absorbed in the children--to the
+exclusion of every other interest--he was always trying to harrow
+her by the suggestion. And Frances only laughed at him and told him
+that he was a silly old thing, and that he needn't think he was
+going to get round her that way.</p>
+<p>There was no other way open for Anthony; unless he were to go
+bankrupt or get pneumonia or peritonitis. Frances would have been
+the first to acknowledge that illness or misfortune constituted a
+claim. And the only things he ever did get were loud, explosive
+colds in his head which made him a mark for derision. His business
+was so sound that not even a revolution or a European war could
+shake it. And his appearance was incompatible with his pretensions
+to pathos.</p>
+<p>It would have paid him better to have been small and weedy, or
+lamentably fat, or to have had a bald place coming, or crow's feet
+pointing to grey hairs; for then there might have been a chance for
+him. But Anthony's body was well made, slender and tall. He had
+blue eyes and black-brown hair, and the look of an amiable hawk,
+alert, fiercely benevolent. Frances couldn't see any pathos in the
+kind of figure she happened to admire most, the only kind she would
+have tolerated in a husband. And if she <i>had</i> seen any pathos
+in it she wouldn't have married it. Pathos, she said, was all very
+well in a father, or a brother, or a friend, but in choosing a
+husband you had to think of your children; and she had wanted boys
+that would look like Michael and Nicholas and John.</p>
+<p>"Don't you mean," Anthony had said, "boys that will look like
+me?"</p>
+<p>"I mean," she had answered, "exactly what I say. You needn't be
+so arrogant."</p>
+<p><i>Her</i> arrogance had been beyond all bearing since John, the
+third son, had been born.</p>
+<p>And it was Frances, after all, who had made him buy West End
+House for her own reasons. Both the day nursery and the night
+nursery had windows to the south. It was the kind of house she had
+always dreamed of living in, and of Michael, or Nicky living in
+after she and Anthony were gone. It was not more than seven
+minutes' walk from the bottom of the lane to the house where her
+people lived. She had to think about the old people when the poor
+dears had come up to London in order to be thought about. And it
+had white storm shutters and a tree of Heaven in the garden.</p>
+<p>And, because they had both decided that they would have that
+house whatever happened, they began to argue and to tease each
+other. Anthony had said it was all right, only the tree of Heaven
+wasn't a tree of Heaven; it was a common ash. He was one of the
+biggest timber merchants in the country and he ought to know.
+Frances said she mightn't know much, but she did know that was the
+kind of tree the people down in her part of the country called a
+tree of Heaven. Anthony said he couldn't help that. It didn't
+matter what they called it. It was a common ash.</p>
+<p>Then she told him he had no poetry in his composition. She had
+always dreamed of having a tree of Heaven in her garden; and he was
+destroying her dream. He replied that he didn't want to destroy her
+dream, but the tree really <i>was</i> an ash. You could tell by the
+bark, and by the leaves and by the number and the shape of the
+leaflets. And anyhow, that was the first he'd heard about her
+dream.</p>
+<p>"You don't know," said Frances, "what goes on inside me."</p>
+<p>She said that if any of the children developed an imagination he
+needn't think <i>he</i> had anything to do with it.</p>
+<p>"I shan't," said Anthony. "I wouldn't have anything to do with
+it if I could. Facts are good enough for me. The children must be
+brought up to realize facts."</p>
+<p>An ash-tree was a fact and a tree of Heaven was a fancy; unless
+by any chance she meant <i>ailanthus glandulosa</i>. (He knew she
+didn't.) If she wanted to know, the buds of the ash were black like
+ebony. The buds of the tree of Heaven were rose-red, like--like bad
+mahogany. Wait till the spring and look at the buds.</p>
+<p>Frances waited till the spring and looked at the buds, and, sure
+enough, they were black like ebony.</p>
+<p>Anthony also said that if they were choosing a house for the
+children, it was no earthly use to think about the old people. For
+the old people would go and the children would remain.</p>
+<p>As if to show how right he was, Grandpapa had died early in that
+summer of 'ninety-five, one month after they had moved into West
+End House. That still left Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie
+Emmeline and Auntie Edie for Anthony to look after.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She was thinking of them now. She hoped that they would come
+early in time to see the children. She also hoped that they would
+go early, so that she and Anthony might have their three sets of
+tennis before dinner in peace.</p>
+<p>There would be no peace if Louie and Edie wanted to play too.
+The one thing that Anthony could not stand was people wanting to do
+things they couldn't do, and spoiling them for those who could. He
+used to say that the sight of Louie anywhere near the tennis court
+put him off his stroke.</p>
+<p>Again, the faint illusion of worry was created by the thought
+that this dreadful thing might happen, that Louie and Edie might
+want to play and that Anthony would be put off his stroke and be
+annoyed, and that his annoyance, his just and legitimate annoyance,
+would spoil the perfection of the afternoon. And as she played with
+the illusion it made more real her tranquillity, her incredible
+content.</p>
+<p>Her hands were busy now putting decorative stitches into a frock
+for John. She had pushed aside a novel by George Moore and a volume
+of Ibsen's plays. She disliked Ibsen and disapproved of George
+Moore. Her firm, tight little character defended itself against
+every form of intellectual disturbance. A copy of the <i>Times</i>
+had fallen from her lap to her feet. Jane, the cat, had found it
+there, and, purring loudly, had trodden it down into a bed, and now
+lay on it, asleep. Frances had informed herself of the affairs of
+the nation.</p>
+<p>At the bottom of her mind was the conviction (profound, because
+unconscious) that the affairs of the nation were not to be compared
+for interest with her own affairs, and an attitude of
+condescension, as if she honoured the <i>Times</i> by reading it
+and the nation by informing herself of its affairs; also the very
+distinct impression that evening papers were more attractive than
+morning papers. She would have admitted that they owed their
+attraction to the circumstance that Anthony brought them home with
+him in his pocket, and that in the evening she was not obliged to
+inform herself of what might be happening. Anthony was certain to
+inform her.</p>
+<p>Not that anything ever did happen. Except strikes; and even
+then, no sooner did the features of the strike begin to get
+dramatic than they were instantly submerged in the flood of
+conversation that was let loose over them. Mrs. Anthony pitied the
+poor editors and reporters while Parliament was sitting. She saw
+them as rather silly, violent and desperate men, yet pathetic in
+their silliness, violence and desperation, snatching at divorces,
+and breach of promise cases, and fires in paraffin shops, as
+drowning men snatch at straws.</p>
+<p>Her imagination refused to picture any end to this state of
+things. There would just be more speeches and more strikes, and
+still more speeches, going on for ever and ever at home; while
+foreign affairs and the British Empire went on for ever and ever
+too, with no connection between the two lines of sequence, and no
+likeness, except that both somehow went on and on.</p>
+<p>That was Anthony's view of England's parliament and of her
+imperial policy; and it was Mrs. Anthony's. Politics, Anthony said,
+had become static; and he assured Frances that there was no
+likelihood that they would ever become dynamic again--ever.</p>
+<p>Anthony's view of politics was Mrs. Anthony's view of life.</p>
+<p>Nothing ever really happened. Things did not change; they
+endured; they went on. At least everything that really mattered
+endured and went on. So that everything that really mattered
+could--if you were given to looking forward--be foreseen. A
+strike--a really bad one--might conceivably affect Anthony's
+business, for a time; but not all the strikes in the world, not all
+the silly speeches, not all the meddling and muddling of
+politicians could ever touch one of those enduring things.</p>
+<p>Frances believed in permanence because, in secret, she abhorred
+the thought of change. And she abhorred the thought of change
+because, at thirty-three, she had got all the things she wanted.
+But only for the last ten years out of the thirty-three. Before
+that (before she was Mrs. Anthony), wanting things, letting it be
+known that you wanted them, had meant not getting them. So that it
+was incredible how she had contrived to get them all. She had not
+yet left off being surprised at her own happiness. It was not like
+things you take for granted and are not aware of. Frances was
+profoundly aware of it. Her happiness was a solid, tangible thing.
+She knew where it resided, and what it was made of, and what terms
+she held it on. It depended on her; on her truth, her love, her
+loyalty; it was of the nature of a trust. But there was no illusion
+about it. It was the reality.</p>
+<p>She denied that she was arrogant, for she had not taken one of
+them for granted, not even Dorothy; though a little arrogance might
+have been excusable in a woman who had borne three sons and only
+one daughter before she was thirty-two. Whereas Grannie's
+achievement had been four daughters, four superfluous women, of
+whom Anthony had married one and supported three.</p>
+<p>To be sure there was Maurice. But he was worse than superfluous,
+considering that most of the time Anthony was supporting Maurice,
+too.</p>
+<p>She had only known one serious anxiety--lest her flesh and blood
+should harbour any of the blood and flesh left over after Morrie
+was made. She had married Anthony to drive out Morrie from the
+bodies and souls of her children. She meant that, through her and
+Anthony, Morrie should go, and Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas and John
+should remain.</p>
+<p>As Frances looked at the four children, her mouth tightened
+itself so as to undo the ruinous adoration of her eyes. She loved
+their slender bodies, their pure, candid faces, their thick,
+straight hair that parted solidly from the brush, clean-cut and
+shining like sheets of polished metal, brown for Dorothy,
+black-brown for Nicholas, red gold for Michael and white gold for
+John. She was glad that they were all made like that; slender and
+clear and hard, and that their very hair was a thing of clean
+surfaces and definite edges. She disliked the blurred outlines of
+fatness and fuzziness and fluffiness. The bright solidity of their
+forms helped her to her adored illusion, the illusion of their
+childhood as going on, lasting for ever and ever.</p>
+<p>They would be the nicest looking children at Mrs. Jervis's
+party. They would stand out solid from the fluffiness and fuzziness
+and fatness of the others. She saw people looking at them. She
+heard them saying: "Who are the two little boys in brown
+linen?"--"They are Michael and Nicholas Harrison." The Funny Man
+came and said: "Hello! I didn't expect to see you here!" It was
+Michael and Nicholas he didn't expect to see; and the noise in the
+room was Nicky's darling laughter.</p>
+<p>Music played. Michael and Nicholas danced to the music. It was
+Michael's body and Nicky's that kept for her the pattern of the
+dance, their feet that beat out its measure. Sitting under the tree
+of Heaven Frances could see Mrs. Jervis's party. It shimmered and
+clustered in a visionary space between the tree and the border of
+blue larkspurs on the other side of the lawn. The firm figures of
+Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy held it together, kept it from
+being shattered amongst the steep blue spires of the larkspurs.
+When it was all over they would still hold it together, so that
+people would know that it had really happened and remember having
+been there. They might even remember that Rosalind had had a
+birthday.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances had just bestowed this life after death on Mrs. Jervis's
+party when she heard Michael saying he didn't want to go to it.</p>
+<p>He had no idea why he didn't want to go except that he
+didn't.</p>
+<p>"What'?" said Frances. "Not when Nicky and Dorothy are
+going?"</p>
+<p>He shook his head. He was mournful and serious.</p>
+<p>"And there's going to be a Magic Lantern"--</p>
+<p>"I know."</p>
+<p>"And a Funny Man"--</p>
+<p>"I know."</p>
+<p>"And a Big White Cake with sugar icing and Rosalind's name on it
+in pink letters, and eight candles--"</p>
+<p>"I know, Mummy." Michael's under lip began to shake.</p>
+<p>"I thought it was only little baby boys that were silly and
+shy."</p>
+<p>Michael was not prepared to contest the statement. He saw it was
+the sort of thing that in the circumstances she was bound to say.
+All the same his under lip would have gone on shaking if he hadn't
+stopped it.</p>
+<p>"I thought you were a big boy," said Frances.</p>
+<p>"So I <i>was</i>, yesterday. To-day isn't yesterday, Mummy."</p>
+<p>"If John--John was asked to a beautiful party <i>he</i> wouldn't
+be afraid to go."</p>
+<p>As soon as Michael's under lip had stopped shaking his eyelids
+began. You couldn't stop your eyelids.</p>
+<p>"It's not <i>afraid</i>, exactly," he said.</p>
+<p>"What is it, then?"</p>
+<p>"It's sort--sort of forgetting things."</p>
+<p>"What things?"</p>
+<p>"I don't know, Mummy. I think--it's pieces of me that I want to
+remember. At a party I can't feel all of myself at once--like I do
+now."</p>
+<p>She loved his strange thoughts as she loved his strange beauty,
+his reddish yellow hair, his light hazel eyes that were not hers
+and not Anthony's.</p>
+<p>"What will you do, sweetheart, all afternoon, without Nicky and
+Dorothy and Mary-Nanna?"</p>
+<p>"I don't want Nicky and Dorothy and Mary-Nanna. I want Myself. I
+want to play with Myself."</p>
+<p>She thought: "Why shouldn't he? What right have I to say these
+things to him and make him cry, and send him to stupid parties that
+he doesn't want to go to? After all, he's only a little boy."</p>
+<p>She thought of Michael, who was seven, as if he were younger
+than Nicholas, who was only five.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky was different. You could never tell what Michael would
+take it into his head to think. You could never tell what Nicky
+would take it into his head to do. There was no guile in Michael.
+But sometimes there was guile in Nicky. Frances was always on the
+look out for Nicky's guile.</p>
+<p>So when Michael remarked that Grannie and the Aunties would be
+there immediately and Nicky said, "Mummy, I think my ear is going
+to ache," her answer was--"You won't have to stay more than a
+minute, darling."</p>
+<p>For Nicky lived in perpetual fear that his Auntie Louie might
+kiss at him.</p>
+<p>Dorothy saw her mother's profound misapprehension and she
+hastened to put it right.</p>
+<p>"It isn't Auntie Louie, Mummy. His ear is really aching."</p>
+<p>And still Frances went on smiling. She knew, and Nicky knew
+that, if a little boy could establish the fact of earache, he was
+absolved from all social and family obligations for as long as his
+affliction lasted. He wouldn't have to stand still and pretend he
+liked it while he was being kissed at.</p>
+<p>Frances kept her mouth shut when she smiled, as if she were
+trying not to. It was her upper lip that got the better of her. The
+fine, thin edges of it quivered and twitched and curled. You would
+have said the very down was sensitive to her thought's secret and
+iniquitous play. Her smile mocked other people's solemnities, her
+husband's solemnity, and the solemnity (no doubt inherited) of her
+son Michael; it mocked the demureness and the gravity of her
+face.</p>
+<p>She had brought her face close to Nicky's; and it was as if her
+mouth had eyes in it to see if there were guile in him.</p>
+<p>"Are you a little humbug?" she said.</p>
+<p>Nicky loved his mother's face. It never got excited or did silly
+things like other people's faces. It never got red and shiny like
+Auntie Louie's face, or hot and rough like Auntie Emmeline's, or
+wet and mizzly like Auntie Edie's. The softness and whiteness and
+dryness of his mother's face were delightful to Nicky. So was her
+hair. It was cold, with a funny sort of coldness that made your
+fingers tingle when you touched it; and it smelt like the taste of
+Brazil nuts.</p>
+<p>Frances saw the likeness of her smile quiver on Nicky's upper
+lip. It broke and became Nicky's smile that bared his little teeth
+and curled up the corners of his blue eyes. (His blue eyes and
+black brown hair were Anthony's.) It wasn't reasonable to suppose
+that Nicky had earache when he could smile like that.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid," she said, "you're a little humbug. Run to the
+terrace and see if Grannie and the Aunties are coming."</p>
+<p>He ran. It was half a child's run and half a full-grown
+boy's.</p>
+<p>Then Mrs. Anthony addressed her daughter.</p>
+<p>"Why did you say his ear's aching when it isn't?"</p>
+<p>"Because," said Dorothy, "it <i>is</i> aching."</p>
+<p>She was polite and exquisite and obstinate, like Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Nicky ought to know his own ear best. Go and tell him he's not
+to stand on the top of the wall. And if they're coming wave to
+them, to show you're glad to see them."</p>
+<p>"But--Mummy--I'm not."</p>
+<p>She knew it was dreadful before she said it. But she had warded
+off reproof by nuzzling against her mother's cheek as it tried to
+turn away from her. She saw her mother's upper lip moving,
+twitching. The sensitive down stirred on it like a dark smudge, a
+dust that quivered. Her own mouth, pushed forward, searching, the
+mouth of a nuzzling puppy, remained grave and tender. She was
+earnest and imperturbable in her truthfulness. "Whether you're glad
+or not you must go," said Frances. She meant to be obeyed.</p>
+<p>Dorothy went. Her body was obedient. For as yet she had her
+mother's body and her face, her blunted oval, the straight nose
+with the fine, tilted nostrils, her brown eyes, her solid hair,
+brown on the top and light underneath, and on the curve of the roll
+above her little ears. Frances had watched the appearance of those
+details with an anxiety that would have surprised her if she had
+been aware of it. She wanted to see herself in the bodies of her
+sons and in the mind of her daughter. But Dorothy had her father's
+mind. You couldn't move it. What she had said once she stuck to for
+ever, like Anthony to his ash-tree. As if sticking to a thing for
+ever could make it right once. And Dorothy had formed the habit of
+actually being right, like Anthony, nine times out of ten. Frances
+foresaw that this persistence, this unreasoning rectitude, might,
+in time, become annoying in a daughter. There were moments when she
+was almost perturbed by the presence of this small, mysterious
+organism, mixed up of her body and her husband's mind.</p>
+<p>But in secret she admired her daughter's candour, her
+downrightness and straightforwardness, her disdain of conventions
+and hypocrisies. Frances was not glad, she knew she was not glad,
+any more than Dorothy was glad, to see her mother and her sisters.
+She only pretended. In secret she was afraid of every moment she
+would have to live with them. She had lived with them too long. She
+foresaw what would happen this afternoon, how they would look, what
+they would say and do, and with what gestures. It would be like the
+telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that you know
+every word of.</p>
+<p>She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she
+had only asked them to come early in order that they might go early
+and leave her to her happiness.</p>
+<p>She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and
+Dorothy were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought
+that she wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if
+they were coming early. It struck her that this was sad.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope
+under the Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the
+sallow grass and the yellow clay of the Heath.</p>
+<p>"How little they look," Michael said.</p>
+<p>Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made
+them pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was
+the difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and
+always would be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and
+Dorothy never would be sorry for being what she was. She seemed to
+be saying, already, in her clearness and hardness, "What I am I am,
+and you can't change me." The utmost you could wring from her was
+that she couldn't help it.</p>
+<p>Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in
+black came nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the
+garden and the lane.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="II"></a>II</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the
+lane to the tree of Heaven.</p>
+<p>She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace,
+advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really
+belonging to each other, as if they had been strangers associated
+by some accident. It had grown on them in their efforts to carry
+off the embarrassment of appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie
+carried it off best. Sharp and rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never
+lent itself to any group. But for her black gown she really might
+not have belonged.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was
+only sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was
+wrapped up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed,
+fascinated by her sacred sense of bereavement. She moved as if
+hypnotized by her own sorrow.</p>
+<p>To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of
+mystic hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she
+suspected them of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if
+they could. But to her one married daughter and to her
+grand-children she was soft and gentle. So that, when they happened
+to be all together, her moods changed so rapidly that she seemed a
+creature of unaccountable caprice. One minute her small, white, dry
+face quivered with softness and gentleness, and the next it
+stiffened, or twitched with the inimical, disapproving look it had
+for Louie and Emmeline and Edith.</p>
+<p>The children lifted up their pure, impassive faces to be kissed
+at. Old Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother's
+knee. Dorothy and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party.
+Michael forgot all about playing with himself. He stayed where he
+was, drawn by the spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties. Grannie was
+clucking and chuckling to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled
+to her own babies long ago. Her under lip made itself wide and
+full; it worked with an in and out movement very funny and
+interesting to Michael. The movement meant that Grannie chuckled
+under protest of memories that were sacred to Grandpapa.</p>
+<p>"Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo--tchoo! Chuckaboo! Beautiful boy!" said
+Grannie.</p>
+<p>Auntie Louie looked at her youngest nephew. She smiled her
+downward, sagging smile, wrung from a virginity sadder than
+Grannie's grief. She spoke to Baby John.</p>
+<p>"You really are rather a nice boy," Auntie Louie said.</p>
+<p>But Edie, the youngest Auntie, was kneeling on the grass before
+him, bringing her face close to his. Baby John's new and flawless
+face was cruel to Auntie Edie's. So was his look of dignity and
+wisdom.</p>
+<p>"Oh, she says you're only rather nice," said Auntie Edie. "And
+you're the beautifullest, sweetest, darlingest that ever was.
+Wasn't she a nasty Auntie Louie? Ten little pink toes. And
+<i>there</i> he goes. Five little tootsies to each of his
+footsies."</p>
+<p>She hid herself behind the <i>Times</i> disturbing Jane.</p>
+<p>"Where's John-John?" she cried. "Where's he gone to? Can anybody
+tell me where to find John-John? Where's John-John?
+Peep-<i>bo</i>--there he is! John-John, look at Auntie Edie. Oh, he
+won't pay any attention to poor me."</p>
+<p>Baby John was playing earnestly with Grannie's watch-chain.</p>
+<p>"You might leave the child alone," said Grannie. "Can't you see
+he doesn't want you?"</p>
+<p>Auntie Edie made a little pouting face, like a scolded, pathetic
+child. Nobody ever did want Auntie Edie.</p>
+<p>And all the time Auntie Emmy was talking to Frances very loud
+and fast.</p>
+<p>"Frances, I do think your garden's too beautiful for words. How
+clever of you to think of clearing away the old flower-beds. I hate
+flower-beds on a lawn. Yet I don't suppose I should have had the
+strength of mind to get rid of them if it bad been me."</p>
+<p>As she talked Auntie Emmy opened her eyes very wide; her
+eyebrows jerked, the left one leaping up above the right; she
+thrust out her chin at you and her long, inquiring nose. Her thin
+face was the play of agitated nerve-strings that pulled it thus
+into perpetual, restless movements; and she made vague gestures
+with her large, bony hands. Her tongue went tick-tack, like a
+clock. Anthony said you-could hear Emmy's tongue striking the roof
+of her-mouth all thee time.</p>
+<p>"And putting those delphiniums all together like that--Massing
+the blues. Anthony? I <i>do</i> think Anthony has perfect taste. I
+adore delphiniums."</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy was behaving as if neither Michael nor Baby John was
+there.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think John-John's too beautiful for words?" said
+Frances. "Don't you like him a little bit too?"</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy winced as if Frances had flicked something in her
+face.</p>
+<p>"Of course I like him too. Why shouldn't I?"</p>
+<p>"I don't think you <i>do</i>, Auntie Emmy," Michael said.</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy considered him as for the first time.</p>
+<p>"What do you know about it?" she said.</p>
+<p>"I can tell by the funny things your face does."</p>
+<p>"I thought," said Frances, "you wanted to play by yourself."</p>
+<p>"So I do," said Michael.</p>
+<p>"Well then, go and play."</p>
+<p>He went and to a heavenly place that he knew of. But as he
+played with Himself there he thought: "Auntie Emmy doesn't tell the
+truth. I think it is because she isn't happy."</p>
+<p>Michael kept his best things to himself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"I suppose you're happy," said Grannie, "now you've got the poor
+child sent away."</p>
+<p>Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as
+much as to say she was helpless under her mother's stupidity.</p>
+<p>"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good
+for him to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."</p>
+<p>It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her
+sisters.</p>
+<p>"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it
+yourself."</p>
+<p>When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put
+her word in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the
+peace.</p>
+<p>Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her
+babies in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight of other
+people's babies was too much for Emmy. She could never be prepared
+for Emmy's moments.</p>
+<p>"It's all very well," Auntie Louie went on; "but I should like
+to hear of somebody admiring Dorothy. I don't see where Dorothy
+comes in."</p>
+<p>Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie's
+favourite. If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared
+that she was sure she wasn't.</p>
+<p>And again Frances knew what Louie meant--that she loved her
+three sons, Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her
+one daughter, Dorothea, with critical affection. That was the sort
+of thing that Louie was always saying and thinking about people,
+and nobody ever paid the slightest attention to what Louie said or
+thought. Frances told herself that if there was one emotion that
+she was more free from than another it was sex jealousy.</p>
+<p>The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given
+up Dorothy to Anthony. It was natural that he should care most for
+the little girl.</p>
+<p>Louie said that was easy--when she knew perfectly well that
+Anthony didn't. Like Frances he cared most for his three sons. She
+was leaving Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael
+and Nicholas to her.</p>
+<p>"You might just as well say," Frances said, "that I'm in love
+with John-John. Poor little Don-Don!"</p>
+<p>"I might," said Louie, "just as well."</p>
+<p>Grannie said she was sure she didn't understand what they were
+talking about and that Louie had some very queer ideas in her
+head.</p>
+<p>"Louie," she said, "knows more than I do."</p>
+<p>Frances thought: Was Grannie really stupid? Was she really
+innocent? Was she not, rather, clever, chock-full of the secret
+wisdom and the secret cruelty of sex?</p>
+<p>Frances was afraid of her thoughts. They came to her not like
+thoughts, but like quick rushes of her blood, partly confusing her.
+She did not like that.</p>
+<p>She thought: Supposing Grannie knew all the time that Emmy was
+unhappy, and took a perverse pleasure in her knowledge? Supposing
+she was not really soft and gentle? She could be soft and gentle to
+her, because of her children and because of Anthony. She respected
+Anthony because he was well-off and efficient and successful, and
+had supported her ever since Grandpapa had gone bankrupt. She was
+proud of Frances because she was Anthony's wife, who had had three
+sons and only one daughter.</p>
+<p>Grannie behaved as if her grandchildren were her own children,
+as if she had borne three Sons and only one daughter, instead of
+four daughters and only one son. Still, Frances was the vehicle of
+flesh and blood that carried on her flesh and blood in Michael and
+Nicholas and John. She respected Frances.</p>
+<p>But Frances could remember a time when she had been unmarried
+like her sisters, and when Grannie had turned on her, too, that
+look that was half contempt and half hostility or displeasure.
+Grannie had not wanted her to marry Anthony, any more than she
+would have wanted Louie or Emmeline or Edith to marry anybody,
+supposing anybody had wanted to marry them. And Frances and Anthony
+had defied her. They had insisted on marrying each other. Frances
+knew that if there had been no Anthony, her mother would have
+despised her in secret, as in secret she despised Emmeline and
+Edith. She despised them more than Louie, because, poor things,
+they wanted, palpably, to be married, whereas Louie didn't, or said
+she didn't. In her own way, Louie had defied her mother. She had
+bought a type-writer and a bicycle with her own earnings, and by
+partially supporting herself she had defied Anthony, the male
+benefactor, Louie's manner intimated that there was nothing Frances
+had that she wanted. She had resources in herself, and Frances had
+none.</p>
+<p>Frances persuaded herself that she admired and respected Louie.
+She knew that she, Frances, was only admired and respected because
+she had succeeded where her three sisters had failed. She was even
+afraid that, in moments of exasperation, Grannie used her and
+Anthony and the children to punish Emmy and Edie for their failure.
+The least she could do was to stand between them and Grannie.</p>
+<p>It was possible that if Grannie had been allowed to ignore them
+and give her whole attention to Frances or Michael or Baby John,
+she could have contrived to be soft and gentle for an afternoon.
+But neither Louie nor Emmeline, nor even Edith, would consent to be
+ignored. They refused to knuckle under, to give in. Theirs was a
+perpetual struggle to achieve an individuality in the teeth of
+circumstances that had denied them any. Frances acknowledged that
+they were right, that in the same circumstances she would have done
+the same.</p>
+<p>In their different ways and by different methods they claimed
+attention. They claimed it incessantly, Louie, the eldest, by an
+attitude of assurance and superiority so stiff and hard that it
+seemed invulnerable; Emmy by sudden jerky enthusiasms, exaltations,
+intensities; Edie by an exaggerated animation, a false excitement.
+Edie would drop from a childish merriment to a childish pathos,
+when she would call herself "Poor me," and demand pity for being
+tired, for missing a train, for cold feet, for hair coming
+down.</p>
+<p>There would be still more animation, and still more enthusiasm
+when Anthony came home.</p>
+<p>Frances prided herself on her power of foreseeing things. She
+foresaw that Anthony would come home early for his game. She
+foresaw the funny, nervous agony of his face when he appeared on
+the terrace and caught sight of Grannie and the three Aunties, and
+the elaborate and exquisite politeness with which he would conceal
+from them his emotion. She foresaw that she would say to Annie,
+"When the master comes tell him we're having tea in the garden,
+under the tree of--under the ash-tree" (for after all, he was the
+master, and discipline must be maintained). She foresaw the very
+gestures of his entrance, the ironically solemn bow that he would
+make to her, far-off, from the terrace; she even foresaw the kind
+of joke that, for the life of him, he would not be able to help
+making. She was so made that she could live happily in this world
+of small, foreseen things.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="III"></a>III</h2>
+<br>
+<p>And it all happened as she had foreseen.</p>
+<p>Anthony came home early, because it was a fine afternoon. He
+made the kind of joke that calamity always forced from him, by some
+perversion of his instincts.</p>
+<p>"When is an ash-tree not an ash-tree? When it's a tree of
+Heaven."</p>
+<p>He was exquisitely polite to Grannie and the Aunties, and his
+manner to Frances, which she openly complained of, was, he said,
+what a woman brought on herself when she reserved her passion for
+her children, her sentiment for trees of Heaven, and her mockery
+for her devoted husband.</p>
+<p>"I suppose we can have some tennis <i>now</i>," said Auntie
+Louie.</p>
+<p>"Certainly," said Anthony, "we can, and we shall." He tried not
+to look at Frances.</p>
+<p>And Auntie Edie became automatically animated.</p>
+<p>"I can't serve for nuts, but I can run. Who's going to play with
+<i>me</i>?"</p>
+<p>"I am," said Anthony. He was perfect.</p>
+<p>The game of tennis had an unholy and terrible attraction for
+Auntie Louie and Auntie Edie. Neither of them could play. But,
+whereas Auntie Louie thought that she could play and took tennis
+seriously, Auntie Edie knew that she couldn't and took it as a
+joke.</p>
+<p>Auntie Louie stood tall and rigid and immovable. She planted
+herself, like a man, close up to the net, where Anthony wanted to
+be, and where he should have been; but Auntie Louie said she was no
+good if you put her to play back; she couldn't be expected to take
+every ball he missed.</p>
+<p>When Auntie Louie called out "Play!" she meant to send a nervous
+shudder through her opponents, shattering their morale. She went
+through all the gestures of an annihilating service that for some
+reason never happened. She said the net was too low and that
+spoiled her eye. And when she missed her return it was because
+Anthony had looked at her and put her off. Still Aunt Louie's
+attitude had this advantage that it kept her quiet in one place
+where Anthony could dance round and round her.</p>
+<p>But Auntie Edie played in little nervous runs and slides and
+rushes; she flung herself, with screams of excitement, against the
+ball, her partner and the net; and she brandished her racket in a
+dangerous manner. The oftener she missed the funnier it was to
+Auntie Edie. She had been pretty when she was young, and seventeen
+years ago her cries and tumbles and collisions had been judged
+amusing; and Auntie Edie thought they were amusing still. Anthony
+had never had the heart to undeceive her. So that when Anthony was
+there Auntie Edie still went about setting a standard of gaiety for
+other people to live up to; and still she was astonished that they
+never did, that other people had no sense of humour.</p>
+<p>Therefore Frances was glad when Anthony told her that he had
+asked Mr. Parsons, the children's tutor, and young Norris and young
+Vereker from the office to come round for tennis at six, and that
+dinner must be put off till half-past eight.</p>
+<p>All was well. The evening would be sacred to Anthony and the
+young men. The illusion of worry passed, and Frances's real world
+of happiness stood firm.</p>
+<p>And as Frances's mind, being a thoroughly healthy mind, refused
+to entertain any dreary possibility for long together, so it was
+simply unable to foresee downright calamity, even when it had been
+pointed out to her. For instance, that Nicky should really have
+chosen the day of the party for an earache, the worst earache he
+had ever had.</p>
+<p>He appeared at tea-time, carried in Mary-Nanna's arms, and with
+his head tied up in one of Mr. Jervis's cricket scarves. As he
+approached his family he tried hard not to look pathetic.</p>
+<p>And at the sight of her little son her whole brilliant world of
+happiness was shattered around Frances.</p>
+<p>"Nicky darling," she said, "why <i>didn't</i> you tell me it was
+really aching?"</p>
+<p>"I didn't know," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>He never did know the precise degree of pain that distinguished
+the beginning of a genuine earache from that of a sham one, and he
+felt that to palm off a sham earache on his mother for a real one,
+was somehow a sneaky thing to do. And while his ear went on
+stabbing him, Nicky did his best to explain.</p>
+<p>"You see, I never know whether it's aching or whether it's only
+going to ache. It began a little, teeny bit when the Funny Man made
+me laugh. And I didn't see the Magic Lantern, and I didn't have any
+of Rosalind's cake. It came on when I was biting the sugar off. And
+it was aching in both ears at once. It was," said Nicky, "a jolly
+sell for me."</p>
+<p>At that moment Nicky's earache jabbed upwards at his eyelids and
+cut them, and shook tears out of them. But Nicky's mouth refused to
+take any part in the performance, though he let his father carry
+him upstairs. And, as he lay on the big bed in his mother's room,
+he said he thought he could bear it if he had Jane-Pussy to lie
+beside him, and his steam-engine.</p>
+<p>Anthony went back into the garden to fetch Jane. He spent an
+hour looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house
+and through the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He
+looked for Jane in the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under
+the rhubarb, and on the scullery roof, and in the water butt. It
+was just possible that on a day of complete calamity Jane should
+have slithered off the scullery roof into the water-butt. The least
+he could do was to find Jane, since Nicky wanted her.</p>
+<p>And in the end it turned out that Jane had been captured in her
+sleep, treacherously, by Auntie Emmy. And she had escaped, maddened
+with terror of the large, nervous, incessantly caressing hands. She
+had climbed into the highest branch of the tree of Heaven, and
+crouched there, glaring, unhappy.</p>
+<p>"Damn the cat!" said Anthony to himself. (It was not Jane he
+meant.)</p>
+<p>He was distressed, irritated, absurdly upset, because he would
+have to go back to Nicky without Jane, because he couldn't get
+Nicky what he wanted.</p>
+<p>In that moment Anthony loved Nicky more than any of them. He
+loved him almost more than Frances. Nicky's earache ruined the fine
+day.</p>
+<p>He confided in young Vereker. "I wouldn't bother," he said, "if
+the little chap wasn't so plucky about it."</p>
+<p>"Quite so, sir," said young Vereker.</p>
+<p>It was young Mr. Vereker who found Jane, who eventually
+recaptured her. Young Mr. Vereker made himself glorious by climbing
+up, at the risk of his neck and in his new white flannels, into the
+high branches of the tree of Heaven, to bring Jane down.</p>
+<p>And when Anthony thanked him he said, "Don't mention it, sir.
+It's only a trifle," though it was, as Mr. Norris said, palpable
+that the flannels were ruined. Still, if he hadn't found that
+confounded cat, they would never, humanly speaking, have had their
+tennis.</p>
+<p>The Aunties did not see Mr. Vereker climbing into the tree of
+Heaven. They did not see him playing with Mr. Parsons and Anthony
+and Mr. Norris. For as soon as the three young men appeared, and
+Emmeline and Edith began to be interested and emphatic, Grannie
+said that as they wouldn't see anything more of Frances and the
+children, it was no good staying any longer, and they'd better be
+getting back. It was as if she knew that they were going to enjoy
+themselves and was determined to prevent it.</p>
+<p>Frances went with them to the bottom of the lane. She stood
+there till the black figures had passed, one by one, through the
+white posts on to the Heath, till, in the distance, they became
+small again and harmless and pathetic.</p>
+<p>Then she went back to her room where Nicky lay in the big
+bed.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky lay in the big bed with Jane on one side of him and his
+steam-engine on the other, and a bag of hot salt against each ear.
+Now and then a thin wall of sleep slid between him and his
+earache.</p>
+<p>Frances sat by the open window and looked out into the garden
+where Anthony and Norris played, quietly yet fiercely, against
+Vereker and Parsons. Frances loved the smell of fresh grass that
+the balls and the men's feet struck from the lawn; she loved the
+men's voices subdued to Nicky's sleep, and the sound of their
+padding feet, the thud of the balls on the turf, the smacking and
+thwacking of the rackets. She loved every movement of Anthony's
+handsome, energetic body; she loved the quick, supple bodies of the
+young men, the tense poise and earnest activity of their
+adolescence. But it was not Vereker or Parsons or Norris that she
+loved or that she saw. It was Michael, Nicholas and John whose
+adolescence was foreshadowed in those athletic forms wearing white
+flannels; Michael, Nicky and John, in white flannels, playing
+fiercely. When young Vereker drew himself to his full height, when
+his young body showed lean and slender as he raised his arms for
+his smashing service, it was not young Vereker, but Michael,
+serious and beautiful. When young Parsons leaped high into the air
+and thus returned Anthony's facetious sky-scraper on the volley,
+that was Nicky. When young Norris turned and ran at the top of his
+speed, and overtook the ball on its rebound from the base line
+where young Vereker had planted it, when, as by a miracle, he sent
+it backwards over his own head, paralysing Vereker and Parsons with
+sheer astonishment, that was John.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Her vision passed. She was leaning over Nicky now, Nicky so
+small in the big bed. Nicky had moaned.</p>
+<p>"Does it count if I make that little noise, Mummy? It sort of
+lets the pain out."</p>
+<p>"No, my lamb, it doesn't count. Is the pain very bad?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, Mummy, awful. It's going faster and faster. And it bizzes.
+And when it doesn't bizz, it thumps." He paused--"I
+think--p'raps--I could bear it better if I sat on your knee."</p>
+<p>Frances thought she could bear it better too. It would be good
+for Nicky that he should grow into beautiful adolescence and a
+perfect manhood; but it was better for her that he should be a baby
+still, that she should have him on her knee and hold him close to
+her; that she should feel his adorable body press quivering against
+her body, and the heat of his earache penetrating her cool flesh.
+For now she was lost to herself and utterly absorbed in Nicky. And
+her agony became a sort of ecstasy, as if, actually, she bore his
+pain.</p>
+<p>It was Anthony who could not stand it. Anthony had come in on
+his way to his dressing-room. As he looked at Nicky his handsome,
+hawk-like face was drawn with a dreadful, yearning, ineffectual
+pity. Frances had discovered that her husband could both be and
+look pathetic. He had wanted her to be sorry for him and she was
+sorry for him, because his male pity was all agony; there was no
+ecstasy in it of any sort at all. Nicky was far more her flesh and
+blood than he was Anthony's.</p>
+<p>Nicky stirred in his mother's lap. He raised his head. And when
+he saw that queer look on his father's face he smiled at it. He had
+to make the smile himself, for it refused to come of its own
+accord. He made it carefully, so that it shouldn't hurt him. But he
+made it so well that it hurt Frances and Anthony.</p>
+<p>"I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does," Frances said in
+her pride.</p>
+<p>"If he can bear it, <i>I</i> can't," said Anthony. And he
+stalked into his dressing-room and shut the door on himself.</p>
+<p>"Daddy minds more than you do," said Frances.</p>
+<p>At that Nicky sat up. His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned
+with the fever of his earache.</p>
+<p>"I don't mind," he said. "Really and truly I don't mind. I don't
+care if my ear <i>does</i> ache.</p>
+<p>"It's my eyes is crying, not me."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner,
+Nicky sent for his father and mother. Something had happened.</p>
+<p>Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt
+most awfully. And when it had done cracking his earache had gone
+away. And Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind's party
+and Michael a tin train. And Michael had given him the train and he
+wouldn't take the trumpet instead. Oughtn't Michael to have had the
+trumpet?</p>
+<p>And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night
+nursery, he called them back again.</p>
+<p>"It was a jolly sell for me, wasn't it?" said Nicky. And he
+laughed.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever
+happened, and something was generally happening to him, he didn't
+care. When he scaled the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it
+gave way under his assault and threw him down the steps on to the
+gravel walk, he picked himself up, displaying a forehead that was a
+red abrasion filled in with yellow gravel and the grey dust of the
+smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't care. I liked it," before
+anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna stepped on his train
+and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I don't care. I
+shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't care came
+to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be life's
+last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen, would
+ever take him at a disadvantage.</p>
+<p>Two years passed and he was just the same.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was
+adorable.</p>
+<p>But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when
+you had to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment
+by first admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a
+better one when it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him
+have any cake for tea after he had tested the resilience of the new
+tyres on his father's bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it
+would have been more to the purpose if they had taken his
+steam-engine from him for a week.</p>
+<p>"You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it,"
+said Nicky.</p>
+<p>Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of
+Mutton Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't
+gone in after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to
+bed at four o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother
+came to tuck him up and say Good-night, she found him sitting up,
+smiling and ready.</p>
+<p>"Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit
+of good sending me to bed."</p>
+<p>"I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost
+suspected Nicky of insincerity.</p>
+<p>"So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things.
+You see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've
+'vented three things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle
+stand still with Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of
+bottles; and a thing to make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't
+a punishment, is it, Mummy?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years
+passed and Nicky was still the same.</p>
+<p>And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John
+were not the same.</p>
+<p>For the awful thing about your children was that they were
+always dying. Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child
+Dorothy was dead and in her place was a strange big girl. The child
+Michael was dead and in his place was a strange big boy. And
+Frances mourned over the passing of each age. You could no more
+bring back that unique loveliness of two years old, of five years
+old, of seven, than you could bring back the dead. Even John-John
+was not a baby any more; he spoke another language and had other
+feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's knee.
+Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more
+wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and
+she wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on,
+at the same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies
+and the mother of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and
+women is to be born.</p>
+<p>Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.</p>
+<p>Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she
+wanted them to?</p>
+<p>There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make
+no impression on him.</p>
+<p>There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and
+showed that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful
+words, by rare, extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with
+his self-will; not by anything solid and continuous. There was a
+softness in Michael that distressed and a hardness that perplexed
+her. You could make an impression on Michael--far too easily--and
+the impression stayed. You couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory
+was terrible. And he had secret ways. He was growing more and more
+sensitive, more and more wrapped up in Himself. Supposing Michael
+became a morbid egoist, like Anthony's brother, Bartholomew?</p>
+<p>And there was Dorothy. She went her own way more than ever, with
+the absolute conviction that it was the right way. Nothing could
+turn her. At thirteen her body was no longer obedient. Dorothy was
+not going to be her mother's companion, or her father's, either;
+she was Rosalind Jervis's companion. She seemed to care more about
+little fat, fluffy Rosalind than about any of them except Nicky.
+Dorothy was interested in Michael; she respected his queer
+thoughts. It was as if she recognized some power in him that could
+beat her somewhere some day, and was humble before a thing her
+cleverness had failed to understand. But it was Nicky that she
+adored, not Michael; and she was bad for Nicky. She encouraged his
+naughtiness because it amused her.</p>
+<p>Frances foresaw that a time would come, a little later, when
+Nicky and Dorothy would be companions, not Nicky and his
+mother.</p>
+<p>In the evenings, coming home from the golf-links, Frances and
+Anthony discussed their children.</p>
+<p>Frances said, "You can't make any impression on Nicky. There
+seems to be no way that you can get at him."</p>
+<p>Anthony thought there was a way. It was a way he had not tried
+yet, that he did not want to try. But, if he could only bring
+himself to it, he judged that he could make a distinct
+impression.</p>
+<p>"What the young rascal wants is a thorough good spanking," said
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>Nicky said so too.</p>
+<p>The first time he got it Nicky's criticism was that it wasn't a
+bad idea if his father could have pulled it off all right. But he
+said, "It's no good if you do it through the cloth. And it's no
+good unless you <i>want</i> to hurt me, Daddy. And you don't want.
+And even if you did want, badly enough to try and hurt, supposing
+you spanked ever so hard, you couldn't hurt as much as my earache.
+And I can bear that."</p>
+<p>"He's top dog again, you see," said Frances, not without a
+secret satisfaction.</p>
+<p>"Oh, is he?" said Anthony. "I don't propose to be downed by
+Nicky."</p>
+<p>Every instinct in him revolted against spanking Nicky. But when
+Williams, the groom, showed him a graze on each knee of the pony he
+had bought for Frances and the children, Anthony determined that,
+this time, Nicky should have a serious spanking.</p>
+<p>"Which of them took Roger out?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I don't know, sir," said Williams.</p>
+<p>But Anthony knew. He lay in wait for Nicky by the door that led
+from the stable yard into the kitchen garden.</p>
+<p>Nicky was in the strawberry bed.</p>
+<p>"Was it you who took Roger out this afternoon?"</p>
+<p>Nicky did not answer promptly. His mouth was still full of
+strawberries.</p>
+<p>"What if I did?" he said at last, after manifest reflection.</p>
+<p>"If you did? Why, you let him down on Golders Hill and cut his
+knees."</p>
+<p>"Holly Mount," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Holly Mount or Golders Hill, it's all the same to you, you
+young monkey."</p>
+<p>"It isn't, Daddy. Holly Mount's much the worst. It's an awful
+hill."</p>
+<p>"That," said Anthony, "is why you're forbidden to ride down it.
+You've <i>got</i> to be spanked for this, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"Have I? All right. Don't look so unhappy, Daddy."</p>
+<p>Anthony did much better this time. Nicky (though he shook with
+laughter) owned it very handsomely. And Anthony had handicapped
+himself again by doing it through the cloth. He drew the line at
+shaming Nicky. (Yet--<i>could</i> you have shamed his indomitable
+impudence?)</p>
+<p>But he had done it. He had done it ruthlessly, while the
+strawberries were still wet on Nicky's mouth.</p>
+<p>And when it was all over Michael, looking for his father, came
+into the school-room where these things happened. He said he was
+awfully sorry, but he'd taken Roger out, and Roger had gone down on
+his knees and cut himself.</p>
+<p>No, it wasn't on Holly Mount, it was at the turn of the road on
+the hill past the "Spaniards."</p>
+<p>Anthony paid no attention to Michael. He turned on Michael's
+brother.</p>
+<p>"Nicky, what did you do it for?"</p>
+<p>"For a rag, of course. I knew you'd feel such a jolly fool when
+you found it wasn't me."</p>
+<p>"You see, Daddy," he explained later, "you might have known I
+wouldn't have let Roger down. But wasn't it a ripping sell?"</p>
+<p>"What are you to do," said Anthony, "with a boy like that?"</p>
+<p>Frances had an inspiration. "Do nothing," she said. Her
+tranquillity refused to be troubled for long together.</p>
+<p>"Nicky's right. It's no good trying to punish him. After all,
+<i>why</i> punish Nicky? It isn't as if he was really naughty. He
+never does unkind things, or mean things. And he's truthful."</p>
+<p>"Horribly truthful. They all are," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Well, then, what does Nicky do?"</p>
+<p>"He does dangerous things."</p>
+<p>"He forgets."</p>
+<p>"Nothing more dangerous than forgetting. We must punish him to
+make him remember."</p>
+<p>"But it doesn't make him remember. It only makes him think us
+fools."</p>
+<p>"You know what it means?" said Anthony. "We shall have to send
+him to school."</p>
+<p>"Not yet," said Frances.</p>
+<p>School was the thing in the future that she dreaded. Nicky was
+only nine, and they were all getting on well with Mt. Parsons.
+Anthony knew that to send Nicky to school now would be punishing
+Frances, not Nicky. The little fiend would only grin in their faces
+if they told him he was going to school.</p>
+<p>It was no use trying to make impressions on Nicky. He was as
+hard as nails. He would never feel things.</p>
+<p>Perhaps, Frances thought, it was just as well.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="V"></a>V</h2>
+<br>
+<p>"I do think it was nice of Jane," said Nicky, "to have
+Jerry."</p>
+<p>"And I do think it was nice of me," said Dorothy, "to give him
+to you."</p>
+<p>Jane was Dorothy's cat; therefore her kittens were
+Dorothy's.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't have given him to just anybody."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"I might have kept him. He's the nicest kitten Jane ever
+had."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Nicky. "It <i>was</i> nice of you."</p>
+<p>"I might want him back again."</p>
+<p>"I--know."</p>
+<p>Nicky was quiet and serious, almost humble, as if he went in the
+fear of losing Jerry. Nobody but Jerry and Dorothy saw Nicky in
+that mood.</p>
+<p>Not that he was really afraid. Nothing could take Jerry from
+him. If Dorothy could have taken him back again she wouldn't have,
+not even if she had really wanted him. Dorothy wasn't cruel, and
+she was only ragging.</p>
+<p>But certainly he was Jane's nicest kitten. Jane was
+half-Persian, white with untidy tabby patterns on her. Jerry was
+black all over. Whatever attitude he took, his tight, short fur
+kept the outlines of his figure firm and clear, whether he arched
+his back and jumped sideways, or rolled himself into a cushion, or
+squatted with haunches spread and paws doubled in under his breast,
+or sat bolt upright with his four legs straight like pillars, and
+his tail curled about his feet. Jerry's coat shone like black
+looking-glass, and the top of his head smelt sweet, like a dove's
+breast.</p>
+<p>And he had yellow eyes. Mary-Nanna said they would turn green
+some day. But Nicky didn't believe it. Mary-Nanna was only ragging.
+Jerry's eyes would always be yellow.</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons declared that Nicky sat for whole hours meditating
+on Jerry, as if in this way he could make him last longer.</p>
+<p>Jerry's life was wonderful to Nicky. Once he was so small that
+his body covered hardly the palm of your hand; you could see his
+skin; it felt soft and weak through the thin fur, sleeked flat and
+wet where Jane had licked it. His eyes were buttoned up tight. Then
+they opened. He crawled feebly on the floor after Jane, or hung on
+to her little breasts, pressing out the milk with his clever paws.
+Then Jerry got older. Sometimes he went mad and became a bat or a
+bird, and flew up the drawing-room curtains as if his legs were
+wings.</p>
+<p>Nicky said that Jerry could turn himself into anything he
+pleased; a hawk, an owl, a dove, a Himalayan bear, a snake, a
+flying squirrel, a monkey, a rabbit, a panther, and a little black
+lamb of God.</p>
+<p>Jerry was a cat now; he was two years old.</p>
+<p>Jerry's fixed idea seemed to be that he was a very young cat,
+and that he must be nursed continually, and that nobody but Nicky
+must nurse him. Mr. Parsons found that Nicky made surprising
+progress in his Latin and Greek that year. What had baffled Mr.
+Parsons up till now had been Nicky's incapacity for sitting still.
+But he would sit still enough when Jerry was on his knee, pressed
+tight between the edge of the desk and Nicky's stomach, so that
+knowledge entered into Nicky through Jerry when there was no other
+way.</p>
+<p>Nicky would even sit still in the open air to watch Jerry as he
+stalked bees in the grass, or played by himself, over and over
+again, his own enchanted game. He always played it in the same way.
+He started from the same clump in the border, to run in one long
+careening curve across the grass; at the same spot in the lawn he
+bounded sideways and gave the same little barking grunt and dashed
+off into the bushes. When you tried to catch him midway he stood on
+his hind legs and bowed to you slantwise, waving his forepaws, or
+rushed like lightning up the tree of Heaven, and climbed into the
+highest branches and clung there, looking down at you. His yellow
+eyes shone through the green leaves; they quivered; they played;
+they mocked you with some challenge, some charm, secret and divine
+and savage.</p>
+<p>"The soul of Nicky is in that cat," Frances said.</p>
+<p>Jerry knew that he was Nicky's cat. When other people caught him
+he scrabbled over their shoulders with his claws and got away from
+them. When Nicky caught him he lay quiet and heavy in his arms,
+pressing down and spreading his soft body. Nicky's sense of touch
+had been hardened by violent impacts and collisions, by experiments
+with jack-knives and saws and chisels and gouges, and by struggling
+with the material of his everlasting inventions. Through communion
+with Jerry it became tender and sensitive again. It delighted in
+the cat's throbbing purr and the thrill of his feet, as Jerry,
+serious and earnest, padded down his bed on Nicky's knee.</p>
+<p>"I like him best, though," said Nicky, "when he's sleepy and at
+the same time bitesome."</p>
+<p>"You mustn't let him bite you," Frances said.</p>
+<p>"I don't mind," said Nicky. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't like
+me."</p>
+<p>Jerry had dropped off to sleep with his jaws closing drowsily on
+Nicky's arm. When it moved his hind legs kicked at it and tore.</p>
+<p>"He's dreaming when he does that," said Nicky. "He thinks he's a
+panther and I'm buffaloes."</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons laughed at him. "Nicky and his cat!" he said. Nicky
+didn't care. Mr. Parsons was always ragging him.</p>
+<p>The tutor preferred dogs himself. He couldn't afford any of the
+expensive breeds; but that summer he was taking care of a Russian
+wolfhound for a friend of his. When Mr. Parsons ran with Michael
+and Nicky round the Heath, the great borzoi ran before them with
+long leaps, head downwards, setting an impossible pace. Michael and
+Dorothy adored Boris openly. Nicky, out of loyalty to Jerry,
+stifled a secret admiration. For Mr. Parsons held that a devotion
+to a cat was incompatible with a proper feeling for a dog, whence
+Nicky had inferred that any feeling for a dog must do violence to
+the nobler passion.</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons tried to wean Nicky from what he pretended to regard
+as his unmanly weakness. "Wait, Nicky," he said, "till you've got a
+dog of your own."</p>
+<p>"I don't want a dog of my own," said Nicky. "I don't want
+anything but Jerry." Boris, he said, was not clever, like Jerry. He
+had a silly face.</p>
+<p>"Think so?" said Mr. Parsons. "Look at his jaws. They could
+break Jerry's back with one snap."</p>
+<p>"<i>Could</i> he, Daddy?"</p>
+<p>They were at tea on the lawn, and Boris had gone to sleep under
+Mr. Parsons' legs with his long muzzle on his forepaws.</p>
+<p>"He could," said Anthony, "if he caught him."</p>
+<p>"But he couldn't catch him. Jerry'd be up a tree before Boris
+could look at him."</p>
+<p>"If you want Jerry to shin up trees you must keep his weight
+down."</p>
+<p>Nicky laughed. He knew that Boris could never catch Jerry. His
+father was only ragging him.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky was in the schoolroom, bowed over his desk. He was doing
+an imposition, the second aorist of the abominable verb [Greek:
+erchomai], written out five and twenty times. (Luckily he could do
+the last fifteen times from memory.)</p>
+<p>Nicky had been arguing with Mr. Parsons. Mr. Parsons had said
+that the second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] was not [Greek:
+&ecirc;rchon].</p>
+<p>Nicky had said, "I can't help it. If it's not [Greek:
+&ecirc;rchon] it ought to be."</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons had replied: "The verb [Greek: erchomai] is
+irregular." And Nicky had retorted, in effect, that no verb had any
+business to be as irregular as all that. Mr. Parsons had then
+suggested that Nicky might know more about the business of
+irregular verbs if he wrote out the second aorist of [Greek:
+erchomai] five and twenty times after tea. As it was a particularly
+fine afternoon, an imposition was, Nicky admitted, a score for Mr.
+Parsons and a jolly good sell for <i>him</i>.</p>
+<p>Mr. Parsons had not allowed him to have Jerry on his knee, or
+even in the room; and this, Nicky owned further, was but just. It
+wouldn't have been nearly so good a punishment if he had had Jerry
+with him.</p>
+<p>Nicky, bowed over his desk, struggled for the perfect legibility
+which Mr. Parsons had insisted on, as otherwise the imposition
+would do him more harm than good. He was in for it, and the thing
+must be done honourably if it was done at all. He had only looked
+out of the windows twice to make sure that Boris was asleep under
+Mr. Parsons' legs. And once he had left the room to see where Jerry
+was. He had found him in the kitchen garden, sitting on a bed of
+fresh-grown mustard and cress, ruining it. He sat like a lamb, his
+forepaws crossed, his head tilted slightly backwards. His yellow
+eyes gazed at Nicky with a sweet and mournful innocence.</p>
+<p>Nicky did not hear the voices in the garden.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully sorry, sir," Mr. Parsons was saying. "I can't think
+how it could have happened." Mr. Parsons' voice was thick and his
+face was very red. "I could have sworn the door was shut."</p>
+<p>"Johnnie opened it," said Anthony. He seemed to have caught,
+suddenly, one of his bad colds and to be giving it to Mr. Parsons.
+They were both in their shirtsleeves, and Anthony carried something
+in his arms which he had covered with his coat.</p>
+<p>The borzoi stood in front of them. His face had a look of
+foolish ecstasy. He stared at Mr. Parsons, and as he stared he
+panted. There was a red smear on his white breast; his open jaws
+still dripped a pink slaver. It sprayed the ground in front of
+them, jerked out with his panting.</p>
+<p>"Get away, you damned brute," said Mr. Parsons.</p>
+<p>Boris abashed himself; he stretched out his fore legs towards
+Mr. Parsons, shook his raised haunches, lifted up his great
+saw-like muzzle, and rolled into one monstrous cry a bark, a howl,
+a yawn.</p>
+<p>Nicky heard it, and he looked out of the schoolroom window. He
+saw the red smear on the white curly breast. He saw his father in
+his shirt sleeves, carrying something in his arms that he had
+covered with his coat.</p>
+<p>Under the tree of Heaven Dorothy and Michael, crouching close
+against their mother, cried quietly. Frances was crying, too; for
+it was she who would have to tell Nicky.</p>
+<p>Dorothy tried to console him.</p>
+<p>"Jerry's eyes would have turned green, if he had lived, Nicky.
+They would, really."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't have minded. They'd have been Jerry's eyes."</p>
+<p>"But he wouldn't have looked like Jerry."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't have cared what he looked like. He'd have
+<i>been</i> Jerry."</p>
+<p>"I'll give you Jane, Nicky, and all the kittens she ever has, if
+that would make up."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't. You don't seem to understand that it's Jerry I
+want. I wish you wouldn't talk about him."</p>
+<p>"Very well," said Dorothy, "I won't."</p>
+<p>Then Grannie tried. She recommended a holy resignation. God, she
+said, had given Jerry to Nicky, and God had taken him away.</p>
+<p>"He didn't give him me, and he'd no right to take him. Dorothy
+wouldn't have done it. She was only ragging. But when God does
+things," said Nicky savagely, "it isn't a rag."</p>
+<p>He hated Grannie, and he hated Mr. Parsons, and he hated God.
+But he loved Dorothy who had given him Jerry.</p>
+<p>Night after night Frances held him in her arms at bed-time while
+Nicky said the same thing. "If--if I could stop seeing him. But I
+keep on seeing him. When he sat on the mustard and cress. And when
+he bit me with his sleep-bites. And when he looked at me out of the
+tree of Heaven. Then I hear that little barking grunt he used to
+make when he was playing with himself--when he dashed off into the
+bushes.</p>
+<p>"And I can't <i>bear</i> it."</p>
+<p>Night after night Nicky cried himself to sleep.</p>
+<p>For the awful thing was that it had been all his fault. If he
+had kept Jerry's weight down Boris couldn't have caught him.</p>
+<p>"Daddy said so, Mummy."</p>
+<p>Over and over again Frances said, "It wasn't your fault. It was
+Don-Don's. He left the door open. Surely you can forgive Don-Don?"
+Over and over again Nicky said, "I do forgive him."</p>
+<p>But it was no good. Nicky became first supernaturally subdued
+and gentle, then ill. They had to take him away from home, away
+from the sight of the garden, and away from Mr. Parsons,
+forestalling the midsummer holidays by two months.</p>
+<p>Nicky at the seaside was troublesome and happy, and they thought
+he had forgotten. But on the first evening at Hampstead, as Frances
+kissed him Good-night, he said: "Shall I have to see Mr. Parsons
+to-morrow?"</p>
+<p>Frances said: "Yes. Of course."</p>
+<p>"I'd rather not."</p>
+<p>"Nonsense, you must get over that."</p>
+<p>"I--can't, Mummy."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Nicky, can't you forgive poor Mr. Parsons? When he was so
+unhappy?"</p>
+<p>Nicky meditated.</p>
+<p>"Do you think," he said at last, "he really minded?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure he did."</p>
+<p>"As much as you and Daddy?"</p>
+<p>"Quite as much."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Nicky, "I'll forgive him."</p>
+<p>But, though he forgave John and Mr. Parsons and even God, who,
+to do him justice, did not seem to have been able to help it, Nicky
+did not forgive himself.</p>
+<p>Yet Frances never could think why the sight of mustard and cress
+made Nicky sick. Neither did Mr. Parsons, nor any schoolmaster who
+came after him understand why, when Nicky knew all the rest of the
+verb [Greek: erchomai] by heart he was unable to remember the
+second aorist.</p>
+<p>He excellent memory, but there was always a gap in it just
+there.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>In that peace and tranquillity where nothing ever happened,
+Jerry's violent death would have counted as an event, a date to
+reckon by; but for three memorable things that happened, one after
+another, in the summer and autumn of 'ninety-nine: the return of
+Frances's brother, Maurice Fleming, from Australia where Anthony
+had sent him two years ago, on the express understanding that he
+was to stay there; the simultaneous arrival of Anthony's brother,
+Bartholomew, and his family; and the outbreak of the Boer War.</p>
+<p>The return of Morrie was not altogether unforeseen, and
+Bartholomew had announced his coming well beforehand, but who could
+have dreamed that at the end of the nineteenth century England
+would be engaged in a War that really <i>was</i> a War? Frances,
+with the <i>Times</i> in her hands, supposed that that meant more
+meddling and muddling of stupid politicians, and that it would mean
+more silly speeches in Parliament, and copy, at last, for foolish
+violent, pathetic and desperate editors, and breach of promise
+cases, divorces and fires in paraffin shops reduced to momentary
+insignificance.</p>
+<p>But as yet there was no war, nor any appearance that sensible
+people interpreted as a sign of war at the time of Morrie's return.
+It stood alone, as other past returns, the return from Bombay, the
+return from Canada, the return from Cape Colony, had stood, in its
+sheer awfulness. To Frances it represented the extremity of
+disaster.</p>
+<p>They might have known what was coming by Grannie's behaviour.
+One day, the day when the Australian mail arrived, she had subsided
+suddenly into a state of softness and gentleness. She approached
+her son-in-law with an air of sorrowful deprecation; she showed a
+certain deference to her daughter Louie; she was soft and gentle
+even with Emmeline and Edith.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Fleming broke the news to Louie who broke it to Frances who
+in her turn broke it to Anthony. That was the procedure they
+invariably adopted.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," Grannie said, "what he can be coming back for!" Each
+time she affected astonishment and incredulity, as if Morrie's
+coming back were, not a recurrence that crushed you with its
+flatness and staleness, but a thing that must interest Louie
+because of its utter un-likeliness.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said Louie, "why he hasn't come before. What else
+did you expect?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I don't know," said Grannie helplessly. "Go and tell
+Frances."</p>
+<p>Louie went. And because she knew that the burden of Morrie would
+fall again on Frances's husband she was disagreeable with
+Frances.</p>
+<p>"It's all very well for you," she said. "You haven't got to live
+with him. You haven't got to sleep in the room next him. You don't
+know what it's like."</p>
+<p>"I do know," said Frances. "I remember. You'll have to bear
+it."</p>
+<p>"You haven't had to bear it for fourteen years."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to bear it," Frances repeated, "till Anthony sends
+him out again. That's all it amounts to."</p>
+<p>She waited till the children were in bed and she was alone with
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Something awful's happened," she said, and paused hoping he
+would guess.</p>
+<p>"I don't know how to tell you."</p>
+<p>"Don't tell me if it's that Nicky's been taking my new bike to
+pieces."</p>
+<p>"It isn't Nicky--It's Maurice."</p>
+<p>Anthony got up and cleared his pipe, thoroughly and
+deliberately. She wondered whether he had heard.</p>
+<p>"I'd no business to have married you--to have let you in for
+him."</p>
+<p>"Why? What's he been up to now?"</p>
+<p>"He's coming home."</p>
+<p>"So," said Anthony, "is Bartholomew. I'd no business to have let
+you in for <i>him</i>."</p>
+<p>"Don't worry, Frances. If Morrie comes home he'll be sent out
+again, that's all."</p>
+<p>"At your expense."</p>
+<p>"I don't grudge any expense in sending Morrie out. Nor in
+keeping him out."</p>
+<p>"Yes. But this time it's different. It's worse."</p>
+<p>"Why worse?"</p>
+<p>"Because of the children. They're older now than they were last
+time. They'll understand."</p>
+<p>"What if they do? They must learn," Anthony said, "to realize
+facts."</p>
+<p>They realized them rather sooner than he had expected. Nobody
+but Louie had allowed for the possibility of Morrie's sailing by
+the same steamer as his letter; and Louie had argued that, if he
+had done so, he was bound either to have arrived before the letter
+or to have sent a wire. Therefore they had at least a clear five
+days of peace before them. Anthony thought he had shown wisdom
+when, the next morning which was a Wednesday, he sent Grannie and
+the Aunties to Eastbourne for a week, so that they shouldn't worry
+Frances, and when on Thursday he made her go with him for a long
+day in the country, to take her mind off Morrie.</p>
+<p>They came back at nine in the evening and found Dorothy, Michael
+and Nicholas sitting up for them. Michael and Nicky were excited,
+but Dorothy looked grown-up and important.</p>
+<p>"Uncle Morrie's come," they said.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy saw him first--"</p>
+<p>"Nicky let him in--"</p>
+<p>"He hadn't got a hat on."</p>
+<p>"We kept him in the schoolroom till Nanna could come and put him
+to bed."</p>
+<p>"He was crying because he'd been to Grannie's house and there
+wasn't anybody there--"</p>
+<p>"And because he'd lost the love-birds he'd brought for Auntie
+Emmy--"</p>
+<p>"And because he couldn't remember which of us was dead."</p>
+<p>"No, Mummy, nobody's seen him but us and Nanna."</p>
+<p>"Nanna's with him now."</p>
+<p>Uncle Morrie never accounted, even to himself, for the time he
+had spent between the arrival of his ship at Tilbury on Sunday
+morning and that Saturday afternoon. Neither could he remember what
+had become of his luggage or whether he had ever had any. Only the
+County Council man, going his last rounds in the farthest places of
+the Heath, came upon a small bundle tied in a blue handkerchief, a
+cap belonging to E.D. Boulger, of the S.S. <i>Arizona</i>, a cage
+of love-birds, and a distinct impression of a recumbent human form,
+on the grass together, under a young birch tree.</p>
+<p>In the stuffy little house behind the Judge's Walk the four
+women lived now under male protection. When they crossed the Heath
+they had no longer any need to borrow Anthony from Frances; they
+had a man of their own. To make room for him Auntie Louie and her
+type-writer were turned out of their own place, and Auntie Louie
+had to sleep in Grannie's bed, a thing she hated. To make room for
+the type-writer the grey parrot was turned out of the dining-room
+into the drawing-room. And as Maurice couldn't stand either the
+noise of the type-writer or the noises of the parrot he found both
+the dining-room and the drawing-room uninhabitable.</p>
+<p>Day after day Dorothy and Michael and Nicky, on the terrace,
+looked out for his coming. (Only extreme distance made Uncle
+Morrie's figure small and harmless and pathetic.) Day after day he
+presented himself with an air of distinction and assurance,
+flushed, and a little battered, but still handsome, wearing a
+spruce grey suit and a panama hat bought with Anthony's money.
+Sheep-farming in Australia--he had infinitely preferred the Cape
+Mounted Police--had ruined Maurice's nerves. He was good for
+nothing but to lounge in Anthony's garden, to ride his horses--it
+was his riding that had got him into the Cape Mounted Police--to
+sit at his table and drink his wines, and, when there was no more
+wine for him, to turn into Jack Straw's Castle for a pick-me-up on
+his way home.</p>
+<p>And before July was out three others were added to the garden
+group: Bartholomew and Vera and Veronica. And after them a fourth,
+Vera's friend, Captain Ferdinand Cameron, home on sick leave before
+anybody expected him.</p>
+<p>Frances's tree of Heaven sheltered them all.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Bartholomew, Anthony's brother, lived in Bombay and looked after
+his business for him in the East. He had something the matter with
+him, and he had come home to look after his own health. At least,
+Bartholomew's health was what he was supposed to be looking after;
+but Dorothy had heard her father say that Bartie had come home to
+look after Vera.</p>
+<p>Vera was Bartie's wife and Veronica's mother. Before she became
+Mrs. Bartholomew Harrison she had been Frances's schoolfellow and
+her dearest friend. Frances Fleming had been her bridesmaid and had
+met Anthony for the first time at Vera's wedding, when he had
+fallen in love with her; and she had fallen in love with him when
+they stayed together in Bartholomew's house, before Bartholomew
+took Vera to Bombay.</p>
+<p>Bartie had not been married ten months before he wanted to get
+Vera out of England; and Vera had not been in India for ten weeks
+before he wanted her to go back. They were always coming backwards
+and forwards, but they never came together. Vera would be sent home
+first, and then Bartie would come over in a great hurry and take
+her out again.</p>
+<p>Twelve years after their marriage Veronica was born at Simla,
+and the coming and going ceased for three years. Then Bartie sent
+them both home. That time Vera had refused to travel farther
+westward than Marseilles. She was afraid of damp and cold, and she
+had got the ship's doctor to order her to the Riviera. She and
+Veronica had been living for two years in a small villa at
+Agaye.</p>
+<p>This summer she had come to England. She was no longer afraid of
+damp and cold. And Bartie followed her.</p>
+<p>Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera,
+though it was more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera
+looked the same. Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her
+face had still the same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell.
+And if these things had changed Frances would still have known her
+by her forehead that looked so broad because her eyebrows and her
+eyes were so long, and by her fine, unfinished, passionate mouth,
+by her pointed chin and by her ways.</p>
+<p>But though her brother-in-law's ways had always been more or
+less disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the
+renewed encounter with Bartholomew. Bartie was long and grey, and
+lean even when you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt.
+He wore a white scarf about his throat, for his idea was that he
+had cancer in it. Cancer made you look grey. He, too, had the face
+of a hawk, of a tired and irritable hawk. It drooped between his
+hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above the scarf as if he were
+too tired or too irritable to hold it up. He behaved to Vera and
+Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into cancer of the
+throat, they who tired and irritated him.</p>
+<p>Vera talked to him as you might talk to a sick child whose
+peevishness prolongs, unreasonably, its pain. Bartie's manner
+almost amounted to a public repudiation of her. The whole house
+vibrated to the shutting of his door at Good-night time. Yet when
+Bartie came down in the morning, late, and more morose than ever,
+Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some visionary image of the poor
+thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for one minute in his cancer.
+It was an excuse for the shutting of his door.</p>
+<p>She kept out of his way as much as possible; yet, when they were
+together they watched each other. They watched; Bartie openly with
+sudden dartings and swoopings of his hawk's eyes; Vera furtively.
+Her eyes were so large and long that, without turning her head, or
+any visible movement, they could hold his image.</p>
+<p>But for Captain Cameron Vera's eyes had a full, open gaze.
+Spread wide apart under her wide forehead they were like dark
+moth's wings; they hovered, rested, flickering, vibrating to the
+fine tips of their corners.</p>
+<p>Whatever had been the matter with him in India, Captain Cameron
+had recovered. His keen, fair, Highland face made Bartie's face
+look terrible. Ferdie was charming; not more charming to Bartie's
+wife than he was to Frances; not more charming to Frances than to
+her sisters; so that even Louie unbent, and Emmeline and Edith fell
+in love with him. He flirted with Frances under Anthony's nose; and
+with the Aunties under Grannie's nose. The corners of Vera's mouth
+followed the tilt of her long eyes' corners as she saw him do
+it.</p>
+<p>You could not think of Vera as the children's Auntie, or as
+Bartie's wife, or as Veronica's mother.</p>
+<p>Veronica was a very little girl who sang songs and was afraid of
+ghosts.</p>
+<p>She slept in her mother's room, and so never could be put to bed
+till half-past seven, or till her mother was dressed to the last
+hook of her gown, the last hairpin, the last touch of powder
+(adhesive without bismuth), and the last shadow drawn fine about
+her eyelashes. When Vera beautiful in a beautiful gown, came
+trailing into the room where everybody waited for her, Veronica hid
+herself behind Uncle Anthony's big chair. When her father told her
+to come out of that and say good-night and be quick about it, she
+came slowly (she was not in the least afraid of Bartie), showing
+herself bit by bit, honey-coloured hair, eyebrows dark under her
+gold, very dark against her white; sorrowful, transparent, lucid
+eyes. A little girl with a straight white face. A little, slender
+girl in a straight white frock. She stood by Anthony's chair,
+spinning out the time, smiling at him with her childish wavering
+mouth, a smile that would not spread, that never went higher than
+the tip of her white nose, that left her lucid, transparent eyes
+still sorrowful.</p>
+<p>She knew that Anthony would take her on his knee, and that she
+could sit there with her head tucked under his chin, smiling at
+him, prolonging her caresses, till Vera told him to put her down
+and let her go.</p>
+<p>Bartie growled: "Did you hear your mother telling you to say
+Good-night?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. But I must kiss Uncle Anthony first. Properly. Once on his
+mouth. Once--on his nose. And once--on--his--eyes.
+And--once--on--his dear little--ears."</p>
+<p>After that, Veronica went slowly from chair to chair, lingering
+at each, sitting first on Frances's lap, then on Vera's, spinning
+out her caresses, that spun out the time and stretched it farther
+and farther between her and the unearthly hour ahead of her.</p>
+<p>But at her father's chair she did not linger for a single
+instant. She slipped her hand into his hand that dropped it as if
+it had hurt him; she touched his forehead with her small mouth,
+pushed out, absurdly, to keep her face as far as possible from his.
+For, though she was not afraid of Bartie, he was not nice either to
+sit on or to kiss.</p>
+<p>Half-way across the room she lingered.</p>
+<p>"I haven't sung 'London Bridge is broken down.' Don't you want
+me to sing it?"</p>
+<p>"No, darling. We want you to go to bed."</p>
+<p>"I'm going, Mummy."</p>
+<p>And at the door she turned and looked at them with her
+sorrowful, lucid, transparent eyes.</p>
+<p>Then she went, leaving the door open behind her. She left it
+open on purpose, so that she might hear their voices, and look down
+into the room on her way upstairs. Besides, she always hoped that
+somebody would call her back again.</p>
+<p>She lingered at the foot of the stairs till Bartie got up and
+shut the door on her. She lingered at the turn of the stairs and on
+the landing. But nobody ever called her back again.</p>
+<p>And nobody but Nicky knew what she was afraid of.</p>
+<p>Veronica was sitting up in the cot that used to be Nicky's when
+he was little. Nicky, rather cold in his pyjamas, sat on the edge
+of it beside her. A big, yellow, tremendous moon hung in the sky
+outside the window, behind a branch of the tree of Heaven, and
+looked at them.</p>
+<p>Veronica crouched sideways on her pillow in a corner of the cot,
+her legs doubled up tight under her tiny body, her shoulders
+hunched together, and her thin arms hanging before her straight to
+her lap. Her honey coloured hair was parted and gathered into two
+funny plaits, that stuck out behind her ear. Her head was tilted
+slightly backwards to rest against the rail of the cot. She looked
+at Nicky and her look reminded him of something, he couldn't
+remember what.</p>
+<p>"Were you ever afraid, Nicky?" she said.</p>
+<p>Nicky searched his memory for some image encircled by an
+atmosphere of terror, and found there a white hound with red smears
+on his breast and a muzzle like two saws.</p>
+<p>"Yes," he said, "I was once."</p>
+<p>A lamb--a white lamb--was what Veronica looked like. And Jerry
+bad looked at him like that when he found him sitting on the
+mustard and cress the day Boris killed him.</p>
+<p>"Afraid--what of?"</p>
+<p>"I don't know that it was 'of' exactly."</p>
+<p>"Would you be afraid of a ghost, now, if you saw one?"</p>
+<p>"I expect I jolly well should, if I <i>really</i> saw one."</p>
+<p>"Being afraid of ghosts doesn't count, does it?"</p>
+<p>"No, of course it doesn't. You aren't afraid as long as I'm
+here, are you?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"I shall stay, then, till you go to sleep."</p>
+<p>Night after night he heard her calling to him, "Nicky, I'm
+frightened." Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that
+floor before midnight. Night after night he got up and came to her
+and stayed beside her till she went to sleep.</p>
+<p>Once he said, "If it was Michael he could tell you stories."</p>
+<p>"I don't <i>want</i> Michael. I want you."</p>
+<p>In the day-time she went about looking for him. "Where's Nicky?"
+she said. "I want him."</p>
+<p>"Nicky's in the schoolroom. You can't have him."</p>
+<p>"But--I <i>want</i> him."</p>
+<p>"Can't be helped. You must do without him."</p>
+<p>"Will he be very long?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, ever so long. Run away like a good little girl and play
+with Don-Don."</p>
+<p>She knew that they told her to play with Don-Don, because she
+was a little girl. If only she could grow big quick and be the same
+age as Nicky.</p>
+<p>Instead of running away and playing with Don-Don, Ronny went
+away by herself into the apple-tree house, to wait for Nicky.</p>
+<p>The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of
+the kitchen garden. The apple-tree had had no apples on it for
+years. It was so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched
+out two great boughs like twisted arms, and was propped up by a
+wooden post under each armpit. The breast of its trunk rested on a
+cross-beam. The posts and the cross-beam were the doorway of the
+house, and the branches were its roof and walls. Anthony had given
+it to Veronica to live in, and Veronica had given it to Nicky. It
+was Nicky's and Ronny's house. The others were only visitors who
+were not expected to stay. There was room enough for them both to
+stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the middle, and to lie
+flat at the far end.</p>
+<p>"What more," said Nicky, "do you want?"</p>
+<p>He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he
+played with Bonny in the apple-tree house.</p>
+<p>"I don't care a ram if they do," he said. But nobody ever did,
+not even Mr. Parsons.</p>
+<p>Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and
+Bonny sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled
+unwillingly. But her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all.
+Nicky wondered why.</p>
+<p>"Is it," said Dorothy one morning, "that Ronny doesn't look as
+if she was Uncle Bartie's daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as
+if he wasn't Ronny's father?"</p>
+<p>However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she
+brought it out as if it had been the result of long and mature
+consideration.</p>
+<p>"Or is it," said Vera, "that I don't look as if I were Ronny's
+mother?"</p>
+<p>Her eyes had opened all their length to take in Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"No. I think it is that Uncle Bartie looks--"</p>
+<p>Frances rushed in. "It doesn't matter, my dear, what you
+think."</p>
+<p>"It will some day," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>It was perhaps the best thing she could have said, as showing
+that she was more interested in the effect she would produce some
+day than in the sensation she had created there and then.</p>
+<p>"May I go round to Rosalind's after lessons?"</p>
+<p>"You may."</p>
+<p>"And may I stay to lunch if they ask me?"</p>
+<p>"You may stay as long as they care to have you. Stay to tea,
+stay to dinner, if you like."</p>
+<p>Dorothy knew by the behaviour of her mother's face that she had
+scored somewhere, somehow. She also knew that she was in disgrace
+and yet not in disgrace; which, if you came to think of it, was a
+funny thing.</p>
+<p>About this time Frances began to notice a symptom in herself.
+She was apt to resent it when Vera discussed her children with her.
+One late afternoon she and Anthony were alone with Vera. Captain
+Cameron had not come round that day, and Bartie had gone into town
+to consult either his solicitor or a specialist. He was always
+consulting one or the other.</p>
+<p>"You're wrong, you two," said Vera. "You think Michael's tender
+and Nicky's hard and unimpressionable. Michael's hard. You won't
+have to bother about Michael's feelings."</p>
+<p>"Michael's feelings," said Frances, "are probably what I shall
+have to bother about more than anything."</p>
+<p>"You needn't. For one thing, they'll be so unlike your feelings
+that you won't know whether they're feelings at all. You won't even
+know whether he's having them or not. Nicky's the one you'll have
+to look out for. He'll go all the howlers."</p>
+<p>"I don't think that Nicky'll be very susceptible. He hasn't
+shown any great signs so far."</p>
+<p>"Hasn't he! Nicky's susceptibility is something awful."</p>
+<p>"My dear Vera, you say yourself you don't care about children
+and that you don't understand them."</p>
+<p>"No more I do," said Vera. "But I understand men."</p>
+<p>"Do you understand Veronica?"</p>
+<p>"Of course I don't. I said men. Veronica's a girl. Besides, I'm
+Veronica's mother."</p>
+<p>"Nicky," said Anthony, "is not much more than nine."</p>
+<p>"You keep on thinking of him as a child--a child--nothing but a
+child. Wait till Nicky has children of his own. Then you'll
+know."</p>
+<p>"They would be rather darlings, Nicky's children," Frances
+said.</p>
+<p>"So would Veronica's."</p>
+<p>"Ver-onica?"</p>
+<p>You needn't be frightened. Nicky's affection for Ronny is purely
+paternal."</p>
+<p>"I'm not frightened," said Frances. But she left the room. She
+did not care for the turn the talk had taken. Besides, she wanted
+Vera to see that she was not afraid to leave her alone with
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>"I'm glad Frances has gone," said Vera, "because I want to talk
+to you. You'd never have known each other if it hadn't been for me.
+She couldn't have married you. It was I who saw you both
+through."</p>
+<p>He assented.</p>
+<p>"And you said if there was ever anything you could do for
+me--You haven't by any chance forgotten?"</p>
+<p>"I have not."</p>
+<p>"Well, if anything should happen to me--"</p>
+<p>"But, my dear girl, what <i>should</i> happen to you?"</p>
+<p>"Things <i>do</i> happen, Anthony."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but how about Bartie?"</p>
+<p>"That's it. Supposing we separated."</p>
+<p>"Good Heavens, you're not contemplating <i>that</i>, are
+you?"</p>
+<p>"I'm not contemplating anything. But Bartie isn't very easy to
+live with, is he?"</p>
+<p>"No, he's not. He never was. All the same--"</p>
+<p>Bartie was impossible. Between the diseases he had and thought
+he hadn't and the diseases he hadn't and thought he had, he made
+life miserable for himself and other people. He was a jealous
+egoist; he had the morbid coldness of the neurotic, and Vera was
+passionate. She ought never to have married him. All the
+same--"</p>
+<p>"All the same I shall stick to Bartie as long as it's possible.
+And as long as it's possible Bartie'll stick to me. But, if
+anything happens I want you to promise that you'll take Ronny."</p>
+<p>"You must get Frances to promise."</p>
+<p>"She'll do anything you ask her to, Anthony."</p>
+<p>When Frances came into the room again Vera was crying.</p>
+<p>And so Frances promised.</p>
+<blockquote>"'London Bridge is broken down<br>
+(<i>Ride over My Lady Leigh</i>!)<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+"'Build it up with stones so strong--<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+"'Build it up with gold so fine'"--</blockquote>
+<p>It was twenty to eight and Ronny had not so much as begun to say
+Good night. She was singing her sons to spin out the time.</p>
+<blockquote>"'London Bridge--'"</blockquote>
+<p>"That'll do, Ronny, it's time you were in bed."</p>
+<p>There was no need for her to linger and draw out her caresses,
+no need to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's
+request, had had her cot moved up into the night nursery.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie
+out to this time, when the Boer War came and solved his
+problem.</p>
+<p>Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South
+Africa, to enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.</p>
+<p>Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders,
+solving, perhaps, another problem.</p>
+<p>"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.</p>
+<p>Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was
+what Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't
+come back? Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances
+hated problems when they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems
+when they bothered Frances.</p>
+<p>And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went
+on.</p>
+<p>"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."</p>
+<p>"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said,
+"what else could he do? His only chance was to go away and do
+something so jolly plucky that <i>we</i>'re ashamed of ourselves,
+and never to come back again to spoil it. You don't want him to
+spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"</p>
+<p>Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to
+realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging
+over them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over
+them. It hung over a country that, except once when it had
+conveniently swallowed up Morrie, they had never thought about and
+could not care for, a landscape that they could not see. The war
+was not even part of that landscape; it refused to move over it in
+any traceable course. It simply hung, or lay as one photographic
+film might lie upon another. It was not their fault. They tried to
+see it. They bought the special editions of the evening papers;
+they read the military dispatches and the stories of the war
+correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the
+printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and
+Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial;
+it was all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated
+papers; the very blood of it ran grey.</p>
+<p>It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the
+open wings of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of
+Heaven were real; so were Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow on the
+Hill; morning and noon and night were real, and getting up and
+dressing and going to bed; most real of all the sight and sound and
+touch of her husband and her children.</p>
+<p>Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances
+carried about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she
+could attach the rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an
+immense slender muzzle, tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out
+Maurice.</p>
+<p>Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.</p>
+<p>"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy
+said he ought to be shut up somewhere."</p>
+<p>"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."</p>
+<p>"Or drink, ducky."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"</p>
+<p>"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I
+shouldn't mind whether he came back or didn't. <i>You</i>'re cruel.
+You ought to think of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and
+Auntie Edie."</p>
+<p>"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle
+Morrie."</p>
+<p>She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had
+been, as a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two
+years younger than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted,
+who contrived, nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to
+want by crying for them, though everybody else went without. And in
+the grown-up Morrie's place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.</p>
+<p>"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to
+miss it."</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and
+Nicky, mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High
+Street with flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a
+Pro-Boer and flew no flags. All these things irritated Maurice.</p>
+<p>He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all
+the chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in
+hospital throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had
+missed the sortie of his squadron and the taking of the guns for
+which Ferdie Cameron got his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come
+back in the middle of the war with nothing but a bullet wound in
+his left leg to prove that he had taken part in it.</p>
+<p>The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only
+depressed him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence
+broke down the sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a
+period of sobriety beyond its natural limits.</p>
+<p>For there were two kinds of drinking: great drinking that came
+seldom and was the only thing that counted, and ordinary drinking
+that, though it went on most of the time, brought no satisfaction
+and didn't count at all. And there were two states of drunkenness
+to correspond: one intense and vivid, without memory, transcending
+all other states; and one that was no more remarkable than any
+other. Before the war Morrie's great drinking came seldom, by fits
+and bursts and splendid unlasting uprushes; after the war the two
+states tended to approach till they merged in one continual sickly
+soaking. And while other important and outstanding things, and
+things that he really wanted to remember, disappeared in the
+poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he never for one
+moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not Anthony, his
+brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded.</p>
+<p>He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the
+war. He was furious with Frances and Anthony. Not realizing the war
+meant not realizing what he had been through. He swore by some
+queer God of his that he would make them realize it. The least they
+could do for him was to listen to what he had to say.</p>
+<p>"You people here don't know what war is. You think it's all
+glory and pluck, and dashing out and blowing up the enemy's guns,
+and the British flag flying, and wounded pipers piping all the time
+and not caring a damn. Nobody caring a damn.</p>
+<p>"And it isn't. It's dirt and funk and stinks and more funk all
+the time. It's lying out all night on the beastly veldt, and going
+to sleep and getting frozen, and waking up and finding you've got
+warm again because your neighbour's inside's been fired out on the
+top of you. You get wounded when the stretcher-bearers aren't
+anywhere about, and you crawl over to the next poor devil and lie
+back to back with him to keep warm. And just when you've dropped
+off to sleep you wake up shivering, because he's died of a wound he
+didn't know he'd got.</p>
+<p>"You'll find a chap lying on his back all nice and comfy, and
+when you start to pick him up you can't lift him because his head's
+glued to the ground. You try a bit, gently, and the flesh gives way
+like rotten fruit, and the bone like a cup you've broken and stuck
+together without any seccotine, and you heave up a body with half a
+head on it. And all the brains are in the other half, the one
+that's glued down. That's war.</p>
+<p>"Huh!" He threw out his breath with a jerk of contempt. It
+seemed to him that neither Frances nor Anthony was listening to
+him. They were not looking at him. They didn't want to listen; they
+didn't want to look at him. He couldn't touch them; he couldn't
+evoke one single clear image in their minds; there was no horror he
+could name that would sting them to vision, to realization. They
+had not been there.</p>
+<p>Dorothy and Michael and Nicky were listening. The three kids had
+imagination; they could take it in. They stared as if he had
+brought those horrors into the room. But even they missed the
+reality of it. They saw everything he meant them to see, except
+him. It was as if they were in the conspiracy to keep him out of
+it.</p>
+<p>He glared at Frances and Anthony. What was the good of telling
+them, of trying to make them realize it? If they'd only given some
+sign, made some noise or some gesture, or looked at him, he might
+have spared them. But the stiff, averted faces of Frances and
+Anthony annoyed him.</p>
+<p>"And if you're a poor wretched Tommy like me, you'll have to
+sweat in a brutal sun, hauling up cases of fizz from the railway up
+country to Headquarters, with a thirst on you that frizzles your
+throat. You see the stuff shining and spluttering, and you go mad.
+You could kill the man if you were to see him drink it, when you
+know there's nothing for <i>you</i> but a bucket of green water
+with typhoid germs swimming about in it. That's war.</p>
+<p>"You think you're lucky if you're wounded and get bumped down in
+a bullock wagon thirty miles to the base hospital. But the best
+thing you can do then is to pop off. For if you get better they
+make you hospital orderly. And the hospital orderly has to clean up
+all the muck of the butcher's shop from morning to night. When
+you're so sick you can't stand you get your supper, dry bread and
+bully beef. The bully beef reminds you of things, and the
+bread--well, the bread's all nice and white on the top. But when
+you turn it over on the other side--it's red. That's war."</p>
+<p>Frances looked at him. He thought: "At last she's turned; at
+last I've touched her; she can realize that."</p>
+<p>"Morrie dear, it must have been awful," she said. "It's
+<i>too</i> awful. I don't mind your telling me and Anthony about
+it; but I'd rather you did it when the children aren't in the
+room."</p>
+<p>"Is that all you think about? The children? The children. You
+don't care a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn
+what happens to me or anybody else. What does it matter who's
+wounded or who's killed, as long as it isn't one of your own
+kids?</p>
+<p>"I'm simply trying to tell you what war <i>is</i>. It's dirt and
+stink and funk. That's all it is. And there's precious little glory
+in it, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"If the Boers won there would be glory," Michael said.</p>
+<p>"Not even if the Boers won," said Maurice.</p>
+<p>"Certainly not if the Boers won," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>"You'll say next there'd be no glory if there was war between
+England and Ireland and the Irish won. And yet there would be
+glory."</p>
+<p>"Would there? Go and read history and don't talk rot."</p>
+<p>"I have read it," said Michael.</p>
+<p>Frances thought: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why
+should he? He's barely thirteen. I can't think where he gets these
+ideas from. But he'll grow out of them."</p>
+<p>It was not Maurice that she saw in Maurice's war-pictures. But
+he had made them realize what war was; and they vowed that as long
+as they lived not one of their sons should have anything to do with
+it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>In the spring of nineteen-one Anthony sent Maurice out to
+California. The Boer War was ended.</p>
+<p>Another year, and the vision of war passed from Frances as if it
+had never been.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+<p>Michael was unhappy.</p>
+<p>The almond trees flowered in front of the white houses in the
+strange white streets.</p>
+<p>White squares, white terraces, white crescents; at the turn of
+the roads the startling beauty of the trees covered with pink
+blossoms, hot against the hot white walls.</p>
+<p>After the pink blossoms, green leaves and a strange white heat
+everywhere. You went, from pavements burning white, down long
+avenues grey-white under the shadows of the limes.</p>
+<p>A great Promenade going down like a long green tunnel, from the
+big white Hotel at the top to the High Street at the bottom of the
+basin where the very dregs of the heat sank and thickened.</p>
+<p>Promenade forbidden for no earthly reason that Michael could
+see, except that it was beautiful. Hotel where his father gave him
+dinner on his last day of blessed life, telling him to choose what
+he liked best, as the condemned criminal chooses his last meal on
+the day they hang him.</p>
+<p>Cleeve Hill and Battledown and Birdlip, and the long rampart of
+Leckhampton, a thin, curling bristle of small trees on the edge of
+it; forms that made an everlasting pattern on his mind; forms that
+haunted him at night and tempted and tormented him all day. Memory
+which it would have been better for him if he had not had, of the
+raking open country over the top, of broad white light and luminous
+blue shadows, of white roads switchbacking through the sheep
+pastures; fields of bright yellow mustard in flower on the lower
+hills; then, rectangular fir plantations and copses of slender
+beech trees in the hollows. Somewhere, far-off, the Severn, faint
+and still, like a river in a dream.</p>
+<p>Memory of the round white town in the round pit of the valley,
+shining, smoking through the thick air and the white orchard
+blossoms; memory saturated by a smell that is like no other smell
+on earth, the delicate smell of the Midland limestone country, the
+smell of clean white dust, and of grass drying in the sun and of
+mustard flowers.</p>
+<p>Michael was in Cheltenham.</p>
+<p>It was a matter of many unhappinesses, not one unhappiness. A
+sudden intolerable unhappiness, the flash and stab of the beauty of
+the almond-flowers, seen in passing and never seized, beauty which
+it would have been better for him if he had not seen; the
+knowledge, which he ought never to have had, that this beauty had
+to die, was killed because he had not seized it, when, if he could
+but have held it for one minute, it would have been immortal. A
+vague, light unhappiness that came sometimes, could not for the
+life of him think why, from the sight of his own body stripped, and
+from the feeling of his own muscles. There was sadness for him in
+his very strength. A long, aching unhappiness that came with his
+memory of the open country over the tops of the hills, which, in
+their incredible stupidity and cruelty, they had let him see. A
+quick, lacerating unhappiness when he thought of his mother, and of
+the garden on the Heath, and the high ridge of the Spaniards' Road,
+and London below it, immense and beautiful.</p>
+<p>The unhappiness of never being by himself.</p>
+<p>He was afraid of the herd. It was with him night and day. He was
+afraid of the thoughts, the emotions that seized it, swaying,
+moving the multitude of undeveloped souls as if they had been one
+monstrous, dominating soul. He was afraid of their voices, when
+they chanted, sang and shouted together. He loathed their slang
+even when he used it. He disliked the collective, male odour of the
+herd, the brushing against him of bodies inflamed with running, the
+steam of their speed rising through their hot sweaters; and the
+smell of dust and ink and india-rubber and resinous wood in the
+warm class-rooms.</p>
+<p>Michael was at school.</p>
+<p>The thing he had dreaded, that had hung over him, threatening
+him for years before it happened, had happened. Nothing could have
+prevented it; their names had been down for Cheltenham long ago;
+first his, then Nicky's. Cheltenham, because Bartie and Vera lived
+there, and because it had a college for girls, and Dorothy, who
+wanted to go to Roedean, had been sent to Cheltenham, because of
+Bartie and Vera and for no other reason. First Dorothy; then, he,
+Michael; then, the next term, Nicky. And Nicky had been sent (a
+whole year before his time) because of Michael, in the hope that
+Michael would settle down better if he had his brother with him. It
+didn't seem reasonable.</p>
+<p>Not that either Dorothy or Nicky minded when they got there. All
+that Nicky minded was not being at Hampstead. Being at Cheltenham
+he did not mind at all. He rather liked it, since Major Cameron had
+come to stay just outside it--on purpose to annoy Bartie--and took
+them out riding. Even Michael did not mind Cheltenham more than any
+other place his people might have chosen. He was not unreasonable.
+All he asked was to be let alone, and to have room to breathe and
+get ahead in. As it was, he had either to go with the school mass,
+or waste energy in resisting its poisonous impact.</p>
+<p>He had chosen resistance.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Sunday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAREST MOTHER:</p>
+<p>I've put Sunday on this letter, though it's really Friday,
+because I'm supposed to be writing it on Sunday when the other
+fellows are writing. That's the beastly thing about this place,
+you're expected to do everything when the other fellows are doing
+it, whether you want to or not, as if the very fact that they're
+doing it too didn't make you hate it.</p>
+<p>I'm writing now because I simply must. If I waited till Sunday I
+mightn't want to, and anyhow I shouldn't remember a single thing I
+meant to say. Even now Johnson minor's digging his skinny elbows
+into one side of me, and Hartley major's biting the feathers off
+his pen and spitting them out again on the other. But they're only
+supposed to be doing Latin verse, so it doesn't matter so much.
+What I mean is it's as if their beastly minds kept on leaking into
+yours till you're all mixed up with them. That's why I asked Daddy
+to take me away next term. You see--it's more serious than he
+thinks--it is, really. You've no idea what it's like. You've got to
+swot every blessed thing the other fellows swot even if you can't
+do it, and whether it's going to be any good to you or not. Why,
+you're expected to sleep when they're sleeping, even if the chap
+next you snores. Daddy <i>might</i> remember that it's Nicky who
+likes mathematics, not me. It's all very well for Nicky when he
+wants to go into the Army all the time. There are things <i>I</i>
+want to do. I want to write and I'm going to write. Daddy can't
+keep me off it. And I don't believe he'd want to if he understood.
+There's nothing else in the world I'll ever be any good at.</p>
+<p>And there are things I want to know. I want to know Greek and
+Latin and French and German and Italian and Spanish, and Old French
+and Russian and Chinese and Japanese, oh, and Proven&ccedil;al, and
+every blessed language that has or has had a literature. I can
+learn languages quite fast. Do you suppose I've got a chance of
+knowing one of them--really knowing--even if I had the time? Not
+much. And that's where being here's so rotten. They waste your time
+as if it was theirs, not yours. They've simply no notion of the
+value of it. They seem to think time doesn't matter because you're
+young. Fancy taking three months over a Greek play you can read in
+three hours. That'll give you some idea.</p>
+<p>It all comes of being in a beastly form and having to go with
+the other fellows. Say they're thirty fellows in your form, and
+twenty-nine stick; you've got to stick with them, if it's terms and
+terms. They can't do it any other way. It's <i>because</i> I'm
+young, Mummy, that I mind so awfully. Supposing I died in ten
+years' time, or even fifteen? It simply makes me hate
+everybody.</p>
+<p>Love to Daddy and Don.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your loving
+MICK.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.-I don't mean that Hartley major isn't good at Latin verse.
+He is. He can lick me into fits when he's bitten <i>all</i> the
+feathers off.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Tuesday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DARLING MUMMY:</p>
+<p>Daddy <i>doesn't</i> understand. You only think he does because
+you like him. It's all rot what he says about esprit de corps, the
+putridest rot, though I know he doesn't mean it.</p>
+<p>And he's wrong about gym, and drill and games and all that. I
+don't mind gym, and I don't mind drill, and I like games. I'm
+fairly good at most of them--except footer. All the fellows say I'm
+fairly good--otherwise I don't suppose they'd stick me for a
+minute. I don't even mind Chapel. You see, when it's only your body
+doing what the other chaps do, it doesn't seem to matter. If esprit
+de corps <i>was</i> esprit de corps it would be all right. But it's
+esprit d'esprit. And it's absolutely sickening the things they can
+do to your mind. I can't stand another term of it.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Always your loving<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+MICK.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.-How do you know I shan't be dead in ten or fifteen years'
+time? It's enough to make me.</p>
+<p>P.P.S.-It's all very well for Daddy to talk--<i>he</i> doesn't
+want to learn Chinese.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Thursday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAR FATHER:</p>
+<p>All right. Have it your own way. Only I shall kill myself. You
+needn't tell Mother that--though it won't matter so much as she'll
+very likely think. And perhaps then you won't try and stop Nicky
+going into the Army as you've stopped me.</p>
+<p>I don't care a "ram", as Nicky would say, whether you bury me or
+cremate me; only you might give my Theocritus to old Parsons, and
+my revolver to Nicky if it doesn't burst. He'd like it.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MICHAEL.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.--If Parsons would rather have my <i>&AElig;schylus</i> he
+can, or both.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;TUDOR HOUSE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Sunday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DARLING MUMMY:</p>
+<p>It's your turn for a letter. Do you think Daddy'd let me turn
+the hen-house into a workshop next holidays, as there aren't any
+hens? And would he give me a proper lathe for turning steel and
+brass and stuff for my next birthday I'm afraid it'll cost an awful
+lot; but he could take it out of my other birthdays, I don't mind
+how many so long as I can have the lathe this one.</p>
+<p>This place isn't half bad once you get used to it. I like the
+fellows, and all the masters are really jolly decent, though I wish
+we had old Parsons here instead of the one we have to do Greek for.
+He's an awful chap to make you swot.</p>
+<p>I don't know what you mean about Mick being seedy. He's as fit
+as fit. You should see him when he's stripped. But he hates the
+place like poison half the time. He can't stand being with a lot of
+fellows. He's a rum chap because they all like him no end, the
+masters and the fellows, though they think he's funny, all except
+Hartley major, but he's such a measly little blighter that he
+doesn't count.</p>
+<p>We had a ripping time last Saturday. Bartie went up to town, and
+Major Cameron took Dorothy and Ronny and Vera and me and Mick to
+Birdlip in his dog-cart, only Mick and me had to bike because there
+wasn't room enough. However we grabbed the chains behind and the
+dog-cart pulled us up the hills like anything, and we could talk to
+Dorothy and Ronny without having to yell at each other. He did us
+jolly well at tea afterwards.</p>
+<p>Dorothy rode my bike stridelegs coming back, so that I could sit
+in the dog-cart. She said she'd get a jolly wigging if she was
+seen. We shan't know till Monday.</p>
+<p>You know, Mummy, that kid Ronny's having a rotten time, what
+with Bartie being such a beast and Vera chumming up with Ferdie and
+going off to country houses where he is. I really think she'd
+better come to us for the holidays. Then I could teach her to ride.
+Bartie won't let her learn here, though Ferdie'd gone and bought a
+pony for her. That was to spite Ferdie. He's worse than ever, if
+you can imagine that, and he's got three more things the matter
+with him.</p>
+<p>I must stop now.</p>
+<p>Love to Dad and Don and Nanna. Next year I'm to go into physics
+and stinks--that's chemistry.</p>
+<p>Your loving NICKY.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE LEAS. PARABOLA
+ROAD.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Sunday</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAREST MUMMY:</p>
+<p>I'm awfully sorry you don't like my last term's school report. I
+know it wasn't what it ought to have been. I have to hold myself in
+so as to keep in the same class with Rosalind when we're moved up
+after Midsummer. But as she's promised me faithfully she'll let
+herself rip next term, you'll see it'll be all right at Xmas. We'll
+both be in I A the Midsummer after, and we can go in for our matic,
+together. I wish you'd arrange with Mrs. Jervis for both of us to
+be at Newnham at the same time. Tell her Rosalind's an awful
+slacker if I'm not there to keep her up to the mark. No--don't tell
+her that. Tell her <i>I'm</i> a slacker if she isn't there.</p>
+<p>I was amused by your saying it was decent of Bartie to have us
+so often. He only does it because things are getting so tight
+between him and Vera that he's glad of anything that relaxes the
+strain a bit. Even us. He's snappier than ever with Ronny. I can't
+think how the poor kid stands it.</p>
+<p>You know that ripping white serge coat and skirt you sent me?
+Well, the skirt's not nearly long enough. It doesn't matter a bit
+though, because I can keep it for hockey. It's nice having a mother
+who <i>can</i> choose clothes. You should see the last blouse Mrs.
+Jervis got for Rosalind. She's burst out of <i>all</i> the seams
+already. You could have heard her doing it.</p>
+<p>Much love to you and Daddy and Don-Don. I can't send any to Mr.
+Parsons now my hair's up. But you might tell him I'm going in
+strong for Sociology and Economics.--</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your loving<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+DOROTHY.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.--Vera asked me if I thought you'd take her and Ronny in at
+Midsummer. I said of course you would--like a shot.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LANSDOWN LODGE.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+CHELTENHAM,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>
+Friday.</i></blockquote>
+<p>MY DEAREST FRANCES:</p>
+<p>I hope you got my two wires in time. You needn't come down,
+either of you. And you needn't worry about Mick. Ferdie went round
+and talked to him like a fa--I mean a big brother, and the revolver
+(bless his heart!) is at present reposing at the bottom of my
+glove-box.</p>
+<p>All the same we both think you'd better take him away at
+Midsummer. He says he can stick it till then, but not a day longer.
+Poor Mick! He has the most mysterious troubles.</p>
+<p>I daresay it's the Cheltenham climate as much as anything. It
+doesn't suit me or Bonny either, and it's simply killing Ferdie by
+inches. I suppose that's why Bartie makes us stay here--in the
+hope--</p>
+<p>Oh! my dear, I'm worried out of my life about him. He's never
+got over that fever he had in South Africa. He's looking
+ghastly.</p>
+<p>And the awful thing is that I can't do a thing for him. Not a
+thing. Unless--</p>
+<p>You haven't forgotten the promise you made me two years ago,
+have you?</p>
+<p>Dorothy seemed to think you could put Bonny and me
+up--again!--at Midsummer. Can you? And if poor Ferdie wants to come
+and see us, you won't turn him off your door-mat, will you?</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Your lovingest<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+"VERA."</blockquote>
+<p>Frances said, "Poor Vera! She even makes poor Mick an excuse for
+seeing Ferdie."</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="X"></a>X</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Three more years passed and Frances had fulfilled her promise.
+She had taken Veronica.</p>
+<p>The situation had become definite. Bartie had delivered his
+ultimatum. Either Vera must give up Major Cameron, signing a
+written pledge in the presence of three witnesses, Frances, Anthony
+and Bartie's solicitor, that she would neither see him nor write to
+him, nor hold any sort or manner of communication with him, direct
+or indirect, or he would obtain a judicial separation. It was to be
+clearly understood by both of them that he would not, in any
+circumstances, divorce her. Bartie knew that a divorce was what
+they wanted, what they had been playing for, and he was not going
+to make things easy for them; he was going to make things hard and
+bitter and shameful He had based his ultimatum on the calculation
+that Vera would not have the courage of her emotions; that even her
+passion would surrender when she found that it had no longer the
+protection of her husband's house and name. Besides Vera was
+expensive, and Cameron was a spendthrift on an insufficient income;
+he could not possibly afford her. If Bartie's suspicions were
+correct, the thing had been going on for the last twelve years, and
+if in twelve years' time they had not forced his hand that was
+because they had counted the cost, and decided that, as Frances had
+put it, the "game was not worth the scandal."</p>
+<p>For when suspicion became unendurable he had consulted Anthony
+who assured him that Frances, who ought to know, was convinced that
+there was nothing in it except incompatibility, for which Bartie
+was superlatively responsible.</p>
+<p>Anthony's manner did not encourage confidence, and he gathered
+that his own more sinister interpretation would be dismissed with
+contemptuous incredulity. Anthony was under his wife's thumb and
+Frances had been completely bamboozled by her dearest friend.
+Still, when once their eyes were opened, he reckoned on the support
+of Anthony and Frances. It was inconceivable, that, faced with a
+public scandal, his brother and his sister-in-law would side with
+Vera.</p>
+<p>It was a game where Bartie apparently held all the cards. And
+his trump card was Veronica.</p>
+<p>He was not going to keep Veronica without Vera. That had been
+tacitly understood between them long ago. If Vera went to Cameron
+she could not take Veronica with her without openly confirming
+Bartie's worst suspicion.</p>
+<p>And yet all these things, so inconceivable to Bartie, happened.
+When it came to the stabbing point the courage of Vera's emotions
+was such that she defied her husband and his ultimatum, and went to
+Cameron. By that time Ferdie was so ill that she would have been
+ashamed of herself if she had not gone. And though Anthony's house
+was not open to the unhappy lovers, Frances and Anthony had taken
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie
+came over to West End House when they heard that it had been
+decided. It was time, they said, that somebody should protest, that
+somebody should advise Frances for her own good and for the good of
+her children.</p>
+<p>They had always detested and distrusted Vera Harrison; they had
+always known what would happen. The wonder was it had not happened
+before. But why Frances should make it easy for her, why Frances
+should shoulder Vera Harrison's responsibilities, and burden
+herself with that child, and why Anthony should give his consent to
+such a proceeding, was more than they could imagine.</p>
+<p>Once Frances had stood up for the three Aunties, against
+Grannie; now Grannie and the three Aunties were united against
+Frances.</p>
+<p>"Frances, you're a foolish woman."</p>
+<p>"My folly is my own affair and Anthony's."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to pay for it some day."</p>
+<p>"You might have thought of your own children first."</p>
+<p>"I did. I thought, How would I like <i>them</i> to be forsaken
+like poor Ronny?"</p>
+<p>"You should have thought of the boys. Michael's growing up; so
+is Nicky."</p>
+<p>"Nicky is fifteen; Ronny is eleven, if you call that growing
+up."</p>
+<p>"That's all very well, but when Nicky is twenty-one and Ronny is
+seventeen what are you going to do?"</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to turn Ronny out of doors for fear Nicky should
+fall in love with her, if that's what you mean."</p>
+<p>"It <i>is</i> what I mean, now you've mentioned it."</p>
+<p>"He's less likely to fall in love with her if I bring them up as
+brother and sister."</p>
+<p>"You might think of Anthony. Bartholomew's wife leaves him for
+another man, and you aid and abet her by taking her child,
+relieving her of her one responsibility."</p>
+<p>"Bartie's wife leaves him, and we help Bartie by taking care of
+his child--who is <i>our niece</i>, not yours."</p>
+<p>"My dear Frances, that attitude isn't going to deceive anybody.
+If you don't think of Anthony and your children, you might think of
+us. We don't want to be mixed up in this perfectly horrible
+affair."</p>
+<p>"How are you mixed up in it?"</p>
+<p>"Well, after all, Frances, we are the family. We are your
+sisters and your mother and your children's grand-mother and
+aunts."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Frances with decision, "you must try to bear it.
+You must take the rough with the smooth, as Anthony and I do."</p>
+<p>And as soon as she had said it she was sorry. It struck her for
+the first time that her sisters were getting old. It was no use for
+Auntie Louie, more red and more rigid than ever, to defy the
+imminence of her forty-ninth birthday. Auntie Emmy's gestures, her
+mouthings and excitement, only drew attention to the fact that she
+was forty-seven. And Edie, why, even poor little Auntie Edie was
+forty-five. Grannie, dry and wiry, hardly looked older than Auntie
+Edie.</p>
+<p>They left her, going stiffly, in offence. And again the
+unbearable pathos of them smote her. The poor Aunties. She was a
+brute to hurt them. She still thought of them as Auntie Louie,
+Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edie. It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed
+upon them a colour and vitality that, but for her and for her
+children, they would not have had. They were helpless, tiresome,
+utterly inefficient. In all their lives they had never done
+anything vigorous or memorable. They were doomed to go out before
+her children; when they were gone they would be gone altogether.
+Neither Auntie Louie, nor Auntie Emmy, nor Auntie Edie would leave
+any mark or sign of herself. But her children gave them titles by
+which they would be remembered after they were gone. It was as if
+she had bestowed on them a little of her own enduring life.</p>
+<p>It was absurd and pathetic that they should think that they were
+the Family.</p>
+<p>But however sorry she was for them she could not allow them to
+dictate to her in matters that concerned her and Anthony alone. If
+they were so worried, about the scandal, why hadn't they the sense
+to see that the only way to meet it was to give it the lie by
+taking Ronny, by behaving as if Ronny were unquestionably Bartie's
+daughter and their niece? They were bound to do it, if not for
+Vera's sake, for the dear little girl's sake. And that was what
+Vera had been thinking of; that was why she had trusted them.</p>
+<p>But her three sisters had always disliked Vera. They disliked
+her because, while they went unmarried, Vera, not content with the
+one man who was her just and legal portion, had taken another man
+whom she had no right to. And Auntie Emmeline had been in love with
+Ferdie.</p>
+<p>Still, there was a certain dreadful truth in their reproaches;
+and it stung. Frances said to herselv that she had not been wise.
+She had done a risky thing in taking Ronny. It was not fair to her
+children, to Michael and Nicholas and John. She was afraid. She had
+been afraid when Vera had talked to her about Nicky and Veronica;
+and when she had seen Veronica and Nicky playing together in the
+apple-tree house; and when she had heard Ronny's voice outside the
+schoolroom door crying, "Where's Nicky? I want him. Will he be very
+long?"</p>
+<p>Supposing Veronica should go on wanting Nicky, and supposing
+Nicky--</p>
+<p>Frances was so worried that, when Dorothy came striding across
+the lawn to ask her what the matter was, and what on earth Grannie
+and the Aunties had been gassing about all that time, she told
+her.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was nineteen. And Dorothy at nineteen, tall and upright,
+was Anthony's daughter. Her face and her whole body had changed;
+they were Anthony's face and body made feminine. Her little
+straight nose had now a short high bridge; her brown eyes were keen
+and alert; she had his hawk's look. She put her arm in Frances's,
+protecting her, and they walked up and down the terrace path,
+discussing it. In the distance Grannie and the Aunties could be
+seen climbing the slope of the Heath to Judges' Walk. They were
+not, Dorothy protested, pathetic; they were simply beastly. She
+hated them for worrying her mother.</p>
+<p>"They think I oughtn't to have taken Ronny. They think Nicky'll
+want to marry her."</p>
+<p>"But Ronny's a kid--"</p>
+<p>"When she's not a kid."</p>
+<p>"He won't, Mummy ducky, he won't. She'll be a kid for ages.
+Nicky'll have married somebody else before she's got her hair
+up."</p>
+<p>"Then Ronny'll fall in love with <i>him</i>, and get her little
+heart broken."</p>
+<p>"She won't, Mummy, she won't. They only talk like that because
+they think Ferdie's Ronny's father."</p>
+<p>"Dorothy!"</p>
+<p>Frances, in horror, released herself from that protecting arm.
+The horror came, not from the fact, but from her daughter's
+knowledge of it.</p>
+<p>"Poor Mummy, didn't you know? That's why Bartie hates her."</p>
+<p>"It isn't true."</p>
+<p>"What's the good of that as long as Bartie thinks it is?" said
+Dorothy.</p>
+<blockquote>"London Bridge is broken down<br>
+(<i>Ride over my Lady Leigh</i>!)"</blockquote>
+<p>Veronica was in the drawing-room, singing "London Bridge."</p>
+<p>Michael, in all the beauty of his adolescence, lay stretched out
+on the sofa, watching her. Her small, exquisite, childish face
+between the plaits of honey-coloured hair, her small, childish face
+thrilled him with a singular delight and sadness. She was so young
+and so small, and at the same time so perfect that Michael could
+think of her as looking like that for ever, not growing up into a
+tiresome, bouncing, fluffy flapper like Rosalind Jervis.</p>
+<p>Aunt Louie and Aunt Emmeline said that Rosalind was in love with
+him. Michael thought that was beastly of them and he hoped it
+wasn't true.</p>
+<blockquote>"'Build it up with gold so fine'"--</blockquote>
+<p>Veronica was happy; for she knew herself to be a cause of
+happiness. Like Frances once, she was profoundly aware of her own
+happiness, and for the same reason. It was, if you came to think of
+it, incredible. It had been given to her, suddenly, when she was
+not looking for it, after she had got used to unhappiness.</p>
+<p>As long as she could remember Veronica had been aware of
+herself. Aware of herself, chiefly, not as a cause of happiness,
+but as a cause of embarrassment and uncertainty and trouble to
+three people, her father, her mother and Ferdie, just as they were
+causes of embarrassment and trouble and uncertainty to her. They
+lived in a sort of violent mystery that she, incomprehensibly, was
+mixed up with. As long as she could remember, her delicate,
+childish soul had quivered with the vibration of their
+incomprehensible and tiresome passions. You could never tell what
+any of them really wanted, though among them they managed to create
+an atmosphere of most devastating want. Only one thing she knew
+definitely--that they didn't want <i>her</i>.</p>
+<p>She was altogether out of it except as a meaningless counter in
+their incomprehensible, grown-up game. Her father didn't want her;
+her mother didn't want her very much; and though now and then
+Ferdie (who wasn't any relation at all) behaved as if he wanted
+her, <i>his</i> wanting only made the other two want her less than
+ever.</p>
+<p>There had been no peace or quietness or security in her little
+life of eleven years. Their places (and they had had so many of
+them!) had never had any proper place for her. She seemed to have
+spent most of her time in being turned out of one room because her
+father had come into it, and out of another because her mother
+wanted to be alone in it with Ferdie. And nobody, except Ferdie
+sometimes, when they let him, ever wanted to be alone in any room
+with her. She was so tired of the rooms where she was obliged to be
+always alone with herself or with the servants, though the servants
+were always kind.</p>
+<p>Now, in Uncle Anthony's house, there was always peace and
+quietness and an immense security. She knew that, having taken her,
+they wouldn't give her up.</p>
+<p>She was utterly happy.</p>
+<p>And the house, with its long, wainscoted rooms, its whiteness
+and darkness, with its gay, clean, shining chintzes, the delicate,
+faded rose stuffs, the deep blue and purple and green stuffs, and
+the blue and white of the old china, and its furniture of curious
+woods, the golden, the golden-brown, the black and the
+wine-coloured, bought by Anthony in many countries, the round
+concave mirrors, the pictures and the old bronzes, all the things
+that he had gathered together and laid up as treasure for his Sons;
+and the garden on the promontory, with its buttressed walls and its
+green lawn, its flower borders, and its tree of Heaven, saturated
+with memories, became for her, as they had become for Frances, the
+sanctuary, crowded with visible and tangible symbols, of the
+Happiness she adored.</p>
+<p>"Sing it again, Ronny."</p>
+<p>She sang it again.</p>
+<blockquote>"'London Bridge is broken down'"--</blockquote>
+<p>It was funny of Michael to like the silly, childish song; but if
+he wanted it he should have it. Veronica would have given any of
+them anything they wanted. There was nothing that she had ever
+wanted that they had not given to her.</p>
+<p>She had wanted to be strong, to be able to run and ride, to play
+tennis and cricket and hockey, and Nicky had shown her how. She had
+wanted books of her own, and Auntie Frances, and Uncle Anthony and
+Dorothy and Michael had given her books, and Nicky had made her a
+bookcase. Her room (it was all her own) was full of treasures. She
+had wanted to learn to sing and play properly, and Uncle Anthony
+had given her masters. She had wanted people to love her music, and
+they loved it. She had wanted a big, grown-up sister like Dorothy,
+and they had given her Dorothy; and she had wanted a little brother
+of her own age, and they had given her John. John had a look of
+Nicky. His golden white hair was light brown now; his fine, wide
+mouth had Nicky's impudence, even when, like Frances, he kept it
+shut to smile her unwilling, twitching, mocking smile. She had
+wanted a father and mother like Frances and Anthony; and they had
+given her themselves.</p>
+<p>And she had wanted to live in the same house with Nicky
+always.</p>
+<p>So if Michael wanted her to sing "London Bridge" to him twenty
+times over, she would sing it, provided Nicky didn't ask her to do
+anything else at the same time. For she wanted to do most for
+Nicky, always.</p>
+<p>And yet she was aware of something else that was not happiness.
+It was not a thing you could name or understand, or seize, or see;
+you were simply aware of it, as you were aware of ghosts in your
+room at night. Like the ghosts, it was not always there; but when
+it was there you knew.</p>
+<p>It felt sometimes as if Auntie Frances was afraid of her; as if
+she, Veronica, was a ghost.</p>
+<p>And Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I am not good. She
+thinks I'll worry her. But I shan't."</p>
+<p>That was before the holidays. Now that they had come and Nicky
+was back, "it" seemed to her something to do with Nicky; and
+Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I'll get in his way and
+worry him, because he's older. But I shan't."</p>
+<p>As if she had not been taught and trained not to get in older
+people's ways and worry them. And as if she wasn't growing older
+every minute herself!</p>
+<blockquote>"'Build it up with gold so fine--<br>
+(<i>Ride over my Lady Leigh</i>!)<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+"'Build it up with stones so strong'"--</blockquote>
+<p>She had her back to the door and to the mirror that reflected
+it, yet she knew that Nicky had come in.</p>
+<p>"That's the song you used to sing at bed-time when you were
+frightened," he said.</p>
+<p>She was sitting now in the old hen-house that was Nicky's
+workshop, watching him as he turned square bars of brass into round
+bars with his lathe. She had plates of steel to polish, and pieces
+of wood to rub smooth with glass-paper. There were sheets of brass
+and copper, and bars and lumps of steel, and great poles and planks
+of timber reared up round the walls of the workshop. The metal
+filings fell from Nicky's lathe into sawdust that smelt
+deliciously.</p>
+<p>The workshop was nicer than the old apple-tree house, because
+there were always lots of things to do in it for Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said suddenly, "do you believe in ghosts?"</p>
+<p>"Well--" Nicky caught his bar as it fell from the lathe and
+examined it critically.</p>
+<p>"You remember when I was afraid of ghosts, and you used to come
+and sit with me till I went to sleep?"</p>
+<p>"Rather."</p>
+<p>"Well--there <i>are</i> ghosts. I saw one last night. It came
+into the room just after I got into bed."</p>
+<p>"You <i>can</i> see them," Nicky said. "Ferdie's seen heaps. It
+runs in his family. He told me."</p>
+<p>"He never told <i>me</i>."</p>
+<p>"Rather not. He was afraid you'd be frightened."</p>
+<p>"Well, I wasn't frightened. Not the least little bit."</p>
+<p>"I shall tell him that. He wanted most awfully to know whether
+you saw them too."</p>
+<p>"<i>Me</i>? But Nicky--it was Ferdie I saw. He stood by the door
+and looked at me. Like he does, you know."</p>
+<p>The next morning Frances had a letter of two lines from
+Veronica's mother:</p>
+<blockquote>"Ferdie died last evening at half past eight.<br>
+<br>
+"He wants you to keep Ronny.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "VERA."<br>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It was not till years later that Veronica knew that "He wanted
+most awfully to know whether you saw them too" meant "He wanted
+most awfully to know whether you really were his daughter."</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="PART_II"></a>PART II</h2>
+<h3><i>THE VORTEX</i></h3>
+&gt;<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Three years passed. It was the autumn of nineteen-ten. Anthony's
+house was empty for the time being of all its children except
+Dorothea.</p>
+<p>Michael was in the beginning of his last year at Cambridge.
+Nicholas was in his second year. He had taken up mathematics and
+theoretical mechanics. In the long vacation, when the others went
+into the country, he stayed behind to work in the engineering sheds
+of the Morss Motor Company. John was at Cheltenham. Veronica was in
+Dresden.</p>
+<p>Dorothea had left Newnham a year ago, having taken a first-class
+in Economics.</p>
+<p>As Anthony came home early one evening in October, he found a
+group of six strange women in the lane, waiting outside his garden
+door in attitudes of conspiracy.</p>
+<p>Four of them, older women, stood together in a close ring. The
+two others, young girls, hung about near, but a little apart from
+the ring, as if they desired not to identify themselves with any
+state of mind outside their own. By their low sibilant voices, the
+daring sidelong sortie of their bright eyes, their gestures,
+furtive and irrepressible, you gathered that there was unanimity on
+one point. All six considered themselves to have been
+discovered.</p>
+<p>At Anthony's approach they moved away, with slow, casual steps,
+passed through the posts at the bottom of the lane and plunged down
+the steep path, as if under the impression that the nature of the
+ground covered their retreat. They bobbed up again, one after the
+other, when the lane was clear.</p>
+<p>The first to appear was a tall, handsome, bad-tempered-looking
+girl. She spoke first.</p>
+<p>"It's a damned shame of them to keep us waiting like this."</p>
+<p>She propped herself up against Anthony's wall and smouldered
+there in her dark, sullen beauty.</p>
+<p>"We were here at six sharp."</p>
+<p>"When they know we were told not to let on where we meet."</p>
+<p>"We're led into a trap," said a grey-haired woman.</p>
+<p>"I say, who is Dorothea Harrison?"</p>
+<p>"She's the girl who roped Rosalind in. She's all right."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but are her people all right?"</p>
+<p>"Rosalind knows them."</p>
+<p>The grey-haired woman spoke again.</p>
+<p>"Well, if you think this lane is a good place for a secret
+meeting, I don't. Are you aware that the yard of `Jack Straw's
+Castle' is behind that wall? What's to prevent them bringing up
+five or six coppers and planting them there? Why, they've only got
+to post one 'tee at the top of the lane, and another at the bottom,
+and we're done. Trapped. I call it rotten."</p>
+<p>"It's all right. Here they are."</p>
+<p>Dorothea Harrison and Rosalind Jervis came down the lane at a
+leisured stride, their long coats buttoned up to their chins and
+their hands in their pockets. Their I gestures were devoid of
+secrecy or any guile. Each had a joyous air of being in command, of
+being able to hold up the whole adventure at her will, or let it
+rip.</p>
+<p>Rosalind Jervis was no longer a bouncing, fluffy flapper. In
+three years she had shot up into the stature of command. She
+slouched, stooping a little from the shoulders, and carried her
+pink face thrust forward, as if leaning from a platform to address
+an audience. From this salience her small chin retreated delicately
+into her pink throat.</p>
+<p>"Is Miss Maud Blackadder here?" she said, marshalling her
+six.</p>
+<p>The handsome girl detached herself slowly from Anthony's
+wall.</p>
+<p>"What's the point," she said, "of keeping us hanging about like
+this--"</p>
+<p>"Till <i>all</i> our faces are known to the police--"</p>
+<p>"There's a johnnie gone in there who can swear to <i>me</i>. Why
+didn't you two turn up before?" said the handsome girl.</p>
+<p>"Because," said Dorothea, "that johnnie was my father. He was
+pounding on in front of us all up East Heath Road. If we'd got here
+sooner I should have had to introduce you."</p>
+<p>She looked at the six benevolently, indulgently. They might have
+been children whose behaviour amused her. It was as if she had
+said, "I avoided that introduction, not because it would have been
+dangerous and indiscreet, but because it would have spoiled your
+fun for you."</p>
+<p>She led the way into the garden and the house and through the
+hall into the schoolroom. There they found eleven young girls who
+had come much too soon, and mistaking the arrangements, had rung
+the bell and allowed themselves to be shown in.</p>
+<p>The schoolroom had been transformed into a sort of meeting hall.
+The big oblong table had been drawn across one end of it. Behind it
+were chairs for the speakers, before it were three rows of chairs
+where the eleven young girls sat scattered, expectant.</p>
+<p>The six stood in the free space in front of the table and looked
+at Rosalind with significance.</p>
+<p>"This," said Rosalind, "is our hostess, Miss Dorothea Harrison.
+Dorothy, I think you've met Mrs. Eden, our Treasurer. This is our
+secretary, Miss Valentina Gilchrist; Miss Ethel Farmer; Miss
+Winifred Burstall--"</p>
+<p>Dorothy greeted in turn Mrs. Eden, a pretty, gentle woman with a
+face of dreaming tragedy (it was she who had defended Rosalind
+outside the gate); Miss Valentina Gilchrist, a middle-aged woman
+who displayed a large grey pompadour above a rosy face with
+turned-back features which, when she was not excited, had an
+incredulous quizzical expression (Miss Gilchrist was the one who
+had said they had been led into a trap); Miss Ethel Farmer, fair,
+attenuated, scholastic, wearing pince-nez with an air of not seeing
+you; and Miss Winifred Burstall, weather-beaten, young at fifty,
+wearing pince-nez with an air of seeing straight through you to the
+other side.</p>
+<p>Rosalind went on. "Miss Maud Blackadder--"</p>
+<p>Miss Blackadder's curt bow accused Rosalind of wasting time in
+meaningless formalities.</p>
+<p>"Miss--" Rosalind was at a loss.</p>
+<p>The other girl, the youngest of the eight, came forward, holding
+out a slender, sallow-white hand. She was the one who had hung with
+Miss Blackadder in the background.</p>
+<p>"Desmond," she said. "Phyllis Desmond."</p>
+<p>She shrugged her pretty shoulders and smiled slightly, as much
+as to say, "She forgets what she ought to remember, but it doesn't
+matter."</p>
+<p>Phyllis Desmond was beautiful. But for the moment her beauty was
+asleep, stilled into hardness. Dorothy saw a long, slender,
+sallow-white face, between sleek bands of black hair; black eyes,
+dulled as if by a subtle film, like breath on a black
+looking-glass; a beautiful slender mouth, pressed tight, holding
+back the secret of its sensual charm.</p>
+<p>Dorothy thought she had seen her before, but she couldn't
+remember where.</p>
+<p>Rosalind Jervis looked at her watch with a businesslike air;
+paper and pencils were produced; coats were thrown on the little
+school-desks and benches in the corner where Dorothy and her
+brothers had sat at their lessons with Mr. Parsons some twelve
+years ago; and the eight gathered about the big table, Rosalind
+taking the presidential chair (which had once been Mr. Parsons'
+chair) in the centre between Miss Gilchrist and Miss
+Blackadder.</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer looked at each other and Miss
+Burstall spoke.</p>
+<p>"We understood that this was to be an informal meeting. Before
+we begin business I should like to ask one question. I should like
+to know what we are and what we are here for?"</p>
+<p>"We, Mrs. Eden, Miss Valentina Gilchrist, Miss Maud Blackadder
+and myself," said Rosalind in the tone of one dealing reasonably
+with an unreasonable person, "are the Committee of the North
+Hampstead Branch of the Women's Franchise Union. Miss Gilchrist is
+our secretary, I am the President and Miss Blackadder is--er--the
+Committee."</p>
+<p>"By whom elected? This," said Miss Burstall, "is most
+irregular."</p>
+<p>Rosalind went on: "We are here to appoint a vice-president, to
+elect members of the Committee and enlist subscribers to the Union.
+These things will take time."</p>
+<p>"<i>We</i> were punctual," said Miss Farmer.</p>
+<p>Rosalind did not even look at her. The moment had come to
+address the meeting.</p>
+<p>"I take it that we are all agreed as to the main issue, that we
+have not come here to convert each other, that we all want Women's
+Franchise, that we all mean to have it, that we are all prepared to
+work for it, and, if necessary, to fight for it, to oppose the
+Government that withholds it by every means in our power--"</p>
+<p>"By every constitutional means," Miss Burstall amended, and was
+told by Miss Gilchrist that, if she desired proceedings to be
+regular, she must not interrupt the Chairwoman.</p>
+<p>"--To oppose the Government that refuses us the vote, whatever
+Government it may be, regardless of party, by <i>every means in our
+power</i>."</p>
+<p>Rosalind's sentences were punctuated by a rhythmic sound of
+tapping. Miss Maud Blackadder, twisted sideways on the chair she
+had pushed farther and farther back from the table, so as to bring
+herself completely out of line with the other seven, from time to
+time, rhythmically, twitching with impatience, struck her own leg
+with her own walking-stick.</p>
+<p>Rosalind perorated. "If we differ, we differ, not as to our end,
+but solely as to the means we, personally and individually, are
+prepared to employ." She looked round. "Agreed."</p>
+<p>"Not agreed," said Dorothy and Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer all
+at once.</p>
+<p>"I will now call on Miss Maud Blackadder to speak. She will
+explain to those of you who are strangers" (she glanced
+comprehensively at the eleven young girls) "the present program of
+the Union."</p>
+<p>"I protest," said Miss Burstall. "There has been confusion."</p>
+<p>"There really <i>has</i>, Rosalind," said Dorothy. "You
+<i>must</i> get it straight. You can't start all at sixes and
+sevens. I protest too."</p>
+<p>"We all three protest," said Miss Farmer, frowning and blinking
+in an agony of protest.</p>
+<p>"Silence, if you please, for the Chairwoman," said Miss
+Gilchrist.</p>
+<p>"May we not say one word?"</p>
+<p>"You may," said Rosalind, "in your turn. I now call on Miss
+Blackadder to speak."</p>
+<p>At the sound of her own name Miss Blackadder jumped to her feet.
+The walking-stick fell to the floor with a light clatter and crash,
+preluding her storm. She jerked out her words at a headlong pace,
+as if to make up for the time the others had wasted in
+futilities.</p>
+<p>"I am not going to say much, I am not going to take up your
+time. Too much time has been lost already. I am not a speaker, I am
+not a writer, I am not an intellectual woman, and if you ask me
+what I am and what I am here for, and what I am doing in the Union,
+and what the Union is doing with me, and what possible use I, an
+untrained girl, can be to you clever women" (she looked
+tempestuously at Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer who did not flinch),
+"I will tell you. I am a fighter. I am here to enlist volunteers. I
+am the recruiting sergeant for this district. That is the use my
+leaders, who should be <i>your</i> leaders, are making of
+<i>me</i>."</p>
+<p>Her head was thrown back, her body swayed, rocked from side to
+side with the violent rhythm of her speech.</p>
+<p>"If you ask me why they have chosen <i>me</i> I will tell you.
+It's because I know what I want and because I know how to get what
+I want.</p>
+<p>"I know what I want. Oh, yes, you think that's nothing; you all
+think you know what you want. But do you? <i>Do</i> you?"</p>
+<p>"Of course we do!"</p>
+<p>"We want the vote!"</p>
+<p>"Nothing but the vote!"</p>
+<p>"<i>Nothing but?</i> Are you quite sure of that? Can you even
+say you want it till you know whether there are things you want
+more?"</p>
+<p>"What are you driving at?"</p>
+<p>"You'll soon see what I'm driving at. I drive straight. And I
+ride straight. And I don't funk my fences.</p>
+<p>"Well--say you all want the vote. Do you know how much you want
+it? Do you know how much you want to pay for it? Do you know what
+you're prepared to give up for it? Because, if you don't know
+<i>that</i>, you don't know how much you want it."</p>
+<p>"We want it as much as you do, I imagine."</p>
+<p>"You want it as much as I do? Good. <i>Then</i> you're going to
+pay the price whatever the price is. <i>Then</i> you're ready to
+give up everything else, your homes and your families and your
+friends and your incomes. Until you're enfranchised you are not
+going to own any <i>man</i> as father, or brother or husband" (her
+voice rang with a deeper and stronger vibration) "or lover, or
+friend. And the man who does not agree with you, the man who
+refuses you the vote, the man who opposes your efforts to get the
+vote, the man who, whether he agrees with you or not, <i>will not
+help you to get it</i>, you count as your enemy. That is wanting
+the vote. That is wanting it as much as I do.</p>
+<p>"You women--are you prepared to go against your men? To give up
+your men?"</p>
+<p>There were cries of "Rather!" from two of the eleven young girls
+who had come too soon.</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall shook her head and murmured, "Hopeless confusion
+of thought. If <i>this</i> is what it's going to be like, Heaven
+help us!"</p>
+<p>"You really <i>are</i> getting a bit mixed," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"We protest--"</p>
+<p>"Protest then; protest as much as you like. Then we shall know
+where we are; then we shall get things straight; then we can begin.
+You all want the vote. Some of you don't know how much, but at
+least you know you want it. Nobody's confused about that. Do you
+know how you're going to get it? Tell me that."</p>
+<p>Lest they should spoil it all by telling her Miss Blackadder
+increased her vehement pace. "You don't because you can't and
+<i>I</i> will tell you. You won't get it by talking about it or by
+writing about it, or by sitting down and thinking about it, you'll
+get it by coming in with me, coming in with the Women's Franchise
+Union, and fighting for it. Fighting women, not talkers--not
+writers--not thinkers are what we want!" She sat down, heaving a
+little with the ground-swell of her storm, amid applause in which
+only Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer did not join. She was now
+looking extraordinarily handsome.</p>
+<p>Rosalind bent over and whispered something in her ear. She rose
+to her feet again, flushed, smiling at them, triumphant.</p>
+<p>"Our Chairwoman has reminded me that I came here to tell you
+what the program of our Union is. And I can tell you in six words.
+It's Hell-for-leather, and it's Neck-or-nothing!"</p>
+<p>"Now," said Rosalind sweetly, bowing towards Miss Burstall,
+"it's your turn. We should like to know what you have to say."</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall did not rise and in the end Dorothea spoke.</p>
+<p>"My friend, Miss Rosalind Jervis, assumed that we were all
+agreed, not only as to our aims, but as to our policy. She has not
+yet discriminated between constitutional and unconstitutional
+means. When we protested, she quashed our protest. We took
+exception to the phrase 'every means in our power,' because that
+would commit us to all sorts of unconstitutional things. It is in
+my power to squirt water into the back of the Prime Minister's
+neck, or to land a bomb in the small of his back, or in the centre
+of the platform at his next public meeting. We were left to
+conclude that the only differences between us would concern our
+choice of the squirt or the bomb. As some of us here might equally
+object to using the bomb or the squirt, I submit that either our
+protest should have been allowed or our agreement should not have
+been taken for granted at the start.</p>
+<p>"Again, Miss Maud Blackadder, in her sporting speech, her heroic
+speech, has not cleared the question. She has appealed to us to
+come in, without counting the cost; but she has said nothing to
+convince us that when our account at our bank is overdrawn, and we
+have declared war on all our male friends and relations, and have
+left our comfortable homes, and are all camping out on the open
+Heath--I repeat, she has said nothing to convince us that the price
+we shall have paid is going to get us the thing we want.</p>
+<p>"She says that fighters are wanted, and not talkers and writers
+and thinkers. Are we not then to fight with our tongues and with
+our brains? Is she leaving us anything but our bare fists? She has
+told us that she rides straight and that she doesn't funk her
+fences; but she has not told us what sort of country she is going
+to ride over, nor where the fences are, not what Hell-for-leather
+and Neck-or-nothing means.</p>
+<p>"We want meaning; we want clearness and precision. We have not
+been given it yet.</p>
+<p>"I would let all this pass if Miss Blackadder were not your
+colour-sergeant. Is it fair to call for volunteers, for raw
+recruits, and not tell them precisely and clearly what services
+will be required of them? How many" (Dorothy glanced at the eleven)
+"realize that the leaders of your Union, Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, and
+Mrs. Blathwaite, and Miss Angela Blathwaite, demand from its
+members blind, unquestioning obedience?"</p>
+<p>Maud Blackadder jumped up.</p>
+<p>"I protest. I, too, have the right to protest. Miss Harrison
+calls me to order. She tells me to be clear and precise. Will she
+be good enough to be clear and precise herself? Will she say
+whether she is with us or against us? If she is not with us she is
+against us. Let her explain her position."</p>
+<p>She sat down; and Rosalind rose.</p>
+<p>"Miss Harrison," she said, "will explain her position to the
+Committee later. This is an open meeting till seven. It is now five
+minutes to. Will any of you here"--she held the eleven with her
+eyes--"who were not present at the meeting in the Town Hall last
+Monday, hold up your hands. No hands. Then you must all be aware of
+the object and the policy and the rules of the Women's Franchise
+Union. Its members pledge themselves to help, as far as they can,
+the object of the Union; to support the decisions of their leaders;
+to abstain from public and private criticism of those decisions and
+of any words or actions of their leaders; and to obey orders--not
+blindly or unquestioningly, but within the terms of their
+undertakings.</p>
+<p>"Those of you who wish to join us will please write your names
+and addresses on the slips of white paper, stating what kind of
+work you are willing to do and the amount of your subscription, if
+you subscribe, and hand your slips to the Secretary at the door, as
+you go out."</p>
+<p>Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer went out. Miss Blackadder
+counted--"One--two--"</p>
+<p>Eight of the eleven young girls signed and handed in the white
+slips at the door, and went out.</p>
+<p>"Three--four--"</p>
+<p>Miss Blackadder reckoned that Dorothea Harrison's speech had
+cost her five recruits. Her own fighting speech had carried the
+eleven in a compact body to her side: Dorothea's speech had divided
+and scattered them again.</p>
+<p>Miss Blackadder hurled her personality at the heads of audiences
+in the certainty that it would hit them hard. That was what she was
+there for. She knew that the Women's Franchise union relied on her
+to wring from herself the utmost spectacular effect. And she did it
+every time. She never once missed fire. And Dorothea Harrison had
+come down on the top of her triumph and destroyed the effect of all
+her fire. She had corrupted five recruits. And, supposing there was
+a secret program, she had betrayed the women of the Union to
+fourteen outsiders, by giving it away. Treachery or no treachery,
+Dorothea Harrison would have to pay for it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Everybody had gone except the members of the Committee and
+Phyllis Desmond who waited for her friend, Maud Blackadder.</p>
+<p>Dorothy remembered Phyllis Desmond now; she was that art-student
+girl that Vera knew. She had seen her at Vera's house.</p>
+<p>They had drawn round the table again. Miss Blackadder and Miss
+Gilchrist conferred in whispers.</p>
+<p>"Before we go," said Rosalind, "I propose that we ask Miss
+Dorothea Harrison to be our Vice-President."</p>
+<p>Miss Gilchrist nodded to Miss Blackadder who rose. It was her
+moment.</p>
+<p>"And <i>I</i> propose," she said, "that before we invite Miss
+Harrison to be anything we ask her to define her position--clearly
+and precisely."</p>
+<p>She made a sign, and the Secretary was on her feet.</p>
+<p>"And first we must ask Miss Harrison to explain <i>how</i> she
+became possessed of the secret policy of the Union which has never
+been discussed at any open meeting and is unknown to members of the
+General Committee."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Dorothy, "there <i>is</i> a secret policy?"</p>
+<p>"You seem to know it. We have the right to ask <i>how</i> you
+know? Unless you invented it."</p>
+<p>Dorothy faced them. It was inconceivable that it should have
+happened, that she should be standing there, in the old schoolroom
+of her father's house, while two strange women worried her. She
+knew that her back was to the wall and that the Blackadder girl had
+been on the watch for the last half-hour to get her knife into her.
+(Odd, for she had admired the Blackadder girl and her fighting
+gestures.) It was inconceivable that she should have to answer to
+that absurd committee for her honour. It was inconceivable that
+Rosalind, her friend, should not help her.</p>
+<p>Yet it had happened. With all her platform eloquence Rosalind
+couldn't, for the life of her, get out one heroic, defending word.
+From the moment when the Gilchrist woman had pounced, Rosalind had
+simply sat and stared, like a rabbit, like a fish, her mouth open
+for the word that would not come. Rosalind was afraid to stand up
+for her. It was dreadful, and it was funny to see Rosalind looking
+like that, and to realize the extent of her weakness and her
+obstinacy.</p>
+<p>Yet Rosalind had not changed. She was still the school-girl
+slacker who could never do a stroke of work until somebody had
+pushed her into it, who could never leave off working until stopped
+by the same hand that had set her going. Her power to go, and to
+let herself rip, and the weakness that made her depend on Dorothy
+to start her were the qualities that attracted Dorothy to Rosalind
+from the beginning. But now she was the tool of the fighting
+Suffrage Women. Or if she wasn't a tool, she was a machine; her
+brain was a rapid, docile, mechanical apparatus for turning out bad
+imitations of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and the two Blathwaites. Her
+air of casual command, half-swagger, half-slouch, her stoop and the
+thrusting forward of her face, were copied sedulously from an
+admired model.</p>
+<p>Dorothy found her pitiable. She was hypnotized by the
+Blathwaites who worked her and would throw her away when she was of
+no more use. She hadn't the strength to resist the pull and the
+grip and the drive of other people. She couldn't even hold out
+against Valentina Gilchrist and Maud Blackadder. Rosalind would
+always be caught and spun round by any movement that was strong
+enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex.</p>
+<p>That was Dorothy's fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled
+the slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of
+the Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught
+and sucked down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go
+on whirling, under the impression that her movements made it
+move.</p>
+<p>The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She
+liked the feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to
+beat up against the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round
+outside it, and swerve away before the thing got her.</p>
+<p>For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother
+Michael had been afraid of the little vortex of school. She was
+afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the
+high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of
+committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the
+tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the
+gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and
+heaving and rushing forward of the many as one. She would not be
+carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and hardness of
+her soul. It was her soul they wanted, these women of the Union,
+the Blathwaites and the Palmerston-Swetes, and Rosalind, and the
+Blackadder girl and the Gilchrist woman; they ran out after her
+like a hungry pack yelping for her soul; and she was not going to
+throw it to them. She would fight for freedom, but not in their way
+and not at their bidding.</p>
+<p>She was her brother Michael, refusing to go to the party;
+refusing to run with the school herd, holding out for his private
+soul against other people who kept him from remembering. Only
+Michael did not hold out. He ran away. She would stay, on the edge
+of the vortex, fascinated by its danger, and resisting.</p>
+<p>But as she looked at them, at Rosalind with her open mouth, at
+the Blackadder girl who was scowling horribly, and at Valentina
+Gilchrist, sceptical and quizzical, she laughed. The three had been
+trying to rush her, and because they couldn't rush her they were
+questioning her honour. She had asked them plainly for a plain
+meaning, and their idea of apt repartee was to pretend to question
+her honour.</p>
+<p>Perhaps they really did question it. She didn't care. She
+loathed their excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't
+care. It was she who had drawn them and led them on to this display
+of incomparable idiocy. Like her brother Nicholas she found that
+adversity was extremely funny; and she laughed.</p>
+<p>She was no longer Michael, she was Nicky, not caring, delighting
+in her power to fool them.</p>
+<p>"You think," she said, "I'd no business to find out?"</p>
+<p>"Your knowledge would certainly have been mysterious," said the
+Secretary; "unless at least two confidences had been betrayed.
+Supposing there had been any secret policy."</p>
+<p>"Well, you see, I don't know it; and I didn't invent it; and I
+didn't find it out--precisely. Your secret policy is the logical
+conclusion of your present policy. I deduced it; that's all.
+Anybody could have done the same. Does that satisfy you? (They
+won't love me any better for making them look fools!)"</p>
+<p>"Thank you," said Miss Gilchrist. "We only wanted to be
+sure."</p>
+<p>The dinner-bell rang as Dorothy was defining her position.</p>
+<p>"I'll work for you; I'll speak for you; I'll write for you; I'll
+fight for you. I'll make hay of every Government meeting, if I can
+get in without lying and sneaking for it. I'll go to prison for
+you, if I can choose my own crime. But I won't give up my liberty
+of speech and thought and action. I won't pledge myself to obey
+your orders. I won't pledge myself not to criticize policy I
+disapprove of. I won't come on your Committee, and I won't join
+your Union. Is that clear and precise enough?"</p>
+<p>Somebody clapped and somebody said, "Hear, Hear!" And somebody
+said, "Go it, Dorothy!"</p>
+<p>It was Anthony and Frances and Captain Drayton, who paused
+outside the door on their way to the dining-room, and listened,
+basely.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They were all going now. Dorothy stood at the door, holding it
+open for them, glad that it was all over.</p>
+<p>Only Phyllis Desmond, the art-student, lingered. Dorothy
+reminded her that they had met at her aunt Vera Harrison's
+house.</p>
+<p>The art-student smiled. "I wondered when you were going to
+remember."</p>
+<p>"I did, but they all called you Desmond. That's what put me
+out."</p>
+<p>"Everybody calls me Desmond. You had a brother or something with
+you, hadn't you?"</p>
+<p>"I might have had two. Which? Michael's got green eyes and
+yellow hair. Nicky's got blue eyes and black hair."</p>
+<p>"It was Nicky--nice name--then."</p>
+<p>Desmond's beauty stirred in its sleep. The film of air was
+lifted from her black eyes.</p>
+<p>"I'm dining with Mrs. Harrison to-night," she said.</p>
+<p>"You'll be late then."</p>
+<p>"It doesn't matter. Lawrence Stephen's never there till after
+eight. She won't dine without him."</p>
+<p>Dorothy stiffened. She did not like that furtive betrayal of
+Vera and Lawrence Stephen.</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd come and see me at my rooms in Chelsea. And bring
+your brother. Not the green and yellow one. The blue and black
+one."</p>
+<p>Dorothy took the card on which Desmond had scribbled an address.
+But she did not mean to go and see her. She wasn't sure that she
+liked Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Rosalind stayed on to dine with Dorothy's family. She was no
+longer living with her own family, for Mrs. Jervis was hostile to
+Women's Franchise. She had rooms off the Strand, not far from the
+headquarters of the Union.</p>
+<p>Frances looked a little careworn. She had been sent for to
+Grannie's house to see what could be done with Aunt Emmeline, and
+had found, as usual, that nothing could be done with her. In the
+last three years the second Miss Fleming had become less and less
+enthusiastic, and more and more emphatic, till she ceased from
+enthusiasm altogether and carried emphasis beyond the bounds of
+sanity. She had become, as Frances put it, extremely tiresome.</p>
+<p>It was not accurate to say, as Mrs. Fleming did, that you never
+knew when Emmeline would start a nervous crisis; for as a matter of
+fact you could time her to a minute. It was her habit to wait till
+her family was absorbed in some urgent affair that diverted
+attention from her case, and then to break out alarmingly. Dorothy
+was generally sent for to bring her round; but to-day it was
+Dorothy who had important things on hand. Aunt Emmeline had scented
+the Suffrage meeting from afar, and had made arrangements
+beforehand for a supreme crisis that would take all the shine out
+of Dorothy's affair.</p>
+<p>When Frances said that Aunt Emmy had been tiresome again,
+Dorothy knew what she meant. For Aunt Emmy's idea was that her
+sisters persecuted her; that Edie was jealous of her and hated her;
+that Louie had always trampled on her and kept her under; that
+Frances had used her influence with Grannie to spoil all her
+chances one after another. It was all Frances's fault that Vera
+Harrison had come between her and Major Cameron; Frances had
+encouraged Vera in her infamous intrigue; and between them they had
+wrecked two lives. And they had killed Major Cameron.</p>
+<p>Since Ferdie's death Emmeline Fleming had lived most of the time
+in a sort of dream in which it seemed to her that these things had
+really happened.</p>
+<p>This afternoon she had been more than usually tiresome. She had
+simply raved.</p>
+<p>"You should have brought her round to the meeting," said
+Dorothy, "and let her rave there. I'd back Aunt Emmeline against
+Maud Blackadder. I wish, Rosalind, you'd leave off making faces and
+kicking my shins. You needn't worry any more, Mummy ducky. I'm
+going to rope them all into the Suffrage Movement. Aunt Edie can
+distribute literature, Aunt Louie can interrupt like anything, and
+Aunt Emmeline can shout and sing."</p>
+<p>"I think, Dorothy," said Rosalind with weak bitterness, "that
+you might have stuck by me."</p>
+<p>The two were walking down East Heath Road to the tram-lines
+where the motor buses started for Charing Cross.</p>
+<p>"It was you who dragged me into it, and the least you could do
+was to stick. Why didn't you keep quiet instead of forcing our
+hands?"</p>
+<p>"I couldn't keep quiet. I'll go with you straight or I won't go
+with you at all."</p>
+<p>"You know what's the matter with you? It's your family. You'll
+never be any good to us, you'll never be any good to yourself till
+you've chucked them and got away. For years--ever since you've been
+born--you've simply been stewing there in the family juice until
+you're soaked with it. You oughtn't to be living at home. You ought
+to be on your own--like me."</p>
+<p>"You're talking rot, Rosalind. If my people were like yours I'd
+have to chuck them, I suppose; but they're not. They're
+angels."</p>
+<p>"That's why they're so dangerous. They couldn't influence you if
+they weren't angels."</p>
+<p>"They don't influence me the least little bit. I'd like to see
+them try. They're much too clever. They know I'd be off like a shot
+if they did. Why, they let me do every mortal thing I please--turn
+the schoolroom into a meeting hall for your friends to play the
+devil in. That Blackadder girl was yelling the house down, yet they
+didn't say anything. And your people aren't as bad as you make out,
+you know. You couldn't live on your own if your father didn't give
+you an allowance. I like Mrs. Jervis."</p>
+<p>"Because she likes you."</p>
+<p>"Well, that's a reason. It isn't the reason why I like my own
+mother, because she doesn't like me so very much. That's why she
+lets me do what I like. She doesn't care enough to stop me. She
+only really cares for Dad and John and Nicky and Michael."</p>
+<p>Rosalind looked fierce and stubborn.</p>
+<p>"That's what's the matter with all of you," she said.</p>
+<p>"What is?"</p>
+<p>"Caring like that. It's all sex. Sex instinct, sex feeling.
+Maud's right. It's what we're up against all the time."</p>
+<p>Dorothy said to herself, "That's what's the matter with
+Rosalind, if she only knew it."</p>
+<p>Rosalind loved Michael and Michael detested her, and Nicky
+didn't like her very much. She always looked fierce and stubborn
+when she heard Michael's name.</p>
+<p>Rosalind went on. "When it comes to sex you don't revolt. You
+sit down."</p>
+<p>"I do revolt. I'm revolting now. I go much farther than you do.
+I think the marriage laws are rotten; I think divorce ought to be
+for incompatibility. I think love isn't love and can't last unless
+it's free. I think marriage ought to be abolished--not yet,
+perhaps, but when we've become civilized. It will be. It's bound to
+be. As it is, I think every woman has a right to have a baby if she
+wants one. If Emmeline had had a baby, she wouldn't be devastating
+us now."</p>
+<p>"That's what you think, but it isn't what you feel. It's all
+thinking with you, Dorothy. The revolt goes on in your brain.
+You'll never do anything. It isn't that you haven't the courage to
+go against your men. You haven't the will. You don't want to."</p>
+<p>"Why should I? What do they do? Father and Michael and Nicky
+don't interfere with me any more than Mother does."</p>
+<p>"You know I'm not thinking of them. They don't really
+matter."</p>
+<p>"Who are you thinking of then? Frank Drayton? You needn't!"</p>
+<p>It was mean of Rosalind to hit below the belt like that, when
+she knew that <i>she</i> was safe. Michael had never been brought
+against her and never would be. It was disgusting of her to imply
+that Dorothy's state of mind was palpable, when her own (though
+sufficiently advertised by her behaviour) had received from
+Michael's sister the consecration of silence as a secret, tragic
+thing.</p>
+<p>They had reached the tram-lines.</p>
+<p>At the sight of the Charing Cross `bus Rosalind assumed an air
+of rollicking, adventurous travel.</p>
+<p>"My hat! What an evening! I shall have a ripping ride down.
+Don't say there's no room on the top. Cheer up, Dorothy!"</p>
+<p>Which showed that Rosalind Jervis was a free woman, suggested
+that life had richer thrills than marrying Dorothy's brother
+Michael, and fixed the detested imputation securely on her
+friend.</p>
+<p>Dorothy watched her as she swung herself on to the footboard and
+up the stair of the motor bus. There was room on the top. Rosalind,
+in fact, had the top all to herself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>As Dorothy crossed the Heath again in the twilight she saw
+something white on the terrace of her father's house. Her mother
+was waiting for her.</p>
+<p>She thought at first that Aunt Emmeline had gone off her head
+and that she had been sent for to keep her quiet. She gloried in
+their dependence on her. But no, that wasn't likely. Her mother was
+just watching for her as she used to watch for her and the boys
+when they were little and had been sent across the Heath to
+Grannie's house with a message.</p>
+<p>And at the sight and memory of her mother Dorothy felt a
+childish, sick dissatisfaction with herself and with her day, and
+an absurd longing for the tranquillity and safety of the home whose
+chief drawback lately had been that it was too tranquil and too
+safe. She could almost have told her mother how they had all gone
+for her, and how Rosalind had turned out rotten, and how beastly it
+had all been. Almost, but not quite. Dorothy had grown up, and she
+was there to protect and not to be protected. However agreeable it
+might have been to confide in her mother, it wouldn't have
+done.</p>
+<p>Frances met her at the garden door. She had been crying.</p>
+<p>"Nicky's come home," she said.</p>
+<p>"Nicky?"</p>
+<p>"He's been sent down."</p>
+<p>"Whatever for?"</p>
+<p>"Darling, I can't possibly tell you."</p>
+<p>But in the end she did.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Up till now Frances had taken a quiet interest in Women's
+Suffrage. It had got itself into the papers and thus become part of
+the affairs of the nation. The names of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and
+Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite had got into the papers,
+where Frances hoped and prayed that the name of Dorothea Harrison
+might not follow them. The spectacle of a frantic Government at
+grips with the Women's Franchise Union had not yet received the
+head-lines accorded to the reports of divorce and breach of promise
+cases and fires in paraffin shops; still, it was beginning to
+figure, and if Frances's <i>Times</i> ignored it, there were other
+papers that Dorothy brought home.</p>
+<p>But for Frances the affairs of the nation sank into
+insignificance beside Nicky's Cambridge affair.</p>
+<p>There could be no doubt that Nicky's affair was serious. You
+could not, Anthony said, get over the letters, the Master's letter
+and the Professor's letter and Michael's. They had arrived one hour
+after Nicky, Nicky so changed from his former candour that he
+refused to give any account of himself beyond the simple statement
+that he had been sent down. They'd know, he had said, soon enough
+why.</p>
+<p>And soon enough they did know.</p>
+<p>To be sure no details could be disentangled from the discreet
+ambiguities of the Master and the Professor. But Michael's letter
+was more explicit. Nicky had been sent down because old "Booster"
+had got it into his head that Nicky had been making love to
+"Booster's" wife when she didn't want to be made love to, and
+nothing could get it out of "Booster's" head.</p>
+<p>Michael was bound to stand up for his brother, and it was clear
+to Anthony that so grave a charge could hardly have been brought
+without some reason. The tone of the letters, especially the
+Professor's, was extraordinarily restrained. That was what made the
+thing stand out in its sheer awfulness. The Professor, although,
+according to Michael, he conceived himself to be profoundly
+injured, wrote sorrowfully, in consideration of Nicky's youth.</p>
+<p>There was one redeeming circumstance, the Master and the
+Professor both laid stress on it: Anthony's son had not attempted
+to deny it.</p>
+<p>"There must," Frances said wildly, "be some terrible
+mistake."</p>
+<p>But Nicky cut the ground from under the theory of the terrible
+mistake by continuing in his refusal to deny it.</p>
+<p>"What sort of woman," said Anthony, "is the Professor's
+wife?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, awfully decent," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"You had no encouragement, then, no provocation?"</p>
+<p>"She's awfully fascinating," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>Then Frances had another thought. It seemed to her that Nicky
+was evading.</p>
+<p>"Are you sure you're not screening somebody else?"</p>
+<p>"Screening somebody else? Do you mean some other fellow?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. I'm not asking you to give the name, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"I swear I'm not. Why should I be? I can't think why you're all
+making such a fuss about it. I don't mean poor old 'Booster.' He's
+got some cause, if you like."</p>
+<p>"But what was it you did--really did, Nicky?"</p>
+<p>"You've read the letters, Mother."</p>
+<p>Nicky's adolescence seemed to die and pass from him there and
+then; and she saw a stubborn, hard virility that frightened and
+repelled her, forcing her to believe that it might have really
+happened.</p>
+<p>To Frances the awfulness of it was beyond belief. And the pathos
+of her belief in Nicky was unbearable to Anthony. There were the
+letters.</p>
+<p>"I think, dear," Anthony said, "you'd better leave us."</p>
+<p>"Mayn't I stay?" It was as if she thought that by staying she
+could bring Nicky's youth back to life again.</p>
+<p>"No," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>She went, and Nicky opened the door for her. His hard, tight
+man's face looked at her as if it had been she who had sinned and
+he who suffered, intolerably, for her sin. The click of the door as
+he shut it stabbed her.</p>
+<p>"It's a damnable business, father. We'd better not talk about
+it."</p>
+<p>But Anthony would talk about it. And when he had done talking
+all that Nicky had to say was: "You know as well as I do that these
+things happen."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>For Nicky had thought it out very carefully beforehand in the
+train. What else could he say? He couldn't tell them that
+"Booster's" poor little wife had lost her head and made hysterical
+love to him, and had been so frightened at what she had done that
+she had made him promise on his word of honour that, whatever
+happened, he wouldn't give her away to anybody, not even to his own
+people.</p>
+<p>He supposed that either Peggy had given herself away, or that
+poor old "Booster" had found her out. He supposed that, having
+found her out, there was no other line that "Booster" could have
+taken. Anyhow, there was no other line that <i>he</i> could take;
+because, in the world where these things happened, being found out
+would be fifty times worse for Peggy than it would be for him.</p>
+<p>He tried to recall the scene in the back drawing-room where she
+had asked him so often to have tea with her alone. The most vivid
+part was the end of it, after he had given his promise. Peggy had
+broken down and put her head on his shoulder and cried like
+anything. And it was at that moment that Nicky thought of
+"Booster," and how awful and yet how funny it would be if he walked
+into the room and saw him there. He had tried hard not to think
+what "Booster's" face would look like; he had tried hard not to
+laugh as long as Peggy's head was on his shoulder, for fear of
+hurting her feelings; but when she took it off he did give one
+half-strangled snort; for it really was the rummest thing that had
+ever happened to him.</p>
+<p>He didn't know, and he couldn't possibly have guessed, that as
+soon as the door had shut on him Peggy's passion had turned to rage
+and utter detestation of Nicky (for she had heard the snort); and
+that she had gone straight to her husband's study and put her head
+on <i>his</i> shoulder, and cried, and told him a lie; and that it
+was Peggy's lie and not the Professor's imagination that had caused
+him to be sent down. And even if Peggy had not been Lord Somebody's
+daughter and related to all sorts of influential people she would
+still have been capable of turning every male head in the
+University. For she was a small, gentle woman with enchanting
+manners and the most beautiful and pathetic eyes, and she had not
+yet been found out. Therefore it was more likely that an
+undergraduate with a face like Nicky's should lose his head than
+that a woman with a face like Peggy's should, for no conceivable
+reason, tell a lie. So that, even if Nicky's word of honour had not
+been previously pledged to his accuser, it would have had no chance
+against any statement that she chose to make. And even if he had
+known that she had lied, he couldn't very well have given it
+against poor pretty Peggy who had lost her head and got
+frightened.</p>
+<p>As Nicky packed up his clothes and his books he said, "I don't
+care if I am sent down. It would have been fifty times worse for
+her than it is for me."</p>
+<p>He had no idea how bad it was, nor how much worse it was going
+to be. For it ended in his going that night from his father's house
+to the house in St. John's Wood where Vera and Mr. Lawrence Stephen
+lived.</p>
+<p>And it was there that he met Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky congratulated himself on having pulled it off so well. At
+the same time he was a little surprised at the ease with which he
+had taken his father and mother in. He might have understood it if
+he had known that Vera had been before him, and that she had warned
+them long ago that this was precisely the sort of thing they would
+have to look out for. And as no opinion ever uttered on the subject
+of their children was likely to be forgotten by Frances and
+Anthony, when this particular disaster came they were more prepared
+for it than they would have believed possible.</p>
+<p>But there were two members of his family whom Nicky had failed
+altogether to convince, Michael and Dorothy. Michael luckily, Nicky
+said to himself, was not on the spot, and his letter had no weight
+against the letters of the Master and the Professor, and on this
+also Nicky had calculated. He reckoned without Dorothy, judging it
+hardly likely that she would be allowed to know anything about it.
+Nobody, not even Frances, was yet aware of Dorothy's
+importance.</p>
+<p>And Dorothy, because of her importance, blamed herself for all
+that happened afterwards. If she had not had that damned Suffrage
+meeting, Rosalind would not have stayed to dinner; if Rosalind had
+not stayed to dinner she would not have gone with her to the
+tram-lines; if she had not gone with her to the tram-lines she
+would have been at home to stop Nicky from going to St. John's
+Wood. As it was, Nicky had reached the main road at the top of the
+lane just as Dorothy was entering it from the bottom.</p>
+<p>At first Frances did not want Dorothy to see her father. He was
+most horribly upset and must not be disturbed. But Dorothy
+insisted. Her father had the letters, and she must see the
+letters.</p>
+<p>"I may understand them better than you or Daddy," she said. "You
+see, Mummy, I know these Cambridge people. They're awful asses,
+some of them."</p>
+<p>And though her mother doubted whether attendance at the
+Professor's lectures would give Dorothy much insight into the
+affair, she had her way. Anthony was too weak to resist her. He
+pushed the letters towards her without a word. He would rather she
+had been left out of it. And yet somehow the sight of her, coming
+in, so robust and undismayed and competent, gave him a sort of
+comfort.</p>
+<p>Dorothy did not agree with Michael. There was more in it than
+the Professor's imagination. The Professor, she said, hadn't got
+any imagination; you could tell from the way he lectured. But she
+did not believe one word of the charge against her brother.
+Something had happened and Nicky was screening somebody.</p>
+<p>"I'll bet you anything you like," said Dorothy, "it's
+'Booster's' wife. She's made him give his word."</p>
+<p>Dorothy was sure that "Booster's" wife was a bad lot.</p>
+<p>"Nicky said she was awfully decent."</p>
+<p>"He'd <i>have</i> to. He couldn't do it by halves."</p>
+<p>"They couldn't have sent him down, unless they'd sifted the
+thing to the bottom."</p>
+<p>"I daresay they've sifted all they could, the silly asses."</p>
+<p>She could have killed them for making her father suffer. The
+sight of his drawn face hurt her abominably. She had never seen him
+like that. She wasn't half so sorry for her mother who was
+sustained by a secret, ineradicable faith in Nicky. Why couldn't he
+have faith in Nicky too? Was it because he was a man and knew that
+these things happened?</p>
+<p>"Daddy--being sent down isn't such an awful calamity. It isn't
+going to blast his career or anything. It's always touch and go.
+<i>I</i> might have been sent down any day. I should have been if
+they'd known about me half what they don't know about Nicky. Why
+can't you take it as a rag? You bet <i>he</i> does."</p>
+<p>Anthony removed himself from her protecting hand. He got up and
+went to bed.</p>
+<p>But he did not sleep there. Neither he nor Frances slept. And he
+came down in the morning looking worse than ever.</p>
+<p>Dorothy thought, "It must be awful to have children if it makes
+you feel like that." She thought, "It's a lucky thing they're not
+likely to cut up the same way about me." She thought again, "It
+must be awful to have children." She thought of the old discussions
+in her room at Newnham, about the woman's right to the child, and
+free union, and easy divorce, and the abolition of the family. Her
+own violent and revolutionary speeches (for which she liked to
+think she might have been sent down) sounded faint and far-off and
+irrelevant. She did not really want to abolish Frances and Anthony.
+And yet, if they had been abolished, as part of the deplorable
+institution of parentage, it would have been better for them; for
+then they would not be suffering as they did.</p>
+<p>It must be awful to have children. But perhaps they knew that it
+was worth it.</p>
+<p>And as her thoughts travelled that way they were overtaken all
+of a sudden by an idea. She did not stop to ask herself what
+business her idea had in that neighbourhood. She went down first
+thing after breakfast and sent off two wires; one to Captain
+Drayton at Croft House, Eltham; one to the same person at the Royal
+Military Academy, Woolwich.</p>
+<p>"Can I see you? It's about Nicky.</p>
+<p>"DOROTHY HARRISON."</p>
+<p>Wires to show that she was impersonal and businesslike, and that
+her business was urgent. "Can I see you?" to show that he was not
+being invited to see <i>her</i>. "It's about Nicky" to justify the
+whole proceeding. "Dorothy Harrison" because "Dorothy" by itself
+was too much.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>As soon as she had sent off her wires Dorothy felt a sense of
+happiness and well-being. She had no grounds for happiness; far
+otherwise; her great friendship with Rosalind Jervis was
+disintegrating bit by bit owing to Rosalind's behaviour; the fiery
+Suffrage meeting had turned into dust and ashes; her darling Nicky
+was in a nasty scrape; her father and mother were utterly
+miserable; yet she was happy.</p>
+<p>Half-way home her mind began to ask questions of its own
+accord.</p>
+<p>"Supposing you had to choose between the Suffrage and Frank
+Drayton?"</p>
+<p>"But I haven't got to."</p>
+<p>"You might have. You know you might any minute. You know he
+hates it. And supposing--"</p>
+<p>But Dorothy refused to give any answer.</p>
+<p>His wire came within the next half hour.</p>
+<p>"Coming three sharp. FRANK."</p>
+<p>Her sense of well-being increased almost to exaltation.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He arrived with punctuality at three o'clock. (He was in the
+gunners and had a job at Woolwich.) She found him standing on the
+hearth-rug in the drawing-room. He had blown his nose when he heard
+her coming, and that meant that he was nervous. She caught him
+stuffing his pocket-handkerchief (a piece of damning evidence) into
+his breast-pocket.</p>
+<p>With her knowledge of his nervousness her exaltation ceased as
+if it had not been. At the sight of him it was as if the sentence
+hidden somewhere in her mind--"You'll have to choose. You know
+you'll have to"--escaping thought and language, had expressed
+itself in one suffocating pang. Unless Nicky's affair staved off
+the dreadful moment.</p>
+<p>"Were you frightfully busy?"</p>
+<p>"No, thank goodness."</p>
+<p>The luck she had had! Of course, if he had been busy he couldn't
+possibly have come.</p>
+<p>She could look at him now without a tightening in her throat.
+She liked to look at him. He was made all of one piece. She liked
+his square face and short fine hair, both the colour of light-brown
+earth; his eyes, the colour of light brown earth under clear water;
+eyes that looked small because they were set so deep. She liked
+their sudden narrowing and their deep wrinkles when he smiled. She
+liked his jutting chin, and the fine, rather small mouth that
+jerked his face slightly crooked when he laughed. She liked that
+slender crookedness that made it a face remarkable and unique among
+faces. She liked his brains. She liked all that she had ever seen
+or heard of him.</p>
+<p>Vera had told them that once, at an up-country station in India,
+he had stopped a mutiny in a native battery by laughing in the
+men's faces. Somebody that Ferdie knew had been with him and saw it
+happen. The men broke into his office where he was sitting,
+vulnerably, in his shirt-sleeves. They had brought knives with
+them, beastly native things, and they had their hands on the
+handles, ready. They screamed and gesticulated with excitement. And
+Frank Drayton leaned back in his office chair and looked at them,
+and burst out laughing, because, he said, they made such funny
+faces. When they got to fingering their knives, he tilted back his
+chair and rocked with laughter. His sudden, incredible mirth
+frightened them and stopped the mutiny. She could see him, she
+could see his face jerked crooked with delight.</p>
+<p>That was the sort of thing that Nicky would have done. She loved
+him for that. She loved him because he was like Nicky.</p>
+<p>She was not able to recall the process of the states that
+flowered in that mysterious sense of well-being and exaltation. A
+year ago Frank Drayton had been only "that nice man we used to meet
+at Cheltenham." First of all he had been Ferdie's and Vera's
+friend. Then he became Nicky's friend; the only one who took a
+serious interest in his inventions and supported him when he wanted
+to go into the Army and consoled him when he was frustrated. Then
+he had become the friend of the family. Now he was recognized as
+more particularly Dorothea's friend.</p>
+<p>At Cheltenham he had been home on leave; and it was not until
+this year that he had got his job at Woolwich teaching gunnery,
+while he waited for a bigger job in the Ordnance Department. Ferdie
+Cameron had always said that Frank Drayton would be worth watching.
+He would be part of the brains of the Army some day. Nicky watched
+him. His brains and their familiarity with explosives and the
+machinery of warfare had been his original attraction for Nicky.
+But it was Dorothea who watched him most.</p>
+<p>She plunged abruptly into Nicky's affair, giving names and
+lineage. "You know all sorts of people, do you know anything about
+her?"</p>
+<p>He looked at her clearly, without smiling. Then he said "Yes. I
+know a good bit about her. Is that what's wrong with Nicky?"</p>
+<p>"Not exactly. But he's been sent down."</p>
+<p>His wry smile intimated that such things might be.</p>
+<p>Then she told him what the Master had written and what the
+Professor had written and what Michael had written, and what Nicky
+had said, and what she, Dorothea thought. Drayton smiled over the
+Master's and the Professor's letters, but when it came to Michael's
+letter he laughed aloud.</p>
+<p>"It's all very well for <i>us</i>. But Daddy and Mummy are
+breaking their hearts. Daddy says he's going down to Cambridge to
+see what really did happen."</p>
+<p>Again that clear look. She gathered that he disapproved of
+"Booster's" wife. He disapproved of so many things: of Women's
+Suffrage; of revolutions; of women who revolted; of anybody who
+revolted; of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela
+Blathwaite. It was putting it too mildly to say he disapproved of
+Rosalind Jervis; he detested her. He disapproved of Vera and of her
+going to see Vera; she remembered that he had even disapproved,
+long ago, of poor Ferdie, though he liked him. Evidently he
+disapproved of "Booster's" wife for the same reason that he
+disapproved of Vera. That was why he didn't say so.</p>
+<p>"I believe you think all the time I'm right," she said. "Would
+you go down if you were he?"</p>
+<p>"No. I wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+<p>"Because he won't get anything out of them. They can't give her
+away any more than Nicky can. Or than <i>you</i> can, Dorothy."</p>
+<p>"You mean I've done it already--to you. I <i>had</i> to, because
+of Nicky. I can't help it if you <i>do</i> think it was beastly of
+me."</p>
+<p>"My dear child--"</p>
+<p>He got up vehemently, as if his idea was to take her in his arms
+and stifle her outbreak that way. But something in her eyes, cold,
+unready, yet aware of him, repelled him.</p>
+<p>He thought: "It's too soon. She's all rigid. She isn't alive
+yet. That's not what she wired for." He thought: "I wish people
+wouldn't send their children to Newnham. It retards their
+development by ten years."</p>
+<p>And she thought: "No. I mustn't let him do that. For then he
+won't be able to go back on me when I tell him my opinions. It
+would be simply trapping him. Supposing--supposing--"</p>
+<p>She did not know that that instinctive renunciation was her
+answer to the question. Her honour would come first.</p>
+<p>"Of course. Of course you had to."</p>
+<p>"What would you do about it if you were Daddy?"</p>
+<p>"I should send them all to blazes."</p>
+<p>"No, but <i>really</i> do?"</p>
+<p>"I should do nothing. I should leave it. You'll find that before
+very long there'll be letters of apology and restitution."</p>
+<p>"Will you come down to the office with me and tell Daddy
+that?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, if you'll come to tea with me somewhere afterwards."</p>
+<p>(He really couldn't be expected to do all this for nothing.)</p>
+<p>She sent her mother to him while she put on her hat and coat.
+When she came down Frances was happy again.</p>
+<p>"You see, Mummy, I was right, after all."</p>
+<p>"You always were right, darling, all the time."</p>
+<p>For the life of her she couldn't help giving that little flick
+at her infallible daughter.</p>
+<p>"She <i>is</i> right--most of the time," said Drayton. His eyes
+covered and protected her.</p>
+<p>Anthony was in his office, sitting before the open doors of the
+cabinet where he kept his samples of rare and valuable woods. The
+polished slabs were laid before him on the table in rows, as he had
+arranged them to show to a customer: wine-coloured mahogany, and
+golden satinwood; ebony black as jet; tulip-wood mottled like fine
+tortoiseshell; coromandel wood, striped black and white like the
+coat of a civet cat; ghostly basswood, shining white on dead white;
+woods of clouded grain, and woods of shining grain, grain that
+showed like the slanting, splintered lines of hewn stone, like
+moss, like the veins of flowers, the fringes of birds' feathers,
+the striping and dappling of beasts; woods of exquisite grain where
+the life of the tree drew its own image in its own heart; woods
+whose surface was tender to the touch like a fine tissue; and
+sweet-smelling sandalwood and camphor-wood and cedar.</p>
+<p>Anthony loved his shining, polished slabs of wood. If a man must
+have a business, let it be timber. Timber was a clean and fine and
+noble thing. He had brought the working of his business to such a
+pitch of smooth perfection that his two elder sons, Michael and
+Nicholas, could catch up with it easily and take it in their
+stride.</p>
+<p>Now he was like a sick child that has ranged all its toys in
+front of it and finds no comfort in them.</p>
+<p>And, as he looked at them, the tulip-wood and the scented
+sandalwood and camphor-wood gave him an idea.</p>
+<p>The Master and the Professor had both advised him to send his
+son Nicholas out of England for a little while. "Let him travel for
+six months and get the whole miserable business out of his
+head."</p>
+<p>Nicky, when he gave up the Army, had told him flatly that he
+would rather die than spend his life sitting in a beastly office.
+Nicky had put it to him that timber meant trees, and trees meant
+forests; why, lots of the stuff they imported came from the
+Himalaya and the West Indies and Ceylon. He had reminded him that
+he was always saying a timber merchant couldn't know enough about
+the living tree. Why shouldn't he go into the places where the
+living trees grew and learn all about them? Why shouldn't he be a
+tree-expert? Since they were specializing in rare and foreign
+woods, why shouldn't he specialize in rare and foreign trees?</p>
+<p>And the slabs of tulip-wood and scented camphor-wood and
+sandalwood were saying to Anthony, "Why not?" Neither he nor
+Frances had wanted Nicky to go off to the West Indies and the
+Himalaya; but now, since clearly he must go off somewhere, why
+not?</p>
+<p>Drayton and Dorothy came in just as Anthony (still profoundly
+dejected) was saying to himself, "Reinstate him. Give him
+responsibility--curiosity--healthy interests. Get the whole
+miserable business out of his head."</p>
+<p>It seemed incredible, after what they had gone through, that
+Drayton should be standing there, telling him that there was
+nothing in it, that there never had been any miserable business,
+that it was all a storm in a hysterical woman's teacup. He blew the
+whole dirty nightmare to nothing with the laughter that was like
+Nicky's own laughter.</p>
+<p>Then Anthony and Drayton and Dorothy sat round the table,
+drafting letters to the Master and the Professor. Anthony, at
+Drayton's dictation, informed them that he regretted the step they
+had seen fit to take; that he knew his own son well enough to be
+pretty certain that there had been some misunderstanding;
+therefore, unless he received within three days a written
+withdrawal of the charge against his son Nicholas, he would be
+obliged to remove his son Michael from the Master's College.</p>
+<p>The idea of removing Michael was Anthony's own inspiration.</p>
+<p>Drayton's advice was that he should give Nicky his choice
+between Oxford and Germany, the big School of Forestry at
+Aschaffenburg. If he chose Germany, he would be well grounded; he
+could specialize and travel afterwards.</p>
+<p>"Now <i>that's</i> all over," Anthony said, "you two had better
+come and have tea with me somewhere."</p>
+<p>But there was something in their faces that made him consult his
+watch and find that "Oh dear me, no! he was afraid he couldn't." He
+had an appointment at five.</p>
+<p>When they were well out of sight he locked up his toys in his
+cabinet, left the appointment at five to Mr. Vereker, and went home
+to tell Frances about the letters he had written to Cambridge and
+the plans that had been made for Nicky's future.</p>
+<p>"He'll choose Germany," Anthony said. "But that can't be
+helped."</p>
+<p>Frances agreed that they could hardly have hit upon a better
+plan.</p>
+<p>So the affair of Nicky and "Booster's" wife was as if it had
+never been. And for that they thanked the blessed common sense and
+sanity of Captain Drayton.</p>
+<p>And yet Anthony's idea was wrecked by "Booster's" wife. It had
+come too late. Anthony had overlooked the fact that his son had
+seventeen hours' start of him. He was unaware of the existence of
+Nicky's own idea; and he had not allowed for the stiff logic of his
+position.</p>
+<p>When he drove down in his car to St. John's Wood to fetch Nicky,
+he found that he had left that afternoon for Chelsea, where, Vera
+told him, he had taken rooms.</p>
+<p>She gave him the address. It had no significance for
+Anthony.</p>
+<p>Nicky refused to be fetched back from his rooms in Chelsea. For
+he had not left his father's house in a huff; he had left it in his
+wisdom, to avoid the embarrassment of an incredible position. His
+position, as he pointed out to his father, had not changed. He was
+as big a blackguard to-day as he was yesterday; the only difference
+was, that to-morrow or the next day he would be a self-supporting
+blackguard.</p>
+<p>He wouldn't listen to his father's plan. It was a beautiful
+plan, but it would only mean spending more money on him. He'd be
+pretty good, he thought, at looking after machinery. He was going
+to try for a job as a chauffeur or foreman mechanic. He thought he
+knew where he could get one; but supposing he couldn't get it, if
+his father cared to take him on at the works for a bit he'd come
+like a shot; but he couldn't stay there, because it wouldn't be
+good enough.</p>
+<p>He was absolutely serious, and absolutely firm in the logic of
+his position. For he argued that, if he allowed himself to be taken
+back as though nothing had happened, this, more than anything he
+could well think of, would be giving Peggy away.</p>
+<p>He sent his love to his mother and Dorothy, and promised to come
+out and dine with them as soon as he had got his job.</p>
+<p>So Anthony drove back without him. But as he drove he smiled.
+And Frances smiled, too, when he told her.</p>
+<p>"There he is, the young monkey, and there he'll stay. It's
+magnificent, but of course he's an ass."</p>
+<p>"If you can't be an ass at twenty," said Frances, "when can you
+be?"</p>
+<p>They said it was so like Nicky. For all he knew to the contrary
+his career was ruined; but he didn't care. You couldn't make any
+impression on him. They wondered if anybody ever would.</p>
+<p>Dorothy wondered too.</p>
+<p>"What sort of rooms has he got, Anthony?" said Frances.</p>
+<p>"Very nice rooms, at the top of the house, looking over the
+river."</p>
+<p>"Darling Nicky, I shall go and see him. What are you thinking
+of, Dorothy?"</p>
+<p>Dorothy was thinking that Nicky's address at Chelsea was the
+address that Desmond had given her yesterday.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with
+the painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and
+see her. She could never bring herself to go to the St. John's Wood
+house that was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen's house than it
+was Vera's.</p>
+<p>The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back
+on Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with
+their liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged
+that frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen's society
+that otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.</p>
+<p>Vera understood that her husband's brother and sister-in-law
+could hardly be expected to condone her last aberration. Her
+attachment to Ferdie Cameron had been different. It was inevitable,
+and in a sense forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by
+Bartie's sheer impossibility. Besides, the knowledge of it had
+dawned on them so gradually and through so many stages of
+extenuating tragedy, that, even when it became an open certainty,
+the benefit of the long doubt remained. And there was Veronica.
+There was still Veronica. Even without Veronica Vera would have had
+to think of something far worse than Lawrence Stephen before
+Frances would have cast her off. Frances felt that it was not for
+her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree of Heaven.
+Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had Ferdie,
+could she have lived without him? For Frances nothing in the world
+had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her
+children; her children first, and Anthony after them. For Vera
+nothing in the world counted but her lover.</p>
+<p>"If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!" she
+would say.</p>
+<p>Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously,
+through the very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.</p>
+<p>Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made
+up for it by an incorruptible adoration of the living. And she had
+been made notorious chiefly through Stephen's celebrity, which was,
+you might say, a pure accident.</p>
+<p>Thus Frances made shelter for her friend. Only Vera must be made
+to understand that, though <i>she</i> was accepted Lawrence Stephen
+was not. He was the point at which toleration ceased.</p>
+<p>And Vera did understand. She understood that Frances and Anthony
+disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie's and
+Veronica's account than on Bartie's. Even family loyalty could not
+espouse Bartie's cause with any zest. For Bartie showed himself
+implacable. Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her
+so that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had
+refused. His idea was to assert himself by refusals. In that way he
+could still feel that he had power over her and a sort of
+possession. It was he who was scandalous. Even now neither Frances
+nor Anthony had a word to say for him.</p>
+<p>So Vera consented to be received surreptitiously, by herself,
+and without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn. It had hurt
+her; but Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so
+distinguished that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either,
+would ever have been received by him without Vera. She came,
+looking half cynical, half pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a
+little beaten after seventeen years of passion and danger, saying
+that she wasn't going to force Larry down their throats if they
+didn't like him; and she went away sustained by her sense of his
+distinction and <i>his</i> repudiations.</p>
+<p>And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances
+and Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn't. Michael
+and Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he
+knew; and he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be
+seen at the parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself
+distinction. Vera had never forgotten and never would forget what
+Anthony and Frances had done for her and Ferdie when they took
+Veronica. She wanted to make up, to pay back, to help their
+children as they had helped her child; to give the best she had,
+and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't possibly have done.
+Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was lamentable. In his
+family and in the dull round of their acquaintance there was not
+anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael; not
+anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old
+attitude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had
+promised her that he would help Michael.</p>
+<p>And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas
+and Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm,
+well-ordered sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral
+vortex that to her was the most redoubtable of all. She hid her
+fear, because in her wisdom she knew that to show fear was not the
+way to keep her children. She hid her strength because she knew
+that to show it was not the way. Her strength was in their love of
+her. She had only used it once when she had stopped Nicky from
+going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will never do
+that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a
+treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be
+bargained with. She tried to hold the balance even between their
+youth and their maturity.</p>
+<p>So Frances fought her fear.</p>
+<p>She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in
+spite of everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and
+she did not know that he had sensibilities and prejudices and
+scruples like her own, and that he and Vera distinguished very
+carefully between the people who would be good for Michael and
+Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who would not. She did not
+know that they both drew the line at Desmond.</p>
+<p>Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's
+fault that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet
+each other. She did not deny that it was in her house they
+<i>had</i> met; but she had not introduced them. Desmond had
+introduced herself, on the grounds that she knew Dorothy. Vera
+suspected that, from the first moment when she had seen him
+there--by pure accident--she had marked him down. Very likely she
+had wriggled into Dorothy's Suffrage meeting on purpose. She was
+capable of anything.</p>
+<p>Not that Vera thought there was any need for Frances to worry.
+It was most unlikely that Desmond's business with Nicky could be
+serious. For one thing she was too young herself to care for
+anybody as young as Nicky. For another she happened to be in the
+beginning, or the middle, certainly nowhere near the end of a
+tremendous affair with Headley Richards. As she was designing the
+dresses and the scenery for the new play he was putting on at the
+Independent Theatre, Vera argued very plausibly that the affair had
+only just started, and that Frances must allow it a certain time to
+run.</p>
+<p>"I hope to goodness that the Richards man will marry her."</p>
+<p>"My dear, how can he? He's married already to a nice little
+woman that he isn't half tired of yet. Desmond was determined to
+have him and she's got him; but he's only taken her in his stride,
+as you may say. I don't suppose he cares very much one way or
+another. But with Desmond it's a point of honour."</p>
+<p>"What's a point of honour?"</p>
+<p>"Why, to have him. Not to be left out. Besides, she always said
+she could take him from poor little Ginny Richards, and she's done
+it. That was another point of honour."</p>
+<p>With a calmness that was horrible to Frances Vera weighed her
+friend Desmond's case. To Frances it was as if she had never known
+Vera. Either Vera had changed or she had never known her. She had
+never known women, or men either, who discussed such performances
+with calmness. Vera herself hadn't made her infidelities a point of
+honour.</p>
+<p>These were the passions and the thoughts of Lawrence Stephen's
+and of Desmond's world; these were the things it took for granted.
+These people lived in a moral vortex; they whirled round and round
+with each other; they were powerless to resist the swirl. Not one
+of them had any other care than to love and to make love after the
+manner of the Vortex. This was their honour, not to be left out of
+it, not to be left out of the vortex, but to be carried away, to be
+sucked in, and whirl round and round with each other and the
+rest.</p>
+<p>The painter girl Desmond was horrible to Frances.</p>
+<p>And all the time her mind was busy with one question: "Do you
+think Nicky knows?"</p>
+<p>"I'm perfectly sure he doesn't."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps--if he did--"</p>
+<p>"No, my dear, that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe
+it. You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting
+into his head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And
+you'll be putting it into Desmond's head."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him
+alone." Those painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You
+couldn't take them seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything
+that Vera Harrison said she was. He didn't think, though, that the
+idea of making love to her would enter Nicky's head if they left
+him alone. Nicky's head had more important ideas in it.</p>
+<p>So they left him alone.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of
+Desmond. Too busy with his assistant manager's job at the Morss
+Motor Works; too busy with one of the little ideas to which he owed
+the sudden rise in his position: the little idea of making the
+Morss cars go faster; too busy with his big Idea which had nothing
+whatever to do with the Morss Company and their cars.</p>
+<p>His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a
+French engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the <i>forteresse
+mobile</i>, had become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality
+for his idea. It was a composite of the amoured train, the
+revolving turret, the tractor with caterpillar wheels and the
+motor-car. These things had welded themselves together gradually in
+Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge. The table in
+Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was now
+covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made
+them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of
+him, and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then
+for little ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was
+with him all day in the workshops and offices and showrooms,
+hovering like a formless spiritual presence among the wheeled
+forms. But in the evening it took shape and sound. It arose and
+moved, after its fashion, as he had conceived it, beautiful,
+monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image of the
+<i>forteresse mobile</i>, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost
+that stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the
+vision.</p>
+<p>But the image of Desmond was there.</p>
+<p>At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder
+when Desmond will have finished the drawings."</p>
+<p>The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond's
+caprice.</p>
+<p>The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before
+these could be fitted together and the permanent model of the
+Moving Fortress set up. The Moving Fortress itself waited upon
+Desmond.</p>
+<p>For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not
+draw his plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who
+understood engines to draw them. He was haunted, almost insanely,
+by the fear that somebody else would hit upon the idea of the
+Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so obvious that no gunner and no
+engineer could miss it. And the drawings Desmond made for him, the
+drawings in black and white, the drawings in grey wash, and the
+coloured drawings were perfect. Nicky, unskilled in everything but
+the inventing and building up of engines, did not know how perfect
+the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the
+extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the
+easels in her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he
+took Desmond into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on
+her.</p>
+<p>He didn't care. He liked Desmond. He couldn't help it if Drayton
+disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn't like her. She was, he said
+to himself, a ripping good sort. She might be frightfully clever;
+Nicky rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she
+never talked that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy's other
+friends talked. She let you think.</p>
+<p>It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn't like her and
+that Frank Drayton disapproved of her.</p>
+<p>"They wouldn't," said Nicky, "if they knew you." And he turned
+again to the subject of his Moving Fortress.</p>
+<p>For Desmond's intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was
+perfect, and her way of listening was perfect. She sat on the
+floor, on the orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience,
+embracing her knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms,
+while Nicky stamped up and down her studio and talked to her, like
+a monomaniac, about his Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to
+listen, because she didn't have to answer; she had only to look at
+him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of
+enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she liked his young
+na&iuml;vet&eacute; and monomania; she liked his face and all his
+gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.</p>
+<p>And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled
+eyes and in her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and
+became alive. It was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the
+secret held back in its long, subtle, serious, and slender lines.
+Desmond's sensuality was woven with so fine a web that you would
+have said it belonged less to her body than to her spirit and her
+mind.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early
+summer, when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent
+him motoring about the country on their business, he took Desmond
+with him and Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on
+the grass borders of the high roads and on the edges of the woods
+and moors, and Desmond painted her extraordinary pictures while
+Nicky lay on his back beside her with his face turned up to the sky
+and dreamed of flying machines.</p>
+<p>For he had done with his Moving Fortress. It only waited for
+Desmond to finish the last drawing.</p>
+<p>When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank
+Drayton before he sent them to the War Office.</p>
+<p>He lived for that moment of completion.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of
+nineteen-eleven Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased
+and flowered and ripened to its fulfilment. And in the early summer
+she found that things had happened as she had meant that they
+should happen.</p>
+<p>She had always meant it. She had always said, and she had always
+thought that women were no good unless they had the courage of
+their opinions; the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice
+that prevented them from getting what they wanted.</p>
+<p>Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked
+her in. Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought
+that by simply spinning round faster and faster she added her own
+energy to the whirl. It was not Dorothy's vortex, or the vortex of
+the fighting Suffrage woman. Desmond didn't care very much about
+the Suffrage; or about any kind of freedom but her own kind; or
+about anybody's freedom but her own. Maud Blackadder's idea of
+freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and physical insanity. Yet
+each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and Mrs. Blathwaite
+and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own particular
+swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century. If you had youth
+and life in you, you were in revolt.</p>
+<p>Desmond's theories were Dorothy's theories too; only that while
+Dorothy, as Rosalind had said, thought out her theories in her
+brain without feeling them, Desmond felt them with her whole being;
+and with her whole being, secret, subtle and absolutely relentless,
+she was bent on carrying them out.</p>
+<p>And in the summer, in the new season, Headley Richards decided
+that he had no further use for Desmond. The new play had run its
+course at the Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards
+had been disappointed. He put down the failure mainly to the
+queerness of the dresses and the scenery she had designed for him.
+Desmond's new art was too new; people weren't ready yet for that
+sort of thing. At the same time he discovered that he was really
+very much attached to his own wife Ginny, and when Ginny nobly
+offered to give him his divorce he had replied nobly that he didn't
+want one. And he left Desmond to face the music.</p>
+<p>Desmond's misery was acute; but it was not so hopeless as it
+would have been if she could have credited Ginny Richards with any
+permanent power of attraction for Headley. She knew he would come
+back to her. She knew the power of her own body. She held him by
+the tie that was never broken so long as it endured. He would never
+marry her; yet he would come back.</p>
+<p>But in the interval between these acts there was the music.</p>
+<p>And the first sound of the music, the changed intonations of her
+landlady, frightened Desmond; for though she was older than Nicky
+she was very young. And there were Desmond's people. You may forget
+that you have people and behave as if they weren't there; but, if
+they are there, sooner or later they will let you know it. An
+immense volume of sound and some terrifying orchestral effects were
+contributed by Desmond's people. So that the music was really very
+bad to bear.</p>
+<p>Desmond couldn't bear it. And in her fright she thought of
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>She knew that she hadn't a chance so long as he was absorbed in
+the Moving Fortress. But the model was finished and set up and she
+was at work on the last drawing. And no more ideas for engines were
+coming into Nicky's head. The Morss Company and Nicky himself were
+even beginning to wonder whether there ever would be any more.</p>
+<p>Then Nicky thought of Desmond. And he showed that he was
+thinking of her by sitting still and not talking when he was with
+her. She did not fill that emptiness and spaciousness of Nicky's
+head, but he couldn't get her out of it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>When Vera noticed the silence of the two she became uneasy, and
+judged that the time had come for discreet intervention.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said, "is it true that Desmond's been doing
+drawings for you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Nicky, "she's done any amount."</p>
+<p>"My dear boy, have you any idea of the amount you'll have to pay
+her?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't," said Nicky, "I wish I had. I hate asking her, and
+yet I suppose I'll have to."</p>
+<p>"Of course you'll have to. <i>She</i> won't hate it. She's got
+to earn her living as much as you have."</p>
+<p>"Has she? You don't mean to say she's hard up?"</p>
+<p>He had never thought of Desmond as earning her own living, still
+less as being hard up.</p>
+<p>"I only wish she were," said Vera, "for your sake."</p>
+<p>"Why on earth for my sake?"</p>
+<p>"Because <i>then</i>, my dear Nicky, you wouldn't have to pay so
+stiff a price."</p>
+<p>"I don't care," said Nicky, "how stiff the price is. I shall pay
+it."</p>
+<p>And Vera replied that Desmond, in her own queer way, really was
+a rather distinguished painter. "Pay her," she said. "Pay her for
+goodness sake and have done with it. And if she wants to give you
+things don't let her."</p>
+<p>"As if," said Nicky, "I should dream of letting her."</p>
+<p>And he went off to Chelsea to pay Desmond then and there.</p>
+<p>Vera thought that she had been rather clever. Nicky would dash
+in and do the thing badly. He would be very proud about it, and he
+would revolt from his dependence on Desmond, and he would show
+her--Vera hoped that he would show her--that he did not want to be
+under any obligation to her. And Desmond would be hurt and lose her
+temper. The hard look would get into her face and destroy its
+beauty, and she would say detestable things in a detestable voice,
+and a dreadful ugliness would come between them, and the impulse of
+Nicky's yet unborn passion would be checked, and the memory of that
+abominable half-hour would divide them for ever.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>But Vera herself had grown hard and clever. She had forgotten
+Nicky's tenderness, and she knew nothing at all about Desmond's
+fright. And, as it happened, neither Nicky nor Desmond did any of
+the things she thought they would do.</p>
+<p>Nicky was not impetuous. He found Desmond in her studio working
+on the last drawing of the Moving Fortress, with the finished model
+before her. That gave him his opening, and he approached shyly and
+tentatively.</p>
+<p>Desmond put on an air of complete absorption in her drawing; but
+she smiled. A pretty smile that lifted the corners of her mouth and
+made it quiver, and gave Nicky a queer and unexpected desire to
+kiss her.</p>
+<p>He went on wanting to know what his debt was--not that he could
+ever really pay it.</p>
+<p>"Oh, you foolish Nicky," Desmond said.</p>
+<p>He repeated himself over and over again, and each time she had
+an answer, and the answers had a cumulative effect.</p>
+<p>"There isn't any debt. You don't pay anything--"</p>
+<p>"I didn't do it for <i>that</i>, you silly boy."</p>
+<p>"What did I do it for? I did it for fun. You couldn't draw a
+thing like that for anything else. Look at it--"</p>
+<p>--"Well, if you want to be horrid and calculating about it,
+think of the lunches and the dinners and the theatre tickets and
+the flowers you've given <i>me</i>. Oh, and the gallons and gallons
+of petrol. How am I ever to pay you back again?"</p>
+<p>Thus she mocked him.</p>
+<p>"Can't you see how you're spoiling it all?"</p>
+<p>And then, passionately: "Oh, Nicky, please don't say it again.
+It hurts."</p>
+<p>She turned on him her big black looking-glass eyes washed
+bright, each with one tear that knew better than to fall just yet.
+He must see that she was holding herself well in hand. It would be
+no use letting herself go until he had forgotten his Moving
+Fortress. He was looking at the beastly thing now, instead of
+looking at her.</p>
+<p>"Are you thinking of another old engine?"</p>
+<p>"No," said Nicky. "I'm not thinking of anything."</p>
+<p>"Then you don't want me to do any more drawings?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Well then--I wonder whether you'd very much mind going
+away?"</p>
+<p>"Now?"</p>
+<p>"No. Not now. But soon. From here. Altogether."</p>
+<p>"Go? Altogether? Me? Why?"</p>
+<p>He was utterly astonished. He thought that he had offended
+Desmond past all forgiveness.</p>
+<p>"Because I came here to be alone. To work. And I can't work. And
+I want to be alone again."</p>
+<p>"Am I--spoiling it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. You're spoiling it damnably."</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry, Desmond. I didn't mean to. I thought--" But he
+hadn't the heart to say what he had thought.</p>
+<p>She looked at him and knew that the moment was coming.</p>
+<p>It had come.</p>
+<p>She turned away from the table where the Moving Fortress stood,
+threatening her with its mimic guns, and reminding Nicky of the
+things she most wanted him to forget. She withdrew to her crouching
+place at the other end of the studio, among the cushions.</p>
+<p>He followed her there with slow, thoughtful steps, steps full of
+brooding purpose and of half-unconscious meaning.</p>
+<p>"Nicky, I'm so unhappy. I didn't know it was possible for
+anybody to be so unhappy in this world."</p>
+<p>She began to cry quietly.</p>
+<p>"Desmond--what is it? What is it? Tell me. Why can't you tell
+me?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She thought, "It will be all right if he kisses me once. If he
+holds me in his arms once. Then I can tell him."</p>
+<p>For then he would know that he loved her. He was not quite sure
+now. She knew that he was not quite sure. She trusted to the power
+of her body to make him sure.</p>
+<p>Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor
+pitied it.</p>
+<p>He had kissed her. He had held her in his arms and kissed her
+more than once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow
+of his arm. She was weak and small. She was like some small, soft,
+helpless animal and she was hurt. Her sobbing and panting made her
+ribs feel fragile like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless
+animal under the pressure of his arms. And she was frightened.</p>
+<p>He couldn't stand the sight of suffering. He had never yet
+resisted the appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and
+pain. He could feel Desmond's heart going thump, thump, under the
+blue thing he called her pinafore. Her heart hurt him with its
+thumping.</p>
+<p>And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was
+smooth and sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf. And Desmond knew
+that he knew it. His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over
+the long, polished bands of her black hair; and he thought that he
+loved her. Desmond knew that he thought it.</p>
+<p>And still she waited. She said to herself, "It's no good his
+thinking it. I daren't tell him till he says it. Till he asks me to
+marry him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He had said it at last. And he had asked her to marry him. And
+then she had told him.</p>
+<p>And all that he said was, "I don't care." He said it to Desmond,
+and he said it to himself.</p>
+<p>The funny thing was that he did not care. He was as miserable as
+it was well possible to be, but he didn't really care. He was not
+even surprised. It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in
+the back of his head behind all the ideas.</p>
+<p>And yet he couldn't have known it all the time. Either it must
+have gone away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not
+to see it.</p>
+<p>She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her
+mouth and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief,
+controlling herself, crying quietly.</p>
+<p>She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn't love
+her. If he had loved her he would have cared intolerably. He didn't
+care about Headley Richards because he didn't care about Desmond
+any more. He was only puzzled.</p>
+<p>"Why did you do it?"</p>
+<p>"I can't think why. I must have been off my head. I didn't know
+what it was like. I didn't know. I thought it would be wonderful
+and beautiful. I thought he was wonderful and beautiful."</p>
+<p>"Poor little Desmond."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Nicky, do you think me a beast? Does it make you hate
+me?"</p>
+<p>"No. Of course it doesn't. The only awful thing is--"</p>
+<p>"What? Tell me."</p>
+<p>"Well--you see--"</p>
+<p>"You mean the baby? I know it's awful. You needn't tell me that,
+Nicky."</p>
+<p>He stared at her.</p>
+<p>"I mean it's so awful for <i>it</i>."</p>
+<p>She thought he had been thinking of himself and her.</p>
+<p>"Why should it be?"</p>
+<p>"Why? There isn't any why. It just is. I <i>know</i> it is."</p>
+<p>He was thinking of Veronica.</p>
+<p>"You see," he said simply, "that's why this sort of thing is
+such a rotten game. It's so hard on the kiddy. I suppose you didn't
+think of that. You couldn't have, or else you wouldn't--"</p>
+<p>He paused. There was one thing he had to know. He must get it
+out of her.</p>
+<p>"It hasn't made you feel that you don't want it?"</p>
+<p>"Oh--I don't know what I want--<i>now</i>. I don't know what it
+makes me feel!"</p>
+<p>"Don't let it, Desmond. Don't let it. It'll be all right. You
+won't feel like that when you've married me. Can't you see that
+<i>that's</i> the wonderful and beautiful part?"</p>
+<p>"<i>What</i> is?" she said in her tired drawl.</p>
+<p>"<i>It</i>--the poor kiddy."</p>
+<p>Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry
+Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Veronica's mother was the first to hear about it. Desmond told
+her.</p>
+<p>Veronica's mother was determined to stop it for the sake of
+everybody concerned.</p>
+<p>She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her
+one evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else.
+(Lawrence Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where
+Vera was not received; but sometimes, when the occasion was
+political, or otherwise important, he had to. That was her
+punishment, as Bartholomew had meant that it should be.)</p>
+<p>Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt's
+assaults and manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't do it; you simply mustn't."</p>
+<p>He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.</p>
+<p>"It isn't. It's the affair of everybody who cares for you."</p>
+<p>"Their caring isn't my affair," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.</p>
+<p>"It's absurd of you," she said, "to treat her as if she was an
+innocent child. She isn't a child, and she isn't innocent. She knew
+perfectly well what she was about. There's nothing she doesn't
+know. She meant it to happen, and she made it happen. She said she
+would. She meant you to marry her, and she's making you marry her.
+I daresay she said she would. She's as clever and determined as the
+devil. Neither you nor Headley Richards ever had a chance against
+her."</p>
+<p>"She hasn't got a dog's chance against all you people yelping at
+her now she's down. I should have thought--"</p>
+<p>"You mean <i>I</i>'ve no business to? That was different. I
+didn't take any other woman's husband, or any other woman's lover,
+Nicky."</p>
+<p>"If you had," said Nicky, "I wouldn't have interfered."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't interfere if I thought you cared <i>that</i> for
+Desmond. But you don't. You know you don't."</p>
+<p>"Of course I care for her."</p>
+<p>He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew
+that he was vulnerable.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Nicky dear, if you'd only waited--"</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+<p>His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched. "I
+don't know what I mean. Unless I mean that you're just a little
+young to marry anybody."</p>
+<p>"I don't care if I am. I don't <i>feel</i> young, I can tell
+you. Anyhow Desmond's years younger."</p>
+<p>"Desmond is twenty-three. You're twenty. It's Veronica who's
+years younger."</p>
+<p>"Veronica?"</p>
+<p>"She's sixteen. You don't imagine Desmond is as young as that,
+do you? Wait till she's twenty-five and you're twenty-two."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't do poor Desmond much good if I did. I could kill
+Headley Richards."</p>
+<p>"What for?"</p>
+<p>"For leaving her."</p>
+<p>Vera smiled. "That shows how much you care. You wouldn't have
+felt like killing him if he'd stuck to her. Why should you marry
+Headley Richards' mistress and take on his child? It's
+preposterous."</p>
+<p>"It isn't. If the other fellow's a brute it's all the more
+reason why I shouldn't be. I want to be some use in this rotten
+world where people are so damnably cruel to each other. And there's
+that unhappy kiddy. You've forgotten the kiddy."</p>
+<p>"Do you mean to say it's Desmond's child <i>you</i>'re thinking
+of?"</p>
+<p>"I can't understand any woman not thinking of it," said
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.</p>
+<p>Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.</p>
+<p>"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for
+your own children?"</p>
+<p>It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why
+don't you marry <i>her</i>?"</p>
+<p>"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.</p>
+<p>Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to
+marry Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards.
+"Nothing I said made the least impression on him."</p>
+<p>That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not
+strictly true. But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for
+remembering, she stuck to it that Desmond's affair would have made
+no impression on him if it had not been for that other absurd
+affair of the Professor's wife. And it would have been better,
+Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made love to all the
+married women in Cambridge than for him to marry Phyllis
+Desmond.</p>
+<p>These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence
+of Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the
+University.</p>
+<p>Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not
+been removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of
+apology and restitution came. But both apology and restitution came
+too late.</p>
+<p>For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.</p>
+<p>Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their
+house, one on each side of the fireplace. They had it all to
+themselves, except for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on
+the hearthrug at their feet. Frances's forehead and her upper lip
+were marked delicately with shallow, tender lines; Anthony's eyes
+had crow's-feet at their corners, pointing to grey hairs at his
+temples. To each other their faces were as they had been fifteen
+years ago. The flight of time was measured for them by the
+generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry. For
+still in secret they refused to think of their children as
+grown-up.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the
+Women's Franchise Union. They owed it to her magnanimity that they
+had one child remaining with them in the house. John was at
+Cheltenham; Veronica was in Dresden. Michael was in Germany, too,
+at that School of Forestry at Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant
+for Nicky. They couldn't bear to think where Nicky was.</p>
+<p>When Frances thought about her children now her mind went
+backwards. If only they hadn't grown-up; if only they could have
+stayed little for ever! In another four years even Don-Don would be
+grown-up--Don-Don who was such a long time getting older that at
+fourteen, only two years ago, he had been capable of sitting in her
+lap, a great long-legged, flumbering puppy, while mother and son
+rocked dangerously together in each other's arms, like two
+children, laughing together, mocking each other.</p>
+<p>She was going to be wiser with Don-Don than she had been with
+Nicky. She would be wiser with Michael when he came back from
+Germany. She would keep them both out of the Vortex, the horrible
+Vortex that Lawrence Stephen and Vera had let Nicky in for, the
+Vortex that seized on youth and forced it into a corrupt maturity.
+After Desmond's affair Anthony and Frances felt that to them the
+social circle inhabited by Vera and Lawrence Stephen would never be
+anything but a dirty hell.</p>
+<p>As for Veronica, the longer she stayed in Germany the
+better.</p>
+<p>Yet Frances knew that they had not sent Veronica to Dresden to
+prevent her mother from getting hold of her. When she remembered
+the fear she had had of the apple-tree house, she said to herself
+that Desmond was a judgment on her for sending little Veronica
+away.</p>
+<p>And yet it was the kindest thing they could have done for her.
+Veronica was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and
+studying music and the language. She had no idea that music and the
+language were mere blinds, and that she had been sent to the German
+family to keep her out of Nicky's way.</p>
+<p>They would have them all back again at Christmas. Frances
+counted the days. From to-night, the seventh of June, to December
+the twentieth was not much more than six months.</p>
+<p>To-night, the seventh of June, was Nicky's wedding-night. But
+they did not know that. Nicky had kept the knowledge from them, in
+his mercy, to save them the agony of deciding whether they would
+recognize the marriage or not. And as neither Frances nor Anthony
+had ever faced squarely the prospect of disaster to their children,
+they had turned their backs on Nicky's marriage and supported each
+other in the hope that at the last minute something would happen to
+prevent it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The ten o'clock post, and two letters from Germany. Not from
+Michael, not from Veronica. One from Frau Sch&auml;fer, the mother
+of the German family. It was all in German, and neither Anthony nor
+Frances could make out more than a word here and there. "Das
+s&uuml;sse, liebe M&auml;dchen" meant Veronica. But certain
+phrases: "traurige Nachrichten" ... "furchtbare Schw&auml;chheit"
+... "... eine entsetzliche Blutleere ..." terrified them, and they
+sent for Dorothy to translate.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was a good German scholar, but somehow she was not very
+fluent. She scowled over the letter.</p>
+<p>"What does it mean?" said Frances. "H&aelig;morhage?"</p>
+<p>"No. No. An&aelig;mia. Severe an&aelig;mia. Heart and stomach
+trouble."</p>
+<p>"But 'traurige Nachrichten' is 'bad news.' They're breaking it
+to us that she's dying."</p>
+<p>(It was unbearable to think of Nicky marrying Ronny; but it was
+more unbearable to think of Ronny dying.)</p>
+<p>"They don't say they're sending <i>us</i> bad news; they say
+they think Ronny must have had some. To account for her illness.
+Because they say she's been so happy with them."</p>
+<p>"But what bad news could she have had?"</p>
+<p>"Perhaps she knows about Nicky."</p>
+<p>"But nobody's told her, unless Vera has."</p>
+<p>"She hasn't. I know she hasn't. She didn't want her to
+know."</p>
+<p>"Well, then--"</p>
+<p>"Mummy, you don't <i>have</i> to tell Ronny things. She always
+knows them."</p>
+<p>"How on earth could she know a thing like that?"</p>
+<p>"She might. She sort of sees things--like Ferdie. She may have
+seen him with Desmond. You can't tell."</p>
+<p>"Do they say what the doctor thinks?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. He thinks it's worry and Heimweh--homesickness. They want
+us to send for her and take her back. Not let her have another
+term."</p>
+<p>Though Frances loved Veronica she was afraid of her coming back.
+For she was more than ever convinced that something would happen
+and that Nicky would not marry Desmond.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The other letter was even more difficult to translate or to
+understand when translated.</p>
+<p>The authorities at Aschaffenburg requested Herr Harrison to
+remove his son Michael from the School of Forestry. Michael after
+his first few weeks had done no good at the school. In view of the
+expense to Herr Harrison involved in his fees and maintenance, they
+could not honestly advise his entering upon another term. It would
+only be a deplorable throwing away of money on a useless scheme.
+His son Michael had no thoroughness, no practical ability, and no
+grasp whatever of theoretic detail. From Herr Harrison's point of
+view this was the more regrettable inasmuch as the young man had
+colossal decision and persistence and energy of his own. He was an
+indefatigable dreamer. Very likely--when his dreams had
+crystallized--a poet. But the idea Herr Harrison had had that his
+son Michael would make a man of business, or an expert in Forestry,
+was altogether fantastic and absurd. And from the desperate
+involutions of the final sentence Dorothy disentangled the clear
+fact that Michael's personal charm, combined with his hostility to
+discipline, his complete indifference to the aims of the
+authorities, and his utter lack of any sense of responsibility,
+made him a dangerous influence in any school.</p>
+<p>That was the end of Anthony's plans for Michael.</p>
+<p>The next morning Nicky wired from some village in Sussex:
+"Married yesterday.--NICKY."</p>
+<p>After that nothing seemed to matter. With Nicky gone from them
+they were glad to have Michael back again. Frances said they might
+be thankful for one thing--that there wasn't any German Peggy or
+any German Desmond in Michael's problem.</p>
+<p>And since both Michael and Veronica were to be removed at once,
+the simplest arrangement was that he should return to Dresden and
+bring her back with him.</p>
+<p>Frances had never been afraid for Michael.</p>
+<p>Michael knew that he had made havoc of his father's plans. He
+couldn't help that. His affair was far too desperate. And any other
+man but his father would have foreseen that the havoc was
+inevitable and would have made no plans. He knew he had been turned
+into the tree-travelling scheme that had been meant for Nicky,
+because, though Nicky had slipped out of it, his father simply
+couldn't bear to give up his idea. And no wonder, when the dear old
+thing had so few of them.</p>
+<p>He had been honest with his father about it; every bit as honest
+as Nicky had been. He had wanted to travel if he could go to China
+and Japan, just as Nicky had wanted to travel if he could go to
+places like the West Indies and the Himalaya. And he didn't mind
+trying to get the trees in when he was there. He was even prepared
+to accept Germany and the School for Forestry if Germany was the
+only way to China and Japan. But he had told his father not to mind
+if nothing came of it at the end of all the travelling. And his
+father had said he would take the risk. He preferred taking the
+risk to giving up his idea.</p>
+<p>And Michael had been honest with himself. He had told himself
+that he too must take some risks, and the chances were that a year
+or two in Germany wouldn't really hurt him. Things never did hurt
+you as much as you thought they would. He had thought that
+Cambridge would do all sorts of things to him, and Cambridge had
+not done anything to him at all. As for Oxford, it had given him
+nearly all the solitude and liberty he wanted, and more
+companionship than he was ever likely to want. At twenty-two
+Michael was no longer afraid of dying before he had finished his
+best work. In spite of both Universities he had done more or less
+what he had meant to do before he went to Germany. His work had not
+yet stood the test of time, but to make up for that he himself, in
+his uneasy passion for perfection, like Time, destroyed almost as
+much as he created. Still, after some pitiless eliminations, enough
+of his verse remained for one fine, thin book.</p>
+<p>It would be published if Lawrence Stephen approved of the
+selection.</p>
+<p>So, Michael argued, even if he died to-morrow there was no
+reason why he should not go to Germany to-day.</p>
+<p>He was too young to know that he acquiesced so calmly because
+his soul was for a moment appeased by accomplishment.</p>
+<p>He was too young to know that his soul had a delicate, profound
+and hidden life of its own, and that in secret it approached the
+crisis of transition. It was passing over from youth to maturity,
+like a sleep-walker, unconscious, enchanted, seeing its way without
+seeing it, safe only from the dangers of the passage if nobody
+touched it, and if it went alone.</p>
+<p>Michael had no idea of what Germany could and would do to his
+soul.</p>
+<p>Otherwise he might have listened to what Paris had to say by way
+of warning.</p>
+<p>For his father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to
+Germany, as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's
+point of view) was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old
+Pater be expected to know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no
+sort of way even to South Germany? He should have gone to Brussels,
+if he was ever, spiritually speaking, to get there at all.</p>
+<p>And neither Anthony nor Frances knew that Lawrence Stephen had
+plans for Michael.</p>
+<p>Michael went to Paris with his unpublished poems in his pocket
+and a letter of introduction from Stephen to Jules
+R&eacute;veillaud. He left it with revolution in his soul and the
+published poems of R&eacute;veillaud and his followers in his
+suit-case, straining and distending it so that it burst open of its
+own accord at the frontier.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen had said to him: "Before you write another line
+read R&eacute;veillaud and show him what you've written."</p>
+<p>Jules R&eacute;veillaud was ten years older than Michael, and he
+recognized the symptoms of the crisis. He could see what was
+happening and what had happened and would happen in Michael's soul.
+He said: "One third of each of your poems is good. And there are a
+few--the three last--which are all good."</p>
+<p>"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."</p>
+<p>"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is
+why they are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do
+not publish these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more
+experiments. And whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School
+of Forestry would be very bad for you. Why not," said
+R&eacute;veillaud, "stay where you are?"</p>
+<p>Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris
+with Jules R&eacute;veillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because
+his conscience kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a
+blackguard if he stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.</p>
+<p>In the train, going into Germany, he read R&eacute;veillaud's
+"Po&egrave;mes" and the "Po&egrave;mes" of the young men who
+followed him. He had read in Paris R&eacute;veillaud's "Critique de
+la Po&eacute;sie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he read his poems,
+he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with "la
+po&eacute;sie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had
+supposed, alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms,
+doing new things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other
+people, in a world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen,
+understood or cared for what he did, it was pure illusion. These
+young Frenchmen, with Jules R&eacute;veillaud at their head, were
+doing the same thing, making the same experiment, believing in the
+experiment, caring for nothing but the experiment, and carrying it
+farther than he had dreamed of carrying it. They were not so far
+ahead of him in time; R&eacute;veillaud himself had only two years'
+start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that he
+must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of
+rottenness, "la po&eacute;sie anglaise contemporaine."</p>
+<p>He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse"
+before he left England, after he had said he would go to Germany,
+even after the final arrangements had been made. His father had
+given him a month to "turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had
+turned completely round.</p>
+<p>He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what
+to think of them himself. But he could see, when once
+R&eacute;veillaud had pointed it out to him, that they were the
+stuff that counted.</p>
+<p>In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things
+that R&eacute;veillaud had said: "Nous avons tremp&eacute; la
+po&eacute;sie dans la peinture et la musique. Il faut la
+d&eacute;livrer par la sculpture. Chaque ligne, chaque vers, chaque
+po&egrave;me taill&eacute; en bloc, sans couleur, sans decor, sans
+rime."... "La sainte pauvresse du style
+d&eacute;pouill&eacute;."... "Il faut de la duret&eacute;, toujours
+de la duret&eacute;."</p>
+<p>He thought of R&eacute;veillaud's criticism, and his sudden
+startled spurt of admiration: "Mais! Vous l'avez trouv&eacute;e, la
+beaut&eacute; de la ligne droite."</p>
+<p>And R&eacute;veillaud's question: "Vraiment? Vous n'avez jamais
+lu un seul vers de mes po&egrave;mes? Alors, c'est
+&eacute;tonnant." And then: "C'est que la r&eacute;alit&eacute; est
+plus forte que nous."</p>
+<p>The revolting irony of it! After stumbling and fumbling for
+years by himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard
+Reality; trying not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary
+rottenness; and, suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had
+got it, so that, but for R&eacute;veillaud, he might easily have
+died in his ignorance; and then, in the incredible moment of
+realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on Paris, where he
+wanted to live, and on R&eacute;veillaud whom he wanted to know,
+and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off
+to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.</p>
+<p>He wondered if he could have done it if he had not loved his
+father? He wondered if his father would ever understand that it was
+the hardest thing he had ever yet done or could do?</p>
+<p>But the trees would be beautiful. He would rather like seeing
+the trees.</p>
+<p>Trees--</p>
+<p>He wondered whether he would ever care about a tree again.</p>
+<p>Trees--</p>
+<p>He wondered whether he would ever see a tree again, ever smell
+tree-sap, or hear the wind sounding in the ash-trees like a river
+and in the firs like a sea.</p>
+<p>Trees--</p>
+<p>He wondered whether any tree would ever come to life for him
+again.</p>
+<p>He looked on at the tree-felling. He saw slaughtered trees,
+trees that tottered, trees that staggered in each other's branches.
+He heard the scream and the shriek of wounded boughs, the creaking
+and crashing of the trunk, and the long hiss of branches falling,
+trailing through branches to the ground. He smelt the raw juice of
+broken leaves and the sharp tree dust in the saw pits. The trees
+died horrible deaths, in the forests under the axes of the woodmen,
+and in the schools under the tongues of the Professors, and in
+Michael's soul. The German Government was determined that he should
+know all about trees. Its officials, the Professors and
+instructors, were sorry if he didn't like it, but they were ordered
+by their Government and paid by their Government to impart this
+information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to
+his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they
+imparted it with all their might.</p>
+<p>Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg. Instead of
+despising him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a
+tree expert, they admired and respected him because he was a poet.
+The family he lived with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his
+fellow-boarders, Carl and Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel,
+and Hedwig and L&ouml;ttchen admired and respected him because he
+was a poet. When he walked with Ludwig in the great forests Michael
+chanted his poems, both in English and in German, till Ludwig's
+soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow, so that Ludwig
+actually shed tears in the forest. He said that if he had not done
+so he would have burst. Ludwig's emotions had nothing whatever to
+do with the forest or with Michael's poems, but he thought they
+had.</p>
+<p>Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was
+to show an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished
+his incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some
+superofficial wrote a letter to his father that gave him his
+liberty.</p>
+<p>The Henschels were sorry when he left. The students, Otto and
+Carl and Ludwig, implored him not to forget them. Hedwig and
+L&ouml;ttchen cried.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by
+Dresden to bring Veronica back. He wanted to be alone on the
+journey. He wanted to stop in Paris and see Jules
+R&eacute;veillaud. He was afraid that Ronny had grown into a
+tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.</p>
+<p>And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had
+grown up. Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker
+plait tied up with broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not
+yet seventeen.</p>
+<p>Ronny was tired. She did not want to talk. When he had tucked
+her up with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat
+still with her hands in her muff.</p>
+<p>"I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael," she said.</p>
+<p>She knew what he had been thinking. Her clear eyes gazed at him
+out of her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual
+maturity.</p>
+<p>"What can have happened to her?" he wondered.</p>
+<p>But she did not disturb his thoughts.</p>
+<p>Up till then Michael's thoughts had not done him any good. They
+had been bitter thoughts of the months he had been compelled to
+waste in Bavaria when every minute had an incomparable value;
+worrying, irritating thoughts of the scenes he would have to have
+with his father, who must be made to understand, once for all, that
+in future he meant to have every minute of his own life for his own
+work. He wondered how on earth he was to make his people see that
+his work justified his giving every minute to it. He had asked
+R&eacute;veillaud to give him a letter that he could show to his
+father. He was angry with his father beforehand, he was so certain
+that he wouldn't see.</p>
+<p>He had other thoughts now. Thoughts of an almond tree flowering
+in a white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting
+a thin shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the
+sting of white dust in an east wind; a drift of white dust against
+the wall.</p>
+<p>Thoughts of pine-trees falling in the forest, glad to fall. He
+thought: The pine forest makes itself a sea for the land wind, and
+the young pine tree is mad for the open sea. She gives her slender
+trunk with passion to the ax; for she thinks that she will be
+stripped naked, and that she will be planted in the ship's hold,
+and that she will carry the great main-sail. She thinks that she
+will rock and strain in the grip of the sea-wind, and that she will
+be whitened with the salt and the foam of the sea.</p>
+<p>She does not know that she will be sawn into planks and made
+into a coffin for the wife of the sexton and grave-digger of
+Aschaffenburg.</p>
+<p>Thoughts of Veronica in her incredible maturity, and of her
+eyes, shining in her dead white face, far back through deep
+crystal, and of the sense he got of her soul poised, steady and
+still, with wings vibrating.</p>
+<p>He wondered where it would come down.</p>
+<p>He thought: "Of course, Veronica's soul will come down like a
+wild pigeon into the ash-tree in our garden, and she will think
+that our ash-tree is a tree of Heaven."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Presently he roused himself to talk to her.</p>
+<p>"How is your singing getting on, Ronny?"</p>
+<p>"My singing voice has gone."</p>
+<p>"It'll come back again."</p>
+<p>"Not unless-"</p>
+<p>But he couldn't make her tell him what would bring it back.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>When Michael came to his father and mother to have it out with
+them his face had a hard, stubborn look. He was ready to fight
+them. He was so certain that he would have to fight. He had shown
+them Jules R&eacute;veillaud's letter.</p>
+<p>He said, "Look here, we've got to get it straight. It isn't any
+use going on like this. I'm afraid I wasn't very honest about
+Germany."</p>
+<p>"Weren't you?" said Anthony. "Let me see, I think you said you'd
+take it on your way to China and Japan."</p>
+<p>"Did I? I tried to be straight about it. I thought I was giving
+it a fair chance. But that was before I'd seen
+R&eacute;veillaud."</p>
+<p>"Well," said Anthony, "now that you have seen him, what is it
+exactly that you want to do?"</p>
+<p>Michael told him.</p>
+<p>"You can make it easy for me. Or you can make it hard. But you
+can't stop me."</p>
+<p>"What makes you think I want to stop you?"</p>
+<p>"Well--you want me to go into the business, though I told you
+years ago there was only one thing I should ever be any good at.
+And I see your point. I can't earn my living at it. That's where
+I'm had. Still, I think Lawrence Stephen will give me work, and I
+can rub along somehow."</p>
+<p>"Without my help, you mean?"</p>
+<p>"Well, yes. Why <i>should</i> you help me? You've wasted tons of
+money on me as it is. Nicky's earning his own living, and he's got
+a wife, too. Why not me?"</p>
+<p>"Because you can't do it, Michael."</p>
+<p>"I can. I don't mind roughing it. I could live on a hundred a
+year--or less, if I don't marry."</p>
+<p>"Well, I don't mean you to try. You needn't bother about what
+you can live on and what you can't live on. It was all settled last
+night. Your mother and I talked it over. We don't want you to go
+into the business. We don't want you to take work from Mr. Stephen.
+We want you to be absolutely free to do your own work, under the
+best possible conditions, whether it pays or not. Nothing in the
+world matters to us but your happiness. You're to have a hundred
+and fifty a year when you're living at home and two hundred and
+fifty when you're living abroad. I suppose you'll want to go abroad
+sometimes. I can't give you a bigger allowance, because I have to
+help Nicky--"</p>
+<p>Michael covered his face with his hands.</p>
+<p>"Oh--don't, Daddy. You do make me feel a rotten beast."</p>
+<p>"We should feel rottener beasts," said Frances, "if we stood in
+your way."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Michael (he was still incredulous), "you do
+care?"</p>
+<p>"Of course we care," said Anthony.</p>
+<p>"I don't mean for me--for <i>it</i>?"</p>
+<p>"My dear Mick," said Frances, "we care for It almost as much as
+we care for you. We're sorry about Germany though. Germany was one
+of your father's bad jokes."</p>
+<p>"Germany--a joke?"</p>
+<p>"Did you take it seriously? Oh, you silly Michael!"</p>
+<p>"But," said Michael, "how about Daddy's idea? He loved it."</p>
+<p>"I loved it," said Anthony, "but I've given it up."</p>
+<p>They knew that this was defeat, for Michael was top-dog. And it
+was also victory.</p>
+<p>They had lost Nicholas, or thought they had lost Nicholas, by
+opposing him. But Michael and Michael's affection they would have
+always.</p>
+<p>Besides, Anthony hadn't given up his idea. He had only
+transferred it--to his youngest son, John.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was five weeks since Nicholas's wedding-day and Desmond had
+quarrelled with him three times.</p>
+<p>First, because he had taken a flat in Aubrey Walk, with a studio
+inside it, instead of a house in Campden Hill Square with a studio
+outside it in the garden.</p>
+<p>Then, because he had refused to go into his father's
+business.</p>
+<p>Last of all, because of Captain Drayton and the Moving
+Fortress.</p>
+<p>Nicky had said that his father, who was paying his rent,
+couldn't afford the house with the studio in the garden; and
+Desmond said Nicky's father could afford it perfectly well if he
+liked. He said he had refused to go into his father's business for
+reasons which didn't concern her. Desmond pointed out that the
+consequences of his refusal were likely to concern her very much
+indeed. As for Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress, nobody but
+a supreme idiot would have done what Nicky did.</p>
+<p>But Nicky absolutely refused to discuss what he had done. Nobody
+but a cad and a rotter would have done anything else.</p>
+<p>In the matter of the Moving Fortress what had happened was
+this.</p>
+<p>The last of the drawings was not finished until Desmond had
+settled down in the flat in Aubrey Walk. You couldn't hurry
+Desmond. Nicky hadn't even waited to sign his name in the margins
+before he had packed the plans in his dispatch box and taken them
+to the works, and thence, hidden under a pile of Morss estimates,
+to Eltham. He couldn't rest till he had shown them to Frank
+Drayton. He could hardly wait till they had dined, and till
+Drayton, who thought he was on the track of a new and horrible
+explosive, had told him as much as he could about it.</p>
+<p>Nicky gave his whole mind to Drayton's new explosive in the hope
+that, when his turn came, Drayton would do as much for him.</p>
+<p>"You know," he said at last, "the old idea of the <i>forteresse
+mobile</i>?</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>He couldn't tell whether Drayton was going to be interested or
+not. He rather thought he wasn't.</p>
+<p>"It hasn't come to anything, <i>has</i> it?"</p>
+<p>Drayton smiled and his eyes glittered. He knew what that excited
+gleam in Drayton's eyes meant.</p>
+<p>"No," he said. "Not yet."</p>
+<p>And Nicky had an awful premonition of his doom.</p>
+<p>"Well," he said, "I believe there's something in it."</p>
+<p>"So do I, Nicky."</p>
+<p>Drayton went on. "I believe there's so much in it that--Look
+here, I don't know what put it into your head, and I'm not asking,
+but that idea's a dead secret. For God's sake don't talk about it.
+You mustn't breathe it, or it'll get into the air. And if it does
+my five years' work goes for nothing. Besides we don't want Germany
+to collar it."</p>
+<p>And then: "Don't look so scared, old chap. I was going to tell
+you about it when I'd got the plans drawn."</p>
+<p>He told him about it then and there.</p>
+<p>"Low on the ground like a racing-car--"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Revolving turret for the guns--no higher than
+<i>that</i>--"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Sort of armoured train. Only it mustn't run on rails. It's got
+to go everywhere, through anything, over anything, if it goes at
+all. It must turn in its own length. It must wade and burrow and
+climb, Nicky. It must have caterpillar wheels--"</p>
+<p>"By Jove, of course it must," said Nicky, as if the idea had
+struck him for the first time.</p>
+<p>"What have you got there?" said Drayton finally as Nicky rose
+and picked up his dispatch-box. "Anything interesting?</p>
+<p>"No," said Nicky. "Mostly estimates."</p>
+<p>For a long time afterwards he loathed the fields between Eltham
+and Kidbrooke, and the Mid-Kent line, and Charing Cross Station. He
+felt as a man feels when the woman he loves goes from him to
+another man. His idea had gone from him to Drayton.</p>
+<p>And that, he said to himself, was just like his luck, just like
+the jolly sells that happened to him when he was a kid.</p>
+<p>To be sure, there was such a thing as sharing. He had only to
+produce his plans and his finished model, and he and Drayton would
+go partners in the Moving Fortress. There was no reason why he
+shouldn't do it. Drayton had not even drawn his plans yet; he
+hadn't thought out the mechanical details.</p>
+<p>He thought, "I could go back now and tell him."</p>
+<p>But he did not go back. He knew that he would never tell him. If
+Drayton asked him to help him with the details he would work them
+out all over again with him; but he would never show his own
+finished plans or his own model.</p>
+<p>He didn't know whether it had been hard or easy for him to give
+up the Moving Fortress. He did it instinctively. There was--unless
+he had chosen to be a blackguard--nothing else for him to do.</p>
+<p>Besides, the Moving Fortress wasn't his idea. Drayton had had it
+first. Anybody might have had it. He hadn't spoken of it first; but
+that was nothing. The point was that he had had it first, and Nicky
+wasn't going to take it from him.</p>
+<p>It meant more to Drayton, who was in the Service, than it could
+possibly mean to him. He hadn't even got a profession.</p>
+<p>As he walked back through the fields to the station, he said to
+himself that he didn't really care. It was only one more jolly
+sell. He didn't like giving up his Moving Fortress; but it wouldn't
+end him. There was something in him that would go on.</p>
+<p>He would make another engine.</p>
+<p>He didn't care. There was something in him that would go on.</p>
+<p>"I can't see," Desmond had said, "why Captain Drayton should be
+allowed to walk off with your idea."</p>
+<p>"He's worked five years on it."</p>
+<p>"He hasn't worked it <i>out</i> yet, and you have. Can't you see
+"--her face was dark and hard with anger--"there's money in
+it?"</p>
+<p>"If there is, all the more reason why I shouldn't bag it."</p>
+<p>"And where do I come in?"</p>
+<p>"Not just here, I'm afraid. It isn't your business."</p>
+<p>"Not my business? When I did the drawings? You couldn't possibly
+have done them yourself."</p>
+<p>At that point Nicky refused to discuss the matter farther.</p>
+<p>And still Desmond brooded on her grievance. And still at
+intervals Desmond brought it up again.</p>
+<p>"There's stacks of money in your father's business--"</p>
+<p>"There's stacks of money in that Moving Fortress--"</p>
+<p>"You are a fool, Nicky, to throw it all away."</p>
+<p>He never answered her. He said to himself that Desmond was
+hysterical and had a morbid fancy.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>But it didn't end there.</p>
+<p>He had taken the drawings and the box that had the model of the
+Moving Fortress in it and buried them in the locker under the big
+north window in Desmond's studio.</p>
+<p>And there, three weeks later, Desmond found them. And she packed
+the model of the Moving Fortress and marked it "Urgent with Care,"
+and sent it to the War Office with a letter. She packed the
+drawings in a portfolio--having signed her own and Nicky's name on
+the margins--and sent them to Captain Drayton with a letter. She
+said she had no doubt she was doing an immoral thing; but she did
+it in fairness to Captain Drayton, for she was sure he would not
+like Nicky to make so great a sacrifice. Nicky, she said, was
+wrapped up in his Moving Fortress. It was his sweetheart, his baby.
+"He will never forgive me," she said, "as long as he lives. But I
+simply had to let you know. It means so much to him."</p>
+<p>For she thought, "Because Nicky's a fool, I needn't be one."</p>
+<p>Drayton came over the same evening after he had got the letter.
+He shouted with laughter.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," he said, "you filthy rotter, why on earth didn't you
+tell me?... It <i>was</i> Nickyish of you.... What if I did think
+of it first? I should have had to come to you for the details. It
+would have been jolly to have worked it out together.... Not a bit
+of it! Your wife's absolutely right. Good thing, after all, you
+married her.</p>
+<p>"By the way, she says there's a model. I want to see that model.
+Have you got it here?"</p>
+<p>Nicky went up into the studio to look for it. He couldn't find
+it in the locker where he'd left it. "Wherever is the damned
+thing?" he said.</p>
+<p>"The damned thing," said Desmond, "is where you should have sent
+it first of all--at the War Office. You're clever, Nicky, but you
+aren't quite clever enough."</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid," he said, "<i>you've</i> been a bit too clever,
+this time."</p>
+<p>Drayton agreed with him. It was, he said, about the worst thing
+that could possibly have happened.</p>
+<p>"She shouldn't have done that, Nicky. What on earth could have
+made her do it?"</p>
+<p>"Don't ask me," said Nicky, "what makes her do things."</p>
+<p>"It looks," Drayton meditated, "as if she didn't trust me. I'm
+afraid she's dished us. God knows whether we can ever get it
+back!"</p>
+<p>Desmond had a fit of hysterics when she realized how clever she
+had been.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Desmond's baby was born late in November of that year, and it
+died when it was two weeks old. It was as if she had not wanted it
+enough to give it life for long outside her body.</p>
+<p>For though Desmond had been determined to have a child, and had
+declared that she had a perfect right to have one if she chose, she
+did not care for it when it came. And when it died Nicky was
+sorrier than Desmond.</p>
+<p>He had not wanted to be a father to Headley Richards' child. And
+yet it was the baby and nothing but the baby that had let him in
+for marrying Desmond. So that, when it died, he felt that somehow
+things had tricked and sold him. As they had turned out he need not
+have married Desmond after all.</p>
+<p>She herself had pointed out the extreme futility of his
+behaviour, lest he should miss the peculiar irony of it. For when
+her fright and the cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented
+Nicky's having married her. She didn't really want anybody to marry
+her, and nobody but Nicky would have dreamed of doing it.</p>
+<p>She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and
+for a little while after she was content to lie stretched out among
+her cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her. But,
+when she got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that
+Desmond's weakness and pathos had come with the baby and had gone
+with it. The real Desmond was not weak, she was not pathetic. She
+was strong and hard and clever with a brutal cleverness. She didn't
+care how much he saw. He could see to the bottom of her nature, if
+he liked, and feel how hard it was. She had no more interest in
+deceiving him.</p>
+<p>She had no more interest in him at all.</p>
+<p>She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long
+fits, after long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard,
+passionless efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous
+and repulsive; but he did not say so. He was not aware of the
+extent to which Desmond imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones. He
+knew nothing about painting and he had got used to the things. He
+had got used to Desmond, slouching about the flat, in her sloping,
+slovenly grace, dressed in her queer square jacket and straight
+short skirt, showing her long delicate ankles, and her slender feet
+in their grey stockings and black slippers.</p>
+<p>He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched
+up on her cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a
+word, and watched him sullenly. Her long, slippered feet, thrust
+out, pointed at him, watching. Her long face watched him between
+the sleek bands of hair and the big black bosses plaited over her
+ears.</p>
+<p>The beauty of Desmond's face had gone to sleep again, stilled
+into hardness by the passing of her passion. A sort of ugliness was
+awake there, and it watched him.</p>
+<p>In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted
+with two-thirds of her power. Yet the third part still served to
+hold him, used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy. He
+resented it, resisted it over and over again; and over and over
+again it conquered resentment and resistance. It had something to
+do with her subtle, sloping lines, with her blackness and her
+sallow whiteness, with the delicate scent and the smoothness of her
+skin under the sliding hand. He couldn't touch her without still
+feeling a sort of pity, a sort of affection.</p>
+<p>But she could take and give caresses while she removed her soul
+from him in stubborn rancour.</p>
+<p>He couldn't understand that. It amazed him every time. He
+thought it horrible. For Nicky's memory was faithful. It still kept
+the impression of the Desmond he had married, the tender,
+frightened, helpless Desmond he had thought he loved. The Desmond
+he remembered reminded him of Veronica.</p>
+<p>And Desmond said to herself, "He's impossible. You can't make
+any impression on him. I might as well be married to a Moving
+Fortress."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Months passed. The War Office had not yet given up Nicky's model
+of the Moving Fortress. In the first month it was not aware of any
+letter or of any parcel or of any Mr. Nicholas Harrison. In the
+second month inquiries would be made and the results communicated
+to Captain Drayton. In the third month the War Office knew nothing
+of the matter referred to by Captain Drayton.</p>
+<p>Drayton hadn't a hope. "We can't get it back, Nicky," he
+said.</p>
+<p>"I can," said Nicky, "I can get it back out of my head."</p>
+<p>All through the winter of nineteen-eleven and the spring of
+nineteen-twelve they worked at it together. They owned that they
+were thus getting better results than either of them could have got
+alone. There were impossibilities about Nicky's model that a gunner
+would have seen at once, and there were faults in Drayton's plans
+that an engineer would not have made. Nicky couldn't draw the plans
+and Drayton couldn't build the models. They said it was fifty times
+better fun to work at it together.</p>
+<p>Nicky was happy.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Desmond watched them sombrely. She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the
+painter, laughed at them behind their backs. She said "How funny
+they are! Frank wouldn't hurt a fly and Nicky wouldn't say 'Bo!' to
+a goose if he thought it would frighten the goose, and yet they're
+only happy when they're inventing some horrible machine that'll
+kill thousands of people who never did them any harm." He said,
+"That's because they haven't any imagination."</p>
+<p>Nicky got up early and went to bed late to work at the Moving
+Fortress. The time between had to be given to the Works. The
+Company had paid him fairly well for all his patents in the hope of
+getting more of his ideas, and when they found that no ideas were
+forthcoming they took it out of him in labour. He was too busy and
+too happy to notice what Desmond was doing.</p>
+<p>One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is
+going about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?"</p>
+<p>"Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?"</p>
+<p>"Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason."</p>
+<p>"You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?"</p>
+<p>"You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond."</p>
+<p>"What do you think I ought to do about it?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing. She goes about with scores of people. It doesn't
+follow that there's anything in it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord, I should hope not! That beastly bounder. What
+<i>could</i> there be in it?"</p>
+<p>"He's a clever painter, Nicky. So's Desmond. There's that in
+it."</p>
+<p>"I've hardly a right to object to that, have I? It's not as if I
+were a clever painter myself."</p>
+<p>But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St.
+John's Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down
+the north side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the
+thing to shreds.</p>
+<p>There couldn't be anything in it.</p>
+<p>He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall
+lean body in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing
+tie. He could see his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric
+face with its seven fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the
+black moustache, the high, close-clipped side whiskers, the two
+forks of the black beard.</p>
+<p>There couldn't be anything in it.</p>
+<p>Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.</p>
+<p>And yet he never came home rather later than usual without
+saying to himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with
+her?"</p>
+<p>He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask
+himself that question.</p>
+<p>He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He
+wondered what other men did. It never occurred to him that at
+twenty-two he was young to be considering this problem.</p>
+<p>He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than
+Orde-Jones's face and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy
+to Orde-Jones's face and figure. He saw himself assaulting
+Orde-Jones with violence, dragging him out of Desmond's studio, and
+throwing him downstairs. He wondered what shapes that body and
+those legs and arms would take when they got to the bottom. Perhaps
+they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He would hang on to
+the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door of the studio
+and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there would be
+nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look an
+awful ass doing it. He saw himself standing in the room and looking
+at them, and saying, "I've no intention of interrupting you."
+Perhaps Desmond would answer, "You're not interrupting us. We've
+finished all we had to say." And <i>he</i> would walk out and leave
+them there. Not caring.</p>
+<p>He wondered if <i>he</i> would look an awful ass doing it.</p>
+<p>In the end, when it came, he hadn't to do any of these things.
+It happened very quietly and simply, early on a Sunday evening
+after he had got back from Eltham. He had dined with Drayton and
+his people on Saturday, and stayed, for once, over-night, risking
+it.</p>
+<p>Desmond was sitting on a cushion, on the floor, with her thin
+legs in their grey stockings slanting out in front of her. She
+propped her chin on her hands. Her thin, long face, between the
+great black ear-bosses, looked at him thoughtfully, without
+rancour.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said, "Alfred Orde-Jones slept with me last
+night."</p>
+<p>And he said, simply and quietly, "Very well, Desmond; then I
+shall leave you. You can keep the flat, and I or my father will
+make you an allowance. I shan't divorce you, but I won't live with
+you."</p>
+<p>"Why won't you divorce me?" she said.</p>
+<p>"Because I don't want to drag you through the dirt."</p>
+<p>She laughed quietly. "Dear Nicky," she said, "how sweet and like
+you. But don't let's have any more chivalrous idiocy. I don't want
+it. I never did." (She had forgotten that she had wanted it very
+badly once. But Nicky did not remind her of that time. No matter.
+She didn't want it now). "Let's look at the thing sensibly, without
+any rotten sentiment. We've had some good times together, and we've
+had some bad times. I'll admit that when you married me you saved
+me from a very bad time. That's no reason why we should go on
+giving each other worse times indefinitely. You seem to think I
+don't want you to divorce me. What else do you imagine Alfred came
+for last night? Why we've been trying for it for the last three
+months.</p>
+<p>"Of course, if you'll let <i>me</i> divorce <i>you</i> for
+desertion, it would be very nice of you. That," said Desmond, "is
+what decent people do."</p>
+<p>He went out and telephoned to his father. Then he left her and
+went back to his father's house.</p>
+<p>Desmond asked the servant to remember particularly that it was
+the fifteenth of June and that the master was going away and would
+not come back again.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>As Nicky walked up the hill and across the Heath, he wondered
+why it had happened, and why, now that it had happened, he cared so
+little. He could have understood it if he hadn't cared at all for
+Desmond. But he had cared in a sort of way. If she had cared at all
+for him he thought they might have made something of it, something
+enduring, perhaps, if they had had children of their own.</p>
+<p>He still couldn't think why it had happened. But he knew that,
+even if he had loved Desmond with passion, it wouldn't have been
+the end of him. The part of him that didn't care, that hadn't cared
+much when he lost his Moving Fortress, was the part that Desmond
+never would have cared for.</p>
+<p>He didn't know whether it was outside him and beyond him, bigger
+and stronger than he was, or whether it was deep inside, the most
+real part of him. Whatever happened or didn't happen it would go
+on.</p>
+<p>How could he have ended <i>here</i>, with poor little Desmond?
+There was something ahead of him, something that he felt to be
+tremendous and holy. He had always known it waited for him. He was
+going out to meet it; and because of it he didn't care.</p>
+<p>And after a year of Desmond he was glad to go back to his
+father's house; even though he knew that the thing that waited for
+him was not there.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony were happy again. After all, Heaven had
+manipulated their happiness with exquisite art and wisdom, letting
+Michael and Nicholas go from them for a little while that they
+might have them again more completely, and teaching them the art
+and wisdom that would keep them.</p>
+<p>Some day the children would marry; even Nicky might marry again.
+They would prepare now, by small daily self-denials, for the big
+renunciation that must come.</p>
+<p>Yet in secret they thought that Michael would never marry; that
+Nicky, made prudent by disaster, wasn't really likely to marry
+again. John would marry; and they would be happy in John's
+happiness and in John's children.</p>
+<p>And Nicky had not been home before he offered to his parents the
+spectacle of an outrageous gaiety. You would have said that life to
+Nicholas was an amusing game where you might win or lose, but
+either way it didn't matter. It was a rag, a sell. Even the
+preceedings, the involved and ridiculous proceedings of his
+divorce, amused him.</p>
+<p>It was undeniably funny that he should be supposed to have
+deserted Desmond.</p>
+<p>Frances wondered, again, whether Nicky really had any feelings,
+and whether things really made any impression on him.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was a quarter past five on a fine morning, early in July. On
+the stroke of the quarter Captain Frank Drayton's motor-car, after
+exceeding the speed limit along the forlorn highway of the
+Caledonian Road, drew up outside the main entrance of Holloway
+Gaol. Captain Frank Drayton was alone in his motor-car.</p>
+<p>He had the street all to himself till twenty past five, when he
+was joined by another motorist, also conspicuously alone in his
+car. Drayton tried hard to look as if the other man were not
+there.</p>
+<p>The other man tried even harder to look as if he were not there
+himself. He was the first to be aware of the absurdity of their
+competitive pretences. He looked at his watch and spoke.</p>
+<p>"I hope they'll be punctual with those doors. I was up at four
+o'clock."</p>
+<p>"I," said Drayton, "was up at three."</p>
+<p>"I'm waiting for my wife," said the other man.</p>
+<p>"I am <i>not</i>," said Drayton, and felt that he had
+scored.</p>
+<p>The other man's smile allowed him the point he made.</p>
+<p>"Yes, but my wife happens to be Lady Victoria Threlfall."</p>
+<p>The other man laughed as if he had made by far the better
+joke.</p>
+<p>Drayton recognized Mr. Augustin Threlfall, that Cabinet Minister
+made notorious by his encounters with the Women's Franchise Union.
+Last year Miss Maud Blackadder had stalked him in the Green Park
+and lamed him by a blow from her hunting-crop. This year his wife,
+Lady Victoria Threlfall, had headed the June raid on the House of
+Commons.</p>
+<p>And here he was at twenty minutes past five in the morning
+waiting to take her out of prison.</p>
+<p>And here was Drayton, waiting for Dorothea, who was not his wife
+yet.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow," said the Cabinet Minister, "we've done them out of
+their Procession."</p>
+<p>"What Procession?"</p>
+<p>All that Drayton knew about it was that, late last night, a
+friend he had in the Home Office had telephoned to him that the
+hour of Miss Dorothea Harrison's release would be five-thirty, not
+six-thirty as the papers had it.</p>
+<p>"The Procession," said the Cabinet Minister, "that was to have
+met 'em at six-thirty. A Car of Victory for Mrs. Blathwaite, and a
+bodyguard of thirteen young women on thirteen white horses. The
+girl who smashed my knee-cap is to be Joan of Arc and ride at the
+head of 'em. In armour. Fact. There's to be a banquet for 'em at
+the Imperial at nine. We can't stop <i>that</i>. And they'll
+process down the Embankment and down Pall Mall and Piccadilly at
+eleven; but they won't process here. We've let 'em out an hour too
+soon."</p>
+<p>A policeman came from the prison-yard. He blew a whistle. Four
+taxi-cabs crept round the corner furtively, driven by visibly
+hilarious chauffeurs.</p>
+<p>"The triumphant procession from Holloway," said the Cabinet
+Minister, "is you and me, sir, and those taxi-cabs."</p>
+<p>On the other side of the gates a woman laughed. The released
+prisoners were coming down the prison-yard.</p>
+<p>The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous
+glee. He was boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had
+done them out of the Car of Victory and the thirteen white
+horses.</p>
+<p>The prison-gates opened. The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised
+their caps.</p>
+<p>The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete came first. Then Lady Victoria Threlfall. Then
+Dorothea. Then sixteen other women.</p>
+<p>Drayton did not look at them. He did not see what happened when
+the Cabinet Minister met his wife. He did not see the sixteen other
+women. He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.</p>
+<p>She had no hat on. Her clothes were as the great raid had left
+them, a month ago. Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket,
+the three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining. Another
+three-cornered flap hung from her right knee. She carried her
+small, hawk-like head alert and high. Her face had the incomparable
+bloom of youth. Her eyes shone. They and her face showed no memory
+of the prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they
+showed no sense of Drayton's decency in coming to meet her, no
+sense of anything at all but of the queerness, the greatness and
+the glory of the world--of him, perhaps, as a part of it. She
+stepped into the car as if they had met by appointment for a run
+into the country. "I shan't hurt your car. I'm quite clean, though
+you mightn't think it. The cells were all right this time."</p>
+<p>He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy," he said, "do you want to go to that banquet?"</p>
+<p>"No, but I've got to. I must go through with it. I swore I'd do
+the thing completely or not at all."</p>
+<p>"It isn't till nine. We've three whole hours before we need
+start."</p>
+<p>"What are you going to do with me?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to take you home first. Then I suppose I shall have
+to drive you down to that beastly banquet."</p>
+<p>"That won't take three and a half hours. It's a heavenly
+morning. Can't we do something with it?"</p>
+<p>"What would you like to do?"</p>
+<p>"I'd like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall. I'm hungry.
+Then--Are you frightfully sleepy?"</p>
+<p>"Me? Oh, Lord, no."</p>
+<p>"Then let's go off somewhere into the country." They went.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the
+buns they had brought with them from the coffee-stall.</p>
+<p>"Did you ever smell anything like this lane? Did you ever eat
+anything like these buns? Did you ever drink anything like that
+divine coffee? If epicures had any imagination they'd go out and
+obstruct policemen and get put in prison for the sake of the
+sensations they'd have afterwards."</p>
+<p>"That reminds me," he said, "that I want to talk to you. No--but
+seriously."</p>
+<p>"I don't mind how seriously you talk if I may go on eating."</p>
+<p>"That's what I brought the buns for. So that I mayn't be
+interrupted. First of all I want to tell you that you haven't taken
+me in. Other people may be impressed with this Holloway business,
+but not me. I'm not moved, or touched, or even interested."</p>
+<p>"Still," she murmured, "you did get up at three o'clock in the
+morning."</p>
+<p>"If you think I got up at three o'clock in the morning to show
+my sympathy, you're mistaken."</p>
+<p>"Sympathy? I don't need your sympathy. It was worth it, Frank.
+There isn't anything on earth like coming out of prison. Unless it
+is going in."</p>
+<p>"That won't work, Dorothy, when I know why you went in. It
+wasn't to prove your principles. Your principles were against that
+sort of thing. It wasn't to get votes for women. You know as well
+as I do that you'll never get them that way. It wasn't to annoy Mr.
+Asquith. You knew Mr. Asquith wouldn't care a hang. It was to annoy
+me."</p>
+<p>"I wonder," she said dreamily, "if I shall <i>ever</i> be able
+to stop eating."</p>
+<p>"You can't take me in. I know too much about it. You said you
+were going to keep out of rows. You weren't going on that
+deputation because it meant a row. You went because I asked you not
+to go."</p>
+<p>"I did; and I should go again tomorrow for the same reason."</p>
+<p>"But it isn't a reason. It's not as if I'd asked you to go
+against your conscience. Your conscience hadn't anything to do with
+it."</p>
+<p>"Oh, hadn't it! I went because you'd no right to ask me not
+to."</p>
+<p>"If I'd had the right you'd have gone just the same."</p>
+<p>"What do you mean by the right?"</p>
+<p>"You know perfectly well what I mean."</p>
+<p>"Of course I do. You mean, and you meant that if I'd married you
+you'd have had the right, not just to ask me not to, but to prevent
+me. That was what I was out against. I'd be out against it tomorrow
+and the next day, and for as long as you keep up that
+attitude."</p>
+<p>"And yet--you said you loved me."</p>
+<p>"So I did. So I do. But I'm out against that too."</p>
+<p>"Good Lord, against what?"</p>
+<p>"Against your exploiting my love for your purposes."</p>
+<p>"My poor dear child, what do you suppose I wanted?"</p>
+<p>She had reached the uttermost limit of absurdity, and in that
+moment she became to him helpless and pathetic.</p>
+<p>"I knew there was going to be the most infernal row and I wanted
+to keep you out of it. Look here, you'd have thought me a rotter if
+I hadn't, wouldn't you?</p>
+<p>"Of course you would. And there's another thing. You weren't
+straight about it. You never told me you were going."</p>
+<p>"I never told you I wasn't."</p>
+<p>"I don't care, Dorothy; you weren't straight. You ought to have
+told me."</p>
+<p>"How could I tell you when I knew you'd only go trying to stop
+me and getting yourself arrested."</p>
+<p>"Not me. They wouldn't have touched me."</p>
+<p>"How was I to know that? If they had I should have dished you.
+And I'd have stayed away rather than do that. I didn't tell Michael
+or Nicky or Father for the same reason."</p>
+<p>"You'd have stayed at home rather than have dished me? Do you
+really mean that?"</p>
+<p>"Of course I mean it. And I meant it. It's you," she said, "who
+don't care."</p>
+<p>"How do you make that out?"</p>
+<p>He really wanted to know. He really wanted, if it were possible,
+to understand her.</p>
+<p>"I make it out this way. Here have I been through the adventure
+and the experience of my life. I was in the thick of the big raid;
+I was four weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don't care;
+you're not interested. You never said to yourself, 'Dorothy was in
+the big raid, I wonder what happened to her?' or 'Dorothy's in
+prison, I wonder how she's feeling?' You didn't care; you weren't
+interested.</p>
+<p>"If it had happened to you, I couldn't have thought of anything
+else, I couldn't have got it out of my head. I should have been
+wondering all the time what you were feeling; I couldn't have
+rested till I knew. It would have been as if I was in prison
+myself. And now, when I've come out, all you think of is how you
+can rag and score off me."</p>
+<p>She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane. Her
+hands were clasped round her knees. One knickerbockered knee
+protruded through the three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared
+across the road, a long, straight stare that took no heed of what
+she saw, the grey road, and the green bank on the other side,
+topped by its hedge of trees.</p>
+<p>Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of
+self-pity or reproach. It was as if she were making statements that
+had no emotional significance whatever.</p>
+<p>She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was
+sorest.</p>
+<p>"I wanted to tell you about it. I counted the days, the minutes
+till I could tell you; but you wouldn't listen. You don't want to
+hear."</p>
+<p>"I won't listen if it's about women's suffrage. And I don't want
+to hear if it's anything awful about you."</p>
+<p>"It is about me, but it isn't awful.</p>
+<p>"That's what I want to tell you.</p>
+<p>"But, first of all--about the raid. I didn't mean to be in it at
+all, as it happens. I meant to go with the deputation because you
+told me not to. You're right about that. But I meant to turn back
+as soon as the police stopped us, because I hate rows with the
+police, and because I don't believe in them, and because I told
+Angela Blathwaite I wasn't going in with her crowd any way. You
+see, she called me a coward before a lot of people and said I
+funked it. So I did. But I should have been a bigger coward if I'd
+gone against my own will, just because of what she said. That's how
+she collars heaps of women. They adore her and they're afraid of
+her. Sometimes they lie and tell her they're going in when their
+moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they're not going in at
+all. I don't adore her, and I'm not afraid of her, and I didn't
+lie.</p>
+<p>"So I went at the tail of the deputation where I could slip out
+when the row began. I swear I didn't mean to be in it. I funked it
+far too much. I didn't mind the police and I didn't mind the crowd.
+But I funked being with the women. When I saw their faces. You
+world have funked it.</p>
+<p>"And anyhow I don't like doing things in a beastly body.
+Ugh!</p>
+<p>"And then they began moving.</p>
+<p>"The police tried to stop them. And the crowd tried. The crowd
+began jeering at them. And still they moved. And the mounted police
+horses got excited, and danced about and reared a bit, and the
+crowd was in a funk then and barged into the women. That was rather
+awful.</p>
+<p>"I could have got away then if I'd chosen. There was a man close
+to me all the time who kept making spaces for me and telling me to
+slip through. I was just going to when a woman fell. Somewhere in
+the front of the deputation where the police were getting
+nasty.</p>
+<p>"Then I had to stay. I had to go on with them. I swear I wasn't
+excited or carried away in the least. Two women near me were
+yelling at the police. I hated them. But I felt I'd be an utter
+brute if I left them and got off safe. You see, it was an ugly
+crowd, and things were beginning to be jolly dangerous, and I'd
+funked it badly. Only the first minute. It went--the funk I
+mean--when I saw the woman go down. She fell sort of slanting
+through the crowd, and it was horrible. I couldn't have left them
+then any more than I could have left children in a burning
+house.</p>
+<p>"I thought of you."</p>
+<p>"You thought of me?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. I thought of you--how you'd have hated it. But I didn't
+care. I was sort of boosted up above caring. The funk had all gone
+and I was absolutely happy. Not insanely happy like some of the
+other women, but quietly, comfily happy.</p>
+<p>"After all, I didn't do anything you <i>need</i> have
+minded."</p>
+<p>"What <i>did</i> you do?" he said.</p>
+<p>"I just went on and stood still and refused to go back. I stuck
+my hands in my pockets so that I shouldn't let out at a policeman
+or anything (I knew you wouldn't like <i>that</i>). I may have
+pushed a bit now and then with my shoulders and my elbows; I can't
+remember. But I didn't make one sound. I was perfectly lady-like
+and perfectly dignified."</p>
+<p>"I suppose you <i>know</i> you haven't got a hat on?"</p>
+<p>"It didn't <i>come</i> off. I <i>took</i> it off and threw it to
+the crowd when the row began. It doesn't matter about your hair
+coming down if you haven't got a hat on, but if your hair's down
+and your hat's bashed in and all crooked you look a perfect
+idiot.</p>
+<p>"It wasn't a bad fight, you know, twenty-one women to I don't
+know how many policemen, and the front ones got right into the
+doorway of St. Stephen's. That was where they copped me.</p>
+<p>"But that, isn't the end of it.</p>
+<p>"The fight was only the first part of the adventure. The
+wonderful thing was what happened afterwards. In prison.</p>
+<p>"I didn't think I'd really <i>like</i> prison. That was another
+thing I funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the
+dirt, you know. And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And
+after the crowds of women, after the meetings and the speeches, the
+endless talking and the boredom, that cell was like heaven.</p>
+<p>"Thank God, it's always solitary confinement. The Government
+doesn't know that if they want to make prison a deterrent they'll
+shut us up together. You won't give the Home Secretary the tip,
+will you?</p>
+<p>"But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about.</p>
+<p>"It was something bigger, something tremendous. You'll not
+believe this part of it, but I was absolutely happy in that cell.
+It was a sort of deep-down unexcited happiness. I'm not a bit
+religious, but I <i>know</i> how the nuns feel in their cells when
+they've given up everything and shut themselves up with God. The
+cell was like a convent cell, you know, as narrow as that bit of
+shadow there is, and it had nice white-washed walls, and a
+planked-bed in the corner, and a window high, high up. There ought
+to have been a crucifix on the wall above the plank-bed, but there
+wasn't a crucifix. There was only a shiny black Bible on the
+chair.</p>
+<p>"Really Frank, if you're to be shut up for a month with just one
+book, it had better be the Bible. Isaiah's ripping. I can remember
+heaps of it: 'in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall
+be grass with reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there ...
+the redeemed shall walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall
+return with singing into Zion' ... 'They that wait upon the Lord
+shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as
+eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not
+faint.' I used to read like anything; and I thought of things. They
+sort of came to me.</p>
+<p>"That's what I wanted to tell you about. The things that came to
+me were so much bigger than the thing I went in for. I could see
+all along we weren't going to get it that way. And I knew we
+<i>were</i> going to get it some other way. I don't in the least
+know how, but it'll be some big, tremendous way that'll make all
+this fighting and fussing seem the rottenest game. That was one of
+the things I used to think about."</p>
+<p>"Then," he said, "you've given it up? You're corning out of
+it?"</p>
+<p>She looked at him keenly. "Are those still your conditions?"</p>
+<p>He hesitated one second before he answered firmly. "Yes, those
+are still my conditions. You still won't agree to them?"</p>
+<p>"I still won't agree. It's no use talking about it. You don't
+believe in freedom. We're incompatible. We don't stand for the same
+ideals."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord, what <i>does</i> that matter?"</p>
+<p>"It matters most awfully."</p>
+<p>"I should have thought," said Drayton, "it would have mattered
+more if I'd had revolting manners or an impediment in my speech or
+something."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't, <i>really</i>."</p>
+<p>"Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things. Did you
+ever once think about me, Dorothy?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I did. Have you ever read the Psalms? There's a jolly one
+that begins: 'Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my
+hands to war and my fingers to fight.' I used to think of you when
+I read that. I thought of you a lot.</p>
+<p>"That's what I was coming to. It was the queerest thing of all.
+Everything seemed ended when I went to prison. I knew you wouldn't
+care for me after what I'd done--you must really listen to this,
+Frank--I knew you couldn't and wouldn't marry me; and it somehow
+didn't matter. What I'd got hold of was bigger than that. I knew
+that all this Women's Suffrage business was only a part of it, a
+small, ridiculous part.</p>
+<p>"I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord. They were men, as well
+as women, Frank. And they were all free. They were all free because
+they were redeemed. And the funny thing was that you were part of
+it. You were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business.
+Everything was ended. And everything was begun; so that I knew you
+understood even when you didn't understand. It was really as if I'd
+got you tight, somehow; and I knew you couldn't go, even when you'd
+gone."</p>
+<p>"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."</p>
+<p>"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if
+you mean going.</p>
+<p>"What time is it?"</p>
+<p>"A quarter to eight."</p>
+<p>"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't
+make me late for that infernal banquet. You <i>are</i> going to
+drive me there?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with
+you."</p>
+<p>"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"</p>
+<p>He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it
+burnished and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the
+broad red, white and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union
+slanting across her breast.</p>
+<p>He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial
+Hotel, Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too
+much for speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there
+was that queer exaltation that had sustained her in prison.</p>
+<p>He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and
+Nicholas waited to receive her.</p>
+<p>Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated
+it, but they went in.</p>
+<p>Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red,
+white and blue ribbons.</p>
+<p>"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you
+through."</p>
+<p>"How can he when he feels like that about it?"</p>
+<p>"As if we didn't feel!"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the
+Banquet Hall to receive the prisoners.</p>
+<p>The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue
+of the Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned
+banners. The silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage
+Leagues and Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged
+along three walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and
+heroic colours, purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and
+royal blue, black, white and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure
+white, dead-black, orange and scarlet and magenta.</p>
+<p>From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent
+tables decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In
+the centre of the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the
+tricolour, were set like three thrones for the three leaders. They
+were flanked by nine other chairs on the right and nine on the left
+for the eighteen other prisoners.</p>
+<p>There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to
+the high table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged
+sound of rustling as the three hundred and fifty turned in their
+places.</p>
+<p>The twenty-one prisoners came in.</p>
+<p>A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself
+up in the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to
+their feet.</p>
+<p>And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a
+savage and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as
+of glass or thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as
+of children and of small, slender-throated animals were held
+together by ringing, vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins
+playing in the treble. And now a woman's voice started off on its
+own note and tore the delicate tissue of this sound with a solitary
+scream; and now a man's voice filled up a pause in the shrill
+hurrahing with a solitary boom.</p>
+<p>To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right
+hand, to Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among
+the crowd, that collective sound was frightful.</p>
+<p>From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one
+on each side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing
+them, she saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.</p>
+<p>It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The
+crowd was on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their
+high places.</p>
+<p>Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and
+seventy-nine women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of
+the Militant Women.</p>
+<blockquote>Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,<br>
+Our army moves from east to west.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+With flag and sword from south and north,<br>
+The sounding, shining hosts go forth.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+Do you not bear our marching feet,<br>
+From door to door, from street to street?<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Follow on! Follow on!</blockquote>
+<p>Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying,
+excited crowd.</p>
+<p>Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top
+of their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang
+from the back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently
+open; she sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever
+it might cost her and other people.</p>
+<p>Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its
+utmost, was overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang
+shrill and loud; her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a
+fantastic march. With one large, long hand raised she beat the
+measure of the music. Her head was thrown back; and on her face
+there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy rapture, exalted, half
+savage, not quite sane.</p>
+<p>Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.</p>
+<p>The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt
+again her old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion
+threatened her. She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for
+its hardness, its nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She
+tried to remember. Her soul, in its danger, tried to get back
+there. But the soul of the crowd in the hail below her swelled and
+heaved itself towards her, drawn by the Vortex. She felt the
+rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her breath: the Vortex was
+drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing almost got her.
+The sight of Emmeline saved her.</p>
+<p>She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the
+same awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at
+Emmeline she saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and
+hard and sane.</p>
+<p>She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers,
+Michael and Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of
+the herd-soul. The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as
+needles, tortured him. Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom.
+His fair, handsome face was set clear and hard. His yellow hair,
+with its hard edges, fitted his head like a cap of solid, polished
+metal. Weariness and disgust made a sort of cloud over his light
+green eyes. When Nicky looked at him Nicky's face twitched and
+twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as Michael hated it.</p>
+<p>She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they
+stuck it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria
+Threlfall were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from
+Blackfriars Bridge along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square
+and Pall Mall and Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and
+Nicholas would march beside them to hold up the poles of the
+standard which, after all, they were not strong enough to
+carry.</p>
+<p>She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same
+time she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison
+cell. She had told him the most real thing that had ever happened
+to her, and he had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would
+have listened. Michael would have cared intensely.</p>
+<p>She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The
+sword was between her and her lover.</p>
+<p>She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the
+Vortex, but between him and her vision which was more than either
+of them or than all this.</p>
+<p>She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in
+the hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her
+lover. She wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could
+have done as much, supposing they had had a choice?</p>
+<p>Then she looked at Veronica.</p>
+<p>Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was
+slender and beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin.
+Presently she would be marching in the Procession. She would carry
+a thin, tall pole, with a round olive wreath on the top of it, and
+a white dove sitting in the ring of the olive wreath. And she would
+look as if she was not in the Procession but in another place.</p>
+<p>When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane
+ecstasy and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of
+Veronica went alone in utter freedom.</p>
+<blockquote>Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,<br>
+And Love's our mighty battle-lord.<br>
+Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+And Justice is our flag unfurled,<br>
+The flaming flag that sweeps the world.<br>
+Follow on! Follow on!<br>
+<br>
+And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;<br>
+For Freedom we will fight and die.<br>
+Follow on! Follow on!</blockquote>
+<p>The Procession was over a mile long.</p>
+<p>It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge
+to Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and
+the Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside
+Cleopatra's Needle and the Sphinxes.</p>
+<p>Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to
+Northumberland Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and
+Societies and Leagues, of the trades and the professions and the
+arts, carrying their banners, the purple and the blue, the black,
+white and gold, the green, the orange and the scarlet and
+magenta.</p>
+<p>Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady
+Victoria Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense
+tricolour standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them.
+Behind the prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of
+young girls dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying
+a pole with the olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the
+obviousness of extreme innocence, the peace that follows victory.
+They were led by Veronica.</p>
+<p>She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because
+of her youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought
+that the Union had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged
+to Dorothea.</p>
+<p>From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the
+big red, white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady
+Victoria Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria,
+white and tense, would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation,
+hardly knowing where she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would
+go in pride, and in disdain for the proceedings in which her honour
+forced her to take part; she would have an awful knowledge of what
+she was doing and of where she was; she would drink every drop of
+the dreadful cup she had poured out for herself, hating it.</p>
+<p>Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she
+thought that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But
+she did not hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful
+and too big to hate, and her part in it was too little.</p>
+<p>She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the
+Procession. She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements,
+pressing closer and closer, pushed back continually by the police.
+Her soul was by itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the
+soul of the crowd and the soul of the Procession; only it was not
+proud; it was simply happy.</p>
+<p>The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the
+music sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the
+march.</p>
+<p>Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release,
+and the whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard
+music, to the rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.</p>
+<p>They went through what were once streets between walls of
+houses, and were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The
+visible aspect of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted.
+The houses stood farther back behind the walls of people; they were
+hung with people; a swarm of people clung like bees to the house
+walls.</p>
+<p>All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still
+and stationary world the Procession was the only thing that
+moved.</p>
+<p>She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was
+friendly.</p>
+<p>A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the
+cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign
+expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman
+was friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.</p>
+<p>Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary
+Procession should be allowed to fill the streets of a great
+capital, and that a body of the same police that arrested the
+insurgents should go with it to protect them, to clear their
+triumphal way before them, holding up the entire traffic of great
+thoroughfares that their bands and their banners and their
+regiments should go through. She said to herself "What a country!
+It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France, or
+anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in
+England."</p>
+<p>Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly.
+The band was playing the Marseillaise.</p>
+<p>And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down
+from its place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they
+played the Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the
+Procession to the ends of the world; she could march into battle to
+the Marseillaise; she could fight to that music and die.</p>
+<p>The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang
+the words of the Women's Marseillaise.</p>
+<p>And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another
+song. She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.</p>
+<blockquote>"'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl &uuml;ber mein Grab,<br>
+Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;<br>
+Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--<br>
+Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu sch&uuml;tzen!'"</blockquote>
+<p>The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn
+Hill.</p>
+<p>Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that
+they were there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the
+standard that they carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and
+front of the Procession, the purple and the blue, the gold and
+white, the green, the scarlet and orange and magenta standards
+rocked and staggered; they bent forwards; they were flung backwards
+as the west wind took them. But the red, white and blue standard
+that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her, steady and
+straight and high.</p>
+<p>And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the
+olive wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the
+ring of the wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine
+sounding in her soul.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Another year passed.</p>
+<p>Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in.
+Because of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children
+who had most hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide
+himself from her to the very end.</p>
+<p>Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and
+gone into his father's business for a while, to see whether he
+could stand it. John was going into the business too when he left
+Oxford. John was even looking forward to his partnership in what he
+called "the Pater's old tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get
+my hand well in. Won't we make it rip!"</p>
+<p>John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble.
+He had no genius for adventure. He would never strike out for
+himself any strange or dangerous line. He had settled down at
+Cheltenham; he had settled down at Oxford.</p>
+<p>And Dorothea had settled down.</p>
+<p>The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its
+revolution. Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it
+ran riot up and down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled
+stone ginger-beer bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers;
+it poured treacle into pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of
+Commons by the water-way, in barges, from which women, armed with
+megaphones, demanded the vote from infamous legislators drinking
+tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons and showered down
+propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show what violence it
+could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or two in a
+pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
+perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid
+followed by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering
+seriously the very painful but possible necessity of interfering
+with British sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in
+some drastic and terrifying way that would bring the men of England
+to their senses.</p>
+<p>And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the
+whirlwind. It would never suck her in. She worked now in the office
+of the Social Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for
+<i>The New Commonwealth</i> on Economics and the Marriage Laws.</p>
+<p>Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the
+revolution was all in Dorothea's brain.</p>
+<p>When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he
+was being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since
+Frances confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis
+Desmond she judged it to be terrible. She understood from Michael
+that it was <i>the</i> Vortex, the only one that really mattered,
+and the only one that would ever do anything.</p>
+<p>And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence
+Stephen.</p>
+<p>Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for
+Michael, she did not realize that they depended much more on
+Michael himself than on him. Stephen had said that if Michael was
+good enough he meant to help him. If his poems amounted to anything
+he would publish them in his <i>Review</i>. If any book of
+Michael's poems amounted to anything he would give a whole article
+to that book in his <i>Review</i>. If Michael's prose should ever
+amount to anything he would give him regular work on the
+<i>Review</i>.</p>
+<p>In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of
+the revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and
+his poems were beginning to appear, one after another, in the
+<i>Green Review</i>. He had brought out a volume of his experiments
+in the spring of that year; they were better than those that
+R&eacute;veillaud had approved of two years ago; and Lawrence
+Stephen had praised them in the <i>Green Review</i>.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he
+said, who would have had the courage either to publish them or to
+praise them.</p>
+<p>And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence
+Stephen she was afraid.</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.</p>
+<p>For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken
+Ferdinand Cameron's place.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love
+Ireland with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the
+beloved. It was a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of
+the spirit as to be compatible with permanent bodily absence from
+its object. Stephen's body had lived at ease in England (a country
+that he declared his spirit hated) ever since he had been old
+enough to choose a habitation for himself.</p>
+<p>He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been
+taken from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch
+and the English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for
+Irishmen to love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in
+London than in Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make
+havoc in his turn; he can harry the English, he can spite, and
+irritate and triumph and get his own back in a thousand ways.
+Living in England he would be a thorn in England's side.</p>
+<p>And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man
+of his talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an
+opportunist: but he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an
+obstinate idealism, one of those damned and solitary souls that
+only the north of Ireland produces in perfection. For the
+Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels like no other rebels on
+earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny as itself. Before
+he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the material comfort
+and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.</p>
+<p>He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton
+spinner settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled
+with this mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish
+blood of Antrim where his people married.</p>
+<p>Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would
+have been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
+inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with
+too wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary
+politics and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his
+own. And yet few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on
+the House of Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic
+politician he ran Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for
+England. Neither Nationalists nor Socialists believed in him; yet
+few men were more worthy of belief. In literature he had
+distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a novelist and an
+essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed not to do
+anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men of
+letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
+sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
+qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far
+contaminated by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes
+of art; yet there was no sense in which he had achieved
+popularity.</p>
+<p>Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he
+would, he fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had
+cast him out and England would none of him. He hated Catholicism
+and Protestantism alike, and Protestants and Catholics alike
+disowned him. To every Church and every sect he was a free thinker,
+destitute of all religion. Yet few men were more religious. His
+enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet on any one of his
+lines no man ever steered a straighter course.</p>
+<p>A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It
+would at any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he
+presented to two countries the disconcerting spectacle of a
+many-sided object moving with violence in a dead straight line. He
+moved so fast that to a stationary on-looker he was gone before one
+angle of him had been apprehended. It was for other people to turn
+and twist if any one of them was to get a complete all-round view
+of the amazing man.</p>
+<p>But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and
+suspicious brilliance.</p>
+<p>And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was
+not yet forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too
+young for men of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all
+England you could not have found a lonelier man.</p>
+<p>The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred
+relations of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married
+to Vera Harrison and yet he was not married. He was neither bound
+nor free.</p>
+<p>All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.</p>
+<p>And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something
+of the Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he
+loved Vera, after his manner, there were moments when Vera's
+capacity for everlasting passion left him tired and bored and
+cold.</p>
+<p>All his life <i>his</i> passions had been at the service of
+ideas. All his life he had looked for some great experience, some
+great satisfaction and consummation; and he had not found it.</p>
+<p>In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the
+opportunist was still waiting for his supreme opportunity.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.</p>
+<p>But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too
+steadily on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and
+weary gesture, to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had
+put his political failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as
+an artist or not at all." They judged him accordingly and their
+judgment was wrong.</p>
+<p>There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as
+he was in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the
+generation just behind him. To conservatives he passed for the
+leader of the revolution in contemporary art, and yet the
+revolution in contemporary art was happening without him. He was
+not the primal energy in the movement of the Vortex. In
+nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he was
+trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little
+farther than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was
+attracted to the young men of the Vortex because they were not of
+the generation that had rejected him, and because he hoped thus to
+prolong indefinitely his own youth. They were attracted to him
+because of his solitary distinction, his comparative poverty, and
+his unpopularity. A prosperous, well-established Stephen would have
+revolted them. He gave the revolutionaries the shelter of his
+<i>Review</i>, the support of his name, and the benefit of his
+bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in return a certain
+homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their merits and
+tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
+abominated.</p>
+<p>"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
+Swinburne."</p>
+<p>Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.</p>
+<p>He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew
+that the young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and
+because of his dealings with the past; because he refused to
+destroy the old gods when he made place for the new.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
+Stephen's study.</p>
+<p>He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half
+irritated, half affable affection.</p>
+<p>The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that
+house in St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera
+Harrison. They were at home there. Their books stood in his
+bookcase; they laid their manuscripts on his writing table and left
+them there; they claimed his empty spaces for the hanging of their
+pictures yet unsold.</p>
+<p>Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at
+the top of the house, and they talked.</p>
+<p>Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet
+them there, and to listen and to talk.</p>
+<p>To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were
+Austen Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young
+sculptor, and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton
+Ellis's disciples.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
+rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
+religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean
+and dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses,
+smooth and straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and
+a bitter, sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard
+drawn, while the lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and
+protested and recanted, was sceptical and sensitive and tender. His
+short, high nose had wide yet fastidious nostrils.</p>
+<p>It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
+affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes
+followed with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any
+moment he might escape her, might be off, God knew where.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the
+presence of his mistress and his friends.</p>
+<p>"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the
+future. I want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I
+believe in Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in
+Keats and Shelley and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more
+than you do, in their imitators. I believe in destroying their
+imitators. I do not believe in destroying them."</p>
+<p>"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They
+breed the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a
+stinking suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if
+we're to get rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new
+and clean. There isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So
+long as old masters are kow-towed to as masters people will go on
+imitating them. When a poet ceases to be a poet and becomes a
+centre of corruption, he must go."</p>
+<p>Michael said, "How about <i>us</i> when people imitate us? Have
+we got to go?"</p>
+<p>Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We
+haven't got to go."</p>
+<p>"I don't see how you get out of it."</p>
+<p>"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."</p>
+<p>There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George
+Wadham. It made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break
+it.</p>
+<p>"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.</p>
+<p>"Nobody, so far, <i>has</i> imitated Shakespeare, any more than
+they have <i>succeeded</i> in imitating me."</p>
+<p>There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton
+Ellis as the imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the
+forms adopted by his contemporaries.</p>
+<p>"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the
+Holy Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your
+sources."</p>
+<p>"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever
+does come down out of heaven. You <i>can</i> trace my sources,
+thank God, because they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream
+that swine like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary
+distinctions) "have made filthy with their paddling."</p>
+<p>He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised,
+Harrison, is absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then,
+supposing the revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because
+it's come. We <i>are</i> the revolution--the revolution means that
+we've made a clean sweep of the past. In the future no artist will
+want to imitate anybody. No artist will be allowed to exist unless
+he's prepared to be buried alive or burned alive rather than
+corrupt the younger generation with the processes and the products
+of his own beastly dissolution.</p>
+<p>"That's why violence is right.</p>
+<blockquote>"'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo<br>
+Sanguigno, stupra le albe,<br>
+irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,<br>
+fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,<br>
+fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,<br>
+fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'</blockquote>
+<p>"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right
+because it's necessary."</p>
+<p>"You mean it's necessary because it's right."</p>
+<p>Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
+flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of
+great strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair
+grow long and cultivating two beards instead of one.</p>
+<p>"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy
+must be got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy
+instead of standing still. The difference between Pastism and
+Futurism is the difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist
+art is simply art that has gone on, that, has left off being static
+and become dynamic. It expresses movement. Owen will tell you
+better than I can why it expresses movement."</p>
+<p>A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul
+Monier-Owen had curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes
+of a young wild animal roused in its lair.</p>
+<p>Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little
+distance he had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black
+panther, half cub, half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of
+his prominent eyes, his eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted
+slightly upwards and backwards. Under his slender, mournful nose
+his restless smile showed the white teeth of a young animal.</p>
+<p>Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded
+incessantly to any childish provocation, the intelligence of
+Monier-Owen watched in his calm and beautiful forehead and in his
+eyes.</p>
+<p>He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects
+directly as cutting across many planes. To do this you have to
+break up objects into the lines and masses that compose them, and
+project those lines and masses into space on any curve, at any
+angle, according to the planes you mean them to cross, otherwise
+the movements you mean them to express. The more planes intersected
+the more movement you get. By decomposing figures you compose
+movements. By decomposing groups of figures you compose groups of
+movement. Nothing but a cinema can represent objects as intact and
+as at the same time moving; and even the cinema only does this by a
+series of decompositions so minute as to escape the eye.</p>
+<p>"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park
+Corner. It can't be done unless you break up your objects as
+Mitchell breaks them up. You want to carve figures in the round,
+wrestling or dancing. It can't be done unless you dislocate their
+lines and masses as I dislocate them, so as to throw them all at
+once into those planes that the intact body could only have
+traversed one after another in a given time.</p>
+<p>"By taking time into account as well as space we produce
+rhythm.</p>
+<p>"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and
+the Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing
+of the sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point.
+They are supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do
+that, because arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and
+because the point of arrest is an artificial and arbitrary
+thing.</p>
+<p>"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact
+body which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which
+are in movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the
+figure and in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is
+immobility. If I wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by
+an absolute symmetry."</p>
+<p>"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're
+out against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism.
+If I draw a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat,
+pink woman and nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink
+woman is a work of Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm
+presenting as a reality what is only an appearance. The better the
+likeness the bigger the lie. But movement and rhythm are realities,
+not appearances. When I present rhythm and movement I've done
+something. I've made reality appear."</p>
+<p>He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the
+exhausted language by destroying its articulations. These he
+declared to be purely arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development
+of a spontaneous and individual style. By breaking up the rigid
+ties of syntax, you do more than create new forms of prose moving
+in perfect freedom, you deliver the creative spirit itself from the
+abominable contact with dead ideas. Association, fixed and
+eternalized by the structure of the language, is the tyranny that
+keeps down the live idea.</p>
+<p>"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin
+restored the innocence of the eye."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
+constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it
+dropped and broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a
+frenzied assault on the Old Masters, a storming of immortal
+strongholds, a tearing and scattering of the wing feathers of
+archangels; then, from this high adventure it sank to a perfunctory
+skirmishing among living eminences over forty, judged, by reason of
+their age, to be too contemptible for an attack in force. It
+rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute ineptitudes, the
+slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and ---- and ----";
+and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet, Edward
+Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the Vortex,
+and was setting up a small swirl of his own.</p>
+<p>Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed
+in Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than
+he believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed
+in Jules R&eacute;veillaud. They stood for all the realities and
+all the ideas and all the accomplishments to which he himself was
+devoted. He had no sort of qualms about the wholesale slaughter of
+the inefficient.</p>
+<p>But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his
+old horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
+unanimity. The vortex--<i>the</i> Vortex--was like the little
+vortex of school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen
+belonged to a herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying
+together, saying the same thing. Their very revolt against the Old
+Masters was a collective and not an individual revolt. Their chase
+was hottest when their quarry was one of the pack who had broken
+through and got away. They hated the fugitive, solitary private
+soul.</p>
+<p>And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he
+had the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great
+thing some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could
+get away from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had
+courage.</p>
+<p>Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he
+had a great longing to break loose and get away.</p>
+<p>He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They
+think they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see
+what's to come of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that
+for ever. I can't see what's coming. Yet something must come.
+<i>They</i> can't be the end."</p>
+<p>He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense
+Vortex. It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They
+will have helped to clear it."</p>
+<p>He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the
+Vortex, and of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the
+clean air.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>END OF PART II</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="PART_III"></a>PART III</h2>
+<h3><i>VICTORY</i></h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the
+British Isles because of the fine weather and the disturbances in
+the political atmosphere due to the fine weather.</p>
+<p>Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his
+family that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and
+that the mere off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the
+striker. And when Michael asked him contentiously what the weather
+had to do with Home Rule, he answered that it had everything to do
+with it by increasing parliamentary blood-pressure.</p>
+<p>"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how
+long the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to
+Mr. Redmond then."</p>
+<p>Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew
+that Home Rule had never been a part of practical politics and
+never would be.</p>
+<p>And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own
+views about the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they
+could have told Anthony what the answers were going to be; only
+they said it wasn't any good talking to Father; when he got an idea
+into his dear old head it stuck there.</p>
+<p>Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make
+some impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could
+get them out.</p>
+<p>Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children,
+had time for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent
+woman than the Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago,
+informed herself of the affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming
+of the <i>Times</i>. In the last four years the affairs of the
+nation had thrust themselves violently upon her attention. She had
+even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement as a vivid and vital
+affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the fighting and had gone
+to prison.</p>
+<p>Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the
+<i>Times</i>, had a sense of things about to happen if other things
+didn't happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any
+reason to complain that nothing happened.</p>
+<p>It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and
+Ireland were on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not
+so much by the head-lines in the papers as by the publication of
+her son Michael's insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green
+Review.</p>
+<p>For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly
+thirteen when he had said that civil war between England and
+Ireland would be glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it
+still. His poem was the green flag that he flew in the face of his
+family and of his country. Neither Frances nor Anthony would have
+been likely to forget the imminence of civil war (only that they
+didn't really believe in it), when from morning till night Michael
+talked and wrote of nothing else. In this Michael was not carried
+away by collective feeling; his dream of Ireland's freedom was a
+secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew shared it but Lawrence
+Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him hot and restless and
+intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish crisis when she
+said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own business. This
+excitement is very bad for Michael."</p>
+<p>And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that
+none of them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a
+week or two, Anthony and the boys would be out of it.</p>
+<p>Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour.
+There was, indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances
+in this particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was
+being disagreeably affected by the strike in the building
+trade.</p>
+<p>So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up
+his idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had
+even thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on
+the Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the
+spring of last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him
+that this extreme measure was unnecessary.</p>
+<p>And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy.
+For the children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were
+showing what was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant
+than ever. Michael and Dorothea had given up their allowances and
+declared their complete ability to support themselves. (They earned
+about fifty pounds a year each on an average.) She had expected
+this from Dorothy, but not from Michael. Nicholas was doing the
+chauffeur's work in his absence; and John showed eagerness to offer
+up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it on his father as his
+contribution to the family economies.</p>
+<p>Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter
+through Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's
+and Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her
+poor little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music
+teacher.</p>
+<p>There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike.
+Her mind refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She
+suspected Anthony of exaggerating his losses in order to draw out
+Dorothy and Michael and Nicholas and John, and wallow in their
+moral beauty. He, too, was arrogant. He was convinced that, though
+there might be girls like Dorothea, there were no boys like his
+three Sons. As for the strike in the building trade, strikes, as
+Anthony insisted, had happened before, and none of them had
+threatened for very long either Frances's peace of mind or
+Anthony's prosperity.</p>
+<p>The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs.
+Anthony Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year,
+on the twenty-fifth of July.</p>
+<p>Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of
+it.</p>
+<p>Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of
+those slight changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for
+regeneration and a change of heart. It marked the close of an
+epoch. Frances's life of exclusive motherhood had ended; she had
+become, or was at any rate trying to become, a social creature. Her
+Day had bored her terribly at first, when it didn't frighten her;
+she was only just beginning to get used to it; and still, at times,
+she had the air of not taking it seriously. It had been forced on
+her. Dorothea had decided that she must have a Day, like other
+people.</p>
+<p>She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come
+out in the spring of the year before, when the young men who met
+every Friday evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at
+Michael's father's house.</p>
+<p>Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this
+palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of
+wonderful, energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred
+the air about him and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their
+feet and of their voices, and of their laughter. And when the house
+was quiet and Anthony had Frances to himself he liked that,
+too.</p>
+<p>But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so
+often--if only I could have my children sometimes to myself!"</p>
+<p>It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and
+suckled them.</p>
+<p>There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted
+and diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd
+of tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves
+over the whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent
+happiness to the "Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and
+Louie and Emmeline and Edith Fleming, who figured as essential
+parts of the social event. She meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in
+the inconceivability of their absence on Frances's Bay, wondered
+more than ever why their daughter Rosalind found them so
+impossible. She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the office,
+and their wives and children, and Anthony's secretary, Miss Lathom.
+If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she soon
+would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and
+guileless faces.</p>
+<p>Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from
+India for good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more
+dangerous than his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was
+genuinely invalided, who had come back from California for the last
+time and would never be sent out anywhere again.</p>
+<p>Dorothea had said: "Let's kill them all off in one awful day."
+Frances had said: "Yes, but we must do it decently. We must be kind
+to them, poor dears!"</p>
+<p>Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to
+Uncle Morrie and Uncle Bartie. That was the only burden she had
+laid on her children. It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth
+constrained them. They had received so much, and they had been let
+off so much; not one of them had inherited the taint that made
+Maurice and Emmeline Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased
+and irresponsible. They could afford to be pitiful and
+merciful.</p>
+<p>And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to
+be pitiful and merciful herself. She could even afford to be
+grateful to the poor dears. She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and
+Bartie as scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose
+affliction left her children clean. She thought of them more and
+more in this sacred and sacrificial character. At fifty-two Frances
+could be gentle over the things that had worried and irritated her
+at thirty-three. Like Anthony she was still young and strong
+through the youth and strength of her children.</p>
+<p>And the poor dears were getting weak and old. Grannie was
+seventy-nine, and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was
+forty-nine, and he looked sixty. Every year Frances was more
+acutely aware of their pathos, their futility, their mortality.
+They would be broken and gone so soon and so utterly, leaving no
+name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only living in the
+memories of her children who would remain.</p>
+<p>And, with an awful sense of mortality surrounding them, her
+children had learned that they must be kind because the old people
+would be gone while they endured and remained.</p>
+<p>This Saturday being the last of the season, they had all come;
+not only the Flemings, but the Jervises and Verekers and Norrises,
+and Uncle Bartie. The fine weather alone would have brought
+them.</p>
+<p>Bartie, more morose and irritable than ever, sat under the tree
+of Heaven and watched the triumphal progress of the Day. He scowled
+darkly and sourly at each group in turn; at the young men in white
+flannels playing tennis; at Mr. and Mr. Jervis and the Verekers and
+Norrises; at the Flemings, old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline
+and Edith, and the disgraceful Maurice, all five of them useless
+pensioners on his brother's bounty; Maurice a thing of battered,
+sodden flesh hanging loose on brittle bone, a rickety prop for the
+irreproachable summer suit bought with Anthony's money. He scowled
+at the tables covered with fine white linen, and at the costly
+silver and old china, at the sandwiches and cakes and ices, and the
+piled-up fruits and the claret cup and champagne cup glowing and
+shining in the tall glass jugs, and at the pretty maidservants
+going to and fro in their accomplished service.</p>
+<p>Bartie wondered how on earth Anthony managed it. His wonder was
+a savage joy to Bartie.</p>
+<p>Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed
+it, and Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr.
+Vereker and Mr. Norris, who held that a strike was a downright
+serious matter, also wondered. But they were sustained by their
+immense belief in Mr. Anthony. Mr. Anthony knew what he was doing;
+he always had known. A strike might be serious while it lasted, but
+it didn't last. And Mr. Nicholas was in the business now, and Mr.
+John was coming into it next year, and Mr. Nicholas might be
+married again by that time; and the chances were that the firm of
+Harrison and Harrison would last long enough to provide for a young
+Vereker and a still younger Norris.</p>
+<p>In spite of the strike, Mr. and Mrs. Vereker and Mr. and Mrs.
+Norris, like Frances and Anthony, were extraordinarily cheerful
+that afternoon.</p>
+<p>So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.</p>
+<p>"I can't think why I feel so happy," said Mrs. Vereker to Mrs.
+Norris. She was looking at her son George.</p>
+<p>"Nor I, either," said Miss Lathom, who was trying suddenly to
+look at nothing in particular.</p>
+<p>Miss Lathom lied and Mrs. Vereker lied; they knew perfectly well
+why they were happy. Each knew that the other lied; each knew that
+the other knew she knew; and neither of them could have said why
+she found it so necessary to lie.</p>
+<p>And to Frances this happiness of Mrs. Vereker, and of young
+Vereker and Miss Lathom was significant and delightful, as if she
+had been personally responsible for it.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and
+of something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up
+with Mr. and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind. She stared at the larkspurs
+as if they held the clue--Nicky's face appeared among the tall blue
+spires, Nicky's darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and
+yellow stripes--something to do with a White Cake--it must have
+been somebody's birthday. Now she had it--Mr. Jervis's cricket
+scarf. It was the day of Nicky's worst earache, the day when Mr.
+Vereker climbed the tree of Heaven--was it possible that Mr.
+Vereker had ever climbed that tree?--the day when Michael wouldn't
+go to the party--Rosalind's birthday.</p>
+<p>Eight candles burning for Rosalind. Why, it was nineteen years
+ago. Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only
+little boys. And look at them now!</p>
+<p>She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit,
+slender bodies of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously
+and well.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy is looking very handsome," Mrs. Jervis said. Yes,
+certainly Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before
+all things the male beauty of her sons. In Michael and Nicholas it
+had reached perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last,
+as Anthony's had lasted.</p>
+<p>She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many
+deaths, each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of
+babyhood, of childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of
+their young manhood would be with her for a long time. John would
+have it. John was only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had
+not hardened; his boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his
+mouth, and in his eyelids and the soft corners of his eyes; so that
+in John she could still see what Nicky had been.</p>
+<p>She had adored Anthony's body, as if she had foreseen that it
+would give her such sons as these; and in her children she had
+adored the small bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she
+foresaw the beauty of their manhood. These were the same bodies,
+the same faces that she had loved in them as children; nothing was
+blurred or twisted or overlaid.</p>
+<p>Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had
+foreseen him. Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other
+moments she was proud of his genius; but at this particular moment,
+sitting beside her friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was
+chiefly aware of his body.</p>
+<p>Michael's body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but
+austere and tranquil satisfaction. It was when she looked at her
+second son that something caught at her breath and held it. She saw
+him as the lover and bridegroom of Veronica. Her sense of his
+virility was terrible to her and delightful.</p>
+<p>Perhaps they were engaged already.</p>
+<p>And Frances was sorry for Mrs. Jervis, who had borne no sons,
+who had only borne one unattractive and unsatisfactory daughter.
+She used to be sorry for her because Rosalind was pink and fat and
+fluffy; she was sorry for her now because Rosalind was
+unsatisfactory. She was sorry for Mrs. Norris because her boy could
+never grow up like Michael or Nicholas or John. She was sorry for
+Mrs. Vereker because George, though he looked all right when he was
+by himself, became clumsy and common at once beside Michael and
+Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels; he played
+furiously and well; he played too furiously and too consciously
+well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp and
+excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang.</p>
+<p>Her arrogance nourished itself on these contrasts.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Jervis looked wistfully at the young men as they played.
+She looked still more wistfully at Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"What do you do," she said, "to keep your children with
+you?"</p>
+<p>"I do nothing," Frances said. "I don't try to keep them. I've
+never appealed to their feelings for my own purposes, or taken
+advantage of their affection, that's all.</p>
+<p>"They know that if they want to walk out of the house to-morrow,
+and stay out, they can. Nobody'll stop them."</p>
+<p>There was a challenging, reminiscent glint in Mr. Jervis's eyes,
+and his wife was significantly silent. Frances knew what they were
+thinking.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," she said, "walked out; but he came back again as soon
+as he was in trouble. Michael walks out and goes abroad every year;
+but he comes back again. Dorothy walks out, but she's never dreamed
+of not coming back again."</p>
+<p>"Of course, if you aren't afraid of taking risks," said Mr.
+Jervis.</p>
+<p>"I am afraid. But I've never shown it."</p>
+<p>"It's very strange that Dorothy hasn't married." Mrs. Jervis
+spoke. She derived comfort from the thought that Dorothy was
+eight-and-twenty and not married.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy," said Frances, "could marry to-morrow if she wanted
+to; but she doesn't want."</p>
+<p>She was sorry for her friend, but she really could not allow her
+that consolation.</p>
+<p>"Veronica is growing up very good-looking," said Mrs. Jervis
+then.</p>
+<p>But it was no use. Frances was aware that Veronica was grown up,
+and that she was good-looking, and that Nicky loved her; but Mrs.
+Jervis's shafts fell wide of all her vulnerable places. Frances was
+no longer afraid.</p>
+<p>"Veronica," she said, "is growing up very good." It was not the
+word she would have chosen, yet it was the only one she could think
+of as likely to convey to Mrs. Jervis what she wanted her to know,
+though it left her obtuseness without any sense of Veronica's
+mysterious quality.</p>
+<p>She herself had never tried to think of a word for it before;
+she was only driven to it now because she detected in her friend's
+tone a challenge and a warning. It was as if Rosalind's mother had
+said, extensively and with pointed reference to the facts:
+"Veronica is dangerous. Her mother has had adventures. She is
+grown-up and she is good-looking, and Nicky is susceptible to that
+sort of thing. If you don't look out he will be caught again. The
+only difference between Phyllis Desmond and Veronica is in their
+skins."</p>
+<p>So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs.
+Jervis should understand, once for all, that she was not in the
+least like her mother or like Phyllis Desmond.</p>
+<p>That was enough for Mrs. Jervis. But it was not enough for
+Frances, who found her mind wandering off from Rosalind's mother
+and looking for the word of words that would express her own
+meaning to her own satisfaction.</p>
+<p>Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation
+that flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs.
+Vereker and Mrs. Norris on her left.</p>
+<p>Veronica was good. But she was not wrapped up in other people's
+lives as Frances was wrapped up. She was wrapped up, not in
+herself, but in some life of her own that, as Frances made it out,
+had nothing in the world to do with anybody else's.</p>
+<p>And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were
+thinking, and what you were going to do, and what was happening to
+you. (She had really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky
+when Desmond made him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls
+that divide every soul from every other soul were made of some thin
+and porous stuff that let things through. And in this life of
+yours, for the moments that she shared it, she lived intensely,
+with uncanny delight and pain that were her own and not her
+own.</p>
+<p>And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile
+these extremes of penetration and detachment.</p>
+<p>She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that. He saw
+things. He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights.
+She supposed it was the Highland blood in both of them.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr.
+Bartholomew was better. Frances said he never would be better till
+chemists were forbidden to advertise and the <i>British Medical
+Journal</i> and <i>The Lancet</i> were suppressed. Bartie would
+read them; and they supplied him with all sorts of extraordinary
+diseases.</p>
+<p>She thought: Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and
+Veronica in her innermost life was happy. She had been happy when
+she came back from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky
+cared for her, before Nicky knew it himself.</p>
+<p>Supposing she had known it all the time? But that, Frances said
+to herself, was nonsense. If she had known as much as all that, why
+should she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of
+it? Unless--supposing--it had been his suffering that she had
+nearly died of?</p>
+<p>Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr.
+Maurice looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that
+Morrie hadn't been fit for anything since he was in South
+Africa.</p>
+<p>Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme
+sustained itself. She thought: Then, Nicky had suffered. And
+Veronica was the only one who knew. She knew more about Nicky than
+Nicky's mother. This thought was disagreeable to Frances.</p>
+<p>It was all nonsense. She didn't really believe that these things
+happened. Yet, why not? Michael said they happened. Even Dorothy,
+who didn't believe in God and immortality or anything, believed
+that.</p>
+<p>She gave it up; it was beyond her; it bothered her.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Seventy-nine her last birthday."</p>
+<p>Mrs. Norris had said that Mrs. Fleming was wonderful.</p>
+<p>Frances thought: "It's wonderful what Veronica does to
+them."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The sets had changed. Nicholas and a girl friend of Veronica's
+played against George Vereker and Miss Lathom; John, with Mr.
+Jervis for his handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The
+very young Norris fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to
+distinguish himself by catching some ball in full flight as it went
+"out." It was a pure and high ambition, for he knew he was so young
+and unimportant that only the eyes of God and of his mother watched
+him.</p>
+<p>Michael had dropped out of it. He sat beside Dorothy under the
+tree of Heaven and watched Veronica.</p>
+<p>"Veronica's wonderful," he said. "Did you see that?"</p>
+<p>Dorothy had seen.</p>
+<p>Veronica had kept Aunt Emmeline quiet all afternoon. She bad
+made Bartie eat an ice under the impression that it would be good
+for him. And now she had gone with Morrie to the table where the
+drinks were, and had taken his third glass of champagne cup from
+him and made him drink lemonade instead.</p>
+<p>"How does she do it?" said Michael.</p>
+<p>"I don't know. She doesn't know herself. I used to think I could
+manage people, but I'm not in it with Ronny. She ought to be a
+wardress in a lunatic asylum."</p>
+<p>"Now look at that!"</p>
+<p>Veronica had returned to the group formed by Grannie and the
+Aunties and some strangers. The eyes of the four Fleming women had
+looked after her as she went from them; they looked towards her now
+as if some great need, some great longing were appeased by her
+return.</p>
+<p>Grannie made a place by her side for the young girl; she took
+her arm, the young white arm, bare from the elbow in its short
+sleeve, and made it lie across her knees. From time to time
+Grannie's yellow, withered hand stroked the smooth, warm white arm,
+or held it. Emmeline and Edith squatted on the grass at Veronica's
+feet; their worn faces and the worn face of Louie looked at her.
+They hung on her, fascinated, curiously tranquillized, as if they
+drank from her youth.</p>
+<p>"It's funny," Dorothy said, "when you think how they used to
+hate her."</p>
+<p>"It's horrible," said Michael.</p>
+<p>He got up and took Veronica away.</p>
+<p>He was lying at her feet now on the grass in the far corner of
+the lawn under the terrace.</p>
+<p>"Why do you go to them?" he said.</p>
+<p>"Because they want me."</p>
+<p>"You mustn't go when they want you. You mustn't let them get
+hold of you."</p>
+<p>"They don't get hold of me--nothing gets hold of me. I want to
+help them. They say it does them good to have me with them."</p>
+<p>"I should think it did do them good! They feed on you, Ronny. I
+can see it by the way they look at you. You'll die of them if you
+don't give it up."</p>
+<p>"Give what up?"</p>
+<p>"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it?
+Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to
+have been dead years ago.</p>
+<p>"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can
+remember them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin
+sacrificed to them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're
+making them go on."</p>
+<p>"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael,
+when you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without
+being happy, without loving.</p>
+<p>"They used to hate me because I'm Vera's daughter. They don't
+hate me now."</p>
+<p>"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires.
+They'll suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of
+them.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a
+kid and Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky
+house they live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's
+ghost I funked. But I know now it wasn't. It was those four
+terrible women. They're ghosts. I thought you were afraid of
+ghosts."</p>
+<p>"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see
+how awful it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living
+people. Everybody afraid of them--not wanting them."</p>
+<p>"Michael--it would be better to be dead!"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its
+appearance and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's
+friends played singles with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting
+the partners offered them and disdaining inferior antagonists; they
+played, Ellis against Mitchell and Monier-Owen against
+Nicholas.</p>
+<p>They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.</p>
+<p>It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could
+not go on for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had
+done so much for Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of
+Michael's Poems had made an end of that old animosity a year ago.
+Practically, they had had to choose between Bartie and Lawrence
+Stephen as the turning point of honour. Michael had made them see
+that it was possible to overvalue Bartie; also that it was possible
+to pay too high a price for a consecrated moral attitude. In all
+his life the wretched Bartie had never done a thing for any of
+them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather extraordinary success
+absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made his father
+bankrupt he would owe his very means of livelihood to Lawrence
+Stephen.</p>
+<p>Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most
+frightfully to go on living in the same house with people who
+disliked him.</p>
+<p>If, Michael said, they chose to dissociate themselves altogether
+from their eldest son and his career, very well. They could go on
+ignoring and tacitly insulting Mr. Stephen. He could understand
+their taking a consistently wrong-headed line like that; but so
+long as they had any regard, either for him or his career, he
+didn't see how they could very well keep it up any longer. He was
+sorry, of course, that his career had let them in for Stephen if
+they didn't like him; but there it was.</p>
+<p>And beyond a doubt it was there.</p>
+<p>"You might vindicate Bartie gloriously," Michael said, "by
+turning me out of the house and disinheriting me. But would it be
+worth while? I'm not asking you to condone Stephen's conduct--if
+you can't condone it; I'm asking you either to acknowledge
+<i>or</i> repudiate your son's debts.</p>
+<p>"After all, if <i>he</i> can condone your beastly treatment of
+him--I wouldn't like him if he was the swine you think him."</p>
+<p>And Anthony had appealed to Michael's mother.</p>
+<p>To his "Well, Frances, what do you think? Ought we or oughtn't
+we?" she had replied: "I think we ought to stand solid behind
+Michael."</p>
+<p>It was Michael's life that counted, for it was going on into a
+great future. Bartie would pass and Michael would remain.</p>
+<p>Their nervous advances had ended in a complete surrender to
+Stephen's charm.</p>
+<p>Vera and Stephen seemed to think that the way to show the
+sincerity and sweetness of their reconciliation was to turn up as
+often as possible on Frances's Day. They arrived always at the same
+hour, a little late; they came by the road and the front door, so
+that when Bartie saw them coming he could retreat through the
+garden door and the lane. The Flemings and the Jervises retreated
+with him; and presently, when it had had a good look at the
+celebrities, the rest of the party followed.</p>
+<p>This Saturday Frances's Day dwindled and melted away and closed,
+after its manner; only Vera and Stephen lingered. They stayed on
+talking to Michael long after everybody else had gone.</p>
+<p>Stephen said he had come to say good-bye to Michael's people and
+to make a proposal to Michael himself. He was going to Ireland.</p>
+<p>Vera interrupted him with passion.</p>
+<p>"He isn't. He hasn't any proposal to make. He hasn't come to say
+good-bye."</p>
+<p>Her restless, unhappy eyes turned to him incessantly, as if,
+more than ever, she was afraid that he would escape her, that he
+would go off God knew where.</p>
+<p>God knew where he was going, but Vera did not believe that he
+was going to Ireland. He had talked about going to Ireland for
+years, and he had never gone.</p>
+<p>Stephen looked as if he did not see her; as if he did not even
+see Michael very distinctly.</p>
+<p>"I'm going," he said, "to Ireland on Monday week, the third of
+August. I mayn't come back for long enough. I may not come back at
+all."</p>
+<p>"That's the sort of thing he keeps on saying."</p>
+<p>"I may not come back <i>at all</i>. So I want you to take over
+the <i>Review</i> for me. Ellis and my secretary will show you how
+it stands. You'll know what to do. I can trust you not to let it
+down."</p>
+<p>"He doesn't mean what he says, Michael. He's only saying it to
+frighten me. He's been holding it over me for years.</p>
+<p>"<i>Say</i> you'll have nothing to do with it. <i>Say</i> you
+won't touch his old <i>Review</i>."</p>
+<p>"Could I go to Ireland for you?"</p>
+<p>"You couldn't."</p>
+<p>"Why not? What do you think you're going to do there?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to pull the Nationalists together, so that if there's
+civil war in Ireland, the Irish will have a chance to win. Thank
+God for Carson! He's given us the opportunity we wanted."</p>
+<p>"Tell him he's not to go, Michael. He won't listen to me, but
+he'll mind what you say."</p>
+<p>"I want to go instead of him."</p>
+<p>"You can't go instead of me. Nobody can go instead of me."</p>
+<p>"I can go with you."</p>
+<p>"You can't."</p>
+<p>"Larry, if you take Michael to Ireland, Anthony and Frances will
+never forgive you. <i>I</i>'ll never forgive you."</p>
+<p>"I'm not taking Michael to Ireland, I'm telling you. There's no
+reason why Michael should go to Ireland at all. It isn't <i>his</i>
+country."</p>
+<p>"You needn't rub <i>that</i> in," said Michael.</p>
+<p>"It isn't <i>yours</i>," said Vera. "Ireland doesn't want you.
+The Nationalists don't want you. You said yourself they've turned
+you out of Ireland. When you've lived in England all these years
+why should you go back to a place that doesn't want you?"</p>
+<p>"Because if Carson gets a free hand I see some chance of Ireland
+being a free country."</p>
+<p>Vera wailed and entreated. She said it showed how much he cared
+for her. It showed that he was tired of her. Why couldn't he say so
+and have done with it?</p>
+<p>"It's not," she said, "as if you could really do anything.
+You're a dreamer. Ireland has had enough of dreamers." And
+Stephen's eyes looked over her head, into the high branches of the
+tree of Heaven, as if he saw his dream shining clear through them
+like a moon.</p>
+<p>The opportunist could see nothing but his sublime
+opportunity.</p>
+<p>Michael went back with him to dine and talk it over. There was
+to be civil war in Ireland then?</p>
+<p>He thought: If only Lawrence would let him go with him. He
+wanted to go to Ireland. To join the Nationalists and fight for
+Ireland, fight for the freedom he was always dreaming
+about--<i>that</i> would be a fine thing. It would be a finer thing
+than writing poems about Ireland.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen went soberly and steadily through the affair of
+the <i>Review</i>, explaining things to Michael. He wanted this
+done, and this. And over and over again Michael's voice broke
+through his instructions. Why couldn't he go to Ireland instead of
+Lawrence? Or, if Lawrence wouldn't let him go instead of him, he
+might at least take him with him. He didn't want to stay at home
+editing the <i>Review</i>. Ellis or Mitchell or Monier-Owen would
+edit it better than he could. Even the wretched Wadham would edit
+it just as well. He wanted to go to Ireland and fight.</p>
+<p>But Lawrence wouldn't let him go. He wasn't going to have the
+boy's blood on his hands. His genius and his youth were too
+precious.</p>
+<p>Besides, Ireland was not his country.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>It was past ten o'clock. Frances was alone in the drawing-room.
+She sat by the open window and waited and watched.</p>
+<p>The quiet garden lay open to her sight. Only the inner end of
+the farther terrace, under the orchard wall, was hidden by a high
+screen of privet.</p>
+<p>It seemed hours to Frances since she had seen Nicky and Veronica
+go down the lawn on to the terrace.</p>
+<p>And then Anthony had gone out too. She was vexed with Anthony.
+She could see him sitting under his ash-tree, her tree of heaven;
+his white shirt-front gave out an oblong gleam like phosphorous in
+the darkness under the tree. She was watching to see that he didn't
+get up and go on to the terrace. Anthony had no business in the
+garden at all. He was catching cold in it. He had sneezed twice.
+She wanted Nicholas and Veronica to have the garden to themselves
+to-night, and the perfect stillness of the twilight to themselves,
+every tree and every little leaf and flower keeping quiet for them;
+and there was Anthony sneezing.</p>
+<p>She was restless and impatient, as if she carried the burden of
+their passion in her own heart.</p>
+<p>Presently she could bear it no longer. She got up and called to
+Anthony to come in. He came obediently. "What are you thinking of,"
+she said, "planting yourself out there and sneezing? I could see
+your shirt-front a mile off. It's indecent of you."</p>
+<p>"Why indecent?"</p>
+<p>"Because Nicky and Veronica are out there."</p>
+<p>"I don't see them."</p>
+<p>"Do you suppose they want you to see them?"</p>
+<p>She turned the electric light on full, to make darkness of their
+twilight out there.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicky and Veronica talked together in the twilight, sitting on
+the seat under the orchard well behind the privet screen. They did
+not see Anthony sitting under the ash-tree, they did not hear him,
+they did not hear Frances calling to him to come in. They were
+utterly unaware of Frances and Anthony.</p>
+<p>"Ronny," he said, "did Michael say anything to you?"</p>
+<p>"When?"</p>
+<p>"This afternoon, when he made you come with him here?"</p>
+<p>"How do you mean, 'say anything'?"</p>
+<p>"You know what I mean."</p>
+<p>"<i>Mick</i>?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Did he ask you to marry him?"</p>
+<p>"No. He said a lot of funny things, but he didn't say that. He
+wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Why wouldn't he?"</p>
+<p>"Because--he just wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Well, he says he understands you."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Veronica conclusively, "of course he wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"Yes; but he says <i>I</i> don't."</p>
+<p>"Dear Nicky, you understand me when nobody else does. You always
+did."</p>
+<p>"Yes, when we were kids. But supposing <i>now</i> I ever didn't,
+would it matter? You see, I'm stupid, and caring--caring
+awfully--might make me stupider. <i>Have</i> people got to
+understand each other?"</p>
+<p>To that she replied astonishingly, "Are you quite sure you
+understand about Ferdie?"</p>
+<p>"Ferdie?"</p>
+<p>"Yes." She turned her face full to him. "I don't know whether
+you know about it. <i>I</i> didn't till Mother told me the other
+day. I'm Ferdie's daughter.</p>
+<p>"Did you know?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord, yes. I've known it for--oh, simply ever so long."</p>
+<p>"Who told you?"</p>
+<p>"Dorothy, I think. But I guessed it because of something he said
+once about seeing ghosts."</p>
+<p>"I wonder if you know how I feel about it? I want you to
+understand that. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I'm proud. I'm
+<i>glad</i> I'm Ferdie's daughter, not Bartie's.... I'd take his
+name, so that everybody should know I was his daughter, only that I
+like Uncle Anthony's name best. I'm glad Mother loved him."</p>
+<p>"So am I, Ronny. I know I shouldn't have liked Bartie's
+daughter. Bartie's daughter wouldn't have been you."</p>
+<p>He took her in his arms and held her face against his face. And
+it was as if Desmond had never been.</p>
+<p>A little while ago he had hated Desmond because she had come
+before Veronica; she had taken what belonged to Veronica, the first
+tremor of his passion, the irrecoverable delight and surprise. And
+now he knew that, because he had not loved her, she had taken
+nothing.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"Do you love me?"</p>
+<p>"Do you love <i>me</i>?"</p>
+<p>"You know I love you."</p>
+<p>"You know. You know."</p>
+<p>What they said was new and wonderful to them as if nobody before
+them had ever thought of it.</p>
+<p>Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the
+birch-trees, and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in
+each other's arms and said the same thing in the same words: "Do
+you love me?" "You know I love you!" over and over, in voices
+drowsy and thick with love.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And
+that's that damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to
+wait goodness knows how long. Ages we may have to."</p>
+<p>"I'd wait all my life if I could have you in the last five
+seconds of it. And if I couldn't, I'd still wait."</p>
+<p>And presently Veronica remembered Michael.</p>
+<p>"Why did you ask me whether Mick had said anything?"</p>
+<p>"Because I thought you ought to know about it before
+you--Besides, if he <i>had</i>, we should have had to wait a bit
+before we told him."</p>
+<p>It seemed that there was nothing to prevent them marrying
+to-morrow if they liked. The strike, Anthony said, couldn't hit him
+as badly as all that.</p>
+<p>He and Frances sat up till long past midnight, talking about
+their plans, and the children's plans. It was all settled. The
+first week in August they would go down to Morfe for the shooting.
+They would stay there till the first week in September. Nicky and
+Veronica would be married the first week in October. And they would
+go to France and Belgium and Germany for their honeymoon.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+<br>
+<p>They did not go down to Morfe the first week in August for the
+shooting.</p>
+<p>Neither did Lawrence Stephen go to Ireland on Monday, the third.
+At the moment when he should have been receiving the
+congratulations of the Dublin Nationalists after his impassioned
+appeal for militant consolidation, Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward
+Carson were shaking hands dramatically in the House of Commons.
+Stephen's sublime opportunity, the civil war, had been snatched
+from him by the unforeseen.</p>
+<p>And there was no chance of Nicky and Veronica going to Belgium
+and France and Germany for their honeymoon.</p>
+<p>For within nine days of Frances's Day Germany had declared war
+on France and Russia, and was marching over the Belgian frontier on
+her way to Paris.</p>
+<p>Frances, aroused at last to realization of the affairs of
+nations, asked, like several million women, "What does it
+mean?"</p>
+<p>And Anthony, like several million men, answered, "It means
+Armageddon." Like several million people, they both thought he was
+saying something as original as it was impressive, something clear
+and final and descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative
+people went about saying it to each other. The sound of the word
+thrilled them, intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that
+was at the same time, in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them
+with a solemn and sombre passion. They said "Armageddon. It means
+Armageddon." Yet nobody knew and nobody asked or thought of asking
+what Armageddon meant.</p>
+<p>"Shall We come into it?" said Frances. She was thinking of the
+Royal Navy turning out to the last destroyer to save England from
+invasion; of the British Army most superfluously prepared to defend
+England from the invader, who, after all, could not invade; of
+Indian troops pouring into England if the worst came to the worst.
+She had the healthy British mind that refuses and always has
+refused to acknowledge the possibility of disaster. Yet she asked
+continually, "Would England be drawn in?" She was thankful that
+none of her sons had gone into the Army or the Navy. Whoever else
+was in, they would be out of it.</p>
+<p>At first Anthony said, "No. Of course England wouldn't be drawn
+in."</p>
+<p>Then, on the morning of England's ultimatum, the closing of the
+Stock Exchange and the Banks made him thoughtful, and he admitted
+that it looked as if England might be drawn in after all. The long
+day, without any business for him and Nicholas, disturbed him.
+There was a nasty, hovering smell of ruin in the air. But there was
+no panic. The closing of the Banks was only a wise precaution
+against panic. And by evening, as the tremendous significance of
+the ultimatum sank into him, he said definitively that England
+would not be drawn in.</p>
+<p>Then Drayton, whom they had not seen for months (since he had
+had his promotion) telephoned to Dorothy to come and dine with him
+at his club in Dover Street. Anthony missed altogether the
+significance of <i>that</i>.</p>
+<p>He had actually made for himself an after-dinner peace in which
+coffee could be drunk and cigarettes smoked as if nothing were
+happening to Europe.</p>
+<p>"England," he said, "will not be drawn in, because her ultimatum
+will stop the War. There won't be any Armageddon."</p>
+<p>"Oh, won't there!" said Michael. "And I can tell you there won't
+be much left of us after it's over."</p>
+<p>He had been in Germany and he knew. He carried himself with a
+sort of stern haughtiness, as one who knew better than any of them.
+And yet his words conveyed no picture to his brain, no definite
+image of anything at all.</p>
+<p>But in Nicholas's brain images gathered fast, one after another;
+they thickened; clear, vivid images with hard outlines. They came
+slowly but with order and precision. While the others talked he had
+been silent and very grave.</p>
+<p>"<i>Some</i> of us'll be left," he said. "But it'll take us all
+our time."</p>
+<p>Anthony looked thoughtfully at Nicholas. A sudden wave of
+realization beat up against his consciousness and receded.</p>
+<p>"Well," he said, "we shall know at midnight."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>An immense restlessness came over them.</p>
+<p>At a quarter-past eight Dorothy telephoned from her club in
+Grafton street. Frank had had to leave her suddenly. Somebody had
+sent for him. And if they wanted to see the sight of their lives
+they were to come into town at once. St. James's was packed with
+people from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace. It was like nothing on
+earth, and they mustn't miss it. She'd wait for them in Grafton
+Street till a quarter to nine, but not a minute later.</p>
+<p>Nicky got out his big four-seater Morss car. They packed
+themselves into it, all six of them somehow, and he drove them into
+London. They had a sense of doing something strange and memorable
+and historic. Dorothy, picked up at her club, showed nothing but a
+pleasurable excitement. She gave no further information about
+Frank. He had had to go off and see somebody. What did he think? He
+thought what he had always thought; only he wouldn't talk about
+it.</p>
+<p>Dorothy was not inclined to talk about it either. The Morss was
+caught in a line blocked at the bottom of Albemarle Street by two
+streams of cars, mixed with two streams of foot passengers, that
+poured steadily from Piccadilly into St. James's Street.</p>
+<p>Michael and Dorothy got out and walked. Nicholas gave up his
+place to Anthony and followed with Veronica.</p>
+<p>Their restlessness had been a part of the immense restlessness
+of the crowd. They were drawn, as the crowd was drawn; they went as
+the crowd went, up and down, restlessly, from Trafalgar Square and
+Whitehall to Buckingham Palace; from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall
+and Trafalgar Square. They drifted down Parliament Street to
+Westminster and back again. An hour ago the drifting, nebulous
+crowd had split, torn asunder between two attractions; its two
+masses had wheeled away, one to the east and the other to the west;
+they had gathered themselves together, one at each pole of the
+space it now traversed. The great meeting in Trafalgar Square
+balanced the multitude that had gravitated towards Buckingham
+Palace, to see the King and Queen come out on their balcony and
+show themselves to their people.</p>
+<p>And as the edges of the two masses gave way, each broke and
+scattered, and was mixed again with the other. Like a flood,
+confined and shaken, it surged and was driven back and surged again
+from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace, from Buckingham Palace to
+Whitehall. It looked for an outlet in the narrow channels of the
+side-streets, or spread itself over the flats of the Green Park,
+only to return restlessly upon itself, sucked back by the main
+current in the Mall.</p>
+<p>It was as if half London had met there for Bank Holiday. Part of
+this crowd was drunk; it was orgiastic; it made strange, fierce
+noises, like the noises of one enormous, mystically excited beast;
+here and there, men and women, with inflamed and drunken faces,
+reeled in each other's arms; they wore pink paper feathers in their
+hats. Some, only half intoxicated, flicked at each other with long
+streamers of pink and white paper, carried like scourges on small
+sticks. These were the inspired.</p>
+<p>But the great body of the crowd was sober. It went decorously in
+a long procession, young men with their sweethearts, friends,
+brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers with
+their children; none, or very few, went alone that night.</p>
+<p>It was an endless procession of faces; grave and thoughtful
+faces; uninterested, respectable faces; faces of unmoved integrity;
+excited faces; dreaming, wondering, bewildered faces; faces merely
+curious, or curiously exalted, slightly ecstatic, open-mouthed,
+fascinated by each other and by the movements and the lights;
+laughing, frivolous faces, and faces utterly vacant and
+unseeing.</p>
+<p>On every other breast there was a small Union Jack pinned; every
+other hand held and waggled a Union Jack. The Union Jack flew from
+the engine of every other automobile. In twelve hours, out of
+nowhere, thousands and thousands of flags sprang magically into
+being; as if for years London had been preparing for this day.</p>
+<p>And in and out of this crowd the train of automobiles with their
+flags dashed up and down the Mall for hours, appearing and
+disappearing. Intoxicated youths with inflamed faces, in full
+evening dress, squatted on the roofs of taxi-cabs or rode astride
+on the engines of their cars, waving flags.</p>
+<p>All this movement, drunken, orgiastic, somnambulistic,
+mysteriously restless, streamed up and down between two solemn and
+processional lines of lights, two solemn and processional lines of
+trees, lines that stretched straight from Whitehall to Buckingham
+Palace in a recurrent pattern of trees and lamps, dark trees,
+twilit trees, a lamp and a tree shining with a metallic unnatural
+green; and, at the end of the avenue, gilded gates and a
+golden-white fa&ccedil;ade.</p>
+<p>The crowd was drifting now towards the Palace. Michael and
+Dorothea, Nicholas and Veronica, went with it. In this eternal
+perambulation they met people that they knew; Stephen and Vera;
+Mitchell, Monier-Owen; Uncle Morrie and his sisters. Anthony,
+looking rather solemn, drove past them in his car. It was like
+impossible, grotesque encounters in a dream.</p>
+<p>Outside the Palace the crowd moved up and down without rest; it
+drifted and returned; it circled round and round the fountain. In
+the open spaces the intoxicated motor-cars and taxi-cabs darted and
+tore with the folly of moths and the fury of destroyers. They stung
+the air with their hooting. Flags, intoxicated flags, still hung
+from their engines. They came flying drunkenly out of the dark,
+like a trumpeting swarm of enormous insects, irresistibly,
+incessantly drawn to the lights of the Palace, hypnotized by the
+golden-white fa&ccedil;ade.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, Michael's soul revolted.</p>
+<p>"If this demented herd of swine is a great people going into a
+great war, God help us! Beasts--it's not as if <i>their</i> bloated
+skins were likely to be punctured."</p>
+<p>He called back over his shoulders to the others.</p>
+<p>"Let's get out of this. If we don't I shall be sick."</p>
+<p>He took Dorothy by her arm and shouldered his way out.</p>
+<p>The water had ceased playing in the fountain.</p>
+<p>Nicholas and Veronica stood by the fountain. The water in the
+basin was green like foul sea-water. The jetsam of the crowd
+floated there. A small child leaned over the edge of the basin and
+fished for Union Jacks in the filthy pool. Its young mother held it
+safe by the tilted edge of its petticoats. She looked up at them
+and smiled. They smiled back again and turned away.</p>
+<p>It was quiet on the south side by the Barracks. Small, sober
+groups of twos and threes strolled there, or stood with their faces
+pressed close against the railings, peering into the barrack yard.
+Motionless, earnest and attentive, they stared at the men in khaki
+moving about on the other side of the railings. They were silent,
+fascinated by the men in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing,
+they stared at them with an awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in
+khaki stared back, proud, self-conscious, as men who know that the
+hour is great and that it is their hour.</p>
+<p>"Nicky," Veronica said, "I wish Michael wouldn't say things like
+that."</p>
+<p>"He's dead right, Ronny. That isn't the way to take it, getting
+drunk and excited, and rushing about making silly asses of
+themselves. They <i>are</i> rather swine, you know."</p>
+<p>"Yes; but they're pathetic. Can't you see how pathetic they are?
+Nicky, I believe I love the swine--even the poor drunken ones with
+the pink paper feathers--just because they're English; because
+awful things are going to happen to them, and they don't know it.
+They're English."</p>
+<p>"You think God's made us all like that? He <i>hasn't</i>."</p>
+<p>They found Anthony in the Mall, driving up and down, looking for
+them. He had picked up Dorothy and Aunt Emmeline and Uncle
+Morrie.</p>
+<p>"We're going down to the Mansion House," he said, "to hear the
+Proclamation. Will you come?"</p>
+<p>But Veronica and Nicholas were tired of crowds, even of historic
+crowds. Anthony drove off with his car-load, and they went
+home.</p>
+<p>"I never saw Daddy so excited," Nicky said.</p>
+<p>But Anthony was not excited. He had never felt calmer or cooler
+in his life.</p>
+<p>He returned some time after midnight. By that time it had sunk
+into him. Germany <i>had</i> defied the ultimatum and England
+<i>had</i> declared war on Germany.</p>
+<p>He said it was only what was to be foreseen. He had known all
+the time that it would happen--really.</p>
+<p>The tension of the day of the ultimatum had this peculiar
+psychological effect that all over England people who had declared
+up to the last minute that there would be no War were saying the
+same thing as Anthony and believing it.</p>
+<p>Michael was disgusted with the event that had put an end to the
+Irish Revolution. It was in this form that he conceived his first
+grudge against the War.</p>
+<p>This emotion of his was like some empty space of horror opened
+up between him and Nicholas; Nicky being the only one of his family
+who was as yet aware of its existence.</p>
+<p>For the next three days, Nicholas, very serious and earnest,
+shut himself up in his workshop at the bottom of the orchard and
+laboured there, putting the last touches to the final, perfect,
+authoritative form of the Moving Fortress, the joint creation of
+his brain and Drayton's, the only experiment that had survived the
+repeated onslaughts of the Major's criticism. The new model was
+three times the size of the lost original; it was less like a
+battleship and more like a racing-car and a destroyer. It was his
+and Drayton's last word on the subject of armaments.</p>
+<p>It was going to the War Office, this time, addressed to the
+right person, and accompanied by all sorts of protective
+introductions, and Drayton blasting its way before it with his new
+explosive.</p>
+<p>In those three days Nick found an immense distraction in his
+Moving Fortress. It also served to blind his family to his real
+intentions. He knew that his real intentions could not be kept from
+them very long. Meanwhile the idea that he was working on something
+made them happy. When Frances saw him in his overalls she smiled
+and said: "Nicky's got <i>his</i> job, anyhow." John came and
+looked at him through the window of the workshop and laughed.</p>
+<p>"Good old Nicky," he said. "Doing his bit!"</p>
+<p>In those three days John went about with an air of agreeable
+excitement. Or you came upon him sitting in solitary places like
+the dining-room, lost in happy thought. Michael said of him that he
+was unctuous. He exuded a secret joy and satisfaction. John had
+acquired a sudden remarkable maturity. He shone on each member of
+his family with benevolence and affection, as if he were its
+protector and consoler, and about to confer on it some tremendous
+benefit.</p>
+<p>"Look at Don-Don," Michael said. "The bloodthirsty little brute.
+He's positively enjoying the War."</p>
+<p>"You might leave me alone," said Don-Don. "I shan't have it to
+enjoy for long."</p>
+<p>He was one of those who believed that the War would be over in
+four months.</p>
+<p>Michael, pledged to secrecy, came and looked at the Moving
+Fortress. He was interested and intelligent; he admired that
+efficiency of Nicky's that was so unlike his own.</p>
+<p>Yet, he wondered, after all, was it so unlike? He, too, was
+aiming at an art as clean and hard and powerful as Nicky's, as
+naked of all blazonry and decoration, an art which would attain its
+objective by the simplest, most perfect adjustment of means to
+ends.</p>
+<p>And Anthony was proud of that hidden wonder locked behind the
+door of the workshop in the orchard. He realized that his son
+Nicholas had taken part in a great and important thing. He was
+prouder of Nicholas than he had been of Michael.</p>
+<p>And Michael knew it.</p>
+<p>Nicky's brains could be used for the service of his country.</p>
+<p>But Michael's? Anthony said to himself that there wasn't any
+sense--any sense that he could endure to contemplate--in which
+Michael's brains could be of any use to his country. When Anthony
+thought of the mobilization of his family for national service,
+Michael and Michael's brains were a problem that he put behind him
+for the present and refused to contemplate. There would be time
+enough for Michael later.</p>
+<p>Anthony was perfectly well aware of his own one talent, the
+talent which had made "Harrison and Harrison" the biggest
+timber-importing firm in England. If there was one thing he
+understood it was organization. If there was one thing he could not
+tolerate it was waste of good material, the folly of forcing men
+and women into places they were not fit for. He had let his eldest
+son slip out of the business without a pang, or with hardly any
+pang. He had only taken Nicholas into it as an experiment. It was
+on John that he relied to inherit it and carry it farther.</p>
+<p>As a man of business he approved of the advertised formula:
+"Business as Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which
+England expected every man to do was to stay in the place he was
+most fitted for and to go where he was most wanted. Nothing but
+muddle and disaster could follow any departure from this rule.</p>
+<p>It was fitting that Frances and Veronica should do Red Cross
+work. It was fitting that Dorothy should help to organize the
+relief of the Belgium refugees. It was fitting that John should
+stay at home and carry on the business, and that he, Anthony,
+should enlist when he had settled John into his place. It was,
+above all, fitting that Nicky should devote himself to the
+invention and manufacture of armaments. He could not conceive
+anything more wantonly and scandalously wasteful than a system that
+could make any other use of Nicky's brains. He thanked goodness
+that, with a European War upon us, such a system, if it existed,
+would not be allowed to live a day.</p>
+<p>As for Michael, it might be fitting later--very much
+later--perhaps. If Michael wanted to volunteer for the Army then,
+and if it were necessary, he would have no right to stop him. But
+it would not be necessary. England was going to win this War on the
+sea and not on land. Michael was practically safe.</p>
+<p>And behind Frances's smile, and John's laughter, and Michael's
+admiration, and Anthony's pride there was the thought: "Whatever
+happens, Nicky will he safe."</p>
+<p>And the model of the Moving Fortress was packed up--Veronica and
+Nicky packed it--and it was sent under high protection to the War
+Office. And Nicky unlocked the door of his workshop and rested
+restlessly from his labour.</p>
+<p>And there was a call for recruits, and for still more
+recruits.</p>
+<p>Westminster Bridge became a highway for regiments marching to
+battle. The streets were parade-grounds for squad after squad of
+volunteers in civilian clothes, self-conscious and abashed under
+the eyes of the men in khaki.</p>
+<p>And Michael said: "This is the end of all the arts. Artists will
+not be allowed to exist except as agents for the recruiting
+sergeant. We're dished."</p>
+<p>That was the second grudge he had against the War. It killed the
+arts in the very hour of their renaissance. "Eccentricities" by
+Morton Ellis, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, and the "New
+Poems" of Michael Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell,
+were to have come out in September. But it was not conceivable that
+they should come out.</p>
+<p>At the first rumour of the ultimatum Michael and Ellis had given
+themselves up for lost.</p>
+<p>Li&eacute;ge fell and Namur was falling.</p>
+<p>And the call went on for recruits, and for still more recruits.
+And Nicky in five seconds had destroyed his mother's illusions and
+the whole fabric of his father's plans.</p>
+<p>It was one evening when they were in the drawing-room, sitting
+up after Veronica had gone to bed.</p>
+<p>"I hope you won't mind, Father," he said; "but I'm going to
+enlist to-morrow."</p>
+<p>He did not look at his father's face. He looked at his mother's.
+She was sitting opposite him on the couch beside Dorothy. John
+balanced himself on the head of the couch with his arm round his
+mother's shoulder. Every now and then he stooped down and rubbed
+his cheek thoughtfully against her hair.</p>
+<p>A slight tremor shook her sensitive, betraying upper lip; then
+she looked back at Nicholas and smiled.</p>
+<p>Dorothy set her mouth hard, unsmiling.</p>
+<p>Anthony had said nothing. He stared before him at Michael's
+foot, thrust out and tilted by the crossing of his knees. Michael's
+foot, with its long, arched instep, fascinated Anthony. He seemed
+to be thinking: "If I look at it long enough I may forget what
+Nicky has said."</p>
+<p>"I hope you won't mind, Father; but I'm enlisting too."</p>
+<p>John's voice was a light, high echo of Nicky's.</p>
+<p>With a great effort Anthony roused himself from his
+contemplation of Michael's foot.</p>
+<p>"I--can't--see--that my minding--or not minding--has
+anything--to do--with it."</p>
+<p>He brought his words out slowly and with separate efforts, as if
+they weighed heavily on his tongue. "We've got to consider what's
+best for the country all round, and I doubt if either of you is
+called upon to go."</p>
+<p>"Some of us have got to go," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"Quite so. But I don't think it ought to be you, Nicky; or John,
+either."</p>
+<p>"I suppose," said Michael, "you mean it ought to be me."</p>
+<p>"I don't mean anything of the sort. One out of four's
+enough."</p>
+<p>"One out of four? Well then--"</p>
+<p>"That only leaves me to fight," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"I wasn't thinking of you, Michael. Or of Dorothy."</p>
+<p>They all looked at him where he sat, upright and noble, in his
+chair, and most absurdly young.</p>
+<p>Dorothy said under her breath: "Oh, you darling Daddy."</p>
+<p>"<i>You</i> won't be allowed to go, anyhow," said John to his
+father. "You needn't think it."</p>
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+<p>"Well--." He hadn't the heart to say: "Because you're too
+old."</p>
+<p>"Nicky's brains will be more use to the country than my old
+carcass."</p>
+<p>Nicky thought: "You're the very last of us that can be spared."
+But he couldn't say it. The thing was so obvious. All he said was:
+"It's out of the question, your going."</p>
+<p>"Old Nicky's out of the question, if you like," said John. "He's
+going to be married. He ought to be thinking of his wife and
+children."</p>
+<p>"Of course he ought," said Anthony. "Whoever goes first, it
+isn't Nicky."</p>
+<p>"You ought to think of Mummy, Daddy ducky; and you ought to
+think of <i>us</i>," said Dorothy.</p>
+<p>"I," said John, "haven't got anybody to think of. I'm not going
+to be married, and I haven't any children."</p>
+<p>"I haven't got a wife and children yet," said Nicky.</p>
+<p>"You've got Veronica. You ought to think of her."</p>
+<p>"I am thinking of her. You don't suppose Veronica'd stop me if I
+wanted to go? Why, she wouldn't look at me if I didn't want to
+go."</p>
+<p>Suddenly he remembered Michael.</p>
+<p>"I mean," he said, "after my <i>saying</i> that I was
+going."</p>
+<p>Their eyes met. Michael's flickered. He knew that Nicky was
+thinking of him.</p>
+<p>"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.</p>
+<p>"Of course she knows. <i>You</i> aren't going to try to stop me,
+Mother?"</p>
+<p>"No," she said. "I'm not going to try to stop you--this
+time."</p>
+<p>She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would
+be safe now, with the Army in India."</p>
+<p>One by one they got up and said "Good night" to each other.</p>
+<p>But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.</p>
+<p>He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not
+enlisting. At any rate, <i>not yet</i>. Don't worry about Don and
+Daddy. They won't take Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his
+heart that he doesn't know about. He's going to be jolly well sold,
+poor chap. And they won't take the guv'nor because he's too old;
+though the dear old thing thinks he can bluff them into it because
+he doesn't look it.</p>
+<p>"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned,
+the War's a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the
+Army. You know how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now
+I'm going in and nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me
+out. Soon they'll all be as pleased as Punch about it.</p>
+<p>"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want
+to stick bayonets into German tummies, just <i>because</i> they're
+so large and oodgy. You'd think of that first and all the time and
+afterwards. And I shan't think of it at all.</p>
+<p>"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons
+that I can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect
+yourself if you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I
+stayed out."</p>
+<p>"I wonder," Michael said, "if you really see it."</p>
+<p>"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing
+chaps. You seem to think nobody can ever see anything except
+yourselves."</p>
+<p>When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really
+does see? Or if he made it all up?"</p>
+<p>They had not said to each other all that they had really meant.
+Of Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered
+vividly, "Not yet."</p>
+<p>Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up
+between him and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the
+two words: "Not yet."</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+<br>
+<p>It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected;
+Anthony on account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur
+that he didn't know about.</p>
+<p>The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was
+under thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if
+he'd left it at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than
+most of 'em when he was stripped. But they'd given him so good an
+innings that the poor old thing got above himself, and spun them a
+yarn about his hair having gone grey from a recent shock. That
+dished him. They said they knew that sort of hair; they'd been
+seeing a lot of it lately.</p>
+<p>Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape,"
+and declared that if that was the way things were going to be
+managed it was a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He
+said the man who examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know
+his own rotten business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to
+tell him they didn't want him dropping down dead when he went into
+action, or fainting from sheer excitement after they'd been to the
+trouble and expense of training him. As if he'd be likely to do a
+damn silly thing like that. He'd never been excited in his life. It
+was enough to <i>give</i> him heart-disease.</p>
+<p>So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and
+joined the ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they
+learned to their disgust that, though they might possibly be
+accepted as volunteers for Home Service, their disabilities would
+keep them forever from the Front.</p>
+<p>At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business
+by a sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the
+War would be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the
+personal significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that
+its immediate message for him was that business must be attended
+to. He had not attended to it many days before he saw that his work
+for his country lay there under his hand, in his offices and his
+stackyards and factories. He sighed and sat down to it, and turned
+his back resolutely on the glamour of the Front. The particular
+business in hand had great issues and a fascination of its own.</p>
+<p>And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body
+and a brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and
+abstracted soul.</p>
+<p>And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through
+the first courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching
+in sun and wind and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high,
+breast high in earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his
+young, hard body harder every day.</p>
+<p>And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael
+widened.</p>
+<p>With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's
+entire family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized
+from Frances and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days
+there were few Red Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner
+or later they would be sent to the Front. Their only fear was that
+they might not be trained and ready when the moment of the summons
+came. Strong young girls hustled for the best places at the
+ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly women, twitching with nervous
+anxiety, contended with these remorseless ones and were pushed to
+the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained by their
+extraordinary illusion.</p>
+<p>Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity
+with bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if
+nobody else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of
+cerebral excitement, while still struggling to find each other's
+arteries, declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no
+earthly reason why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted
+the Emergency class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch
+triangular bandage round his neck, and volunteered as an
+instructor. He got mixed up with his bandages, and finally
+consented to the use of his person as a lay-figure for practical
+demonstrations while he waited for his orders to go to the
+Front.</p>
+<p>They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each
+other's hopes.</p>
+<p>For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings
+had ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a
+curious gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom
+(Michael's study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall,
+and there the queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and
+tender, showing Edith over and over again how to adjust a scalp
+bandage on Emmeline's head, and of Emmeline motionless for hours
+under Edie's little, clumsy, pinching fingers. It was thus, with
+small vibrations of tenderness and charity, that they responded to
+the vast rhythm of the War.</p>
+<p>And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence,
+pushed out her lower lip at them.</p>
+<p>"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit,
+you might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every
+woman in England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have
+enough socks for his Army."</p>
+<p>Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted
+conspicuously, as a protest against bandage practice; giving to her
+soft and gentle action an air of energy inimical to her three
+unmarried daughters. And not even Louie had the heart to tell her
+that all her knitting had to be unravelled overnight, to save the
+wool.</p>
+<p>"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting
+khaki!"</p>
+<p>Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal
+affair, as if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other
+women were interfering with them.</p>
+<p>Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all
+the men. The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and
+her followers received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain
+from violence during the period of the War. And instantly, in the
+first week of war, the Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies
+(already organized and disciplined by seven years' methodical
+resistance) presented their late enemy, the Government, with an
+instrument of national service made to its hand and none the worse
+because originally devised for its torture and embarassment.</p>
+<p>The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a
+sound into the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all
+over England and went into uniform.</p>
+<p>And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches
+and puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a
+motor-ambulance as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that
+Anthony had given to it. Dorothea really had a chance of being sent
+to Belgium before the end of the month. Meanwhile she convoyed
+Belgian refugees from Cannon Street Station.</p>
+<p>She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon
+Street Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the
+horror and misery of Belgium poured and was congested.</p>
+<p>Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending
+all of her life that counted there; as if for years she had been
+familiar with the scene.</p>
+<p>Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the
+blurred transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long
+roof, that was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a
+greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps,
+opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By
+night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like
+moons, lit again to a ghastly, ruinous life.</p>
+<p>The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing
+under the immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of
+carriages packed tight with packages, with, enormous bundles; human
+heads appearing, here and there, above the swollen curves of the
+bundles; human bodies emerging in the struggle to bring forth the
+bundles through the narrow doors.</p>
+<p>For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding
+wounds and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this
+one incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon
+Street Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the
+sequences of which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of
+men, women and children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they
+were staggering under those bundles along their straight, flat
+roads between the everlasting rows of poplars; their towns and
+villages flamed and smoked behind them; some of them, goaded like
+tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at their backs--yesterday.
+And this morning they were here, brave and gay, smiling at Dorothea
+as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their small children
+in her arms.</p>
+<p>And they were still proud of themselves.</p>
+<p>A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a
+large pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other
+a cage with a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and
+smiled, proud of herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A
+Belgium boy carried a paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He
+grinned at Dorothea, proud of himself because he had saved his
+grandfather. A young Flemish peasant woman pushed back the shawl
+that covered her baby's face to show her how pretty he was; she
+laughed because she had borne him and saved him.</p>
+<p>And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women
+and girls idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in
+trying to throw himself into a moving train because he thought his
+lost mother was in it. The ring screening the agony of a woman
+giving birth to her child on the platform. A death in the train;
+stiff, upturned feet at the end of a stretcher that the
+police-ambulance carried away.</p>
+<p>And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in
+perfect safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety
+was hard and bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had
+a monstrous longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the
+shells burst, and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the
+straight, flat roads between the poplars where the refugees had
+gone, so that her nerves and flesh should know and feel their
+suffering and their danger. She was not feeling anything now except
+the shame of her immunity.</p>
+<p>She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I
+were dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."</p>
+<p>Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were
+in Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could
+walk."</p>
+<p>Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians,
+because it was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate,
+were safe. Her father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not
+in it--yet; though of course he would be in it some time. She tried
+not to think too much about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next
+six months. And Frank was safe. Frank was training recruits. He had
+told her he might be kept indefinitely at that infernal job. But
+for that he would be fighting now. He wanted her to be sorry for
+him; and she was sorry for him. And she was glad too.</p>
+<p>One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till
+dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she
+found him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting
+for her by himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the
+schoolroom.</p>
+<p>"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait
+up here."</p>
+<p>She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur
+of dust on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her
+face and hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her
+car.</p>
+<p>He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was
+the first time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and
+puttees, the loose felt hat turned up at one side, its funny,
+boyish chin-strap, the dust and dirt of her; and he smiled. His
+smile had none of the cynical derision which had once greeted her
+appearances as a militant suffragist.</p>
+<p>"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe
+me now."</p>
+<p>"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.</p>
+<p>"Not <i>yet</i>--worse luck."</p>
+<p>"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas,
+or what?"</p>
+<p>"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair
+off?"</p>
+<p>"They might. They might do anything. This is a most
+extraordinary war."</p>
+<p>"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."</p>
+<p>"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in
+him.</p>
+<p>"What did you think?"</p>
+<p>"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like
+business. Do you really mean it? Are you really going to
+Flanders?"</p>
+<p>"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this
+if she wasn't going <i>some</i>where?"</p>
+<p>He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And
+then: "It makes you look about eighteen."</p>
+<p>"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."</p>
+<p>"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that
+you're not eighteen? You're eight and twenty."</p>
+<p>"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you
+did, you wouldn't say so."</p>
+<p>"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made
+a pretty mess of each other's lives."</p>
+<p>"Have I made a mess of <i>your</i> life?'</p>
+<p>"A beastly mess."</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known.
+You know I wouldn't.</p>
+<p>"But one doesn't know things."</p>
+<p>"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully
+well; but not the things that matter."</p>
+<p>"Well--but what could I do?" she said.</p>
+<p>"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married
+me. And we would have had three years of each other."</p>
+<p>"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't
+manage it."</p>
+<p>"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.</p>
+<p>"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I
+get leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three
+days."</p>
+<p>"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three
+days--No, it wasn't worth while.</p>
+<p>"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck
+doesn't change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change.
+So, you see, it's got to be one thing or another."</p>
+<p>And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not
+worth while?</p>
+<p>"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There
+really isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what
+you like and do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I
+shan't care if you'll only marry me."</p>
+<p>"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love
+me. You never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all
+that."</p>
+<p>"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine
+years--ten years?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go
+off and get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for
+me or not.</p>
+<p>"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my
+face--filthy--you mustn't--"</p>
+<p>"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't
+care."</p>
+<p>The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He
+laughed. He said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a
+scrimmage, and she keeps it on <i>now</i>!"</p>
+<p>She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of
+a Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face,
+over her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped
+her shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender
+body fast to him, straight against his own straightness, till the
+passion and the youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.</p>
+<p>He said to himself, "She <i>shall</i> come alive. She
+<i>shall</i> feel. She <i>shall want</i> me. I'll make her. I
+should have thought of this ten years ago."</p>
+<p>Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and
+hands. And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing
+something happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him
+now--to-night."</p>
+<p>Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he
+knew what she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor
+Dorothy, who had made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive
+so late.</p>
+<p>She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me
+if he knew."</p>
+<p>Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at
+her?</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her
+face and hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever
+would be.</p>
+<p>"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if
+there was anything that could have prevented it."</p>
+<p>"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't
+matter--that it made no difference to you what I did. But, you see,
+it made all the difference. And there we were."</p>
+<p>"It didn't--really."</p>
+<p>She shook her head. "We thought it did."</p>
+<p>"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from
+Holloway?</p>
+<p>"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk
+about it. I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear
+of you."</p>
+<p>"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that
+we seemed to go wrong.</p>
+<p>"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could
+stand going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying
+that I didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in
+prison or wondered what you were feeling? <i>That's</i> what put me
+off. It hurt so atrociously that I couldn't say anything.</p>
+<p>"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about
+nothing else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with
+thinking.</p>
+<p>"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't
+true. I was listening like anything."</p>
+<p>"Darling--what did I tell you?"</p>
+<p>"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your
+adventure, or something."</p>
+<p>"My adventure?"</p>
+<p>"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I
+couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's
+beyond me now."</p>
+<p>"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"</p>
+<p>"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something
+big and important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to
+bother me. I kept on trying to get it, and not getting it."</p>
+<p>"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully
+big and important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had
+happened to somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."</p>
+<p>"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of
+that business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."</p>
+<p>"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the
+War."</p>
+<p>"You're not swallowed up."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps I shall be."</p>
+<p>"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you
+to know that I understand what you were driving at. It was this
+way, wasn't it? You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You
+couldn't keep out of it any more than I can keep out of this
+War."</p>
+<p>"You couldn't stay out just for me any more than I can stay out
+for just you."</p>
+<p>"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way
+you were in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."</p>
+<p>"How clever of you," she said, "to see it!"</p>
+<p>"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a
+war on. We've both had to pay for my stupidity."</p>
+<p>"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see,
+or risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow, we've got this evening."</p>
+<p>"We haven't. I've got to drive Belgians from nine till past
+midnight."</p>
+<p>"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married
+in. I say--how about to-morrow evening?"</p>
+<p>"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know
+who'll drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married
+in, too."</p>
+<p>She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out.
+If he is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."</p>
+<p>It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch
+at their happiness and secure it, before their hour came.</p>
+<p>She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the
+British line was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of
+course it would recover. We always began like that. We went back to
+go forwards faster, when we got into our stride.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The next evening, Thursday, the girl she knew drove for
+Dorothea.</p>
+<p>When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her
+with two frocks over her arm.</p>
+<p>"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell
+whether to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if
+it mattered more than anything. More than anything on earth."</p>
+<p>Frances considered it--Dorothea in her uniform, and the white
+frock and the blue frock.</p>
+<p>"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose
+to you in that get-up--"</p>
+<p>"Can't you see that I want to make up for <i>that</i> and for
+all the things he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only
+I was as beautiful as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."</p>
+<p>"My dear--my dear--"</p>
+<p>Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as
+Nicky with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up
+Dorothy in khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and
+blue frocks, made Frances want to cry.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy
+that he couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only
+have one hour to give her.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony looked at each other. But Dorothy looked at
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>"What's the matter, Ronny? You look simply awful."</p>
+<p>"Do I? My head's splitting. I think I'll go and lie down."</p>
+<p>"You'd better."</p>
+<p>"Go straight to bed," said Frances. "and let Nanna bring you
+some hot soup."</p>
+<p>But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to
+take herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.</p>
+<p>"Well," said Anthony, "if she's going to worry herself sick
+about Nicky now--"</p>
+<p>Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.</p>
+<p>It was nine o'clock.</p>
+<p>At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought:
+"Supposing he hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely.
+If he hadn't got leave he would have said so when he
+telephoned.</p>
+<p>The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would
+hold her in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be
+afraid, and she would be afraid, and he would let her go.</p>
+<p>The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud
+and quick on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room
+to them, holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes
+shone with excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that
+narrowed his eyes and jerked his mouth slightly crooked.</p>
+<p>They all spoke at once. "You've got leave?" "<i>He's</i> got it
+all right." "What kept you?" "You <i>have</i> got leave?"</p>
+<p>His eyes still shone; his mouth still jerked, laughing.</p>
+<p>"Well, no," he said. "That's what I haven't got. In fact, I'm
+lucky to be here at all."</p>
+<p>Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat
+down on the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his
+spoon, and smiling as if at something pleasant that he knew,
+something that he would tell them presently when Nanna left the
+room.</p>
+<p>The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening
+intently for the click of the latch.</p>
+<p>"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off
+till you come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then
+they say they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that
+day.</p>
+<p>"Twelve hours isn't much notice to give a fellow."</p>
+<p>He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was
+speaking to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions
+about trains and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if
+he were not conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat,
+slowly stirring his coffee without drinking it. The vibration of
+her nerves made his answers sound muffled and far-off.</p>
+<p>She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing
+from her minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable
+longing to be alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what
+she had felt yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in
+yesterday, and refused to move on into to-day.</p>
+<p>Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they
+stopped talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would
+be the end.</p>
+<p>Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup
+he had not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea
+that for a moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small
+sound. She saw her mother take the cup from him and set it on the
+table.</p>
+<p>One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they
+were guilty, and left her alone with him.</p>
+<p>It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He
+sat there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance.
+He seemed to be wondering how she was going to take it.</p>
+<p>He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to
+make her want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left
+it."</p>
+<p>And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.</p>
+<p>She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be
+ready to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness
+he required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes
+implored her to put away from her.</p>
+<p>There was something more.</p>
+<p>He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is
+hard luck on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard
+for me." (She could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He
+knew she was brave; he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he
+knew he hadn't got to say the obvious things.</p>
+<p>There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her
+with the power and sweetness of first passion; but without its
+fear. She no longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her
+as he had held her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it
+vibrated to an intenser rhythm.</p>
+<p>She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that
+they were seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more
+than they. When realization passed it would endure.</p>
+<p>Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it,
+to say to each other what it was they felt and saw.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He said, "I shall have to go soon."</p>
+<p>And she said, "I know. Is there anything I can do?"</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd go and see my mother some time. She'd like
+it."</p>
+<p>"I should love to go and see her. What else?"</p>
+<p>"Well--I've no business to ask you, but I wish you'd give it
+up."</p>
+<p>"I'll give anything up. But what?"</p>
+<p>"That ambulance of yours that's going to get into the firing
+line."</p>
+<p>"Oh--"</p>
+<p>"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the
+hardest and most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it
+easier for us to win the War. You can't expect us to fight so
+comfy, and to be killed so comfy, if we know our womenkind are
+being pounded to bits in the ground we've just cleared. If I
+thought <i>you</i> were knocking about anywhere there--"</p>
+<p>"It would make it too hard?"</p>
+<p>"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much
+time to think about it, but when I did--"</p>
+<p>"You'd think 'She might have spared me <i>that</i>.'"</p>
+<p>"Yes. And you might think of your people. It's bad enough for
+them, Nicky going."</p>
+<p>"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and
+where he'll be. That was natural."</p>
+<p>"It's also natural that we should like to find you here when we
+come back."</p>
+<p>"I was thinking of those Belgian women, and the babies--and
+England; so safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."</p>
+<p>"I know. Leaving the children in the burning house?"</p>
+<p>(She had said that once and he had remembered.)</p>
+<p>"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you
+to take the hardest job, really."</p>
+<p>"It isn't; if it's what you want most."</p>
+<p>He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and
+they were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous
+thing.</p>
+<p>"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about
+it. I want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."</p>
+<p>"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it's
+<i>your</i> War, too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"</p>
+<p>"I know," she said.</p>
+<p>And then: "Have you got all your things?"</p>
+<p>"Somebody's got 'em."</p>
+<p>"I haven't given you anything. You must have my
+wrist-watch."</p>
+<p>She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.</p>
+<p>"My wrist's a whopper."</p>
+<p>"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's
+phosphorous," she said. "You can see the time by it in the
+dark."</p>
+<p>"I've nothing for <i>you</i>. Except--" he fumbled in his
+pockets--"I say--here's the wedding-ring."</p>
+<p>They laughed.</p>
+<p>"What more could you want?" she said.</p>
+<p>He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he
+stooped and kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But
+it was not like yesterday.</p>
+<p>Suddenly his face stiffened. "Tell them," he said, "that I'm
+going."</p>
+<p>The British were retreating from Mons.</p>
+<p>The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like
+the travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There
+was no end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no
+end to the German people. And there was no news of British
+reinforcements, or rumour of reinforcements.</p>
+<p>"They come on like waves. Like waves," said Dorothea, reading
+from the papers.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't read about it if I were you, darling," said
+Frances.</p>
+<p>"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we
+don't."</p>
+<p>Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given
+way before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the
+retreat from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been
+sent.</p>
+<p>Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve
+hours' notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any
+sense in it. They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here,
+safe; and the least we could do for <i>them</i> was to trust them,
+and not believe any tales of their retreating.</p>
+<p>And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By
+wire? By letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to
+wait at home, listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the
+knock, the ringing of the bell.</p>
+<p>She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the
+message came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child
+for me that my son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from
+Mons. And ask her to come and see me; but not just yet."</p>
+<p>She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter
+from his Colonel.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into
+Cannon Street Station.</p>
+<p>Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium.
+But she could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts
+that turned it into something more terrible than grief. They came
+to her regularly, beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and
+should have slept, worn out with her hard day's driving.</p>
+<p>She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we
+might have had together. All those years--like a fool--over that
+silly suffrage.</p>
+<p>"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him
+like a brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom.
+And he's died for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last
+things he remembered. He said 'It's <i>your</i> War--it's the
+biggest fight for freedom.' And he's killed in it.</p>
+<p>"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for
+one night.</p>
+<p>"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked
+it. I was a coward. He got nothing."</p>
+<p>His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an
+illusion that prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging
+it towards a contact that was never reached. Death had no power
+over this illusion. She could not see Drayton's face, dead among
+the dead.</p>
+<p>Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality
+that they had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as
+if she had dreamed it or made it up.</p>
+<p>Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking.
+The Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of
+September, and it would take her car with it and a new driver.</p>
+<p>Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.</p>
+<p>"If I could only help you."</p>
+<p>"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up
+and leave the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to
+Veronica; but more often she hid away somewhere by herself.</p>
+<p>Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her.
+She'll go to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now
+it's Veronica."</p>
+<p>But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to
+Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd
+been killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the
+retreat. He couldn't have had five hours' fighting.</p>
+<p>"And to be killed--Retreating.</p>
+<p>"He got nothing out of it but agony."</p>
+<p>Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You
+don't know what he may have got in the last minute of it."</p>
+<p>"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going
+out to Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet
+getting me. But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.</p>
+<p>"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"</p>
+<p>"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you,
+more alive."</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were
+enclosed with it, one from Drayton's mother and one from
+Drayton:</p>
+<p>"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he
+must have known that he would not come back."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular
+bequest. But I want you to see that my memory is fairly good."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three
+cigarette-lighters for markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July
+5th, 1912."</p>
+<p>The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah
+xxxv. and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:</p>
+<p>"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war
+and my fingers to fight."...</p>
+<p>"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk
+there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...</p>
+<p>... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;
+they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be
+weary; they shall walk and not faint."</p>
+<p>And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet
+and powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold
+again on the Reality they had seen and felt together.</p>
+<p>The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it
+lasted she was at peace.</p>
+<p>But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of
+remorse for all that she had wasted.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had
+ceased to feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in
+vain for them. They did not believe that it had saved Paris.</p>
+<p>Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was
+no more Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were
+only a question of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there
+would be no more France. They were face to face with the further
+possibility of there being no more England.</p>
+<p>In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances
+were changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before
+the War, Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she
+would, after careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I
+like England. But I dislike the English people. They are narrow and
+hypocritical and conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs."
+At the time of the Boer War, beyond thinking that the British ought
+to win, and that they would win, and feeling a little spurt as of
+personal satisfaction when they did win, she had had no
+consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for loving it, she
+loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of mild,
+cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her
+house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as
+well talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once
+sat in peace under the tree of Heaven with her <i>Times</i>
+newspaper, and flicked the affairs of the nation from her as less
+important than the stitching on her baby's frock, now talked and
+thought and dreamed of nothing else. She was sad, not because her
+son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling week by week, but
+because England was in danger; she was worried, not because Lord
+Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son Michael,
+but because she had found that the race was to the swift and the
+battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent
+sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she
+left her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City
+with Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office,
+receiving, packing, and sending off great cases of food and
+clothing to the Belgian soldiers.</p>
+<p>Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all
+well under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the
+Government persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber
+that swelled and shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and
+because officials wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them
+what he knew about timber, and because the head of a department had
+talked to <i>him</i> about private firms and profiteering. As if
+any man with three sons under twenty-seven would want to make a
+profit out of the War; and as if they couldn't cut down everybody's
+profits if they took the trouble. They might cut his to the last
+cent so long as we had gun-carriages that would carry guns and
+rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was talking about and they
+didn't.</p>
+<p>And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who
+had once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness,
+loved it now. She thought and said that if there were a few men
+like Anthony at the head of departments we should win the War. We
+were losing it for want of precisely that specialized knowledge and
+that power of organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud
+of him, not because he was her husband and the father of her
+children, but because he was a man who could help England. They
+were both proud of Michael and Nicholas and John, not because they
+were their sons, but because they were men who could fight for
+England.</p>
+<p>They found that they loved England with a secret, religious,
+instinctive love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man
+might stand and fight for, became, mysteriously and magically,
+dearer to them than their home. They loved England more than their
+own life or the lives of their children. Long ago they had realized
+that fathers do not beget children nor mothers bear them merely to
+gratify themselves. Now, in September and October, they were
+realizing that children are not begotten and born for their own
+profit and pleasure either.</p>
+<p>When they sat together after the day's work they found
+themselves saying the most amazing things to each other.</p>
+<p>Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better.
+I shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had
+been pleasant to him.</p>
+<p>And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of
+three, we ought to send them all."</p>
+<p>"Positively," said Anthony. "I believe I'd let Dorothy go out
+now if she insisted."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no, I think we might be allowed to keep Dorothy."</p>
+<p>She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I
+grudged giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if
+he went out to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how
+splendid it was of him."</p>
+<p>"I wish poor Dorothy could feel that way about Drayton."</p>
+<p>"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was
+his profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."</p>
+<p>He did not remind her that Frank's free will had counted in his
+choice of a profession.</p>
+<p>"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count
+more than the whole Army put together."</p>
+<p>They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing
+that sooner or later they must speak of it.</p>
+<p>Frances was the braver of the two. She spoke first.</p>
+<p>"There's Michael. I don't know what to make of him. He doesn't
+seem to want to go."</p>
+<p>That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably
+in secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something
+must be done about Michael.</p>
+<p>"I wish you'd say something to him, Anthony."</p>
+<p>"I would if I were going myself. But how can I?"</p>
+<p>"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you
+were young enough."</p>
+<p>"I can't say anything. You'll have to."</p>
+<p>"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky
+is the only one of us who has any right to."</p>
+<p>"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her
+way."</p>
+<p>"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."</p>
+<p>But in the end she did say something.</p>
+<p>She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding
+himself away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she
+thought, "as if he were ashamed of himself."</p>
+<p>Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious
+beauty of his young face; at the thick masses of his hair that
+would not stay as they were brushed back, but fell over his
+forehead; it was still yellow, and shining as it shone when he was
+a little boy.</p>
+<p>He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of
+verse on the white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came
+in lest she should see them. That hurt her.</p>
+<p>"Michael," she said, "I wonder if you <i>ever</i> realize that
+we are at war."</p>
+<p>"The War isn't a positive obsession to me, if that's what you
+mean."</p>
+<p>"It isn't what I mean. Only--that when other people are doing so
+much--</p>
+<p>"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."</p>
+<p>"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If
+George Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."</p>
+<p>"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason,
+when so much more has been done for you than was ever done for
+him?"</p>
+<p>"It's no use trying to get at me."</p>
+<p>"England's fighting for her life," said Frances.</p>
+<p>"So's Germany.</p>
+<p>"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker
+hates Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear
+old Frau Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and
+Carl, and make Hedwig and L&ouml;ttchen cry."</p>
+<p>"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George
+and Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."</p>
+<p>"Bayonetting isn't my business."</p>
+<p>"Your own safety is. How can you bear to let other men fight for
+you?"</p>
+<p>"They're not fighting for <i>me</i>, Mother. You ask them if
+they are, and see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God
+knows what; but they're no more fighting for me than they're
+fighting for Aunt Emmeline."</p>
+<p>"They <i>are</i> fighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting
+for everything that's weak and defenceless."</p>
+<p>"Well, then, they're not fighting for me. I'm not weak and
+defenceless," said Michael.</p>
+<p>"All the more shame for you, then."</p>
+<p>He smiled, acknowledging her score.</p>
+<p>"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the
+opening for a repartee. It was quite a nice one."</p>
+<p>"If," she said, "you were only <i>doing</i> something. But you
+go on with your own things as though nothing had happened."</p>
+<p>"I <i>am</i> doing something. I'm keeping sane. And I'm keeping
+sanity alive in other people."</p>
+<p>"Much you care for other people," said Frances as she left the
+room.</p>
+<p>But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him
+again. She went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his
+room.</p>
+<p>"<i>Well?</i>" he said.</p>
+<p>"It's no use. He won't go."</p>
+<p>And Frances, quite suddenly and to her own surprise, burst into
+tears.</p>
+<p>He drew her to him, and she clung to him, sobbing softly.</p>
+<p>"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's
+as obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."</p>
+<p>He pressed her tighter to him. He loved her in her unfamiliar
+weakness, crying and clinging to him.</p>
+<p>"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm
+glad he didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to
+him, I couldn't bear to be the one who made him go."</p>
+<p>After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.</p>
+<p>They were silent.</p>
+<p>"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.</p>
+<p>But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.</p>
+<p>"He must know that <i>public</i> feeling's pretty strong against
+him. To say nothing of <i>my</i> feeling and <i>your</i>
+feeling."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his
+father and his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't
+bear to look at Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him,
+he kept out of her way as much as possible.</p>
+<p>As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he
+against it.</p>
+<p>But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of
+these antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant
+to go. Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had
+always offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul.
+From his very first encounters with the collective soul and its
+emotions they had seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were
+loathsome. Collective emotion might be on the side of the
+archangels or on the side of devils and of swine; its mass was what
+made it dangerous, a thing that challenged the resistance of the
+private soul But in his worst dreams of what it could do to him
+Michael had never imagined anything more appalling than the
+collective patriotism of the British and their Allies, this rushing
+together of the souls of four countries to make one monstrous
+soul.</p>
+<p>And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this
+moment, was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of
+the War, the awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his
+real self and from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no
+doubt, a fine emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got
+you; it got you and you were done for. He was determined that it
+shouldn't get him. They couldn't see--and that was Michael's
+grievance--that his resistance was his strength and not his
+weakness.</p>
+<p>Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not
+realize that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the
+same entity as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the
+party, who had wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of
+nothing so much as of forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted
+to remember." He was Michael who refused to stay at school another
+term, and who talked about shooting himself because he had to go
+with his class and do what the other fellows were doing. He
+objected to being suddenly required to feel patriotic because other
+people were feeling patriotic, to think that Germany was in the
+wrong because other people thought that Germany was in the wrong,
+to fight because other people were fighting.</p>
+<p>Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.</p>
+<p>He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the
+assumption that he resented. There was a peculiarly British
+hypocrisy and unfairness and tyranny about it all.</p>
+<p>It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to
+fight. He had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight
+any day in a cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a
+cause that had not been messed about so much by other people. Other
+people had not put pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact
+they had tried to stop him. Michael was also aware that in the
+matter of Ireland his emotions, though shared by considerable
+numbers of the Irish people, were not shared by his family or by
+many people whom he knew; to all intents and purposes he had them
+to himself.</p>
+<p>It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and
+mother, for they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the
+more he would seem to them to be a shirker.</p>
+<p>He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff,
+reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's
+silence when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their
+eyes--his mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the
+unspoken question: "Why don't you go and get killed--for
+England--like other people?"</p>
+<p>Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible,
+palpable; he knew where he was with them. What he could not stand
+was that empty spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him
+where he was most vulnerable--in his imagination.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.</p>
+<p>It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion,
+and your religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored
+Beauty as the supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else;
+if you lived, impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive;
+and for no other end, how could you consent to take part in this
+bloody business? That would be the last betrayal, the most cowardly
+surrender.</p>
+<p>And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one
+of the leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the
+world, of all the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>For Michael, even more than Ellis, had given himself up as
+lost.</p>
+<p>And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect.
+When the young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed
+it with a calm, high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on,
+without pay, without praise, without any sort of recognition. Any
+fool could fight; but, if you were an artist, your honour bound you
+to ignore the material contest, to refuse, even to your country,
+the surrender of the highest that you knew. They believed with the
+utmost fervour and sincerity that they defied Germany more
+effectually, because more spiritually, by going on and producing
+fine things with imperturbability than if they went out against the
+German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they were
+restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.</p>
+<p>They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly,
+on Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease
+(but rather less than more) in Stephen's study.</p>
+<p>They had asked each other: "Are <i>you</i> going to fight for
+your country?"</p>
+<p>And Ellis had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country;
+and Mitchell had said he hadn't got a country, so there was no
+point in his fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could
+show him a country that cared for the arts before anything he'd
+fight for it; but that England was very far from being that
+country.</p>
+<p>And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.</p>
+<p>And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not
+listening to what was said.</p>
+<p>And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral.
+Michael said to himself that he could stand these massed war
+emotions if they were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and
+Rheims Cathedral who had never cared a damn about either before the
+War.</p>
+<p>Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired
+whether Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims
+Cathedral?</p>
+<p>Michael shrugged his shoulders. "Why bother," he said, "about
+Rheims Cathedral and Louvain? From your point of view it's all
+right. If Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the
+enemy's artillery they've got to go. They didn't happen to be in
+the way of ours, that's all."</p>
+<p>Michael's mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its
+malady. He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of
+the Allies and to justify the acts of Germany.</p>
+<p>"It's up to the French to defend Paris. And what have we got to
+do with Alsace-Lorraine? As if every inteligent Frenchman didn't
+know that Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt. No. I'm not
+pro-German. I simply see things as they are."</p>
+<p>"I think," Frances would say placably, "we'd better not talk
+about the War."</p>
+<p>He would remind them that it was not his subject.</p>
+<p>And John laughed at him. "Poor old Nick hates the War because
+it's dished him. He knows his poems can't come out till it's
+over."</p>
+<p>As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.</p>
+<p>After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris. As Stephen
+pointed out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael. In
+magnificent defiance of the enemy, the "New Poems" of Michael
+Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as
+forthcoming in October; and Morton Ellis's "Eccentricities," with
+illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month.
+Even Wadham's poems would come out some time, perhaps next
+spring.</p>
+<p>Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War
+Office as posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the
+morale of the Allied Armies. "If England could afford to publish
+Michael--"</p>
+<p>Michael's family made no comment on the appearance of his poems.
+The book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for
+weeks. When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none
+of his people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or
+hold it in their hands. It seemed to Michael that they were
+conscious of it all the time, and that they turned their faces away
+from it pointedly. They hated it. They hated him for having written
+it.</p>
+<p>He remembered that it had been different when his first book had
+come out two years ago. They had read that; they had snatched at
+all the reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was
+that they had missed.</p>
+<p>They had taken each other aside, and it had been:</p>
+<p>"Anthony, do you understand Michael's poems?"</p>
+<p>"Dorothy, do you understand Michael's poems?"</p>
+<p>"Nicky, do you understand Michael's poems?"</p>
+<p>He remembered his mother's apology for not understanding them:
+"Darling, I <i>do</i> see that they're very beautiful." He
+remembered how he had wished that they would give up the struggle
+and leave his poems alone. They were not written for them. He had
+been amused and irritated when he had seen his father holding the
+book doggedly in front of him, his poor old hands twitching with
+embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was looking at him.</p>
+<p>And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was
+sensitive to the least quiver of his mother's upper lip.</p>
+<p>Veronica's were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did
+not hunt him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.</p>
+<p>Veronica had been rejected too. She was not strong enough to
+nurse in the hospitals. She was only strong enough to work from
+morning to night, packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the
+Belgian soldiers. She wanted Michael to be sorry for her because
+she couldn't be a nurse. Rosalind Jervis was a nurse. But he was
+not sorry. He said he would very much rather she didn't do anything
+that Rosalind did.</p>
+<p>"So would Nicky," he said.</p>
+<p>And then: "Veronica, do <i>you</i> think I ought to enlist?"</p>
+<p>The thought was beginning to obsess him.</p>
+<p>"No," she said; "you're different.</p>
+<p>"I know how you feel about it. Nicky's heart and soul are in the
+War. If he's killed it can only kill his body. <i>Your</i> soul
+isn't in it. It would kill your soul."</p>
+<p>"It's killing it now, killing everything I care for."</p>
+<p>"Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can't
+kill."</p>
+<p>That was one Sunday evening in October. They were standing
+together on the long terrace under the house wall. Before them, a
+little to the right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree
+rose over the garden. The curved and dipping branches swayed and
+swung in a low wind that moved like quiet water.</p>
+<p>"Michael," she said, "do look what's happening to that
+tree."</p>
+<p>"I see," he said.</p>
+<p>It made him sad to look at the tree; it made him sad to look at
+Veronica--because both the tree and Veronica were beautiful.</p>
+<p>"When I was a little girl I used to sit and look and look at
+that tree till it changed and got all thin and queer and began to
+move towards me.</p>
+<p>"I never knew whether it had really happened or not; I don't
+know now--or whether it was the tree or me. It was as if by looking
+and looking you could make the tree more real and more alive."</p>
+<p>Michael remembered something.</p>
+<p>"Dorothy says you saw Ferdie the night he died."</p>
+<p>"So I did. But that's not the same thing. I didn't have to look
+and look. I just saw him. I <i>sort</i> of saw Frank that last
+night--when the call came--only sort of--but I knew he was going to
+be killed.</p>
+<p>"I didn't see him nearly so distinctly as I saw Nicky-"</p>
+<p>"Nicky? You didn't see him--as you saw Ferdie?"</p>
+<p>"No, no, no! it was ages ago--in Germany--before he married. I
+saw him with Desmond."</p>
+<p>"Have you ever seen me?"</p>
+<p>"Not yet. That's because you don't want me as they did."</p>
+<p>"Don't I! Don't I!"</p>
+<p>And she said again: "Not yet."</p>
+<p>Nicky had had leave for Christmas. He had come and gone.</p>
+<p>Frances and Anthony were depressed; they were beginning to be
+frightened.</p>
+<p>For Nicky had finished his training. He might be sent out any
+day.</p>
+<p>Nicky had had some moments of depression. Nothing had been heard
+of the Moving Fortress. Again, the War Office had given no sign of
+having received it. It was hard luck, he said, on Drayton.</p>
+<p>And John was depressed after he had gone.</p>
+<p>"They'd much better have taken me," he said.</p>
+<p>"What's the good of sending the best brains in the Army to get
+pounded? There's Drayton. He ought to have been in the Ordnance.
+He's killed.</p>
+<p>"And here's Nicky. Nicky ought to be in the engineers or the
+gunners or the Royal Flying Corps; but he's got to stand in the
+trenches and be pounded.</p>
+<p>"Lot they care about anybody's brains. Drayton could have told
+Kitchener that we can't win this war without high-explosive shells.
+So could Nicky.</p>
+<p>"You bet they've stuck all those plans and models in the
+sanitary dust-bin behind the War Office back door. It's enough to
+make Nicky blow his brains out."</p>
+<p>"Nicky doesn't care, really," Veronica said. "He just leaves
+things--and goes on."</p>
+<p>That night, after the others had gone to bed, Michael stayed
+behind with his father.</p>
+<p>"It must look to you," he said, "as if I ought to have gone
+instead of Nicky."</p>
+<p>"I don't say so, Michael. And I'm sure Nicky wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"No, but you both think it. You see, if I went I shouldn't be
+any good at it. Not the same good as Nicky. He wants to go and I
+don't. Can't you see it's different?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Anthony, "I see. I've seen it for some time."</p>
+<p>And Michael remembered the night in August when his brother came
+to him in his room.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Beauty--the Forlorn Hope of God--if he cared for it supremely,
+why was he pursued and tormented by the thought of the space
+between him and Nicky?</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Michael had gone to Stephen's house.</p>
+<p>He was no longer at his ease there. It seemed to him that
+Lawrence's eyes followed him too; not with hatred, but with a
+curious meditative wonder.</p>
+<p>To-night Stephen said to him, "Did you know that
+R&eacute;veillaud's killed?"</p>
+<p>"Killed? Killed? I didn't even know he was fighting."</p>
+<p>Lawrence laughed. "What did you suppose he was doing?"</p>
+<p>"No--but how?"</p>
+<p>"Out with the patrol and shot down. There you are--"</p>
+<p>He shoved the <i>Times</i> to him, pointing to the extract from
+<i>Le Matin</i>: "It is with regret that we record the death of M.
+Jules R&eacute;veillaud, the brilliant young poet and critic--"</p>
+<p>Michael stared at the first three lines; something in his mind
+prevented him from going on to the rest, as if he did not care to
+read about R&eacute;veillaud and know how he died.</p>
+<p>"It is with regret that we record the death. It is with regret
+that we record--with regret--"</p>
+<p>Then he read on, slowly and carefully, to the end. It was a long
+paragraph.</p>
+<p>"To think," he said at last, "that this revolting thing should
+have happened to him."</p>
+<p>"His death?"</p>
+<p>"No--<i>this</i>. The <i>Matin</i> never mentioned
+R&eacute;veillaud before. None of the big papers, none of the big
+reviews noticed his existence except to sneer at him. He goes out
+and gets killed like any little bourgeois, and the swine plaster
+him all over with their filthy praise. He'd rather they'd spat on
+him."</p>
+<p>He meditated fiercely. "Well--he couldn't help it. He was
+conscripted."</p>
+<p>"You think he wouldn't have gone of his own accord?"</p>
+<p>"I'm certain he wouldn't."</p>
+<p>"And I'm certain he would."</p>
+<p>"I wish to God we'd got conscription here. I'd rather the
+Government commandeered my body than stand this everlasting
+interference with my soul."</p>
+<p>"Then," said Lawrence, "you'll not be surprised at my
+enlisting."</p>
+<p>"You're not--"</p>
+<p>"I am. I'd have been in the first week if I'd known what to do
+about Vera."</p>
+<p>"But--it's--it's not sane."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps not. But it's Irish."</p>
+<p>"Irish? I can understand ordinary Irishmen rushing into a
+European row for the row's sake, just because they haven't got a
+civil war to mess about in. But you--of all Irishmen--why on earth
+should <i>you</i> be in it?"</p>
+<p>"Because I want to be in it."</p>
+<p>"I thought," said Michael, "you were to have been a thorn in
+England's side?"</p>
+<p>"So I was. So I am. But not at this minute. My grandmother was a
+hard Ulster woman and I hated her. But I wouldn't be a thorn in my
+grandmother's side if the old lady was assaulted by a brutal
+voluptuary, and I saw her down and fighting for her honour.</p>
+<p>"I've been a thorn in England's side all my life. But it's
+nothing to the thorn I'll be if I'm killed fighting for her."</p>
+<p>"Why--why--if you want to fight in the civil war
+afterwards?"</p>
+<p>"Why? Because I'm one of the few Irishmen who can reason
+straight. I was going into the civil war last year because it was a
+fight for freedom. I'm going into this War this year because it's a
+bigger fight for a bigger freedom.</p>
+<p>"You can't have a free Ireland without a free England, any more
+than you can have religious liberty without political liberty. If
+the Orangemen understood anything at all about it they'd see it was
+the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners that'll help them to put down
+Catholicism in Ireland."</p>
+<p>"You think it matters to Ireland whether Germany licks us or we
+lick Germany?"</p>
+<p>"I think it matters to the whole world."</p>
+<p>"What's changed you?" said Michael.</p>
+<p>He was angry with Lawrence. He thought: "He hasn't any excuse
+for failing us. He hasn't been conscripted."</p>
+<p>"Nothing's changed me. But supposing it didn't matter to the
+whole world, or even to Europe, and supposing the Allies were
+beaten in the end, you and I shouldn't be beaten, once we'd
+stripped ourselves, stripped our souls clean, and gone in.</p>
+<p>"Victory, Michael--victory is a state of mind."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity.</p>
+<p>He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he
+had said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not
+making it easy now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered
+about him, fluttering with anxiety.</p>
+<p>When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>Veronica said, "You must let him go."</p>
+<p>"I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's
+over age. He's no more fit than I am."</p>
+<p>"You'll have to, sooner or later."</p>
+<p>"Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let
+them come and take him."</p>
+<p>"It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll
+tear at you if you keep him."</p>
+<p>"He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his
+tearing. I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded,
+paralysed, broken to pieces."</p>
+<p>"You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully."</p>
+<p>"I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once.
+But he came back. He can't really do without me."</p>
+<p>"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and
+what he wants most."</p>
+<p>"<i>I</i> used to be what he wanted most."</p>
+<p>"Well--it's his honour now."</p>
+<p>"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy.
+They're men and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a
+woman.</p>
+<p>"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep
+him--they say you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the
+way you go on!"</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have
+kept Nicky for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him.
+She wants Michael to go."</p>
+<p>"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are
+lying. Either they don't care--they're just <i>lumps</i>, with no
+hearts and no nerves in them--or they lie.</p>
+<p>"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each
+other, like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael
+sick."</p>
+<p>"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut
+about and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling
+and sentimentalizing--</p>
+<p>"Lying--lying--lying."</p>
+<p>"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie,
+if it sends them off happy?"</p>
+<p>"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever
+happened to us. I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my
+life."</p>
+<p>"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up.
+You were a miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you
+look as if every drop of blood was drained out of your body in your
+teens. If that's your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself.
+It seems to be all you've got."</p>
+<p>"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it <i>would</i>
+have been all I've got."</p>
+<p>Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as
+she really was. The child was not a child any more. She was a
+woman, astonishingly and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful,
+lucid eyes took her in; they neither weighed her nor measured her,
+but judged her, off-hand with perfect accuracy.</p>
+<p>"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still,
+you can thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle
+Anthony."</p>
+<p>Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's
+your beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're
+keeping him for."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She knew; and Lawrence knew.</p>
+<p>That night he told her that if he hadn't wanted to enlist he'd
+be driven to it to get away from her.</p>
+<p>And she was frightened and held her tongue.</p>
+<p>Then she got desperate. She did things. She intrigued behind his
+back to keep him; and he found her out.</p>
+<p>He came to her, furious.</p>
+<p>"You needn't lie about it," he said. "I know what you've done.
+You've been writing letters and getting at people. You've told the
+truth about my age and you've lied about my health. You've even
+gone round cadging for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press
+Bureau and the Intelligence Department, and God only knows whether
+I'm supposed to have put you up to it."</p>
+<p>"I took care of that, Larry."</p>
+<p>"You? You'd no right to interfere with my affairs."</p>
+<p>"Hadn't I? Not after living with you seven years?"</p>
+<p>"If you'd lived with me seven centuries you'd have had no right
+to try to keep a man back from the Army."</p>
+<p>"I'm trying to keep a man's brain for my country."</p>
+<p>"You lie. It's my body you're trying to keep for yourself. As
+you did when I was going to Ireland."</p>
+<p>"Oh, then--I tried to stop you from being a traitor to England.
+They'd have hanged you, my dear, for that."</p>
+<p>"Traitor? It's women like you that are the traitors. My God, if
+there was a Government in this country that could govern, you'd be
+strung up in a row, all of you, and hanged."</p>
+<p>"No wonder you think you're cut out for a soldier. You're cruel
+enough."</p>
+<p>"<i>You're</i> cruel. I'd rather be hanged than live with you a
+day longer after what you've done. A Frenchman shot his <i>wife</i>
+the other day for less than that."</p>
+<p>"What was 'less than that'?" she said.</p>
+<p>"She crawled after him to the camp, like a bitch.</p>
+<p>"He sent her away and she came again and again. He <i>had</i> to
+shoot her."</p>
+<p>"Was there nothing to be said for her?"</p>
+<p>"There was. She knew it was a big risk and she took it.
+<i>You</i> knew you were safe while you slimed my honour."</p>
+<p>"She loved him, and he shot her, and you think that's a fine
+thing. <i>How</i> she must have loved him!"</p>
+<p>"Men don't want to be loved that way. That's the mistake you
+women will make."</p>
+<p>"It's the way you've taught us. I should like to know what other
+way you ever want us to love you?"</p>
+<p>"The way Veronica loves Nicky, and Dorothy loved Drayton and
+Frances loves Anthony."</p>
+<p>"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."</p>
+<p>"Men's lives aren't ruined that way. And not all women's."</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow, if she'd loved him she'd have married him. And
+Frances loves her children better than Anthony, and Anthony knows
+it."</p>
+<p>"Veronica, then."</p>
+<p>"Veronica doesn't know what passion is. The poor child's
+an&aelig;mic."</p>
+<p>"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have
+more passion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."</p>
+<p>"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her
+eyelashes instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."</p>
+<p>He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.</p>
+<p>"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the
+Front. It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and
+pose as heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and
+mistresses--they're tired of because the poor things aren't young
+or pretty any longer."</p>
+<p>She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her.
+"I'm old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and
+uglier. And I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How
+<i>can</i> I keep you when I'm old and ugly?"</p>
+<p>He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always
+worked in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained
+with crying.</p>
+<p>"That's how--by getting older.</p>
+<p>"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were
+when I first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm
+sure I love you."</p>
+<p>She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.</p>
+<p>"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they
+believe you; but not me."</p>
+<p>"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were
+married to me I should have enlisted months ago.</p>
+<p>"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm
+sick and tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with
+it. I'd rather be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house
+of yours."</p>
+<p>"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it
+now?"</p>
+<p>"Everything. Those damned lime-trees all round it. And that
+damned white wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.</p>
+<p>"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.</p>
+<p>"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.</p>
+<p>"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and
+Orde-Jones, drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and
+Michael and Ellis are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade
+themselves that funk's the divinest thing in God's universe.</p>
+<p>"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my
+life--the one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from
+it."</p>
+<p>They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the
+next. And Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to
+train it upwards in the way she hated.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the
+moustache stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He
+was another man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she
+hated him or not.</p>
+<p>But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best
+gown to do honour to his khaki.</p>
+<p>She said, "It'll be like living with another man."</p>
+<p>"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.</p>
+<p>And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her
+passion for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to
+violence, to perversity.</p>
+<p>And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out
+of her reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where
+he was stationed.</p>
+<p>"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot
+me?"</p>
+<p>"I might shoot <i>myself</i>. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear
+from me again."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.</p>
+<p>She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent,
+till she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he
+had gone she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a
+sort of peace. She told herself that she would rather he were
+killed soon than that she should be tortured any longer with
+suspense.</p>
+<p>"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind.
+That would end it."</p>
+<p>And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers
+for fear lest she should see his name in the lists.</p>
+<p>But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement,
+and died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.</p>
+<p>The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before
+he died. She gave details and a message.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to
+forgive him and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought
+it would be (he means the fighting) only much more so--all except
+this last bit.</p>
+<p>"He wants you to tell Michael and Dicky?--Nicky?--that. He says:
+'It's odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'</p>
+<p>"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go
+to the War.)"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"8.30. It is all over.</p>
+<p>"He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his
+love."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Vera said to herself: "He didn't. She made that up."</p>
+<p>She hated the Red Cross woman who had been with Lawrence and had
+seen so much; who had dared to tell her what he meant and to make
+up messages.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Nicholas had applied for a commission, and he had got it, and
+Frances was glad.</p>
+<p>She had been proud of him because he had chosen the ranks
+instead of the Officers' Training Corps; but she persisted in the
+belief that, when it came to the trenches, second lieutenants stood
+a better chance. "For goodness' sake," Nicholas had said, "don't
+tell her that they're over the parapet first."</p>
+<p>That was in December. In February he got a week's leave--sudden,
+unforeseen and special leave. It had to be broken to her this time
+that leave as special as that meant war-leave.</p>
+<p>She said, "Well, if it does, I shall have him for six whole
+days." She had learned how to handle time, how to prolong the
+present, drawing it out minute by minute; thus her happiness,
+stretched to the snapping point, vibrated.</p>
+<p>She had a sense of its vibration now, as she looked at Nicholas.
+It was the evening of the day he had come home, and they were all
+in the drawing-room together. He was standing before her, straight
+and tall, on the hearthrug, where he had lifted the Persian cat,
+Timmy, out of his sleep and was holding him against his breast.
+Timmy spread himself there, softly and heavily, hanging on to
+Nicky's shoulder by his claws; he butted Nicky's chin with his
+head, purring.</p>
+<p>"I don't know how I'm to tear myself away from Timmy. I should
+like to wear him alive as a waistcoat. Or hanging on my shoulder
+like a cape, with his tail curled tight round my neck. He'd look
+uncommonly <i>chic</i> with all his khaki patches."</p>
+<p>"Why don't you take him with you?" Anthony said.</p>
+<p>"'Cos he's Ronny's cat."</p>
+<p>"He isn't. I've given him to you," Veronica said.</p>
+<p>"When?"</p>
+<p>"Now, this minute. To sleep on your feet and keep you warm."</p>
+<p>Frances listened and thought: "What children--what babies they
+are, after all." If only this minute could be stretched out
+farther.</p>
+<p>"I mustn't," Nicky said. "I should spend hours in dalliance; and
+if a shell got him it would ruin my morale."</p>
+<p>Timmy, unhooked from Nicky's shoulder, lay limp in his arms. He
+lay on his back, in ecstasy, his legs apart, showing the soft,
+cream-white fur of his stomach. Nicky rubbed his face against the
+soft, cream-white fur.</p>
+<p>"I say, what a heavenly death it would be to die--smothered in
+Timmies."</p>
+<p>"Nicky, you're a beastly sensualist. That's what's the matter
+with you," John said. And they all laughed.</p>
+<p>The minute broke, stretched to its furthest.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances was making plans now for Nicky's week. There were things
+they could do, plays they could see, places they could go to.
+Anthony would let them have the big car as much as they wanted. For
+you could stretch time out by filling it; you could multiply the
+hours by what they held.</p>
+<p>"Ronny and I are going to get married to-morrow," Nicky said.
+"We settled it that we would at once, if I got war-leave. It's the
+best thing to do."</p>
+<p>"Of course," Frances said, "it's the best thing to do."</p>
+<p>But she had not allowed for it, nor for the pain it gave her.
+That pain shocked her. It was awful to think that, after all her
+surrenders, Nicky's happiness could give her pain. It meant that
+she had never let go her secret hold. She had been a hypocrite to
+herself.</p>
+<p>Nicky was talking on about it, excitedly, as he used to talk on
+about his pleasures when he was a child.</p>
+<p>If Dad'll let us have the racing car, we'll go down to Morfe. We
+can do it in a day."</p>
+<p>"My dear boy," Anthony said, "don't you know I've lent the house
+to the Red Cross, and let the shooting?"</p>
+<p>"I don't care. There's the little house in the village we can
+have. And Harker and his wife can look after us."</p>
+<p>"Harker gone to the War, and his wife's looking after his
+brother's children somewhere. And I've put two Belgian refugees
+into it."</p>
+<p>"<i>They</i> can look after us," said Nicky. "We'll stay three
+days, run back, and have one day at home before I sail."</p>
+<p>Frances gave up her play with time. She was beaten.</p>
+<p>And still she thought: "At least I shall have him one whole
+day."</p>
+<p>And then she looked across the room to Michael, as if Michael's
+face had signalled to her. His clear, sun-burnt skin showed
+blotches of white where the blood had left it. A light sweat was on
+his forehead. When their eyes met, he shifted his position to give
+himself an appearance of ease.</p>
+<p>Michael had not reckoned on his brother's marriage, either. It
+was when he asked himself: "On what, then, <i>had</i> he been
+reckoning?" that the sweat broke out on his forehead.</p>
+<p>He had not reckoned on anything. But the sudden realization of
+what he might have reckoned on made him sick. He couldn't bear to
+think of Ronny married. And yet again, he couldn't bear to think of
+Nicky not marrying her. If he had had a hold on her he would have
+let her go. In this he knew himself to be sincere. He had had no
+hold on her, and to talk about letting her go was idiotic; still,
+there was a violent pursuit and possession by the mind--and
+Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy, that psychic assault and
+outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual surrender of her was
+so perfect that his very imagination gave her up to Nicky.</p>
+<p>He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing
+could take their three days from them, even when the War had done
+its worst.</p>
+<p>And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she
+think I was reckoning on that?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead
+Town Hall, before the Registrar.</p>
+<p>They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying
+and circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky
+said, whole handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals,
+with a clear run before him, he let out the racing car to its top
+speed on the Great North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed
+like some immense, nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all
+its weight were purged from it by speed. It flew up and down the
+hills of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat
+country round Peterborough and Grantham, a country of silver green
+and emerald green grass and purple fallow land and bright red
+houses; and so on to the great plain of York, and past Reyburn up
+towards the bare hill country netted with grey stone walls.</p>
+<p>Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road.</p>
+<p>It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed
+enormous and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen
+moon. Other hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous,
+stood piled up in front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale.</p>
+<p>Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was
+as if, ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that
+incredibly high, immense obstruction. They were thrilled,
+mysteriously, as before the image of monstrous and omnipotent
+disaster. Then the dale widened; it made way for them and saved
+them.</p>
+<p>The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a
+coronet and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights
+of the village below, the village they were making for, showed as
+if dropped out of the pattern on the hill.</p>
+<p>One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage
+chamber. Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch
+to receive them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage
+torches. The old woman held her light low down, lighting the
+flagstone of the threshold. The old man lifted his high, showing
+the lintel of the door. It was so low that Nicholas had to stoop to
+go in.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>In the morning they read the date cut in the wall above the
+porch: 1665.</p>
+<p>The house was old and bent and grey. Its windows were narrow
+slits in the stone mullions. It crouched under the dipping boughs
+of the ash-tree that sheltered it. Inside there was just room for
+Veronica to stand up. Nicholas had to stoop or knock his head
+against the beams. It had only four rooms, two for Nicholas and
+Veronica, and two for Jean and Suzanne. And it was rather dark.</p>
+<p>But it pleased them. They said it was their apple-tree-house
+grown up because they were grown up, and keeping strict
+proportions. You had to crawl into it, and you were only really
+comfortable sitting or lying down. So they sat outside it, watching
+old Suzanne through the window as she moved about the house place,
+cooking Belgian food for them, and old Jean as he worked in the
+garden.</p>
+<p>Veronica loved Jean and Suzanne. She had found out all about
+them the first morning.</p>
+<p>"Only think, Nicky. They're from Termonde, and their house was
+burnt behind them as they left it. They saw horrors, and their son
+was killed in the War.</p>
+<p>"Yet they're happy and at peace. Almost as if they'd forgotten.
+He'll plant flowers in his garden."</p>
+<p>"They're old, Ronny. And perhaps they were tired already when it
+happened."</p>
+<p>"Yes, that must be it. They're old and tired."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>And now it was the last adventure of their last day. They were
+walking on the slope of Renton Moor that looks over Rathdale
+towards Greffington Edge. The light from the west poured itself in
+vivid green down the valley below them, broke itself into purple on
+Karva Hill to the north above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle
+blue and violet from the stone rampart of the Edge.</p>
+<p>Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources
+of the country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge,
+on Sarrack Moor. The raking lines of the hills were straight as if
+they had been measured with a ruler and then planed.</p>
+<p>"Ronny," he said at last, "we've licked 'em in the first round,
+you and I. The beastly Boche can't do us out of these three
+days."</p>
+<p>"No. We've been absolutely happy. And we'll never forget it.
+Never."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps it was a bit rough on Dad and Mummy, our carting
+ourselves up here, away from them. But, you see, they don't really
+mind. They're feeling about it now just as we feel about it. I knew
+they would."</p>
+<p>There had been a letter from Frances saying she was glad they'd
+gone. She was so happy thinking how happy they were.</p>
+<p>"They're angels, Nicky."</p>
+<p>"Aren't they? Simply angels. That's the rotten part of it. I
+wish--</p>
+<p>"I wish I could tell them what I think of them. But you can't,
+somehow. It sticks in your throat, that sort of thing."</p>
+<p>"You needn't," she said; "they know all right."</p>
+<p>She thought: "This is what he wants me to tell them
+about--afterwards."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but--I must have hurt them--hurt them horribly--lots of
+times. I wish I hadn't.</p>
+<p>"But" he went on, "they're funny, you know. Dad actually thought
+it idiotic of us to do this. He said it would only make it harder
+for us when I had to go. They don't see that it's just piling it
+on--going from one jolly adventure to another.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on
+you; because the rest of it's all my show."</p>
+<p>"But it isn't all your show, Nicky darling. It's mine, and it's
+theirs--because we haven't grudged you your adventure."</p>
+<p>"That's exactly how I want you to feel about it."</p>
+<p>"And they're assuming that I shan't come back. Which, if you
+come to think of it, is pretty big cheek. They talk, and they
+think, as though nobody ever got through. Whereas I've every
+intention of getting through and of coming back. I'm the sort of
+chap who does get through, who does come back."</p>
+<p>"And even if I wasn't, if they studied statistics they'd see
+that it's a thousand chances to one against the Boches getting
+me--just me out of all the other chaps. As if I was so jolly
+important.</p>
+<p>"No; don't interrupt. Let's get this thing straight while we
+can. Supposing--just supposing I didn't get through--didn't come
+back--supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to
+think of <i>that</i>, not as a clumsy accident, but just another
+awfully interesting thing I'd done.</p>
+<p>"Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you
+took the thing as a shock instead of--of what it probably really
+is, and went and got cut up about it, you might start the little
+beggar with a sort of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that
+it would be jumpy all its life.</p>
+<p>"It ought," said Nicky, "to sit in its little house all quiet
+and comfy till it's time for it to come out."</p>
+<p>He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might
+be, what probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted
+more than anything, next to Veronica.</p>
+<p>"It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy."</p>
+<p>"If <i>that</i> came off all right," he said, "it would make it
+up to Mother no end."</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't make it up to me."</p>
+<p>"You don't know what it would do," he said.</p>
+<p>She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but
+you."</p>
+<p>"That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of
+kin--the one they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way;
+it'll only make him madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid
+of you or Mummy or Dad, or Michael being told first."</p>
+<p>"It doesn't matter a bit who's <i>told</i> first. I shall
+<i>know</i> first," she said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't
+kill either me or the baby. If a shock could kill me I should have
+died long ago."</p>
+<p>"When?"</p>
+<p>"When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear
+it any longer, something happened."</p>
+<p>"What?"</p>
+<p>"I don't know. I don't know what it <i>is</i> now; I only know
+what it does. It always happens--always--when you want it awfully.
+And when you're quiet and give yourself up to it."</p>
+<p>"It'll happen again."</p>
+<p>He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite
+interested; puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if
+something had come between him and her.</p>
+<p>"You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so
+that when things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to
+happen to Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she
+was absolutely happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came
+to her. And, Nicky, they were the same queer things that came to
+me. It was like something getting through to her."</p>
+<p>"I say--did you ever do it to me?"</p>
+<p>"Only once, when you wanted it awfully."</p>
+<p>"When? When?"</p>
+<p>Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her
+trail.</p>
+<p>"When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it
+didn't matter, it wasn't the end."</p>
+<p>"But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself.
+It looks as if it worked, then?"</p>
+<p>"It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with
+<i>you</i> it would always come; because you're more <i>me</i> than
+other people; I mean I care more for you."</p>
+<p>She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother
+about me, Nicky. If <i>the</i> most awful thing happened, and you
+didn't come back, It would come."</p>
+<p>"I wish I knew what It was," he said.</p>
+<p>"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's
+God."</p>
+<p>"That's why <i>they're</i> so magnificently brave--Dorothy and
+Aunt Frances and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't
+know it's there; even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and
+still they go on bearing and bearing; and they were glad to give
+you up."</p>
+<p>"I know," he said; "lots of people <i>say</i> they're glad, but
+they really <i>are</i> glad."</p>
+<p>He meditated.</p>
+<p>"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's
+praying or something; and if you're going to turn it on to me,
+Ronny, I wish you'd be careful; because it seems to me that if
+there's anything in it at all, there might be hitches. I mean to
+say, you might work it just enough to keep me from being killed but
+not enough to keep my legs from being blown off. Or the Boches
+might get me fair enough and you might bring me back, all paralysed
+and idiotic.</p>
+<p>"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I
+thought about it. Luckily one doesn't think."</p>
+<p>"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than
+I tried before."</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"</p>
+<p>"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin
+with, I won't believe that you're not going to get through.</p>
+<p>"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't
+believe you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to
+something else. It doesn't end him.'"</p>
+<p>He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it,
+made a pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention
+to.</p>
+<p>Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind
+talking about it?" she said.</p>
+<p>"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I
+believe in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling,
+that you go on. You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't
+care. They used to think I was trying to be funny when I said I
+didn't care. But I really didn't. Things, most things, don't much
+matter, because there's always something else. You go on to it.</p>
+<p>"I care for <i>you</i>. <i>You</i> matter most awfully; and my
+people; but most of all you. You always have mattered to me more
+than anything, since the first time I heard you calling out to me
+to come and sit on your bed because you were frightened. You always
+will matter.</p>
+<p>"But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make
+me <i>think</i> she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her
+because she was going to have a baby. And <i>that</i> was because I
+remembered you and the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would
+have kept me straight with women if nothing else did.</p>
+<p>"Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying
+you till Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too
+late.</p>
+<p>"That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Nicky.</p>
+<p>"I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The
+cottage belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>"Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?"</p>
+<p>"I think he'd give it to you if you asked him."</p>
+<p>"For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll
+give it to me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where
+it's all quiet and you'd never know there was a war at all--even
+the Belgians have forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look
+at that hill, because it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I
+simply won't think of anything that isn't straight and beautiful.
+And I shall get strong. Then the baby will be straight and
+beautiful and strong, too.</p>
+<p>"I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like
+you."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little
+things that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and
+she, to be on the edge of something great, something satisfying and
+revealing. It was to come in a look or a word; and both would
+remember it afterwards for ever.</p>
+<p>In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline,
+and Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say
+good-bye. And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited
+and happy, as he had gone off on his wedding journey. And between
+Frances and her son the great thing remained unsaid.</p>
+<p>Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine
+sand.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>February 27th,
+1915.</i><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you
+all for the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long
+way, that's been seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it
+because it "looked as if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It
+makes me feel as if I <i>was</i> Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs,
+rampant, clawing at the Boches. Just think of the effect if he got
+up over the parapet!</p>
+<p>The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't
+think what else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those
+tubes of chutney are a good idea.</p>
+<p>No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no
+English and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to
+himself, you simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old
+Mick could send himself out by himself against the whole German
+Army he'd manage to put in some first rate fancy work in the second
+or two before they got him. He'd be quite capable of going off and
+doing grisly things that would make me faint with funk, if he was
+by himself, with nothing but the eye of God to look at him. And
+<i>then</i> he'd rather God wasn't there. He always <i>was</i>
+afraid of having a crowd with him.</p>
+<p>The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were
+you two, I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he
+is the youngest.</p>
+<p>And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest
+curtain fire there <i>are</i> holes; there are more holes than
+there is stuff; and the chances are I shall be where a hole is.</p>
+<p>Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight
+for you like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's
+going to get you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of
+personal resentment which must be the worst part of the business.
+Bits of shells that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew
+all about before and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted
+out in the open, the peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is
+it more than the peculiar awfulness of being run over by express
+trains let loose about the sky? Tell Don that when shrapnel empties
+itself over your head like an old tin pail, you might feel injured,
+but the big shell has a most disarming air of not being able to
+help itself, of not looking for anybody in particular. It's so
+innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it any day than
+fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe.</p>
+<p>That's an answer to his question.</p>
+<p>And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action.
+Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I
+told her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but
+Stephen was absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than
+anything you could have imagined. I'm not speaking only for
+myself.</p>
+<p>There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between
+your parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it
+too--when you're afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before
+you get there. But it doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply
+swinging you on to them, and that swing makes up for all the rotten
+times put together. You needn't be sorry for us. It's waste of
+pity.</p>
+<p>I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us.
+But I'm not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NICKY.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; May,
+1915.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;B.E.F.,
+FRANCE</blockquote>
+<p>My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when
+you loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you
+needn't do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the
+papers more or less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith
+is saying or what Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's
+motives are. Personally, I should say he was simply trying, like
+most of us, to save his country. Looks like it. But you can tell
+him from me, if he gets them to send us enough shells out <i>in
+time</i> we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow that sort of
+thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much better
+than you, if you don't mind my saying so.</p>
+<p>What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the
+last sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my
+billet for one of his <i>worst</i> jokes. And I like to hear about
+Morrie going on the bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if
+it really is anxiety about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd
+leave off thinking about me, poor old thing.</p>
+<p>More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's
+looking and what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot,
+and she may tell you things she won't tell the others. That's why
+I'm glad you're there and not here.</p>
+<p>And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel
+about it. I think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were
+a "putrid Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes
+me like religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about
+religion to say, but it seems near enough for a first shot. And
+when you say it doesn't take you that way, that you haven't "got"
+it, I can see that that expresses a fairly understandable state of
+mind. Of course, I know it isn't funk. If you'd happened to think
+of the Ultimatum first, instead of the Government, you'd have been
+in at the start, before me.</p>
+<p>Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never
+can tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those
+of us who are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a
+long way. There's no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the
+finish; so that the patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to
+join up will be jolly well sold, poor devils. Take me, for
+instance. If I'd got what I wanted and been out in Flanders in
+1914, ten to one I should have been in the retreat from Mons, like
+Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have given my head to have
+gone to Gallipoli; but <i>now</i>, well, I'm just as glad I'm not
+mixed up in that affair.</p>
+<p>Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you
+can get out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to
+win the War. At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the
+Rhine, while all the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash
+on the way there. So if you're going to be converted let's hope
+you'll be converted quick.</p>
+<p>If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight
+away. There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a
+Tommy. For instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your
+brother Tommies. I slept for three months next to a beastly
+blighter who used to come in drunk and tread on my face and be ill
+all over me.</p>
+<p>Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything
+that's happened out here. But that's because at home your mind
+isn't adjusted to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise
+to me every time. I <i>couldn't</i> get used to him. Whereas out
+here everything's shifted in the queerest way. Your mind shifts.
+You funk your first and your second sight, say, of a bad stretcher
+case; but when it comes to the third and the fourth you don't funk
+at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit surprised. It's all in
+the picture, and you're in the picture too. There's a sort of
+horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly dream which
+doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the
+beastliness.</p>
+<p>No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what
+d'you think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run
+over the other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian
+at that. There were two or three women round it, crying and
+gesticulating. It looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath
+of blood. That made me sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the
+picture. I hadn't bargained for him.</p>
+<p>Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa--do you remember how
+he <i>would</i> tell us about them?--weren't in it with the things
+that happened here. Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do,
+apparently on their own, are simply unbelievable--what the war
+correspondents call "fantastic postures." But I haven't got to the
+point when I can slap my thighs, and roar with laughter--if they
+happen to be Germans.</p>
+<p>In between, the boredom is so awful that I've heard some of our
+men say they'd rather have things happening. And, of course, we're
+all hoping that when those shells come along there won't be quite
+so much "between."</p>
+<p>Love to Ronny and Mother and all of them.--Your very
+affectionate,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NICHOLAS.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; June 1st,
+1915.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>My Darling Ronny,--Yes, I think all your letters must have come,
+because you've answered everything. You always tell me just what I
+want to know. When I see the fat envelopes coming I know they're
+going to be chock-full of the things I've happened to be thinking
+about. Don't let's ever forget to put the dates, because I make out
+that I've always dreamed about you, too, the nights you've
+written.</p>
+<p>And so the Aunties are working in the War Hospital Supply
+Dep&ocirc;t? It's frightfully funny what Dorothy says about their
+enjoying the War and feeling so important. Don't let her grudge it
+them, though; it's all the enjoyment, or importance, they're ever
+had in their lives, poor dears. But I shall know, if a swab bursts
+in my inside, that it's Auntie Edie's. As for Auntie Emmeline's, I
+can't even imagine what they'd be like--monstrosities--or little
+babies injured at birth. Aunt Louie's would be well-shaped and
+firm, but erring a little on the hard side, don't you think?</p>
+<p>That reminds me, I suppose I may tell you now since it's been in
+the papers, that we've actually got Moving Fortresses out here. I
+haven't seen them yet, but a fellow who has thinks they must be
+uncommonly like Drayton's and my thing. I suspect, from what he
+says, they're a bit better, though. We hadn't got the rocking-horse
+idea.</p>
+<p>It's odd--this time last year I should have gone off my head
+with agony at the mere thought of anybody getting in before us; and
+now I don't care a bit. I do mind rather for Drayton's sake, though
+I don't suppose he cares, either. The great thing is that it's been
+done, and done better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the
+Germans had got on to them, and trotted them out first, and one of
+our own guns had potted him or me, <i>that</i> would have been a
+jolly sell.</p>
+<p>What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the
+awful thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the
+base hospital on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock,
+and--<i>he never came back again</i>. It doesn't matter, because
+the weather's so warm now that I don't want him. But I'm sorry
+because you all gave him to me and it looks as if I hadn't cared
+for him. But I did....</p>
+<blockquote>June 10th.</blockquote>
+<p>Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather
+suddenly. I wish I could tell you <i>what</i>, but we mustn't let
+on what happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still,
+there are all the other things I couldn't say anything about at the
+time.</p>
+<p>If you <i>must</i> know, I've been up "over the top" three times
+now since I came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all
+right.</p>
+<p>Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's
+been like that every time (except that I've got over the queer
+funky feeling half-way through). It'll be like that again next
+time, I know. Because now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't
+tell Dorothy this, because she'd think it was all rot--but when
+you're up first out of the trench and stand alone on the parapet,
+it's absolute happiness. And the charge is--well, it's simply
+heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till then; I certainly
+hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three days we had
+together.</p>
+<p>That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something
+rotten about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out
+that this gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's
+trying for) is nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks
+that's all there is in it, he doesn't know much about war, or love
+either. Though I'm bound to say there's a clever chap in my
+battalion who thinks the same thing. He says he feels the ecstasy,
+or whatever it is, all right, just the same as I do; but that it's
+simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the top--a hidden lust for
+killing, and the hidden memory of having killed, he called it. He's
+always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had been drunk.</p>
+<p>And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but
+"a ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give
+mine to a funny chap who <i>knows</i> he's going to have
+collywobbles as soon as he gets out into the open.</p>
+<p>But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it,
+because they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of
+being killed. <i>That</i>--when you realize it--well, it's like the
+thing you told me about that you said you thought must be God
+because it's so real. I didn't understand it then, but I do now.
+You're bang up against reality--you're going clean into it--and the
+sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while one half of you is
+feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill and doing its
+best to keep on <i>this</i> side reality. But I've been near enough
+to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come
+out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick.
+<i>He</i>'d write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's
+a sin that I should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't
+do anything with it.</p>
+<p>Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your
+loving,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NICKY.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and
+Dorothy and Mother. It would save them half the misery they're
+probably going through.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the
+garden, weeding the delphinium border.</p>
+<p>It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was
+digging in the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering
+green peas and fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came
+through the open door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace
+with the piled up baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to
+Veronica.</p>
+<p>It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came,
+Veronica could time it by the striking of the clock heard through
+the open doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and
+then, almost on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious
+happiness.</p>
+<p>Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity
+made each small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged
+at the weeds, and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the
+palms of her hand smoothed over the places where they had been. She
+thought of old Jean and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at
+Renton, and of that tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest
+thing she had ever seen.</p>
+<p>And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the
+half-hour, not out of herself or out of her thoughts, but
+mysteriously and from somewhere a long way off.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through
+the door with her basket, and it was then that she saw
+Nicholas.</p>
+<p>He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised
+between her and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested
+in the act of looking back to see if she were following him. His
+eyes shone, vivid and blue, as they always shone when he was happy.
+He smiled at her, but with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to
+her, but with no sound.</p>
+<p>Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her
+heart was still; it beat steadily.</p>
+<p>She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust
+itself between them, and he was gone.</p>
+<p>And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had
+seen her when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of
+the sun.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>The young men had gone--Morton Ellis, who had said he was damned
+if he'd fight for his country; and Austin Mitchell who had said he
+hadn't got a country; and Monier-Owen, who had said that England
+was not a country you could fight for. George Wadham had gone long
+ago. That, Michael said, was to be expected. Even a weak gust could
+sweep young Wadham off his feet--and he had been fairly carried
+away. He could no more resist the vortex of the War than he could
+resist the vortex of the arts.</p>
+<p>Michael had two pitiful memories of the boy: one of young Wadham
+swaggering into Stephen's room in uniform (the first time he had it
+on), flushed and pleased with himself and talking excitedly about
+the "Great Game"; and one of young Wadham returned from the Front,
+mature and hard, not talking about the "Great Game" at all, and
+wincing palpably when other people talked; a young Wadham who, they
+said, ought to be arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act as a
+quencher of war-enthusiasms.</p>
+<p>The others had gone later, one by one, each with his own
+gesture: Mitchell and Monier-Owen when Stephen went; Ellis the day
+after Stephen's death. It had taken Stephen's death to draw
+him.</p>
+<p>Only Michael remained.</p>
+<p>He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going
+would inspire him to follow them. It, and Stephen's death, merely
+intensified the bitterness he felt towards the War. He was more
+than ever determined to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to
+his Forlorn Hope. If they fell back, all the more reason why be
+should go on.</p>
+<p>And, while he waited for the moment of vision, he continued
+Stephen's work on the <i>Green Review</i>. Stephen had left it to
+him when he went out. Michael tried to be faithful to the tradition
+he thus inherited; but gradually Stephen's spirit disappeared from
+the <i>Review</i> and its place was taken by the clear, hard,
+unbreakable thing that was Michael's mind.</p>
+<p>And Michael knew that he was beginning to make himself felt.</p>
+<p>But Stephen's staff, such as it was, and nearly all his
+contributors had gone to the War, one after another, and Michael
+found himself taking all their places. He began to feel a strain,
+which he took to be the strain of overwork, and he went down to
+Renton to recover.</p>
+<p>That was on the Tuesday that followed Veronica's Sunday.</p>
+<p>He thought that down there he would get away from everything
+that did him harm: from his father's and mother's eyes; from his
+sister's proud, cold face; and from his young brother's smile; and
+from Veronica's beauty that saddened him; and from the sense of
+Nicky's danger that brooded as a secret obsession over the house.
+He would fill up the awful empty space. He thought: "For a whole
+fortnight I shall get away from this infernal War."</p>
+<p>But he did not get away from it. On every stage of the journey
+down he encountered soldiers going to the Front. He walked in the
+Park at Darlington between his trains, and wounded soldiers waited
+for him on every seat, shuffled towards him round every turning,
+hobbled after him on their crutches down every path. Their eyes
+looked at him with a shrewd hostility. He saw the young Yorkshire
+recruits drinking in the open spaces. Sergeants' eyes caught and
+measured him, appraising his physique. Behind and among them he saw
+Drayton's, and R&eacute;veillaud's, and Stephen's eyes; and young
+Wadham's eyes, strange and secretive and hard.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>At Reyburn Michael's train was switched off to a side platform
+in the open. Before he left Darlington, a thin, light rain had
+begun to fall from a shred of blown cloud; and at Reyburn the burst
+mass was coming down. The place was full of the noise of rain. The
+drops tapped on the open platform and hissed as the wind drove them
+in a running stream. They drummed loudly on the station roof. But
+these sounds went out suddenly, covered by the trampling of
+feet.</p>
+<p>A band of Highlanders with their bagpipes marched into the
+station. They lined up solemnly along the open platform with their
+backs to Michael's train and their faces to the naked rails on the
+other side. Higher up Michael could see the breast of an engine; it
+was backing, backing, towards the troop-train that waited under the
+cover of the roof. He could hear the clank of the coupling and the
+recoil. At that sound the band had their mouths to their bagpipes
+and their fingers ready on the stops. Two or three officers hurried
+down from the station doors and stood ready.</p>
+<p>The train came on slowly, packed with men; men who thrust their
+heads and shoulders through the carriage windows, and knelt on the
+seats, and stood straining over each other's backs to look out; men
+whose faces were scarlet with excitement; men with open mouths
+shouting for joy.</p>
+<p>The officers saluted as it passed. It halted at the open
+platform, and suddenly the pipers began to play.</p>
+<p>Michael got out of his train and watched.</p>
+<p>Solemnly, in the grey evening of the rain, with their faces set
+in a sort of stern esctasy, the Highlanders played to their
+comrades. Michael did not know whether their tune was sad or gay.
+It poured itself into one mournful, savage, sacred cry of
+salutation and valediction. When it stopped the men shouted; there
+were voices that barked hoarsely and broke; voices that roared;
+young voices that screamed, strung up by the skirling of the
+bagpipes. The pipers played to them again.</p>
+<p>And suddenly Michael was overcome. Pity shook him and grief and
+an intolerable yearning, and shame. For one instant his soul rose
+up above the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he
+cowered under it, stripped and beaten. He clenched his fists,
+hating this emotion that stung him to tears and tore at his heart
+and at the hardness of his mind.</p>
+<p>As the troop-train moved slowly out of the station the pipers,
+piping more and more shrilly, swung round and marched beside it to
+the end of the platform. The band ceased abruptly, and the men
+answered with shout after shout of violent joy; they reared up
+through the windows, straining for the last look--and were
+gone.</p>
+<p>Michael turned to the porter who lifted his luggage from the
+rack. "What regiment are they?" he said.</p>
+<p>"Camerons, sir. Going to the Front."</p>
+<p>The clear, uncanny eyes of Veronica's father pursued him
+now.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>At last he had got away from it.</p>
+<p>In Rathdale, at any rate, there was peace. The hills and their
+pastures, and the flat river fields were at peace. And in the
+villages of Morfe and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few
+men had gone from them. The rest were tied to the land, and they
+were more absorbed in the hay-harvest than in the War. Even the old
+Belgians in Veronica's cottage were at peace. They had
+forgotten.</p>
+<p>For three days Michael himself had peace.</p>
+<p>He went up to Veronica's hill and sat on it; and thought how for
+hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was
+not a soul whom he knew. In all his life he had never been more by
+himself.</p>
+<p>This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael's mind. So
+far from having got away from the War he had never been more
+conscious of it than he was now. What he had got away from was
+other people's consciousness. From the beginning the thing that
+threatened him had been, not the War but this collective
+war-spirit, clamouring for his private soul.</p>
+<p>For the first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found
+himself thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity,
+about the War. He had really known, half the time, that it was the
+greatest War of Independence that had ever been. As for his old
+hatred of the British Empire, he had seen long ago that there was
+no such thing, in the continental sense of Empire; there was a
+unique thing, the rule, more good than bad, of an imperial people.
+He had seen that the strength of the Allies was in exact proportion
+to the strength and the enlightenment of their democracies.
+Reckoning by decades, there could be no deadlock in the struggle;
+the deadlock meant a ten years' armistice and another war. He could
+not help seeing these things. His objection to occupying his mind
+with them had been that they were too easy.</p>
+<p>Now that he could look at it by himself he saw how the War might
+take hold of you like a religion. It was the Great War of
+Redemption. And redemption meant simply thousands and millions of
+men in troop-ships and troop-trains coming from the ends of the
+world to buy the freedom of the world with their bodies. It meant
+that the very fields he was looking over, and this beauty of the
+hills, those unused ramparts where no batteries were hid, and the
+small, silent villages, Morfe and Renton, were bought now with
+their bodies.</p>
+<p>He wondered how at this moment any sane man could be a Pacifist.
+And, wondering, he felt a reminiscent sting of grief and yearning.
+But he refused, resolutely, to feel any shame.</p>
+<p>His religion also was good; and, anyhow, you didn't choose your
+religion; it chose you.</p>
+<p>And on Saturday the letters came: John's letter enclosing the
+wire from the War Office, and the letter that Nicky's Colonel had
+written to Anthony.</p>
+<p>Nicky was killed.</p>
+<p>Michael took in the fact, and the date (it was last Sunday).
+There were some official regrets, but they made no impression on
+him. John's letter made no impression on him. Last Sunday Nicky was
+killed.</p>
+<p>He had not even unfolded the Colonel's letter yet. The close
+black lines showed through the thin paper. Their closeness repelled
+him. He did not want to know how his brother had died; at least not
+yet. He was afraid of the Colonel's letter. He felt that by simply
+not reading it he could put off the unbearable turn of the
+screw.</p>
+<p>He was shivering with cold. He drew up his chair to the wide,
+open hearth-place where there was no fire; he held out his hands
+over it. The wind swept down the chimney and made him colder; and
+he felt sick.</p>
+<p>He had been sitting there about an hour when Suzanne came in and
+asked him if he would like a little fire. He heard himself saying,
+"No, thank you," in a hard voice. The idea of warmth and comfort
+was disagreeable to him. Suzanne asked him then if he had had bad
+news? And he heard himself saying: "Yes," and Suzanne trying,
+trying very gently, to persuade him that it was perhaps only that
+Monsieur Nicky was wounded?</p>
+<p>"No? <i>Then</i>," said the old woman, "he is killed." And she
+began to cry.</p>
+<p>Michael couldn't stand that. He got up and opened the door into
+the outer room, and she passed through before him, sobbing and
+whimpering. Her voice came to him through the closed door in a
+sharp cry telling Jean that Monsieur Nicky was dead, and Jean's
+voice came, hushing her.</p>
+<p>Then he heard the feet of the old man shuffling across the
+kitchen floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and
+through the windows at the back of the room, he saw, without
+heeding, as the Belgians passed and went up into the fields
+together, weeping, leaving him alone.</p>
+<p>They had remembered.</p>
+<p>It was then that Michael read the Colonel's letter, and learned
+the manner of his brother's death: "... About a quarter past four
+o'clock in the afternoon his battalion was being pressed back, when
+he rallied his men and led them in as gallant an attack as was ever
+made by so small a number in this War. He was standing on the
+enemy's parapet when he was shot through the heart and fell. By a
+quarter to five the trench was stormed and taken, owing to his
+personal daring and impetus and to the affection and confidence he
+inspired.... We hear it continually said of our officers and men
+that 'they're all the same,' and I daresay as far as pluck goes
+they are. But, if I may say so, we all felt that your son had
+something that we haven't got...."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Michael lay awake in the bed that had been his brother's
+marriage bed. The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him.
+For three nights the room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had
+never gone from it. They had compelled him to think of them. They
+had lain where he lay, falling asleep in each other's arms.</p>
+<p>The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them
+had in no way troubled him. It had been simply there like some
+exquisite atmosphere, intensifying his peace. He had had the same
+feeling he always had when Veronica was with him. He had liked to
+lie with his head on their pillow, to touch what they had touched,
+to look at the same things in the same room, to go in and out
+through the same doors over the same floors, remembering their
+hands and feet and eyes, and saying to himself: "They did this and
+this"; or, "That must have pleased them."</p>
+<p>It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine
+why it was not.</p>
+<p>And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of
+Nicky and Veronica together. The room had emptied itself of its own
+memory and significance. He was aware of nothing but the bare,
+spiritual space between him and Nicky. He lay contemplating it
+steadily and without any horror.</p>
+<p>He thought: "This ends it. Of course I shall go out now. I might
+have known that this would end it. <i>He</i> knew."</p>
+<p>He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night
+in August. He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed,
+half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.</p>
+<p>Nicky had taken it for granted even then that he would go out
+some time. He remembered how he had said, "Not yet."</p>
+<p>He thought: "Of course; this must have been what he meant."</p>
+<p>And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time
+appeased.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>It was morning.</p>
+<p>Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as
+he struggled to wake.</p>
+<p>Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came
+clear out of this drowning.</p>
+<p>Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last Sunday. He knew that.
+But that wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed
+on--</p>
+<p>Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be
+killed too. And because he was going out, and because he would be
+killed, he was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should
+have thought he would have felt it. He had been let off that.</p>
+<p>He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do,
+feeling a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and
+R&eacute;veillaud and Lawrence had gone out, and they had been
+killed. Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen were going out and they
+would certainly be killed. Wadham had gone out and young Vereker,
+and they also would be killed.</p>
+<p>Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.</p>
+<p>His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without
+concern. It was aware that his going depended on his own will. But
+never in all his life had he brought so little imagination to the
+act of willing.</p>
+<p>He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast.
+He accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or
+concern.</p>
+<p>Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other
+things: "I know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know
+how you cared for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not
+bear it, Michael, if we were not so proud of him."</p>
+<p>He answered this letter at once. He wrote: "I couldn't bear it
+either, if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now."</p>
+<p>As he signed himself, "Your loving Michael," he thought: "That
+settles it." Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it
+he would have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night
+had settled it; that his resolution had been absolutely
+self-determined and absolutely irrevocable then, and that his
+signature gave it no more sanctity or finality than it had already.
+If he was conscript, he was conscript to his own will.</p>
+<p>He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the
+post did not leave Renton for another five hours.</p>
+<p>It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the
+letter-box that shook him into realization of what he had done and
+of what was before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to
+write that letter and to post it. By those two slight acts, not
+dreadful nor difficult in themselves, he had put it out of his
+power to withdraw from the one supremely difficult and dreadful
+act. A second ago, while the letter was still in his hands, he
+could have backed out, because he had not given any pledge. Now he
+would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly for the first
+time what it was that he would have to go through.</p>
+<p>He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along
+the top for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and
+seeing nothing before him but his own act and what must come
+afterwards. By to-morrow, or the next day at the latest, he would
+have enlisted; by six months, at the latest, three months if he had
+what they called "luck," he would be in the trenches, fighting and
+killing, not because he chose, but because he would be told to
+fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that letter to his
+mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.</p>
+<p>And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying
+that he didn't funk it.</p>
+<p>Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked
+looking on at fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn't
+think he would really mind that so much. It would come--it must
+come--as a relief from the horrors he would have to see before it
+came. Nicky had said that they were unbelievable; he had seemed to
+think you couldn't imagine them if you hadn't seen them. But
+Michael could. He had only to think of them to see them now. He
+could make war-pictures for himself, in five minutes, every bit as
+terrifying as the things they said happened under fire. Any fool,
+if he chose to think about it, could see what must happen. Only
+people didn't think. They rushed into it without seeing anything;
+and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it,
+before and during and afterwards and all the time.</p>
+<p>Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that
+the others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very
+well to say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as
+their phrase was, "Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far
+as he was concerned, the end of beauty and of the making of beauty,
+and of everything worth caring for; but it was also the beginning
+of a life that Michael dreaded more than fighting and killing and
+being killed: a life of boredom, of obscene ugliness, of revolting
+contacts, of intolerable subjection. For of course he was going
+into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he could feel the
+heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed beside and
+around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he could
+smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.</p>
+<p>Of course he was going through with it; only--this was the
+thought his mind turned round and round on in horror at itself--he
+funked it. He funked it so badly that he would really rather die
+than go through with it. When he was actually killed that would be
+his second death; months before it could happen he would have known
+all about it; he would have been dead and buried and alive again in
+hell.</p>
+<p>What shocked Michael was his discovering, not that he funked it
+now, which was natural, almost permissible, but that he had funked
+it all the time. He could see now that, since the War began, he had
+been struggling to keep out of it. His mind had fought every
+suggestion that he should go in. It had run to cover, like a mad,
+frightened animal before the thoughts that hunted it down. Funk,
+pure funk, had been at the bottom of all he had said and thought
+and done since August, nineteen-fourteen; his attitude to the War,
+his opinion of the Allies, and of the Government and of its conduct
+of the War, all his wretched criticisms and disparagements--what
+had they been but the very subterfuges of funk?</p>
+<p>His mother had known it; his father had known it; and Dorothy
+and John. It was not conceivable that Nicky did not know it.</p>
+<p>That was what had made the horror of the empty space that
+separated them.</p>
+<p>Lawrence Stephen had certainly known it.</p>
+<p>He could not understand his not knowing it himself, not seeing
+that he struggled. Yet he must have seen that Nicky's death would
+end it. Anyhow, it <i>was</i> ended; if not last night, then this
+morning when he posted the letter.</p>
+<p>But he was no longer appeased by this certainty of his. He was
+going out all right. But merely going out was not enough. What
+counted was the state of mind in which you went. Lawrence had said,
+"Victory--Victory is a state of mind."</p>
+<p>Well--it was a state that came naturally to Nicky, and did not
+come naturally to him. It was all very well for Nicky: he had
+wanted to go. He had gone out victorious before victory. Michael
+would go beaten before defeat.</p>
+<p>He thought: "If this is volunteering, give me compulsion." All
+the same he was going.</p>
+<p>All morning and afternoon, as he walked and walked, his thoughts
+went the same round. And in the evening they began again, but on a
+new track. He thought: "It's all very well to say I'm going; but
+how <i>can</i> I go?" He had Lawrence Stephen's work to do;
+Lawrence's Life and Letters were in his hands. How could he
+possibly go and leave Lawrence dead and forgotten? This view seemed
+to him to be sanity and common sense.</p>
+<p>As his mind darted up this turning it was driven back. He saw
+Lawrence Stephen smiling at him as he had smiled at him when
+R&eacute;veillaud died. Lawrence would have wanted him to go more
+than anything. He would have chosen to be dead and forgotten rather
+than keep him.</p>
+<p>At night these thoughts left him. He began to think of Nicky and
+of his people. His father and mother would never be happy again.
+Nicky had been more to them than he was, or even John. He had been
+more to Dorothy. It was hard on Dorothy to lose Nicky and Drayton
+too.</p>
+<p>He thought of Nicky and Veronica. Poor little Ronny, what would
+she do without Nicky? He thought of Veronica, sitting silent in the
+train, and looking at him with her startling look of spiritual
+maturity. He thought of Veronica singing to him over and over
+again:</p>
+<blockquote>"London Bridge is broken down--<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+"Build it up with gold so fine--<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+"Build it up with stones so strong-"</blockquote>
+<p>He thought of Veronica running about the house and crying,
+"Where's Nicky? I want him."</p>
+<p>Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in
+the morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of
+Renton Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way
+as yesterday. The images were, if anything, more crowded and more
+horrible; but they had lost their hold. He was tired of looking at
+them.</p>
+<p>About five o'clock he turned abruptly and went back to the
+village the same way by which he came.</p>
+<p>And as he swung down the hill road in sight of Renton, suddenly
+there was a great clearance in his soul.</p>
+<p>When he went into the cottage he found Veronica there waiting
+for him. She sat with her hands lying in her lap, and she had the
+same look he had seen when she was in the train.</p>
+<p>"Ronny--"</p>
+<p>She stood up to greet him, as if it had been she who was staying
+there and he who had incredibly arrived.</p>
+<p>"They told me you wouldn't be long," she said.</p>
+<p>"I? You haven't come because you were ill or anything?"</p>
+<p>She smiled and shook her head. "No. Not for anything like
+that."</p>
+<p>"I didn't write, Ronny. I couldn't."</p>
+<p>"I know." Their eyes met, measuring each other's grief. "That's
+why I came. I couldn't bear to leave you to it."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>"I'd have come before, Michael, if you'd wanted me."</p>
+<p>They were sitting together now, on the settle by the
+hearth-place.</p>
+<p>"I can't understand your being able to think of me," he
+said.</p>
+<p>"Because of Nicky? If I haven't got Nicky it's all the more
+reason why I should think of his people."</p>
+<p>He looked up. "I say--how are they? Mother and Father?"</p>
+<p>"They're very brave.</p>
+<p>"It's worse for them than it is for me," she said. "What they
+can't bear is your going."</p>
+<p>"Mother got my letter, then?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. This morning."</p>
+<p>"What did she say?"</p>
+<p>"She said: 'Oh, no. <i>Not</i> Michael.'</p>
+<p>"It was a good thing you wrote, though. Your letter made her
+cry. It made even Dorothy cry. They hadn't been able to,
+before."</p>
+<p>"I should have thought if they could stand Nicky's going--"</p>
+<p>"That was different. They know it was different."</p>
+<p>"Do you suppose <i>I</i> don't know how different it was? They
+mean I funked it and Nicky didn't."</p>
+<p>"They mean that Nicky got what he wanted when he went, and that
+there was nothing else he could have done so well, except flying,
+or engineering."</p>
+<p>"It comes to the same thing, Nicky simply wasn't afraid."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Michael, he <i>was</i> afraid."</p>
+<p>"What <i>of</i>?"</p>
+<p>"He was most awfully afraid of seeing suffering."</p>
+<p>"Well, so am I. And I'm afraid of suffering myself too. I'm
+afraid of the whole blessed thing from beginning to end."</p>
+<p>"That's because you keep on seeing the whole blessed thing from
+beginning to end. Nicky only saw little bits of it. The bits he
+liked. Machine-guns working beautifully, and shells dropping in the
+right places, and trenches being taken.</p>
+<p>"And then, remember--Nicky hadn't so much to give up."</p>
+<p>"He had you."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no. He knew that was the way to keep me."</p>
+<p>"Ronny--if Nicky had been like me could he have kept you?"</p>
+<p>She considered it.</p>
+<p>"Yes--if he could have been himself too."</p>
+<p>"He couldn't, you see. He never could have felt like that."</p>
+<p>"I don't say He could."</p>
+<p>"Well--the awful thing is 'feeling like that.'"</p>
+<p>"And the magnificent thing is 'feeling like that,' and going all
+the same. Everybody knows that but you, Michael."</p>
+<p>"Yes," he said. "I'm <i>going</i>. But I'm not going to lie
+about it and say I don't funk it. Because I do."</p>
+<p>"You don't <i>really</i>."</p>
+<p>"I own I didn't the first night--the night I knew Nicky was
+killed. Because I couldn't think of anything else <i>but</i>
+Nicky.</p>
+<p>"It was after I'd written to Mother that it came on. Because I
+knew then I couldn't back out of it. That's what I can't get
+over--my having to do that--to clinch it--because I was
+afraid."</p>
+<p>"My dear, my dear, thousands of men do that every day for the
+same reason, only they don't find themselves out; and if they did
+they wouldn't care. You're finding yourself out all the time, and
+killing yourself with caring."</p>
+<p>"Of course I care. Can't you see it proves that I never meant to
+go at all?"</p>
+<p>"It proves that you knew you'd have to go through hell first and
+you were determined that even hell shouldn't keep you back."</p>
+<p>"Ronny--that's what it <i>has</i> been. Simply hell. It's been
+inconceivable. Nothing--absolutely nothing out there could be as
+bad. It went on all yesterday and to-day--till you came."</p>
+<p>"I know, Michael. That's why I came."</p>
+<p>"To get me out of it?"</p>
+<p>"To get you out of it.</p>
+<p>"It's all over," she said.</p>
+<p>"It may come back--out there."</p>
+<p>"It won't. Out there you'll be happy. I saw Nicky on Sunday--the
+minute before he was killed, Michael. And he was happy."</p>
+<p>"He would be." He was silent for a long time.</p>
+<p>"Ronny. Did Nicky know I funked it?"</p>
+<p>"Never! He knew you wouldn't keep out. All he minded was your
+missing any of it."</p>
+<p>She got up and put on her hat. "I must go. It's getting late.
+Will you walk up to Morfe with me? I'm sleeping there. In the
+hotel."</p>
+<p>"No, I say--I'm not going to let you turn out for me.
+<i>I</i>'ll sleep at the hotel."</p>
+<p>She smiled at him with a sort of wonder, as if she thought: "Has
+he forgotten, so soon?" And he remembered.</p>
+<p>"I can't stop here," she said. "That would be more than even
+<i>I</i> can bear."</p>
+<p>He thought: "She's gone through hell herself, to get me out of
+it."</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;May, 1916.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER,--Yes, "Captain," please. (I can
+hardly believe it myself, but it is so.) It was thundering good
+luck getting into dear old Nicky's regiment. The whole thing's
+incredible. But promotion's nothing. Everybody's getting it like
+lightning now. You're no sooner striped than you're starred.</p>
+<p>I'm glad I resisted the Adjutant and worked up from the ranks. I
+own it was a bit beastly at the time--quite as beastly as Nicky
+said it would be; but it was worth while going through with it,
+especially living in the trenches as a Tommy. There's nothing like
+it for making you know your men. You can tell exactly what's going
+to bother them, and what isn't. You've got your finger on the pulse
+of their morale--not that it's jumpier than yours; it isn't--and
+their knowing that they haven't got to stand anything that you
+haven't stood gives you no end of a pull. Honestly, I don't believe
+I could have faced them if it wasn't for that. So that <i>your</i>
+morale's the better for it as well as theirs. You know, if you're
+shot down this minute it won't matter. The weediest Tommy in your
+Company can "carry on."</p>
+<p><i>We</i>'re a funny crowd in my billet all risen from the ranks
+except my Senior. John would love us. There's a chap who writes
+short stories and goes out very earnestly among the corpses to find
+copy; and there's another who was in the publishing business and
+harks back to it, now and then, in a dreamy nostalgic way, and
+rather as if he wanted to rub it into us writing chaps what he
+<i>could</i> do for us, only he wouldn't; and there's a tailor who
+swears he could tell a mile off where my tunic came from; and a
+lawyer's clerk who sticks his cigarette behind his ear. (We used to
+wonder what he'd do with his revolver till we saw what he did with
+it.) They all love thinking of what they've been and telling you
+about it. I almost wish I'd gone into Daddy's business. Then
+perhaps I'd know what it feels like to go straight out of a shop or
+an office into the most glorious Army in history.</p>
+<p>I forgot the Jew pawnbroker at least we <i>think</i> he's a
+pawnbroker--who's always inventing things; stupendous and
+impossible things. His last idea was machine-howitzers fourteen
+feet high, that take in shells exactly as a machine-gun takes in
+bullets. He says "You'll see them in the next War." When you ask
+him how he's going to transport and emplace and hide his
+machine-howitzers, he looks dejected, and says "I never thought of
+<i>that</i>," and has another idea at once, even more
+impossible.</p>
+<p>That reminds me. I've seen the "Tanks" (Nicky's Moving
+Fortresses) in action. I'd give my promotion if only he could have
+seen them too. We mustn't call them Fortresses any more--they're
+most violently for attack. As far as I can make out Nicky's and
+Drayton's thing was something between these and the French ones;
+otherwise one might have wondered whether their plans and models
+really did go where John says they did! I wish I could believe that
+Nicky and Drayton really <i>had</i> had a hand in it.</p>
+<p>I'm most awfully grieved to hear that young Vereker's reported
+missing. Do you remember how excited he used to be dashing about
+the lawn at tennis, and how Alice Lathom used to sit and look at
+him, and jump if you brought her her tea too suddenly? Let's hope
+we'll have finished up this damned War before they get little
+Norris.</p>
+<p>Love to Dorothy and Don and Ronny.--Your loving, MICK.</p>
+<p>When Frances read that letter she said, "I wonder if he really
+is all right. He says very little about himself."</p>
+<p>And Anthony said, "Then you may be sure he is."</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;May 31st, 1916.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad Mummy and Father have got all my
+letters. They won't mind my writing to you this time. It really
+<i>is</i> your turn now. Thanks for Wadham's "Poems" (I wish they'd
+been Ellis's). It's a shame to laugh at Waddy--but--he <i>has</i>
+spread himself over Flanders, hasn't he? Like the inundations round
+Ypres.</p>
+<p>I'm most awfully touched at Dad and Mummy wanting to publish
+mine. Here they all are--just as I wrote them, in our billet, at
+night or in the early morning, when the others were sleeping and I
+wasn't. I don't know whether they're bad or good; I haven't had
+time to think about them. It all seems so incredibly far away. Even
+last week seems far away. You go on so fast here.</p>
+<p>I'd like Ellis and Monier-Owen to see them and to weed out the
+bad ones. But you mustn't ask them to do anything. They haven't
+time, either. I think you and Dorothy and Dad will manage it all
+right among you. If you don't I shan't much care.</p>
+<p>Of course I'm glad that they've taken you on at the Hampstead
+Hospital, if it makes you happier to nurse. And I'm glad Dad put
+his foot down on your going to Vera. She gave you up to my people
+and she can't take you back now. I'm sorry for her though; so is
+he.</p>
+<p>Have I had any adventures "by myself"? Only two. (I've given up
+what Mother calls my "not wanting to go to the party.") One came
+off in "No Man's Land" the other night. I went out with a "party"
+and came back by myself--unless you count a damaged Tommy hanging
+on to me. It began in pleasurable excitement and ended in some
+perturbation, for I had to get him in under cover somehow, and my
+responsibility weighed on me--so did he. The other was ages ago in
+a German trench. I was by myself, because I'd gone in too quick,
+and the "party" behind me took the wrong turning. I did manage to
+squeeze a chilly excitement out of going on alone. Then I bumped up
+against a fat German officer and his revolver. That really was an
+exquisite moment, and I was beast enough to be glad I had it all to
+myself. It meant a bag of fifteen prisoners--all my own. But that
+was nothing; they'd have surrendered to a mouse. There was no
+reason why they shouldn't, because I'd fired first and there was no
+more officer to play up to.</p>
+<p>But the things you don't do by yourself are a long way the best.
+Nothing--not even poetry--can beat an infantry charge when you're
+leading it. That's because of your men. It feels as if you were
+drawing them all up after you. Of course you aren't. They're coming
+on their own, and you're simply nothing, only a little unimportant
+part of them--even when you're feeling as if you were God
+Almighty.</p>
+<p>I'm afraid it <i>does</i> look awfully as if young Vereker were
+killed. They may hear, you know, in some roundabout way--through
+the Red Cross, or some of his men. I've written to them.</p>
+<p>Love to everybody. Certainly you may kiss Nanna for me, if she'd
+like it. I wish I liked Waddy more--when you've given him to
+me.--Always your affectionate,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MICHAEL.</blockquote>
+<p>P.S.--I don't sound pleased about the publication; but I am. I
+can't get over their wanting to do it. I thought they didn't
+care.</p>
+<p>Ronny--I've been such a beast to them--when Father tried to read
+my stuff--bless him!--and couldn't, I used to wish to God he'd
+leave it alone. And now I'd give anything to see his dear old paws
+hanging on to it and twitching with fright, and his eyes slewing
+round to see if I'm looking at him.</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;June 14th, 1916.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; B.E.F.,
+FRANCE.</blockquote>
+<p>MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad you like them, and I'm glad Father
+thinks he "understands Michael's poems" this time, and I'm glad
+they've made Mother and Dorothy feel happier about me--BUT--they
+must get it out of their heads that they're my "message," or any
+putrescent thing of that sort. The bare idea of writing a message,
+or of being supposed to write a message, makes me sick. I know it's
+beastly of me, but, really I'd rather they weren't published at
+all, if there's the smallest chance of their being taken that
+way.</p>
+<p>But if Ellis is doing the introduction there isn't the smallest
+chance. Thank God for Ellis.</p>
+<p>There--I've let off all my beastliness.</p>
+<p>And now I'll try to answer your letter. Yes; the "ecstasy" in
+the last two poems <i>is</i> Nicky's ecstasy. And as Ellis says it
+strikes him as absolutely real, I take it that some of Nicky's
+"reality" has got through. It's hard on Ellis that he has to take
+<i>his</i> ecstasy from me, instead of coming out and getting it
+for himself.</p>
+<p>But you and Nicky and Lawrence are right. It <i>is</i>
+absolutely real. I mean it has to do with absolute reality. With
+God. It hasn't anything to do with having courage, or not having
+courage; it's another state of mind altogether. It isn't what
+Nicky's man said it was--you're not ashamed of it the next day. It
+isn't excitement; you're not excited. It isn't a tingling of your
+nerves; they don't tingle. It's all curiously quiet and steady. You
+remember when you saw Nicky--how everything stood still? And how
+two times were going on, and you and Nicky were in one time, and
+Mother was in the other? Well--it's like that. Your body and its
+nerves aren't in it at all. Your body may be moving violently, with
+other bodies moving violently round it; but <i>you</i>'re
+still.</p>
+<p>But suppose it is your nerves. Why should they tingle at just
+that particular moment, the moment that makes <i>animals</i>
+afraid? Why should you be so extraordinarily happy? Why should the
+moment of extreme danger be always the "exquisite" moment? Why not
+the moment of safety?</p>
+<p>Doesn't it look as if danger were the point of contact with
+reality, and death the closest point? You're through. Actually you
+lay hold on eternal life, and you know it.</p>
+<p>Another thing--it always comes with that little shock of
+recognition. It's happened before, and when you get near to it
+again you know what it is. You keep on wanting to get near it,
+wanting it to happen again. You may lose it the next minute, but
+you know. Lawrence knew what it was. Nicky knew.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<blockquote>June 19th.</blockquote>
+<p>I'm coming back to it--after that interruption--because I want
+to get the thing clear. I have to put it down as I feel it; there's
+no other way. But they mustn't think it's something that only
+Lawrence and Nicky and I feel. The men feel it too, even when they
+don't know what it is. And some of them <i>do</i> know.</p>
+<p>Of course we shall be accused of glorifying War and telling lies
+about it. Well--there's a Frenchman who has told the truth, piling
+up all the horrors, faithfully, remorselessly, magnificently. But
+he seems to think people oughtn't to write about this War at all
+unless they show up the infamy of it, as a deterrent, so that no
+Government can ever start another one. It's a sort of literary
+"frightfulness." But who is he trying to frighten? Does he imagine
+that France, or England, or Russia or Belgium, or Serbia, will want
+to start another war when this is over? And does he suppose that
+Germany--if we don't beat her--will be deterred by his
+frightfulness? Germany's arrogance will be satisfied when she knows
+she's made a Frenchman feel like that about it.</p>
+<p>He's got his truth all right. As Morrie would say: "That's War."
+But a peaceful earthquake can do much the same thing. And if
+<i>our</i> truth--what <i>we</i>'ve seen--isn't War, at any rate
+it's what we've got out of it, it's our "glory," our spiritual
+compensation for the physical torture, and there would be a sort of
+infamy in trying to take it from us. It isn't the French
+Government, or the British that's fighting Germany; it's we--all of
+us. To insist on the world remembering nothing but these horrors is
+as if men up to their knees in the filth they're clearing away
+should complain of each other for standing in it and splashing it
+about.</p>
+<p>The filth of War--and the physical torture--Good God! As if the
+world was likely to forget it. Any more than we're likely to forget
+what <i>we</i> know.</p>
+<p>You remember because you've known it before and it all hangs
+together. It's not as if danger were the only point of contact with
+reality. You get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition,
+and the same utter satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing. At
+least to me it's like that. You know what Nicky thought it was
+like. You know what it was like when you used to sit looking and
+looking at Mother's "tree of Heaven."</p>
+<p>It's odd, Ronny, to have gone all your life trying to get
+reality, trying to get new beauty, trying to get utter
+satisfaction; to have funked coming out here because you thought it
+was all obscene ugliness and waste and frustration, and then to
+come out, and to find what you wanted.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<blockquote>June 25th.</blockquote>
+<p>I wrote all that, while I could, because I want to make them see
+it. It's horrible that Dorothy should think that Drayton's dead and
+that Mother should think that Nicky's dead, when they wouldn't, if
+they really knew. If they don't believe Lawrence or me, can't they
+believe Nicky? I'm only saying what he said. But I can't write to
+them about it because they make me shy, and I'm afraid they'll
+think I'm only gassing, or "making poetry"--as if poetry wasn't the
+most real thing there is!</p>
+<p>If anybody can make them see it, you can.--Always your
+affectionate,</p>
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MICHAEL.</blockquote>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>XXV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Anthony was going into the house to take back the key of the
+workshop.</p>
+<p>He had locked the door of the workshop a year ago, after Nicky's
+death, and had not opened it again until to-day. This afternoon in
+the orchard he had seen that the props of the old apple-tree were
+broken and he had thought that he would like to make new ones, and
+the wood was in the workshop.</p>
+<p>Everything in there was as it had been when Nicky finished with
+his Moving Fortress. The brass and steel filings lay in a heap
+under the lathe, the handle was tilted at the point where he had
+left it; pits in the saw-dust showed where his feet had stood. His
+overalls hung over the bench where he had slipped them off.</p>
+<p>Anthony had sat down on the bench and had looked at these things
+with remembrance and foreboding. He thought of Nicky and of Nicky's
+pleasure and excitement over the unpacking of his first lathe--the
+one he had begged for for his birthday--and of his own pleasure and
+excitement as he watched his boy handling it and showing him so
+cleverly how it worked. It stood there still in the corner. Nicky
+had given it to Veronica. He had taught her how to use it. And
+Anthony thought of Veronica when she was little; he saw Nicky
+taking care of her, teaching her to run and ride and play games.
+And he remembered what Veronica's mother had said to him and
+Frances: "Wait till Nicky has children of his own."</p>
+<p>He thought of John. John had volunteered three times and had
+been three times rejected. And now conscription had got him. He had
+to appear before the Board of Examiners that afternoon. He might be
+rejected again. But the standard was not so exacting as it had
+been--John might be taken.</p>
+<p>He thought of his business--John's business and his, and
+Bartie's. Those big Government contracts had more than saved them.
+They were making tons of money out of the War. Even when the
+Government cut down their profits; even when they had given more
+than half they made to the War funds, the fact remained that they
+were living on the War. Bartie, without a wife or children, was
+appallingly rich.</p>
+<p>If John were taken. If John were killed--</p>
+<p>If Michael died--</p>
+<p>Michael had been reported seriously wounded.</p>
+<p>He had thought then of Michael. And he had not been able to bear
+thinking any more. He had got up and left the workshop, locking the
+door behind him, forgetting what he had gone in for; and he had
+taken the key back to the house. He kept it in what his children
+used to call the secret drawer of his bureau. It lay there with
+Nicky's last letter of June, 1915, and a slab of coromandel
+wood.</p>
+<p>It was when he was going into the house with the key that John
+met him.</p>
+<p>"Have they taken you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>John's face was hard and white. They went together into
+Anthony's room.</p>
+<p>"It's what you wanted," Anthony said.</p>
+<p>"Of course it's what I wanted. I want it more than ever now.</p>
+<p>"The wire's come, Father. Mother opened it."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>It was five days now since they had heard that Michael had died
+of his wounds. Frances was in Michael's room. She was waiting for
+Dorothea and Veronica to help her to find his papers. It was eight
+o'clock in the evening, and they had to be sorted and laid out
+ready for Morton Ellis to look over them to-morrow. To-morrow
+Morton Ellis would come, and he would take them away.</p>
+<p>The doors of Michael's and of Nicky's rooms were always kept
+shut; Frances knew that, if she were to open the door on the other
+side of the corridor and look in, every thing in Nicky's room would
+welcome her with tenderness even while it inflicted its unique and
+separate wound. But Michael's room was bare and silent. He had
+cleared everything away out of her sight last year before he went.
+The very books on the shelves repudiated her; reminded her that she
+had never understood him, that he had always escaped her. His room
+kept his secret, and she felt afraid and abashed in it, knowing
+herself an intruder. Presently all that was most precious in it
+would be taken from her and given over to a stranger whom he had
+never liked.</p>
+<p>Her mind turned and fastened on one object--the stiff, naked
+wooden chair standing in its place before the oak table by the
+window. She remembered how she had come to Michael there and found
+him writing at his table, and how she had talked to him as though
+he had been a shirker and a coward.</p>
+<p>She had borne Nicky's death. But she could not bear Michael's.
+She stood there in his room, staring, hypnotized by her memory. She
+heard Dorothea come in and go out again. And then Veronica came
+in.</p>
+<p>She turned to Veronica to help her.</p>
+<p>She clung to Veronica and was jealous of her. Veronica had not
+come between her and Nicky as long as he was alive, but now that he
+was dead she came between them. She came between her and Michael
+too. Michael's mind had always been beyond her; she could only
+reach it through Veronica and through Veronica's secret. Her mind
+clutched at Veronica's secret, and flung it away as useless, and
+returned, clutching at it again.</p>
+<p>It was as if Veronica held the souls of Michael and Nicholas in
+her hands. She offered her the souls of her dead sons. She was the
+mediator between her and their souls.</p>
+<p>"I could bear it, Veronica, if I hadn't made him go. I came to
+him, here, in this room, and bullied him till he went. I said
+horrible things to him--that he must have remembered.</p>
+<p>"He wasn't like Nicky--it was infinitely worse for him. And I
+was cruel to him. I had no pity. I drove him out--to be killed.</p>
+<p>"And I simply cannot bear it."</p>
+<p>"But--he didn't go then. He waited till--till he was free. If
+anybody could have made him, Nicky could. But it wasn't even Nicky.
+It was himself."</p>
+<p>"If he'd been killed as Nicky was--but to die like that, in the
+hospital--of those horrible wounds."</p>
+<p>"He was leading a charge, just as Nicky was. And you know he was
+happy, just as Nicky was. Every line he's written shows that he was
+happy."</p>
+<p>"It only shows that they were both full of life, that they loved
+their life and wanted to live.</p>
+<p>"It's no use, Ronny, you're saying you know they're there. I
+don't. I'd give anything to believe it. And yet it wouldn't be a
+bit of good if I did. I don't <i>want</i> them all changed into
+something spiritual that I shouldn't know if it was there. I want
+their bodies with me just as they used to be. I want to hear them
+and touch them, and see them come in in their old clothes.</p>
+<p>"To see Nicky standing on the hearthrug with Timmy in his arms.
+I want things like that, Ronny. Even if you're right, it's all
+clean gone."</p>
+<p>Her lips tightened.</p>
+<p>"I'm talking as if I was, the only one. But I know it's worse
+for you, Ronny. I <i>had</i> them all those years. And I've got
+Anthony. You've had nothing but your poor three days."</p>
+<p>Veronica thought: "How can I tell her that I've got more than
+she thinks? It's awful that I should have what she hasn't." She was
+ashamed and beaten before this irreparable, mortal grief.</p>
+<p>"And it's worse," Frances said, "for the wretched mothers whose
+sons haven't fought."</p>
+<p>For her pride rose in her again--the pride that uplifted her
+supernaturally when Nicky died.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't think I grudge them. I don't. I don't even grudge
+John."</p>
+<p>The silence of Michael's room sank into them, it weighed on
+their hearts and they were afraid of each other's voices. Frances
+was glad when Dorothy came and they could begin their work
+there.</p>
+<p>But Michael had not left them much to do. They found his papers
+all in one drawer of his writing-table, sorted and packed and
+labelled, ready for Morton Ellis to take away. One sealed envelope
+lay in a place by itself. Frances thought: "He didn't want any of
+us to touch his things."</p>
+<p>Then she saw Veronica's name on the sealed envelope. She was
+glad when Veronica left them and went to her hospital.</p>
+<p>And when she was gone she wanted her back again.</p>
+<p>"I wish I hadn't spoken that way to Veronica," she said.</p>
+<p>"She won't mind. She knows you couldn't help it."</p>
+<p>"I could, Dorothy, if I wasn't jealous of her. I mean I'm
+jealous of her certainty. If I had it, too, I shouldn't be
+jealous."</p>
+<p>"She wants you to have it. She's trying to give it you.</p>
+<p>"Mother--how do we know she isn't right? Nicky said she was. And
+Michael said Nicky was right.</p>
+<p>"If it had been only Nicky--<i>he</i> might have got it from
+Veronica. But Michael never got things from anybody. And you
+<i>do</i> know things in queer ways. Even I do. At least I did
+once--when I was in prison. I knew something tremendous was going
+to happen. I saw it, or felt it, or something. I won't swear I knew
+it was the War. I don't suppose I did. But I knew Frank was all
+mixed up with it. And it was the most awfully real thing. You
+couldn't go back on it, or get behind it. It was as if I'd seen
+that he and Lawrence and Nicky and Michael and all of them would
+die in it to save the whole world. Like Christ, only that they
+really <i>did</i> die and the whole world <i>was</i> saved. There
+was nothing futile about it."</p>
+<p>"Well--?"</p>
+<p>"Well, <i>they</i> might see their real thing the same way--in a
+flash. Aren't they a thousand times more likely to know than we
+are? What right have we--sitting here safe--to say it isn't when
+they say it is?"</p>
+<p>"But--if there's anything in it--why can't I see it as well as
+you and Veronica? After all, I'm their mother."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps that's why it takes you longer, Mummy. You think of
+their bodies more than we do, because they were part of your body.
+Their souls, or whatever it is, aren't as real to you just at
+first."</p>
+<p>"I see," said Frances, bitterly. "You've only got to be a
+mother, and give your children your flesh and blood, to be sure of
+their souls going from you and somebody else getting them."</p>
+<p>"That's the price you pay for being mothers."</p>
+<p>"Was Frank's soul ever more real to <i>you</i>, Dorothy?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. It was once--for just one minute. The night he went away.
+That's another queer thing that happened."</p>
+<p>"It didn't satisfy you, darling, did it?"</p>
+<p>"Of course it didn't satisfy me. I want more and more of it. Not
+just flashes."</p>
+<p>"You say it's the price we pay for being mothers. Yet if
+Veronica had had a child--"</p>
+<p>"You needn't be so sorry for Veronica."</p>
+<p>"I'm not. It's you I'm sorriest for. You've had nothing. From
+beginning to end you had nothing.</p>
+<p>"I might at least have seen that you had it in the
+beginning."</p>
+<p>"<i>You</i>, Mummy?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Me. You <i>shall</i> have it now. Unless you want to leave
+me."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't leave you for the world, Mummy ducky. Only you must
+let me work always and all the time."</p>
+<p>"Let you? I'll let you do what you like, my dear."</p>
+<p>"You always have let me, haven't you?"</p>
+<p>"It was the least I could do."</p>
+<p>"Poor Mummy, did you think you had to make up because you cared
+for them more than me?"</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said Frances, thoughtfully, "if I did."</p>
+<p>"Of course. Of course you did. Who wouldn't?"</p>
+<p>"I never meant you to know it, Dorothy."</p>
+<p>"Of course I knew it. I must have known it ever since Michael
+was born. I knew you couldn't help it. You had to. Even when I was
+a tiresome kid I knew you had to. It was natural."</p>
+<p>"Natural or unnatural, many girls have hated their mothers for
+less. You've been very big and generous.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps--if you'd been little and weak--but you were always
+such an independent thing. I used to think you didn't want me."</p>
+<p>"I wanted you a lot more than you thought. But, you see, I've
+learned to do without."</p>
+<p>She thought: "It's better she should have it straight."</p>
+<p>"If you'd think less about me, Mother," she said, "and more
+about Father--"</p>
+<p>"Father?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Father isn't independent--though he looks it. He wants you
+awfully. He always has wanted you. And he hasn't learned to do
+without."</p>
+<p>"Where is he?"</p>
+<p>"He's sitting out there in the garden, all by himself, in the
+dark, under the tree."</p>
+<p>Frances went to him there.</p>
+<p>"I wondered whether you would come to me," he said.</p>
+<p>"I was doing something for Michael."</p>
+<p>"Is it done?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. It's done."</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Five months passed. It was November now.</p>
+<p>In the lane by the side door, Anthony was waiting in his car.
+Rain was falling, hanging from the trees and falling. Every now and
+then he looked at his watch.</p>
+<p>He had still a quarter of an hour before he need start. But he
+was not going back into the house. They were all in there saying
+good-bye to John: old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and
+Edith. And Maurice. And his brother Bartie.</p>
+<p>The door in the garden wall opened and they came out: the four
+women in black--the black they still wore for Michael--and the two
+men.</p>
+<p>They all walked slowly up the lane. Anthony could see Bartie's
+shoulders hunched irritably against the rain. He could see Morrie
+carrying his sodden, quivering body with care and an exaggerated
+sobriety. He saw Grannie, going slowly, under the umbrella, very
+upright and conscious of herself as wonderful and outlasting.</p>
+<p>He got down and cranked up his engine.</p>
+<p>Then he sat sternly in his car and waited, with his hands on the
+steering-wheel, ready.</p>
+<p>The engine throbbed, impatient for the start.</p>
+<p>John came out very quickly and took his seat beside his father.
+And the car went slowly towards the high road.</p>
+<p>Uncle Morrie stood waiting for it by the gate at the top of the
+lane. As it passed through he straightened himself and put up his
+hand in a crapulous salute.</p>
+<p>The young man smiled at him, saluted, and was gone</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREE OF HEAVEN***</p>
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+</pre>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Tree of Heaven, by May Sinclair
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Tree of Heaven
+
+Author: May Sinclair
+
+Release Date: October 27, 2004  [eBook #13883]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREE OF HEAVEN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+THE TREE OF HEAVEN
+
+by
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+Author of _The Belfry_, _The Three Sisters_, etc.
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+PEACE
+
+
+
+I
+
+Frances Harrison was sitting out in the garden under the tree that her
+husband called an ash-tree, and that the people down in her part of the
+country called a tree of Heaven.
+
+It was warm under the tree, and Frances might have gone to sleep there
+and wasted an hour out of the afternoon, if it hadn't been for
+the children.
+
+Dorothy, Michael and Nicholas were going to a party, and Nicky was
+excited. She could hear Old Nanna talking to Michael and telling him to
+be a good boy. She could hear young Mary-Nanna singing to Baby John.
+Baby John was too young himself to go to parties; so to make up for that
+he was riding furiously on Mary-Nanna's knee to the tune of the
+"Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major!"
+
+It was Nicky's first party. That was why he was excited.
+
+He had asked her for the third time what it would be like; and for the
+third time she had told him. There would be dancing and a Magic Lantern,
+and a Funny Man, and a Big White Cake covered with sugar icing and
+Rosalind's name on it in pink sugar letters and eight little pink wax
+candles burning on the top for Rosalind's birthday. Nicky's eyes shone
+as she told him.
+
+Dorothy, who was nine years old, laughed at Nicky.
+
+"Look at Nicky," she said, "how excited he is!"
+
+And every time she laughed at him his mother kissed him.
+
+"I don't care," said Nicky. "I don't care if I am becited!"
+
+And for the fifth time he asked, "When will it be time to go?"
+
+"Not for another hour and a half, my sweetheart."
+
+"How long," said Nicky, "is an hour and a half?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances had a tranquil nature and she never worried. But as she sat
+under her tree of Heaven a thought came that made a faint illusion of
+worry for her mind. She had forgotten to ask Grannie and Auntie Louie
+and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie to tea.
+
+She had come to think of them like that in relation to her children
+rather than to her or to each other.
+
+It was a Tuesday, and they had not been there since Friday. Perhaps, she
+thought, I'd better send over for them now. Especially as it's such a
+beautiful afternoon. Supposing I sent Michael?
+
+And yet, supposing Anthony came home early? He was always kind to her
+people, but that was the very reason why she oughtn't to let them spoil
+a beautiful afternoon for him. It could not be said that any of them
+was amusing.
+
+She could still hear Mary-Nanna singing her song about the
+Bumpetty-Bumpetty Major. She could still hear Old Nanna talking to
+Michael and telling him to be a good boy. That could only end in Michael
+being naughty. To avert naughtiness or any other disaster from her
+children was the end of Frances's existence.
+
+So she called Michael to come to her. He came, running like a little
+dog, obediently.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael was glad that he had been sent across the Heath to Grannie's
+house with a message. It made him feel big and brave. Besides, it would
+put off the moment when Mary-Nanna would come for him, to make him ready
+for the party. He was not sure that he wanted to go to it.
+
+Michael did not much like going to Grannie's house either. In all the
+rooms there was a queer dark-greenness and creepiness. It smelt of
+bird-cages and elder bushes and of Grandpapa's funeral. And when you had
+seen Auntie Edie's Senegal wax-bills, and the stuffed fish, and the
+inside of Auntie Louie's type-writer there was nothing else to see.
+
+His mother said that Grandpapa's funeral was all over, and that the
+green creepiness came from the green creepers. But Michael knew it
+didn't. She only said things like that to make you feel nice and comfy
+when you were going to bed. Michael knew very well that they had put
+Grandpapa into the drawing-room and locked the door so that the funeral
+men shouldn't get at him and take him away too soon. And Auntie Louie
+had kept the key in her pocket.
+
+Funerals meant taking people away.
+
+Old Nanna wouldn't let him talk about it; but Mary-Nanna had told him
+that was what funerals meant. All the same, as he went up the flagged
+path, he took care not to look through the black panes of the window
+where the elder bush was, lest he should see Grandpapa's coffin standing
+in the place where the big table used to be, and Grandpapa lying inside
+it wrapped in a white sheet.
+
+Michael's message was that Mummy sent her love, and would Grannie and
+Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie come to tea? She was
+going to have tea in the garden, and would they please come early? As
+early as possible. That was the part he was not to forget.
+
+The queer thing was that when Michael went to see Grannie and the
+Aunties in Grannie's house he saw four old women. They wore black
+dresses that smelt sometimes of something sweet and sometimes like your
+fingers when you get ink on them. The Aunties looked cross; and Auntie
+Emmeline smelt as if she had been crying. He thought that perhaps they
+had not been able to stop crying since Grandpapa's funeral. He thought
+that was why Auntie Louie's nose was red and shiny and Auntie Edie's
+eyelids had pink edges instead of lashes. In Grannie's house they never
+let you do anything. They never did anything themselves. They never
+wanted to do anything; not even to talk. He thought it was because they
+knew that Grandpapa was still there all the time.
+
+But outside it the Aunties were not so very old. They rode bicycles. And
+when they came to Michael's Father's house they forgot all about
+Grandpapa's funeral and ran about and played tennis like Michael's
+mother and Mrs. Jervis, and they talked a lot.
+
+Michael's mother was Grannie's child. To see how she could be a child
+you had only to think of her in her nightgown with her long brown hair
+plaited in a pigtail hanging down her back and tied with a blue ribbon.
+But he couldn't see how the three Aunties could be Grannie's other
+children. They were bigger than Grannie and they had grey hair. Grannie
+was a little thing; she was white and dry; and she had hair like hay.
+Besides, she hardly ever took any notice of them except to make a face
+at Auntie Emmeline or Auntie Edie now and then. She did it with her head
+a little on one side, pushing out her underlip and drawing it
+back again.
+
+Grannie interested Michael; but more when he thought about her than when
+she was actually there. She stood for him as the mark and measure of
+past time. To understand how old Grannie was you had to think backwards;
+this way: Once there was a time when there was no Michael; but there was
+Mummy and there was Daddy. And once there was a time when there was no
+Mummy and no Daddy; but there was Grannie and there was Grandpapa. Now
+there was no Grandpapa. But he couldn't think back far enough to get to
+the time when there was no Grannie.
+
+Michael thought that being Grannie must feel like being God.
+
+Before he came to the black window pane and the elder bush he had to run
+down the slopes and jump the gullies on his side of the Heath, and cross
+the West Road, and climb the other slope to Grannie's side. And it was
+not till you got to the row of elms on Judge's Walk that you had to go
+carefully because of the funeral.
+
+He stood there on the ridge of the Walk and looked back to his own side.
+There were other houses there; but he knew his father's house by the
+tree of Heaven in the garden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The garden stood on a high, flat promontory jutting out into the Heath.
+A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like fortifications on a
+breastwork, enclosed it on three sides. From the flagged terrace at the
+bottom of the garden you looked down, through the tops of the
+birch-trees that rose against the rampart, over the wild places of the
+Heath. There was another flagged terrace at the other end of the garden.
+The house rose sheer from its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and
+flat-fronted, with the white wings of its storm shutters spread open,
+row on row. It barred the promontory from the mainland. And at the back
+of it, beyond its kitchen garden and its courtyard, a fringe of Heath
+still parted it from the hill road that went from "Jack Straw's Castle"
+to "The Bull and Bush." You reached it by a lane that led from the road
+to the Heath.
+
+The house belonged to the Heath and the open country. It was aware of
+nothing but the Heath and the open country between it and Harrow on the
+Hill. It had the air of all the old houses of Hampstead, the wonderful
+air of not acknowledging the existence of Bank Holidays. It was lifted
+up high above the town; shut in; utterly secluded.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anthony Harrison considered that he had done well when he acquired West
+End House for his wife Frances, and for his children, Dorothea, Michael,
+Nicholas and John.
+
+Frances had said that, if he was thinking of her, he needn't buy a big
+place, because she didn't want one. But he might buy it for the children
+if he liked. Anthony had said that she had no idea of what she mightn't
+want, once she began to give her mind to it, and that he would like to
+think of her living in it after he was gone. Not that he had any
+intention of going; he was only thirty-six (not much older than Frances)
+and incurably healthy. But since his wife's attention had become
+absorbed in the children--to the exclusion of every other interest--he
+was always trying to harrow her by the suggestion. And Frances only
+laughed at him and told him that he was a silly old thing, and that he
+needn't think he was going to get round her that way.
+
+There was no other way open for Anthony; unless he were to go bankrupt
+or get pneumonia or peritonitis. Frances would have been the first to
+acknowledge that illness or misfortune constituted a claim. And the only
+things he ever did get were loud, explosive colds in his head which made
+him a mark for derision. His business was so sound that not even a
+revolution or a European war could shake it. And his appearance was
+incompatible with his pretensions to pathos.
+
+It would have paid him better to have been small and weedy, or
+lamentably fat, or to have had a bald place coming, or crow's feet
+pointing to grey hairs; for then there might have been a chance for him.
+But Anthony's body was well made, slender and tall. He had blue eyes and
+black-brown hair, and the look of an amiable hawk, alert, fiercely
+benevolent. Frances couldn't see any pathos in the kind of figure she
+happened to admire most, the only kind she would have tolerated in a
+husband. And if she _had_ seen any pathos in it she wouldn't have
+married it. Pathos, she said, was all very well in a father, or a
+brother, or a friend, but in choosing a husband you had to think of your
+children; and she had wanted boys that would look like Michael and
+Nicholas and John.
+
+"Don't you mean," Anthony had said, "boys that will look like me?"
+
+"I mean," she had answered, "exactly what I say. You needn't be so
+arrogant."
+
+_Her_ arrogance had been beyond all bearing since John, the third son,
+had been born.
+
+And it was Frances, after all, who had made him buy West End House for
+her own reasons. Both the day nursery and the night nursery had windows
+to the south. It was the kind of house she had always dreamed of living
+in, and of Michael, or Nicky living in after she and Anthony were gone.
+It was not more than seven minutes' walk from the bottom of the lane to
+the house where her people lived. She had to think about the old people
+when the poor dears had come up to London in order to be thought about.
+And it had white storm shutters and a tree of Heaven in the garden.
+
+And, because they had both decided that they would have that house
+whatever happened, they began to argue and to tease each other. Anthony
+had said it was all right, only the tree of Heaven wasn't a tree of
+Heaven; it was a common ash. He was one of the biggest timber merchants
+in the country and he ought to know. Frances said she mightn't know
+much, but she did know that was the kind of tree the people down in her
+part of the country called a tree of Heaven. Anthony said he couldn't
+help that. It didn't matter what they called it. It was a common ash.
+
+Then she told him he had no poetry in his composition. She had always
+dreamed of having a tree of Heaven in her garden; and he was destroying
+her dream. He replied that he didn't want to destroy her dream, but the
+tree really _was_ an ash. You could tell by the bark, and by the leaves
+and by the number and the shape of the leaflets. And anyhow, that was
+the first he'd heard about her dream.
+
+"You don't know," said Frances, "what goes on inside me."
+
+She said that if any of the children developed an imagination he needn't
+think _he_ had anything to do with it.
+
+"I shan't," said Anthony. "I wouldn't have anything to do with it if I
+could. Facts are good enough for me. The children must be brought up to
+realize facts."
+
+An ash-tree was a fact and a tree of Heaven was a fancy; unless by any
+chance she meant _ailanthus glandulosa_. (He knew she didn't.) If she
+wanted to know, the buds of the ash were black like ebony. The buds of
+the tree of Heaven were rose-red, like--like bad mahogany. Wait till the
+spring and look at the buds.
+
+Frances waited till the spring and looked at the buds, and, sure enough,
+they were black like ebony.
+
+Anthony also said that if they were choosing a house for the children,
+it was no earthly use to think about the old people. For the old people
+would go and the children would remain.
+
+As if to show how right he was, Grandpapa had died early in that summer
+of 'ninety-five, one month after they had moved into West End House.
+That still left Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie
+Edie for Anthony to look after.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was thinking of them now. She hoped that they would come early in
+time to see the children. She also hoped that they would go early, so
+that she and Anthony might have their three sets of tennis before
+dinner in peace.
+
+There would be no peace if Louie and Edie wanted to play too. The one
+thing that Anthony could not stand was people wanting to do things they
+couldn't do, and spoiling them for those who could. He used to say that
+the sight of Louie anywhere near the tennis court put him off
+his stroke.
+
+Again, the faint illusion of worry was created by the thought that this
+dreadful thing might happen, that Louie and Edie might want to play and
+that Anthony would be put off his stroke and be annoyed, and that his
+annoyance, his just and legitimate annoyance, would spoil the
+perfection of the afternoon. And as she played with the illusion it made
+more real her tranquillity, her incredible content.
+
+Her hands were busy now putting decorative stitches into a frock for
+John. She had pushed aside a novel by George Moore and a volume of
+Ibsen's plays. She disliked Ibsen and disapproved of George Moore. Her
+firm, tight little character defended itself against every form of
+intellectual disturbance. A copy of the _Times_ had fallen from her lap
+to her feet. Jane, the cat, had found it there, and, purring loudly, had
+trodden it down into a bed, and now lay on it, asleep. Frances had
+informed herself of the affairs of the nation.
+
+At the bottom of her mind was the conviction (profound, because
+unconscious) that the affairs of the nation were not to be compared for
+interest with her own affairs, and an attitude of condescension, as if
+she honoured the _Times_ by reading it and the nation by informing
+herself of its affairs; also the very distinct impression that evening
+papers were more attractive than morning papers. She would have admitted
+that they owed their attraction to the circumstance that Anthony brought
+them home with him in his pocket, and that in the evening she was not
+obliged to inform herself of what might be happening. Anthony was
+certain to inform her.
+
+Not that anything ever did happen. Except strikes; and even then, no
+sooner did the features of the strike begin to get dramatic than they
+were instantly submerged in the flood of conversation that was let loose
+over them. Mrs. Anthony pitied the poor editors and reporters while
+Parliament was sitting. She saw them as rather silly, violent and
+desperate men, yet pathetic in their silliness, violence and
+desperation, snatching at divorces, and breach of promise cases, and
+fires in paraffin shops, as drowning men snatch at straws.
+
+Her imagination refused to picture any end to this state of things.
+There would just be more speeches and more strikes, and still more
+speeches, going on for ever and ever at home; while foreign affairs and
+the British Empire went on for ever and ever too, with no connection
+between the two lines of sequence, and no likeness, except that both
+somehow went on and on.
+
+That was Anthony's view of England's parliament and of her imperial
+policy; and it was Mrs. Anthony's. Politics, Anthony said, had become
+static; and he assured Frances that there was no likelihood that they
+would ever become dynamic again--ever.
+
+Anthony's view of politics was Mrs. Anthony's view of life.
+
+Nothing ever really happened. Things did not change; they endured; they
+went on. At least everything that really mattered endured and went on.
+So that everything that really mattered could--if you were given to
+looking forward--be foreseen. A strike--a really bad one--might
+conceivably affect Anthony's business, for a time; but not all the
+strikes in the world, not all the silly speeches, not all the meddling
+and muddling of politicians could ever touch one of those
+enduring things.
+
+Frances believed in permanence because, in secret, she abhorred the
+thought of change. And she abhorred the thought of change because, at
+thirty-three, she had got all the things she wanted. But only for the
+last ten years out of the thirty-three. Before that (before she was Mrs.
+Anthony), wanting things, letting it be known that you wanted them, had
+meant not getting them. So that it was incredible how she had contrived
+to get them all. She had not yet left off being surprised at her own
+happiness. It was not like things you take for granted and are not aware
+of. Frances was profoundly aware of it. Her happiness was a solid,
+tangible thing. She knew where it resided, and what it was made of, and
+what terms she held it on. It depended on her; on her truth, her love,
+her loyalty; it was of the nature of a trust. But there was no illusion
+about it. It was the reality.
+
+She denied that she was arrogant, for she had not taken one of them for
+granted, not even Dorothy; though a little arrogance might have been
+excusable in a woman who had borne three sons and only one daughter
+before she was thirty-two. Whereas Grannie's achievement had been four
+daughters, four superfluous women, of whom Anthony had married one and
+supported three.
+
+To be sure there was Maurice. But he was worse than superfluous,
+considering that most of the time Anthony was supporting Maurice, too.
+
+She had only known one serious anxiety--lest her flesh and blood should
+harbour any of the blood and flesh left over after Morrie was made. She
+had married Anthony to drive out Morrie from the bodies and souls of her
+children. She meant that, through her and Anthony, Morrie should go, and
+Dorothea, Michael, Nicholas and John should remain.
+
+As Frances looked at the four children, her mouth tightened itself so as
+to undo the ruinous adoration of her eyes. She loved their slender
+bodies, their pure, candid faces, their thick, straight hair that parted
+solidly from the brush, clean-cut and shining like sheets of polished
+metal, brown for Dorothy, black-brown for Nicholas, red gold for Michael
+and white gold for John. She was glad that they were all made like that;
+slender and clear and hard, and that their very hair was a thing of
+clean surfaces and definite edges. She disliked the blurred outlines of
+fatness and fuzziness and fluffiness. The bright solidity of their forms
+helped her to her adored illusion, the illusion of their childhood as
+going on, lasting for ever and ever.
+
+They would be the nicest looking children at Mrs. Jervis's party. They
+would stand out solid from the fluffiness and fuzziness and fatness of
+the others. She saw people looking at them. She heard them saying: "Who
+are the two little boys in brown linen?"--"They are Michael and Nicholas
+Harrison." The Funny Man came and said: "Hello! I didn't expect to see
+you here!" It was Michael and Nicholas he didn't expect to see; and the
+noise in the room was Nicky's darling laughter.
+
+Music played. Michael and Nicholas danced to the music. It was Michael's
+body and Nicky's that kept for her the pattern of the dance, their feet
+that beat out its measure. Sitting under the tree of Heaven Frances
+could see Mrs. Jervis's party. It shimmered and clustered in a visionary
+space between the tree and the border of blue larkspurs on the other
+side of the lawn. The firm figures of Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy
+held it together, kept it from being shattered amongst the steep blue
+spires of the larkspurs. When it was all over they would still hold it
+together, so that people would know that it had really happened and
+remember having been there. They might even remember that Rosalind had
+had a birthday.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances had just bestowed this life after death on Mrs. Jervis's party
+when she heard Michael saying he didn't want to go to it.
+
+He had no idea why he didn't want to go except that he didn't.
+
+"What'?" said Frances. "Not when Nicky and Dorothy are going?"
+
+He shook his head. He was mournful and serious.
+
+"And there's going to be a Magic Lantern"--
+
+"I know."
+
+"And a Funny Man"--
+
+"I know."
+
+"And a Big White Cake with sugar icing and Rosalind's name on it in pink
+letters, and eight candles--"
+
+"I know, Mummy." Michael's under lip began to shake.
+
+"I thought it was only little baby boys that were silly and shy."
+
+Michael was not prepared to contest the statement. He saw it was the
+sort of thing that in the circumstances she was bound to say. All the
+same his under lip would have gone on shaking if he hadn't stopped it.
+
+"I thought you were a big boy," said Frances.
+
+"So I _was_, yesterday. To-day isn't yesterday, Mummy."
+
+"If John--John was asked to a beautiful party _he_ wouldn't be afraid to
+go."
+
+As soon as Michael's under lip had stopped shaking his eyelids began.
+You couldn't stop your eyelids.
+
+"It's not _afraid_, exactly," he said.
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"It's sort--sort of forgetting things."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"I don't know, Mummy. I think--it's pieces of me that I want to
+remember. At a party I can't feel all of myself at once--like I do now."
+
+She loved his strange thoughts as she loved his strange beauty, his
+reddish yellow hair, his light hazel eyes that were not hers and not
+Anthony's.
+
+"What will you do, sweetheart, all afternoon, without Nicky and Dorothy
+and Mary-Nanna?"
+
+"I don't want Nicky and Dorothy and Mary-Nanna. I want Myself. I want to
+play with Myself."
+
+She thought: "Why shouldn't he? What right have I to say these things to
+him and make him cry, and send him to stupid parties that he doesn't
+want to go to? After all, he's only a little boy."
+
+She thought of Michael, who was seven, as if he were younger than
+Nicholas, who was only five.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky was different. You could never tell what Michael would take it
+into his head to think. You could never tell what Nicky would take it
+into his head to do. There was no guile in Michael. But sometimes there
+was guile in Nicky. Frances was always on the look out for
+Nicky's guile.
+
+So when Michael remarked that Grannie and the Aunties would be there
+immediately and Nicky said, "Mummy, I think my ear is going to ache,"
+her answer was--"You won't have to stay more than a minute, darling."
+
+For Nicky lived in perpetual fear that his Auntie Louie might kiss at
+him.
+
+Dorothy saw her mother's profound misapprehension and she hastened to
+put it right.
+
+"It isn't Auntie Louie, Mummy. His ear is really aching."
+
+And still Frances went on smiling. She knew, and Nicky knew that, if a
+little boy could establish the fact of earache, he was absolved from all
+social and family obligations for as long as his affliction lasted. He
+wouldn't have to stand still and pretend he liked it while he was being
+kissed at.
+
+Frances kept her mouth shut when she smiled, as if she were trying not
+to. It was her upper lip that got the better of her. The fine, thin
+edges of it quivered and twitched and curled. You would have said the
+very down was sensitive to her thought's secret and iniquitous play. Her
+smile mocked other people's solemnities, her husband's solemnity, and
+the solemnity (no doubt inherited) of her son Michael; it mocked the
+demureness and the gravity of her face.
+
+She had brought her face close to Nicky's; and it was as if her mouth
+had eyes in it to see if there were guile in him.
+
+"Are you a little humbug?" she said.
+
+Nicky loved his mother's face. It never got excited or did silly things
+like other people's faces. It never got red and shiny like Auntie
+Louie's face, or hot and rough like Auntie Emmeline's, or wet and mizzly
+like Auntie Edie's. The softness and whiteness and dryness of his
+mother's face were delightful to Nicky. So was her hair. It was cold,
+with a funny sort of coldness that made your fingers tingle when you
+touched it; and it smelt like the taste of Brazil nuts.
+
+Frances saw the likeness of her smile quiver on Nicky's upper lip. It
+broke and became Nicky's smile that bared his little teeth and curled up
+the corners of his blue eyes. (His blue eyes and black brown hair were
+Anthony's.) It wasn't reasonable to suppose that Nicky had earache when
+he could smile like that.
+
+"I'm afraid," she said, "you're a little humbug. Run to the terrace and
+see if Grannie and the Aunties are coming."
+
+He ran. It was half a child's run and half a full-grown boy's.
+
+Then Mrs. Anthony addressed her daughter.
+
+"Why did you say his ear's aching when it isn't?"
+
+"Because," said Dorothy, "it _is_ aching."
+
+She was polite and exquisite and obstinate, like Anthony.
+
+"Nicky ought to know his own ear best. Go and tell him he's not to stand
+on the top of the wall. And if they're coming wave to them, to show
+you're glad to see them."
+
+"But--Mummy--I'm not."
+
+She knew it was dreadful before she said it. But she had warded off
+reproof by nuzzling against her mother's cheek as it tried to turn away
+from her. She saw her mother's upper lip moving, twitching. The
+sensitive down stirred on it like a dark smudge, a dust that quivered.
+Her own mouth, pushed forward, searching, the mouth of a nuzzling puppy,
+remained grave and tender. She was earnest and imperturbable in her
+truthfulness. "Whether you're glad or not you must go," said Frances.
+She meant to be obeyed.
+
+Dorothy went. Her body was obedient. For as yet she had her mother's
+body and her face, her blunted oval, the straight nose with the fine,
+tilted nostrils, her brown eyes, her solid hair, brown on the top and
+light underneath, and on the curve of the roll above her little ears.
+Frances had watched the appearance of those details with an anxiety that
+would have surprised her if she had been aware of it. She wanted to see
+herself in the bodies of her sons and in the mind of her daughter. But
+Dorothy had her father's mind. You couldn't move it. What she had said
+once she stuck to for ever, like Anthony to his ash-tree. As if sticking
+to a thing for ever could make it right once. And Dorothy had formed the
+habit of actually being right, like Anthony, nine times out of ten.
+Frances foresaw that this persistence, this unreasoning rectitude,
+might, in time, become annoying in a daughter. There were moments when
+she was almost perturbed by the presence of this small, mysterious
+organism, mixed up of her body and her husband's mind.
+
+But in secret she admired her daughter's candour, her downrightness and
+straightforwardness, her disdain of conventions and hypocrisies. Frances
+was not glad, she knew she was not glad, any more than Dorothy was glad,
+to see her mother and her sisters. She only pretended. In secret she was
+afraid of every moment she would have to live with them. She had lived
+with them too long. She foresaw what would happen this afternoon, how
+they would look, what they would say and do, and with what gestures. It
+would be like the telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that
+you know every word of.
+
+She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she had only
+asked them to come early in order that they might go early and leave her
+to her happiness.
+
+She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and Dorothy
+were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought that she
+wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if they were
+coming early. It struck her that this was sad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope under the
+Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the sallow grass and
+the yellow clay of the Heath.
+
+"How little they look," Michael said.
+
+Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them
+pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was the
+difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always would
+be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never would be
+sorry for being what she was. She seemed to be saying, already, in her
+clearness and hardness, "What I am I am, and you can't change me." The
+utmost you could wring from her was that she couldn't help it.
+
+Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black came
+nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the garden and
+the lane.
+
+
+
+II
+
+Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the lane to
+the tree of Heaven.
+
+She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace,
+advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really belonging to
+each other, as if they had been strangers associated by some accident.
+It had grown on them in their efforts to carry off the embarrassment of
+appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie carried it off best. Sharp
+and rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never lent itself to any group. But for
+her black gown she really might not have belonged.
+
+Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was only
+sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was wrapped
+up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed, fascinated by
+her sacred sense of bereavement. She moved as if hypnotized by her
+own sorrow.
+
+To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of mystic
+hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she suspected them
+of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if they could. But to
+her one married daughter and to her grand-children she was soft and
+gentle. So that, when they happened to be all together, her moods
+changed so rapidly that she seemed a creature of unaccountable caprice.
+One minute her small, white, dry face quivered with softness and
+gentleness, and the next it stiffened, or twitched with the inimical,
+disapproving look it had for Louie and Emmeline and Edith.
+
+The children lifted up their pure, impassive faces to be kissed at. Old
+Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother's knee. Dorothy
+and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party. Michael forgot all
+about playing with himself. He stayed where he was, drawn by the
+spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties. Grannie was clucking and chuckling
+to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled to her own babies long ago.
+Her under lip made itself wide and full; it worked with an in and out
+movement very funny and interesting to Michael. The movement meant that
+Grannie chuckled under protest of memories that were sacred to
+Grandpapa.
+
+"Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo--tchoo! Chuckaboo! Beautiful boy!" said Grannie.
+
+Auntie Louie looked at her youngest nephew. She smiled her downward,
+sagging smile, wrung from a virginity sadder than Grannie's grief. She
+spoke to Baby John.
+
+"You really are rather a nice boy," Auntie Louie said.
+
+But Edie, the youngest Auntie, was kneeling on the grass before him,
+bringing her face close to his. Baby John's new and flawless face was
+cruel to Auntie Edie's. So was his look of dignity and wisdom.
+
+"Oh, she says you're only rather nice," said Auntie Edie. "And you're
+the beautifullest, sweetest, darlingest that ever was. Wasn't she a
+nasty Auntie Louie? Ten little pink toes. And _there_ he goes. Five
+little tootsies to each of his footsies."
+
+She hid herself behind the _Times_ disturbing Jane.
+
+"Where's John-John?" she cried. "Where's he gone to? Can anybody tell me
+where to find John-John? Where's John-John? Peep-_bo_--there he is!
+John-John, look at Auntie Edie. Oh, he won't pay any attention to
+poor me."
+
+Baby John was playing earnestly with Grannie's watch-chain.
+
+"You might leave the child alone," said Grannie. "Can't you see he
+doesn't want you?"
+
+Auntie Edie made a little pouting face, like a scolded, pathetic child.
+Nobody ever did want Auntie Edie.
+
+And all the time Auntie Emmy was talking to Frances very loud and fast.
+
+"Frances, I do think your garden's too beautiful for words. How clever
+of you to think of clearing away the old flower-beds. I hate flower-beds
+on a lawn. Yet I don't suppose I should have had the strength of mind to
+get rid of them if it bad been me."
+
+As she talked Auntie Emmy opened her eyes very wide; her eyebrows
+jerked, the left one leaping up above the right; she thrust out her chin
+at you and her long, inquiring nose. Her thin face was the play of
+agitated nerve-strings that pulled it thus into perpetual, restless
+movements; and she made vague gestures with her large, bony hands. Her
+tongue went tick-tack, like a clock. Anthony said you-could hear Emmy's
+tongue striking the roof of her-mouth all thee time.
+
+"And putting those delphiniums all together like that--Massing the
+blues. Anthony? I _do_ think Anthony has perfect taste. I adore
+delphiniums."
+
+Auntie Emmy was behaving as if neither Michael nor Baby John was there.
+
+"Don't you think John-John's too beautiful for words?" said Frances.
+"Don't you like him a little bit too?"
+
+Auntie Emmy winced as if Frances had flicked something in her face.
+
+"Of course I like him too. Why shouldn't I?"
+
+"I don't think you _do_, Auntie Emmy," Michael said.
+
+Auntie Emmy considered him as for the first time.
+
+"What do you know about it?" she said.
+
+"I can tell by the funny things your face does."
+
+"I thought," said Frances, "you wanted to play by yourself."
+
+"So I do," said Michael.
+
+"Well then, go and play."
+
+He went and to a heavenly place that he knew of. But as he played with
+Himself there he thought: "Auntie Emmy doesn't tell the truth. I think
+it is because she isn't happy."
+
+Michael kept his best things to himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I suppose you're happy," said Grannie, "now you've got the poor child
+sent away."
+
+Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as much as to
+say she was helpless under her mother's stupidity.
+
+"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good for him
+to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."
+
+It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her sisters.
+
+"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it yourself."
+
+When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put her word
+in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the peace.
+
+Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her babies
+in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight of other people's babies
+was too much for Emmy. She could never be prepared for Emmy's moments.
+
+"It's all very well," Auntie Louie went on; "but I should like to hear
+of somebody admiring Dorothy. I don't see where Dorothy comes in."
+
+Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie's favourite.
+If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared that she was
+sure she wasn't.
+
+And again Frances knew what Louie meant--that she loved her three sons,
+Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her one daughter,
+Dorothea, with critical affection. That was the sort of thing that Louie
+was always saying and thinking about people, and nobody ever paid the
+slightest attention to what Louie said or thought. Frances told herself
+that if there was one emotion that she was more free from than another
+it was sex jealousy.
+
+The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given up
+Dorothy to Anthony. It was natural that he should care most for the
+little girl.
+
+Louie said that was easy--when she knew perfectly well that Anthony
+didn't. Like Frances he cared most for his three sons. She was leaving
+Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael and Nicholas
+to her.
+
+"You might just as well say," Frances said, "that I'm in love with
+John-John. Poor little Don-Don!"
+
+"I might," said Louie, "just as well."
+
+Grannie said she was sure she didn't understand what they were talking
+about and that Louie had some very queer ideas in her head.
+
+"Louie," she said, "knows more than I do."
+
+Frances thought: Was Grannie really stupid? Was she really innocent? Was
+she not, rather, clever, chock-full of the secret wisdom and the secret
+cruelty of sex?
+
+Frances was afraid of her thoughts. They came to her not like thoughts,
+but like quick rushes of her blood, partly confusing her. She did not
+like that.
+
+She thought: Supposing Grannie knew all the time that Emmy was unhappy,
+and took a perverse pleasure in her knowledge? Supposing she was not
+really soft and gentle? She could be soft and gentle to her, because of
+her children and because of Anthony. She respected Anthony because he
+was well-off and efficient and successful, and had supported her ever
+since Grandpapa had gone bankrupt. She was proud of Frances because she
+was Anthony's wife, who had had three sons and only one daughter.
+
+Grannie behaved as if her grandchildren were her own children, as if she
+had borne three Sons and only one daughter, instead of four daughters
+and only one son. Still, Frances was the vehicle of flesh and blood that
+carried on her flesh and blood in Michael and Nicholas and John. She
+respected Frances.
+
+But Frances could remember a time when she had been unmarried like her
+sisters, and when Grannie had turned on her, too, that look that was
+half contempt and half hostility or displeasure. Grannie had not wanted
+her to marry Anthony, any more than she would have wanted Louie or
+Emmeline or Edith to marry anybody, supposing anybody had wanted to
+marry them. And Frances and Anthony had defied her. They had insisted on
+marrying each other. Frances knew that if there had been no Anthony, her
+mother would have despised her in secret, as in secret she despised
+Emmeline and Edith. She despised them more than Louie, because, poor
+things, they wanted, palpably, to be married, whereas Louie didn't, or
+said she didn't. In her own way, Louie had defied her mother. She had
+bought a type-writer and a bicycle with her own earnings, and by
+partially supporting herself she had defied Anthony, the male
+benefactor, Louie's manner intimated that there was nothing Frances had
+that she wanted. She had resources in herself, and Frances had none.
+
+Frances persuaded herself that she admired and respected Louie. She knew
+that she, Frances, was only admired and respected because she had
+succeeded where her three sisters had failed. She was even afraid that,
+in moments of exasperation, Grannie used her and Anthony and the
+children to punish Emmy and Edie for their failure. The least she could
+do was to stand between them and Grannie.
+
+It was possible that if Grannie had been allowed to ignore them and give
+her whole attention to Frances or Michael or Baby John, she could have
+contrived to be soft and gentle for an afternoon. But neither Louie nor
+Emmeline, nor even Edith, would consent to be ignored. They refused to
+knuckle under, to give in. Theirs was a perpetual struggle to achieve an
+individuality in the teeth of circumstances that had denied them any.
+Frances acknowledged that they were right, that in the same
+circumstances she would have done the same.
+
+In their different ways and by different methods they claimed attention.
+They claimed it incessantly, Louie, the eldest, by an attitude of
+assurance and superiority so stiff and hard that it seemed invulnerable;
+Emmy by sudden jerky enthusiasms, exaltations, intensities; Edie by an
+exaggerated animation, a false excitement. Edie would drop from a
+childish merriment to a childish pathos, when she would call herself
+"Poor me," and demand pity for being tired, for missing a train, for
+cold feet, for hair coming down.
+
+There would be still more animation, and still more enthusiasm when
+Anthony came home.
+
+Frances prided herself on her power of foreseeing things. She foresaw
+that Anthony would come home early for his game. She foresaw the funny,
+nervous agony of his face when he appeared on the terrace and caught
+sight of Grannie and the three Aunties, and the elaborate and exquisite
+politeness with which he would conceal from them his emotion. She
+foresaw that she would say to Annie, "When the master comes tell him
+we're having tea in the garden, under the tree of--under the ash-tree"
+(for after all, he was the master, and discipline must be maintained).
+She foresaw the very gestures of his entrance, the ironically solemn bow
+that he would make to her, far-off, from the terrace; she even foresaw
+the kind of joke that, for the life of him, he would not be able to
+help making. She was so made that she could live happily in this world
+of small, foreseen things.
+
+
+
+III
+
+And it all happened as she had foreseen.
+
+Anthony came home early, because it was a fine afternoon. He made the
+kind of joke that calamity always forced from him, by some perversion of
+his instincts.
+
+"When is an ash-tree not an ash-tree? When it's a tree of Heaven."
+
+He was exquisitely polite to Grannie and the Aunties, and his manner to
+Frances, which she openly complained of, was, he said, what a woman
+brought on herself when she reserved her passion for her children, her
+sentiment for trees of Heaven, and her mockery for her devoted husband.
+
+"I suppose we can have some tennis _now_," said Auntie Louie.
+
+"Certainly," said Anthony, "we can, and we shall." He tried not to look
+at Frances.
+
+And Auntie Edie became automatically animated.
+
+"I can't serve for nuts, but I can run. Who's going to play with _me_?"
+
+"I am," said Anthony. He was perfect.
+
+The game of tennis had an unholy and terrible attraction for Auntie
+Louie and Auntie Edie. Neither of them could play. But, whereas Auntie
+Louie thought that she could play and took tennis seriously, Auntie Edie
+knew that she couldn't and took it as a joke.
+
+Auntie Louie stood tall and rigid and immovable. She planted herself,
+like a man, close up to the net, where Anthony wanted to be, and where
+he should have been; but Auntie Louie said she was no good if you put
+her to play back; she couldn't be expected to take every ball he missed.
+
+When Auntie Louie called out "Play!" she meant to send a nervous shudder
+through her opponents, shattering their morale. She went through all the
+gestures of an annihilating service that for some reason never happened.
+She said the net was too low and that spoiled her eye. And when she
+missed her return it was because Anthony had looked at her and put her
+off. Still Aunt Louie's attitude had this advantage that it kept her
+quiet in one place where Anthony could dance round and round her.
+
+But Auntie Edie played in little nervous runs and slides and rushes; she
+flung herself, with screams of excitement, against the ball, her partner
+and the net; and she brandished her racket in a dangerous manner. The
+oftener she missed the funnier it was to Auntie Edie. She had been
+pretty when she was young, and seventeen years ago her cries and tumbles
+and collisions had been judged amusing; and Auntie Edie thought they
+were amusing still. Anthony had never had the heart to undeceive her. So
+that when Anthony was there Auntie Edie still went about setting a
+standard of gaiety for other people to live up to; and still she was
+astonished that they never did, that other people had no sense
+of humour.
+
+Therefore Frances was glad when Anthony told her that he had asked Mr.
+Parsons, the children's tutor, and young Norris and young Vereker from
+the office to come round for tennis at six, and that dinner must be put
+off till half-past eight.
+
+All was well. The evening would be sacred to Anthony and the young men.
+The illusion of worry passed, and Frances's real world of happiness
+stood firm.
+
+And as Frances's mind, being a thoroughly healthy mind, refused to
+entertain any dreary possibility for long together, so it was simply
+unable to foresee downright calamity, even when it had been pointed out
+to her. For instance, that Nicky should really have chosen the day of
+the party for an earache, the worst earache he had ever had.
+
+He appeared at tea-time, carried in Mary-Nanna's arms, and with his head
+tied up in one of Mr. Jervis's cricket scarves. As he approached his
+family he tried hard not to look pathetic.
+
+And at the sight of her little son her whole brilliant world of
+happiness was shattered around Frances.
+
+"Nicky darling," she said, "why _didn't_ you tell me it was really
+aching?"
+
+"I didn't know," said Nicky.
+
+He never did know the precise degree of pain that distinguished the
+beginning of a genuine earache from that of a sham one, and he felt that
+to palm off a sham earache on his mother for a real one, was somehow a
+sneaky thing to do. And while his ear went on stabbing him, Nicky did
+his best to explain.
+
+"You see, I never know whether it's aching or whether it's only going to
+ache. It began a little, teeny bit when the Funny Man made me laugh.
+And I didn't see the Magic Lantern, and I didn't have any of Rosalind's
+cake. It came on when I was biting the sugar off. And it was aching in
+both ears at once. It was," said Nicky, "a jolly sell for me."
+
+At that moment Nicky's earache jabbed upwards at his eyelids and cut
+them, and shook tears out of them. But Nicky's mouth refused to take any
+part in the performance, though he let his father carry him upstairs.
+And, as he lay on the big bed in his mother's room, he said he thought
+he could bear it if he had Jane-Pussy to lie beside him, and his
+steam-engine.
+
+Anthony went back into the garden to fetch Jane. He spent an hour
+looking for her, wandering in utter misery through the house and through
+the courtyard and stables and the kitchen garden. He looked for Jane in
+the hothouse and the cucumber frames, and under the rhubarb, and on the
+scullery roof, and in the water butt. It was just possible that on a day
+of complete calamity Jane should have slithered off the scullery roof
+into the water-butt. The least he could do was to find Jane, since Nicky
+wanted her.
+
+And in the end it turned out that Jane had been captured in her sleep,
+treacherously, by Auntie Emmy. And she had escaped, maddened with terror
+of the large, nervous, incessantly caressing hands. She had climbed into
+the highest branch of the tree of Heaven, and crouched there,
+glaring, unhappy.
+
+"Damn the cat!" said Anthony to himself. (It was not Jane he meant.)
+
+He was distressed, irritated, absurdly upset, because he would have to
+go back to Nicky without Jane, because he couldn't get Nicky what
+he wanted.
+
+In that moment Anthony loved Nicky more than any of them. He loved him
+almost more than Frances. Nicky's earache ruined the fine day.
+
+He confided in young Vereker. "I wouldn't bother," he said, "if the
+little chap wasn't so plucky about it."
+
+"Quite so, sir," said young Vereker.
+
+It was young Mr. Vereker who found Jane, who eventually recaptured her.
+Young Mr. Vereker made himself glorious by climbing up, at the risk of
+his neck and in his new white flannels, into the high branches of the
+tree of Heaven, to bring Jane down.
+
+And when Anthony thanked him he said, "Don't mention it, sir. It's only
+a trifle," though it was, as Mr. Norris said, palpable that the flannels
+were ruined. Still, if he hadn't found that confounded cat, they would
+never, humanly speaking, have had their tennis.
+
+The Aunties did not see Mr. Vereker climbing into the tree of Heaven.
+They did not see him playing with Mr. Parsons and Anthony and Mr.
+Norris. For as soon as the three young men appeared, and Emmeline and
+Edith began to be interested and emphatic, Grannie said that as they
+wouldn't see anything more of Frances and the children, it was no good
+staying any longer, and they'd better be getting back. It was as if she
+knew that they were going to enjoy themselves and was determined to
+prevent it.
+
+Frances went with them to the bottom of the lane. She stood there till
+the black figures had passed, one by one, through the white posts on to
+the Heath, till, in the distance, they became small again and harmless
+and pathetic.
+
+Then she went back to her room where Nicky lay in the big bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky lay in the big bed with Jane on one side of him and his
+steam-engine on the other, and a bag of hot salt against each ear. Now
+and then a thin wall of sleep slid between him and his earache.
+
+Frances sat by the open window and looked out into the garden where
+Anthony and Norris played, quietly yet fiercely, against Vereker and
+Parsons. Frances loved the smell of fresh grass that the balls and the
+men's feet struck from the lawn; she loved the men's voices subdued to
+Nicky's sleep, and the sound of their padding feet, the thud of the
+balls on the turf, the smacking and thwacking of the rackets. She loved
+every movement of Anthony's handsome, energetic body; she loved the
+quick, supple bodies of the young men, the tense poise and earnest
+activity of their adolescence. But it was not Vereker or Parsons or
+Norris that she loved or that she saw. It was Michael, Nicholas and John
+whose adolescence was foreshadowed in those athletic forms wearing white
+flannels; Michael, Nicky and John, in white flannels, playing fiercely.
+When young Vereker drew himself to his full height, when his young body
+showed lean and slender as he raised his arms for his smashing service,
+it was not young Vereker, but Michael, serious and beautiful. When young
+Parsons leaped high into the air and thus returned Anthony's facetious
+sky-scraper on the volley, that was Nicky. When young Norris turned and
+ran at the top of his speed, and overtook the ball on its rebound from
+the base line where young Vereker had planted it, when, as by a miracle,
+he sent it backwards over his own head, paralysing Vereker and Parsons
+with sheer astonishment, that was John.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her vision passed. She was leaning over Nicky now, Nicky so small in the
+big bed. Nicky had moaned.
+
+"Does it count if I make that little noise, Mummy? It sort of lets the
+pain out."
+
+"No, my lamb, it doesn't count. Is the pain very bad?"
+
+"Yes, Mummy, awful. It's going faster and faster. And it bizzes. And
+when it doesn't bizz, it thumps." He paused--"I think--p'raps--I could
+bear it better if I sat on your knee."
+
+Frances thought she could bear it better too. It would be good for Nicky
+that he should grow into beautiful adolescence and a perfect manhood;
+but it was better for her that he should be a baby still, that she
+should have him on her knee and hold him close to her; that she should
+feel his adorable body press quivering against her body, and the heat of
+his earache penetrating her cool flesh. For now she was lost to herself
+and utterly absorbed in Nicky. And her agony became a sort of ecstasy,
+as if, actually, she bore his pain.
+
+It was Anthony who could not stand it. Anthony had come in on his way to
+his dressing-room. As he looked at Nicky his handsome, hawk-like face
+was drawn with a dreadful, yearning, ineffectual pity. Frances had
+discovered that her husband could both be and look pathetic. He had
+wanted her to be sorry for him and she was sorry for him, because his
+male pity was all agony; there was no ecstasy in it of any sort at all.
+Nicky was far more her flesh and blood than he was Anthony's.
+
+Nicky stirred in his mother's lap. He raised his head. And when he saw
+that queer look on his father's face he smiled at it. He had to make the
+smile himself, for it refused to come of its own accord. He made it
+carefully, so that it shouldn't hurt him. But he made it so well that it
+hurt Frances and Anthony.
+
+"I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does," Frances said in her
+pride.
+
+"If he can bear it, _I_ can't," said Anthony. And he stalked into his
+dressing-room and shut the door on himself.
+
+"Daddy minds more than you do," said Frances.
+
+At that Nicky sat up. His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned with the
+fever of his earache.
+
+"I don't mind," he said. "Really and truly I don't mind. I don't care if
+my ear _does_ ache.
+
+"It's my eyes is crying, not me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner, Nicky sent
+for his father and mother. Something had happened.
+
+Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt most
+awfully. And when it had done cracking his earache had gone away. And
+Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind's party and Michael a
+tin train. And Michael had given him the train and he wouldn't take the
+trumpet instead. Oughtn't Michael to have had the trumpet?
+
+And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night nursery, he
+called them back again.
+
+"It was a jolly sell for me, wasn't it?" said Nicky. And he laughed.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever happened, and
+something was generally happening to him, he didn't care. When he scaled
+the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it gave way under his assault
+and threw him down the steps on to the gravel walk, he picked himself
+up, displaying a forehead that was a red abrasion filled in with yellow
+gravel and the grey dust of the smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't
+care. I liked it," before anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna
+stepped on his train and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I
+don't care. I shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't
+care came to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be
+life's last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen,
+would ever take him at a disadvantage.
+
+Two years passed and he was just the same.
+
+Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was adorable.
+
+But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when you had
+to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment by first
+admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a better one when
+it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him have any cake for
+tea after he had tested the resilience of the new tyres on his father's
+bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it would have been more to
+the purpose if they had taken his steam-engine from him for a week.
+
+"You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it," said Nicky.
+
+Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of Mutton
+Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't gone in
+after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to bed at four
+o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother came to tuck him up
+and say Good-night, she found him sitting up, smiling and ready.
+
+"Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit of good
+sending me to bed."
+
+"I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost
+suspected Nicky of insincerity.
+
+"So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things. You
+see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've 'vented three
+things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle stand still with
+Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of bottles; and a thing to
+make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't a punishment, is it, Mummy?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years passed and
+Nicky was still the same.
+
+And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John were not
+the same.
+
+For the awful thing about your children was that they were always dying.
+Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child Dorothy was dead and in
+her place was a strange big girl. The child Michael was dead and in his
+place was a strange big boy. And Frances mourned over the passing of
+each age. You could no more bring back that unique loveliness of two
+years old, of five years old, of seven, than you could bring back the
+dead. Even John-John was not a baby any more; he spoke another language
+and had other feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's
+knee. Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more
+wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and she
+wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on, at the
+same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies and the mother
+of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and women is to be born.
+
+Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.
+
+Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she wanted them
+to?
+
+There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make no
+impression on him.
+
+There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and showed
+that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare,
+extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not
+by anything solid and continuous. There was a softness in Michael that
+distressed and a hardness that perplexed her. You could make an
+impression on Michael--far too easily--and the impression stayed. You
+couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory was terrible. And he had secret
+ways. He was growing more and more sensitive, more and more wrapped up
+in Himself. Supposing Michael became a morbid egoist, like Anthony's
+brother, Bartholomew?
+
+And there was Dorothy. She went her own way more than ever, with the
+absolute conviction that it was the right way. Nothing could turn her.
+At thirteen her body was no longer obedient. Dorothy was not going to be
+her mother's companion, or her father's, either; she was Rosalind
+Jervis's companion. She seemed to care more about little fat, fluffy
+Rosalind than about any of them except Nicky. Dorothy was interested in
+Michael; she respected his queer thoughts. It was as if she recognized
+some power in him that could beat her somewhere some day, and was humble
+before a thing her cleverness had failed to understand. But it was Nicky
+that she adored, not Michael; and she was bad for Nicky. She encouraged
+his naughtiness because it amused her.
+
+Frances foresaw that a time would come, a little later, when Nicky and
+Dorothy would be companions, not Nicky and his mother.
+
+In the evenings, coming home from the golf-links, Frances and Anthony
+discussed their children.
+
+Frances said, "You can't make any impression on Nicky. There seems to be
+no way that you can get at him."
+
+Anthony thought there was a way. It was a way he had not tried yet, that
+he did not want to try. But, if he could only bring himself to it, he
+judged that he could make a distinct impression.
+
+"What the young rascal wants is a thorough good spanking," said Anthony.
+
+Nicky said so too.
+
+The first time he got it Nicky's criticism was that it wasn't a bad idea
+if his father could have pulled it off all right. But he said, "It's no
+good if you do it through the cloth. And it's no good unless you _want_
+to hurt me, Daddy. And you don't want. And even if you did want, badly
+enough to try and hurt, supposing you spanked ever so hard, you couldn't
+hurt as much as my earache. And I can bear that."
+
+"He's top dog again, you see," said Frances, not without a secret
+satisfaction.
+
+"Oh, is he?" said Anthony. "I don't propose to be downed by Nicky."
+
+Every instinct in him revolted against spanking Nicky. But when
+Williams, the groom, showed him a graze on each knee of the pony he had
+bought for Frances and the children, Anthony determined that, this time,
+Nicky should have a serious spanking.
+
+"Which of them took Roger out?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know, sir," said Williams.
+
+But Anthony knew. He lay in wait for Nicky by the door that led from the
+stable yard into the kitchen garden.
+
+Nicky was in the strawberry bed.
+
+"Was it you who took Roger out this afternoon?"
+
+Nicky did not answer promptly. His mouth was still full of strawberries.
+
+"What if I did?" he said at last, after manifest reflection.
+
+"If you did? Why, you let him down on Golders Hill and cut his knees."
+
+"Holly Mount," said Nicky.
+
+"Holly Mount or Golders Hill, it's all the same to you, you young
+monkey."
+
+"It isn't, Daddy. Holly Mount's much the worst. It's an awful hill."
+
+"That," said Anthony, "is why you're forbidden to ride down it. You've
+_got_ to be spanked for this, Nicky."
+
+"Have I? All right. Don't look so unhappy, Daddy."
+
+Anthony did much better this time. Nicky (though he shook with laughter)
+owned it very handsomely. And Anthony had handicapped himself again by
+doing it through the cloth. He drew the line at shaming Nicky.
+(Yet--_could_ you have shamed his indomitable impudence?)
+
+But he had done it. He had done it ruthlessly, while the strawberries
+were still wet on Nicky's mouth.
+
+And when it was all over Michael, looking for his father, came into the
+school-room where these things happened. He said he was awfully sorry,
+but he'd taken Roger out, and Roger had gone down on his knees and
+cut himself.
+
+No, it wasn't on Holly Mount, it was at the turn of the road on the hill
+past the "Spaniards."
+
+Anthony paid no attention to Michael. He turned on Michael's brother.
+
+"Nicky, what did you do it for?"
+
+"For a rag, of course. I knew you'd feel such a jolly fool when you
+found it wasn't me."
+
+"You see, Daddy," he explained later, "you might have known I wouldn't
+have let Roger down. But wasn't it a ripping sell?"
+
+"What are you to do," said Anthony, "with a boy like that?"
+
+Frances had an inspiration. "Do nothing," she said. Her tranquillity
+refused to be troubled for long together.
+
+"Nicky's right. It's no good trying to punish him. After all, _why_
+punish Nicky? It isn't as if he was really naughty. He never does unkind
+things, or mean things. And he's truthful."
+
+"Horribly truthful. They all are," said Anthony.
+
+"Well, then, what does Nicky do?"
+
+"He does dangerous things."
+
+"He forgets."
+
+"Nothing more dangerous than forgetting. We must punish him to make him
+remember."
+
+"But it doesn't make him remember. It only makes him think us fools."
+
+"You know what it means?" said Anthony. "We shall have to send him to
+school."
+
+"Not yet," said Frances.
+
+School was the thing in the future that she dreaded. Nicky was only
+nine, and they were all getting on well with Mt. Parsons. Anthony knew
+that to send Nicky to school now would be punishing Frances, not Nicky.
+The little fiend would only grin in their faces if they told him he was
+going to school.
+
+It was no use trying to make impressions on Nicky. He was as hard as
+nails. He would never feel things.
+
+Perhaps, Frances thought, it was just as well.
+
+
+
+V
+
+"I do think it was nice of Jane," said Nicky, "to have Jerry."
+
+"And I do think it was nice of me," said Dorothy, "to give him to you."
+
+Jane was Dorothy's cat; therefore her kittens were Dorothy's.
+
+"I wouldn't have given him to just anybody."
+
+"I know," said Nicky.
+
+"I might have kept him. He's the nicest kitten Jane ever had."
+
+"I know," said Nicky. "It _was_ nice of you."
+
+"I might want him back again."
+
+"I--know."
+
+Nicky was quiet and serious, almost humble, as if he went in the fear of
+losing Jerry. Nobody but Jerry and Dorothy saw Nicky in that mood.
+
+Not that he was really afraid. Nothing could take Jerry from him. If
+Dorothy could have taken him back again she wouldn't have, not even if
+she had really wanted him. Dorothy wasn't cruel, and she was
+only ragging.
+
+But certainly he was Jane's nicest kitten. Jane was half-Persian, white
+with untidy tabby patterns on her. Jerry was black all over. Whatever
+attitude he took, his tight, short fur kept the outlines of his figure
+firm and clear, whether he arched his back and jumped sideways, or
+rolled himself into a cushion, or squatted with haunches spread and
+paws doubled in under his breast, or sat bolt upright with his four legs
+straight like pillars, and his tail curled about his feet. Jerry's coat
+shone like black looking-glass, and the top of his head smelt sweet,
+like a dove's breast.
+
+And he had yellow eyes. Mary-Nanna said they would turn green some day.
+But Nicky didn't believe it. Mary-Nanna was only ragging. Jerry's eyes
+would always be yellow.
+
+Mr. Parsons declared that Nicky sat for whole hours meditating on Jerry,
+as if in this way he could make him last longer.
+
+Jerry's life was wonderful to Nicky. Once he was so small that his body
+covered hardly the palm of your hand; you could see his skin; it felt
+soft and weak through the thin fur, sleeked flat and wet where Jane had
+licked it. His eyes were buttoned up tight. Then they opened. He crawled
+feebly on the floor after Jane, or hung on to her little breasts,
+pressing out the milk with his clever paws. Then Jerry got older.
+Sometimes he went mad and became a bat or a bird, and flew up the
+drawing-room curtains as if his legs were wings.
+
+Nicky said that Jerry could turn himself into anything he pleased; a
+hawk, an owl, a dove, a Himalayan bear, a snake, a flying squirrel, a
+monkey, a rabbit, a panther, and a little black lamb of God.
+
+Jerry was a cat now; he was two years old.
+
+Jerry's fixed idea seemed to be that he was a very young cat, and that
+he must be nursed continually, and that nobody but Nicky must nurse him.
+Mr. Parsons found that Nicky made surprising progress in his Latin and
+Greek that year. What had baffled Mr. Parsons up till now had been
+Nicky's incapacity for sitting still. But he would sit still enough when
+Jerry was on his knee, pressed tight between the edge of the desk and
+Nicky's stomach, so that knowledge entered into Nicky through Jerry when
+there was no other way.
+
+Nicky would even sit still in the open air to watch Jerry as he stalked
+bees in the grass, or played by himself, over and over again, his own
+enchanted game. He always played it in the same way. He started from the
+same clump in the border, to run in one long careening curve across the
+grass; at the same spot in the lawn he bounded sideways and gave the
+same little barking grunt and dashed off into the bushes. When you tried
+to catch him midway he stood on his hind legs and bowed to you
+slantwise, waving his forepaws, or rushed like lightning up the tree of
+Heaven, and climbed into the highest branches and clung there, looking
+down at you. His yellow eyes shone through the green leaves; they
+quivered; they played; they mocked you with some challenge, some charm,
+secret and divine and savage.
+
+"The soul of Nicky is in that cat," Frances said.
+
+Jerry knew that he was Nicky's cat. When other people caught him he
+scrabbled over their shoulders with his claws and got away from them.
+When Nicky caught him he lay quiet and heavy in his arms, pressing down
+and spreading his soft body. Nicky's sense of touch had been hardened by
+violent impacts and collisions, by experiments with jack-knives and saws
+and chisels and gouges, and by struggling with the material of his
+everlasting inventions. Through communion with Jerry it became tender
+and sensitive again. It delighted in the cat's throbbing purr and the
+thrill of his feet, as Jerry, serious and earnest, padded down his bed
+on Nicky's knee.
+
+"I like him best, though," said Nicky, "when he's sleepy and at the same
+time bitesome."
+
+"You mustn't let him bite you," Frances said.
+
+"I don't mind," said Nicky. "He wouldn't do it if he didn't like me."
+
+Jerry had dropped off to sleep with his jaws closing drowsily on Nicky's
+arm. When it moved his hind legs kicked at it and tore.
+
+"He's dreaming when he does that," said Nicky. "He thinks he's a panther
+and I'm buffaloes."
+
+Mr. Parsons laughed at him. "Nicky and his cat!" he said. Nicky didn't
+care. Mr. Parsons was always ragging him.
+
+The tutor preferred dogs himself. He couldn't afford any of the
+expensive breeds; but that summer he was taking care of a Russian
+wolfhound for a friend of his. When Mr. Parsons ran with Michael and
+Nicky round the Heath, the great borzoi ran before them with long leaps,
+head downwards, setting an impossible pace. Michael and Dorothy adored
+Boris openly. Nicky, out of loyalty to Jerry, stifled a secret
+admiration. For Mr. Parsons held that a devotion to a cat was
+incompatible with a proper feeling for a dog, whence Nicky had inferred
+that any feeling for a dog must do violence to the nobler passion.
+
+Mr. Parsons tried to wean Nicky from what he pretended to regard as his
+unmanly weakness. "Wait, Nicky," he said, "till you've got a dog of
+your own."
+
+"I don't want a dog of my own," said Nicky. "I don't want anything but
+Jerry." Boris, he said, was not clever, like Jerry. He had a silly face.
+
+"Think so?" said Mr. Parsons. "Look at his jaws. They could break
+Jerry's back with one snap."
+
+"_Could_ he, Daddy?"
+
+They were at tea on the lawn, and Boris had gone to sleep under Mr.
+Parsons' legs with his long muzzle on his forepaws.
+
+"He could," said Anthony, "if he caught him."
+
+"But he couldn't catch him. Jerry'd be up a tree before Boris could look
+at him."
+
+"If you want Jerry to shin up trees you must keep his weight down."
+
+Nicky laughed. He knew that Boris could never catch Jerry. His father
+was only ragging him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky was in the schoolroom, bowed over his desk. He was doing an
+imposition, the second aorist of the abominable verb [Greek: erchomai],
+written out five and twenty times. (Luckily he could do the last fifteen
+times from memory.)
+
+Nicky had been arguing with Mr. Parsons. Mr. Parsons had said that the
+second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] was not [Greek: erchon].
+
+Nicky had said, "I can't help it. If it's not [Greek: erchon] it ought
+to be."
+
+Mr. Parsons had replied: "The verb [Greek: erchomai] is irregular." And
+Nicky had retorted, in effect, that no verb had any business to be as
+irregular as all that. Mr. Parsons had then suggested that Nicky might
+know more about the business of irregular verbs if he wrote out the
+second aorist of [Greek: erchomai] five and twenty times after tea. As
+it was a particularly fine afternoon, an imposition was, Nicky admitted,
+a score for Mr. Parsons and a jolly good sell for _him_.
+
+Mr. Parsons had not allowed him to have Jerry on his knee, or even in
+the room; and this, Nicky owned further, was but just. It wouldn't have
+been nearly so good a punishment if he had had Jerry with him.
+
+Nicky, bowed over his desk, struggled for the perfect legibility which
+Mr. Parsons had insisted on, as otherwise the imposition would do him
+more harm than good. He was in for it, and the thing must be done
+honourably if it was done at all. He had only looked out of the windows
+twice to make sure that Boris was asleep under Mr. Parsons' legs. And
+once he had left the room to see where Jerry was. He had found him in
+the kitchen garden, sitting on a bed of fresh-grown mustard and cress,
+ruining it. He sat like a lamb, his forepaws crossed, his head tilted
+slightly backwards. His yellow eyes gazed at Nicky with a sweet and
+mournful innocence.
+
+Nicky did not hear the voices in the garden.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, sir," Mr. Parsons was saying. "I can't think how it
+could have happened." Mr. Parsons' voice was thick and his face was very
+red. "I could have sworn the door was shut."
+
+"Johnnie opened it," said Anthony. He seemed to have caught, suddenly,
+one of his bad colds and to be giving it to Mr. Parsons. They were both
+in their shirtsleeves, and Anthony carried something in his arms which
+he had covered with his coat.
+
+The borzoi stood in front of them. His face had a look of foolish
+ecstasy. He stared at Mr. Parsons, and as he stared he panted. There was
+a red smear on his white breast; his open jaws still dripped a pink
+slaver. It sprayed the ground in front of them, jerked out with
+his panting.
+
+"Get away, you damned brute," said Mr. Parsons.
+
+Boris abashed himself; he stretched out his fore legs towards Mr.
+Parsons, shook his raised haunches, lifted up his great saw-like muzzle,
+and rolled into one monstrous cry a bark, a howl, a yawn.
+
+Nicky heard it, and he looked out of the schoolroom window. He saw the
+red smear on the white curly breast. He saw his father in his shirt
+sleeves, carrying something in his arms that he had covered with
+his coat.
+
+Under the tree of Heaven Dorothy and Michael, crouching close against
+their mother, cried quietly. Frances was crying, too; for it was she who
+would have to tell Nicky.
+
+Dorothy tried to console him.
+
+"Jerry's eyes would have turned green, if he had lived, Nicky. They
+would, really."
+
+"I wouldn't have minded. They'd have been Jerry's eyes."
+
+"But he wouldn't have looked like Jerry."
+
+"I wouldn't have cared what he looked like. He'd have _been_ Jerry."
+
+"I'll give you Jane, Nicky, and all the kittens she ever has, if that
+would make up."
+
+"It wouldn't. You don't seem to understand that it's Jerry I want. I
+wish you wouldn't talk about him."
+
+"Very well," said Dorothy, "I won't."
+
+Then Grannie tried. She recommended a holy resignation. God, she said,
+had given Jerry to Nicky, and God had taken him away.
+
+"He didn't give him me, and he'd no right to take him. Dorothy wouldn't
+have done it. She was only ragging. But when God does things," said
+Nicky savagely, "it isn't a rag."
+
+He hated Grannie, and he hated Mr. Parsons, and he hated God. But he
+loved Dorothy who had given him Jerry.
+
+Night after night Frances held him in her arms at bed-time while Nicky
+said the same thing. "If--if I could stop seeing him. But I keep on
+seeing him. When he sat on the mustard and cress. And when he bit me
+with his sleep-bites. And when he looked at me out of the tree of
+Heaven. Then I hear that little barking grunt he used to make when he
+was playing with himself--when he dashed off into the bushes.
+
+"And I can't _bear_ it."
+
+Night after night Nicky cried himself to sleep.
+
+For the awful thing was that it had been all his fault. If he had kept
+Jerry's weight down Boris couldn't have caught him.
+
+"Daddy said so, Mummy."
+
+Over and over again Frances said, "It wasn't your fault. It was
+Don-Don's. He left the door open. Surely you can forgive Don-Don?" Over
+and over again Nicky said, "I do forgive him."
+
+But it was no good. Nicky became first supernaturally subdued and
+gentle, then ill. They had to take him away from home, away from the
+sight of the garden, and away from Mr. Parsons, forestalling the
+midsummer holidays by two months.
+
+Nicky at the seaside was troublesome and happy, and they thought he had
+forgotten. But on the first evening at Hampstead, as Frances kissed him
+Good-night, he said: "Shall I have to see Mr. Parsons to-morrow?"
+
+Frances said: "Yes. Of course."
+
+"I'd rather not."
+
+"Nonsense, you must get over that."
+
+"I--can't, Mummy."
+
+"Oh, Nicky, can't you forgive poor Mr. Parsons? When he was so unhappy?"
+
+Nicky meditated.
+
+"Do you think," he said at last, "he really minded?"
+
+"I'm sure he did."
+
+"As much as you and Daddy?"
+
+"Quite as much."
+
+"Then," said Nicky, "I'll forgive him."
+
+But, though he forgave John and Mr. Parsons and even God, who, to do him
+justice, did not seem to have been able to help it, Nicky did not
+forgive himself.
+
+Yet Frances never could think why the sight of mustard and cress made
+Nicky sick. Neither did Mr. Parsons, nor any schoolmaster who came after
+him understand why, when Nicky knew all the rest of the verb [Greek:
+erchomai] by heart he was unable to remember the second aorist.
+
+He excellent memory, but there was always a gap in it just there.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+In that peace and tranquillity where nothing ever happened, Jerry's
+violent death would have counted as an event, a date to reckon by; but
+for three memorable things that happened, one after another, in the
+summer and autumn of 'ninety-nine: the return of Frances's brother,
+Maurice Fleming, from Australia where Anthony had sent him two years
+ago, on the express understanding that he was to stay there; the
+simultaneous arrival of Anthony's brother, Bartholomew, and his family;
+and the outbreak of the Boer War.
+
+The return of Morrie was not altogether unforeseen, and Bartholomew had
+announced his coming well beforehand, but who could have dreamed that at
+the end of the nineteenth century England would be engaged in a War that
+really _was_ a War? Frances, with the _Times_ in her hands, supposed
+that that meant more meddling and muddling of stupid politicians, and
+that it would mean more silly speeches in Parliament, and copy, at last,
+for foolish violent, pathetic and desperate editors, and breach of
+promise cases, divorces and fires in paraffin shops reduced to momentary
+insignificance.
+
+But as yet there was no war, nor any appearance that sensible people
+interpreted as a sign of war at the time of Morrie's return. It stood
+alone, as other past returns, the return from Bombay, the return from
+Canada, the return from Cape Colony, had stood, in its sheer awfulness.
+To Frances it represented the extremity of disaster.
+
+They might have known what was coming by Grannie's behaviour. One day,
+the day when the Australian mail arrived, she had subsided suddenly into
+a state of softness and gentleness. She approached her son-in-law with
+an air of sorrowful deprecation; she showed a certain deference to her
+daughter Louie; she was soft and gentle even with Emmeline and Edith.
+
+Mrs. Fleming broke the news to Louie who broke it to Frances who in her
+turn broke it to Anthony. That was the procedure they invariably
+adopted.
+
+"I wonder," Grannie said, "what he can be coming back for!" Each time
+she affected astonishment and incredulity, as if Morrie's coming back
+were, not a recurrence that crushed you with its flatness and staleness,
+but a thing that must interest Louie because of its utter un-likeliness.
+
+"I wonder," said Louie, "why he hasn't come before. What else did you
+expect?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," said Grannie helplessly. "Go and tell Frances."
+
+Louie went. And because she knew that the burden of Morrie would fall
+again on Frances's husband she was disagreeable with Frances.
+
+"It's all very well for you," she said. "You haven't got to live with
+him. You haven't got to sleep in the room next him. You don't know what
+it's like."
+
+"I do know," said Frances. "I remember. You'll have to bear it."
+
+"You haven't had to bear it for fourteen years."
+
+"You'll have to bear it," Frances repeated, "till Anthony sends him out
+again. That's all it amounts to."
+
+She waited till the children were in bed and she was alone with Anthony.
+
+"Something awful's happened," she said, and paused hoping he would
+guess.
+
+"I don't know how to tell you."
+
+"Don't tell me if it's that Nicky's been taking my new bike to pieces."
+
+"It isn't Nicky--It's Maurice."
+
+Anthony got up and cleared his pipe, thoroughly and deliberately. She
+wondered whether he had heard.
+
+"I'd no business to have married you--to have let you in for him."
+
+"Why? What's he been up to now?"
+
+"He's coming home."
+
+"So," said Anthony, "is Bartholomew. I'd no business to have let you in
+for _him_."
+
+"Don't worry, Frances. If Morrie comes home he'll be sent out again,
+that's all."
+
+"At your expense."
+
+"I don't grudge any expense in sending Morrie out. Nor in keeping him
+out."
+
+"Yes. But this time it's different. It's worse."
+
+"Why worse?"
+
+"Because of the children. They're older now than they were last time.
+They'll understand."
+
+"What if they do? They must learn," Anthony said, "to realize facts."
+
+They realized them rather sooner than he had expected. Nobody but Louie
+had allowed for the possibility of Morrie's sailing by the same steamer
+as his letter; and Louie had argued that, if he had done so, he was
+bound either to have arrived before the letter or to have sent a wire.
+Therefore they had at least a clear five days of peace before them.
+Anthony thought he had shown wisdom when, the next morning which was a
+Wednesday, he sent Grannie and the Aunties to Eastbourne for a week, so
+that they shouldn't worry Frances, and when on Thursday he made her go
+with him for a long day in the country, to take her mind off Morrie.
+
+They came back at nine in the evening and found Dorothy, Michael and
+Nicholas sitting up for them. Michael and Nicky were excited, but
+Dorothy looked grown-up and important.
+
+"Uncle Morrie's come," they said.
+
+"Dorothy saw him first--"
+
+"Nicky let him in--"
+
+"He hadn't got a hat on."
+
+"We kept him in the schoolroom till Nanna could come and put him to
+bed."
+
+"He was crying because he'd been to Grannie's house and there wasn't
+anybody there--"
+
+"And because he'd lost the love-birds he'd brought for Auntie Emmy--"
+
+"And because he couldn't remember which of us was dead."
+
+"No, Mummy, nobody's seen him but us and Nanna."
+
+"Nanna's with him now."
+
+Uncle Morrie never accounted, even to himself, for the time he had spent
+between the arrival of his ship at Tilbury on Sunday morning and that
+Saturday afternoon. Neither could he remember what had become of his
+luggage or whether he had ever had any. Only the County Council man,
+going his last rounds in the farthest places of the Heath, came upon a
+small bundle tied in a blue handkerchief, a cap belonging to E.D.
+Boulger, of the S.S. _Arizona_, a cage of love-birds, and a distinct
+impression of a recumbent human form, on the grass together, under a
+young birch tree.
+
+In the stuffy little house behind the Judge's Walk the four women lived
+now under male protection. When they crossed the Heath they had no
+longer any need to borrow Anthony from Frances; they had a man of their
+own. To make room for him Auntie Louie and her type-writer were turned
+out of their own place, and Auntie Louie had to sleep in Grannie's bed,
+a thing she hated. To make room for the type-writer the grey parrot was
+turned out of the dining-room into the drawing-room. And as Maurice
+couldn't stand either the noise of the type-writer or the noises of the
+parrot he found both the dining-room and the drawing-room uninhabitable.
+
+Day after day Dorothy and Michael and Nicky, on the terrace, looked out
+for his coming. (Only extreme distance made Uncle Morrie's figure small
+and harmless and pathetic.) Day after day he presented himself with an
+air of distinction and assurance, flushed, and a little battered, but
+still handsome, wearing a spruce grey suit and a panama hat bought with
+Anthony's money. Sheep-farming in Australia--he had infinitely preferred
+the Cape Mounted Police--had ruined Maurice's nerves. He was good for
+nothing but to lounge in Anthony's garden, to ride his horses--it was
+his riding that had got him into the Cape Mounted Police--to sit at his
+table and drink his wines, and, when there was no more wine for him, to
+turn into Jack Straw's Castle for a pick-me-up on his way home.
+
+And before July was out three others were added to the garden group:
+Bartholomew and Vera and Veronica. And after them a fourth, Vera's
+friend, Captain Ferdinand Cameron, home on sick leave before anybody
+expected him.
+
+Frances's tree of Heaven sheltered them all.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Bartholomew, Anthony's brother, lived in Bombay and looked after his
+business for him in the East. He had something the matter with him, and
+he had come home to look after his own health. At least, Bartholomew's
+health was what he was supposed to be looking after; but Dorothy had
+heard her father say that Bartie had come home to look after Vera.
+
+Vera was Bartie's wife and Veronica's mother. Before she became Mrs.
+Bartholomew Harrison she had been Frances's schoolfellow and her dearest
+friend. Frances Fleming had been her bridesmaid and had met Anthony for
+the first time at Vera's wedding, when he had fallen in love with her;
+and she had fallen in love with him when they stayed together in
+Bartholomew's house, before Bartholomew took Vera to Bombay.
+
+Bartie had not been married ten months before he wanted to get Vera out
+of England; and Vera had not been in India for ten weeks before he
+wanted her to go back. They were always coming backwards and forwards,
+but they never came together. Vera would be sent home first, and then
+Bartie would come over in a great hurry and take her out again.
+
+Twelve years after their marriage Veronica was born at Simla, and the
+coming and going ceased for three years. Then Bartie sent them both
+home. That time Vera had refused to travel farther westward than
+Marseilles. She was afraid of damp and cold, and she had got the ship's
+doctor to order her to the Riviera. She and Veronica had been living for
+two years in a small villa at Agaye.
+
+This summer she had come to England. She was no longer afraid of damp
+and cold. And Bartie followed her.
+
+Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera, though it was
+more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera looked the same.
+Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her face had still the
+same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell. And if these things had
+changed Frances would still have known her by her forehead that looked
+so broad because her eyebrows and her eyes were so long, and by her
+fine, unfinished, passionate mouth, by her pointed chin and by her ways.
+
+But though her brother-in-law's ways had always been more or less
+disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the renewed
+encounter with Bartholomew. Bartie was long and grey, and lean even when
+you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt. He wore a white scarf
+about his throat, for his idea was that he had cancer in it. Cancer made
+you look grey. He, too, had the face of a hawk, of a tired and irritable
+hawk. It drooped between his hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above
+the scarf as if he were too tired or too irritable to hold it up. He
+behaved to Vera and Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into
+cancer of the throat, they who tired and irritated him.
+
+Vera talked to him as you might talk to a sick child whose peevishness
+prolongs, unreasonably, its pain. Bartie's manner almost amounted to a
+public repudiation of her. The whole house vibrated to the shutting of
+his door at Good-night time. Yet when Bartie came down in the morning,
+late, and more morose than ever, Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some
+visionary image of the poor thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for
+one minute in his cancer. It was an excuse for the shutting of his door.
+
+She kept out of his way as much as possible; yet, when they were
+together they watched each other. They watched; Bartie openly with
+sudden dartings and swoopings of his hawk's eyes; Vera furtively. Her
+eyes were so large and long that, without turning her head, or any
+visible movement, they could hold his image.
+
+But for Captain Cameron Vera's eyes had a full, open gaze. Spread wide
+apart under her wide forehead they were like dark moth's wings; they
+hovered, rested, flickering, vibrating to the fine tips of
+their corners.
+
+Whatever had been the matter with him in India, Captain Cameron had
+recovered. His keen, fair, Highland face made Bartie's face look
+terrible. Ferdie was charming; not more charming to Bartie's wife than
+he was to Frances; not more charming to Frances than to her sisters; so
+that even Louie unbent, and Emmeline and Edith fell in love with him. He
+flirted with Frances under Anthony's nose; and with the Aunties under
+Grannie's nose. The corners of Vera's mouth followed the tilt of her
+long eyes' corners as she saw him do it.
+
+You could not think of Vera as the children's Auntie, or as Bartie's
+wife, or as Veronica's mother.
+
+Veronica was a very little girl who sang songs and was afraid of
+ghosts.
+
+She slept in her mother's room, and so never could be put to bed till
+half-past seven, or till her mother was dressed to the last hook of her
+gown, the last hairpin, the last touch of powder (adhesive without
+bismuth), and the last shadow drawn fine about her eyelashes. When Vera
+beautiful in a beautiful gown, came trailing into the room where
+everybody waited for her, Veronica hid herself behind Uncle Anthony's
+big chair. When her father told her to come out of that and say
+good-night and be quick about it, she came slowly (she was not in the
+least afraid of Bartie), showing herself bit by bit, honey-coloured
+hair, eyebrows dark under her gold, very dark against her white;
+sorrowful, transparent, lucid eyes. A little girl with a straight white
+face. A little, slender girl in a straight white frock. She stood by
+Anthony's chair, spinning out the time, smiling at him with her childish
+wavering mouth, a smile that would not spread, that never went higher
+than the tip of her white nose, that left her lucid, transparent eyes
+still sorrowful.
+
+She knew that Anthony would take her on his knee, and that she could sit
+there with her head tucked under his chin, smiling at him, prolonging
+her caresses, till Vera told him to put her down and let her go.
+
+Bartie growled: "Did you hear your mother telling you to say
+Good-night?"
+
+"Yes. But I must kiss Uncle Anthony first. Properly. Once on his mouth.
+Once--on his nose. And once--on--his--eyes. And--once--on--his dear
+little--ears."
+
+After that, Veronica went slowly from chair to chair, lingering at each,
+sitting first on Frances's lap, then on Vera's, spinning out her
+caresses, that spun out the time and stretched it farther and farther
+between her and the unearthly hour ahead of her.
+
+But at her father's chair she did not linger for a single instant. She
+slipped her hand into his hand that dropped it as if it had hurt him;
+she touched his forehead with her small mouth, pushed out, absurdly, to
+keep her face as far as possible from his. For, though she was not
+afraid of Bartie, he was not nice either to sit on or to kiss.
+
+Half-way across the room she lingered.
+
+"I haven't sung 'London Bridge is broken down.' Don't you want me to
+sing it?"
+
+"No, darling. We want you to go to bed."
+
+"I'm going, Mummy."
+
+And at the door she turned and looked at them with her sorrowful, lucid,
+transparent eyes.
+
+Then she went, leaving the door open behind her. She left it open on
+purpose, so that she might hear their voices, and look down into the
+room on her way upstairs. Besides, she always hoped that somebody would
+call her back again.
+
+She lingered at the foot of the stairs till Bartie got up and shut the
+door on her. She lingered at the turn of the stairs and on the landing.
+But nobody ever called her back again.
+
+And nobody but Nicky knew what she was afraid of.
+
+Veronica was sitting up in the cot that used to be Nicky's when he was
+little. Nicky, rather cold in his pyjamas, sat on the edge of it beside
+her. A big, yellow, tremendous moon hung in the sky outside the window,
+behind a branch of the tree of Heaven, and looked at them.
+
+Veronica crouched sideways on her pillow in a corner of the cot, her
+legs doubled up tight under her tiny body, her shoulders hunched
+together, and her thin arms hanging before her straight to her lap. Her
+honey coloured hair was parted and gathered into two funny plaits, that
+stuck out behind her ear. Her head was tilted slightly backwards to rest
+against the rail of the cot. She looked at Nicky and her look reminded
+him of something, he couldn't remember what.
+
+"Were you ever afraid, Nicky?" she said.
+
+Nicky searched his memory for some image encircled by an atmosphere of
+terror, and found there a white hound with red smears on his breast and
+a muzzle like two saws.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I was once."
+
+A lamb--a white lamb--was what Veronica looked like. And Jerry bad
+looked at him like that when he found him sitting on the mustard and
+cress the day Boris killed him.
+
+"Afraid--what of?"
+
+"I don't know that it was 'of' exactly."
+
+"Would you be afraid of a ghost, now, if you saw one?"
+
+"I expect I jolly well should, if I _really_ saw one."
+
+"Being afraid of ghosts doesn't count, does it?"
+
+"No, of course it doesn't. You aren't afraid as long as I'm here, are
+you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I shall stay, then, till you go to sleep."
+
+Night after night he heard her calling to him, "Nicky, I'm frightened."
+Nobody but Veronica and Nicky were ever in bed on that floor before
+midnight. Night after night he got up and came to her and stayed beside
+her till she went to sleep.
+
+Once he said, "If it was Michael he could tell you stories."
+
+"I don't _want_ Michael. I want you."
+
+In the day-time she went about looking for him. "Where's Nicky?" she
+said. "I want him."
+
+"Nicky's in the schoolroom. You can't have him."
+
+"But--I _want_ him."
+
+"Can't be helped. You must do without him."
+
+"Will he be very long?"
+
+"Yes, ever so long. Run away like a good little girl and play with
+Don-Don."
+
+She knew that they told her to play with Don-Don, because she was a
+little girl. If only she could grow big quick and be the same age
+as Nicky.
+
+Instead of running away and playing with Don-Don, Ronny went away by
+herself into the apple-tree house, to wait for Nicky.
+
+The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of the
+kitchen garden. The apple-tree had had no apples on it for years. It was
+so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched out two great boughs
+like twisted arms, and was propped up by a wooden post under each
+armpit. The breast of its trunk rested on a cross-beam. The posts and
+the cross-beam were the doorway of the house, and the branches were its
+roof and walls. Anthony had given it to Veronica to live in, and
+Veronica had given it to Nicky. It was Nicky's and Ronny's house. The
+others were only visitors who were not expected to stay. There was room
+enough for them both to stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the
+middle, and to lie flat at the far end.
+
+"What more," said Nicky, "do you want?"
+
+He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he played
+with Bonny in the apple-tree house.
+
+"I don't care a ram if they do," he said. But nobody ever did, not even
+Mr. Parsons.
+
+Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and Bonny
+sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled unwillingly. But
+her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all. Nicky wondered why.
+
+"Is it," said Dorothy one morning, "that Ronny doesn't look as if she
+was Uncle Bartie's daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as if he wasn't
+Ronny's father?"
+
+However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she brought it out
+as if it had been the result of long and mature consideration.
+
+"Or is it," said Vera, "that I don't look as if I were Ronny's mother?"
+
+Her eyes had opened all their length to take in Dorothy.
+
+"No. I think it is that Uncle Bartie looks--"
+
+Frances rushed in. "It doesn't matter, my dear, what you think."
+
+"It will some day," said Dorothy.
+
+It was perhaps the best thing she could have said, as showing that she
+was more interested in the effect she would produce some day than in the
+sensation she had created there and then.
+
+"May I go round to Rosalind's after lessons?"
+
+"You may."
+
+"And may I stay to lunch if they ask me?"
+
+"You may stay as long as they care to have you. Stay to tea, stay to
+dinner, if you like."
+
+Dorothy knew by the behaviour of her mother's face that she had scored
+somewhere, somehow. She also knew that she was in disgrace and yet not
+in disgrace; which, if you came to think of it, was a funny thing.
+
+About this time Frances began to notice a symptom in herself. She was
+apt to resent it when Vera discussed her children with her. One late
+afternoon she and Anthony were alone with Vera. Captain Cameron had not
+come round that day, and Bartie had gone into town to consult either his
+solicitor or a specialist. He was always consulting one or the other.
+
+"You're wrong, you two," said Vera. "You think Michael's tender and
+Nicky's hard and unimpressionable. Michael's hard. You won't have to
+bother about Michael's feelings."
+
+"Michael's feelings," said Frances, "are probably what I shall have to
+bother about more than anything."
+
+"You needn't. For one thing, they'll be so unlike your feelings that you
+won't know whether they're feelings at all. You won't even know whether
+he's having them or not. Nicky's the one you'll have to look out for.
+He'll go all the howlers."
+
+"I don't think that Nicky'll be very susceptible. He hasn't shown any
+great signs so far."
+
+"Hasn't he! Nicky's susceptibility is something awful."
+
+"My dear Vera, you say yourself you don't care about children and that
+you don't understand them."
+
+"No more I do," said Vera. "But I understand men."
+
+"Do you understand Veronica?"
+
+"Of course I don't. I said men. Veronica's a girl. Besides, I'm
+Veronica's mother."
+
+"Nicky," said Anthony, "is not much more than nine."
+
+"You keep on thinking of him as a child--a child--nothing but a child.
+Wait till Nicky has children of his own. Then you'll know."
+
+"They would be rather darlings, Nicky's children," Frances said.
+
+"So would Veronica's."
+
+"Ver-onica?"
+
+You needn't be frightened. Nicky's affection for Ronny is purely
+paternal."
+
+"I'm not frightened," said Frances. But she left the room. She did not
+care for the turn the talk had taken. Besides, she wanted Vera to see
+that she was not afraid to leave her alone with Anthony.
+
+"I'm glad Frances has gone," said Vera, "because I want to talk to you.
+You'd never have known each other if it hadn't been for me. She couldn't
+have married you. It was I who saw you both through."
+
+He assented.
+
+"And you said if there was ever anything you could do for me--You
+haven't by any chance forgotten?"
+
+"I have not."
+
+"Well, if anything should happen to me--"
+
+"But, my dear girl, what _should_ happen to you?"
+
+"Things _do_ happen, Anthony."
+
+"Yes, but how about Bartie?"
+
+"That's it. Supposing we separated."
+
+"Good Heavens, you're not contemplating _that_, are you?"
+
+"I'm not contemplating anything. But Bartie isn't very easy to live
+with, is he?"
+
+"No, he's not. He never was. All the same--"
+
+Bartie was impossible. Between the diseases he had and thought he hadn't
+and the diseases he hadn't and thought he had, he made life miserable
+for himself and other people. He was a jealous egoist; he had the morbid
+coldness of the neurotic, and Vera was passionate. She ought never to
+have married him. All the same--"
+
+"All the same I shall stick to Bartie as long as it's possible. And as
+long as it's possible Bartie'll stick to me. But, if anything happens I
+want you to promise that you'll take Ronny."
+
+"You must get Frances to promise."
+
+"She'll do anything you ask her to, Anthony."
+
+When Frances came into the room again Vera was crying.
+
+And so Frances promised.
+
+     "'London Bridge is broken down
+     (_Ride over My Lady Leigh_!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with stones so strong--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine'"--
+
+It was twenty to eight and Ronny had not so much as begun to say Good
+night. She was singing her sons to spin out the time.
+
+     "'London Bridge--'"
+
+"That'll do, Ronny, it's time you were in bed."
+
+There was no need for her to linger and draw out her caresses, no need
+to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's request, had had
+her cot moved up into the night nursery.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie out to
+this time, when the Boer War came and solved his problem.
+
+Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South Africa, to
+enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.
+
+Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders,
+solving, perhaps, another problem.
+
+"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.
+
+Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was what
+Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't come back?
+Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances hated problems when
+they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems when they
+bothered Frances.
+
+And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went on.
+
+"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."
+
+"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.
+
+Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said, "what else
+could he do? His only chance was to go away and do something so jolly
+plucky that _we_'re ashamed of ourselves, and never to come back again
+to spoil it. You don't want him to spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"
+
+Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to
+realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging over
+them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over them. It
+hung over a country that, except once when it had conveniently swallowed
+up Morrie, they had never thought about and could not care for, a
+landscape that they could not see. The war was not even part of that
+landscape; it refused to move over it in any traceable course. It simply
+hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another. It was not
+their fault. They tried to see it. They bought the special editions of
+the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of
+the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the
+printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and
+Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial; it was
+all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very
+blood of it ran grey.
+
+It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the open wings
+of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of Heaven were real; so
+were Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow on the Hill; morning and noon and
+night were real, and getting up and dressing and going to bed; most real
+of all the sight and sound and touch of her husband and her children.
+
+Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances carried
+about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she could attach the
+rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an immense slender muzzle,
+tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out Maurice.
+
+Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.
+
+"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy said he
+ought to be shut up somewhere."
+
+"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."
+
+"Or drink, ducky."
+
+"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"
+
+"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I shouldn't
+mind whether he came back or didn't. _You_'re cruel. You ought to think
+of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edie."
+
+"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle Morrie."
+
+She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had been, as
+a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two years younger
+than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted, who contrived,
+nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to want by crying for
+them, though everybody else went without. And in the grown-up Morrie's
+place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky.
+
+For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.
+
+"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss
+it."
+
+Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and Nicky,
+mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High Street with
+flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a Pro-Boer and flew no
+flags. All these things irritated Maurice.
+
+He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all the
+chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in hospital
+throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had missed the sortie
+of his squadron and the taking of the guns for which Ferdie Cameron got
+his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come back in the middle of the war
+with nothing but a bullet wound in his left leg to prove that he had
+taken part in it.
+
+The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only depressed
+him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence broke down the
+sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a period of sobriety
+beyond its natural limits.
+
+For there were two kinds of drinking: great drinking that came seldom
+and was the only thing that counted, and ordinary drinking that, though
+it went on most of the time, brought no satisfaction and didn't count at
+all. And there were two states of drunkenness to correspond: one intense
+and vivid, without memory, transcending all other states; and one that
+was no more remarkable than any other. Before the war Morrie's great
+drinking came seldom, by fits and bursts and splendid unlasting
+uprushes; after the war the two states tended to approach till they
+merged in one continual sickly soaking. And while other important and
+outstanding things, and things that he really wanted to remember,
+disappeared in the poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he
+never for one moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not
+Anthony, his brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded.
+
+He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the war. He
+was furious with Frances and Anthony. Not realizing the war meant not
+realizing what he had been through. He swore by some queer God of his
+that he would make them realize it. The least they could do for him was
+to listen to what he had to say.
+
+"You people here don't know what war is. You think it's all glory and
+pluck, and dashing out and blowing up the enemy's guns, and the British
+flag flying, and wounded pipers piping all the time and not caring a
+damn. Nobody caring a damn.
+
+"And it isn't. It's dirt and funk and stinks and more funk all the time.
+It's lying out all night on the beastly veldt, and going to sleep and
+getting frozen, and waking up and finding you've got warm again because
+your neighbour's inside's been fired out on the top of you. You get
+wounded when the stretcher-bearers aren't anywhere about, and you crawl
+over to the next poor devil and lie back to back with him to keep warm.
+And just when you've dropped off to sleep you wake up shivering, because
+he's died of a wound he didn't know he'd got.
+
+"You'll find a chap lying on his back all nice and comfy, and when you
+start to pick him up you can't lift him because his head's glued to the
+ground. You try a bit, gently, and the flesh gives way like rotten
+fruit, and the bone like a cup you've broken and stuck together without
+any seccotine, and you heave up a body with half a head on it. And all
+the brains are in the other half, the one that's glued down. That's war.
+
+"Huh!" He threw out his breath with a jerk of contempt. It seemed to him
+that neither Frances nor Anthony was listening to him. They were not
+looking at him. They didn't want to listen; they didn't want to look at
+him. He couldn't touch them; he couldn't evoke one single clear image in
+their minds; there was no horror he could name that would sting them to
+vision, to realization. They had not been there.
+
+Dorothy and Michael and Nicky were listening. The three kids had
+imagination; they could take it in. They stared as if he had brought
+those horrors into the room. But even they missed the reality of it.
+They saw everything he meant them to see, except him. It was as if they
+were in the conspiracy to keep him out of it.
+
+He glared at Frances and Anthony. What was the good of telling them, of
+trying to make them realize it? If they'd only given some sign, made
+some noise or some gesture, or looked at him, he might have spared them.
+But the stiff, averted faces of Frances and Anthony annoyed him.
+
+"And if you're a poor wretched Tommy like me, you'll have to sweat in a
+brutal sun, hauling up cases of fizz from the railway up country to
+Headquarters, with a thirst on you that frizzles your throat. You see
+the stuff shining and spluttering, and you go mad. You could kill the
+man if you were to see him drink it, when you know there's nothing for
+_you_ but a bucket of green water with typhoid germs swimming about in
+it. That's war.
+
+"You think you're lucky if you're wounded and get bumped down in a
+bullock wagon thirty miles to the base hospital. But the best thing you
+can do then is to pop off. For if you get better they make you hospital
+orderly. And the hospital orderly has to clean up all the muck of the
+butcher's shop from morning to night. When you're so sick you can't
+stand you get your supper, dry bread and bully beef. The bully beef
+reminds you of things, and the bread--well, the bread's all nice and
+white on the top. But when you turn it over on the other side--it's red.
+That's war."
+
+Frances looked at him. He thought: "At last she's turned; at last I've
+touched her; she can realize that."
+
+"Morrie dear, it must have been awful," she said. "It's _too_ awful. I
+don't mind your telling me and Anthony about it; but I'd rather you did
+it when the children aren't in the room."
+
+"Is that all you think about? The children? The children. You don't care
+a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn what happens to me
+or anybody else. What does it matter who's wounded or who's killed, as
+long as it isn't one of your own kids?
+
+"I'm simply trying to tell you what war _is_. It's dirt and stink and
+funk. That's all it is. And there's precious little glory in it, Nicky."
+
+"If the Boers won there would be glory," Michael said.
+
+"Not even if the Boers won," said Maurice.
+
+"Certainly not if the Boers won," said Anthony.
+
+"You'll say next there'd be no glory if there was war between England
+and Ireland and the Irish won. And yet there would be glory."
+
+"Would there? Go and read history and don't talk rot."
+
+"I have read it," said Michael.
+
+Frances thought: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why should
+he? He's barely thirteen. I can't think where he gets these ideas from.
+But he'll grow out of them."
+
+It was not Maurice that she saw in Maurice's war-pictures. But he had
+made them realize what war was; and they vowed that as long as they
+lived not one of their sons should have anything to do with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the spring of nineteen-one Anthony sent Maurice out to California.
+The Boer War was ended.
+
+Another year, and the vision of war passed from Frances as if it had
+never been.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Michael was unhappy.
+
+The almond trees flowered in front of the white houses in the strange
+white streets.
+
+White squares, white terraces, white crescents; at the turn of the roads
+the startling beauty of the trees covered with pink blossoms, hot
+against the hot white walls.
+
+After the pink blossoms, green leaves and a strange white heat
+everywhere. You went, from pavements burning white, down long avenues
+grey-white under the shadows of the limes.
+
+A great Promenade going down like a long green tunnel, from the big
+white Hotel at the top to the High Street at the bottom of the basin
+where the very dregs of the heat sank and thickened.
+
+Promenade forbidden for no earthly reason that Michael could see, except
+that it was beautiful. Hotel where his father gave him dinner on his
+last day of blessed life, telling him to choose what he liked best, as
+the condemned criminal chooses his last meal on the day they hang him.
+
+Cleeve Hill and Battledown and Birdlip, and the long rampart of
+Leckhampton, a thin, curling bristle of small trees on the edge of it;
+forms that made an everlasting pattern on his mind; forms that haunted
+him at night and tempted and tormented him all day. Memory which it
+would have been better for him if he had not had, of the raking open
+country over the top, of broad white light and luminous blue shadows, of
+white roads switchbacking through the sheep pastures; fields of bright
+yellow mustard in flower on the lower hills; then, rectangular fir
+plantations and copses of slender beech trees in the hollows. Somewhere,
+far-off, the Severn, faint and still, like a river in a dream.
+
+Memory of the round white town in the round pit of the valley, shining,
+smoking through the thick air and the white orchard blossoms; memory
+saturated by a smell that is like no other smell on earth, the delicate
+smell of the Midland limestone country, the smell of clean white dust,
+and of grass drying in the sun and of mustard flowers.
+
+Michael was in Cheltenham.
+
+It was a matter of many unhappinesses, not one unhappiness. A sudden
+intolerable unhappiness, the flash and stab of the beauty of the
+almond-flowers, seen in passing and never seized, beauty which it would
+have been better for him if he had not seen; the knowledge, which he
+ought never to have had, that this beauty had to die, was killed because
+he had not seized it, when, if he could but have held it for one minute,
+it would have been immortal. A vague, light unhappiness that came
+sometimes, could not for the life of him think why, from the sight of
+his own body stripped, and from the feeling of his own muscles. There
+was sadness for him in his very strength. A long, aching unhappiness
+that came with his memory of the open country over the tops of the
+hills, which, in their incredible stupidity and cruelty, they had let
+him see. A quick, lacerating unhappiness when he thought of his mother,
+and of the garden on the Heath, and the high ridge of the Spaniards'
+Road, and London below it, immense and beautiful.
+
+The unhappiness of never being by himself.
+
+He was afraid of the herd. It was with him night and day. He was afraid
+of the thoughts, the emotions that seized it, swaying, moving the
+multitude of undeveloped souls as if they had been one monstrous,
+dominating soul. He was afraid of their voices, when they chanted, sang
+and shouted together. He loathed their slang even when he used it. He
+disliked the collective, male odour of the herd, the brushing against
+him of bodies inflamed with running, the steam of their speed rising
+through their hot sweaters; and the smell of dust and ink and
+india-rubber and resinous wood in the warm class-rooms.
+
+Michael was at school.
+
+The thing he had dreaded, that had hung over him, threatening him for
+years before it happened, had happened. Nothing could have prevented it;
+their names had been down for Cheltenham long ago; first his, then
+Nicky's. Cheltenham, because Bartie and Vera lived there, and because it
+had a college for girls, and Dorothy, who wanted to go to Roedean, had
+been sent to Cheltenham, because of Bartie and Vera and for no other
+reason. First Dorothy; then, he, Michael; then, the next term, Nicky.
+And Nicky had been sent (a whole year before his time) because of
+Michael, in the hope that Michael would settle down better if he had his
+brother with him. It didn't seem reasonable.
+
+Not that either Dorothy or Nicky minded when they got there. All that
+Nicky minded was not being at Hampstead. Being at Cheltenham he did not
+mind at all. He rather liked it, since Major Cameron had come to stay
+just outside it--on purpose to annoy Bartie--and took them out riding.
+Even Michael did not mind Cheltenham more than any other place his
+people might have chosen. He was not unreasonable. All he asked was to
+be let alone, and to have room to breathe and get ahead in. As it was,
+he had either to go with the school mass, or waste energy in resisting
+its poisonous impact.
+
+He had chosen resistance.
+
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DEAREST MOTHER:
+
+I've put Sunday on this letter, though it's really Friday, because I'm
+supposed to be writing it on Sunday when the other fellows are writing.
+That's the beastly thing about this place, you're expected to do
+everything when the other fellows are doing it, whether you want to or
+not, as if the very fact that they're doing it too didn't make you
+hate it.
+
+I'm writing now because I simply must. If I waited till Sunday I
+mightn't want to, and anyhow I shouldn't remember a single thing I meant
+to say. Even now Johnson minor's digging his skinny elbows into one side
+of me, and Hartley major's biting the feathers off his pen and spitting
+them out again on the other. But they're only supposed to be doing Latin
+verse, so it doesn't matter so much. What I mean is it's as if their
+beastly minds kept on leaking into yours till you're all mixed up with
+them. That's why I asked Daddy to take me away next term. You see--it's
+more serious than he thinks--it is, really. You've no idea what it's
+like. You've got to swot every blessed thing the other fellows swot
+even if you can't do it, and whether it's going to be any good to you or
+not. Why, you're expected to sleep when they're sleeping, even if the
+chap next you snores. Daddy _might_ remember that it's Nicky who likes
+mathematics, not me. It's all very well for Nicky when he wants to go
+into the Army all the time. There are things _I_ want to do. I want to
+write and I'm going to write. Daddy can't keep me off it. And I don't
+believe he'd want to if he understood. There's nothing else in the world
+I'll ever be any good at.
+
+And there are things I want to know. I want to know Greek and Latin and
+French and German and Italian and Spanish, and Old French and Russian
+and Chinese and Japanese, oh, and Provencal, and every blessed language
+that has or has had a literature. I can learn languages quite fast. Do
+you suppose I've got a chance of knowing one of them--really
+knowing--even if I had the time? Not much. And that's where being here's
+so rotten. They waste your time as if it was theirs, not yours. They've
+simply no notion of the value of it. They seem to think time doesn't
+matter because you're young. Fancy taking three months over a Greek play
+you can read in three hours. That'll give you some idea.
+
+It all comes of being in a beastly form and having to go with the other
+fellows. Say they're thirty fellows in your form, and twenty-nine stick;
+you've got to stick with them, if it's terms and terms. They can't do it
+any other way. It's _because_ I'm young, Mummy, that I mind so awfully.
+Supposing I died in ten years' time, or even fifteen? It simply makes me
+hate everybody.
+
+Love to Daddy and Don.
+
+     Your loving MICK.
+
+P.S.-I don't mean that Hartley major isn't good at Latin verse. He is.
+He can lick me into fits when he's bitten _all_ the feathers off.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Tuesday_.
+
+DARLING MUMMY:
+
+Daddy _doesn't_ understand. You only think he does because you like him.
+It's all rot what he says about esprit de corps, the putridest rot,
+though I know he doesn't mean it.
+
+And he's wrong about gym, and drill and games and all that. I don't mind
+gym, and I don't mind drill, and I like games. I'm fairly good at most
+of them--except footer. All the fellows say I'm fairly good--otherwise I
+don't suppose they'd stick me for a minute. I don't even mind Chapel.
+You see, when it's only your body doing what the other chaps do, it
+doesn't seem to matter. If esprit de corps _was_ esprit de corps it
+would be all right. But it's esprit d'esprit. And it's absolutely
+sickening the things they can do to your mind. I can't stand another
+term of it.
+
+     Always your loving
+          MICK.
+P.S.-How do you know I shan't be dead in ten or
+fifteen years' time? It's enough to make me.
+
+P.P.S.-It's all very well for Daddy to talk--_he_ doesn't want to learn
+Chinese.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Thursday_.
+
+DEAR FATHER:
+
+All right. Have it your own way. Only I shall kill myself. You needn't
+tell Mother that--though it won't matter so much as she'll very likely
+think. And perhaps then you won't try and stop Nicky going into the Army
+as you've stopped me.
+
+I don't care a "ram", as Nicky would say, whether you bury me or cremate
+me; only you might give my Theocritus to old Parsons, and my revolver
+to Nicky if it doesn't burst. He'd like it.
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+P.S.--If Parsons would rather have my _AEschylus_ he can, or both.
+
+     TUDOR HOUSE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DARLING MUMMY:
+
+It's your turn for a letter. Do you think Daddy'd let me turn the
+hen-house into a workshop next holidays, as there aren't any hens? And
+would he give me a proper lathe for turning steel and brass and stuff
+for my next birthday I'm afraid it'll cost an awful lot; but he could
+take it out of my other birthdays, I don't mind how many so long as I
+can have the lathe this one.
+
+This place isn't half bad once you get used to it. I like the fellows,
+and all the masters are really jolly decent, though I wish we had old
+Parsons here instead of the one we have to do Greek for. He's an awful
+chap to make you swot.
+
+I don't know what you mean about Mick being seedy. He's as fit as fit.
+You should see him when he's stripped. But he hates the place like
+poison half the time. He can't stand being with a lot of fellows. He's a
+rum chap because they all like him no end, the masters and the fellows,
+though they think he's funny, all except Hartley major, but he's such a
+measly little blighter that he doesn't count.
+
+We had a ripping time last Saturday. Bartie went up to town, and Major
+Cameron took Dorothy and Ronny and Vera and me and Mick to Birdlip in
+his dog-cart, only Mick and me had to bike because there wasn't room
+enough. However we grabbed the chains behind and the dog-cart pulled us
+up the hills like anything, and we could talk to Dorothy and Ronny
+without having to yell at each other. He did us jolly well at tea
+afterwards.
+
+Dorothy rode my bike stridelegs coming back, so that I could sit in the
+dog-cart. She said she'd get a jolly wigging if she was seen. We shan't
+know till Monday.
+
+You know, Mummy, that kid Ronny's having a rotten time, what with Bartie
+being such a beast and Vera chumming up with Ferdie and going off to
+country houses where he is. I really think she'd better come to us for
+the holidays. Then I could teach her to ride. Bartie won't let her learn
+here, though Ferdie'd gone and bought a pony for her. That was to spite
+Ferdie. He's worse than ever, if you can imagine that, and he's got
+three more things the matter with him.
+
+I must stop now.
+
+Love to Dad and Don and Nanna. Next year I'm to go into physics and
+stinks--that's chemistry.
+
+Your loving NICKY.
+
+     THE LEAS. PARABOLA ROAD.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Sunday_.
+
+DEAREST MUMMY:
+
+I'm awfully sorry you don't like my last term's school report. I know it
+wasn't what it ought to have been. I have to hold myself in so as to
+keep in the same class with Rosalind when we're moved up after
+Midsummer. But as she's promised me faithfully she'll let herself rip
+next term, you'll see it'll be all right at Xmas. We'll both be in I A
+the Midsummer after, and we can go in for our matic, together. I wish
+you'd arrange with Mrs. Jervis for both of us to be at Newnham at the
+same time. Tell her Rosalind's an awful slacker if I'm not there to keep
+her up to the mark. No--don't tell her that. Tell her _I'm_ a slacker if
+she isn't there.
+
+I was amused by your saying it was decent of Bartie to have us so often.
+He only does it because things are getting so tight between him and
+Vera that he's glad of anything that relaxes the strain a bit. Even us.
+He's snappier than ever with Ronny. I can't think how the poor kid
+stands it.
+
+You know that ripping white serge coat and skirt you sent me? Well, the
+skirt's not nearly long enough. It doesn't matter a bit though, because
+I can keep it for hockey. It's nice having a mother who _can_ choose
+clothes. You should see the last blouse Mrs. Jervis got for Rosalind.
+She's burst out of _all_ the seams already. You could have heard
+her doing it.
+
+Much love to you and Daddy and Don-Don. I can't send any to Mr. Parsons
+now my hair's up. But you might tell him I'm going in strong for
+Sociology and Economics.--
+
+     Your loving
+          DOROTHY.
+
+P.S.--Vera asked me if I thought you'd take her and Ronny in at
+Midsummer. I said of course you would--like a shot.
+
+
+     LANSDOWN LODGE.
+          CHELTENHAM,
+               _Friday._
+
+MY DEAREST FRANCES:
+
+I hope you got my two wires in time. You needn't come down, either of
+you. And you needn't worry about Mick. Ferdie went round and talked to
+him like a fa--I mean a big brother, and the revolver (bless his heart!)
+is at present reposing at the bottom of my glove-box.
+
+All the same we both think you'd better take him away at Midsummer. He
+says he can stick it till then, but not a day longer. Poor Mick! He has
+the most mysterious troubles.
+
+I daresay it's the Cheltenham climate as much as anything. It doesn't
+suit me or Bonny either, and it's simply killing Ferdie by inches. I
+suppose that's why Bartie makes us stay here--in the hope--
+
+Oh! my dear, I'm worried out of my life about him. He's never got over
+that fever he had in South Africa. He's looking ghastly.
+
+And the awful thing is that I can't do a thing for him. Not a thing.
+Unless--
+
+You haven't forgotten the promise you made me two years ago, have you?
+
+Dorothy seemed to think you could put Bonny and me up--again!--at
+Midsummer. Can you? And if poor Ferdie wants to come and see us, you
+won't turn him off your door-mat, will you?
+
+     Your lovingest
+          "VERA."
+
+Frances said, "Poor Vera! She even makes poor Mick an excuse for seeing
+Ferdie."
+
+
+
+X
+
+Three more years passed and Frances had fulfilled her promise. She had
+taken Veronica.
+
+The situation had become definite. Bartie had delivered his ultimatum.
+Either Vera must give up Major Cameron, signing a written pledge in the
+presence of three witnesses, Frances, Anthony and Bartie's solicitor,
+that she would neither see him nor write to him, nor hold any sort or
+manner of communication with him, direct or indirect, or he would obtain
+a judicial separation. It was to be clearly understood by both of them
+that he would not, in any circumstances, divorce her. Bartie knew that a
+divorce was what they wanted, what they had been playing for, and he was
+not going to make things easy for them; he was going to make things hard
+and bitter and shameful He had based his ultimatum on the calculation
+that Vera would not have the courage of her emotions; that even her
+passion would surrender when she found that it had no longer the
+protection of her husband's house and name. Besides Vera was expensive,
+and Cameron was a spendthrift on an insufficient income; he could not
+possibly afford her. If Bartie's suspicions were correct, the thing had
+been going on for the last twelve years, and if in twelve years' time
+they had not forced his hand that was because they had counted the cost,
+and decided that, as Frances had put it, the "game was not worth the
+scandal."
+
+For when suspicion became unendurable he had consulted Anthony who
+assured him that Frances, who ought to know, was convinced that there
+was nothing in it except incompatibility, for which Bartie was
+superlatively responsible.
+
+Anthony's manner did not encourage confidence, and he gathered that his
+own more sinister interpretation would be dismissed with contemptuous
+incredulity. Anthony was under his wife's thumb and Frances had been
+completely bamboozled by her dearest friend. Still, when once their eyes
+were opened, he reckoned on the support of Anthony and Frances. It was
+inconceivable, that, faced with a public scandal, his brother and his
+sister-in-law would side with Vera.
+
+It was a game where Bartie apparently held all the cards. And his trump
+card was Veronica.
+
+He was not going to keep Veronica without Vera. That had been tacitly
+understood between them long ago. If Vera went to Cameron she could not
+take Veronica with her without openly confirming Bartie's worst
+suspicion.
+
+And yet all these things, so inconceivable to Bartie, happened. When it
+came to the stabbing point the courage of Vera's emotions was such that
+she defied her husband and his ultimatum, and went to Cameron. By that
+time Ferdie was so ill that she would have been ashamed of herself if
+she had not gone. And though Anthony's house was not open to the unhappy
+lovers, Frances and Anthony had taken Veronica.
+
+Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie came over
+to West End House when they heard that it had been decided. It was
+time, they said, that somebody should protest, that somebody should
+advise Frances for her own good and for the good of her children.
+
+They had always detested and distrusted Vera Harrison; they had always
+known what would happen. The wonder was it had not happened before. But
+why Frances should make it easy for her, why Frances should shoulder
+Vera Harrison's responsibilities, and burden herself with that child,
+and why Anthony should give his consent to such a proceeding, was more
+than they could imagine.
+
+Once Frances had stood up for the three Aunties, against Grannie; now
+Grannie and the three Aunties were united against Frances.
+
+"Frances, you're a foolish woman."
+
+"My folly is my own affair and Anthony's."
+
+"You'll have to pay for it some day."
+
+"You might have thought of your own children first."
+
+"I did. I thought, How would I like _them_ to be forsaken like poor
+Ronny?"
+
+"You should have thought of the boys. Michael's growing up; so is
+Nicky."
+
+"Nicky is fifteen; Ronny is eleven, if you call that growing up."
+
+"That's all very well, but when Nicky is twenty-one and Ronny is
+seventeen what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm not going to turn Ronny out of doors for fear Nicky should fall in
+love with her, if that's what you mean."
+
+"It _is_ what I mean, now you've mentioned it."
+
+"He's less likely to fall in love with her if I bring them up as
+brother and sister."
+
+"You might think of Anthony. Bartholomew's wife leaves him for another
+man, and you aid and abet her by taking her child, relieving her of her
+one responsibility."
+
+"Bartie's wife leaves him, and we help Bartie by taking care of his
+child--who is _our niece_, not yours."
+
+"My dear Frances, that attitude isn't going to deceive anybody. If you
+don't think of Anthony and your children, you might think of us. We
+don't want to be mixed up in this perfectly horrible affair."
+
+"How are you mixed up in it?"
+
+"Well, after all, Frances, we are the family. We are your sisters and
+your mother and your children's grand-mother and aunts."
+
+"Then," said Frances with decision, "you must try to bear it. You must
+take the rough with the smooth, as Anthony and I do."
+
+And as soon as she had said it she was sorry. It struck her for the
+first time that her sisters were getting old. It was no use for Auntie
+Louie, more red and more rigid than ever, to defy the imminence of her
+forty-ninth birthday. Auntie Emmy's gestures, her mouthings and
+excitement, only drew attention to the fact that she was forty-seven.
+And Edie, why, even poor little Auntie Edie was forty-five. Grannie, dry
+and wiry, hardly looked older than Auntie Edie.
+
+They left her, going stiffly, in offence. And again the unbearable
+pathos of them smote her. The poor Aunties. She was a brute to hurt
+them. She still thought of them as Auntie Louie, Auntie Emmy, Auntie
+Edie. It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed upon them a colour and
+vitality that, but for her and for her children, they would not have
+had. They were helpless, tiresome, utterly inefficient. In all their
+lives they had never done anything vigorous or memorable. They were
+doomed to go out before her children; when they were gone they would be
+gone altogether. Neither Auntie Louie, nor Auntie Emmy, nor Auntie Edie
+would leave any mark or sign of herself. But her children gave them
+titles by which they would be remembered after they were gone. It was as
+if she had bestowed on them a little of her own enduring life.
+
+It was absurd and pathetic that they should think that they were the
+Family.
+
+But however sorry she was for them she could not allow them to dictate
+to her in matters that concerned her and Anthony alone. If they were so
+worried, about the scandal, why hadn't they the sense to see that the
+only way to meet it was to give it the lie by taking Ronny, by behaving
+as if Ronny were unquestionably Bartie's daughter and their niece? They
+were bound to do it, if not for Vera's sake, for the dear little girl's
+sake. And that was what Vera had been thinking of; that was why she had
+trusted them.
+
+But her three sisters had always disliked Vera. They disliked her
+because, while they went unmarried, Vera, not content with the one man
+who was her just and legal portion, had taken another man whom she had
+no right to. And Auntie Emmeline had been in love with Ferdie.
+
+Still, there was a certain dreadful truth in their reproaches; and it
+stung. Frances said to herselv that she had not been wise. She had done
+a risky thing in taking Ronny. It was not fair to her children, to
+Michael and Nicholas and John. She was afraid. She had been afraid when
+Vera had talked to her about Nicky and Veronica; and when she had seen
+Veronica and Nicky playing together in the apple-tree house; and when
+she had heard Ronny's voice outside the schoolroom door crying, "Where's
+Nicky? I want him. Will he be very long?"
+
+Supposing Veronica should go on wanting Nicky, and supposing Nicky--
+
+Frances was so worried that, when Dorothy came striding across the lawn
+to ask her what the matter was, and what on earth Grannie and the
+Aunties had been gassing about all that time, she told her.
+
+Dorothy was nineteen. And Dorothy at nineteen, tall and upright, was
+Anthony's daughter. Her face and her whole body had changed; they were
+Anthony's face and body made feminine. Her little straight nose had now
+a short high bridge; her brown eyes were keen and alert; she had his
+hawk's look. She put her arm in Frances's, protecting her, and they
+walked up and down the terrace path, discussing it. In the distance
+Grannie and the Aunties could be seen climbing the slope of the Heath to
+Judges' Walk. They were not, Dorothy protested, pathetic; they were
+simply beastly. She hated them for worrying her mother.
+
+"They think I oughtn't to have taken Ronny. They think Nicky'll want to
+marry her."
+
+"But Ronny's a kid--"
+
+"When she's not a kid."
+
+"He won't, Mummy ducky, he won't. She'll be a kid for ages. Nicky'll
+have married somebody else before she's got her hair up."
+
+"Then Ronny'll fall in love with _him_, and get her little heart
+broken."
+
+"She won't, Mummy, she won't. They only talk like that because they
+think Ferdie's Ronny's father."
+
+"Dorothy!"
+
+Frances, in horror, released herself from that protecting arm. The
+horror came, not from the fact, but from her daughter's knowledge of it.
+
+"Poor Mummy, didn't you know? That's why Bartie hates her."
+
+"It isn't true."
+
+"What's the good of that as long as Bartie thinks it is?" said Dorothy.
+
+     "London Bridge is broken down
+     (_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)"
+
+Veronica was in the drawing-room, singing "London Bridge."
+
+Michael, in all the beauty of his adolescence, lay stretched out on the
+sofa, watching her. Her small, exquisite, childish face between the
+plaits of honey-coloured hair, her small, childish face thrilled him
+with a singular delight and sadness. She was so young and so small, and
+at the same time so perfect that Michael could think of her as looking
+like that for ever, not growing up into a tiresome, bouncing, fluffy
+flapper like Rosalind Jervis.
+
+Aunt Louie and Aunt Emmeline said that Rosalind was in love with him.
+Michael thought that was beastly of them and he hoped it wasn't true.
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine'"--
+
+Veronica was happy; for she knew herself to be a cause of happiness.
+Like Frances once, she was profoundly aware of her own happiness, and
+for the same reason. It was, if you came to think of it, incredible. It
+had been given to her, suddenly, when she was not looking for it, after
+she had got used to unhappiness.
+
+As long as she could remember Veronica had been aware of herself. Aware
+of herself, chiefly, not as a cause of happiness, but as a cause of
+embarrassment and uncertainty and trouble to three people, her father,
+her mother and Ferdie, just as they were causes of embarrassment and
+trouble and uncertainty to her. They lived in a sort of violent mystery
+that she, incomprehensibly, was mixed up with. As long as she could
+remember, her delicate, childish soul had quivered with the vibration of
+their incomprehensible and tiresome passions. You could never tell what
+any of them really wanted, though among them they managed to create an
+atmosphere of most devastating want. Only one thing she knew
+definitely--that they didn't want _her_.
+
+She was altogether out of it except as a meaningless counter in their
+incomprehensible, grown-up game. Her father didn't want her; her mother
+didn't want her very much; and though now and then Ferdie (who wasn't
+any relation at all) behaved as if he wanted her, _his_ wanting only
+made the other two want her less than ever.
+
+There had been no peace or quietness or security in her little life of
+eleven years. Their places (and they had had so many of them!) had never
+had any proper place for her. She seemed to have spent most of her time
+in being turned out of one room because her father had come into it, and
+out of another because her mother wanted to be alone in it with Ferdie.
+And nobody, except Ferdie sometimes, when they let him, ever wanted to
+be alone in any room with her. She was so tired of the rooms where she
+was obliged to be always alone with herself or with the servants, though
+the servants were always kind.
+
+Now, in Uncle Anthony's house, there was always peace and quietness and
+an immense security. She knew that, having taken her, they wouldn't
+give her up.
+
+She was utterly happy.
+
+And the house, with its long, wainscoted rooms, its whiteness and
+darkness, with its gay, clean, shining chintzes, the delicate, faded
+rose stuffs, the deep blue and purple and green stuffs, and the blue and
+white of the old china, and its furniture of curious woods, the golden,
+the golden-brown, the black and the wine-coloured, bought by Anthony in
+many countries, the round concave mirrors, the pictures and the old
+bronzes, all the things that he had gathered together and laid up as
+treasure for his Sons; and the garden on the promontory, with its
+buttressed walls and its green lawn, its flower borders, and its tree of
+Heaven, saturated with memories, became for her, as they had become for
+Frances, the sanctuary, crowded with visible and tangible symbols, of
+the Happiness she adored.
+
+"Sing it again, Ronny."
+
+She sang it again.
+
+     "'London Bridge is broken down'"--
+
+It was funny of Michael to like the silly, childish song; but if he
+wanted it he should have it. Veronica would have given any of them
+anything they wanted. There was nothing that she had ever wanted that
+they had not given to her.
+
+She had wanted to be strong, to be able to run and ride, to play tennis
+and cricket and hockey, and Nicky had shown her how. She had wanted
+books of her own, and Auntie Frances, and Uncle Anthony and Dorothy and
+Michael had given her books, and Nicky had made her a bookcase. Her room
+(it was all her own) was full of treasures. She had wanted to learn to
+sing and play properly, and Uncle Anthony had given her masters. She had
+wanted people to love her music, and they loved it. She had wanted a
+big, grown-up sister like Dorothy, and they had given her Dorothy; and
+she had wanted a little brother of her own age, and they had given her
+John. John had a look of Nicky. His golden white hair was light brown
+now; his fine, wide mouth had Nicky's impudence, even when, like
+Frances, he kept it shut to smile her unwilling, twitching, mocking
+smile. She had wanted a father and mother like Frances and Anthony; and
+they had given her themselves.
+
+And she had wanted to live in the same house with Nicky always.
+
+So if Michael wanted her to sing "London Bridge" to him twenty times
+over, she would sing it, provided Nicky didn't ask her to do anything
+else at the same time. For she wanted to do most for Nicky, always.
+
+And yet she was aware of something else that was not happiness. It was
+not a thing you could name or understand, or seize, or see; you were
+simply aware of it, as you were aware of ghosts in your room at night.
+Like the ghosts, it was not always there; but when it was there
+you knew.
+
+It felt sometimes as if Auntie Frances was afraid of her; as if she,
+Veronica, was a ghost.
+
+And Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I am not good. She thinks
+I'll worry her. But I shan't."
+
+That was before the holidays. Now that they had come and Nicky was back,
+"it" seemed to her something to do with Nicky; and Veronica said to
+herself, "She is afraid I'll get in his way and worry him, because he's
+older. But I shan't."
+
+As if she had not been taught and trained not to get in older people's
+ways and worry them. And as if she wasn't growing older every
+minute herself!
+
+     "'Build it up with gold so fine--
+     (_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "'Build it up with stones so strong'"--
+
+She had her back to the door and to the mirror that reflected it, yet
+she knew that Nicky had come in.
+
+"That's the song you used to sing at bed-time when you were frightened,"
+he said.
+
+She was sitting now in the old hen-house that was Nicky's workshop,
+watching him as he turned square bars of brass into round bars with his
+lathe. She had plates of steel to polish, and pieces of wood to rub
+smooth with glass-paper. There were sheets of brass and copper, and bars
+and lumps of steel, and great poles and planks of timber reared up round
+the walls of the workshop. The metal filings fell from Nicky's lathe
+into sawdust that smelt deliciously.
+
+The workshop was nicer than the old apple-tree house, because there were
+always lots of things to do in it for Nicky.
+
+"Nicky," she said suddenly, "do you believe in ghosts?"
+
+"Well--" Nicky caught his bar as it fell from the lathe and examined it
+critically.
+
+"You remember when I was afraid of ghosts, and you used to come and sit
+with me till I went to sleep?"
+
+"Rather."
+
+"Well--there _are_ ghosts. I saw one last night. It came into the room
+just after I got into bed."
+
+"You _can_ see them," Nicky said. "Ferdie's seen heaps. It runs in his
+family. He told me."
+
+"He never told _me_."
+
+"Rather not. He was afraid you'd be frightened."
+
+"Well, I wasn't frightened. Not the least little bit."
+
+"I shall tell him that. He wanted most awfully to know whether you saw
+them too."
+
+"_Me_? But Nicky--it was Ferdie I saw. He stood by the door and looked
+at me. Like he does, you know."
+
+The next morning Frances had a letter of two lines from Veronica's
+mother:
+
+     "Ferdie died last evening at half past eight.
+
+     "He wants you to keep Ronny.
+
+          "VERA."
+
+It was not till years later that Veronica knew that "He wanted most
+awfully to know whether you saw them too" meant "He wanted most awfully
+to know whether you really were his daughter."
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE VORTEX
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Three years passed. It was the autumn of nineteen-ten. Anthony's house
+was empty for the time being of all its children except Dorothea.
+
+Michael was in the beginning of his last year at Cambridge. Nicholas was
+in his second year. He had taken up mathematics and theoretical
+mechanics. In the long vacation, when the others went into the country,
+he stayed behind to work in the engineering sheds of the Morss Motor
+Company. John was at Cheltenham. Veronica was in Dresden.
+
+Dorothea had left Newnham a year ago, having taken a first-class in
+Economics.
+
+As Anthony came home early one evening in October, he found a group of
+six strange women in the lane, waiting outside his garden door in
+attitudes of conspiracy.
+
+Four of them, older women, stood together in a close ring. The two
+others, young girls, hung about near, but a little apart from the ring,
+as if they desired not to identify themselves with any state of mind
+outside their own. By their low sibilant voices, the daring sidelong
+sortie of their bright eyes, their gestures, furtive and irrepressible,
+you gathered that there was unanimity on one point. All six considered
+themselves to have been discovered.
+
+At Anthony's approach they moved away, with slow, casual steps, passed
+through the posts at the bottom of the lane and plunged down the steep
+path, as if under the impression that the nature of the ground covered
+their retreat. They bobbed up again, one after the other, when the lane
+was clear.
+
+The first to appear was a tall, handsome, bad-tempered-looking girl. She
+spoke first.
+
+"It's a damned shame of them to keep us waiting like this."
+
+She propped herself up against Anthony's wall and smouldered there in
+her dark, sullen beauty.
+
+"We were here at six sharp."
+
+"When they know we were told not to let on where we meet."
+
+"We're led into a trap," said a grey-haired woman.
+
+"I say, who is Dorothea Harrison?"
+
+"She's the girl who roped Rosalind in. She's all right."
+
+"Yes, but are her people all right?"
+
+"Rosalind knows them."
+
+The grey-haired woman spoke again.
+
+"Well, if you think this lane is a good place for a secret meeting, I
+don't. Are you aware that the yard of `Jack Straw's Castle' is behind
+that wall? What's to prevent them bringing up five or six coppers and
+planting them there? Why, they've only got to post one 'tee at the top
+of the lane, and another at the bottom, and we're done. Trapped. I call
+it rotten."
+
+"It's all right. Here they are."
+
+Dorothea Harrison and Rosalind Jervis came down the lane at a leisured
+stride, their long coats buttoned up to their chins and their hands in
+their pockets. Their I gestures were devoid of secrecy or any guile.
+Each had a joyous air of being in command, of being able to hold up the
+whole adventure at her will, or let it rip.
+
+Rosalind Jervis was no longer a bouncing, fluffy flapper. In three years
+she had shot up into the stature of command. She slouched, stooping a
+little from the shoulders, and carried her pink face thrust forward, as
+if leaning from a platform to address an audience. From this salience
+her small chin retreated delicately into her pink throat.
+
+"Is Miss Maud Blackadder here?" she said, marshalling her six.
+
+The handsome girl detached herself slowly from Anthony's wall.
+
+"What's the point," she said, "of keeping us hanging about like this--"
+
+"Till _all_ our faces are known to the police--"
+
+"There's a johnnie gone in there who can swear to _me_. Why didn't you
+two turn up before?" said the handsome girl.
+
+"Because," said Dorothea, "that johnnie was my father. He was pounding
+on in front of us all up East Heath Road. If we'd got here sooner I
+should have had to introduce you."
+
+She looked at the six benevolently, indulgently. They might have been
+children whose behaviour amused her. It was as if she had said, "I
+avoided that introduction, not because it would have been dangerous and
+indiscreet, but because it would have spoiled your fun for you."
+
+She led the way into the garden and the house and through the hall into
+the schoolroom. There they found eleven young girls who had come much
+too soon, and mistaking the arrangements, had rung the bell and allowed
+themselves to be shown in.
+
+The schoolroom had been transformed into a sort of meeting hall. The big
+oblong table had been drawn across one end of it. Behind it were chairs
+for the speakers, before it were three rows of chairs where the eleven
+young girls sat scattered, expectant.
+
+The six stood in the free space in front of the table and looked at
+Rosalind with significance.
+
+"This," said Rosalind, "is our hostess, Miss Dorothea Harrison. Dorothy,
+I think you've met Mrs. Eden, our Treasurer. This is our secretary, Miss
+Valentina Gilchrist; Miss Ethel Farmer; Miss Winifred Burstall--"
+
+Dorothy greeted in turn Mrs. Eden, a pretty, gentle woman with a face of
+dreaming tragedy (it was she who had defended Rosalind outside the
+gate); Miss Valentina Gilchrist, a middle-aged woman who displayed a
+large grey pompadour above a rosy face with turned-back features which,
+when she was not excited, had an incredulous quizzical expression (Miss
+Gilchrist was the one who had said they had been led into a trap); Miss
+Ethel Farmer, fair, attenuated, scholastic, wearing pince-nez with an
+air of not seeing you; and Miss Winifred Burstall, weather-beaten, young
+at fifty, wearing pince-nez with an air of seeing straight through you
+to the other side.
+
+Rosalind went on. "Miss Maud Blackadder--"
+
+Miss Blackadder's curt bow accused Rosalind of wasting time in
+meaningless formalities.
+
+"Miss--" Rosalind was at a loss.
+
+The other girl, the youngest of the eight, came forward, holding out a
+slender, sallow-white hand. She was the one who had hung with Miss
+Blackadder in the background.
+
+"Desmond," she said. "Phyllis Desmond."
+
+She shrugged her pretty shoulders and smiled slightly, as much as to
+say, "She forgets what she ought to remember, but it doesn't matter."
+
+Phyllis Desmond was beautiful. But for the moment her beauty was asleep,
+stilled into hardness. Dorothy saw a long, slender, sallow-white face,
+between sleek bands of black hair; black eyes, dulled as if by a subtle
+film, like breath on a black looking-glass; a beautiful slender mouth,
+pressed tight, holding back the secret of its sensual charm.
+
+Dorothy thought she had seen her before, but she couldn't remember
+where.
+
+Rosalind Jervis looked at her watch with a businesslike air; paper and
+pencils were produced; coats were thrown on the little school-desks and
+benches in the corner where Dorothy and her brothers had sat at their
+lessons with Mr. Parsons some twelve years ago; and the eight gathered
+about the big table, Rosalind taking the presidential chair (which had
+once been Mr. Parsons' chair) in the centre between Miss Gilchrist and
+Miss Blackadder.
+
+Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer looked at each other and Miss Burstall
+spoke.
+
+"We understood that this was to be an informal meeting. Before we begin
+business I should like to ask one question. I should like to know what
+we are and what we are here for?"
+
+"We, Mrs. Eden, Miss Valentina Gilchrist, Miss Maud Blackadder and
+myself," said Rosalind in the tone of one dealing reasonably with an
+unreasonable person, "are the Committee of the North Hampstead Branch of
+the Women's Franchise Union. Miss Gilchrist is our secretary, I am the
+President and Miss Blackadder is--er--the Committee."
+
+"By whom elected? This," said Miss Burstall, "is most irregular."
+
+Rosalind went on: "We are here to appoint a vice-president, to elect
+members of the Committee and enlist subscribers to the Union. These
+things will take time."
+
+"_We_ were punctual," said Miss Farmer.
+
+Rosalind did not even look at her. The moment had come to address the
+meeting.
+
+"I take it that we are all agreed as to the main issue, that we have not
+come here to convert each other, that we all want Women's Franchise,
+that we all mean to have it, that we are all prepared to work for it,
+and, if necessary, to fight for it, to oppose the Government that
+withholds it by every means in our power--"
+
+"By every constitutional means," Miss Burstall amended, and was told by
+Miss Gilchrist that, if she desired proceedings to be regular, she must
+not interrupt the Chairwoman.
+
+"--To oppose the Government that refuses us the vote, whatever
+Government it may be, regardless of party, by _every means in
+our power_."
+
+Rosalind's sentences were punctuated by a rhythmic sound of tapping.
+Miss Maud Blackadder, twisted sideways on the chair she had pushed
+farther and farther back from the table, so as to bring herself
+completely out of line with the other seven, from time to time,
+rhythmically, twitching with impatience, struck her own leg with her own
+walking-stick.
+
+Rosalind perorated. "If we differ, we differ, not as to our end, but
+solely as to the means we, personally and individually, are prepared to
+employ." She looked round. "Agreed."
+
+"Not agreed," said Dorothy and Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer all at
+once.
+
+"I will now call on Miss Maud Blackadder to speak. She will explain to
+those of you who are strangers" (she glanced comprehensively at the
+eleven young girls) "the present program of the Union."
+
+"I protest," said Miss Burstall. "There has been confusion."
+
+"There really _has_, Rosalind," said Dorothy. "You _must_ get it
+straight. You can't start all at sixes and sevens. I protest too."
+
+"We all three protest," said Miss Farmer, frowning and blinking in an
+agony of protest.
+
+"Silence, if you please, for the Chairwoman," said Miss Gilchrist.
+
+"May we not say one word?"
+
+"You may," said Rosalind, "in your turn. I now call on Miss Blackadder
+to speak."
+
+At the sound of her own name Miss Blackadder jumped to her feet. The
+walking-stick fell to the floor with a light clatter and crash,
+preluding her storm. She jerked out her words at a headlong pace, as if
+to make up for the time the others had wasted in futilities.
+
+"I am not going to say much, I am not going to take up your time. Too
+much time has been lost already. I am not a speaker, I am not a writer,
+I am not an intellectual woman, and if you ask me what I am and what I
+am here for, and what I am doing in the Union, and what the Union is
+doing with me, and what possible use I, an untrained girl, can be to you
+clever women" (she looked tempestuously at Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer
+who did not flinch), "I will tell you. I am a fighter. I am here to
+enlist volunteers. I am the recruiting sergeant for this district. That
+is the use my leaders, who should be _your_ leaders, are making
+of _me_."
+
+Her head was thrown back, her body swayed, rocked from side to side with
+the violent rhythm of her speech.
+
+"If you ask me why they have chosen _me_ I will tell you. It's because I
+know what I want and because I know how to get what I want.
+
+"I know what I want. Oh, yes, you think that's nothing; you all think
+you know what you want. But do you? _Do_ you?"
+
+"Of course we do!"
+
+"We want the vote!"
+
+"Nothing but the vote!"
+
+"_Nothing but?_ Are you quite sure of that? Can you even say you want it
+till you know whether there are things you want more?"
+
+"What are you driving at?"
+
+"You'll soon see what I'm driving at. I drive straight. And I ride
+straight. And I don't funk my fences.
+
+"Well--say you all want the vote. Do you know how much you want it? Do
+you know how much you want to pay for it? Do you know what you're
+prepared to give up for it? Because, if you don't know _that_, you don't
+know how much you want it."
+
+"We want it as much as you do, I imagine."
+
+"You want it as much as I do? Good. _Then_ you're going to pay the price
+whatever the price is. _Then_ you're ready to give up everything else,
+your homes and your families and your friends and your incomes. Until
+you're enfranchised you are not going to own any _man_ as father, or
+brother or husband" (her voice rang with a deeper and stronger
+vibration) "or lover, or friend. And the man who does not agree with
+you, the man who refuses you the vote, the man who opposes your efforts
+to get the vote, the man who, whether he agrees with you or not, _will
+not help you to get it_, you count as your enemy. That is wanting the
+vote. That is wanting it as much as I do.
+
+"You women--are you prepared to go against your men? To give up your
+men?"
+
+There were cries of "Rather!" from two of the eleven young girls who had
+come too soon.
+
+Miss Burstall shook her head and murmured, "Hopeless confusion of
+thought. If _this_ is what it's going to be like, Heaven help us!"
+
+"You really _are_ getting a bit mixed," said Dorothy.
+
+"We protest--"
+
+"Protest then; protest as much as you like. Then we shall know where we
+are; then we shall get things straight; then we can begin. You all want
+the vote. Some of you don't know how much, but at least you know you
+want it. Nobody's confused about that. Do you know how you're going to
+get it? Tell me that."
+
+Lest they should spoil it all by telling her Miss Blackadder increased
+her vehement pace. "You don't because you can't and _I_ will tell you.
+You won't get it by talking about it or by writing about it, or by
+sitting down and thinking about it, you'll get it by coming in with me,
+coming in with the Women's Franchise Union, and fighting for it.
+Fighting women, not talkers--not writers--not thinkers are what we
+want!" She sat down, heaving a little with the ground-swell of her
+storm, amid applause in which only Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer did not
+join. She was now looking extraordinarily handsome.
+
+Rosalind bent over and whispered something in her ear. She rose to her
+feet again, flushed, smiling at them, triumphant.
+
+"Our Chairwoman has reminded me that I came here to tell you what the
+program of our Union is. And I can tell you in six words. It's
+Hell-for-leather, and it's Neck-or-nothing!"
+
+"Now," said Rosalind sweetly, bowing towards Miss Burstall, "it's your
+turn. We should like to know what you have to say."
+
+Miss Burstall did not rise and in the end Dorothea spoke.
+
+"My friend, Miss Rosalind Jervis, assumed that we were all agreed, not
+only as to our aims, but as to our policy. She has not yet discriminated
+between constitutional and unconstitutional means. When we protested,
+she quashed our protest. We took exception to the phrase 'every means in
+our power,' because that would commit us to all sorts of
+unconstitutional things. It is in my power to squirt water into the back
+of the Prime Minister's neck, or to land a bomb in the small of his
+back, or in the centre of the platform at his next public meeting. We
+were left to conclude that the only differences between us would concern
+our choice of the squirt or the bomb. As some of us here might equally
+object to using the bomb or the squirt, I submit that either our protest
+should have been allowed or our agreement should not have been taken for
+granted at the start.
+
+"Again, Miss Maud Blackadder, in her sporting speech, her heroic speech,
+has not cleared the question. She has appealed to us to come in, without
+counting the cost; but she has said nothing to convince us that when our
+account at our bank is overdrawn, and we have declared war on all our
+male friends and relations, and have left our comfortable homes, and are
+all camping out on the open Heath--I repeat, she has said nothing to
+convince us that the price we shall have paid is going to get us the
+thing we want.
+
+"She says that fighters are wanted, and not talkers and writers and
+thinkers. Are we not then to fight with our tongues and with our brains?
+Is she leaving us anything but our bare fists? She has told us that she
+rides straight and that she doesn't funk her fences; but she has not
+told us what sort of country she is going to ride over, nor where the
+fences are, not what Hell-for-leather and Neck-or-nothing means.
+
+"We want meaning; we want clearness and precision. We have not been
+given it yet.
+
+"I would let all this pass if Miss Blackadder were not your
+colour-sergeant. Is it fair to call for volunteers, for raw recruits,
+and not tell them precisely and clearly what services will be required
+of them? How many" (Dorothy glanced at the eleven) "realize that the
+leaders of your Union, Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, and Mrs. Blathwaite, and
+Miss Angela Blathwaite, demand from its members blind, unquestioning
+obedience?"
+
+Maud Blackadder jumped up.
+
+"I protest. I, too, have the right to protest. Miss Harrison calls me to
+order. She tells me to be clear and precise. Will she be good enough to
+be clear and precise herself? Will she say whether she is with us or
+against us? If she is not with us she is against us. Let her explain her
+position."
+
+She sat down; and Rosalind rose.
+
+"Miss Harrison," she said, "will explain her position to the Committee
+later. This is an open meeting till seven. It is now five minutes to.
+Will any of you here"--she held the eleven with her eyes--"who were not
+present at the meeting in the Town Hall last Monday, hold up your hands.
+No hands. Then you must all be aware of the object and the policy and
+the rules of the Women's Franchise Union. Its members pledge themselves
+to help, as far as they can, the object of the Union; to support the
+decisions of their leaders; to abstain from public and private criticism
+of those decisions and of any words or actions of their leaders; and to
+obey orders--not blindly or unquestioningly, but within the terms of
+their undertakings.
+
+"Those of you who wish to join us will please write your names and
+addresses on the slips of white paper, stating what kind of work you are
+willing to do and the amount of your subscription, if you subscribe, and
+hand your slips to the Secretary at the door, as you go out."
+
+Miss Burstall and Miss Farmer went out. Miss Blackadder
+counted--"One--two--"
+
+Eight of the eleven young girls signed and handed in the white slips at
+the door, and went out.
+
+"Three--four--"
+
+Miss Blackadder reckoned that Dorothea Harrison's speech had cost her
+five recruits. Her own fighting speech had carried the eleven in a
+compact body to her side: Dorothea's speech had divided and scattered
+them again.
+
+Miss Blackadder hurled her personality at the heads of audiences in the
+certainty that it would hit them hard. That was what she was there for.
+She knew that the Women's Franchise union relied on her to wring from
+herself the utmost spectacular effect. And she did it every time. She
+never once missed fire. And Dorothea Harrison had come down on the top
+of her triumph and destroyed the effect of all her fire. She had
+corrupted five recruits. And, supposing there was a secret program, she
+had betrayed the women of the Union to fourteen outsiders, by giving it
+away. Treachery or no treachery, Dorothea Harrison would have to pay
+for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everybody had gone except the members of the Committee and Phyllis
+Desmond who waited for her friend, Maud Blackadder.
+
+Dorothy remembered Phyllis Desmond now; she was that art-student girl
+that Vera knew. She had seen her at Vera's house.
+
+They had drawn round the table again. Miss Blackadder and Miss Gilchrist
+conferred in whispers.
+
+"Before we go," said Rosalind, "I propose that we ask Miss Dorothea
+Harrison to be our Vice-President."
+
+Miss Gilchrist nodded to Miss Blackadder who rose. It was her moment.
+
+"And _I_ propose," she said, "that before we invite Miss Harrison to be
+anything we ask her to define her position--clearly and precisely."
+
+She made a sign, and the Secretary was on her feet.
+
+"And first we must ask Miss Harrison to explain _how_ she became
+possessed of the secret policy of the Union which has never been
+discussed at any open meeting and is unknown to members of the General
+Committee."
+
+"Then," said Dorothy, "there _is_ a secret policy?"
+
+"You seem to know it. We have the right to ask _how_ you know? Unless
+you invented it."
+
+Dorothy faced them. It was inconceivable that it should have happened,
+that she should be standing there, in the old schoolroom of her father's
+house, while two strange women worried her. She knew that her back was
+to the wall and that the Blackadder girl had been on the watch for the
+last half-hour to get her knife into her. (Odd, for she had admired the
+Blackadder girl and her fighting gestures.) It was inconceivable that
+she should have to answer to that absurd committee for her honour. It
+was inconceivable that Rosalind, her friend, should not help her.
+
+Yet it had happened. With all her platform eloquence Rosalind couldn't,
+for the life of her, get out one heroic, defending word. From the moment
+when the Gilchrist woman had pounced, Rosalind had simply sat and
+stared, like a rabbit, like a fish, her mouth open for the word that
+would not come. Rosalind was afraid to stand up for her. It was
+dreadful, and it was funny to see Rosalind looking like that, and to
+realize the extent of her weakness and her obstinacy.
+
+Yet Rosalind had not changed. She was still the school-girl slacker who
+could never do a stroke of work until somebody had pushed her into it,
+who could never leave off working until stopped by the same hand that
+had set her going. Her power to go, and to let herself rip, and the
+weakness that made her depend on Dorothy to start her were the qualities
+that attracted Dorothy to Rosalind from the beginning. But now she was
+the tool of the fighting Suffrage Women. Or if she wasn't a tool, she
+was a machine; her brain was a rapid, docile, mechanical apparatus for
+turning out bad imitations of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and the two
+Blathwaites. Her air of casual command, half-swagger, half-slouch, her
+stoop and the thrusting forward of her face, were copied sedulously from
+an admired model.
+
+Dorothy found her pitiable. She was hypnotized by the Blathwaites who
+worked her and would throw her away when she was of no more use. She
+hadn't the strength to resist the pull and the grip and the drive of
+other people. She couldn't even hold out against Valentina Gilchrist and
+Maud Blackadder. Rosalind would always be caught and spun round by any
+movement that was strong enough. She was foredoomed to the Vortex.
+
+That was Dorothy's fault. It was she who had pushed and pulled the
+slacker, in spite of her almost whining protest, to the edge of the
+Vortex; and it was Rosalind, not Dorothy, who had been caught and sucked
+down into the swirl. She whirled in it now, and would go on whirling,
+under the impression that her movements made it move.
+
+The Vortex fascinated Dorothy even while she resisted it. She liked the
+feeling of her own power to resist, to keep her head, to beat up against
+the rush of the whirlwind, to wheel round and round outside it, and
+swerve away before the thing got her.
+
+For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex, as her brother Michael
+had been afraid of the little vortex of school. She was afraid of the
+herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices
+skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and
+the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge
+of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the
+collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many
+as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the
+clearness and hardness of her soul. It was her soul they wanted, these
+women of the Union, the Blathwaites and the Palmerston-Swetes, and
+Rosalind, and the Blackadder girl and the Gilchrist woman; they ran out
+after her like a hungry pack yelping for her soul; and she was not going
+to throw it to them. She would fight for freedom, but not in their way
+and not at their bidding.
+
+She was her brother Michael, refusing to go to the party; refusing to
+run with the school herd, holding out for his private soul against other
+people who kept him from remembering. Only Michael did not hold out. He
+ran away. She would stay, on the edge of the vortex, fascinated by its
+danger, and resisting.
+
+But as she looked at them, at Rosalind with her open mouth, at the
+Blackadder girl who was scowling horribly, and at Valentina Gilchrist,
+sceptical and quizzical, she laughed. The three had been trying to rush
+her, and because they couldn't rush her they were questioning her
+honour. She had asked them plainly for a plain meaning, and their idea
+of apt repartee was to pretend to question her honour.
+
+Perhaps they really did question it. She didn't care. She loathed their
+excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't care. It was she who
+had drawn them and led them on to this display of incomparable idiocy.
+Like her brother Nicholas she found that adversity was extremely funny;
+and she laughed.
+
+She was no longer Michael, she was Nicky, not caring, delighting in her
+power to fool them.
+
+"You think," she said, "I'd no business to find out?"
+
+"Your knowledge would certainly have been mysterious," said the
+Secretary; "unless at least two confidences had been betrayed. Supposing
+there had been any secret policy."
+
+"Well, you see, I don't know it; and I didn't invent it; and I didn't
+find it out--precisely. Your secret policy is the logical conclusion of
+your present policy. I deduced it; that's all. Anybody could have done
+the same. Does that satisfy you? (They won't love me any better for
+making them look fools!)"
+
+"Thank you," said Miss Gilchrist. "We only wanted to be sure."
+
+The dinner-bell rang as Dorothy was defining her position.
+
+"I'll work for you; I'll speak for you; I'll write for you; I'll fight
+for you. I'll make hay of every Government meeting, if I can get in
+without lying and sneaking for it. I'll go to prison for you, if I can
+choose my own crime. But I won't give up my liberty of speech and
+thought and action. I won't pledge myself to obey your orders. I won't
+pledge myself not to criticize policy I disapprove of. I won't come on
+your Committee, and I won't join your Union. Is that clear and
+precise enough?"
+
+Somebody clapped and somebody said, "Hear, Hear!" And somebody said, "Go
+it, Dorothy!"
+
+It was Anthony and Frances and Captain Drayton, who paused outside the
+door on their way to the dining-room, and listened, basely.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were all going now. Dorothy stood at the door, holding it open for
+them, glad that it was all over.
+
+Only Phyllis Desmond, the art-student, lingered. Dorothy reminded her
+that they had met at her aunt Vera Harrison's house.
+
+The art-student smiled. "I wondered when you were going to remember."
+
+"I did, but they all called you Desmond. That's what put me out."
+
+"Everybody calls me Desmond. You had a brother or something with you,
+hadn't you?"
+
+"I might have had two. Which? Michael's got green eyes and yellow hair.
+Nicky's got blue eyes and black hair."
+
+"It was Nicky--nice name--then."
+
+Desmond's beauty stirred in its sleep. The film of air was lifted from
+her black eyes.
+
+"I'm dining with Mrs. Harrison to-night," she said.
+
+"You'll be late then."
+
+"It doesn't matter. Lawrence Stephen's never there till after eight. She
+won't dine without him."
+
+Dorothy stiffened. She did not like that furtive betrayal of Vera and
+Lawrence Stephen.
+
+"I wish you'd come and see me at my rooms in Chelsea. And bring your
+brother. Not the green and yellow one. The blue and black one."
+
+Dorothy took the card on which Desmond had scribbled an address. But she
+did not mean to go and see her. She wasn't sure that she liked Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Rosalind stayed on to dine with Dorothy's family. She was no longer
+living with her own family, for Mrs. Jervis was hostile to Women's
+Franchise. She had rooms off the Strand, not far from the headquarters
+of the Union.
+
+Frances looked a little careworn. She had been sent for to Grannie's
+house to see what could be done with Aunt Emmeline, and had found, as
+usual, that nothing could be done with her. In the last three years the
+second Miss Fleming had become less and less enthusiastic, and more and
+more emphatic, till she ceased from enthusiasm altogether and carried
+emphasis beyond the bounds of sanity. She had become, as Frances put it,
+extremely tiresome.
+
+It was not accurate to say, as Mrs. Fleming did, that you never knew
+when Emmeline would start a nervous crisis; for as a matter of fact you
+could time her to a minute. It was her habit to wait till her family was
+absorbed in some urgent affair that diverted attention from her case,
+and then to break out alarmingly. Dorothy was generally sent for to
+bring her round; but to-day it was Dorothy who had important things on
+hand. Aunt Emmeline had scented the Suffrage meeting from afar, and had
+made arrangements beforehand for a supreme crisis that would take all
+the shine out of Dorothy's affair.
+
+When Frances said that Aunt Emmy had been tiresome again, Dorothy knew
+what she meant. For Aunt Emmy's idea was that her sisters persecuted
+her; that Edie was jealous of her and hated her; that Louie had always
+trampled on her and kept her under; that Frances had used her influence
+with Grannie to spoil all her chances one after another. It was all
+Frances's fault that Vera Harrison had come between her and Major
+Cameron; Frances had encouraged Vera in her infamous intrigue; and
+between them they had wrecked two lives. And they had killed
+Major Cameron.
+
+Since Ferdie's death Emmeline Fleming had lived most of the time in a
+sort of dream in which it seemed to her that these things had
+really happened.
+
+This afternoon she had been more than usually tiresome. She had simply
+raved.
+
+"You should have brought her round to the meeting," said Dorothy, "and
+let her rave there. I'd back Aunt Emmeline against Maud Blackadder. I
+wish, Rosalind, you'd leave off making faces and kicking my shins. You
+needn't worry any more, Mummy ducky. I'm going to rope them all into
+the Suffrage Movement. Aunt Edie can distribute literature, Aunt Louie
+can interrupt like anything, and Aunt Emmeline can shout and sing."
+
+"I think, Dorothy," said Rosalind with weak bitterness, "that you might
+have stuck by me."
+
+The two were walking down East Heath Road to the tram-lines where the
+motor buses started for Charing Cross.
+
+"It was you who dragged me into it, and the least you could do was to
+stick. Why didn't you keep quiet instead of forcing our hands?"
+
+"I couldn't keep quiet. I'll go with you straight or I won't go with you
+at all."
+
+"You know what's the matter with you? It's your family. You'll never be
+any good to us, you'll never be any good to yourself till you've chucked
+them and got away. For years--ever since you've been born--you've simply
+been stewing there in the family juice until you're soaked with it. You
+oughtn't to be living at home. You ought to be on your own--like me."
+
+"You're talking rot, Rosalind. If my people were like yours I'd have to
+chuck them, I suppose; but they're not. They're angels."
+
+"That's why they're so dangerous. They couldn't influence you if they
+weren't angels."
+
+"They don't influence me the least little bit. I'd like to see them try.
+They're much too clever. They know I'd be off like a shot if they did.
+Why, they let me do every mortal thing I please--turn the schoolroom
+into a meeting hall for your friends to play the devil in. That
+Blackadder girl was yelling the house down, yet they didn't say
+anything. And your people aren't as bad as you make out, you know. You
+couldn't live on your own if your father didn't give you an allowance. I
+like Mrs. Jervis."
+
+"Because she likes you."
+
+"Well, that's a reason. It isn't the reason why I like my own mother,
+because she doesn't like me so very much. That's why she lets me do what
+I like. She doesn't care enough to stop me. She only really cares for
+Dad and John and Nicky and Michael."
+
+Rosalind looked fierce and stubborn.
+
+"That's what's the matter with all of you," she said.
+
+"What is?"
+
+"Caring like that. It's all sex. Sex instinct, sex feeling. Maud's
+right. It's what we're up against all the time."
+
+Dorothy said to herself, "That's what's the matter with Rosalind, if she
+only knew it."
+
+Rosalind loved Michael and Michael detested her, and Nicky didn't like
+her very much. She always looked fierce and stubborn when she heard
+Michael's name.
+
+Rosalind went on. "When it comes to sex you don't revolt. You sit down."
+
+"I do revolt. I'm revolting now. I go much farther than you do. I think
+the marriage laws are rotten; I think divorce ought to be for
+incompatibility. I think love isn't love and can't last unless it's
+free. I think marriage ought to be abolished--not yet, perhaps, but when
+we've become civilized. It will be. It's bound to be. As it is, I think
+every woman has a right to have a baby if she wants one. If Emmeline
+had had a baby, she wouldn't be devastating us now."
+
+"That's what you think, but it isn't what you feel. It's all thinking
+with you, Dorothy. The revolt goes on in your brain. You'll never do
+anything. It isn't that you haven't the courage to go against your men.
+You haven't the will. You don't want to."
+
+"Why should I? What do they do? Father and Michael and Nicky don't
+interfere with me any more than Mother does."
+
+"You know I'm not thinking of them. They don't really matter."
+
+"Who are you thinking of then? Frank Drayton? You needn't!"
+
+It was mean of Rosalind to hit below the belt like that, when she knew
+that _she_ was safe. Michael had never been brought against her and
+never would be. It was disgusting of her to imply that Dorothy's state
+of mind was palpable, when her own (though sufficiently advertised by
+her behaviour) had received from Michael's sister the consecration of
+silence as a secret, tragic thing.
+
+They had reached the tram-lines.
+
+At the sight of the Charing Cross `bus Rosalind assumed an air of
+rollicking, adventurous travel.
+
+"My hat! What an evening! I shall have a ripping ride down. Don't say
+there's no room on the top. Cheer up, Dorothy!"
+
+Which showed that Rosalind Jervis was a free woman, suggested that life
+had richer thrills than marrying Dorothy's brother Michael, and fixed
+the detested imputation securely on her friend.
+
+Dorothy watched her as she swung herself on to the footboard and up the
+stair of the motor bus. There was room on the top. Rosalind, in fact,
+had the top all to herself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Dorothy crossed the Heath again in the twilight she saw something
+white on the terrace of her father's house. Her mother was waiting
+for her.
+
+She thought at first that Aunt Emmeline had gone off her head and that
+she had been sent for to keep her quiet. She gloried in their dependence
+on her. But no, that wasn't likely. Her mother was just watching for her
+as she used to watch for her and the boys when they were little and had
+been sent across the Heath to Grannie's house with a message.
+
+And at the sight and memory of her mother Dorothy felt a childish, sick
+dissatisfaction with herself and with her day, and an absurd longing for
+the tranquillity and safety of the home whose chief drawback lately had
+been that it was too tranquil and too safe. She could almost have told
+her mother how they had all gone for her, and how Rosalind had turned
+out rotten, and how beastly it had all been. Almost, but not quite.
+Dorothy had grown up, and she was there to protect and not to be
+protected. However agreeable it might have been to confide in her
+mother, it wouldn't have done.
+
+Frances met her at the garden door. She had been crying.
+
+"Nicky's come home," she said.
+
+"Nicky?"
+
+"He's been sent down."
+
+"Whatever for?"
+
+"Darling, I can't possibly tell you."
+
+But in the end she did.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Up till now Frances had taken a quiet interest in Women's Suffrage. It
+had got itself into the papers and thus become part of the affairs of
+the nation. The names of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and
+Angela Blathwaite had got into the papers, where Frances hoped and
+prayed that the name of Dorothea Harrison might not follow them. The
+spectacle of a frantic Government at grips with the Women's Franchise
+Union had not yet received the head-lines accorded to the reports of
+divorce and breach of promise cases and fires in paraffin shops; still,
+it was beginning to figure, and if Frances's _Times_ ignored it, there
+were other papers that Dorothy brought home.
+
+But for Frances the affairs of the nation sank into insignificance
+beside Nicky's Cambridge affair.
+
+There could be no doubt that Nicky's affair was serious. You could not,
+Anthony said, get over the letters, the Master's letter and the
+Professor's letter and Michael's. They had arrived one hour after Nicky,
+Nicky so changed from his former candour that he refused to give any
+account of himself beyond the simple statement that he had been sent
+down. They'd know, he had said, soon enough why.
+
+And soon enough they did know.
+
+To be sure no details could be disentangled from the discreet
+ambiguities of the Master and the Professor. But Michael's letter was
+more explicit. Nicky had been sent down because old "Booster" had got
+it into his head that Nicky had been making love to "Booster's" wife
+when she didn't want to be made love to, and nothing could get it out of
+"Booster's" head.
+
+Michael was bound to stand up for his brother, and it was clear to
+Anthony that so grave a charge could hardly have been brought without
+some reason. The tone of the letters, especially the Professor's, was
+extraordinarily restrained. That was what made the thing stand out in
+its sheer awfulness. The Professor, although, according to Michael, he
+conceived himself to be profoundly injured, wrote sorrowfully, in
+consideration of Nicky's youth.
+
+There was one redeeming circumstance, the Master and the Professor both
+laid stress on it: Anthony's son had not attempted to deny it.
+
+"There must," Frances said wildly, "be some terrible mistake."
+
+But Nicky cut the ground from under the theory of the terrible mistake
+by continuing in his refusal to deny it.
+
+"What sort of woman," said Anthony, "is the Professor's wife?"
+
+"Oh, awfully decent," said Nicky.
+
+"You had no encouragement, then, no provocation?"
+
+"She's awfully fascinating," said Nicky.
+
+Then Frances had another thought. It seemed to her that Nicky was
+evading.
+
+"Are you sure you're not screening somebody else?"
+
+"Screening somebody else? Do you mean some other fellow?"
+
+"Yes. I'm not asking you to give the name, Nicky."
+
+"I swear I'm not. Why should I be? I can't think why you're all making
+such a fuss about it. I don't mean poor old 'Booster.' He's got some
+cause, if you like."
+
+"But what was it you did--really did, Nicky?"
+
+"You've read the letters, Mother."
+
+Nicky's adolescence seemed to die and pass from him there and then; and
+she saw a stubborn, hard virility that frightened and repelled her,
+forcing her to believe that it might have really happened.
+
+To Frances the awfulness of it was beyond belief. And the pathos of her
+belief in Nicky was unbearable to Anthony. There were the letters.
+
+"I think, dear," Anthony said, "you'd better leave us."
+
+"Mayn't I stay?" It was as if she thought that by staying she could
+bring Nicky's youth back to life again.
+
+"No," said Anthony.
+
+She went, and Nicky opened the door for her. His hard, tight man's face
+looked at her as if it had been she who had sinned and he who suffered,
+intolerably, for her sin. The click of the door as he shut it
+stabbed her.
+
+"It's a damnable business, father. We'd better not talk about it."
+
+But Anthony would talk about it. And when he had done talking all that
+Nicky had to say was: "You know as well as I do that these
+things happen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For Nicky had thought it out very carefully beforehand in the train.
+What else could he say? He couldn't tell them that "Booster's" poor
+little wife had lost her head and made hysterical love to him, and had
+been so frightened at what she had done that she had made him promise on
+his word of honour that, whatever happened, he wouldn't give her away to
+anybody, not even to his own people.
+
+He supposed that either Peggy had given herself away, or that poor old
+"Booster" had found her out. He supposed that, having found her out,
+there was no other line that "Booster" could have taken. Anyhow, there
+was no other line that _he_ could take; because, in the world where
+these things happened, being found out would be fifty times worse for
+Peggy than it would be for him.
+
+He tried to recall the scene in the back drawing-room where she had
+asked him so often to have tea with her alone. The most vivid part was
+the end of it, after he had given his promise. Peggy had broken down and
+put her head on his shoulder and cried like anything. And it was at that
+moment that Nicky thought of "Booster," and how awful and yet how funny
+it would be if he walked into the room and saw him there. He had tried
+hard not to think what "Booster's" face would look like; he had tried
+hard not to laugh as long as Peggy's head was on his shoulder, for fear
+of hurting her feelings; but when she took it off he did give one
+half-strangled snort; for it really was the rummest thing that had ever
+happened to him.
+
+He didn't know, and he couldn't possibly have guessed, that as soon as
+the door had shut on him Peggy's passion had turned to rage and utter
+detestation of Nicky (for she had heard the snort); and that she had
+gone straight to her husband's study and put her head on _his_ shoulder,
+and cried, and told him a lie; and that it was Peggy's lie and not the
+Professor's imagination that had caused him to be sent down. And even if
+Peggy had not been Lord Somebody's daughter and related to all sorts of
+influential people she would still have been capable of turning every
+male head in the University. For she was a small, gentle woman with
+enchanting manners and the most beautiful and pathetic eyes, and she had
+not yet been found out. Therefore it was more likely that an
+undergraduate with a face like Nicky's should lose his head than that a
+woman with a face like Peggy's should, for no conceivable reason, tell a
+lie. So that, even if Nicky's word of honour had not been previously
+pledged to his accuser, it would have had no chance against any
+statement that she chose to make. And even if he had known that she had
+lied, he couldn't very well have given it against poor pretty Peggy who
+had lost her head and got frightened.
+
+As Nicky packed up his clothes and his books he said, "I don't care if I
+am sent down. It would have been fifty times worse for her than it
+is for me."
+
+He had no idea how bad it was, nor how much worse it was going to be.
+For it ended in his going that night from his father's house to the
+house in St. John's Wood where Vera and Mr. Lawrence Stephen lived.
+
+And it was there that he met Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky congratulated himself on having pulled it off so well. At the
+same time he was a little surprised at the ease with which he had taken
+his father and mother in. He might have understood it if he had known
+that Vera had been before him, and that she had warned them long ago
+that this was precisely the sort of thing they would have to look out
+for. And as no opinion ever uttered on the subject of their children was
+likely to be forgotten by Frances and Anthony, when this particular
+disaster came they were more prepared for it than they would have
+believed possible.
+
+But there were two members of his family whom Nicky had failed
+altogether to convince, Michael and Dorothy. Michael luckily, Nicky said
+to himself, was not on the spot, and his letter had no weight against
+the letters of the Master and the Professor, and on this also Nicky had
+calculated. He reckoned without Dorothy, judging it hardly likely that
+she would be allowed to know anything about it. Nobody, not even
+Frances, was yet aware of Dorothy's importance.
+
+And Dorothy, because of her importance, blamed herself for all that
+happened afterwards. If she had not had that damned Suffrage meeting,
+Rosalind would not have stayed to dinner; if Rosalind had not stayed to
+dinner she would not have gone with her to the tram-lines; if she had
+not gone with her to the tram-lines she would have been at home to stop
+Nicky from going to St. John's Wood. As it was, Nicky had reached the
+main road at the top of the lane just as Dorothy was entering it from
+the bottom.
+
+At first Frances did not want Dorothy to see her father. He was most
+horribly upset and must not be disturbed. But Dorothy insisted. Her
+father had the letters, and she must see the letters.
+
+"I may understand them better than you or Daddy," she said. "You see,
+Mummy, I know these Cambridge people. They're awful asses, some
+of them."
+
+And though her mother doubted whether attendance at the Professor's
+lectures would give Dorothy much insight into the affair, she had her
+way. Anthony was too weak to resist her. He pushed the letters towards
+her without a word. He would rather she had been left out of it. And yet
+somehow the sight of her, coming in, so robust and undismayed and
+competent, gave him a sort of comfort.
+
+Dorothy did not agree with Michael. There was more in it than the
+Professor's imagination. The Professor, she said, hadn't got any
+imagination; you could tell from the way he lectured. But she did not
+believe one word of the charge against her brother. Something had
+happened and Nicky was screening somebody.
+
+"I'll bet you anything you like," said Dorothy, "it's 'Booster's' wife.
+She's made him give his word."
+
+Dorothy was sure that "Booster's" wife was a bad lot.
+
+"Nicky said she was awfully decent."
+
+"He'd _have_ to. He couldn't do it by halves."
+
+"They couldn't have sent him down, unless they'd sifted the thing to the
+bottom."
+
+"I daresay they've sifted all they could, the silly asses."
+
+She could have killed them for making her father suffer. The sight of
+his drawn face hurt her abominably. She had never seen him like that.
+She wasn't half so sorry for her mother who was sustained by a secret,
+ineradicable faith in Nicky. Why couldn't he have faith in Nicky too?
+Was it because he was a man and knew that these things happened?
+
+"Daddy--being sent down isn't such an awful calamity. It isn't going to
+blast his career or anything. It's always touch and go. _I_ might have
+been sent down any day. I should have been if they'd known about me half
+what they don't know about Nicky. Why can't you take it as a rag? You
+bet _he_ does."
+
+Anthony removed himself from her protecting hand. He got up and went to
+bed.
+
+But he did not sleep there. Neither he nor Frances slept. And he came
+down in the morning looking worse than ever.
+
+Dorothy thought, "It must be awful to have children if it makes you feel
+like that." She thought, "It's a lucky thing they're not likely to cut
+up the same way about me." She thought again, "It must be awful to have
+children." She thought of the old discussions in her room at Newnham,
+about the woman's right to the child, and free union, and easy divorce,
+and the abolition of the family. Her own violent and revolutionary
+speeches (for which she liked to think she might have been sent down)
+sounded faint and far-off and irrelevant. She did not really want to
+abolish Frances and Anthony. And yet, if they had been abolished, as
+part of the deplorable institution of parentage, it would have been
+better for them; for then they would not be suffering as they did.
+
+It must be awful to have children. But perhaps they knew that it was
+worth it.
+
+And as her thoughts travelled that way they were overtaken all of a
+sudden by an idea. She did not stop to ask herself what business her
+idea had in that neighbourhood. She went down first thing after
+breakfast and sent off two wires; one to Captain Drayton at Croft House,
+Eltham; one to the same person at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
+
+"Can I see you? It's about Nicky.
+
+"DOROTHY HARRISON."
+
+Wires to show that she was impersonal and businesslike, and that her
+business was urgent. "Can I see you?" to show that he was not being
+invited to see _her_. "It's about Nicky" to justify the whole
+proceeding. "Dorothy Harrison" because "Dorothy" by itself was too much.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as she had sent off her wires Dorothy felt a sense of happiness
+and well-being. She had no grounds for happiness; far otherwise; her
+great friendship with Rosalind Jervis was disintegrating bit by bit
+owing to Rosalind's behaviour; the fiery Suffrage meeting had turned
+into dust and ashes; her darling Nicky was in a nasty scrape; her father
+and mother were utterly miserable; yet she was happy.
+
+Half-way home her mind began to ask questions of its own accord.
+
+"Supposing you had to choose between the Suffrage and Frank Drayton?"
+
+"But I haven't got to."
+
+"You might have. You know you might any minute. You know he hates it.
+And supposing--"
+
+But Dorothy refused to give any answer.
+
+His wire came within the next half hour.
+
+"Coming three sharp. FRANK."
+
+Her sense of well-being increased almost to exaltation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He arrived with punctuality at three o'clock. (He was in the gunners and
+had a job at Woolwich.) She found him standing on the hearth-rug in the
+drawing-room. He had blown his nose when he heard her coming, and
+that meant that he was nervous. She caught him stuffing his
+pocket-handkerchief (a piece of damning evidence) into his
+breast-pocket.
+
+With her knowledge of his nervousness her exaltation ceased as if it had
+not been. At the sight of him it was as if the sentence hidden somewhere
+in her mind--"You'll have to choose. You know you'll have to"--escaping
+thought and language, had expressed itself in one suffocating pang.
+Unless Nicky's affair staved off the dreadful moment.
+
+"Were you frightfully busy?"
+
+"No, thank goodness."
+
+The luck she had had! Of course, if he had been busy he couldn't
+possibly have come.
+
+She could look at him now without a tightening in her throat. She liked
+to look at him. He was made all of one piece. She liked his square face
+and short fine hair, both the colour of light-brown earth; his eyes, the
+colour of light brown earth under clear water; eyes that looked small
+because they were set so deep. She liked their sudden narrowing and
+their deep wrinkles when he smiled. She liked his jutting chin, and the
+fine, rather small mouth that jerked his face slightly crooked when he
+laughed. She liked that slender crookedness that made it a face
+remarkable and unique among faces. She liked his brains. She liked all
+that she had ever seen or heard of him.
+
+Vera had told them that once, at an up-country station in India, he had
+stopped a mutiny in a native battery by laughing in the men's faces.
+Somebody that Ferdie knew had been with him and saw it happen. The men
+broke into his office where he was sitting, vulnerably, in his
+shirt-sleeves. They had brought knives with them, beastly native things,
+and they had their hands on the handles, ready. They screamed and
+gesticulated with excitement. And Frank Drayton leaned back in his
+office chair and looked at them, and burst out laughing, because, he
+said, they made such funny faces. When they got to fingering their
+knives, he tilted back his chair and rocked with laughter. His sudden,
+incredible mirth frightened them and stopped the mutiny. She could see
+him, she could see his face jerked crooked with delight.
+
+That was the sort of thing that Nicky would have done. She loved him for
+that. She loved him because he was like Nicky.
+
+She was not able to recall the process of the states that flowered in
+that mysterious sense of well-being and exaltation. A year ago Frank
+Drayton had been only "that nice man we used to meet at Cheltenham."
+First of all he had been Ferdie's and Vera's friend. Then he became
+Nicky's friend; the only one who took a serious interest in his
+inventions and supported him when he wanted to go into the Army and
+consoled him when he was frustrated. Then he had become the friend of
+the family. Now he was recognized as more particularly Dorothea's
+friend.
+
+At Cheltenham he had been home on leave; and it was not until this year
+that he had got his job at Woolwich teaching gunnery, while he waited
+for a bigger job in the Ordnance Department. Ferdie Cameron had always
+said that Frank Drayton would be worth watching. He would be part of the
+brains of the Army some day. Nicky watched him. His brains and their
+familiarity with explosives and the machinery of warfare had been his
+original attraction for Nicky. But it was Dorothea who watched him most.
+
+She plunged abruptly into Nicky's affair, giving names and lineage. "You
+know all sorts of people, do you know anything about her?"
+
+He looked at her clearly, without smiling. Then he said "Yes. I know a
+good bit about her. Is that what's wrong with Nicky?"
+
+"Not exactly. But he's been sent down."
+
+His wry smile intimated that such things might be.
+
+Then she told him what the Master had written and what the Professor had
+written and what Michael had written, and what Nicky had said, and what
+she, Dorothea thought. Drayton smiled over the Master's and the
+Professor's letters, but when it came to Michael's letter he
+laughed aloud.
+
+"It's all very well for _us_. But Daddy and Mummy are breaking their
+hearts. Daddy says he's going down to Cambridge to see what really
+did happen."
+
+Again that clear look. She gathered that he disapproved of "Booster's"
+wife. He disapproved of so many things: of Women's Suffrage; of
+revolutions; of women who revolted; of anybody who revolted; of Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite. It was
+putting it too mildly to say he disapproved of Rosalind Jervis; he
+detested her. He disapproved of Vera and of her going to see Vera; she
+remembered that he had even disapproved, long ago, of poor Ferdie,
+though he liked him. Evidently he disapproved of "Booster's" wife for
+the same reason that he disapproved of Vera. That was why he didn't
+say so.
+
+"I believe you think all the time I'm right," she said. "Would you go
+down if you were he?"
+
+"No. I wouldn't."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because he won't get anything out of them. They can't give her away any
+more than Nicky can. Or than _you_ can, Dorothy."
+
+"You mean I've done it already--to you. I _had_ to, because of Nicky. I
+can't help it if you _do_ think it was beastly of me."
+
+"My dear child--"
+
+He got up vehemently, as if his idea was to take her in his arms and
+stifle her outbreak that way. But something in her eyes, cold, unready,
+yet aware of him, repelled him.
+
+He thought: "It's too soon. She's all rigid. She isn't alive yet.
+That's not what she wired for." He thought: "I wish people wouldn't send
+their children to Newnham. It retards their development by ten years."
+
+And she thought: "No. I mustn't let him do that. For then he won't be
+able to go back on me when I tell him my opinions. It would be simply
+trapping him. Supposing--supposing--"
+
+She did not know that that instinctive renunciation was her answer to
+the question. Her honour would come first.
+
+"Of course. Of course you had to."
+
+"What would you do about it if you were Daddy?"
+
+"I should send them all to blazes."
+
+"No, but _really_ do?"
+
+"I should do nothing. I should leave it. You'll find that before very
+long there'll be letters of apology and restitution."
+
+"Will you come down to the office with me and tell Daddy that?"
+
+"Yes, if you'll come to tea with me somewhere afterwards."
+
+(He really couldn't be expected to do all this for nothing.)
+
+She sent her mother to him while she put on her hat and coat. When she
+came down Frances was happy again.
+
+"You see, Mummy, I was right, after all."
+
+"You always were right, darling, all the time."
+
+For the life of her she couldn't help giving that little flick at her
+infallible daughter.
+
+"She _is_ right--most of the time," said Drayton. His eyes covered and
+protected her.
+
+Anthony was in his office, sitting before the open doors of the cabinet
+where he kept his samples of rare and valuable woods. The polished slabs
+were laid before him on the table in rows, as he had arranged them to
+show to a customer: wine-coloured mahogany, and golden satinwood; ebony
+black as jet; tulip-wood mottled like fine tortoiseshell; coromandel
+wood, striped black and white like the coat of a civet cat; ghostly
+basswood, shining white on dead white; woods of clouded grain, and woods
+of shining grain, grain that showed like the slanting, splintered lines
+of hewn stone, like moss, like the veins of flowers, the fringes of
+birds' feathers, the striping and dappling of beasts; woods of exquisite
+grain where the life of the tree drew its own image in its own heart;
+woods whose surface was tender to the touch like a fine tissue; and
+sweet-smelling sandalwood and camphor-wood and cedar.
+
+Anthony loved his shining, polished slabs of wood. If a man must have a
+business, let it be timber. Timber was a clean and fine and noble thing.
+He had brought the working of his business to such a pitch of smooth
+perfection that his two elder sons, Michael and Nicholas, could catch up
+with it easily and take it in their stride.
+
+Now he was like a sick child that has ranged all its toys in front of it
+and finds no comfort in them.
+
+And, as he looked at them, the tulip-wood and the scented sandalwood and
+camphor-wood gave him an idea.
+
+The Master and the Professor had both advised him to send his son
+Nicholas out of England for a little while. "Let him travel for six
+months and get the whole miserable business out of his head."
+
+Nicky, when he gave up the Army, had told him flatly that he would
+rather die than spend his life sitting in a beastly office. Nicky had
+put it to him that timber meant trees, and trees meant forests; why,
+lots of the stuff they imported came from the Himalaya and the West
+Indies and Ceylon. He had reminded him that he was always saying a
+timber merchant couldn't know enough about the living tree. Why
+shouldn't he go into the places where the living trees grew and learn
+all about them? Why shouldn't he be a tree-expert? Since they were
+specializing in rare and foreign woods, why shouldn't he specialize in
+rare and foreign trees?
+
+And the slabs of tulip-wood and scented camphor-wood and sandalwood were
+saying to Anthony, "Why not?" Neither he nor Frances had wanted Nicky to
+go off to the West Indies and the Himalaya; but now, since clearly he
+must go off somewhere, why not?
+
+Drayton and Dorothy came in just as Anthony (still profoundly
+dejected) was saying to himself, "Reinstate him. Give him
+responsibility--curiosity--healthy interests. Get the whole miserable
+business out of his head."
+
+It seemed incredible, after what they had gone through, that Drayton
+should be standing there, telling him that there was nothing in it, that
+there never had been any miserable business, that it was all a storm in
+a hysterical woman's teacup. He blew the whole dirty nightmare to
+nothing with the laughter that was like Nicky's own laughter.
+
+Then Anthony and Drayton and Dorothy sat round the table, drafting
+letters to the Master and the Professor. Anthony, at Drayton's
+dictation, informed them that he regretted the step they had seen fit to
+take; that he knew his own son well enough to be pretty certain that
+there had been some misunderstanding; therefore, unless he received
+within three days a written withdrawal of the charge against his son
+Nicholas, he would be obliged to remove his son Michael from the
+Master's College.
+
+The idea of removing Michael was Anthony's own inspiration.
+
+Drayton's advice was that he should give Nicky his choice between Oxford
+and Germany, the big School of Forestry at Aschaffenburg. If he chose
+Germany, he would be well grounded; he could specialize and travel
+afterwards.
+
+"Now _that's_ all over," Anthony said, "you two had better come and have
+tea with me somewhere."
+
+But there was something in their faces that made him consult his watch
+and find that "Oh dear me, no! he was afraid he couldn't." He had an
+appointment at five.
+
+When they were well out of sight he locked up his toys in his cabinet,
+left the appointment at five to Mr. Vereker, and went home to tell
+Frances about the letters he had written to Cambridge and the plans that
+had been made for Nicky's future.
+
+"He'll choose Germany," Anthony said. "But that can't be helped."
+
+Frances agreed that they could hardly have hit upon a better plan.
+
+So the affair of Nicky and "Booster's" wife was as if it had never been.
+And for that they thanked the blessed common sense and sanity of
+Captain Drayton.
+
+And yet Anthony's idea was wrecked by "Booster's" wife. It had come too
+late. Anthony had overlooked the fact that his son had seventeen hours'
+start of him. He was unaware of the existence of Nicky's own idea; and
+he had not allowed for the stiff logic of his position.
+
+When he drove down in his car to St. John's Wood to fetch Nicky, he
+found that he had left that afternoon for Chelsea, where, Vera told him,
+he had taken rooms.
+
+She gave him the address. It had no significance for Anthony.
+
+Nicky refused to be fetched back from his rooms in Chelsea. For he had
+not left his father's house in a huff; he had left it in his wisdom, to
+avoid the embarrassment of an incredible position. His position, as he
+pointed out to his father, had not changed. He was as big a blackguard
+to-day as he was yesterday; the only difference was, that to-morrow or
+the next day he would be a self-supporting blackguard.
+
+He wouldn't listen to his father's plan. It was a beautiful plan, but it
+would only mean spending more money on him. He'd be pretty good, he
+thought, at looking after machinery. He was going to try for a job as a
+chauffeur or foreman mechanic. He thought he knew where he could get
+one; but supposing he couldn't get it, if his father cared to take him
+on at the works for a bit he'd come like a shot; but he couldn't stay
+there, because it wouldn't be good enough.
+
+He was absolutely serious, and absolutely firm in the logic of his
+position. For he argued that, if he allowed himself to be taken back as
+though nothing had happened, this, more than anything he could well
+think of, would be giving Peggy away.
+
+He sent his love to his mother and Dorothy, and promised to come out and
+dine with them as soon as he had got his job.
+
+So Anthony drove back without him. But as he drove he smiled. And
+Frances smiled, too, when he told her.
+
+"There he is, the young monkey, and there he'll stay. It's magnificent,
+but of course he's an ass."
+
+"If you can't be an ass at twenty," said Frances, "when can you be?"
+
+They said it was so like Nicky. For all he knew to the contrary his
+career was ruined; but he didn't care. You couldn't make any impression
+on him. They wondered if anybody ever would.
+
+Dorothy wondered too.
+
+"What sort of rooms has he got, Anthony?" said Frances.
+
+"Very nice rooms, at the top of the house, looking over the river."
+
+"Darling Nicky, I shall go and see him. What are you thinking of,
+Dorothy?"
+
+Dorothy was thinking that Nicky's address at Chelsea was the address
+that Desmond had given her yesterday.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with the
+painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and see her.
+She could never bring herself to go to the St. John's Wood house that
+was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen's house than it was Vera's.
+
+The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back on
+Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with their
+liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged that
+frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen's society that
+otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.
+
+Vera understood that her husband's brother and sister-in-law could
+hardly be expected to condone her last aberration. Her attachment to
+Ferdie Cameron had been different. It was inevitable, and in a sense
+forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by Bartie's sheer
+impossibility. Besides, the knowledge of it had dawned on them so
+gradually and through so many stages of extenuating tragedy, that, even
+when it became an open certainty, the benefit of the long doubt
+remained. And there was Veronica. There was still Veronica. Even without
+Veronica Vera would have had to think of something far worse than
+Lawrence Stephen before Frances would have cast her off. Frances felt
+that it was not for her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree
+of Heaven. Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had
+Ferdie, could she have lived without him? For Frances nothing in the
+world had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her
+children; her children first, and Anthony after them. For Vera nothing
+in the world counted but her lover.
+
+"If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!" she would
+say.
+
+Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously, through the
+very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.
+
+Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made up for
+it by an incorruptible adoration of the living. And she had been made
+notorious chiefly through Stephen's celebrity, which was, you might say,
+a pure accident.
+
+Thus Frances made shelter for her friend. Only Vera must be made to
+understand that, though _she_ was accepted Lawrence Stephen was not. He
+was the point at which toleration ceased.
+
+And Vera did understand. She understood that Frances and Anthony
+disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie's and
+Veronica's account than on Bartie's. Even family loyalty could not
+espouse Bartie's cause with any zest. For Bartie showed himself
+implacable. Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her so
+that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had refused.
+His idea was to assert himself by refusals. In that way he could still
+feel that he had power over her and a sort of possession. It was he who
+was scandalous. Even now neither Frances nor Anthony had a word to
+say for him.
+
+So Vera consented to be received surreptitiously, by herself, and
+without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn. It had hurt her; but
+Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so distinguished
+that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either, would ever have
+been received by him without Vera. She came, looking half cynical, half
+pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a little beaten after seventeen
+years of passion and danger, saying that she wasn't going to force Larry
+down their throats if they didn't like him; and she went away sustained
+by her sense of his distinction and _his_ repudiations.
+
+And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances and
+Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn't. Michael and
+Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he knew; and
+he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be seen at the
+parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself distinction. Vera
+had never forgotten and never would forget what Anthony and Frances had
+done for her and Ferdie when they took Veronica. She wanted to make up,
+to pay back, to help their children as they had helped her child; to
+give the best she had, and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't
+possibly have done. Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was
+lamentable. In his family and in the dull round of their acquaintance
+there was not anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael;
+not anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old
+attitude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had promised
+her that he would help Michael.
+
+And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas and
+Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm, well-ordered
+sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral vortex that to her was
+the most redoubtable of all. She hid her fear, because in her wisdom she
+knew that to show fear was not the way to keep her children. She hid her
+strength because she knew that to show it was not the way. Her strength
+was in their love of her. She had only used it once when she had stopped
+Nicky from going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will
+never do that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a
+treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be bargained
+with. She tried to hold the balance even between their youth and
+their maturity.
+
+So Frances fought her fear.
+
+She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in spite of
+everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and she did not know
+that he had sensibilities and prejudices and scruples like her own, and
+that he and Vera distinguished very carefully between the people who
+would be good for Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who
+would not. She did not know that they both drew the line at Desmond.
+
+Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's fault
+that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet each other.
+She did not deny that it was in her house they _had_ met; but she had
+not introduced them. Desmond had introduced herself, on the grounds that
+she knew Dorothy. Vera suspected that, from the first moment when she
+had seen him there--by pure accident--she had marked him down. Very
+likely she had wriggled into Dorothy's Suffrage meeting on purpose. She
+was capable of anything.
+
+Not that Vera thought there was any need for Frances to worry. It was
+most unlikely that Desmond's business with Nicky could be serious. For
+one thing she was too young herself to care for anybody as young as
+Nicky. For another she happened to be in the beginning, or the middle,
+certainly nowhere near the end of a tremendous affair with Headley
+Richards. As she was designing the dresses and the scenery for the new
+play he was putting on at the Independent Theatre, Vera argued very
+plausibly that the affair had only just started, and that Frances must
+allow it a certain time to run.
+
+"I hope to goodness that the Richards man will marry her."
+
+"My dear, how can he? He's married already to a nice little woman that
+he isn't half tired of yet. Desmond was determined to have him and she's
+got him; but he's only taken her in his stride, as you may say. I don't
+suppose he cares very much one way or another. But with Desmond it's a
+point of honour."
+
+"What's a point of honour?"
+
+"Why, to have him. Not to be left out. Besides, she always said she
+could take him from poor little Ginny Richards, and she's done it. That
+was another point of honour."
+
+With a calmness that was horrible to Frances Vera weighed her friend
+Desmond's case. To Frances it was as if she had never known Vera. Either
+Vera had changed or she had never known her. She had never known women,
+or men either, who discussed such performances with calmness. Vera
+herself hadn't made her infidelities a point of honour.
+
+These were the passions and the thoughts of Lawrence Stephen's and of
+Desmond's world; these were the things it took for granted. These people
+lived in a moral vortex; they whirled round and round with each other;
+they were powerless to resist the swirl. Not one of them had any other
+care than to love and to make love after the manner of the Vortex. This
+was their honour, not to be left out of it, not to be left out of the
+vortex, but to be carried away, to be sucked in, and whirl round and
+round with each other and the rest.
+
+The painter girl Desmond was horrible to Frances.
+
+And all the time her mind was busy with one question: "Do you think
+Nicky knows?"
+
+"I'm perfectly sure he doesn't."
+
+"Perhaps--if he did--"
+
+"No, my dear, that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe it.
+You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting into his
+head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And you'll be
+putting it into Desmond's head."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him alone." Those
+painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You couldn't take them
+seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything that Vera Harrison said
+she was. He didn't think, though, that the idea of making love to her
+would enter Nicky's head if they left him alone. Nicky's head had more
+important ideas in it.
+
+So they left him alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of Desmond. Too
+busy with his assistant manager's job at the Morss Motor Works; too busy
+with one of the little ideas to which he owed the sudden rise in his
+position: the little idea of making the Morss cars go faster; too busy
+with his big Idea which had nothing whatever to do with the Morss
+Company and their cars.
+
+His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a French
+engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the _forteresse mobile_, had
+become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality for his idea. It was a
+composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with
+caterpillar wheels and the motor-car. These things had welded themselves
+together gradually in Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge.
+The table in Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was
+now covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made
+them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him,
+and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little
+ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day
+in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless
+spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took
+shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had
+conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image
+of the _forteresse mobile_, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost that
+stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the vision.
+
+But the image of Desmond was there.
+
+At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder when
+Desmond will have finished the drawings."
+
+The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond's caprice.
+
+The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before these
+could be fitted together and the permanent model of the Moving Fortress
+set up. The Moving Fortress itself waited upon Desmond.
+
+For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not draw his
+plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who understood engines to
+draw them. He was haunted, almost insanely, by the fear that somebody
+else would hit upon the idea of the Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so
+obvious that no gunner and no engineer could miss it. And the drawings
+Desmond made for him, the drawings in black and white, the drawings in
+grey wash, and the coloured drawings were perfect. Nicky, unskilled in
+everything but the inventing and building up of engines, did not know
+how perfect the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the
+extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the easels in
+her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he took Desmond
+into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on her.
+
+He didn't care. He liked Desmond. He couldn't help it if Drayton
+disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn't like her. She was, he said to
+himself, a ripping good sort. She might be frightfully clever; Nicky
+rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she never talked
+that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy's other friends talked. She
+let you think.
+
+It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn't like her and that
+Frank Drayton disapproved of her.
+
+"They wouldn't," said Nicky, "if they knew you." And he turned again to
+the subject of his Moving Fortress.
+
+For Desmond's intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was perfect,
+and her way of listening was perfect. She sat on the floor, on the
+orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience, embracing her
+knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms, while Nicky stamped up
+and down her studio and talked to her, like a monomaniac, about his
+Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have
+to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at
+him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she
+liked his young naivete and monomania; she liked his face and all his
+gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.
+
+And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled eyes and in
+her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It
+was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its
+long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven
+with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body
+than to her spirit and her mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early summer,
+when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent him motoring
+about the country on their business, he took Desmond with him and
+Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on the grass borders
+of the high roads and on the edges of the woods and moors, and Desmond
+painted her extraordinary pictures while Nicky lay on his back beside
+her with his face turned up to the sky and dreamed of flying machines.
+
+For he had done with his Moving Fortress. It only waited for Desmond to
+finish the last drawing.
+
+When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank Drayton
+before he sent them to the War Office.
+
+He lived for that moment of completion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of nineteen-eleven
+Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased and flowered and
+ripened to its fulfilment. And in the early summer she found that things
+had happened as she had meant that they should happen.
+
+She had always meant it. She had always said, and she had always thought
+that women were no good unless they had the courage of their opinions;
+the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice that prevented them
+from getting what they wanted.
+
+Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked her in.
+Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought that by simply
+spinning round faster and faster she added her own energy to the whirl.
+It was not Dorothy's vortex, or the vortex of the fighting Suffrage
+woman. Desmond didn't care very much about the Suffrage; or about any
+kind of freedom but her own kind; or about anybody's freedom but her
+own. Maud Blackadder's idea of freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and
+physical insanity. Yet each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and
+Mrs. Blathwaite and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own
+particular swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century. If you had
+youth and life in you, you were in revolt.
+
+Desmond's theories were Dorothy's theories too; only that while Dorothy,
+as Rosalind had said, thought out her theories in her brain without
+feeling them, Desmond felt them with her whole being; and with her whole
+being, secret, subtle and absolutely relentless, she was bent on
+carrying them out.
+
+And in the summer, in the new season, Headley Richards decided that he
+had no further use for Desmond. The new play had run its course at the
+Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards had been
+disappointed. He put down the failure mainly to the queerness of the
+dresses and the scenery she had designed for him. Desmond's new art was
+too new; people weren't ready yet for that sort of thing. At the same
+time he discovered that he was really very much attached to his own wife
+Ginny, and when Ginny nobly offered to give him his divorce he had
+replied nobly that he didn't want one. And he left Desmond to face
+the music.
+
+Desmond's misery was acute; but it was not so hopeless as it would have
+been if she could have credited Ginny Richards with any permanent power
+of attraction for Headley. She knew he would come back to her. She knew
+the power of her own body. She held him by the tie that was never broken
+so long as it endured. He would never marry her; yet he would come back.
+
+But in the interval between these acts there was the music.
+
+And the first sound of the music, the changed intonations of her
+landlady, frightened Desmond; for though she was older than Nicky she
+was very young. And there were Desmond's people. You may forget that you
+have people and behave as if they weren't there; but, if they are there,
+sooner or later they will let you know it. An immense volume of sound
+and some terrifying orchestral effects were contributed by Desmond's
+people. So that the music was really very bad to bear.
+
+Desmond couldn't bear it. And in her fright she thought of Nicky.
+
+She knew that she hadn't a chance so long as he was absorbed in the
+Moving Fortress. But the model was finished and set up and she was at
+work on the last drawing. And no more ideas for engines were coming into
+Nicky's head. The Morss Company and Nicky himself were even beginning to
+wonder whether there ever would be any more.
+
+Then Nicky thought of Desmond. And he showed that he was thinking of her
+by sitting still and not talking when he was with her. She did not fill
+that emptiness and spaciousness of Nicky's head, but he couldn't get her
+out of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Vera noticed the silence of the two she became uneasy, and judged
+that the time had come for discreet intervention.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "is it true that Desmond's been doing drawings for
+you?"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky, "she's done any amount."
+
+"My dear boy, have you any idea of the amount you'll have to pay her?"
+
+"I haven't," said Nicky, "I wish I had. I hate asking her, and yet I
+suppose I'll have to."
+
+"Of course you'll have to. _She_ won't hate it. She's got to earn her
+living as much as you have."
+
+"Has she? You don't mean to say she's hard up?"
+
+He had never thought of Desmond as earning her own living, still less as
+being hard up.
+
+"I only wish she were," said Vera, "for your sake."
+
+"Why on earth for my sake?"
+
+"Because _then_, my dear Nicky, you wouldn't have to pay so stiff a
+price."
+
+"I don't care," said Nicky, "how stiff the price is. I shall pay it."
+
+And Vera replied that Desmond, in her own queer way, really was a rather
+distinguished painter. "Pay her," she said. "Pay her for goodness sake
+and have done with it. And if she wants to give you things don't
+let her."
+
+"As if," said Nicky, "I should dream of letting her."
+
+And he went off to Chelsea to pay Desmond then and there.
+
+Vera thought that she had been rather clever. Nicky would dash in and do
+the thing badly. He would be very proud about it, and he would revolt
+from his dependence on Desmond, and he would show her--Vera hoped that
+he would show her--that he did not want to be under any obligation to
+her. And Desmond would be hurt and lose her temper. The hard look would
+get into her face and destroy its beauty, and she would say detestable
+things in a detestable voice, and a dreadful ugliness would come between
+them, and the impulse of Nicky's yet unborn passion would be checked,
+and the memory of that abominable half-hour would divide them for ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Vera herself had grown hard and clever. She had forgotten Nicky's
+tenderness, and she knew nothing at all about Desmond's fright. And, as
+it happened, neither Nicky nor Desmond did any of the things she thought
+they would do.
+
+Nicky was not impetuous. He found Desmond in her studio working on the
+last drawing of the Moving Fortress, with the finished model before her.
+That gave him his opening, and he approached shyly and tentatively.
+
+Desmond put on an air of complete absorption in her drawing; but she
+smiled. A pretty smile that lifted the corners of her mouth and made it
+quiver, and gave Nicky a queer and unexpected desire to kiss her.
+
+He went on wanting to know what his debt was--not that he could ever
+really pay it.
+
+"Oh, you foolish Nicky," Desmond said.
+
+He repeated himself over and over again, and each time she had an
+answer, and the answers had a cumulative effect.
+
+"There isn't any debt. You don't pay anything--"
+
+"I didn't do it for _that_, you silly boy."
+
+"What did I do it for? I did it for fun. You couldn't draw a thing like
+that for anything else. Look at it--"
+
+--"Well, if you want to be horrid and calculating about it, think of the
+lunches and the dinners and the theatre tickets and the flowers you've
+given _me_. Oh, and the gallons and gallons of petrol. How am I ever to
+pay you back again?"
+
+Thus she mocked him.
+
+"Can't you see how you're spoiling it all?"
+
+And then, passionately: "Oh, Nicky, please don't say it again. It
+hurts."
+
+She turned on him her big black looking-glass eyes washed bright, each
+with one tear that knew better than to fall just yet. He must see that
+she was holding herself well in hand. It would be no use letting herself
+go until he had forgotten his Moving Fortress. He was looking at the
+beastly thing now, instead of looking at her.
+
+"Are you thinking of another old engine?"
+
+"No," said Nicky. "I'm not thinking of anything."
+
+"Then you don't want me to do any more drawings?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well then--I wonder whether you'd very much mind going away?"
+
+"Now?"
+
+"No. Not now. But soon. From here. Altogether."
+
+"Go? Altogether? Me? Why?"
+
+He was utterly astonished. He thought that he had offended Desmond past
+all forgiveness.
+
+"Because I came here to be alone. To work. And I can't work. And I want
+to be alone again."
+
+"Am I--spoiling it?"
+
+"Yes. You're spoiling it damnably."
+
+"I'm sorry, Desmond. I didn't mean to. I thought--" But he hadn't the
+heart to say what he had thought.
+
+She looked at him and knew that the moment was coming.
+
+It had come.
+
+She turned away from the table where the Moving Fortress stood,
+threatening her with its mimic guns, and reminding Nicky of the things
+she most wanted him to forget. She withdrew to her crouching place at
+the other end of the studio, among the cushions.
+
+He followed her there with slow, thoughtful steps, steps full of
+brooding purpose and of half-unconscious meaning.
+
+"Nicky, I'm so unhappy. I didn't know it was possible for anybody to be
+so unhappy in this world."
+
+She began to cry quietly.
+
+"Desmond--what is it? What is it? Tell me. Why can't you tell me?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She thought, "It will be all right if he kisses me once. If he holds me
+in his arms once. Then I can tell him."
+
+For then he would know that he loved her. He was not quite sure now. She
+knew that he was not quite sure. She trusted to the power of her body to
+make him sure.
+
+Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor pitied
+it.
+
+He had kissed her. He had held her in his arms and kissed her more than
+once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow of his arm.
+She was weak and small. She was like some small, soft, helpless animal
+and she was hurt. Her sobbing and panting made her ribs feel fragile
+like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless animal under the pressure of
+his arms. And she was frightened.
+
+He couldn't stand the sight of suffering. He had never yet resisted the
+appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and pain. He could feel
+Desmond's heart going thump, thump, under the blue thing he called her
+pinafore. Her heart hurt him with its thumping.
+
+And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was smooth and
+sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf. And Desmond knew that he knew it.
+His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over the long, polished
+bands of her black hair; and he thought that he loved her. Desmond knew
+that he thought it.
+
+And still she waited. She said to herself, "It's no good his thinking
+it. I daren't tell him till he says it. Till he asks me to marry him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had said it at last. And he had asked her to marry him. And then she
+had told him.
+
+And all that he said was, "I don't care." He said it to Desmond, and he
+said it to himself.
+
+The funny thing was that he did not care. He was as miserable as it was
+well possible to be, but he didn't really care. He was not even
+surprised. It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in the back
+of his head behind all the ideas.
+
+And yet he couldn't have known it all the time. Either it must have gone
+away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not to see it.
+
+She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her mouth
+and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief, controlling herself,
+crying quietly.
+
+She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn't love her. If
+he had loved her he would have cared intolerably. He didn't care about
+Headley Richards because he didn't care about Desmond any more. He was
+only puzzled.
+
+"Why did you do it?"
+
+"I can't think why. I must have been off my head. I didn't know what it
+was like. I didn't know. I thought it would be wonderful and beautiful.
+I thought he was wonderful and beautiful."
+
+"Poor little Desmond."
+
+"Oh, Nicky, do you think me a beast? Does it make you hate me?"
+
+"No. Of course it doesn't. The only awful thing is--"
+
+"What? Tell me."
+
+"Well--you see--"
+
+"You mean the baby? I know it's awful. You needn't tell me that, Nicky."
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"I mean it's so awful for _it_."
+
+She thought he had been thinking of himself and her.
+
+"Why should it be?"
+
+"Why? There isn't any why. It just is. I _know_ it is."
+
+He was thinking of Veronica.
+
+"You see," he said simply, "that's why this sort of thing is such a
+rotten game. It's so hard on the kiddy. I suppose you didn't think of
+that. You couldn't have, or else you wouldn't--"
+
+He paused. There was one thing he had to know. He must get it out of
+her.
+
+"It hasn't made you feel that you don't want it?"
+
+"Oh--I don't know what I want--_now_. I don't know what it makes me
+feel!"
+
+"Don't let it, Desmond. Don't let it. It'll be all right. You won't feel
+like that when you've married me. Can't you see that _that's_ the
+wonderful and beautiful part?"
+
+"_What_ is?" she said in her tired drawl.
+
+"_It_--the poor kiddy."
+
+Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Veronica's mother was the first to hear about it. Desmond told her.
+
+Veronica's mother was determined to stop it for the sake of everybody
+concerned.
+
+She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her one
+evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else. (Lawrence
+Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where Vera was not
+received; but sometimes, when the occasion was political, or otherwise
+important, he had to. That was her punishment, as Bartholomew had meant
+that it should be.)
+
+Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt's assaults and
+manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.
+
+"You mustn't do it; you simply mustn't."
+
+He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.
+
+"It isn't. It's the affair of everybody who cares for you."
+
+"Their caring isn't my affair," said Nicky.
+
+And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.
+
+"It's absurd of you," she said, "to treat her as if she was an innocent
+child. She isn't a child, and she isn't innocent. She knew perfectly
+well what she was about. There's nothing she doesn't know. She meant it
+to happen, and she made it happen. She said she would. She meant you to
+marry her, and she's making you marry her. I daresay she said she would.
+She's as clever and determined as the devil. Neither you nor Headley
+Richards ever had a chance against her."
+
+"She hasn't got a dog's chance against all you people yelping at her now
+she's down. I should have thought--"
+
+"You mean _I_'ve no business to? That was different. I didn't take any
+other woman's husband, or any other woman's lover, Nicky."
+
+"If you had," said Nicky, "I wouldn't have interfered."
+
+"I wouldn't interfere if I thought you cared _that_ for Desmond. But you
+don't. You know you don't."
+
+"Of course I care for her."
+
+He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew that he
+was vulnerable.
+
+"Oh, Nicky dear, if you'd only waited--"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched. "I don't
+know what I mean. Unless I mean that you're just a little young to
+marry anybody."
+
+"I don't care if I am. I don't _feel_ young, I can tell you. Anyhow
+Desmond's years younger."
+
+"Desmond is twenty-three. You're twenty. It's Veronica who's years
+younger."
+
+"Veronica?"
+
+"She's sixteen. You don't imagine Desmond is as young as that, do you?
+Wait till she's twenty-five and you're twenty-two."
+
+"It wouldn't do poor Desmond much good if I did. I could kill Headley
+Richards."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"For leaving her."
+
+Vera smiled. "That shows how much you care. You wouldn't have felt like
+killing him if he'd stuck to her. Why should you marry Headley Richards'
+mistress and take on his child? It's preposterous."
+
+"It isn't. If the other fellow's a brute it's all the more reason why I
+shouldn't be. I want to be some use in this rotten world where people
+are so damnably cruel to each other. And there's that unhappy kiddy.
+You've forgotten the kiddy."
+
+"Do you mean to say it's Desmond's child _you_'re thinking of?"
+
+"I can't understand any woman not thinking of it," said Nicky.
+
+He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.
+
+Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.
+
+"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for your own
+children?"
+
+It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why don't
+you marry _her_?"
+
+"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.
+
+Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry
+Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards. "Nothing I said
+made the least impression on him."
+
+That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true.
+But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to
+it that Desmond's affair would have made no impression on him if it had
+not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor's wife. And it
+would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made
+love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry
+Phyllis Desmond.
+
+These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of
+Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.
+
+Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not been
+removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of apology and
+restitution came. But both apology and restitution came too late.
+
+For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.
+
+Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their house,
+one on each side of the fireplace. They had it all to themselves, except
+for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on the hearthrug at their
+feet. Frances's forehead and her upper lip were marked delicately with
+shallow, tender lines; Anthony's eyes had crow's-feet at their corners,
+pointing to grey hairs at his temples. To each other their faces were as
+they had been fifteen years ago. The flight of time was measured for
+them by the generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry.
+For still in secret they refused to think of their children as grown-up.
+
+Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the Women's
+Franchise Union. They owed it to her magnanimity that they had one child
+remaining with them in the house. John was at Cheltenham; Veronica was
+in Dresden. Michael was in Germany, too, at that School of Forestry at
+Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant for Nicky. They couldn't bear to
+think where Nicky was.
+
+When Frances thought about her children now her mind went backwards. If
+only they hadn't grown-up; if only they could have stayed little for
+ever! In another four years even Don-Don would be grown-up--Don-Don who
+was such a long time getting older that at fourteen, only two years
+ago, he had been capable of sitting in her lap, a great long-legged,
+flumbering puppy, while mother and son rocked dangerously together in
+each other's arms, like two children, laughing together, mocking
+each other.
+
+She was going to be wiser with Don-Don than she had been with Nicky. She
+would be wiser with Michael when he came back from Germany. She would
+keep them both out of the Vortex, the horrible Vortex that Lawrence
+Stephen and Vera had let Nicky in for, the Vortex that seized on youth
+and forced it into a corrupt maturity. After Desmond's affair Anthony
+and Frances felt that to them the social circle inhabited by Vera and
+Lawrence Stephen would never be anything but a dirty hell.
+
+As for Veronica, the longer she stayed in Germany the better.
+
+Yet Frances knew that they had not sent Veronica to Dresden to prevent
+her mother from getting hold of her. When she remembered the fear she
+had had of the apple-tree house, she said to herself that Desmond was a
+judgment on her for sending little Veronica away.
+
+And yet it was the kindest thing they could have done for her. Veronica
+was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and studying music and
+the language. She had no idea that music and the language were mere
+blinds, and that she had been sent to the German family to keep her out
+of Nicky's way.
+
+They would have them all back again at Christmas. Frances counted the
+days. From to-night, the seventh of June, to December the twentieth was
+not much more than six months.
+
+To-night, the seventh of June, was Nicky's wedding-night. But they did
+not know that. Nicky had kept the knowledge from them, in his mercy, to
+save them the agony of deciding whether they would recognize the
+marriage or not. And as neither Frances nor Anthony had ever faced
+squarely the prospect of disaster to their children, they had turned
+their backs on Nicky's marriage and supported each other in the hope
+that at the last minute something would happen to prevent it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ten o'clock post, and two letters from Germany. Not from Michael,
+not from Veronica. One from Frau Schaefer, the mother of the German
+family. It was all in German, and neither Anthony nor Frances could make
+out more than a word here and there. "Das suesse, liebe Maedchen" meant
+Veronica. But certain phrases: "traurige Nachrichten" ... "furchtbare
+Schwaechheit" ... "... eine entsetzliche Blutleere ..." terrified them,
+and they sent for Dorothy to translate.
+
+Dorothy was a good German scholar, but somehow she was not very fluent.
+She scowled over the letter.
+
+"What does it mean?" said Frances. "Haemorhage?"
+
+"No. No. Anaemia. Severe anaemia. Heart and stomach trouble."
+
+"But 'traurige Nachrichten' is 'bad news.' They're breaking it to us
+that she's dying."
+
+(It was unbearable to think of Nicky marrying Ronny; but it was more
+unbearable to think of Ronny dying.)
+
+"They don't say they're sending _us_ bad news; they say they think
+Ronny must have had some. To account for her illness. Because they say
+she's been so happy with them."
+
+"But what bad news could she have had?"
+
+"Perhaps she knows about Nicky."
+
+"But nobody's told her, unless Vera has."
+
+"She hasn't. I know she hasn't. She didn't want her to know."
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+"Mummy, you don't _have_ to tell Ronny things. She always knows them."
+
+"How on earth could she know a thing like that?"
+
+"She might. She sort of sees things--like Ferdie. She may have seen him
+with Desmond. You can't tell."
+
+"Do they say what the doctor thinks?"
+
+"Yes. He thinks it's worry and Heimweh--homesickness. They want us to
+send for her and take her back. Not let her have another term."
+
+Though Frances loved Veronica she was afraid of her coming back. For she
+was more than ever convinced that something would happen and that Nicky
+would not marry Desmond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The other letter was even more difficult to translate or to understand
+when translated.
+
+The authorities at Aschaffenburg requested Herr Harrison to remove his
+son Michael from the School of Forestry. Michael after his first few
+weeks had done no good at the school. In view of the expense to Herr
+Harrison involved in his fees and maintenance, they could not honestly
+advise his entering upon another term. It would only be a deplorable
+throwing away of money on a useless scheme. His son Michael had no
+thoroughness, no practical ability, and no grasp whatever of theoretic
+detail. From Herr Harrison's point of view this was the more regrettable
+inasmuch as the young man had colossal decision and persistence and
+energy of his own. He was an indefatigable dreamer. Very likely--when
+his dreams had crystallized--a poet. But the idea Herr Harrison had had
+that his son Michael would make a man of business, or an expert in
+Forestry, was altogether fantastic and absurd. And from the desperate
+involutions of the final sentence Dorothy disentangled the clear fact
+that Michael's personal charm, combined with his hostility to
+discipline, his complete indifference to the aims of the authorities,
+and his utter lack of any sense of responsibility, made him a dangerous
+influence in any school.
+
+That was the end of Anthony's plans for Michael.
+
+The next morning Nicky wired from some village in Sussex: "Married
+yesterday.--NICKY."
+
+After that nothing seemed to matter. With Nicky gone from them they were
+glad to have Michael back again. Frances said they might be thankful for
+one thing--that there wasn't any German Peggy or any German Desmond in
+Michael's problem.
+
+And since both Michael and Veronica were to be removed at once, the
+simplest arrangement was that he should return to Dresden and bring her
+back with him.
+
+Frances had never been afraid for Michael.
+
+Michael knew that he had made havoc of his father's plans. He couldn't
+help that. His affair was far too desperate. And any other man but his
+father would have foreseen that the havoc was inevitable and would have
+made no plans. He knew he had been turned into the tree-travelling
+scheme that had been meant for Nicky, because, though Nicky had slipped
+out of it, his father simply couldn't bear to give up his idea. And no
+wonder, when the dear old thing had so few of them.
+
+He had been honest with his father about it; every bit as honest as
+Nicky had been. He had wanted to travel if he could go to China and
+Japan, just as Nicky had wanted to travel if he could go to places like
+the West Indies and the Himalaya. And he didn't mind trying to get the
+trees in when he was there. He was even prepared to accept Germany and
+the School for Forestry if Germany was the only way to China and Japan.
+But he had told his father not to mind if nothing came of it at the end
+of all the travelling. And his father had said he would take the risk.
+He preferred taking the risk to giving up his idea.
+
+And Michael had been honest with himself. He had told himself that he
+too must take some risks, and the chances were that a year or two in
+Germany wouldn't really hurt him. Things never did hurt you as much as
+you thought they would. He had thought that Cambridge would do all sorts
+of things to him, and Cambridge had not done anything to him at all. As
+for Oxford, it had given him nearly all the solitude and liberty he
+wanted, and more companionship than he was ever likely to want. At
+twenty-two Michael was no longer afraid of dying before he had finished
+his best work. In spite of both Universities he had done more or less
+what he had meant to do before he went to Germany. His work had not yet
+stood the test of time, but to make up for that he himself, in his
+uneasy passion for perfection, like Time, destroyed almost as much as he
+created. Still, after some pitiless eliminations, enough of his verse
+remained for one fine, thin book.
+
+It would be published if Lawrence Stephen approved of the selection.
+
+So, Michael argued, even if he died to-morrow there was no reason why he
+should not go to Germany to-day.
+
+He was too young to know that he acquiesced so calmly because his soul
+was for a moment appeased by accomplishment.
+
+He was too young to know that his soul had a delicate, profound and
+hidden life of its own, and that in secret it approached the crisis of
+transition. It was passing over from youth to maturity, like a
+sleep-walker, unconscious, enchanted, seeing its way without seeing it,
+safe only from the dangers of the passage if nobody touched it, and if
+it went alone.
+
+Michael had no idea of what Germany could and would do to his soul.
+
+Otherwise he might have listened to what Paris had to say by way of
+warning.
+
+For his father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to Germany,
+as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's point of view)
+was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old Pater be expected to
+know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no sort of way even to South
+Germany? He should have gone to Brussels, if he was ever, spiritually
+speaking, to get there at all.
+
+And neither Anthony nor Frances knew that Lawrence Stephen had plans for
+Michael.
+
+Michael went to Paris with his unpublished poems in his pocket and a
+letter of introduction from Stephen to Jules Reveillaud. He left it with
+revolution in his soul and the published poems of Reveillaud and his
+followers in his suit-case, straining and distending it so that it burst
+open of its own accord at the frontier.
+
+Lawrence Stephen had said to him: "Before you write another line read
+Reveillaud and show him what you've written."
+
+Jules Reveillaud was ten years older than Michael, and he recognized the
+symptoms of the crisis. He could see what was happening and what had
+happened and would happen in Michael's soul. He said: "One third of each
+of your poems is good. And there are a few--the three last--which are
+all good."
+
+"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."
+
+"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is why they
+are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do not publish
+these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more experiments. And
+whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School of Forestry would be
+very bad for you. Why not," said Reveillaud, "stay where you are?"
+
+Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris with
+Jules Reveillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because his conscience
+kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a blackguard if he
+stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.
+
+In the train, going into Germany, he read Reveillaud's "Poemes" and the
+"Poemes" of the young men who followed him. He had read in Paris
+Reveillaud's "Critique de la Poesie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he
+read his poems, he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with
+"la poesie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had supposed,
+alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms, doing new
+things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other people, in a
+world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen, understood or cared for
+what he did, it was pure illusion. These young Frenchmen, with Jules
+Reveillaud at their head, were doing the same thing, making the same
+experiment, believing in the experiment, caring for nothing but the
+experiment, and carrying it farther than he had dreamed of carrying it.
+They were not so far ahead of him in time; Reveillaud himself had only
+two years' start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that
+he must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of rottenness,
+"la poesie anglaise contemporaine."
+
+He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse" before he
+left England, after he had said he would go to Germany, even after the
+final arrangements had been made. His father had given him a month to
+"turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had turned completely round.
+
+He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what to
+think of them himself. But he could see, when once Reveillaud had
+pointed it out to him, that they were the stuff that counted.
+
+In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things that
+Reveillaud had said: "Nous avons trempe la poesie dans la peinture et la
+musique. Il faut la delivrer par la sculpture. Chaque ligne, chaque
+vers, chaque poeme taille en bloc, sans couleur, sans decor, sans
+rime."... "La sainte pauvresse du style depouille."... "Il faut de la
+durete, toujours de la durete."
+
+He thought of Reveillaud's criticism, and his sudden startled spurt of
+admiration: "Mais! Vous l'avez trouvee, la beaute de la ligne droite."
+
+And Reveillaud's question: "Vraiment? Vous n'avez jamais lu un seul vers
+de mes poemes? Alors, c'est etonnant." And then: "C'est que la realite
+est plus forte que nous."
+
+The revolting irony of it! After stumbling and fumbling for years by
+himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard Reality; trying
+not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary rottenness; and,
+suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had got it, so that, but for
+Reveillaud, he might easily have died in his ignorance; and then, in the
+incredible moment of realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on
+Paris, where he wanted to live, and on Reveillaud whom he wanted to
+know, and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off
+to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.
+
+He wondered if he could have done it if he had not loved his father? He
+wondered if his father would ever understand that it was the hardest
+thing he had ever yet done or could do?
+
+But the trees would be beautiful. He would rather like seeing the trees.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether he would ever care about a tree again.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether he would ever see a tree again, ever smell tree-sap,
+or hear the wind sounding in the ash-trees like a river and in the firs
+like a sea.
+
+Trees--
+
+He wondered whether any tree would ever come to life for him again.
+
+He looked on at the tree-felling. He saw slaughtered trees, trees that
+tottered, trees that staggered in each other's branches. He heard the
+scream and the shriek of wounded boughs, the creaking and crashing of
+the trunk, and the long hiss of branches falling, trailing through
+branches to the ground. He smelt the raw juice of broken leaves and the
+sharp tree dust in the saw pits. The trees died horrible deaths, in the
+forests under the axes of the woodmen, and in the schools under the
+tongues of the Professors, and in Michael's soul. The German Government
+was determined that he should know all about trees. Its officials, the
+Professors and instructors, were sorry if he didn't like it, but they
+were ordered by their Government and paid by their Government to impart
+this information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to
+his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they imparted it
+with all their might.
+
+Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg. Instead of despising
+him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a tree expert, they
+admired and respected him because he was a poet. The family he lived
+with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his fellow-boarders, Carl and
+Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel, and Hedwig and Loettchen admired
+and respected him because he was a poet. When he walked with Ludwig in
+the great forests Michael chanted his poems, both in English and in
+German, till Ludwig's soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow,
+so that Ludwig actually shed tears in the forest. He said that if he had
+not done so he would have burst. Ludwig's emotions had nothing whatever
+to do with the forest or with Michael's poems, but he thought they had.
+
+Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was to show
+an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished his
+incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some superofficial
+wrote a letter to his father that gave him his liberty.
+
+The Henschels were sorry when he left. The students, Otto and Carl and
+Ludwig, implored him not to forget them. Hedwig and Loettchen cried.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by Dresden
+to bring Veronica back. He wanted to be alone on the journey. He wanted
+to stop in Paris and see Jules Reveillaud. He was afraid that Ronny had
+grown into a tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.
+
+And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had grown up.
+Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker plait tied up with
+broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not yet seventeen.
+
+Ronny was tired. She did not want to talk. When he had tucked her up
+with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat still with her
+hands in her muff.
+
+"I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael," she said.
+
+She knew what he had been thinking. Her clear eyes gazed at him out of
+her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual maturity.
+
+"What can have happened to her?" he wondered.
+
+But she did not disturb his thoughts.
+
+Up till then Michael's thoughts had not done him any good. They had been
+bitter thoughts of the months he had been compelled to waste in Bavaria
+when every minute had an incomparable value; worrying, irritating
+thoughts of the scenes he would have to have with his father, who must
+be made to understand, once for all, that in future he meant to have
+every minute of his own life for his own work. He wondered how on earth
+he was to make his people see that his work justified his giving every
+minute to it. He had asked Reveillaud to give him a letter that he could
+show to his father. He was angry with his father beforehand, he was so
+certain that he wouldn't see.
+
+He had other thoughts now. Thoughts of an almond tree flowering in a
+white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting a thin
+shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the sting of
+white dust in an east wind; a drift of white dust against the wall.
+
+Thoughts of pine-trees falling in the forest, glad to fall. He thought:
+The pine forest makes itself a sea for the land wind, and the young pine
+tree is mad for the open sea. She gives her slender trunk with passion
+to the ax; for she thinks that she will be stripped naked, and that she
+will be planted in the ship's hold, and that she will carry the great
+main-sail. She thinks that she will rock and strain in the grip of the
+sea-wind, and that she will be whitened with the salt and the foam
+of the sea.
+
+She does not know that she will be sawn into planks and made into a
+coffin for the wife of the sexton and grave-digger of Aschaffenburg.
+
+Thoughts of Veronica in her incredible maturity, and of her eyes,
+shining in her dead white face, far back through deep crystal, and of
+the sense he got of her soul poised, steady and still, with wings
+vibrating.
+
+He wondered where it would come down.
+
+He thought: "Of course, Veronica's soul will come down like a wild
+pigeon into the ash-tree in our garden, and she will think that our
+ash-tree is a tree of Heaven."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently he roused himself to talk to her.
+
+"How is your singing getting on, Ronny?"
+
+"My singing voice has gone."
+
+"It'll come back again."
+
+"Not unless-"
+
+But he couldn't make her tell him what would bring it back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Michael came to his father and mother to have it out with them his
+face had a hard, stubborn look. He was ready to fight them. He was so
+certain that he would have to fight. He had shown them Jules
+Reveillaud's letter.
+
+He said, "Look here, we've got to get it straight. It isn't any use
+going on like this. I'm afraid I wasn't very honest about Germany."
+
+"Weren't you?" said Anthony. "Let me see, I think you said you'd take it
+on your way to China and Japan."
+
+"Did I? I tried to be straight about it. I thought I was giving it a
+fair chance. But that was before I'd seen Reveillaud."
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "now that you have seen him, what is it exactly
+that you want to do?"
+
+Michael told him.
+
+"You can make it easy for me. Or you can make it hard. But you can't
+stop me."
+
+"What makes you think I want to stop you?"
+
+"Well--you want me to go into the business, though I told you years ago
+there was only one thing I should ever be any good at. And I see your
+point. I can't earn my living at it. That's where I'm had. Still, I
+think Lawrence Stephen will give me work, and I can rub along somehow."
+
+"Without my help, you mean?"
+
+"Well, yes. Why _should_ you help me? You've wasted tons of money on me
+as it is. Nicky's earning his own living, and he's got a wife, too.
+Why not me?"
+
+"Because you can't do it, Michael."
+
+"I can. I don't mind roughing it. I could live on a hundred a year--or
+less, if I don't marry."
+
+"Well, I don't mean you to try. You needn't bother about what you can
+live on and what you can't live on. It was all settled last night. Your
+mother and I talked it over. We don't want you to go into the business.
+We don't want you to take work from Mr. Stephen. We want you to be
+absolutely free to do your own work, under the best possible conditions,
+whether it pays or not. Nothing in the world matters to us but your
+happiness. You're to have a hundred and fifty a year when you're living
+at home and two hundred and fifty when you're living abroad. I suppose
+you'll want to go abroad sometimes. I can't give you a bigger allowance,
+because I have to help Nicky--"
+
+Michael covered his face with his hands.
+
+"Oh--don't, Daddy. You do make me feel a rotten beast."
+
+"We should feel rottener beasts," said Frances, "if we stood in your
+way."
+
+"Then," said Michael (he was still incredulous), "you do care?"
+
+"Of course we care," said Anthony.
+
+"I don't mean for me--for _it_?"
+
+"My dear Mick," said Frances, "we care for It almost as much as we care
+for you. We're sorry about Germany though. Germany was one of your
+father's bad jokes."
+
+"Germany--a joke?"
+
+"Did you take it seriously? Oh, you silly Michael!"
+
+"But," said Michael, "how about Daddy's idea? He loved it."
+
+"I loved it," said Anthony, "but I've given it up."
+
+They knew that this was defeat, for Michael was top-dog. And it was also
+victory.
+
+They had lost Nicholas, or thought they had lost Nicholas, by opposing
+him. But Michael and Michael's affection they would have always.
+
+Besides, Anthony hadn't given up his idea. He had only transferred
+it--to his youngest son, John.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+It was five weeks since Nicholas's wedding-day and Desmond had
+quarrelled with him three times.
+
+First, because he had taken a flat in Aubrey Walk, with a studio inside
+it, instead of a house in Campden Hill Square with a studio outside it
+in the garden.
+
+Then, because he had refused to go into his father's business.
+
+Last of all, because of Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress.
+
+Nicky had said that his father, who was paying his rent, couldn't afford
+the house with the studio in the garden; and Desmond said Nicky's father
+could afford it perfectly well if he liked. He said he had refused to go
+into his father's business for reasons which didn't concern her. Desmond
+pointed out that the consequences of his refusal were likely to concern
+her very much indeed. As for Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress,
+nobody but a supreme idiot would have done what Nicky did.
+
+But Nicky absolutely refused to discuss what he had done. Nobody but a
+cad and a rotter would have done anything else.
+
+In the matter of the Moving Fortress what had happened was this.
+
+The last of the drawings was not finished until Desmond had settled down
+in the flat in Aubrey Walk. You couldn't hurry Desmond. Nicky hadn't
+even waited to sign his name in the margins before he had packed the
+plans in his dispatch box and taken them to the works, and thence,
+hidden under a pile of Morss estimates, to Eltham. He couldn't rest till
+he had shown them to Frank Drayton. He could hardly wait till they had
+dined, and till Drayton, who thought he was on the track of a new and
+horrible explosive, had told him as much as he could about it.
+
+Nicky gave his whole mind to Drayton's new explosive in the hope that,
+when his turn came, Drayton would do as much for him.
+
+"You know," he said at last, "the old idea of the _forteresse mobile_?
+
+"Yes."
+
+He couldn't tell whether Drayton was going to be interested or not. He
+rather thought he wasn't.
+
+"It hasn't come to anything, _has_ it?"
+
+Drayton smiled and his eyes glittered. He knew what that excited gleam
+in Drayton's eyes meant.
+
+"No," he said. "Not yet."
+
+And Nicky had an awful premonition of his doom.
+
+"Well," he said, "I believe there's something in it."
+
+"So do I, Nicky."
+
+Drayton went on. "I believe there's so much in it that--Look here, I
+don't know what put it into your head, and I'm not asking, but that
+idea's a dead secret. For God's sake don't talk about it. You mustn't
+breathe it, or it'll get into the air. And if it does my five years'
+work goes for nothing. Besides we don't want Germany to collar it."
+
+And then: "Don't look so scared, old chap. I was going to tell you
+about it when I'd got the plans drawn."
+
+He told him about it then and there.
+
+"Low on the ground like a racing-car--"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky.
+
+"Revolving turret for the guns--no higher than _that_--"
+
+"Yes," said Nicky.
+
+"Sort of armoured train. Only it mustn't run on rails. It's got to go
+everywhere, through anything, over anything, if it goes at all. It must
+turn in its own length. It must wade and burrow and climb, Nicky. It
+must have caterpillar wheels--"
+
+"By Jove, of course it must," said Nicky, as if the idea had struck him
+for the first time.
+
+"What have you got there?" said Drayton finally as Nicky rose and picked
+up his dispatch-box. "Anything interesting?
+
+"No," said Nicky. "Mostly estimates."
+
+For a long time afterwards he loathed the fields between Eltham and
+Kidbrooke, and the Mid-Kent line, and Charing Cross Station. He felt as
+a man feels when the woman he loves goes from him to another man. His
+idea had gone from him to Drayton.
+
+And that, he said to himself, was just like his luck, just like the
+jolly sells that happened to him when he was a kid.
+
+To be sure, there was such a thing as sharing. He had only to produce
+his plans and his finished model, and he and Drayton would go partners
+in the Moving Fortress. There was no reason why he shouldn't do it.
+Drayton had not even drawn his plans yet; he hadn't thought out the
+mechanical details.
+
+He thought, "I could go back now and tell him."
+
+But he did not go back. He knew that he would never tell him. If Drayton
+asked him to help him with the details he would work them out all over
+again with him; but he would never show his own finished plans or his
+own model.
+
+He didn't know whether it had been hard or easy for him to give up the
+Moving Fortress. He did it instinctively. There was--unless he had
+chosen to be a blackguard--nothing else for him to do.
+
+Besides, the Moving Fortress wasn't his idea. Drayton had had it first.
+Anybody might have had it. He hadn't spoken of it first; but that was
+nothing. The point was that he had had it first, and Nicky wasn't going
+to take it from him.
+
+It meant more to Drayton, who was in the Service, than it could possibly
+mean to him. He hadn't even got a profession.
+
+As he walked back through the fields to the station, he said to himself
+that he didn't really care. It was only one more jolly sell. He didn't
+like giving up his Moving Fortress; but it wouldn't end him. There was
+something in him that would go on.
+
+He would make another engine.
+
+He didn't care. There was something in him that would go on.
+
+"I can't see," Desmond had said, "why Captain Drayton should be allowed
+to walk off with your idea."
+
+"He's worked five years on it."
+
+"He hasn't worked it _out_ yet, and you have. Can't you see "--her face
+was dark and hard with anger--"there's money in it?"
+
+"If there is, all the more reason why I shouldn't bag it."
+
+"And where do I come in?"
+
+"Not just here, I'm afraid. It isn't your business."
+
+"Not my business? When I did the drawings? You couldn't possibly have
+done them yourself."
+
+At that point Nicky refused to discuss the matter farther.
+
+And still Desmond brooded on her grievance. And still at intervals
+Desmond brought it up again.
+
+"There's stacks of money in your father's business--"
+
+"There's stacks of money in that Moving Fortress--"
+
+"You are a fool, Nicky, to throw it all away."
+
+He never answered her. He said to himself that Desmond was hysterical
+and had a morbid fancy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But it didn't end there.
+
+He had taken the drawings and the box that had the model of the Moving
+Fortress in it and buried them in the locker under the big north window
+in Desmond's studio.
+
+And there, three weeks later, Desmond found them. And she packed the
+model of the Moving Fortress and marked it "Urgent with Care," and sent
+it to the War Office with a letter. She packed the drawings in a
+portfolio--having signed her own and Nicky's name on the margins--and
+sent them to Captain Drayton with a letter. She said she had no doubt
+she was doing an immoral thing; but she did it in fairness to Captain
+Drayton, for she was sure he would not like Nicky to make so great a
+sacrifice. Nicky, she said, was wrapped up in his Moving Fortress. It
+was his sweetheart, his baby. "He will never forgive me," she said, "as
+long as he lives. But I simply had to let you know. It means so much
+to him."
+
+For she thought, "Because Nicky's a fool, I needn't be one."
+
+Drayton came over the same evening after he had got the letter. He
+shouted with laughter.
+
+"Nicky," he said, "you filthy rotter, why on earth didn't you tell
+me?... It _was_ Nickyish of you.... What if I did think of it first? I
+should have had to come to you for the details. It would have been jolly
+to have worked it out together.... Not a bit of it! Your wife's
+absolutely right. Good thing, after all, you married her.
+
+"By the way, she says there's a model. I want to see that model. Have
+you got it here?"
+
+Nicky went up into the studio to look for it. He couldn't find it in the
+locker where he'd left it. "Wherever is the damned thing?" he said.
+
+"The damned thing," said Desmond, "is where you should have sent it
+first of all--at the War Office. You're clever, Nicky, but you aren't
+quite clever enough."
+
+"I'm afraid," he said, "_you've_ been a bit too clever, this time."
+
+Drayton agreed with him. It was, he said, about the worst thing that
+could possibly have happened.
+
+"She shouldn't have done that, Nicky. What on earth could have made her
+do it?"
+
+"Don't ask me," said Nicky, "what makes her do things."
+
+"It looks," Drayton meditated, "as if she didn't trust me. I'm afraid
+she's dished us. God knows whether we can ever get it back!"
+
+Desmond had a fit of hysterics when she realized how clever she had
+been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desmond's baby was born late in November of that year, and it died when
+it was two weeks old. It was as if she had not wanted it enough to give
+it life for long outside her body.
+
+For though Desmond had been determined to have a child, and had declared
+that she had a perfect right to have one if she chose, she did not care
+for it when it came. And when it died Nicky was sorrier than Desmond.
+
+He had not wanted to be a father to Headley Richards' child. And yet it
+was the baby and nothing but the baby that had let him in for marrying
+Desmond. So that, when it died, he felt that somehow things had tricked
+and sold him. As they had turned out he need not have married Desmond
+after all.
+
+She herself had pointed out the extreme futility of his behaviour, lest
+he should miss the peculiar irony of it. For when her fright and the
+cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented Nicky's having married
+her. She didn't really want anybody to marry her, and nobody but Nicky
+would have dreamed of doing it.
+
+She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and for a
+little while after she was content to lie stretched out among her
+cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her. But, when she
+got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that Desmond's weakness
+and pathos had come with the baby and had gone with it. The real Desmond
+was not weak, she was not pathetic. She was strong and hard and clever
+with a brutal cleverness. She didn't care how much he saw. He could see
+to the bottom of her nature, if he liked, and feel how hard it was. She
+had no more interest in deceiving him.
+
+She had no more interest in him at all.
+
+She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long fits, after
+long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard, passionless
+efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous and repulsive; but
+he did not say so. He was not aware of the extent to which Desmond
+imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones. He knew nothing about painting
+and he had got used to the things. He had got used to Desmond, slouching
+about the flat, in her sloping, slovenly grace, dressed in her queer
+square jacket and straight short skirt, showing her long delicate
+ankles, and her slender feet in their grey stockings and black slippers.
+
+He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched up on her
+cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a word, and
+watched him sullenly. Her long, slippered feet, thrust out, pointed at
+him, watching. Her long face watched him between the sleek bands of hair
+and the big black bosses plaited over her ears.
+
+The beauty of Desmond's face had gone to sleep again, stilled into
+hardness by the passing of her passion. A sort of ugliness was awake
+there, and it watched him.
+
+In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted with
+two-thirds of her power. Yet the third part still served to hold him,
+used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy. He resented it,
+resisted it over and over again; and over and over again it conquered
+resentment and resistance. It had something to do with her subtle,
+sloping lines, with her blackness and her sallow whiteness, with the
+delicate scent and the smoothness of her skin under the sliding hand. He
+couldn't touch her without still feeling a sort of pity, a sort of
+affection.
+
+But she could take and give caresses while she removed her soul from him
+in stubborn rancour.
+
+He couldn't understand that. It amazed him every time. He thought it
+horrible. For Nicky's memory was faithful. It still kept the impression
+of the Desmond he had married, the tender, frightened, helpless Desmond
+he had thought he loved. The Desmond he remembered reminded him
+of Veronica.
+
+And Desmond said to herself, "He's impossible. You can't make any
+impression on him. I might as well be married to a Moving Fortress."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Months passed. The War Office had not yet given up Nicky's model of the
+Moving Fortress. In the first month it was not aware of any letter or of
+any parcel or of any Mr. Nicholas Harrison. In the second month
+inquiries would be made and the results communicated to Captain Drayton.
+In the third month the War Office knew nothing of the matter referred to
+by Captain Drayton.
+
+Drayton hadn't a hope. "We can't get it back, Nicky," he said.
+
+"I can," said Nicky, "I can get it back out of my head."
+
+All through the winter of nineteen-eleven and the spring of
+nineteen-twelve they worked at it together. They owned that they were
+thus getting better results than either of them could have got alone.
+There were impossibilities about Nicky's model that a gunner would have
+seen at once, and there were faults in Drayton's plans that an engineer
+would not have made. Nicky couldn't draw the plans and Drayton couldn't
+build the models. They said it was fifty times better fun to work at
+it together.
+
+Nicky was happy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desmond watched them sombrely. She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the painter,
+laughed at them behind their backs. She said "How funny they are! Frank
+wouldn't hurt a fly and Nicky wouldn't say 'Bo!' to a goose if he
+thought it would frighten the goose, and yet they're only happy when
+they're inventing some horrible machine that'll kill thousands of people
+who never did them any harm." He said, "That's because they haven't any
+imagination."
+
+Nicky got up early and went to bed late to work at the Moving Fortress.
+The time between had to be given to the Works. The Company had paid him
+fairly well for all his patents in the hope of getting more of his
+ideas, and when they found that no ideas were forthcoming they took it
+out of him in labour. He was too busy and too happy to notice what
+Desmond was doing.
+
+One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is going
+about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?"
+
+"Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?"
+
+"Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason."
+
+"You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?"
+
+"You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond."
+
+"What do you think I ought to do about it?"
+
+"Nothing. She goes about with scores of people. It doesn't follow that
+there's anything in it."
+
+"Oh, Lord, I should hope not! That beastly bounder. What _could_ there
+be in it?"
+
+"He's a clever painter, Nicky. So's Desmond. There's that in it."
+
+"I've hardly a right to object to that, have I? It's not as if I were a
+clever painter myself."
+
+But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St. John's
+Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down the north
+side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing
+to shreds.
+
+There couldn't be anything in it.
+
+He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall lean body
+in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie. He could see
+his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric face with its seven
+fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the black moustache, the high,
+close-clipped side whiskers, the two forks of the black beard.
+
+There couldn't be anything in it.
+
+Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.
+
+And yet he never came home rather later than usual without saying to
+himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with her?"
+
+He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask himself
+that question.
+
+He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He wondered what
+other men did. It never occurred to him that at twenty-two he was young
+to be considering this problem.
+
+He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face
+and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face
+and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging
+him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered
+what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when they got
+to the bottom. Perhaps they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He
+would hang on to the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door
+of the studio and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there
+would be nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look
+an awful ass doing it. He saw himself standing in the room and looking
+at them, and saying, "I've no intention of interrupting you." Perhaps
+Desmond would answer, "You're not interrupting us. We've finished all
+we had to say." And _he_ would walk out and leave them there.
+Not caring.
+
+He wondered if _he_ would look an awful ass doing it.
+
+In the end, when it came, he hadn't to do any of these things. It
+happened very quietly and simply, early on a Sunday evening after he had
+got back from Eltham. He had dined with Drayton and his people on
+Saturday, and stayed, for once, over-night, risking it.
+
+Desmond was sitting on a cushion, on the floor, with her thin legs in
+their grey stockings slanting out in front of her. She propped her chin
+on her hands. Her thin, long face, between the great black ear-bosses,
+looked at him thoughtfully, without rancour.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "Alfred Orde-Jones slept with me last night."
+
+And he said, simply and quietly, "Very well, Desmond; then I shall leave
+you. You can keep the flat, and I or my father will make you an
+allowance. I shan't divorce you, but I won't live with you."
+
+"Why won't you divorce me?" she said.
+
+"Because I don't want to drag you through the dirt."
+
+She laughed quietly. "Dear Nicky," she said, "how sweet and like you.
+But don't let's have any more chivalrous idiocy. I don't want it. I
+never did." (She had forgotten that she had wanted it very badly once.
+But Nicky did not remind her of that time. No matter. She didn't want it
+now). "Let's look at the thing sensibly, without any rotten sentiment.
+We've had some good times together, and we've had some bad times. I'll
+admit that when you married me you saved me from a very bad time.
+That's no reason why we should go on giving each other worse times
+indefinitely. You seem to think I don't want you to divorce me. What
+else do you imagine Alfred came for last night? Why we've been trying
+for it for the last three months.
+
+"Of course, if you'll let _me_ divorce _you_ for desertion, it would be
+very nice of you. That," said Desmond, "is what decent people do."
+
+He went out and telephoned to his father. Then he left her and went back
+to his father's house.
+
+Desmond asked the servant to remember particularly that it was the
+fifteenth of June and that the master was going away and would not come
+back again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Nicky walked up the hill and across the Heath, he wondered why it had
+happened, and why, now that it had happened, he cared so little. He
+could have understood it if he hadn't cared at all for Desmond. But he
+had cared in a sort of way. If she had cared at all for him he thought
+they might have made something of it, something enduring, perhaps, if
+they had had children of their own.
+
+He still couldn't think why it had happened. But he knew that, even if
+he had loved Desmond with passion, it wouldn't have been the end of him.
+The part of him that didn't care, that hadn't cared much when he lost
+his Moving Fortress, was the part that Desmond never would have
+cared for.
+
+He didn't know whether it was outside him and beyond him, bigger and
+stronger than he was, or whether it was deep inside, the most real part
+of him. Whatever happened or didn't happen it would go on.
+
+How could he have ended _here_, with poor little Desmond? There was
+something ahead of him, something that he felt to be tremendous and
+holy. He had always known it waited for him. He was going out to meet
+it; and because of it he didn't care.
+
+And after a year of Desmond he was glad to go back to his father's
+house; even though he knew that the thing that waited for him was
+not there.
+
+Frances and Anthony were happy again. After all, Heaven had manipulated
+their happiness with exquisite art and wisdom, letting Michael and
+Nicholas go from them for a little while that they might have them again
+more completely, and teaching them the art and wisdom that would
+keep them.
+
+Some day the children would marry; even Nicky might marry again. They
+would prepare now, by small daily self-denials, for the big renunciation
+that must come.
+
+Yet in secret they thought that Michael would never marry; that Nicky,
+made prudent by disaster, wasn't really likely to marry again. John
+would marry; and they would be happy in John's happiness and in
+John's children.
+
+And Nicky had not been home before he offered to his parents the
+spectacle of an outrageous gaiety. You would have said that life to
+Nicholas was an amusing game where you might win or lose, but either way
+it didn't matter. It was a rag, a sell. Even the preceedings, the
+involved and ridiculous proceedings of his divorce, amused him.
+
+It was undeniably funny that he should be supposed to have deserted
+Desmond.
+
+Frances wondered, again, whether Nicky really had any feelings, and
+whether things really made any impression on him.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+It was a quarter past five on a fine morning, early in July. On the
+stroke of the quarter Captain Frank Drayton's motor-car, after exceeding
+the speed limit along the forlorn highway of the Caledonian Road, drew
+up outside the main entrance of Holloway Gaol. Captain Frank Drayton was
+alone in his motor-car.
+
+He had the street all to himself till twenty past five, when he was
+joined by another motorist, also conspicuously alone in his car. Drayton
+tried hard to look as if the other man were not there.
+
+The other man tried even harder to look as if he were not there himself.
+He was the first to be aware of the absurdity of their competitive
+pretences. He looked at his watch and spoke.
+
+"I hope they'll be punctual with those doors. I was up at four o'clock."
+
+"I," said Drayton, "was up at three."
+
+"I'm waiting for my wife," said the other man.
+
+"I am _not_," said Drayton, and felt that he had scored.
+
+The other man's smile allowed him the point he made.
+
+"Yes, but my wife happens to be Lady Victoria Threlfall."
+
+The other man laughed as if he had made by far the better joke.
+
+Drayton recognized Mr. Augustin Threlfall, that Cabinet Minister made
+notorious by his encounters with the Women's Franchise Union. Last year
+Miss Maud Blackadder had stalked him in the Green Park and lamed him by
+a blow from her hunting-crop. This year his wife, Lady Victoria
+Threlfall, had headed the June raid on the House of Commons.
+
+And here he was at twenty minutes past five in the morning waiting to
+take her out of prison.
+
+And here was Drayton, waiting for Dorothea, who was not his wife yet.
+
+"Anyhow," said the Cabinet Minister, "we've done them out of their
+Procession."
+
+"What Procession?"
+
+All that Drayton knew about it was that, late last night, a friend he
+had in the Home Office had telephoned to him that the hour of Miss
+Dorothea Harrison's release would be five-thirty, not six-thirty as the
+papers had it.
+
+"The Procession," said the Cabinet Minister, "that was to have met 'em
+at six-thirty. A Car of Victory for Mrs. Blathwaite, and a bodyguard of
+thirteen young women on thirteen white horses. The girl who smashed my
+knee-cap is to be Joan of Arc and ride at the head of 'em. In armour.
+Fact. There's to be a banquet for 'em at the Imperial at nine. We can't
+stop _that_. And they'll process down the Embankment and down Pall Mall
+and Piccadilly at eleven; but they won't process here. We've let 'em out
+an hour too soon."
+
+A policeman came from the prison-yard. He blew a whistle. Four taxi-cabs
+crept round the corner furtively, driven by visibly hilarious
+chauffeurs.
+
+"The triumphant procession from Holloway," said the Cabinet Minister,
+"is you and me, sir, and those taxi-cabs."
+
+On the other side of the gates a woman laughed. The released prisoners
+were coming down the prison-yard.
+
+The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous glee. He was
+boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had done them out of
+the Car of Victory and the thirteen white horses.
+
+The prison-gates opened. The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised their
+caps.
+
+The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs.
+Palmerston-Swete came first. Then Lady Victoria Threlfall. Then
+Dorothea. Then sixteen other women.
+
+Drayton did not look at them. He did not see what happened when the
+Cabinet Minister met his wife. He did not see the sixteen other women.
+He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.
+
+She had no hat on. Her clothes were as the great raid had left them, a
+month ago. Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket, the
+three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining. Another
+three-cornered flap hung from her right knee. She carried her small,
+hawk-like head alert and high. Her face had the incomparable bloom of
+youth. Her eyes shone. They and her face showed no memory of the
+prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they showed no sense
+of Drayton's decency in coming to meet her, no sense of anything at all
+but of the queerness, the greatness and the glory of the world--of him,
+perhaps, as a part of it. She stepped into the car as if they had met by
+appointment for a run into the country. "I shan't hurt your car. I'm
+quite clean, though you mightn't think it. The cells were all right
+this time."
+
+He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.
+
+"Dorothy," he said, "do you want to go to that banquet?"
+
+"No, but I've got to. I must go through with it. I swore I'd do the
+thing completely or not at all."
+
+"It isn't till nine. We've three whole hours before we need start."
+
+"What are you going to do with me?"
+
+"I'm going to take you home first. Then I suppose I shall have to drive
+you down to that beastly banquet."
+
+"That won't take three and a half hours. It's a heavenly morning. Can't
+we do something with it?"
+
+"What would you like to do?"
+
+"I'd like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall. I'm hungry. Then--Are you
+frightfully sleepy?"
+
+"Me? Oh, Lord, no."
+
+"Then let's go off somewhere into the country." They went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the buns they
+had brought with them from the coffee-stall.
+
+"Did you ever smell anything like this lane? Did you ever eat anything
+like these buns? Did you ever drink anything like that divine coffee? If
+epicures had any imagination they'd go out and obstruct policemen and
+get put in prison for the sake of the sensations they'd have
+afterwards."
+
+"That reminds me," he said, "that I want to talk to you. No--but
+seriously."
+
+"I don't mind how seriously you talk if I may go on eating."
+
+"That's what I brought the buns for. So that I mayn't be interrupted.
+First of all I want to tell you that you haven't taken me in. Other
+people may be impressed with this Holloway business, but not me. I'm not
+moved, or touched, or even interested."
+
+"Still," she murmured, "you did get up at three o'clock in the morning."
+
+"If you think I got up at three o'clock in the morning to show my
+sympathy, you're mistaken."
+
+"Sympathy? I don't need your sympathy. It was worth it, Frank. There
+isn't anything on earth like coming out of prison. Unless it is
+going in."
+
+"That won't work, Dorothy, when I know why you went in. It wasn't to
+prove your principles. Your principles were against that sort of thing.
+It wasn't to get votes for women. You know as well as I do that you'll
+never get them that way. It wasn't to annoy Mr. Asquith. You knew Mr.
+Asquith wouldn't care a hang. It was to annoy me."
+
+"I wonder," she said dreamily, "if I shall _ever_ be able to stop
+eating."
+
+"You can't take me in. I know too much about it. You said you were going
+to keep out of rows. You weren't going on that deputation because it
+meant a row. You went because I asked you not to go."
+
+"I did; and I should go again tomorrow for the same reason."
+
+"But it isn't a reason. It's not as if I'd asked you to go against your
+conscience. Your conscience hadn't anything to do with it."
+
+"Oh, hadn't it! I went because you'd no right to ask me not to."
+
+"If I'd had the right you'd have gone just the same."
+
+"What do you mean by the right?"
+
+"You know perfectly well what I mean."
+
+"Of course I do. You mean, and you meant that if I'd married you you'd
+have had the right, not just to ask me not to, but to prevent me. That
+was what I was out against. I'd be out against it tomorrow and the next
+day, and for as long as you keep up that attitude."
+
+"And yet--you said you loved me."
+
+"So I did. So I do. But I'm out against that too."
+
+"Good Lord, against what?"
+
+"Against your exploiting my love for your purposes."
+
+"My poor dear child, what do you suppose I wanted?"
+
+She had reached the uttermost limit of absurdity, and in that moment she
+became to him helpless and pathetic.
+
+"I knew there was going to be the most infernal row and I wanted to keep
+you out of it. Look here, you'd have thought me a rotter if I hadn't,
+wouldn't you?
+
+"Of course you would. And there's another thing. You weren't straight
+about it. You never told me you were going."
+
+"I never told you I wasn't."
+
+"I don't care, Dorothy; you weren't straight. You ought to have told
+me."
+
+"How could I tell you when I knew you'd only go trying to stop me and
+getting yourself arrested."
+
+"Not me. They wouldn't have touched me."
+
+"How was I to know that? If they had I should have dished you. And I'd
+have stayed away rather than do that. I didn't tell Michael or Nicky or
+Father for the same reason."
+
+"You'd have stayed at home rather than have dished me? Do you really
+mean that?"
+
+"Of course I mean it. And I meant it. It's you," she said, "who don't
+care."
+
+"How do you make that out?"
+
+He really wanted to know. He really wanted, if it were possible, to
+understand her.
+
+"I make it out this way. Here have I been through the adventure and the
+experience of my life. I was in the thick of the big raid; I was four
+weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don't care; you're not
+interested. You never said to yourself, 'Dorothy was in the big raid, I
+wonder what happened to her?' or 'Dorothy's in prison, I wonder how
+she's feeling?' You didn't care; you weren't interested.
+
+"If it had happened to you, I couldn't have thought of anything else, I
+couldn't have got it out of my head. I should have been wondering all
+the time what you were feeling; I couldn't have rested till I knew. It
+would have been as if I was in prison myself. And now, when I've come
+out, all you think of is how you can rag and score off me."
+
+She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane. Her hands were
+clasped round her knees. One knickerbockered knee protruded through the
+three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared across the road, a long,
+straight stare that took no heed of what she saw, the grey road, and
+the green bank on the other side, topped by its hedge of trees.
+
+Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of self-pity
+or reproach. It was as if she were making statements that had no
+emotional significance whatever.
+
+She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was sorest.
+
+"I wanted to tell you about it. I counted the days, the minutes till I
+could tell you; but you wouldn't listen. You don't want to hear."
+
+"I won't listen if it's about women's suffrage. And I don't want to hear
+if it's anything awful about you."
+
+"It is about me, but it isn't awful.
+
+"That's what I want to tell you.
+
+"But, first of all--about the raid. I didn't mean to be in it at all, as
+it happens. I meant to go with the deputation because you told me not
+to. You're right about that. But I meant to turn back as soon as the
+police stopped us, because I hate rows with the police, and because I
+don't believe in them, and because I told Angela Blathwaite I wasn't
+going in with her crowd any way. You see, she called me a coward before
+a lot of people and said I funked it. So I did. But I should have been a
+bigger coward if I'd gone against my own will, just because of what she
+said. That's how she collars heaps of women. They adore her and they're
+afraid of her. Sometimes they lie and tell her they're going in when
+their moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they're not going in at
+all. I don't adore her, and I'm not afraid of her, and I didn't lie.
+
+"So I went at the tail of the deputation where I could slip out when the
+row began. I swear I didn't mean to be in it. I funked it far too much.
+I didn't mind the police and I didn't mind the crowd. But I funked being
+with the women. When I saw their faces. You world have funked it.
+
+"And anyhow I don't like doing things in a beastly body. Ugh!
+
+"And then they began moving.
+
+"The police tried to stop them. And the crowd tried. The crowd began
+jeering at them. And still they moved. And the mounted police horses got
+excited, and danced about and reared a bit, and the crowd was in a funk
+then and barged into the women. That was rather awful.
+
+"I could have got away then if I'd chosen. There was a man close to me
+all the time who kept making spaces for me and telling me to slip
+through. I was just going to when a woman fell. Somewhere in the front
+of the deputation where the police were getting nasty.
+
+"Then I had to stay. I had to go on with them. I swear I wasn't excited
+or carried away in the least. Two women near me were yelling at the
+police. I hated them. But I felt I'd be an utter brute if I left them
+and got off safe. You see, it was an ugly crowd, and things were
+beginning to be jolly dangerous, and I'd funked it badly. Only the first
+minute. It went--the funk I mean--when I saw the woman go down. She fell
+sort of slanting through the crowd, and it was horrible. I couldn't have
+left them then any more than I could have left children in a
+burning house.
+
+"I thought of you."
+
+"You thought of me?"
+
+"Yes. I thought of you--how you'd have hated it. But I didn't care. I
+was sort of boosted up above caring. The funk had all gone and I was
+absolutely happy. Not insanely happy like some of the other women, but
+quietly, comfily happy.
+
+"After all, I didn't do anything you _need_ have minded."
+
+"What _did_ you do?" he said.
+
+"I just went on and stood still and refused to go back. I stuck my hands
+in my pockets so that I shouldn't let out at a policeman or anything (I
+knew you wouldn't like _that_). I may have pushed a bit now and then
+with my shoulders and my elbows; I can't remember. But I didn't make one
+sound. I was perfectly lady-like and perfectly dignified."
+
+"I suppose you _know_ you haven't got a hat on?"
+
+"It didn't _come_ off. I _took_ it off and threw it to the crowd when
+the row began. It doesn't matter about your hair coming down if you
+haven't got a hat on, but if your hair's down and your hat's bashed in
+and all crooked you look a perfect idiot.
+
+"It wasn't a bad fight, you know, twenty-one women to I don't know how
+many policemen, and the front ones got right into the doorway of St.
+Stephen's. That was where they copped me.
+
+"But that, isn't the end of it.
+
+"The fight was only the first part of the adventure. The wonderful thing
+was what happened afterwards. In prison.
+
+"I didn't think I'd really _like_ prison. That was another thing I
+funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the dirt, you know.
+And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And after the crowds of
+women, after the meetings and the speeches, the endless talking and the
+boredom, that cell was like heaven.
+
+"Thank God, it's always solitary confinement. The Government doesn't
+know that if they want to make prison a deterrent they'll shut us up
+together. You won't give the Home Secretary the tip, will you?
+
+"But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about.
+
+"It was something bigger, something tremendous. You'll not believe this
+part of it, but I was absolutely happy in that cell. It was a sort of
+deep-down unexcited happiness. I'm not a bit religious, but I _know_ how
+the nuns feel in their cells when they've given up everything and shut
+themselves up with God. The cell was like a convent cell, you know, as
+narrow as that bit of shadow there is, and it had nice white-washed
+walls, and a planked-bed in the corner, and a window high, high up.
+There ought to have been a crucifix on the wall above the plank-bed, but
+there wasn't a crucifix. There was only a shiny black Bible on
+the chair.
+
+"Really Frank, if you're to be shut up for a month with just one book,
+it had better be the Bible. Isaiah's ripping. I can remember heaps of
+it: 'in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with
+reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall
+walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall return with singing into
+Zion' ... 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they
+shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary;
+they shall walk, and not faint.' I used to read like anything; and I
+thought of things. They sort of came to me.
+
+"That's what I wanted to tell you about. The things that came to me were
+so much bigger than the thing I went in for. I could see all along we
+weren't going to get it that way. And I knew we _were_ going to get it
+some other way. I don't in the least know how, but it'll be some big,
+tremendous way that'll make all this fighting and fussing seem the
+rottenest game. That was one of the things I used to think about."
+
+"Then," he said, "you've given it up? You're corning out of it?"
+
+She looked at him keenly. "Are those still your conditions?"
+
+He hesitated one second before he answered firmly. "Yes, those are still
+my conditions. You still won't agree to them?"
+
+"I still won't agree. It's no use talking about it. You don't believe in
+freedom. We're incompatible. We don't stand for the same ideals."
+
+"Oh, Lord, what _does_ that matter?"
+
+"It matters most awfully."
+
+"I should have thought," said Drayton, "it would have mattered more if
+I'd had revolting manners or an impediment in my speech or something."
+
+"It wouldn't, _really_."
+
+"Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things. Did you ever once
+think about me, Dorothy?"
+
+"Yes, I did. Have you ever read the Psalms? There's a jolly one that
+begins: 'Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to
+war and my fingers to fight.' I used to think of you when I read that. I
+thought of you a lot.
+
+"That's what I was coming to. It was the queerest thing of all.
+Everything seemed ended when I went to prison. I knew you wouldn't care
+for me after what I'd done--you must really listen to this, Frank--I
+knew you couldn't and wouldn't marry me; and it somehow didn't matter.
+What I'd got hold of was bigger than that. I knew that all this Women's
+Suffrage business was only a part of it, a small, ridiculous part.
+
+"I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord. They were men, as well as
+women, Frank. And they were all free. They were all free because they
+were redeemed. And the funny thing was that you were part of it. You
+were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business. Everything was
+ended. And everything was begun; so that I knew you understood even when
+you didn't understand. It was really as if I'd got you tight, somehow;
+and I knew you couldn't go, even when you'd gone."
+
+"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."
+
+"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if you mean
+going.
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"A quarter to eight."
+
+"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't make me
+late for that infernal banquet. You _are_ going to drive me there?"
+
+"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with you."
+
+"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"
+
+He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it burnished
+and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the broad red, white
+and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union slanting across
+her breast.
+
+He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial Hotel,
+Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too much for
+speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there was that queer
+exaltation that had sustained her in prison.
+
+He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and Nicholas
+waited to receive her.
+
+Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated it, but
+they went in.
+
+Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red, white and
+blue ribbons.
+
+"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you through."
+
+"How can he when he feels like that about it?"
+
+"As if we didn't feel!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall
+to receive the prisoners.
+
+The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue of the
+Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned banners. The
+silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage Leagues and
+Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged along three
+walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and heroic colours,
+purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and royal blue, black, white
+and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure white, dead-black, orange and
+scarlet and magenta.
+
+From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent tables
+decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In the centre of
+the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the tricolour, were set
+like three thrones for the three leaders. They were flanked by nine
+other chairs on the right and nine on the left for the eighteen other
+prisoners.
+
+There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to the high
+table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged sound of rustling
+as the three hundred and fifty turned in their places.
+
+The twenty-one prisoners came in.
+
+A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself up in
+the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to their feet.
+
+And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a savage
+and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as of glass or
+thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of
+small, slender-throated animals were held together by ringing,
+vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins playing in the treble. And
+now a woman's voice started off on its own note and tore the delicate
+tissue of this sound with a solitary scream; and now a man's voice
+filled up a pause in the shrill hurrahing with a solitary boom.
+
+To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right hand, to
+Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among the crowd, that
+collective sound was frightful.
+
+From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one on each
+side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing them, she
+saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.
+
+It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The crowd was
+on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their high places.
+
+Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and seventy-nine
+women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of the
+Militant Women.
+
+     Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,
+     Our army moves from east to west.
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     With flag and sword from south and north,
+     The sounding, shining hosts go forth.
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     Do you not bear our marching feet,
+     From door to door, from street to street?
+         Follow on! Follow on!
+
+Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying, excited
+crowd.
+
+Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top of
+their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang from the
+back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently open; she
+sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever it might cost
+her and other people.
+
+Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its utmost, was
+overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang shrill and loud;
+her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a fantastic march. With one
+large, long hand raised she beat the measure of the music. Her head was
+thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy
+rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane.
+
+Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.
+
+The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her
+old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion threatened her.
+She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its
+nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her
+soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd
+in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by
+the Vortex. She felt the rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her
+breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing
+almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.
+
+She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the same
+awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at Emmeline she
+saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and hard and sane.
+
+She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and
+Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul.
+The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as needles, tortured him.
+Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom. His fair, handsome face was
+set clear and hard. His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his
+head like a cap of solid, polished metal. Weariness and disgust made a
+sort of cloud over his light green eyes. When Nicky looked at him
+Nicky's face twitched and twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as
+Michael hated it.
+
+She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they stuck
+it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria Threlfall
+were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from Blackfriars Bridge
+along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall and
+Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and Nicholas would march
+beside them to hold up the poles of the standard which, after all, they
+were not strong enough to carry.
+
+She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same time
+she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison cell. She
+had told him the most real thing that had ever happened to her, and he
+had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would have listened. Michael
+would have cared intensely.
+
+She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The sword
+was between her and her lover.
+
+She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the Vortex,
+but between him and her vision which was more than either of them or
+than all this.
+
+She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in the
+hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her lover. She
+wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could have done as
+much, supposing they had had a choice?
+
+Then she looked at Veronica.
+
+Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was slender and
+beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin. Presently she would be
+marching in the Procession. She would carry a thin, tall pole, with a
+round olive wreath on the top of it, and a white dove sitting in the
+ring of the olive wreath. And she would look as if she was not in the
+Procession but in another place.
+
+When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane ecstasy
+and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of Veronica went
+alone in utter freedom.
+
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,
+     And Love's our mighty battle-lord.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     And Justice is our flag unfurled,
+     The flaming flag that sweeps the world.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+     And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;
+     For Freedom we will fight and die.
+     Follow on! Follow on!
+
+The Procession was over a mile long.
+
+It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge to
+Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and the
+Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside Cleopatra's
+Needle and the Sphinxes.
+
+Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to Northumberland
+Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and Societies and Leagues,
+of the trades and the professions and the arts, carrying their banners,
+the purple and the blue, the black, white and gold, the green, the
+orange and the scarlet and magenta.
+
+Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady Victoria
+Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense tricolour
+standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them. Behind the
+prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of young girls
+dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying a pole with the
+olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the obviousness of extreme
+innocence, the peace that follows victory. They were led by Veronica.
+
+She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because of her
+youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought that the Union
+had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged to Dorothea.
+
+From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the big red,
+white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady Victoria
+Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria, white and tense,
+would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation, hardly knowing where
+she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would go in pride, and in disdain
+for the proceedings in which her honour forced her to take part; she
+would have an awful knowledge of what she was doing and of where she
+was; she would drink every drop of the dreadful cup she had poured out
+for herself, hating it.
+
+Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she thought
+that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But she did not
+hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful and too big to
+hate, and her part in it was too little.
+
+She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the Procession.
+She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements, pressing closer
+and closer, pushed back continually by the police. Her soul was by
+itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the soul of the crowd
+and the soul of the Procession; only it was not proud; it was
+simply happy.
+
+The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the music
+sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the march.
+
+Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release, and the
+whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard music, to the
+rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.
+
+They went through what were once streets between walls of houses, and
+were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The visible aspect
+of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted. The houses stood
+farther back behind the walls of people; they were hung with people; a
+swarm of people clung like bees to the house walls.
+
+All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still and
+stationary world the Procession was the only thing that moved.
+
+She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was friendly.
+
+A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the
+cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign
+expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman was
+friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.
+
+Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary Procession
+should be allowed to fill the streets of a great capital, and that a
+body of the same police that arrested the insurgents should go with it
+to protect them, to clear their triumphal way before them, holding up
+the entire traffic of great thoroughfares that their bands and their
+banners and their regiments should go through. She said to herself "What
+a country! It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France,
+or anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in England."
+
+Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly. The band
+was playing the Marseillaise.
+
+And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down from its
+place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they played the
+Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the Procession to the
+ends of the world; she could march into battle to the Marseillaise; she
+could fight to that music and die.
+
+The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang the
+words of the Women's Marseillaise.
+
+And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another song.
+She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.
+
+     "'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl ueber mein Grab,
+     Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;
+      Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--
+      Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schuetzen!'"
+
+The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn Hill.
+
+Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that they were
+there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the standard that they
+carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and front of the Procession,
+the purple and the blue, the gold and white, the green, the scarlet and
+orange and magenta standards rocked and staggered; they bent forwards;
+they were flung backwards as the west wind took them. But the red, white
+and blue standard that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her,
+steady and straight and high.
+
+And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the olive
+wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the ring of the
+wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine sounding in
+her soul.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Another year passed.
+
+Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in. Because
+of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children who had most
+hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide himself from her to
+the very end.
+
+Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and gone into
+his father's business for a while, to see whether he could stand it.
+John was going into the business too when he left Oxford. John was even
+looking forward to his partnership in what he called "the Pater's old
+tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get my hand well in. Won't we
+make it rip!"
+
+John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble. He had no
+genius for adventure. He would never strike out for himself any strange
+or dangerous line. He had settled down at Cheltenham; he had settled
+down at Oxford.
+
+And Dorothea had settled down.
+
+The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution.
+Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and
+down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer
+bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into
+pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in
+barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from
+infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons
+and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show
+what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or
+two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
+perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed
+by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering seriously the
+very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British
+sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in some drastic and
+terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.
+
+And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind. It
+would never suck her in. She worked now in the office of the Social
+Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for _The New
+Commonwealth_ on Economics and the Marriage Laws.
+
+Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the revolution
+was all in Dorothea's brain.
+
+When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was
+being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances
+confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged
+it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it was _the_ Vortex,
+the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever
+do anything.
+
+And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.
+
+Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she
+did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on
+him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help
+him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his
+_Review_. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would
+give a whole article to that book in his _Review_. If Michael's prose
+should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on
+the _Review_.
+
+In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the
+revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems
+were beginning to appear, one after another, in the _Green Review_. He
+had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year;
+they were better than those that Reveillaud had approved of two years
+ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in the _Green Review_.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he said, who
+would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.
+
+And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence Stephen she
+was afraid.
+
+"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.
+
+For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand
+Cameron's place.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland
+with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was
+a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be
+compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's
+body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit
+hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation
+for himself.
+
+He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken
+from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the
+English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to
+love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in
+Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn;
+he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get
+his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn
+in England's side.
+
+And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his
+talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but
+he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one
+of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland
+produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels
+like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny
+as itself. Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the
+material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.
+
+He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner
+settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled with this
+mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim
+where his people married.
+
+Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have
+been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
+inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too
+wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary politics
+and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own. And yet
+few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on the House of
+Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic politician he ran
+Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists
+nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief.
+In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a
+novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed
+not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men
+of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
+sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
+qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated
+by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there
+was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.
+
+Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he would, he
+fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and
+England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike,
+and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and
+every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men
+were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet
+on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.
+
+A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It would at
+any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he presented to two
+countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with
+violence in a dead straight line. He moved so fast that to a stationary
+on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended. It
+was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a
+complete all-round view of the amazing man.
+
+But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious
+brilliance.
+
+And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet
+forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men
+of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all England you could not
+have found a lonelier man.
+
+The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations
+of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison
+and yet he was not married. He was neither bound nor free.
+
+All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.
+
+And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the
+Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera,
+after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for
+everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.
+
+All his life _his_ passions had been at the service of ideas. All his
+life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction
+and consummation; and he had not found it.
+
+In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was
+still waiting for his supreme opportunity.
+
+Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.
+
+But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily
+on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture,
+to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had put his political
+failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as an artist or not at
+all." They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.
+
+There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was
+in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just
+behind him. To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution
+in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was
+happening without him. He was not the primal energy in the movement of
+the Vortex. In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he
+was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther
+than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was attracted to the
+young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had
+rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own
+youth. They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction,
+his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity. A prosperous,
+well-established Stephen would have revolted them. He gave the
+revolutionaries the shelter of his _Review_, the support of his name,
+and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in
+return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their
+merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
+abominated.
+
+"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
+Swinburne."
+
+Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.
+
+He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew that the
+young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his
+dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when
+he made place for the new.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
+Stephen's study.
+
+He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated,
+half affable affection.
+
+The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that house in
+St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera Harrison. They
+were at home there. Their books stood in his bookcase; they laid their
+manuscripts on his writing table and left them there; they claimed his
+empty spaces for the hanging of their pictures yet unsold.
+
+Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at the top
+of the house, and they talked.
+
+Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet them there,
+and to listen and to talk.
+
+To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were Austen
+Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young sculptor,
+and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton Ellis's disciples.
+
+Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
+rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
+religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean and
+dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses, smooth and
+straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and a bitter,
+sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard drawn, while the
+lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and protested and recanted, was
+sceptical and sensitive and tender. His short, high nose had wide yet
+fastidious nostrils.
+
+It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
+affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes followed
+with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he
+might escape her, might be off, God knew where.
+
+Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of
+his mistress and his friends.
+
+"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I
+want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in
+Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley
+and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their
+imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in
+destroying them."
+
+"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They breed
+the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a stinking
+suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if we're to get
+rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new and clean. There
+isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So long as old masters are
+kow-towed to as masters people will go on imitating them. When a poet
+ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go."
+
+Michael said, "How about _us_ when people imitate us? Have we got to
+go?"
+
+Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't
+got to go."
+
+"I don't see how you get out of it."
+
+"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."
+
+There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It
+made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.
+
+"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.
+
+"Nobody, so far, _has_ imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have
+_succeeded_ in imitating me."
+
+There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the
+imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by
+his contemporaries.
+
+"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy
+Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."
+
+"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does
+come down out of heaven. You _can_ trace my sources, thank God, because
+they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine
+like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions)
+"have made filthy with their paddling."
+
+He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised, Harrison, is
+absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then, supposing the
+revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because it's come. We
+_are_ the revolution--the revolution means that we've made a clean sweep
+of the past. In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody. No
+artist will be allowed to exist unless he's prepared to be buried alive
+or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the
+processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.
+
+"That's why violence is right.
+
+     "'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo
+     Sanguigno, stupra le albe,
+     irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,
+     fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,
+     fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,
+     fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'
+
+"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right because it's
+necessary."
+
+"You mean it's necessary because it's right."
+
+Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
+flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of great
+strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair grow long
+and cultivating two beards instead of one.
+
+"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy must be
+got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy instead of
+standing still. The difference between Pastism and Futurism is the
+difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist art is simply art that
+has gone on, that, has left off being static and become dynamic. It
+expresses movement. Owen will tell you better than I can why it
+expresses movement."
+
+A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul Monier-Owen had
+curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes of a young wild animal
+roused in its lair.
+
+Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little distance he
+had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black panther, half cub,
+half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of his prominent eyes, his
+eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted slightly upwards and backwards.
+Under his slender, mournful nose his restless smile showed the white
+teeth of a young animal.
+
+Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded incessantly
+to any childish provocation, the intelligence of Monier-Owen watched in
+his calm and beautiful forehead and in his eyes.
+
+He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as
+cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into
+the lines and masses that compose them, and project those lines and
+masses into space on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes
+you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to
+express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By
+decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of
+figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can
+represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the
+cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to
+escape the eye.
+
+"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It
+can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitchell breaks them
+up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It
+can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and masses as I dislocate
+them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact
+body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.
+
+"By taking time into account as well as space we produce rhythm.
+
+"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the
+Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the
+sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are
+supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because
+arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of
+arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.
+
+"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body
+which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in
+movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and
+in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I
+wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."
+
+"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out
+against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw
+a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and
+nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of
+Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality
+what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.
+But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present
+rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."
+
+He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted
+language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely
+arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and
+individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more
+than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver
+the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas.
+Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is
+the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.
+
+"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the
+innocence of the eye."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
+constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and
+broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on
+the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and
+scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high
+adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences
+over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for
+an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute
+ineptitudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and
+---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet,
+Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the
+Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.
+
+Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in
+Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than he
+believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules
+Reveillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all
+the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of
+qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.
+
+But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old
+horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
+unanimity. The vortex--_the_ Vortex--was like the little vortex of
+school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a
+herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the
+same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective
+and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry
+was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the
+fugitive, solitary private soul.
+
+And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had
+the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing
+some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away
+from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.
+
+Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a
+great longing to break loose and get away.
+
+He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think
+they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come
+of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't
+see what's coming. Yet something must come. _They_ can't be the end."
+
+He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.
+It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have
+helped to clear it."
+
+He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and
+of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+VICTORY
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles
+because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political
+atmosphere due to the fine weather.
+
+Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his family
+that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and that the mere
+off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the striker. And when
+Michael asked him contentiously what the weather had to do with Home
+Rule, he answered that it had everything to do with it by increasing
+parliamentary blood-pressure.
+
+"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how long
+the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to Mr.
+Redmond then."
+
+Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew that Home
+Rule had never been a part of practical politics and never would be.
+
+And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own views about
+the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they could have told
+Anthony what the answers were going to be; only they said it wasn't any
+good talking to Father; when he got an idea into his dear old head it
+stuck there.
+
+Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make some
+impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could get
+them out.
+
+Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children, had time
+for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent woman than the
+Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago, informed herself of the
+affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming of the _Times_. In the last
+four years the affairs of the nation had thrust themselves violently
+upon her attention. She had even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement
+as a vivid and vital affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the
+fighting and had gone to prison.
+
+Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the
+_Times_, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn't
+happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any reason to
+complain that nothing happened.
+
+It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and Ireland were
+on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the
+head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael's
+insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green Review.
+
+For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly thirteen
+when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be
+glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still. His poem was the
+green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country.
+Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the
+imminence of civil war (only that they didn't really believe in it),
+when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else.
+In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of
+Ireland's freedom was a secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew
+shared it but Lawrence Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him
+hot and restless and intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish
+crisis when she said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own
+business. This excitement is very bad for Michael."
+
+And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of
+them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two,
+Anthony and the boys would be out of it.
+
+Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour. There was,
+indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this
+particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was being
+disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.
+
+So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his
+idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had even
+thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the
+Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of
+last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme
+measure was unnecessary.
+
+And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy. For the
+children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what
+was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever. Michael
+and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete
+ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year
+each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from
+Michael. Nicholas was doing the chauffeur's work in his absence; and
+John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it
+on his father as his contribution to the family economies.
+
+Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through
+Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's and
+Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her poor
+little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.
+
+There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike. Her mind
+refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of
+exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and
+Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was
+arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like
+Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in
+the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before,
+and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of
+mind or Anthony's prosperity.
+
+The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony
+Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the
+twenty-fifth of July.
+
+Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of it.
+
+Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of those slight
+changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a
+change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of
+exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate
+trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at
+first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get
+used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it
+seriously. It had been forced on her. Dorothea had decided that she must
+have a Day, like other people.
+
+She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come out in the
+spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday
+evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at Michael's
+father's house.
+
+Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this
+palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful,
+energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred the air about him
+and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices,
+and of their laughter. And when the house was quiet and Anthony had
+Frances to himself he liked that, too.
+
+But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so often--if only
+I could have my children sometimes to myself!"
+
+It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and suckled them.
+
+There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted and
+diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd of
+tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves over the
+whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent happiness to the
+"Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and
+Edith Fleming, who figured as essential parts of the social event. She
+meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in the inconceivability of their absence
+on Frances's Bay, wondered more than ever why their daughter Rosalind
+found them so impossible. She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the
+office, and their wives and children, and Anthony's secretary, Miss
+Lathom. If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she
+soon would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and
+guileless faces.
+
+Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from India for
+good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more dangerous than
+his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was genuinely invalided,
+who had come back from California for the last time and would never be
+sent out anywhere again.
+
+Dorothea had said: "Let's kill them all off in one awful day." Frances
+had said: "Yes, but we must do it decently. We must be kind to them,
+poor dears!"
+
+Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to Uncle
+Morrie and Uncle Bartie. That was the only burden she had laid on her
+children. It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth constrained
+them. They had received so much, and they had been let off so much; not
+one of them had inherited the taint that made Maurice and Emmeline
+Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased and irresponsible. They
+could afford to be pitiful and merciful.
+
+And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to be
+pitiful and merciful herself. She could even afford to be grateful to
+the poor dears. She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and Bartie as
+scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose affliction left her
+children clean. She thought of them more and more in this sacred and
+sacrificial character. At fifty-two Frances could be gentle over the
+things that had worried and irritated her at thirty-three. Like Anthony
+she was still young and strong through the youth and strength of
+her children.
+
+And the poor dears were getting weak and old. Grannie was seventy-nine,
+and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was forty-nine, and he
+looked sixty. Every year Frances was more acutely aware of their pathos,
+their futility, their mortality. They would be broken and gone so soon
+and so utterly, leaving no name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only
+living in the memories of her children who would remain.
+
+And, with an awful sense of mortality surrounding them, her children had
+learned that they must be kind because the old people would be gone
+while they endured and remained.
+
+This Saturday being the last of the season, they had all come; not only
+the Flemings, but the Jervises and Verekers and Norrises, and Uncle
+Bartie. The fine weather alone would have brought them.
+
+Bartie, more morose and irritable than ever, sat under the tree of
+Heaven and watched the triumphal progress of the Day. He scowled darkly
+and sourly at each group in turn; at the young men in white flannels
+playing tennis; at Mr. and Mr. Jervis and the Verekers and Norrises; at
+the Flemings, old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith, and
+the disgraceful Maurice, all five of them useless pensioners on his
+brother's bounty; Maurice a thing of battered, sodden flesh hanging
+loose on brittle bone, a rickety prop for the irreproachable summer
+suit bought with Anthony's money. He scowled at the tables covered with
+fine white linen, and at the costly silver and old china, at the
+sandwiches and cakes and ices, and the piled-up fruits and the claret
+cup and champagne cup glowing and shining in the tall glass jugs, and at
+the pretty maidservants going to and fro in their accomplished service.
+
+Bartie wondered how on earth Anthony managed it. His wonder was a savage
+joy to Bartie.
+
+Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed it, and
+Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr. Vereker and Mr.
+Norris, who held that a strike was a downright serious matter, also
+wondered. But they were sustained by their immense belief in Mr.
+Anthony. Mr. Anthony knew what he was doing; he always had known. A
+strike might be serious while it lasted, but it didn't last. And Mr.
+Nicholas was in the business now, and Mr. John was coming into it next
+year, and Mr. Nicholas might be married again by that time; and the
+chances were that the firm of Harrison and Harrison would last long
+enough to provide for a young Vereker and a still younger Norris.
+
+In spite of the strike, Mr. and Mrs. Vereker and Mr. and Mrs. Norris,
+like Frances and Anthony, were extraordinarily cheerful that afternoon.
+
+So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.
+
+"I can't think why I feel so happy," said Mrs. Vereker to Mrs. Norris.
+She was looking at her son George.
+
+"Nor I, either," said Miss Lathom, who was trying suddenly to look at
+nothing in particular.
+
+Miss Lathom lied and Mrs. Vereker lied; they knew perfectly well why
+they were happy. Each knew that the other lied; each knew that the other
+knew she knew; and neither of them could have said why she found it so
+necessary to lie.
+
+And to Frances this happiness of Mrs. Vereker, and of young Vereker and
+Miss Lathom was significant and delightful, as if she had been
+personally responsible for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and of
+something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up with Mr.
+and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind. She stared at the larkspurs as if they
+held the clue--Nicky's face appeared among the tall blue spires, Nicky's
+darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and yellow
+stripes--something to do with a White Cake--it must have been somebody's
+birthday. Now she had it--Mr. Jervis's cricket scarf. It was the day of
+Nicky's worst earache, the day when Mr. Vereker climbed the tree of
+Heaven--was it possible that Mr. Vereker had ever climbed that
+tree?--the day when Michael wouldn't go to the party--Rosalind's
+birthday.
+
+Eight candles burning for Rosalind. Why, it was nineteen years ago.
+Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only little boys.
+And look at them now!
+
+She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit, slender bodies
+of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously and well.
+
+"Dorothy is looking very handsome," Mrs. Jervis said. Yes, certainly
+Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before all things the
+male beauty of her sons. In Michael and Nicholas it had reached
+perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last, as Anthony's
+had lasted.
+
+She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many deaths,
+each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of babyhood, of
+childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of their young
+manhood would be with her for a long time. John would have it. John was
+only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had not hardened; his
+boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his mouth, and in his eyelids
+and the soft corners of his eyes; so that in John she could still see
+what Nicky had been.
+
+She had adored Anthony's body, as if she had foreseen that it would give
+her such sons as these; and in her children she had adored the small
+bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she foresaw the beauty of their
+manhood. These were the same bodies, the same faces that she had loved
+in them as children; nothing was blurred or twisted or overlaid.
+
+Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had foreseen
+him. Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other moments she was
+proud of his genius; but at this particular moment, sitting beside her
+friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was chiefly aware of his body.
+
+Michael's body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but austere
+and tranquil satisfaction. It was when she looked at her second son that
+something caught at her breath and held it. She saw him as the lover
+and bridegroom of Veronica. Her sense of his virility was terrible to
+her and delightful.
+
+Perhaps they were engaged already.
+
+And Frances was sorry for Mrs. Jervis, who had borne no sons, who had
+only borne one unattractive and unsatisfactory daughter. She used to be
+sorry for her because Rosalind was pink and fat and fluffy; she was
+sorry for her now because Rosalind was unsatisfactory. She was sorry for
+Mrs. Norris because her boy could never grow up like Michael or Nicholas
+or John. She was sorry for Mrs. Vereker because George, though he looked
+all right when he was by himself, became clumsy and common at once
+beside Michael and Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels;
+he played furiously and well; he played too furiously and too
+consciously well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp
+and excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang.
+
+Her arrogance nourished itself on these contrasts.
+
+Mrs. Jervis looked wistfully at the young men as they played. She looked
+still more wistfully at Dorothy.
+
+"What do you do," she said, "to keep your children with you?"
+
+"I do nothing," Frances said. "I don't try to keep them. I've never
+appealed to their feelings for my own purposes, or taken advantage of
+their affection, that's all.
+
+"They know that if they want to walk out of the house to-morrow, and
+stay out, they can. Nobody'll stop them."
+
+There was a challenging, reminiscent glint in Mr. Jervis's eyes, and his
+wife was significantly silent. Frances knew what they were thinking.
+
+"Nicky," she said, "walked out; but he came back again as soon as he
+was in trouble. Michael walks out and goes abroad every year; but he
+comes back again. Dorothy walks out, but she's never dreamed of not
+coming back again."
+
+"Of course, if you aren't afraid of taking risks," said Mr. Jervis.
+
+"I am afraid. But I've never shown it."
+
+"It's very strange that Dorothy hasn't married." Mrs. Jervis spoke. She
+derived comfort from the thought that Dorothy was eight-and-twenty and
+not married.
+
+"Dorothy," said Frances, "could marry to-morrow if she wanted to; but
+she doesn't want."
+
+She was sorry for her friend, but she really could not allow her that
+consolation.
+
+"Veronica is growing up very good-looking," said Mrs. Jervis then.
+
+But it was no use. Frances was aware that Veronica was grown up, and
+that she was good-looking, and that Nicky loved her; but Mrs. Jervis's
+shafts fell wide of all her vulnerable places. Frances was no
+longer afraid.
+
+"Veronica," she said, "is growing up very good." It was not the word she
+would have chosen, yet it was the only one she could think of as likely
+to convey to Mrs. Jervis what she wanted her to know, though it left her
+obtuseness without any sense of Veronica's mysterious quality.
+
+She herself had never tried to think of a word for it before; she was
+only driven to it now because she detected in her friend's tone a
+challenge and a warning. It was as if Rosalind's mother had said,
+extensively and with pointed reference to the facts: "Veronica is
+dangerous. Her mother has had adventures. She is grown-up and she is
+good-looking, and Nicky is susceptible to that sort of thing. If you
+don't look out he will be caught again. The only difference between
+Phyllis Desmond and Veronica is in their skins."
+
+So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs. Jervis
+should understand, once for all, that she was not in the least like her
+mother or like Phyllis Desmond.
+
+That was enough for Mrs. Jervis. But it was not enough for Frances, who
+found her mind wandering off from Rosalind's mother and looking for the
+word of words that would express her own meaning to her own
+satisfaction.
+
+Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation that
+flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs. Vereker
+and Mrs. Norris on her left.
+
+Veronica was good. But she was not wrapped up in other people's lives as
+Frances was wrapped up. She was wrapped up, not in herself, but in some
+life of her own that, as Frances made it out, had nothing in the world
+to do with anybody else's.
+
+And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were thinking,
+and what you were going to do, and what was happening to you. (She had
+really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky when Desmond made
+him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls that divide every soul
+from every other soul were made of some thin and porous stuff that let
+things through. And in this life of yours, for the moments that she
+shared it, she lived intensely, with uncanny delight and pain that were
+her own and not her own.
+
+And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile these
+extremes of penetration and detachment.
+
+She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that. He saw things.
+He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights. She supposed
+it was the Highland blood in both of them.
+
+Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr. Bartholomew was
+better. Frances said he never would be better till chemists were
+forbidden to advertise and the _British Medical Journal_ and _The
+Lancet_ were suppressed. Bartie would read them; and they supplied him
+with all sorts of extraordinary diseases.
+
+She thought: Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and Veronica
+in her innermost life was happy. She had been happy when she came back
+from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky cared for her,
+before Nicky knew it himself.
+
+Supposing she had known it all the time? But that, Frances said to
+herself, was nonsense. If she had known as much as all that, why should
+she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of it?
+Unless--supposing--it had been his suffering that she had nearly
+died of?
+
+Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr. Maurice
+looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that Morrie hadn't
+been fit for anything since he was in South Africa.
+
+Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme
+sustained itself. She thought: Then, Nicky had suffered. And Veronica
+was the only one who knew. She knew more about Nicky than Nicky's
+mother. This thought was disagreeable to Frances.
+
+It was all nonsense. She didn't really believe that these things
+happened. Yet, why not? Michael said they happened. Even Dorothy, who
+didn't believe in God and immortality or anything, believed that.
+
+She gave it up; it was beyond her; it bothered her.
+
+"Yes. Seventy-nine her last birthday."
+
+Mrs. Norris had said that Mrs. Fleming was wonderful.
+
+Frances thought: "It's wonderful what Veronica does to them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sets had changed. Nicholas and a girl friend of Veronica's played
+against George Vereker and Miss Lathom; John, with Mr. Jervis for his
+handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The very young Norris
+fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to distinguish himself by catching
+some ball in full flight as it went "out." It was a pure and high
+ambition, for he knew he was so young and unimportant that only the eyes
+of God and of his mother watched him.
+
+Michael had dropped out of it. He sat beside Dorothy under the tree of
+Heaven and watched Veronica.
+
+"Veronica's wonderful," he said. "Did you see that?"
+
+Dorothy had seen.
+
+Veronica had kept Aunt Emmeline quiet all afternoon. She bad made Bartie
+eat an ice under the impression that it would be good for him. And now
+she had gone with Morrie to the table where the drinks were, and had
+taken his third glass of champagne cup from him and made him drink
+lemonade instead.
+
+"How does she do it?" said Michael.
+
+"I don't know. She doesn't know herself. I used to think I could manage
+people, but I'm not in it with Ronny. She ought to be a wardress in a
+lunatic asylum."
+
+"Now look at that!"
+
+Veronica had returned to the group formed by Grannie and the Aunties and
+some strangers. The eyes of the four Fleming women had looked after her
+as she went from them; they looked towards her now as if some great
+need, some great longing were appeased by her return.
+
+Grannie made a place by her side for the young girl; she took her arm,
+the young white arm, bare from the elbow in its short sleeve, and made
+it lie across her knees. From time to time Grannie's yellow, withered
+hand stroked the smooth, warm white arm, or held it. Emmeline and Edith
+squatted on the grass at Veronica's feet; their worn faces and the worn
+face of Louie looked at her. They hung on her, fascinated, curiously
+tranquillized, as if they drank from her youth.
+
+"It's funny," Dorothy said, "when you think how they used to hate her."
+
+"It's horrible," said Michael.
+
+He got up and took Veronica away.
+
+He was lying at her feet now on the grass in the far corner of the lawn
+under the terrace.
+
+"Why do you go to them?" he said.
+
+"Because they want me."
+
+"You mustn't go when they want you. You mustn't let them get hold of
+you."
+
+"They don't get hold of me--nothing gets hold of me. I want to help
+them. They say it does them good to have me with them."
+
+"I should think it did do them good! They feed on you, Ronny. I can see
+it by the way they look at you. You'll die of them if you don't give
+it up."
+
+"Give what up?"
+
+"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it?
+Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to have
+been dead years ago.
+
+"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can remember
+them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin sacrificed to
+them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're making them go on."
+
+"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael, when
+you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without being happy,
+without loving.
+
+"They used to hate me because I'm Vera's daughter. They don't hate me
+now."
+
+"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires. They'll
+suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of them.
+
+"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a kid and
+Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky house they
+live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's ghost I funked. But
+I know now it wasn't. It was those four terrible women. They're ghosts.
+I thought you were afraid of ghosts."
+
+"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see how awful
+it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living people. Everybody
+afraid of them--not wanting them."
+
+"Michael--it would be better to be dead!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its appearance
+and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's friends played singles
+with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting the partners offered them
+and disdaining inferior antagonists; they played, Ellis against Mitchell
+and Monier-Owen against Nicholas.
+
+They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.
+
+It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could not go on
+for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had done so much for
+Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of Michael's Poems had made an
+end of that old animosity a year ago. Practically, they had had to
+choose between Bartie and Lawrence Stephen as the turning point of
+honour. Michael had made them see that it was possible to overvalue
+Bartie; also that it was possible to pay too high a price for a
+consecrated moral attitude. In all his life the wretched Bartie had
+never done a thing for any of them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather
+extraordinary success absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made
+his father bankrupt he would owe his very means of livelihood to
+Lawrence Stephen.
+
+Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most frightfully to
+go on living in the same house with people who disliked him.
+
+If, Michael said, they chose to dissociate themselves altogether from
+their eldest son and his career, very well. They could go on ignoring
+and tacitly insulting Mr. Stephen. He could understand their taking a
+consistently wrong-headed line like that; but so long as they had any
+regard, either for him or his career, he didn't see how they could very
+well keep it up any longer. He was sorry, of course, that his career had
+let them in for Stephen if they didn't like him; but there it was.
+
+And beyond a doubt it was there.
+
+"You might vindicate Bartie gloriously," Michael said, "by turning me
+out of the house and disinheriting me. But would it be worth while? I'm
+not asking you to condone Stephen's conduct--if you can't condone it;
+I'm asking you either to acknowledge _or_ repudiate your son's debts.
+
+"After all, if _he_ can condone your beastly treatment of him--I
+wouldn't like him if he was the swine you think him."
+
+And Anthony had appealed to Michael's mother.
+
+To his "Well, Frances, what do you think? Ought we or oughtn't we?" she
+had replied: "I think we ought to stand solid behind Michael."
+
+It was Michael's life that counted, for it was going on into a great
+future. Bartie would pass and Michael would remain.
+
+Their nervous advances had ended in a complete surrender to Stephen's
+charm.
+
+Vera and Stephen seemed to think that the way to show the sincerity and
+sweetness of their reconciliation was to turn up as often as possible on
+Frances's Day. They arrived always at the same hour, a little late; they
+came by the road and the front door, so that when Bartie saw them
+coming he could retreat through the garden door and the lane. The
+Flemings and the Jervises retreated with him; and presently, when it had
+had a good look at the celebrities, the rest of the party followed.
+
+This Saturday Frances's Day dwindled and melted away and closed, after
+its manner; only Vera and Stephen lingered. They stayed on talking to
+Michael long after everybody else had gone.
+
+Stephen said he had come to say good-bye to Michael's people and to make
+a proposal to Michael himself. He was going to Ireland.
+
+Vera interrupted him with passion.
+
+"He isn't. He hasn't any proposal to make. He hasn't come to say
+good-bye."
+
+Her restless, unhappy eyes turned to him incessantly, as if, more than
+ever, she was afraid that he would escape her, that he would go off God
+knew where.
+
+God knew where he was going, but Vera did not believe that he was going
+to Ireland. He had talked about going to Ireland for years, and he had
+never gone.
+
+Stephen looked as if he did not see her; as if he did not even see
+Michael very distinctly.
+
+"I'm going," he said, "to Ireland on Monday week, the third of August. I
+mayn't come back for long enough. I may not come back at all."
+
+"That's the sort of thing he keeps on saying."
+
+"I may not come back _at all_. So I want you to take over the _Review_
+for me. Ellis and my secretary will show you how it stands. You'll know
+what to do. I can trust you not to let it down."
+
+"He doesn't mean what he says, Michael. He's only saying it to frighten
+me. He's been holding it over me for years.
+
+"_Say_ you'll have nothing to do with it. _Say_ you won't touch his old
+_Review_."
+
+"Could I go to Ireland for you?"
+
+"You couldn't."
+
+"Why not? What do you think you're going to do there?"
+
+"I'm going to pull the Nationalists together, so that if there's civil
+war in Ireland, the Irish will have a chance to win. Thank God for
+Carson! He's given us the opportunity we wanted."
+
+"Tell him he's not to go, Michael. He won't listen to me, but he'll mind
+what you say."
+
+"I want to go instead of him."
+
+"You can't go instead of me. Nobody can go instead of me."
+
+"I can go with you."
+
+"You can't."
+
+"Larry, if you take Michael to Ireland, Anthony and Frances will never
+forgive you. _I_'ll never forgive you."
+
+"I'm not taking Michael to Ireland, I'm telling you. There's no reason
+why Michael should go to Ireland at all. It isn't _his_ country."
+
+"You needn't rub _that_ in," said Michael.
+
+"It isn't _yours_," said Vera. "Ireland doesn't want you. The
+Nationalists don't want you. You said yourself they've turned you out of
+Ireland. When you've lived in England all these years why should you go
+back to a place that doesn't want you?"
+
+"Because if Carson gets a free hand I see some chance of Ireland being a
+free country."
+
+Vera wailed and entreated. She said it showed how much he cared for her.
+It showed that he was tired of her. Why couldn't he say so and have
+done with it?
+
+"It's not," she said, "as if you could really do anything. You're a
+dreamer. Ireland has had enough of dreamers." And Stephen's eyes looked
+over her head, into the high branches of the tree of Heaven, as if he
+saw his dream shining clear through them like a moon.
+
+The opportunist could see nothing but his sublime opportunity.
+
+Michael went back with him to dine and talk it over. There was to be
+civil war in Ireland then?
+
+He thought: If only Lawrence would let him go with him. He wanted to go
+to Ireland. To join the Nationalists and fight for Ireland, fight for
+the freedom he was always dreaming about--_that_ would be a fine thing.
+It would be a finer thing than writing poems about Ireland.
+
+Lawrence Stephen went soberly and steadily through the affair of the
+_Review_, explaining things to Michael. He wanted this done, and this.
+And over and over again Michael's voice broke through his instructions.
+Why couldn't he go to Ireland instead of Lawrence? Or, if Lawrence
+wouldn't let him go instead of him, he might at least take him with him.
+He didn't want to stay at home editing the _Review_. Ellis or Mitchell
+or Monier-Owen would edit it better than he could. Even the wretched
+Wadham would edit it just as well. He wanted to go to Ireland and fight.
+
+But Lawrence wouldn't let him go. He wasn't going to have the boy's
+blood on his hands. His genius and his youth were too precious.
+
+Besides, Ireland was not his country.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was past ten o'clock. Frances was alone in the drawing-room. She sat
+by the open window and waited and watched.
+
+The quiet garden lay open to her sight. Only the inner end of the
+farther terrace, under the orchard wall, was hidden by a high screen
+of privet.
+
+It seemed hours to Frances since she had seen Nicky and Veronica go down
+the lawn on to the terrace.
+
+And then Anthony had gone out too. She was vexed with Anthony. She could
+see him sitting under his ash-tree, her tree of heaven; his white
+shirt-front gave out an oblong gleam like phosphorous in the darkness
+under the tree. She was watching to see that he didn't get up and go on
+to the terrace. Anthony had no business in the garden at all. He was
+catching cold in it. He had sneezed twice. She wanted Nicholas and
+Veronica to have the garden to themselves to-night, and the perfect
+stillness of the twilight to themselves, every tree and every little
+leaf and flower keeping quiet for them; and there was Anthony sneezing.
+
+She was restless and impatient, as if she carried the burden of their
+passion in her own heart.
+
+Presently she could bear it no longer. She got up and called to Anthony
+to come in. He came obediently. "What are you thinking of," she said,
+"planting yourself out there and sneezing? I could see your shirt-front
+a mile off. It's indecent of you."
+
+"Why indecent?"
+
+"Because Nicky and Veronica are out there."
+
+"I don't see them."
+
+"Do you suppose they want you to see them?"
+
+She turned the electric light on full, to make darkness of their
+twilight out there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicky and Veronica talked together in the twilight, sitting on the seat
+under the orchard well behind the privet screen. They did not see
+Anthony sitting under the ash-tree, they did not hear him, they did not
+hear Frances calling to him to come in. They were utterly unaware of
+Frances and Anthony.
+
+"Ronny," he said, "did Michael say anything to you?"
+
+"When?"
+
+"This afternoon, when he made you come with him here?"
+
+"How do you mean, 'say anything'?"
+
+"You know what I mean."
+
+"_Mick_?"
+
+"Yes. Did he ask you to marry him?"
+
+"No. He said a lot of funny things, but he didn't say that. He
+wouldn't."
+
+"Why wouldn't he?"
+
+"Because--he just wouldn't."
+
+"Well, he says he understands you."
+
+"Then," said Veronica conclusively, "of course he wouldn't."
+
+"Yes; but he says _I_ don't."
+
+"Dear Nicky, you understand me when nobody else does. You always did."
+
+"Yes, when we were kids. But supposing _now_ I ever didn't, would it
+matter? You see, I'm stupid, and caring--caring awfully--might make me
+stupider. _Have_ people got to understand each other?"
+
+To that she replied astonishingly, "Are you quite sure you understand
+about Ferdie?"
+
+"Ferdie?"
+
+"Yes." She turned her face full to him. "I don't know whether you know
+about it. _I_ didn't till Mother told me the other day. I'm
+Ferdie's daughter.
+
+"Did you know?"
+
+"Oh, Lord, yes. I've known it for--oh, simply ever so long."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Dorothy, I think. But I guessed it because of something he said once
+about seeing ghosts."
+
+"I wonder if you know how I feel about it? I want you to understand
+that. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I'm proud. I'm _glad_ I'm Ferdie's
+daughter, not Bartie's.... I'd take his name, so that everybody should
+know I was his daughter, only that I like Uncle Anthony's name best. I'm
+glad Mother loved him."
+
+"So am I, Ronny. I know I shouldn't have liked Bartie's daughter.
+Bartie's daughter wouldn't have been you."
+
+He took her in his arms and held her face against his face. And it was
+as if Desmond had never been.
+
+A little while ago he had hated Desmond because she had come before
+Veronica; she had taken what belonged to Veronica, the first tremor of
+his passion, the irrecoverable delight and surprise. And now he knew
+that, because he had not loved her, she had taken nothing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"Do you love _me_?"
+
+"You know I love you."
+
+"You know. You know."
+
+What they said was new and wonderful to them as if nobody before them
+had ever thought of it.
+
+Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the birch-trees,
+and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in each other's arms and
+said the same thing in the same words: "Do you love me?" "You know I
+love you!" over and over, in voices drowsy and thick with love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And that's that
+damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to wait goodness knows
+how long. Ages we may have to."
+
+"I'd wait all my life if I could have you in the last five seconds of
+it. And if I couldn't, I'd still wait."
+
+And presently Veronica remembered Michael.
+
+"Why did you ask me whether Mick had said anything?"
+
+"Because I thought you ought to know about it before you--Besides, if he
+_had_, we should have had to wait a bit before we told him."
+
+It seemed that there was nothing to prevent them marrying to-morrow if
+they liked. The strike, Anthony said, couldn't hit him as badly as
+all that.
+
+He and Frances sat up till long past midnight, talking about their
+plans, and the children's plans. It was all settled. The first week in
+August they would go down to Morfe for the shooting. They would stay
+there till the first week in September. Nicky and Veronica would be
+married the first week in October. And they would go to France and
+Belgium and Germany for their honeymoon.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+They did not go down to Morfe the first week in August for the shooting.
+
+Neither did Lawrence Stephen go to Ireland on Monday, the third. At the
+moment when he should have been receiving the congratulations of the
+Dublin Nationalists after his impassioned appeal for militant
+consolidation, Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson were shaking hands
+dramatically in the House of Commons. Stephen's sublime opportunity, the
+civil war, had been snatched from him by the unforeseen.
+
+And there was no chance of Nicky and Veronica going to Belgium and
+France and Germany for their honeymoon.
+
+For within nine days of Frances's Day Germany had declared war on France
+and Russia, and was marching over the Belgian frontier on her way
+to Paris.
+
+Frances, aroused at last to realization of the affairs of nations,
+asked, like several million women, "What does it mean?"
+
+And Anthony, like several million men, answered, "It means Armageddon."
+Like several million people, they both thought he was saying something
+as original as it was impressive, something clear and final and
+descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative people went about
+saying it to each other. The sound of the word thrilled them,
+intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that was at the same time,
+in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them with a solemn and sombre
+passion. They said "Armageddon. It means Armageddon." Yet nobody knew
+and nobody asked or thought of asking what Armageddon meant.
+
+"Shall We come into it?" said Frances. She was thinking of the Royal
+Navy turning out to the last destroyer to save England from invasion; of
+the British Army most superfluously prepared to defend England from the
+invader, who, after all, could not invade; of Indian troops pouring into
+England if the worst came to the worst. She had the healthy British mind
+that refuses and always has refused to acknowledge the possibility of
+disaster. Yet she asked continually, "Would England be drawn in?" She
+was thankful that none of her sons had gone into the Army or the Navy.
+Whoever else was in, they would be out of it.
+
+At first Anthony said, "No. Of course England wouldn't be drawn in."
+
+Then, on the morning of England's ultimatum, the closing of the Stock
+Exchange and the Banks made him thoughtful, and he admitted that it
+looked as if England might be drawn in after all. The long day, without
+any business for him and Nicholas, disturbed him. There was a nasty,
+hovering smell of ruin in the air. But there was no panic. The closing
+of the Banks was only a wise precaution against panic. And by evening,
+as the tremendous significance of the ultimatum sank into him, he said
+definitively that England would not be drawn in.
+
+Then Drayton, whom they had not seen for months (since he had had his
+promotion) telephoned to Dorothy to come and dine with him at his club
+in Dover Street. Anthony missed altogether the significance of _that_.
+
+He had actually made for himself an after-dinner peace in which coffee
+could be drunk and cigarettes smoked as if nothing were happening
+to Europe.
+
+"England," he said, "will not be drawn in, because her ultimatum will
+stop the War. There won't be any Armageddon."
+
+"Oh, won't there!" said Michael. "And I can tell you there won't be much
+left of us after it's over."
+
+He had been in Germany and he knew. He carried himself with a sort of
+stern haughtiness, as one who knew better than any of them. And yet his
+words conveyed no picture to his brain, no definite image of anything
+at all.
+
+But in Nicholas's brain images gathered fast, one after another; they
+thickened; clear, vivid images with hard outlines. They came slowly but
+with order and precision. While the others talked he had been silent and
+very grave.
+
+"_Some_ of us'll be left," he said. "But it'll take us all our time."
+
+Anthony looked thoughtfully at Nicholas. A sudden wave of realization
+beat up against his consciousness and receded.
+
+"Well," he said, "we shall know at midnight."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An immense restlessness came over them.
+
+At a quarter-past eight Dorothy telephoned from her club in Grafton
+street. Frank had had to leave her suddenly. Somebody had sent for him.
+And if they wanted to see the sight of their lives they were to come
+into town at once. St. James's was packed with people from Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace. It was like nothing on earth, and they mustn't miss
+it. She'd wait for them in Grafton Street till a quarter to nine, but
+not a minute later.
+
+Nicky got out his big four-seater Morss car. They packed themselves into
+it, all six of them somehow, and he drove them into London. They had a
+sense of doing something strange and memorable and historic. Dorothy,
+picked up at her club, showed nothing but a pleasurable excitement. She
+gave no further information about Frank. He had had to go off and see
+somebody. What did he think? He thought what he had always thought; only
+he wouldn't talk about it.
+
+Dorothy was not inclined to talk about it either. The Morss was caught
+in a line blocked at the bottom of Albemarle Street by two streams of
+cars, mixed with two streams of foot passengers, that poured steadily
+from Piccadilly into St. James's Street.
+
+Michael and Dorothy got out and walked. Nicholas gave up his place to
+Anthony and followed with Veronica.
+
+Their restlessness had been a part of the immense restlessness of the
+crowd. They were drawn, as the crowd was drawn; they went as the crowd
+went, up and down, restlessly, from Trafalgar Square and Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace; from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall and Trafalgar
+Square. They drifted down Parliament Street to Westminster and back
+again. An hour ago the drifting, nebulous crowd had split, torn asunder
+between two attractions; its two masses had wheeled away, one to the
+east and the other to the west; they had gathered themselves together,
+one at each pole of the space it now traversed. The great meeting in
+Trafalgar Square balanced the multitude that had gravitated towards
+Buckingham Palace, to see the King and Queen come out on their balcony
+and show themselves to their people.
+
+And as the edges of the two masses gave way, each broke and scattered,
+and was mixed again with the other. Like a flood, confined and shaken,
+it surged and was driven back and surged again from Whitehall to
+Buckingham Palace, from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall. It looked for an
+outlet in the narrow channels of the side-streets, or spread itself over
+the flats of the Green Park, only to return restlessly upon itself,
+sucked back by the main current in the Mall.
+
+It was as if half London had met there for Bank Holiday. Part of this
+crowd was drunk; it was orgiastic; it made strange, fierce noises, like
+the noises of one enormous, mystically excited beast; here and there,
+men and women, with inflamed and drunken faces, reeled in each other's
+arms; they wore pink paper feathers in their hats. Some, only half
+intoxicated, flicked at each other with long streamers of pink and white
+paper, carried like scourges on small sticks. These were the inspired.
+
+But the great body of the crowd was sober. It went decorously in a long
+procession, young men with their sweethearts, friends, brothers and
+sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers with their children;
+none, or very few, went alone that night.
+
+It was an endless procession of faces; grave and thoughtful faces;
+uninterested, respectable faces; faces of unmoved integrity; excited
+faces; dreaming, wondering, bewildered faces; faces merely curious, or
+curiously exalted, slightly ecstatic, open-mouthed, fascinated by each
+other and by the movements and the lights; laughing, frivolous faces,
+and faces utterly vacant and unseeing.
+
+On every other breast there was a small Union Jack pinned; every other
+hand held and waggled a Union Jack. The Union Jack flew from the engine
+of every other automobile. In twelve hours, out of nowhere, thousands
+and thousands of flags sprang magically into being; as if for years
+London had been preparing for this day.
+
+And in and out of this crowd the train of automobiles with their flags
+dashed up and down the Mall for hours, appearing and disappearing.
+Intoxicated youths with inflamed faces, in full evening dress, squatted
+on the roofs of taxi-cabs or rode astride on the engines of their cars,
+waving flags.
+
+All this movement, drunken, orgiastic, somnambulistic, mysteriously
+restless, streamed up and down between two solemn and processional lines
+of lights, two solemn and processional lines of trees, lines that
+stretched straight from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace in a recurrent
+pattern of trees and lamps, dark trees, twilit trees, a lamp and a tree
+shining with a metallic unnatural green; and, at the end of the avenue,
+gilded gates and a golden-white facade.
+
+The crowd was drifting now towards the Palace. Michael and Dorothea,
+Nicholas and Veronica, went with it. In this eternal perambulation they
+met people that they knew; Stephen and Vera; Mitchell, Monier-Owen;
+Uncle Morrie and his sisters. Anthony, looking rather solemn, drove
+past them in his car. It was like impossible, grotesque encounters in
+a dream.
+
+Outside the Palace the crowd moved up and down without rest; it drifted
+and returned; it circled round and round the fountain. In the open
+spaces the intoxicated motor-cars and taxi-cabs darted and tore with the
+folly of moths and the fury of destroyers. They stung the air with their
+hooting. Flags, intoxicated flags, still hung from their engines. They
+came flying drunkenly out of the dark, like a trumpeting swarm of
+enormous insects, irresistibly, incessantly drawn to the lights of the
+Palace, hypnotized by the golden-white facade.
+
+Suddenly, Michael's soul revolted.
+
+"If this demented herd of swine is a great people going into a great
+war, God help us! Beasts--it's not as if _their_ bloated skins were
+likely to be punctured."
+
+He called back over his shoulders to the others.
+
+"Let's get out of this. If we don't I shall be sick."
+
+He took Dorothy by her arm and shouldered his way out.
+
+The water had ceased playing in the fountain.
+
+Nicholas and Veronica stood by the fountain. The water in the basin was
+green like foul sea-water. The jetsam of the crowd floated there. A
+small child leaned over the edge of the basin and fished for Union Jacks
+in the filthy pool. Its young mother held it safe by the tilted edge of
+its petticoats. She looked up at them and smiled. They smiled back again
+and turned away.
+
+It was quiet on the south side by the Barracks. Small, sober groups of
+twos and threes strolled there, or stood with their faces pressed close
+against the railings, peering into the barrack yard. Motionless,
+earnest and attentive, they stared at the men in khaki moving about on
+the other side of the railings. They were silent, fascinated by the men
+in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing, they stared at them with an
+awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in khaki stared back, proud,
+self-conscious, as men who know that the hour is great and that it is
+their hour.
+
+"Nicky," Veronica said, "I wish Michael wouldn't say things like that."
+
+"He's dead right, Ronny. That isn't the way to take it, getting drunk
+and excited, and rushing about making silly asses of themselves. They
+_are_ rather swine, you know."
+
+"Yes; but they're pathetic. Can't you see how pathetic they are? Nicky,
+I believe I love the swine--even the poor drunken ones with the pink
+paper feathers--just because they're English; because awful things are
+going to happen to them, and they don't know it. They're English."
+
+"You think God's made us all like that? He _hasn't_."
+
+They found Anthony in the Mall, driving up and down, looking for them.
+He had picked up Dorothy and Aunt Emmeline and Uncle Morrie.
+
+"We're going down to the Mansion House," he said, "to hear the
+Proclamation. Will you come?"
+
+But Veronica and Nicholas were tired of crowds, even of historic crowds.
+Anthony drove off with his car-load, and they went home.
+
+"I never saw Daddy so excited," Nicky said.
+
+But Anthony was not excited. He had never felt calmer or cooler in his
+life.
+
+He returned some time after midnight. By that time it had sunk into him.
+Germany _had_ defied the ultimatum and England _had_ declared war
+on Germany.
+
+He said it was only what was to be foreseen. He had known all the time
+that it would happen--really.
+
+The tension of the day of the ultimatum had this peculiar psychological
+effect that all over England people who had declared up to the last
+minute that there would be no War were saying the same thing as Anthony
+and believing it.
+
+Michael was disgusted with the event that had put an end to the Irish
+Revolution. It was in this form that he conceived his first grudge
+against the War.
+
+This emotion of his was like some empty space of horror opened up
+between him and Nicholas; Nicky being the only one of his family who was
+as yet aware of its existence.
+
+For the next three days, Nicholas, very serious and earnest, shut
+himself up in his workshop at the bottom of the orchard and laboured
+there, putting the last touches to the final, perfect, authoritative
+form of the Moving Fortress, the joint creation of his brain and
+Drayton's, the only experiment that had survived the repeated onslaughts
+of the Major's criticism. The new model was three times the size of the
+lost original; it was less like a battleship and more like a racing-car
+and a destroyer. It was his and Drayton's last word on the subject of
+armaments.
+
+It was going to the War Office, this time, addressed to the right
+person, and accompanied by all sorts of protective introductions, and
+Drayton blasting its way before it with his new explosive.
+
+In those three days Nick found an immense distraction in his Moving
+Fortress. It also served to blind his family to his real intentions. He
+knew that his real intentions could not be kept from them very long.
+Meanwhile the idea that he was working on something made them happy.
+When Frances saw him in his overalls she smiled and said: "Nicky's got
+_his_ job, anyhow." John came and looked at him through the window of
+the workshop and laughed.
+
+"Good old Nicky," he said. "Doing his bit!"
+
+In those three days John went about with an air of agreeable excitement.
+Or you came upon him sitting in solitary places like the dining-room,
+lost in happy thought. Michael said of him that he was unctuous. He
+exuded a secret joy and satisfaction. John had acquired a sudden
+remarkable maturity. He shone on each member of his family with
+benevolence and affection, as if he were its protector and consoler, and
+about to confer on it some tremendous benefit.
+
+"Look at Don-Don," Michael said. "The bloodthirsty little brute. He's
+positively enjoying the War."
+
+"You might leave me alone," said Don-Don. "I shan't have it to enjoy for
+long."
+
+He was one of those who believed that the War would be over in four
+months.
+
+Michael, pledged to secrecy, came and looked at the Moving Fortress. He
+was interested and intelligent; he admired that efficiency of Nicky's
+that was so unlike his own.
+
+Yet, he wondered, after all, was it so unlike? He, too, was aiming at an
+art as clean and hard and powerful as Nicky's, as naked of all blazonry
+and decoration, an art which would attain its objective by the simplest,
+most perfect adjustment of means to ends.
+
+And Anthony was proud of that hidden wonder locked behind the door of
+the workshop in the orchard. He realized that his son Nicholas had taken
+part in a great and important thing. He was prouder of Nicholas than he
+had been of Michael.
+
+And Michael knew it.
+
+Nicky's brains could be used for the service of his country.
+
+But Michael's? Anthony said to himself that there wasn't any sense--any
+sense that he could endure to contemplate--in which Michael's brains
+could be of any use to his country. When Anthony thought of the
+mobilization of his family for national service, Michael and Michael's
+brains were a problem that he put behind him for the present and refused
+to contemplate. There would be time enough for Michael later.
+
+Anthony was perfectly well aware of his own one talent, the talent which
+had made "Harrison and Harrison" the biggest timber-importing firm in
+England. If there was one thing he understood it was organization. If
+there was one thing he could not tolerate it was waste of good material,
+the folly of forcing men and women into places they were not fit for. He
+had let his eldest son slip out of the business without a pang, or with
+hardly any pang. He had only taken Nicholas into it as an experiment.
+It was on John that he relied to inherit it and carry it farther.
+
+As a man of business he approved of the advertised formula: "Business as
+Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which England expected
+every man to do was to stay in the place he was most fitted for and to
+go where he was most wanted. Nothing but muddle and disaster could
+follow any departure from this rule.
+
+It was fitting that Frances and Veronica should do Red Cross work. It
+was fitting that Dorothy should help to organize the relief of the
+Belgium refugees. It was fitting that John should stay at home and carry
+on the business, and that he, Anthony, should enlist when he had settled
+John into his place. It was, above all, fitting that Nicky should devote
+himself to the invention and manufacture of armaments. He could not
+conceive anything more wantonly and scandalously wasteful than a system
+that could make any other use of Nicky's brains. He thanked goodness
+that, with a European War upon us, such a system, if it existed, would
+not be allowed to live a day.
+
+As for Michael, it might be fitting later--very much later--perhaps. If
+Michael wanted to volunteer for the Army then, and if it were necessary,
+he would have no right to stop him. But it would not be necessary.
+England was going to win this War on the sea and not on land. Michael
+was practically safe.
+
+And behind Frances's smile, and John's laughter, and Michael's
+admiration, and Anthony's pride there was the thought: "Whatever
+happens, Nicky will he safe."
+
+And the model of the Moving Fortress was packed up--Veronica and Nicky
+packed it--and it was sent under high protection to the War Office. And
+Nicky unlocked the door of his workshop and rested restlessly from
+his labour.
+
+And there was a call for recruits, and for still more recruits.
+
+Westminster Bridge became a highway for regiments marching to battle.
+The streets were parade-grounds for squad after squad of volunteers in
+civilian clothes, self-conscious and abashed under the eyes of the
+men in khaki.
+
+And Michael said: "This is the end of all the arts. Artists will not be
+allowed to exist except as agents for the recruiting sergeant.
+We're dished."
+
+That was the second grudge he had against the War. It killed the arts in
+the very hour of their renaissance. "Eccentricities" by Morton Ellis,
+with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, and the "New Poems" of Michael
+Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to have come out
+in September. But it was not conceivable that they should come out.
+
+At the first rumour of the ultimatum Michael and Ellis had given
+themselves up for lost.
+
+Liege fell and Namur was falling.
+
+And the call went on for recruits, and for still more recruits. And
+Nicky in five seconds had destroyed his mother's illusions and the whole
+fabric of his father's plans.
+
+It was one evening when they were in the drawing-room, sitting up after
+Veronica had gone to bed.
+
+"I hope you won't mind, Father," he said; "but I'm going to enlist
+to-morrow."
+
+He did not look at his father's face. He looked at his mother's. She was
+sitting opposite him on the couch beside Dorothy. John balanced himself
+on the head of the couch with his arm round his mother's shoulder. Every
+now and then he stooped down and rubbed his cheek thoughtfully
+against her hair.
+
+A slight tremor shook her sensitive, betraying upper lip; then she
+looked back at Nicholas and smiled.
+
+Dorothy set her mouth hard, unsmiling.
+
+Anthony had said nothing. He stared before him at Michael's foot, thrust
+out and tilted by the crossing of his knees. Michael's foot, with its
+long, arched instep, fascinated Anthony. He seemed to be thinking: "If I
+look at it long enough I may forget what Nicky has said."
+
+"I hope you won't mind, Father; but I'm enlisting too."
+
+John's voice was a light, high echo of Nicky's.
+
+With a great effort Anthony roused himself from his contemplation of
+Michael's foot.
+
+"I--can't--see--that my minding--or not minding--has anything--to
+do--with it."
+
+He brought his words out slowly and with separate efforts, as if they
+weighed heavily on his tongue. "We've got to consider what's best for
+the country all round, and I doubt if either of you is called upon
+to go."
+
+"Some of us have got to go," said Nicky.
+
+"Quite so. But I don't think it ought to be you, Nicky; or John,
+either."
+
+"I suppose," said Michael, "you mean it ought to be me."
+
+"I don't mean anything of the sort. One out of four's enough."
+
+"One out of four? Well then--"
+
+"That only leaves me to fight," said Dorothy.
+
+"I wasn't thinking of you, Michael. Or of Dorothy."
+
+They all looked at him where he sat, upright and noble, in his chair,
+and most absurdly young.
+
+Dorothy said under her breath: "Oh, you darling Daddy."
+
+"_You_ won't be allowed to go, anyhow," said John to his father. "You
+needn't think it."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well--." He hadn't the heart to say: "Because you're too old."
+
+"Nicky's brains will be more use to the country than my old carcass."
+
+Nicky thought: "You're the very last of us that can be spared." But he
+couldn't say it. The thing was so obvious. All he said was: "It's out of
+the question, your going."
+
+"Old Nicky's out of the question, if you like," said John. "He's going
+to be married. He ought to be thinking of his wife and children."
+
+"Of course he ought," said Anthony. "Whoever goes first, it isn't
+Nicky."
+
+"You ought to think of Mummy, Daddy ducky; and you ought to think of
+_us_," said Dorothy.
+
+"I," said John, "haven't got anybody to think of. I'm not going to be
+married, and I haven't any children."
+
+"I haven't got a wife and children yet," said Nicky.
+
+"You've got Veronica. You ought to think of her."
+
+"I am thinking of her. You don't suppose Veronica'd stop me if I wanted
+to go? Why, she wouldn't look at me if I didn't want to go."
+
+Suddenly he remembered Michael.
+
+"I mean," he said, "after my _saying_ that I was going."
+
+Their eyes met. Michael's flickered. He knew that Nicky was thinking of
+him.
+
+"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.
+
+"Of course she knows. _You_ aren't going to try to stop me, Mother?"
+
+"No," she said. "I'm not going to try to stop you--this time."
+
+She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would be safe
+now, with the Army in India."
+
+One by one they got up and said "Good night" to each other.
+
+But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.
+
+He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not enlisting. At
+any rate, _not yet_. Don't worry about Don and Daddy. They won't take
+Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his heart that he doesn't know
+about. He's going to be jolly well sold, poor chap. And they won't take
+the guv'nor because he's too old; though the dear old thing thinks he
+can bluff them into it because he doesn't look it.
+
+"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned, the War's
+a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the Army. You know
+how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now I'm going in and
+nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me out. Soon they'll all
+be as pleased as Punch about it.
+
+"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want to stick
+bayonets into German tummies, just _because_ they're so large and oodgy.
+You'd think of that first and all the time and afterwards. And I shan't
+think of it at all.
+
+"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons that I
+can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect yourself if
+you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I stayed out."
+
+"I wonder," Michael said, "if you really see it."
+
+"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing chaps. You
+seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves."
+
+When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really does see?
+Or if he made it all up?"
+
+They had not said to each other all that they had really meant. Of
+Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered vividly,
+"Not yet."
+
+Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up between him
+and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the two words:
+"Not yet."
+
+
+
+XX
+
+It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on
+account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn't
+know about.
+
+The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was under
+thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if he'd left it
+at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than most of 'em when he
+was stripped. But they'd given him so good an innings that the poor old
+thing got above himself, and spun them a yarn about his hair having gone
+grey from a recent shock. That dished him. They said they knew that sort
+of hair; they'd been seeing a lot of it lately.
+
+Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape," and
+declared that if that was the way things were going to be managed it was
+a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He said the man who
+examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know his own rotten
+business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to tell him they didn't
+want him dropping down dead when he went into action, or fainting from
+sheer excitement after they'd been to the trouble and expense of
+training him. As if he'd be likely to do a damn silly thing like that.
+He'd never been excited in his life. It was enough to _give_ him
+heart-disease.
+
+So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the
+ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they learned to their
+disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for
+Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.
+
+At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business by a
+sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the War would
+be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal
+significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate
+message for him was that business must be attended to. He had not
+attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay
+there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories.
+He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the
+glamour of the Front. The particular business in hand had great issues
+and a fascination of its own.
+
+And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a
+brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and
+abstracted soul.
+
+And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through the first
+courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind
+and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in
+earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder
+every day.
+
+And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael widened.
+
+With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's entire
+family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances
+and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red
+Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be
+sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained
+and ready when the moment of the summons came. Strong young girls
+hustled for the best places at the ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly
+women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless
+ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained
+by their extraordinary illusion.
+
+Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with
+bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if nobody
+else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral
+excitement, while still struggling to find each other's arteries,
+declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no earthly reason
+why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency
+class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage
+round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor. He got mixed up with
+his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a
+lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders
+to go to the Front.
+
+They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each other's
+hopes.
+
+For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had
+ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a curious
+gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael's
+study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the
+queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith
+over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline's head,
+and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie's little, clumsy,
+pinching fingers. It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and
+charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.
+
+And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out
+her lower lip at them.
+
+"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you
+might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every woman in
+England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have enough socks
+for his Army."
+
+Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted conspicuously, as a
+protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action
+an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even
+Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be
+unravelled overnight, to save the wool.
+
+"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting khaki!"
+
+Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as
+if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were
+interfering with them.
+
+Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men.
+The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers
+received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during
+the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the
+Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and
+disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late
+enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to
+its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture
+and embarassment.
+
+The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into
+the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and
+went into uniform.
+
+And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and
+puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance
+as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it.
+Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of
+the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon
+Street Station.
+
+She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street
+Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery
+of Belgium poured and was congested.
+
+Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of
+her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with
+the scene.
+
+Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred
+transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that
+was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light,
+filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes,
+hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and
+large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a
+ghastly, ruinous life.
+
+The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the
+immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of carriages packed tight
+with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and
+there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in
+the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.
+
+For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding wounds
+and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this one
+incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon Street
+Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the sequences of
+which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of men, women and
+children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they were staggering under
+those bundles along their straight, flat roads between the everlasting
+rows of poplars; their towns and villages flamed and smoked behind them;
+some of them, goaded like tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at
+their backs--yesterday. And this morning they were here, brave and gay,
+smiling at Dorothea as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their
+small children in her arms.
+
+And they were still proud of themselves.
+
+A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a large
+pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other a cage with
+a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and smiled, proud of
+herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A Belgium boy carried a
+paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He grinned at Dorothea, proud of
+himself because he had saved his grandfather. A young Flemish peasant
+woman pushed back the shawl that covered her baby's face to show her how
+pretty he was; she laughed because she had borne him and saved him.
+
+And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women and girls
+idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in trying to throw
+himself into a moving train because he thought his lost mother was in
+it. The ring screening the agony of a woman giving birth to her child on
+the platform. A death in the train; stiff, upturned feet at the end of a
+stretcher that the police-ambulance carried away.
+
+And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect
+safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and
+bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous
+longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the shells burst,
+and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads
+between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and
+flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger. She was not
+feeling anything now except the shame of her immunity.
+
+She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I were
+dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."
+
+Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were in
+Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could walk."
+
+Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians, because it
+was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate, were safe. Her
+father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not in it--yet; though
+of course he would be in it some time. She tried not to think too much
+about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next six months. And Frank was
+safe. Frank was training recruits. He had told her he might be kept
+indefinitely at that infernal job. But for that he would be fighting
+now. He wanted her to be sorry for him; and she was sorry for him. And
+she was glad too.
+
+One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till
+dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she found
+him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting for her by
+himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.
+
+"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait up here."
+
+She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust
+on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and
+hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.
+
+He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was the first
+time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose
+felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust
+and dirt of her; and he smiled. His smile had none of the cynical
+derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant
+suffragist.
+
+"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe me now."
+
+"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.
+
+"Not _yet_--worse luck."
+
+"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas, or
+what?"
+
+"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair off?"
+
+"They might. They might do anything. This is a most extraordinary war."
+
+"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."
+
+"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in him.
+
+"What did you think?"
+
+"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like business.
+Do you really mean it? Are you really going to Flanders?"
+
+"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she
+wasn't going _some_where?"
+
+He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And then:
+"It makes you look about eighteen."
+
+"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."
+
+"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that you're not
+eighteen? You're eight and twenty."
+
+"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you did,
+you wouldn't say so."
+
+"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made a
+pretty mess of each other's lives."
+
+"Have I made a mess of _your_ life?'
+
+"A beastly mess."
+
+"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known. You know
+I wouldn't.
+
+"But one doesn't know things."
+
+"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully well; but
+not the things that matter."
+
+"Well--but what could I do?" she said.
+
+"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married me. And
+we would have had three years of each other."
+
+"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't manage
+it."
+
+"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.
+
+"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I get
+leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three days."
+
+"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three
+days--No, it wasn't worth while.
+
+"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn't
+change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change. So, you see,
+it's got to be one thing or another."
+
+And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not worth
+while?
+
+"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There really
+isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what you like and
+do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I shan't care if
+you'll only marry me."
+
+"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love me. You
+never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all that."
+
+"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine years--ten
+years?"
+
+"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go off and
+get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.
+
+"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my
+face--filthy--you mustn't--"
+
+"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't care."
+
+The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He
+said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she
+keeps it on _now_!"
+
+She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a
+Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over
+her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her
+shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast
+to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the
+youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.
+
+He said to himself, "She _shall_ come alive. She _shall_ feel. She
+_shall want_ me. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten
+years ago."
+
+Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands.
+And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing something
+happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him
+now--to-night."
+
+Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what
+she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had
+made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.
+
+She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me if he
+knew."
+
+Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and
+hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.
+
+"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there
+was anything that could have prevented it."
+
+"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it
+made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the
+difference. And there we were."
+
+"It didn't--really."
+
+She shook her head. "We thought it did."
+
+"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?
+
+"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it.
+I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."
+
+"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that we seemed
+to go wrong.
+
+"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand
+going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I
+didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or
+wondered what you were feeling? _That's_ what put me off. It hurt so
+atrociously that I couldn't say anything.
+
+"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about nothing
+else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.
+
+"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't true. I
+was listening like anything."
+
+"Darling--what did I tell you?"
+
+"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your adventure, or
+something."
+
+"My adventure?"
+
+"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I
+couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's
+beyond me now."
+
+"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"
+
+"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something big and
+important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to bother me. I kept
+on trying to get it, and not getting it."
+
+"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully big and
+important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had happened to
+somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."
+
+"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of that
+business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."
+
+"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the War."
+
+"You're not swallowed up."
+
+"Perhaps I shall be."
+
+"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you to know
+that I understand what you were driving at. It was this way, wasn't it?
+You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You couldn't keep out of
+it any more than I can keep out of this War."
+
+"You couldn't stay out just for me any more than I can stay out for just
+you."
+
+"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way you were
+in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."
+
+"How clever of you," she said, "to see it!"
+
+"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a war on.
+We've both had to pay for my stupidity."
+
+"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see, or
+risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."
+
+"Well, anyhow, we've got this evening."
+
+"We haven't. I've got to drive Belgians from nine till past midnight."
+
+"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married in. I
+say--how about to-morrow evening?"
+
+"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know who'll
+drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married in, too."
+
+She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out. If he
+is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."
+
+It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch at their
+happiness and secure it, before their hour came.
+
+She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the British line
+was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of course it would
+recover. We always began like that. We went back to go forwards faster,
+when we got into our stride.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next evening, Thursday, the girl she knew drove for Dorothea.
+
+When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her with two
+frocks over her arm.
+
+"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell whether
+to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if it mattered
+more than anything. More than anything on earth."
+
+Frances considered it--Dorothea in her uniform, and the white frock and
+the blue frock.
+
+"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose to you
+in that get-up--"
+
+"Can't you see that I want to make up for _that_ and for all the things
+he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only I was as beautiful
+as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."
+
+"My dear--my dear--"
+
+Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as Nicky
+with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up Dorothy in
+khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and blue frocks, made
+Frances want to cry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy that he
+couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only have one hour
+to give her.
+
+Frances and Anthony looked at each other. But Dorothy looked at
+Veronica.
+
+"What's the matter, Ronny? You look simply awful."
+
+"Do I? My head's splitting. I think I'll go and lie down."
+
+"You'd better."
+
+"Go straight to bed," said Frances. "and let Nanna bring you some hot
+soup."
+
+But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to take
+herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.
+
+"Well," said Anthony, "if she's going to worry herself sick about Nicky
+now--"
+
+Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.
+
+It was nine o'clock.
+
+At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought: "Supposing he
+hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely. If he hadn't got
+leave he would have said so when he telephoned.
+
+The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would hold her
+in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be afraid, and
+she would be afraid, and he would let her go.
+
+The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud and quick
+on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room to them,
+holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes shone with
+excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that narrowed his eyes and
+jerked his mouth slightly crooked.
+
+They all spoke at once. "You've got leave?" "_He's_ got it all right."
+"What kept you?" "You _have_ got leave?"
+
+His eyes still shone; his mouth still jerked, laughing.
+
+"Well, no," he said. "That's what I haven't got. In fact, I'm lucky to
+be here at all."
+
+Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat down on
+the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his spoon, and smiling
+as if at something pleasant that he knew, something that he would tell
+them presently when Nanna left the room.
+
+The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening intently
+for the click of the latch.
+
+"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off till you
+come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then they say
+they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that day.
+
+"Twelve hours isn't much notice to give a fellow."
+
+He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was speaking
+to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions about trains
+and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if he were not
+conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat, slowly stirring his
+coffee without drinking it. The vibration of her nerves made his answers
+sound muffled and far-off.
+
+She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing from her
+minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable longing to be
+alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what she had felt
+yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in yesterday, and
+refused to move on into to-day.
+
+Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they stopped
+talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would be the end.
+
+Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup he had
+not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea that for a
+moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small sound. She saw
+her mother take the cup from him and set it on the table.
+
+One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they were
+guilty, and left her alone with him.
+
+It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He sat
+there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance. He seemed
+to be wondering how she was going to take it.
+
+He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to make her
+want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left it."
+
+And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.
+
+She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be ready
+to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness he
+required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes implored
+her to put away from her.
+
+There was something more.
+
+He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is hard luck
+on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard for me." (She
+could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He knew she was brave;
+he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he knew he hadn't got to say
+the obvious things.
+
+There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her with the
+power and sweetness of first passion; but without its fear. She no
+longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her as he had held
+her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it vibrated to an
+intenser rhythm.
+
+She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that they were
+seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more than they. When
+realization passed it would endure.
+
+Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it, to say to
+each other what it was they felt and saw.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He said, "I shall have to go soon."
+
+And she said, "I know. Is there anything I can do?"
+
+"I wish you'd go and see my mother some time. She'd like it."
+
+"I should love to go and see her. What else?"
+
+"Well--I've no business to ask you, but I wish you'd give it up."
+
+"I'll give anything up. But what?"
+
+"That ambulance of yours that's going to get into the firing line."
+
+"Oh--"
+
+"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the hardest and
+most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it easier for us to win
+the War. You can't expect us to fight so comfy, and to be killed so
+comfy, if we know our womenkind are being pounded to bits in the ground
+we've just cleared. If I thought _you_ were knocking about
+anywhere there--"
+
+"It would make it too hard?"
+
+"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much time to
+think about it, but when I did--"
+
+"You'd think 'She might have spared me _that_.'"
+
+"Yes. And you might think of your people. It's bad enough for them,
+Nicky going."
+
+"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and where
+he'll be. That was natural."
+
+"It's also natural that we should like to find you here when we come
+back."
+
+"I was thinking of those Belgian women, and the babies--and England; so
+safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."
+
+"I know. Leaving the children in the burning house?"
+
+(She had said that once and he had remembered.)
+
+"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you to take
+the hardest job, really."
+
+"It isn't; if it's what you want most."
+
+He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and they
+were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous thing.
+
+"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about it. I
+want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."
+
+"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it's _your_ War,
+too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"
+
+"I know," she said.
+
+And then: "Have you got all your things?"
+
+"Somebody's got 'em."
+
+"I haven't given you anything. You must have my wrist-watch."
+
+She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.
+
+"My wrist's a whopper."
+
+"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's phosphorous," she
+said. "You can see the time by it in the dark."
+
+"I've nothing for _you_. Except--" he fumbled in his pockets--"I
+say--here's the wedding-ring."
+
+They laughed.
+
+"What more could you want?" she said.
+
+He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he stooped and
+kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But it was not like
+yesterday.
+
+Suddenly his face stiffened. "Tell them," he said, "that I'm going."
+
+The British were retreating from Mons.
+
+The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like the
+travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There was no
+end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no end to the
+German people. And there was no news of British reinforcements, or
+rumour of reinforcements.
+
+"They come on like waves. Like waves," said Dorothea, reading from the
+papers.
+
+"I wouldn't read about it if I were you, darling," said Frances.
+
+"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we don't."
+
+Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way
+before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat
+from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.
+
+Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours'
+notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it.
+They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least
+we could do for _them_ was to trust them, and not believe any tales of
+their retreating.
+
+And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By
+letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home,
+listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing
+of the bell.
+
+She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message
+came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child for me that my
+son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to
+come and see me; but not just yet."
+
+She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter from
+his Colonel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into Cannon Street
+Station.
+
+Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she
+could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned
+it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly,
+beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept,
+worn out with her hard day's driving.
+
+She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have
+had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.
+
+"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a
+brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died
+for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered.
+He said 'It's _your_ War--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's
+killed in it.
+
+"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for one
+night.
+
+"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was
+a coward. He got nothing."
+
+His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that
+prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a
+contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion.
+She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.
+
+Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they
+had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had
+dreamed it or made it up.
+
+Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The
+Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and
+it would take her car with it and a new driver.
+
+Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.
+
+"If I could only help you."
+
+"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave
+the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more
+often she hid away somewhere by herself.
+
+Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go
+to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's
+Veronica."
+
+But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to
+Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been
+killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He
+couldn't have had five hours' fighting.
+
+"And to be killed--Retreating.
+
+"He got nothing out of it but agony."
+
+Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know
+what he may have got in the last minute of it."
+
+"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to
+Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me.
+But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.
+
+"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"
+
+"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you, more
+alive."
+
+"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with
+it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:
+
+"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must
+have known that he would not come back."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I
+want you to see that my memory is fairly good."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for
+markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."
+
+The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah xxxv.
+and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:
+
+"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my
+fingers to fight."...
+
+"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and
+the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...
+
+... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall
+mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they
+shall walk and not faint."
+
+And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet and
+powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold again on the
+Reality they had seen and felt together.
+
+The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it lasted
+she was at peace.
+
+But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of remorse
+for all that she had wasted.
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had ceased to
+feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in vain for them.
+They did not believe that it had saved Paris.
+
+Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was no more
+Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were only a question
+of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there would be no more
+France. They were face to face with the further possibility of there
+being no more England.
+
+In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances were
+changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before the War,
+Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she would, after
+careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I like England. But I
+dislike the English people. They are narrow and hypocritical and
+conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs." At the time of the Boer
+War, beyond thinking that the British ought to win, and that they would
+win, and feeling a little spurt as of personal satisfaction when they
+did win, she had had no consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for
+loving it, she loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of
+mild, cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her
+house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as well
+talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once sat in
+peace under the tree of Heaven with her _Times_ newspaper, and flicked
+the affairs of the nation from her as less important than the stitching
+on her baby's frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else.
+She was sad, not because her son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling
+week by week, but because England was in danger; she was worried, not
+because Lord Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son
+Michael, but because she had found that the race was to the swift and
+the battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent
+sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she left
+her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City with
+Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office, receiving,
+packing, and sending off great cases of food and clothing to the
+Belgian soldiers.
+
+Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all well
+under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the Government
+persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber that swelled and
+shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and because officials
+wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them what he knew about
+timber, and because the head of a department had talked to _him_ about
+private firms and profiteering. As if any man with three sons under
+twenty-seven would want to make a profit out of the War; and as if they
+couldn't cut down everybody's profits if they took the trouble. They
+might cut his to the last cent so long as we had gun-carriages that
+would carry guns and rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was
+talking about and they didn't.
+
+And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who had
+once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it
+now. She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at
+the head of departments we should win the War. We were losing it for
+want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of
+organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud of him, not
+because he was her husband and the father of her children, but because
+he was a man who could help England. They were both proud of Michael and
+Nicholas and John, not because they were their sons, but because they
+were men who could fight for England.
+
+They found that they loved England with a secret, religious, instinctive
+love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man might stand and
+fight for, became, mysteriously and magically, dearer to them than their
+home. They loved England more than their own life or the lives of their
+children. Long ago they had realized that fathers do not beget children
+nor mothers bear them merely to gratify themselves. Now, in September
+and October, they were realizing that children are not begotten and born
+for their own profit and pleasure either.
+
+When they sat together after the day's work they found themselves saying
+the most amazing things to each other.
+
+Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better. I
+shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had been
+pleasant to him.
+
+And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of three,
+we ought to send them all."
+
+"Positively," said Anthony. "I believe I'd let Dorothy go out now if she
+insisted."
+
+"Oh, no, I think we might be allowed to keep Dorothy."
+
+She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I grudged
+giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if he went out
+to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how splendid it was
+of him."
+
+"I wish poor Dorothy could feel that way about Drayton."
+
+"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was his
+profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."
+
+He did not remind her that Frank's free will had counted in his choice
+of a profession.
+
+"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count more than
+the whole Army put together."
+
+They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing that sooner
+or later they must speak of it.
+
+Frances was the braver of the two. She spoke first.
+
+"There's Michael. I don't know what to make of him. He doesn't seem to
+want to go."
+
+That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably in
+secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something must be
+done about Michael.
+
+"I wish you'd say something to him, Anthony."
+
+"I would if I were going myself. But how can I?"
+
+"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you were young
+enough."
+
+"I can't say anything. You'll have to."
+
+"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky is the
+only one of us who has any right to."
+
+"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her way."
+
+"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."
+
+But in the end she did say something.
+
+She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding himself
+away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she thought, "as if he
+were ashamed of himself."
+
+Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious beauty of his
+young face; at the thick masses of his hair that would not stay as they
+were brushed back, but fell over his forehead; it was still yellow, and
+shining as it shone when he was a little boy.
+
+He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of verse on the
+white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came in lest she
+should see them. That hurt her.
+
+"Michael," she said, "I wonder if you _ever_ realize that we are at
+war."
+
+"The War isn't a positive obsession to me, if that's what you mean."
+
+"It isn't what I mean. Only--that when other people are doing so much--
+
+"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."
+
+"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If George
+Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."
+
+"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason, when so
+much more has been done for you than was ever done for him?"
+
+"It's no use trying to get at me."
+
+"England's fighting for her life," said Frances.
+
+"So's Germany.
+
+"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker hates
+Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear old Frau
+Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and Carl, and make
+Hedwig and Loettchen cry."
+
+"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George and
+Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."
+
+"Bayonetting isn't my business."
+
+"Your own safety is. How can you bear to let other men fight for you?"
+
+"They're not fighting for _me_, Mother. You ask them if they are, and
+see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God knows what; but
+they're no more fighting for me than they're fighting for Aunt
+Emmeline."
+
+"They _are_ fighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting for everything
+that's weak and defenceless."
+
+"Well, then, they're not fighting for me. I'm not weak and defenceless,"
+said Michael.
+
+"All the more shame for you, then."
+
+He smiled, acknowledging her score.
+
+"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the opening for
+a repartee. It was quite a nice one."
+
+"If," she said, "you were only _doing_ something. But you go on with
+your own things as though nothing had happened."
+
+"I _am_ doing something. I'm keeping sane. And I'm keeping sanity alive
+in other people."
+
+"Much you care for other people," said Frances as she left the room.
+
+But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him again. She
+went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his room.
+
+"_Well?_" he said.
+
+"It's no use. He won't go."
+
+And Frances, quite suddenly and to her own surprise, burst into tears.
+
+He drew her to him, and she clung to him, sobbing softly.
+
+"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's as
+obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."
+
+He pressed her tighter to him. He loved her in her unfamiliar weakness,
+crying and clinging to him.
+
+"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm glad he
+didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to him, I couldn't
+bear to be the one who made him go."
+
+After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.
+
+They were silent.
+
+"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.
+
+But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.
+
+"He must know that _public_ feeling's pretty strong against him. To say
+nothing of _my_ feeling and _your_ feeling."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his father and
+his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't bear to look at
+Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her
+way as much as possible.
+
+As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he against
+it.
+
+But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these
+antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go.
+Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had always
+offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul. From his very
+first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had
+seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective
+emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils
+and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that
+challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of
+what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more
+appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their
+Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one
+monstrous soul.
+
+And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment,
+was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the
+awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and
+from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine
+emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you
+and you were done for. He was determined that it shouldn't get him. They
+couldn't see--and that was Michael's grievance--that his resistance was
+his strength and not his weakness.
+
+Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize
+that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the same entity
+as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the party, who had
+wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of
+forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted to remember." He was
+Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about
+shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the
+other fellows were doing. He objected to being suddenly required to feel
+patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that
+Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was
+in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.
+
+Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.
+
+He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that
+he resented. There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and
+tyranny about it all.
+
+It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to fight. He
+had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight any day in a
+cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a cause that had not
+been messed about so much by other people. Other people had not put
+pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact they had tried to stop
+him. Michael was also aware that in the matter of Ireland his emotions,
+though shared by considerable numbers of the Irish people, were not
+shared by his family or by many people whom he knew; to all intents and
+purposes he had them to himself.
+
+It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and mother, for
+they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the more he would
+seem to them to be a shirker.
+
+He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff,
+reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's silence
+when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their eyes--his
+mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the unspoken question:
+"Why don't you go and get killed--for England--like other people?"
+
+Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible, palpable; he
+knew where he was with them. What he could not stand was that empty
+spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him where he was most
+vulnerable--in his imagination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.
+
+It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion, and your
+religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored Beauty as the
+supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else; if you lived,
+impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive; and for no other end,
+how could you consent to take part in this bloody business? That would
+be the last betrayal, the most cowardly surrender.
+
+And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one of the
+leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the world, of all
+the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For Michael, even more than Ellis, had given himself up as lost.
+
+And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect. When the
+young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed it with a calm,
+high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on, without pay, without
+praise, without any sort of recognition. Any fool could fight; but, if
+you were an artist, your honour bound you to ignore the material
+contest, to refuse, even to your country, the surrender of the highest
+that you knew. They believed with the utmost fervour and sincerity that
+they defied Germany more effectually, because more spiritually, by going
+on and producing fine things with imperturbability than if they went out
+against the German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they
+were restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.
+
+They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly, on
+Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease (but rather
+less than more) in Stephen's study.
+
+They had asked each other: "Are _you_ going to fight for your country?"
+
+And Ellis had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country; and
+Mitchell had said he hadn't got a country, so there was no point in his
+fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could show him a country
+that cared for the arts before anything he'd fight for it; but that
+England was very far from being that country.
+
+And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.
+
+And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not listening to
+what was said.
+
+And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral. Michael
+said to himself that he could stand these massed war emotions if they
+were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral who
+had never cared a damn about either before the War.
+
+Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired whether
+Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral?
+
+Michael shrugged his shoulders. "Why bother," he said, "about Rheims
+Cathedral and Louvain? From your point of view it's all right. If
+Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the enemy's artillery
+they've got to go. They didn't happen to be in the way of ours,
+that's all."
+
+Michael's mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its malady.
+He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of the Allies and
+to justify the acts of Germany.
+
+"It's up to the French to defend Paris. And what have we got to do with
+Alsace-Lorraine? As if every inteligent Frenchman didn't know that
+Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt. No. I'm not pro-German. I simply
+see things as they are."
+
+"I think," Frances would say placably, "we'd better not talk about the
+War."
+
+He would remind them that it was not his subject.
+
+And John laughed at him. "Poor old Nick hates the War because it's
+dished him. He knows his poems can't come out till it's over."
+
+As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.
+
+After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris. As Stephen pointed
+out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael. In magnificent
+defiance of the enemy, the "New Poems" of Michael Harrison, with
+illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as forthcoming in
+October; and Morton Ellis's "Eccentricities," with illustrations by
+Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month. Even Wadham's poems
+would come out some time, perhaps next spring.
+
+Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War Office as
+posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the morale of the
+Allied Armies. "If England could afford to publish Michael--"
+
+Michael's family made no comment on the appearance of his poems. The
+book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for weeks.
+When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none of his
+people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or hold it in
+their hands. It seemed to Michael that they were conscious of it all the
+time, and that they turned their faces away from it pointedly. They
+hated it. They hated him for having written it.
+
+He remembered that it had been different when his first book had come
+out two years ago. They had read that; they had snatched at all the
+reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was that they
+had missed.
+
+They had taken each other aside, and it had been:
+
+"Anthony, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+"Dorothy, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+"Nicky, do you understand Michael's poems?"
+
+He remembered his mother's apology for not understanding them: "Darling,
+I _do_ see that they're very beautiful." He remembered how he had wished
+that they would give up the struggle and leave his poems alone. They
+were not written for them. He had been amused and irritated when he had
+seen his father holding the book doggedly in front of him, his poor old
+hands twitching with embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was
+looking at him.
+
+And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was
+sensitive to the least quiver of his mother's upper lip.
+
+Veronica's were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did not hunt
+him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.
+
+Veronica had been rejected too. She was not strong enough to nurse in
+the hospitals. She was only strong enough to work from morning to night,
+packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the Belgian soldiers. She
+wanted Michael to be sorry for her because she couldn't be a nurse.
+Rosalind Jervis was a nurse. But he was not sorry. He said he would very
+much rather she didn't do anything that Rosalind did.
+
+"So would Nicky," he said.
+
+And then: "Veronica, do _you_ think I ought to enlist?"
+
+The thought was beginning to obsess him.
+
+"No," she said; "you're different.
+
+"I know how you feel about it. Nicky's heart and soul are in the War. If
+he's killed it can only kill his body. _Your_ soul isn't in it. It would
+kill your soul."
+
+"It's killing it now, killing everything I care for."
+
+"Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can't kill."
+
+That was one Sunday evening in October. They were standing together on
+the long terrace under the house wall. Before them, a little to the
+right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree rose over the garden.
+The curved and dipping branches swayed and swung in a low wind that
+moved like quiet water.
+
+"Michael," she said, "do look what's happening to that tree."
+
+"I see," he said.
+
+It made him sad to look at the tree; it made him sad to look at
+Veronica--because both the tree and Veronica were beautiful.
+
+"When I was a little girl I used to sit and look and look at that tree
+till it changed and got all thin and queer and began to move towards me.
+
+"I never knew whether it had really happened or not; I don't know
+now--or whether it was the tree or me. It was as if by looking and
+looking you could make the tree more real and more alive."
+
+Michael remembered something.
+
+"Dorothy says you saw Ferdie the night he died."
+
+"So I did. But that's not the same thing. I didn't have to look and
+look. I just saw him. I _sort_ of saw Frank that last night--when the
+call came--only sort of--but I knew he was going to be killed.
+
+"I didn't see him nearly so distinctly as I saw Nicky-"
+
+"Nicky? You didn't see him--as you saw Ferdie?"
+
+"No, no, no! it was ages ago--in Germany--before he married. I saw him
+with Desmond."
+
+"Have you ever seen me?"
+
+"Not yet. That's because you don't want me as they did."
+
+"Don't I! Don't I!"
+
+And she said again: "Not yet."
+
+Nicky had had leave for Christmas. He had come and gone.
+
+Frances and Anthony were depressed; they were beginning to be
+frightened.
+
+For Nicky had finished his training. He might be sent out any day.
+
+Nicky had had some moments of depression. Nothing had been heard of the
+Moving Fortress. Again, the War Office had given no sign of having
+received it. It was hard luck, he said, on Drayton.
+
+And John was depressed after he had gone.
+
+"They'd much better have taken me," he said.
+
+"What's the good of sending the best brains in the Army to get pounded?
+There's Drayton. He ought to have been in the Ordnance. He's killed.
+
+"And here's Nicky. Nicky ought to be in the engineers or the gunners or
+the Royal Flying Corps; but he's got to stand in the trenches and
+be pounded.
+
+"Lot they care about anybody's brains. Drayton could have told Kitchener
+that we can't win this war without high-explosive shells. So
+could Nicky.
+
+"You bet they've stuck all those plans and models in the sanitary
+dust-bin behind the War Office back door. It's enough to make Nicky blow
+his brains out."
+
+"Nicky doesn't care, really," Veronica said. "He just leaves things--and
+goes on."
+
+That night, after the others had gone to bed, Michael stayed behind with
+his father.
+
+"It must look to you," he said, "as if I ought to have gone instead of
+Nicky."
+
+"I don't say so, Michael. And I'm sure Nicky wouldn't."
+
+"No, but you both think it. You see, if I went I shouldn't be any good
+at it. Not the same good as Nicky. He wants to go and I don't. Can't you
+see it's different?"
+
+"Yes," said Anthony, "I see. I've seen it for some time."
+
+And Michael remembered the night in August when his brother came to him
+in his room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beauty--the Forlorn Hope of God--if he cared for it supremely, why was
+he pursued and tormented by the thought of the space between him
+and Nicky?
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Michael had gone to Stephen's house.
+
+He was no longer at his ease there. It seemed to him that Lawrence's
+eyes followed him too; not with hatred, but with a curious
+meditative wonder.
+
+To-night Stephen said to him, "Did you know that Reveillaud's killed?"
+
+"Killed? Killed? I didn't even know he was fighting."
+
+Lawrence laughed. "What did you suppose he was doing?"
+
+"No--but how?"
+
+"Out with the patrol and shot down. There you are--"
+
+He shoved the _Times_ to him, pointing to the extract from _Le Matin_:
+"It is with regret that we record the death of M. Jules Reveillaud, the
+brilliant young poet and critic--"
+
+Michael stared at the first three lines; something in his mind prevented
+him from going on to the rest, as if he did not care to read about
+Reveillaud and know how he died.
+
+"It is with regret that we record the death. It is with regret that we
+record--with regret--"
+
+Then he read on, slowly and carefully, to the end. It was a long
+paragraph.
+
+"To think," he said at last, "that this revolting thing should have
+happened to him."
+
+"His death?"
+
+"No--_this_. The _Matin_ never mentioned Reveillaud before. None of the
+big papers, none of the big reviews noticed his existence except to
+sneer at him. He goes out and gets killed like any little bourgeois, and
+the swine plaster him all over with their filthy praise. He'd rather
+they'd spat on him."
+
+He meditated fiercely. "Well--he couldn't help it. He was conscripted."
+
+"You think he wouldn't have gone of his own accord?"
+
+"I'm certain he wouldn't."
+
+"And I'm certain he would."
+
+"I wish to God we'd got conscription here. I'd rather the Government
+commandeered my body than stand this everlasting interference with
+my soul."
+
+"Then," said Lawrence, "you'll not be surprised at my enlisting."
+
+"You're not--"
+
+"I am. I'd have been in the first week if I'd known what to do about
+Vera."
+
+"But--it's--it's not sane."
+
+"Perhaps not. But it's Irish."
+
+"Irish? I can understand ordinary Irishmen rushing into a European row
+for the row's sake, just because they haven't got a civil war to mess
+about in. But you--of all Irishmen--why on earth should _you_ be in it?"
+
+"Because I want to be in it."
+
+"I thought," said Michael, "you were to have been a thorn in England's
+side?"
+
+"So I was. So I am. But not at this minute. My grandmother was a hard
+Ulster woman and I hated her. But I wouldn't be a thorn in my
+grandmother's side if the old lady was assaulted by a brutal voluptuary,
+and I saw her down and fighting for her honour.
+
+"I've been a thorn in England's side all my life. But it's nothing to
+the thorn I'll be if I'm killed fighting for her."
+
+"Why--why--if you want to fight in the civil war afterwards?"
+
+"Why? Because I'm one of the few Irishmen who can reason straight. I was
+going into the civil war last year because it was a fight for freedom.
+I'm going into this War this year because it's a bigger fight for a
+bigger freedom.
+
+"You can't have a free Ireland without a free England, any more than you
+can have religious liberty without political liberty. If the Orangemen
+understood anything at all about it they'd see it was the Nationalists
+and the Sinn Feiners that'll help them to put down Catholicism
+in Ireland."
+
+"You think it matters to Ireland whether Germany licks us or we lick
+Germany?"
+
+"I think it matters to the whole world."
+
+"What's changed you?" said Michael.
+
+He was angry with Lawrence. He thought: "He hasn't any excuse for
+failing us. He hasn't been conscripted."
+
+"Nothing's changed me. But supposing it didn't matter to the whole
+world, or even to Europe, and supposing the Allies were beaten in the
+end, you and I shouldn't be beaten, once we'd stripped ourselves,
+stripped our souls clean, and gone in.
+
+"Victory, Michael--victory is a state of mind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity.
+
+He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he had
+said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not making it easy
+now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered about him,
+fluttering with anxiety.
+
+When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for Veronica.
+
+Veronica said, "You must let him go."
+
+"I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's over age.
+He's no more fit than I am."
+
+"You'll have to, sooner or later."
+
+"Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let them
+come and take him."
+
+"It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll tear at you
+if you keep him."
+
+"He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his tearing.
+I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded, paralysed, broken
+to pieces."
+
+"You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully."
+
+"I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once. But he
+came back. He can't really do without me."
+
+"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and what he
+wants most."
+
+"_I_ used to be what he wanted most."
+
+"Well--it's his honour now."
+
+"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy. They're men
+and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a woman.
+
+"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep him--they say
+you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the way you go on!"
+
+"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have kept Nicky
+for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him. She wants
+Michael to go."
+
+"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are lying.
+Either they don't care--they're just _lumps_, with no hearts and no
+nerves in them--or they lie.
+
+"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each other,
+like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael sick."
+
+"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut about
+and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and
+sentimentalizing--
+
+"Lying--lying--lying."
+
+"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it
+sends them off happy?"
+
+"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever happened to us.
+I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my life."
+
+"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up. You were a
+miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you look as if every
+drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens. If that's
+your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself. It seems to be all
+you've got."
+
+"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it _would_ have been
+all I've got."
+
+Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really
+was. The child was not a child any more. She was a woman, astonishingly
+and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in;
+they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with
+perfect accuracy.
+
+"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still, you can
+thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony."
+
+Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's your
+beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're keeping
+him for."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She knew; and Lawrence knew.
+
+That night he told her that if he hadn't wanted to enlist he'd be driven
+to it to get away from her.
+
+And she was frightened and held her tongue.
+
+Then she got desperate. She did things. She intrigued behind his back to
+keep him; and he found her out.
+
+He came to her, furious.
+
+"You needn't lie about it," he said. "I know what you've done. You've
+been writing letters and getting at people. You've told the truth about
+my age and you've lied about my health. You've even gone round cadging
+for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press Bureau and the
+Intelligence Department, and God only knows whether I'm supposed to have
+put you up to it."
+
+"I took care of that, Larry."
+
+"You? You'd no right to interfere with my affairs."
+
+"Hadn't I? Not after living with you seven years?"
+
+"If you'd lived with me seven centuries you'd have had no right to try
+to keep a man back from the Army."
+
+"I'm trying to keep a man's brain for my country."
+
+"You lie. It's my body you're trying to keep for yourself. As you did
+when I was going to Ireland."
+
+"Oh, then--I tried to stop you from being a traitor to England. They'd
+have hanged you, my dear, for that."
+
+"Traitor? It's women like you that are the traitors. My God, if there
+was a Government in this country that could govern, you'd be strung up
+in a row, all of you, and hanged."
+
+"No wonder you think you're cut out for a soldier. You're cruel enough."
+
+"_You're_ cruel. I'd rather be hanged than live with you a day longer
+after what you've done. A Frenchman shot his _wife_ the other day for
+less than that."
+
+"What was 'less than that'?" she said.
+
+"She crawled after him to the camp, like a bitch.
+
+"He sent her away and she came again and again. He _had_ to shoot her."
+
+"Was there nothing to be said for her?"
+
+"There was. She knew it was a big risk and she took it. _You_ knew you
+were safe while you slimed my honour."
+
+"She loved him, and he shot her, and you think that's a fine thing.
+_How_ she must have loved him!"
+
+"Men don't want to be loved that way. That's the mistake you women will
+make."
+
+"It's the way you've taught us. I should like to know what other way you
+ever want us to love you?"
+
+"The way Veronica loves Nicky, and Dorothy loved Drayton and Frances
+loves Anthony."
+
+"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."
+
+"Men's lives aren't ruined that way. And not all women's."
+
+"Well, anyhow, if she'd loved him she'd have married him. And Frances
+loves her children better than Anthony, and Anthony knows it."
+
+"Veronica, then."
+
+"Veronica doesn't know what passion is. The poor child's anaemic."
+
+"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have more
+passion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."
+
+"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her eyelashes
+instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."
+
+He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.
+
+"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the Front.
+It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and pose as
+heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and mistresses--they're tired
+of because the poor things aren't young or pretty any longer."
+
+She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her. "I'm
+old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and uglier. And
+I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How _can_ I keep you when
+I'm old and ugly?"
+
+He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always worked
+in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained with crying.
+
+"That's how--by getting older.
+
+"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were when I
+first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm sure I
+love you."
+
+She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.
+
+"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they believe
+you; but not me."
+
+"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were married to
+me I should have enlisted months ago.
+
+"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm sick and
+tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with it. I'd rather
+be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house of yours."
+
+"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it now?"
+
+"Everything. Those damned lime-trees all round it. And that damned white
+wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.
+
+"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.
+
+"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.
+
+"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones,
+drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis
+are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk's
+the divinest thing in God's universe.
+
+"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my life--the
+one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from it."
+
+They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the next. And
+Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to train it upwards in
+the way she hated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the moustache
+stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He was another
+man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she hated him or not.
+
+But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best gown to
+do honour to his khaki.
+
+She said, "It'll be like living with another man."
+
+"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.
+
+And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her passion
+for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to violence, to
+perversity.
+
+And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out of her
+reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where he was
+stationed.
+
+"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot me?"
+
+"I might shoot _myself_. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear from me
+again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.
+
+She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent, till
+she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he had gone
+she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a sort of peace.
+She told herself that she would rather he were killed soon than that she
+should be tortured any longer with suspense.
+
+"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind. That
+would end it."
+
+And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers for fear
+lest she should see his name in the lists.
+
+But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement, and
+died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.
+
+The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before he died.
+She gave details and a message.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to forgive him
+and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought it would be (he
+means the fighting) only much more so--all except this last bit.
+
+"He wants you to tell Michael and Dicky?--Nicky?--that. He says: 'It's
+odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'
+
+"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go to the
+War.)"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"8.30. It is all over.
+
+"He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his love."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Vera said to herself: "He didn't. She made that up."
+
+She hated the Red Cross woman who had been with Lawrence and had seen so
+much; who had dared to tell her what he meant and to make up messages.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+Nicholas had applied for a commission, and he had got it, and Frances
+was glad.
+
+She had been proud of him because he had chosen the ranks instead of the
+Officers' Training Corps; but she persisted in the belief that, when it
+came to the trenches, second lieutenants stood a better chance. "For
+goodness' sake," Nicholas had said, "don't tell her that they're over
+the parapet first."
+
+That was in December. In February he got a week's leave--sudden,
+unforeseen and special leave. It had to be broken to her this time that
+leave as special as that meant war-leave.
+
+She said, "Well, if it does, I shall have him for six whole days." She
+had learned how to handle time, how to prolong the present, drawing it
+out minute by minute; thus her happiness, stretched to the snapping
+point, vibrated.
+
+She had a sense of its vibration now, as she looked at Nicholas. It was
+the evening of the day he had come home, and they were all in the
+drawing-room together. He was standing before her, straight and tall, on
+the hearthrug, where he had lifted the Persian cat, Timmy, out of his
+sleep and was holding him against his breast. Timmy spread himself
+there, softly and heavily, hanging on to Nicky's shoulder by his claws;
+he butted Nicky's chin with his head, purring.
+
+"I don't know how I'm to tear myself away from Timmy. I should like to
+wear him alive as a waistcoat. Or hanging on my shoulder like a cape,
+with his tail curled tight round my neck. He'd look uncommonly _chic_
+with all his khaki patches."
+
+"Why don't you take him with you?" Anthony said.
+
+"'Cos he's Ronny's cat."
+
+"He isn't. I've given him to you," Veronica said.
+
+"When?"
+
+"Now, this minute. To sleep on your feet and keep you warm."
+
+Frances listened and thought: "What children--what babies they are,
+after all." If only this minute could be stretched out farther.
+
+"I mustn't," Nicky said. "I should spend hours in dalliance; and if a
+shell got him it would ruin my morale."
+
+Timmy, unhooked from Nicky's shoulder, lay limp in his arms. He lay on
+his back, in ecstasy, his legs apart, showing the soft, cream-white fur
+of his stomach. Nicky rubbed his face against the soft, cream-white fur.
+
+"I say, what a heavenly death it would be to die--smothered in Timmies."
+
+"Nicky, you're a beastly sensualist. That's what's the matter with you,"
+John said. And they all laughed.
+
+The minute broke, stretched to its furthest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances was making plans now for Nicky's week. There were things they
+could do, plays they could see, places they could go to. Anthony would
+let them have the big car as much as they wanted. For you could stretch
+time out by filling it; you could multiply the hours by what they held.
+
+"Ronny and I are going to get married to-morrow," Nicky said. "We
+settled it that we would at once, if I got war-leave. It's the best
+thing to do."
+
+"Of course," Frances said, "it's the best thing to do."
+
+But she had not allowed for it, nor for the pain it gave her. That pain
+shocked her. It was awful to think that, after all her surrenders,
+Nicky's happiness could give her pain. It meant that she had never let
+go her secret hold. She had been a hypocrite to herself.
+
+Nicky was talking on about it, excitedly, as he used to talk on about
+his pleasures when he was a child.
+
+If Dad'll let us have the racing car, we'll go down to Morfe. We can do
+it in a day."
+
+"My dear boy," Anthony said, "don't you know I've lent the house to the
+Red Cross, and let the shooting?"
+
+"I don't care. There's the little house in the village we can have. And
+Harker and his wife can look after us."
+
+"Harker gone to the War, and his wife's looking after his brother's
+children somewhere. And I've put two Belgian refugees into it."
+
+"_They_ can look after us," said Nicky. "We'll stay three days, run
+back, and have one day at home before I sail."
+
+Frances gave up her play with time. She was beaten.
+
+And still she thought: "At least I shall have him one whole day."
+
+And then she looked across the room to Michael, as if Michael's face
+had signalled to her. His clear, sun-burnt skin showed blotches of white
+where the blood had left it. A light sweat was on his forehead. When
+their eyes met, he shifted his position to give himself an appearance
+of ease.
+
+Michael had not reckoned on his brother's marriage, either. It was when
+he asked himself: "On what, then, _had_ he been reckoning?" that the
+sweat broke out on his forehead.
+
+He had not reckoned on anything. But the sudden realization of what he
+might have reckoned on made him sick. He couldn't bear to think of Ronny
+married. And yet again, he couldn't bear to think of Nicky not marrying
+her. If he had had a hold on her he would have let her go. In this he
+knew himself to be sincere. He had had no hold on her, and to talk about
+letting her go was idiotic; still, there was a violent pursuit and
+possession by the mind--and Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy,
+that psychic assault and outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual
+surrender of her was so perfect that his very imagination gave her up
+to Nicky.
+
+He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing could
+take their three days from them, even when the War had done its worst.
+
+And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she think I
+was reckoning on that?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead Town
+Hall, before the Registrar.
+
+They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying and
+circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky said, whole
+handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals, with a clear run
+before him, he let out the racing car to its top speed on the Great
+North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed like some immense,
+nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all its weight were purged
+from it by speed. It flew up and down the hills of Hertfordshire and
+Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat country round Peterborough and
+Grantham, a country of silver green and emerald green grass and purple
+fallow land and bright red houses; and so on to the great plain of York,
+and past Reyburn up towards the bare hill country netted with grey
+stone walls.
+
+Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road.
+
+It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed enormous
+and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen moon. Other
+hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous, stood piled up in
+front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale.
+
+Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was as if,
+ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that incredibly high,
+immense obstruction. They were thrilled, mysteriously, as before the
+image of monstrous and omnipotent disaster. Then the dale widened; it
+made way for them and saved them.
+
+The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a coronet
+and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights of the village
+below, the village they were making for, showed as if dropped out of the
+pattern on the hill.
+
+One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage chamber.
+Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch to receive
+them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage torches. The old
+woman held her light low down, lighting the flagstone of the threshold.
+The old man lifted his high, showing the lintel of the door. It was so
+low that Nicholas had to stoop to go in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning they read the date cut in the wall above the porch: 1665.
+
+The house was old and bent and grey. Its windows were narrow slits in
+the stone mullions. It crouched under the dipping boughs of the ash-tree
+that sheltered it. Inside there was just room for Veronica to stand up.
+Nicholas had to stoop or knock his head against the beams. It had only
+four rooms, two for Nicholas and Veronica, and two for Jean and Suzanne.
+And it was rather dark.
+
+But it pleased them. They said it was their apple-tree-house grown up
+because they were grown up, and keeping strict proportions. You had to
+crawl into it, and you were only really comfortable sitting or lying
+down. So they sat outside it, watching old Suzanne through the window as
+she moved about the house place, cooking Belgian food for them, and old
+Jean as he worked in the garden.
+
+Veronica loved Jean and Suzanne. She had found out all about them the
+first morning.
+
+"Only think, Nicky. They're from Termonde, and their house was burnt
+behind them as they left it. They saw horrors, and their son was killed
+in the War.
+
+"Yet they're happy and at peace. Almost as if they'd forgotten. He'll
+plant flowers in his garden."
+
+"They're old, Ronny. And perhaps they were tired already when it
+happened."
+
+"Yes, that must be it. They're old and tired."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now it was the last adventure of their last day. They were walking
+on the slope of Renton Moor that looks over Rathdale towards Greffington
+Edge. The light from the west poured itself in vivid green down the
+valley below them, broke itself into purple on Karva Hill to the north
+above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle blue and violet from the
+stone rampart of the Edge.
+
+Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources of the
+country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge, on Sarrack
+Moor. The raking lines of the hills were straight as if they had been
+measured with a ruler and then planed.
+
+"Ronny," he said at last, "we've licked 'em in the first round, you and
+I. The beastly Boche can't do us out of these three days."
+
+"No. We've been absolutely happy. And we'll never forget it. Never."
+
+"Perhaps it was a bit rough on Dad and Mummy, our carting ourselves up
+here, away from them. But, you see, they don't really mind. They're
+feeling about it now just as we feel about it. I knew they would."
+
+There had been a letter from Frances saying she was glad they'd gone.
+She was so happy thinking how happy they were.
+
+"They're angels, Nicky."
+
+"Aren't they? Simply angels. That's the rotten part of it. I wish--
+
+"I wish I could tell them what I think of them. But you can't, somehow.
+It sticks in your throat, that sort of thing."
+
+"You needn't," she said; "they know all right."
+
+She thought: "This is what he wants me to tell them about--afterwards."
+
+"Yes, but--I must have hurt them--hurt them horribly--lots of times. I
+wish I hadn't.
+
+"But" he went on, "they're funny, you know. Dad actually thought it
+idiotic of us to do this. He said it would only make it harder for us
+when I had to go. They don't see that it's just piling it on--going from
+one jolly adventure to another.
+
+"I'm afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on you;
+because the rest of it's all my show."
+
+"But it isn't all your show, Nicky darling. It's mine, and it's
+theirs--because we haven't grudged you your adventure."
+
+"That's exactly how I want you to feel about it."
+
+"And they're assuming that I shan't come back. Which, if you come to
+think of it, is pretty big cheek. They talk, and they think, as though
+nobody ever got through. Whereas I've every intention of getting through
+and of coming back. I'm the sort of chap who does get through, who does
+come back."
+
+"And even if I wasn't, if they studied statistics they'd see that it's a
+thousand chances to one against the Boches getting me--just me out of
+all the other chaps. As if I was so jolly important.
+
+"No; don't interrupt. Let's get this thing straight while we can.
+Supposing--just supposing I didn't get through--didn't come
+back--supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to think
+of _that_, not as a clumsy accident, but just another awfully
+interesting thing I'd done.
+
+"Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you took
+the thing as a shock instead of--of what it probably really is, and went
+and got cut up about it, you might start the little beggar with a sort
+of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that it would be jumpy
+all its life.
+
+"It ought," said Nicky, "to sit in its little house all quiet and comfy
+till it's time for it to come out."
+
+He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might be, what
+probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted more than
+anything, next to Veronica.
+
+"It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy."
+
+"If _that_ came off all right," he said, "it would make it up to Mother
+no end."
+
+"It wouldn't make it up to me."
+
+"You don't know what it would do," he said.
+
+She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but you."
+
+"That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of kin--the one
+they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way; it'll only make him
+madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid of you or Mummy or Dad, or
+Michael being told first."
+
+"It doesn't matter a bit who's _told_ first. I shall _know_ first," she
+said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't kill either me or the baby.
+If a shock could kill me I should have died long ago."
+
+"When?"
+
+"When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear it any
+longer, something happened."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't know what it _is_ now; I only know what it does.
+It always happens--always--when you want it awfully. And when you're
+quiet and give yourself up to it."
+
+"It'll happen again."
+
+He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite interested;
+puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if something had come
+between him and her.
+
+"You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so that when
+things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to happen to
+Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she was absolutely
+happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came to her. And, Nicky,
+they were the same queer things that came to me. It was like something
+getting through to her."
+
+"I say--did you ever do it to me?"
+
+"Only once, when you wanted it awfully."
+
+"When? When?"
+
+Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her trail.
+
+"When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it didn't
+matter, it wasn't the end."
+
+"But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself. It looks
+as if it worked, then?"
+
+"It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with _you_ it would
+always come; because you're more _me_ than other people; I mean I care
+more for you."
+
+She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother about me,
+Nicky. If _the_ most awful thing happened, and you didn't come back, It
+would come."
+
+"I wish I knew what It was," he said.
+
+"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's God."
+
+"That's why _they're_ so magnificently brave--Dorothy and Aunt Frances
+and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't know it's there;
+even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and still they go on bearing
+and bearing; and they were glad to give you up."
+
+"I know," he said; "lots of people _say_ they're glad, but they really
+_are_ glad."
+
+He meditated.
+
+"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's praying or
+something; and if you're going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you'd
+be careful; because it seems to me that if there's anything in it at
+all, there might be hitches. I mean to say, you might work it just
+enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from
+being blown off. Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might
+bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic.
+
+"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I thought
+about it. Luckily one doesn't think."
+
+"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than I tried
+before."
+
+"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"
+
+"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin with, I
+won't believe that you're not going to get through.
+
+"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't believe
+you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to something
+else. It doesn't end him.'"
+
+He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a
+pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to.
+
+Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind talking about
+it?" she said.
+
+"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I believe
+in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling, that you go on.
+You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't care. They used to
+think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn't care. But I really
+didn't. Things, most things, don't much matter, because there's always
+something else. You go on to it.
+
+"I care for _you_. _You_ matter most awfully; and my people; but most of
+all you. You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the
+first time I heard you calling out to me to come and sit on your bed
+because you were frightened. You always will matter.
+
+"But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make me
+_think_ she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her because she
+was going to have a baby. And _that_ was because I remembered you and
+the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would have kept me straight
+with women if nothing else did.
+
+"Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying you till
+Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too late.
+
+"That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby."
+
+"Yes, Nicky.
+
+"I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The cottage
+belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?"
+
+"I think he'd give it to you if you asked him."
+
+"For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll give it to
+me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where it's all quiet
+and you'd never know there was a war at all--even the Belgians have
+forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look at that hill, because
+it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I simply won't think of anything
+that isn't straight and beautiful. And I shall get strong. Then the baby
+will be straight and beautiful and strong, too.
+
+"I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little things
+that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and she, to be on
+the edge of something great, something satisfying and revealing. It was
+to come in a look or a word; and both would remember it afterwards
+for ever.
+
+In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline, and
+Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say good-bye.
+And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited and happy, as he
+had gone off on his wedding journey. And between Frances and her son the
+great thing remained unsaid.
+
+Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine sand.
+
+
+     _February 27th, 1915._
+          B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you all for
+the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long way, that's been
+seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it because it "looked as
+if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It makes me feel as if I
+_was_ Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs, rampant, clawing at the Boches.
+Just think of the effect if he got up over the parapet!
+
+The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't think what
+else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those tubes of chutney are
+a good idea.
+
+No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no English
+and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to himself, you
+simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old Mick could send
+himself out by himself against the whole German Army he'd manage to put
+in some first rate fancy work in the second or two before they got him.
+He'd be quite capable of going off and doing grisly things that would
+make me faint with funk, if he was by himself, with nothing but the eye
+of God to look at him. And _then_ he'd rather God wasn't there. He
+always _was_ afraid of having a crowd with him.
+
+The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were you two,
+I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he is
+the youngest.
+
+And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest curtain
+fire there _are_ holes; there are more holes than there is stuff; and
+the chances are I shall be where a hole is.
+
+Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight for you
+like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's going to get
+you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of personal
+resentment which must be the worst part of the business. Bits of shells
+that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew all about before
+and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted out in the open, the
+peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is it more than the peculiar
+awfulness of being run over by express trains let loose about the sky?
+Tell Don that when shrapnel empties itself over your head like an old
+tin pail, you might feel injured, but the big shell has a most disarming
+air of not being able to help itself, of not looking for anybody in
+particular. It's so innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it
+any day than fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe.
+
+That's an answer to his question.
+
+And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action.
+Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I told
+her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but Stephen was
+absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than anything you could
+have imagined. I'm not speaking only for myself.
+
+There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between your
+parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it too--when you're
+afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before you get there. But it
+doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply swinging you on to them, and
+that swing makes up for all the rotten times put together. You needn't
+be sorry for us. It's waste of pity.
+
+I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us. But I'm
+not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving,
+
+     NICKY.
+
+               May, 1915.
+          B.E.F., FRANCE
+
+My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when you
+loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you needn't
+do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the papers more or
+less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith is saying or what
+Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's motives are. Personally, I
+should say he was simply trying, like most of us, to save his country.
+Looks like it. But you can tell him from me, if he gets them to send us
+enough shells out _in time_ we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow
+that sort of thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much
+better than you, if you don't mind my saying so.
+
+What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the last
+sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my billet for
+one of his _worst_ jokes. And I like to hear about Morrie going on the
+bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if it really is anxiety
+about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd leave off thinking about me,
+poor old thing.
+
+More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's looking and
+what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot, and she may tell
+you things she won't tell the others. That's why I'm glad you're there
+and not here.
+
+And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel about it. I
+think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were a "putrid
+Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes me like
+religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say,
+but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't
+take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that
+expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it
+isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead
+of the Government, you'd have been in at the start, before me.
+
+Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never can
+tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those of us who
+are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a long way. There's
+no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the finish; so that the
+patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to join up will be jolly well
+sold, poor devils. Take me, for instance. If I'd got what I wanted and
+been out in Flanders in 1914, ten to one I should have been in the
+retreat from Mons, like Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have
+given my head to have gone to Gallipoli; but _now_, well, I'm just as
+glad I'm not mixed up in that affair.
+
+Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you can get
+out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to win the War.
+At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the Rhine, while all
+the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash on the way there. So
+if you're going to be converted let's hope you'll be converted quick.
+
+If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight away.
+There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a Tommy. For
+instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your brother Tommies. I
+slept for three months next to a beastly blighter who used to come in
+drunk and tread on my face and be ill all over me.
+
+Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything that's
+happened out here. But that's because at home your mind isn't adjusted
+to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise to me every time.
+I _couldn't_ get used to him. Whereas out here everything's shifted in
+the queerest way. Your mind shifts. You funk your first and your second
+sight, say, of a bad stretcher case; but when it comes to the third and
+the fourth you don't funk at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit
+surprised. It's all in the picture, and you're in the picture too.
+There's a sort of horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly
+dream which doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the
+beastliness.
+
+No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what d'you
+think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run over the
+other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian at that.
+There were two or three women round it, crying and gesticulating. It
+looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath of blood. That made me
+sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the picture. I hadn't
+bargained for him.
+
+Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa--do you remember how he
+_would_ tell us about them?--weren't in it with the things that happened
+here. Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do, apparently on
+their own, are simply unbelievable--what the war correspondents call
+"fantastic postures." But I haven't got to the point when I can slap my
+thighs, and roar with laughter--if they happen to be Germans.
+
+In between, the boredom is so awful that I've heard some of our men say
+they'd rather have things happening. And, of course, we're all hoping
+that when those shells come along there won't be quite so much
+"between."
+
+Love to Ronny and Mother and all of them.--Your very affectionate,
+
+     NICHOLAS.
+
+
+          June 1st, 1915.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+My Darling Ronny,--Yes, I think all your letters must have come, because
+you've answered everything. You always tell me just what I want to know.
+When I see the fat envelopes coming I know they're going to be
+chock-full of the things I've happened to be thinking about. Don't let's
+ever forget to put the dates, because I make out that I've always
+dreamed about you, too, the nights you've written.
+
+And so the Aunties are working in the War Hospital Supply Depot? It's
+frightfully funny what Dorothy says about their enjoying the War and
+feeling so important. Don't let her grudge it them, though; it's all the
+enjoyment, or importance, they're ever had in their lives, poor dears.
+But I shall know, if a swab bursts in my inside, that it's Auntie
+Edie's. As for Auntie Emmeline's, I can't even imagine what they'd be
+like--monstrosities--or little babies injured at birth. Aunt Louie's
+would be well-shaped and firm, but erring a little on the hard side,
+don't you think?
+
+That reminds me, I suppose I may tell you now since it's been in the
+papers, that we've actually got Moving Fortresses out here. I haven't
+seen them yet, but a fellow who has thinks they must be uncommonly like
+Drayton's and my thing. I suspect, from what he says, they're a bit
+better, though. We hadn't got the rocking-horse idea.
+
+It's odd--this time last year I should have gone off my head with agony
+at the mere thought of anybody getting in before us; and now I don't
+care a bit. I do mind rather for Drayton's sake, though I don't suppose
+he cares, either. The great thing is that it's been done, and done
+better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the Germans had got on to
+them, and trotted them out first, and one of our own guns had potted him
+or me, _that_ would have been a jolly sell.
+
+What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the awful
+thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the base hospital
+on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock, and--_he never came
+back again_. It doesn't matter, because the weather's so warm now that I
+don't want him. But I'm sorry because you all gave him to me and it
+looks as if I hadn't cared for him. But I did....
+
+     June 10th.
+
+Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather
+suddenly. I wish I could tell you _what_, but we mustn't let on what
+happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still, there are all
+the other things I couldn't say anything about at the time.
+
+If you _must_ know, I've been up "over the top" three times now since I
+came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all right.
+
+Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's been like
+that every time (except that I've got over the queer funky feeling
+half-way through). It'll be like that again next time, I know. Because
+now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't tell Dorothy this, because
+she'd think it was all rot--but when you're up first out of the trench
+and stand alone on the parapet, it's absolute happiness. And the charge
+is--well, it's simply heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till
+then; I certainly hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three
+days we had together.
+
+That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something rotten
+about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this
+gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's trying for) is
+nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks that's all there is in
+it, he doesn't know much about war, or love either. Though I'm bound to
+say there's a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing. He
+says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same
+as I do; but that it's simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the
+top--a hidden lust for killing, and the hidden memory of having killed,
+he called it. He's always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had
+been drunk.
+
+And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but "a
+ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give mine to a
+funny chap who _knows_ he's going to have collywobbles as soon as he
+gets out into the open.
+
+But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it, because
+they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of being killed.
+_That_--when you realize it--well, it's like the thing you told me about
+that you said you thought must be God because it's so real. I didn't
+understand it then, but I do now. You're bang up against reality--you're
+going clean into it--and the sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while
+one half of you is feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill
+and doing its best to keep on _this_ side reality. But I've been near
+enough to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come
+out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick. _He_'d
+write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's a sin that I
+should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't do anything
+with it.
+
+Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your loving,
+
+     NICKY.
+
+P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and Dorothy and
+Mother. It would save them half the misery they're probably
+going through.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the garden,
+weeding the delphinium border.
+
+It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was digging in
+the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering green peas and
+fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came through the open
+door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace with the piled up
+baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to Veronica.
+
+It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came, Veronica
+could time it by the striking of the clock heard through the open
+doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and then, almost
+on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious happiness.
+
+Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity made each
+small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged at the weeds,
+and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the palms of her hand
+smoothed over the places where they had been. She thought of old Jean
+and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at Renton, and of that
+tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest thing she had ever seen.
+
+And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the half-hour, not
+out of herself or out of her thoughts, but mysteriously and from
+somewhere a long way off.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through the door
+with her basket, and it was then that she saw Nicholas.
+
+He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised between her
+and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested in the act of
+looking back to see if she were following him. His eyes shone, vivid and
+blue, as they always shone when he was happy. He smiled at her, but
+with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to her, but with no sound.
+
+Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her heart was
+still; it beat steadily.
+
+She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust itself
+between them, and he was gone.
+
+And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had seen her
+when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of the sun.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+The young men had gone--Morton Ellis, who had said he was damned if he'd
+fight for his country; and Austin Mitchell who had said he hadn't got a
+country; and Monier-Owen, who had said that England was not a country
+you could fight for. George Wadham had gone long ago. That, Michael
+said, was to be expected. Even a weak gust could sweep young Wadham off
+his feet--and he had been fairly carried away. He could no more resist
+the vortex of the War than he could resist the vortex of the arts.
+
+Michael had two pitiful memories of the boy: one of young Wadham
+swaggering into Stephen's room in uniform (the first time he had it on),
+flushed and pleased with himself and talking excitedly about the "Great
+Game"; and one of young Wadham returned from the Front, mature and hard,
+not talking about the "Great Game" at all, and wincing palpably when
+other people talked; a young Wadham who, they said, ought to be arrested
+under the Defence of the Realm Act as a quencher of war-enthusiasms.
+
+The others had gone later, one by one, each with his own gesture:
+Mitchell and Monier-Owen when Stephen went; Ellis the day after
+Stephen's death. It had taken Stephen's death to draw him.
+
+Only Michael remained.
+
+He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going would
+inspire him to follow them. It, and Stephen's death, merely intensified
+the bitterness he felt towards the War. He was more than ever determined
+to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to his Forlorn Hope. If they
+fell back, all the more reason why be should go on.
+
+And, while he waited for the moment of vision, he continued Stephen's
+work on the _Green Review_. Stephen had left it to him when he went out.
+Michael tried to be faithful to the tradition he thus inherited; but
+gradually Stephen's spirit disappeared from the _Review_ and its place
+was taken by the clear, hard, unbreakable thing that was Michael's mind.
+
+And Michael knew that he was beginning to make himself felt.
+
+But Stephen's staff, such as it was, and nearly all his contributors had
+gone to the War, one after another, and Michael found himself taking all
+their places. He began to feel a strain, which he took to be the strain
+of overwork, and he went down to Renton to recover.
+
+That was on the Tuesday that followed Veronica's Sunday.
+
+He thought that down there he would get away from everything that did
+him harm: from his father's and mother's eyes; from his sister's proud,
+cold face; and from his young brother's smile; and from Veronica's
+beauty that saddened him; and from the sense of Nicky's danger that
+brooded as a secret obsession over the house. He would fill up the awful
+empty space. He thought: "For a whole fortnight I shall get away from
+this infernal War."
+
+But he did not get away from it. On every stage of the journey down he
+encountered soldiers going to the Front. He walked in the Park at
+Darlington between his trains, and wounded soldiers waited for him on
+every seat, shuffled towards him round every turning, hobbled after him
+on their crutches down every path. Their eyes looked at him with a
+shrewd hostility. He saw the young Yorkshire recruits drinking in the
+open spaces. Sergeants' eyes caught and measured him, appraising his
+physique. Behind and among them he saw Drayton's, and Reveillaud's, and
+Stephen's eyes; and young Wadham's eyes, strange and secretive and hard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Reyburn Michael's train was switched off to a side platform in the
+open. Before he left Darlington, a thin, light rain had begun to fall
+from a shred of blown cloud; and at Reyburn the burst mass was coming
+down. The place was full of the noise of rain. The drops tapped on the
+open platform and hissed as the wind drove them in a running stream.
+They drummed loudly on the station roof. But these sounds went out
+suddenly, covered by the trampling of feet.
+
+A band of Highlanders with their bagpipes marched into the station. They
+lined up solemnly along the open platform with their backs to Michael's
+train and their faces to the naked rails on the other side. Higher up
+Michael could see the breast of an engine; it was backing, backing,
+towards the troop-train that waited under the cover of the roof. He
+could hear the clank of the coupling and the recoil. At that sound the
+band had their mouths to their bagpipes and their fingers ready on the
+stops. Two or three officers hurried down from the station doors and
+stood ready.
+
+The train came on slowly, packed with men; men who thrust their heads
+and shoulders through the carriage windows, and knelt on the seats, and
+stood straining over each other's backs to look out; men whose faces
+were scarlet with excitement; men with open mouths shouting for joy.
+
+The officers saluted as it passed. It halted at the open platform, and
+suddenly the pipers began to play.
+
+Michael got out of his train and watched.
+
+Solemnly, in the grey evening of the rain, with their faces set in a
+sort of stern esctasy, the Highlanders played to their comrades. Michael
+did not know whether their tune was sad or gay. It poured itself into
+one mournful, savage, sacred cry of salutation and valediction. When it
+stopped the men shouted; there were voices that barked hoarsely and
+broke; voices that roared; young voices that screamed, strung up by the
+skirling of the bagpipes. The pipers played to them again.
+
+And suddenly Michael was overcome. Pity shook him and grief and an
+intolerable yearning, and shame. For one instant his soul rose up above
+the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he cowered under it,
+stripped and beaten. He clenched his fists, hating this emotion that
+stung him to tears and tore at his heart and at the hardness of
+his mind.
+
+As the troop-train moved slowly out of the station the pipers, piping
+more and more shrilly, swung round and marched beside it to the end of
+the platform. The band ceased abruptly, and the men answered with shout
+after shout of violent joy; they reared up through the windows,
+straining for the last look--and were gone.
+
+Michael turned to the porter who lifted his luggage from the rack. "What
+regiment are they?" he said.
+
+"Camerons, sir. Going to the Front."
+
+The clear, uncanny eyes of Veronica's father pursued him now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At last he had got away from it.
+
+In Rathdale, at any rate, there was peace. The hills and their pastures,
+and the flat river fields were at peace. And in the villages of Morfe
+and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few men had gone from
+them. The rest were tied to the land, and they were more absorbed in the
+hay-harvest than in the War. Even the old Belgians in Veronica's cottage
+were at peace. They had forgotten.
+
+For three days Michael himself had peace.
+
+He went up to Veronica's hill and sat on it; and thought how for
+hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was not a
+soul whom he knew. In all his life he had never been more by himself.
+
+This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael's mind. So far
+from having got away from the War he had never been more conscious of it
+than he was now. What he had got away from was other people's
+consciousness. From the beginning the thing that threatened him had
+been, not the War but this collective war-spirit, clamouring for his
+private soul.
+
+For the first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found himself
+thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity, about the War.
+He had really known, half the time, that it was the greatest War of
+Independence that had ever been. As for his old hatred of the British
+Empire, he had seen long ago that there was no such thing, in the
+continental sense of Empire; there was a unique thing, the rule, more
+good than bad, of an imperial people. He had seen that the strength of
+the Allies was in exact proportion to the strength and the enlightenment
+of their democracies. Reckoning by decades, there could be no deadlock
+in the struggle; the deadlock meant a ten years' armistice and another
+war. He could not help seeing these things. His objection to occupying
+his mind with them had been that they were too easy.
+
+Now that he could look at it by himself he saw how the War might take
+hold of you like a religion. It was the Great War of Redemption. And
+redemption meant simply thousands and millions of men in troop-ships and
+troop-trains coming from the ends of the world to buy the freedom of the
+world with their bodies. It meant that the very fields he was looking
+over, and this beauty of the hills, those unused ramparts where no
+batteries were hid, and the small, silent villages, Morfe and Renton,
+were bought now with their bodies.
+
+He wondered how at this moment any sane man could be a Pacifist. And,
+wondering, he felt a reminiscent sting of grief and yearning. But he
+refused, resolutely, to feel any shame.
+
+His religion also was good; and, anyhow, you didn't choose your
+religion; it chose you.
+
+And on Saturday the letters came: John's letter enclosing the wire from
+the War Office, and the letter that Nicky's Colonel had written
+to Anthony.
+
+Nicky was killed.
+
+Michael took in the fact, and the date (it was last Sunday). There were
+some official regrets, but they made no impression on him. John's letter
+made no impression on him. Last Sunday Nicky was killed.
+
+He had not even unfolded the Colonel's letter yet. The close black lines
+showed through the thin paper. Their closeness repelled him. He did not
+want to know how his brother had died; at least not yet. He was afraid
+of the Colonel's letter. He felt that by simply not reading it he could
+put off the unbearable turn of the screw.
+
+He was shivering with cold. He drew up his chair to the wide, open
+hearth-place where there was no fire; he held out his hands over it. The
+wind swept down the chimney and made him colder; and he felt sick.
+
+He had been sitting there about an hour when Suzanne came in and asked
+him if he would like a little fire. He heard himself saying, "No, thank
+you," in a hard voice. The idea of warmth and comfort was disagreeable
+to him. Suzanne asked him then if he had had bad news? And he heard
+himself saying: "Yes," and Suzanne trying, trying very gently, to
+persuade him that it was perhaps only that Monsieur Nicky was wounded?
+
+"No? _Then_," said the old woman, "he is killed." And she began to cry.
+
+Michael couldn't stand that. He got up and opened the door into the
+outer room, and she passed through before him, sobbing and whimpering.
+Her voice came to him through the closed door in a sharp cry telling
+Jean that Monsieur Nicky was dead, and Jean's voice came, hushing her.
+
+Then he heard the feet of the old man shuffling across the kitchen
+floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and through the
+windows at the back of the room, he saw, without heeding, as the
+Belgians passed and went up into the fields together, weeping, leaving
+him alone.
+
+They had remembered.
+
+It was then that Michael read the Colonel's letter, and learned the
+manner of his brother's death: "... About a quarter past four o'clock in
+the afternoon his battalion was being pressed back, when he rallied his
+men and led them in as gallant an attack as was ever made by so small a
+number in this War. He was standing on the enemy's parapet when he was
+shot through the heart and fell. By a quarter to five the trench was
+stormed and taken, owing to his personal daring and impetus and to the
+affection and confidence he inspired.... We hear it continually said of
+our officers and men that 'they're all the same,' and I daresay as far
+as pluck goes they are. But, if I may say so, we all felt that your son
+had something that we haven't got...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Michael lay awake in the bed that had been his brother's marriage bed.
+The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him. For three nights the
+room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had never gone from it. They had
+compelled him to think of them. They had lain where he lay, falling
+asleep in each other's arms.
+
+The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them had in no
+way troubled him. It had been simply there like some exquisite
+atmosphere, intensifying his peace. He had had the same feeling he
+always had when Veronica was with him. He had liked to lie with his head
+on their pillow, to touch what they had touched, to look at the same
+things in the same room, to go in and out through the same doors over
+the same floors, remembering their hands and feet and eyes, and saying
+to himself: "They did this and this"; or, "That must have pleased them."
+
+It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine why it
+was not.
+
+And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of Nicky and
+Veronica together. The room had emptied itself of its own memory and
+significance. He was aware of nothing but the bare, spiritual space
+between him and Nicky. He lay contemplating it steadily and without
+any horror.
+
+He thought: "This ends it. Of course I shall go out now. I might have
+known that this would end it. _He_ knew."
+
+He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night in
+August. He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed,
+half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.
+
+Nicky had taken it for granted even then that he would go out some time.
+He remembered how he had said, "Not yet."
+
+He thought: "Of course; this must have been what he meant."
+
+And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time appeased.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was morning.
+
+Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as he
+struggled to wake.
+
+Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came clear out
+of this drowning.
+
+Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last Sunday. He knew that. But that
+wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed on--
+
+Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be killed
+too. And because he was going out, and because he would be killed, he
+was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should have thought he
+would have felt it. He had been let off that.
+
+He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do, feeling
+a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and Reveillaud and Lawrence
+had gone out, and they had been killed. Ellis and Mitchell and
+Monier-Owen were going out and they would certainly be killed. Wadham
+had gone out and young Vereker, and they also would be killed.
+
+Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.
+
+His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without concern. It
+was aware that his going depended on his own will. But never in all his
+life had he brought so little imagination to the act of willing.
+
+He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast. He
+accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or concern.
+
+Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other things: "I
+know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know how you cared
+for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not bear it, Michael, if
+we were not so proud of him."
+
+He answered this letter at once. He wrote: "I couldn't bear it either,
+if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now."
+
+As he signed himself, "Your loving Michael," he thought: "That settles
+it." Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it he would
+have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night had settled it;
+that his resolution had been absolutely self-determined and absolutely
+irrevocable then, and that his signature gave it no more sanctity or
+finality than it had already. If he was conscript, he was conscript to
+his own will.
+
+He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the post did
+not leave Renton for another five hours.
+
+It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the letter-box
+that shook him into realization of what he had done and of what was
+before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to write that letter
+and to post it. By those two slight acts, not dreadful nor difficult in
+themselves, he had put it out of his power to withdraw from the one
+supremely difficult and dreadful act. A second ago, while the letter was
+still in his hands, he could have backed out, because he had not given
+any pledge. Now he would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly
+for the first time what it was that he would have to go through.
+
+He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along the top
+for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and seeing nothing
+before him but his own act and what must come afterwards. By to-morrow,
+or the next day at the latest, he would have enlisted; by six months, at
+the latest, three months if he had what they called "luck," he would be
+in the trenches, fighting and killing, not because he chose, but because
+he would be told to fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that
+letter to his mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.
+
+And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying that he
+didn't funk it.
+
+Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked looking on at
+fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn't think he would
+really mind that so much. It would come--it must come--as a relief from
+the horrors he would have to see before it came. Nicky had said that
+they were unbelievable; he had seemed to think you couldn't imagine them
+if you hadn't seen them. But Michael could. He had only to think of them
+to see them now. He could make war-pictures for himself, in five
+minutes, every bit as terrifying as the things they said happened under
+fire. Any fool, if he chose to think about it, could see what must
+happen. Only people didn't think. They rushed into it without seeing
+anything; and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it,
+before and during and afterwards and all the time.
+
+Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that the
+others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very well to
+say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as their phrase was,
+"Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far as he was concerned,
+the end of beauty and of the making of beauty, and of everything worth
+caring for; but it was also the beginning of a life that Michael dreaded
+more than fighting and killing and being killed: a life of boredom, of
+obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection. For
+of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he
+could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed
+beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he
+could smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.
+
+Of course he was going through with it; only--this was the thought his
+mind turned round and round on in horror at itself--he funked it. He
+funked it so badly that he would really rather die than go through with
+it. When he was actually killed that would be his second death; months
+before it could happen he would have known all about it; he would have
+been dead and buried and alive again in hell.
+
+What shocked Michael was his discovering, not that he funked it now,
+which was natural, almost permissible, but that he had funked it all the
+time. He could see now that, since the War began, he had been struggling
+to keep out of it. His mind had fought every suggestion that he should
+go in. It had run to cover, like a mad, frightened animal before the
+thoughts that hunted it down. Funk, pure funk, had been at the bottom of
+all he had said and thought and done since August, nineteen-fourteen;
+his attitude to the War, his opinion of the Allies, and of the
+Government and of its conduct of the War, all his wretched criticisms
+and disparagements--what had they been but the very subterfuges
+of funk?
+
+His mother had known it; his father had known it; and Dorothy and John.
+It was not conceivable that Nicky did not know it.
+
+That was what had made the horror of the empty space that separated
+them.
+
+Lawrence Stephen had certainly known it.
+
+He could not understand his not knowing it himself, not seeing that he
+struggled. Yet he must have seen that Nicky's death would end it.
+Anyhow, it _was_ ended; if not last night, then this morning when he
+posted the letter.
+
+But he was no longer appeased by this certainty of his. He was going out
+all right. But merely going out was not enough. What counted was the
+state of mind in which you went. Lawrence had said, "Victory--Victory is
+a state of mind."
+
+Well--it was a state that came naturally to Nicky, and did not come
+naturally to him. It was all very well for Nicky: he had wanted to go.
+He had gone out victorious before victory. Michael would go beaten
+before defeat.
+
+He thought: "If this is volunteering, give me compulsion." All the same
+he was going.
+
+All morning and afternoon, as he walked and walked, his thoughts went
+the same round. And in the evening they began again, but on a new track.
+He thought: "It's all very well to say I'm going; but how _can_ I go?"
+He had Lawrence Stephen's work to do; Lawrence's Life and Letters were
+in his hands. How could he possibly go and leave Lawrence dead and
+forgotten? This view seemed to him to be sanity and common sense.
+
+As his mind darted up this turning it was driven back. He saw Lawrence
+Stephen smiling at him as he had smiled at him when Reveillaud died.
+Lawrence would have wanted him to go more than anything. He would have
+chosen to be dead and forgotten rather than keep him.
+
+At night these thoughts left him. He began to think of Nicky and of his
+people. His father and mother would never be happy again. Nicky had been
+more to them than he was, or even John. He had been more to Dorothy. It
+was hard on Dorothy to lose Nicky and Drayton too.
+
+He thought of Nicky and Veronica. Poor little Ronny, what would she do
+without Nicky? He thought of Veronica, sitting silent in the train, and
+looking at him with her startling look of spiritual maturity. He thought
+of Veronica singing to him over and over again:
+
+     "London Bridge is broken down--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "Build it up with gold so fine--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     "Build it up with stones so strong--"
+
+He thought of Veronica running about the house and crying, "Where's
+Nicky? I want him."
+
+Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in the
+morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of Renton
+Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way as yesterday.
+The images were, if anything, more crowded and more horrible; but they
+had lost their hold. He was tired of looking at them.
+
+About five o'clock he turned abruptly and went back to the village the
+same way by which he came.
+
+And as he swung down the hill road in sight of Renton, suddenly there
+was a great clearance in his soul.
+
+When he went into the cottage he found Veronica there waiting for him.
+She sat with her hands lying in her lap, and she had the same look he
+had seen when she was in the train.
+
+"Ronny--"
+
+She stood up to greet him, as if it had been she who was staying there
+and he who had incredibly arrived.
+
+"They told me you wouldn't be long," she said.
+
+"I? You haven't come because you were ill or anything?"
+
+She smiled and shook her head. "No. Not for anything like that."
+
+"I didn't write, Ronny. I couldn't."
+
+"I know." Their eyes met, measuring each other's grief. "That's why I
+came. I couldn't bear to leave you to it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'd have come before, Michael, if you'd wanted me."
+
+They were sitting together now, on the settle by the hearth-place.
+
+"I can't understand your being able to think of me," he said.
+
+"Because of Nicky? If I haven't got Nicky it's all the more reason why I
+should think of his people."
+
+He looked up. "I say--how are they? Mother and Father?"
+
+"They're very brave.
+
+"It's worse for them than it is for me," she said. "What they can't bear
+is your going."
+
+"Mother got my letter, then?"
+
+"Yes. This morning."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"She said: 'Oh, no. _Not_ Michael.'
+
+"It was a good thing you wrote, though. Your letter made her cry. It
+made even Dorothy cry. They hadn't been able to, before."
+
+"I should have thought if they could stand Nicky's going--"
+
+"That was different. They know it was different."
+
+"Do you suppose _I_ don't know how different it was? They mean I funked
+it and Nicky didn't."
+
+"They mean that Nicky got what he wanted when he went, and that there
+was nothing else he could have done so well, except flying, or
+engineering."
+
+"It comes to the same thing, Nicky simply wasn't afraid."
+
+"Yes, Michael, he _was_ afraid."
+
+"What _of_?"
+
+"He was most awfully afraid of seeing suffering."
+
+"Well, so am I. And I'm afraid of suffering myself too. I'm afraid of
+the whole blessed thing from beginning to end."
+
+"That's because you keep on seeing the whole blessed thing from
+beginning to end. Nicky only saw little bits of it. The bits he liked.
+Machine-guns working beautifully, and shells dropping in the right
+places, and trenches being taken.
+
+"And then, remember--Nicky hadn't so much to give up."
+
+"He had you."
+
+"Oh, no. He knew that was the way to keep me."
+
+"Ronny--if Nicky had been like me could he have kept you?"
+
+She considered it.
+
+"Yes--if he could have been himself too."
+
+"He couldn't, you see. He never could have felt like that."
+
+"I don't say He could."
+
+"Well--the awful thing is 'feeling like that.'"
+
+"And the magnificent thing is 'feeling like that,' and going all the
+same. Everybody knows that but you, Michael."
+
+"Yes," he said. "I'm _going_. But I'm not going to lie about it and say
+I don't funk it. Because I do."
+
+"You don't _really_."
+
+"I own I didn't the first night--the night I knew Nicky was killed.
+Because I couldn't think of anything else _but_ Nicky.
+
+"It was after I'd written to Mother that it came on. Because I knew then
+I couldn't back out of it. That's what I can't get over--my having to do
+that--to clinch it--because I was afraid."
+
+"My dear, my dear, thousands of men do that every day for the same
+reason, only they don't find themselves out; and if they did they
+wouldn't care. You're finding yourself out all the time, and killing
+yourself with caring."
+
+"Of course I care. Can't you see it proves that I never meant to go at
+all?"
+
+"It proves that you knew you'd have to go through hell first and you
+were determined that even hell shouldn't keep you back."
+
+"Ronny--that's what it _has_ been. Simply hell. It's been inconceivable.
+Nothing--absolutely nothing out there could be as bad. It went on all
+yesterday and to-day--till you came."
+
+"I know, Michael. That's why I came."
+
+"To get me out of it?"
+
+"To get you out of it.
+
+"It's all over," she said.
+
+"It may come back--out there."
+
+"It won't. Out there you'll be happy. I saw Nicky on Sunday--the minute
+before he was killed, Michael. And he was happy."
+
+"He would be." He was silent for a long time.
+
+"Ronny. Did Nicky know I funked it?"
+
+"Never! He knew you wouldn't keep out. All he minded was your missing
+any of it."
+
+She got up and put on her hat. "I must go. It's getting late. Will you
+walk up to Morfe with me? I'm sleeping there. In the hotel."
+
+"No, I say--I'm not going to let you turn out for me. _I_'ll sleep at
+the hotel."
+
+She smiled at him with a sort of wonder, as if she thought: "Has he
+forgotten, so soon?" And he remembered.
+
+"I can't stop here," she said. "That would be more than even _I_ can
+bear."
+
+He thought: "She's gone through hell herself, to get me out of it."
+
+          May, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER,--Yes, "Captain," please. (I can hardly
+believe it myself, but it is so.) It was thundering good luck getting
+into dear old Nicky's regiment. The whole thing's incredible. But
+promotion's nothing. Everybody's getting it like lightning now. You're
+no sooner striped than you're starred.
+
+I'm glad I resisted the Adjutant and worked up from the ranks. I own it
+was a bit beastly at the time--quite as beastly as Nicky said it would
+be; but it was worth while going through with it, especially living in
+the trenches as a Tommy. There's nothing like it for making you know
+your men. You can tell exactly what's going to bother them, and what
+isn't. You've got your finger on the pulse of their morale--not that
+it's jumpier than yours; it isn't--and their knowing that they haven't
+got to stand anything that you haven't stood gives you no end of a pull.
+Honestly, I don't believe I could have faced them if it wasn't for that.
+So that _your_ morale's the better for it as well as theirs. You know,
+if you're shot down this minute it won't matter. The weediest Tommy in
+your Company can "carry on."
+
+_We_'re a funny crowd in my billet all risen from the ranks except my
+Senior. John would love us. There's a chap who writes short stories and
+goes out very earnestly among the corpses to find copy; and there's
+another who was in the publishing business and harks back to it, now and
+then, in a dreamy nostalgic way, and rather as if he wanted to rub it
+into us writing chaps what he _could_ do for us, only he wouldn't; and
+there's a tailor who swears he could tell a mile off where my tunic came
+from; and a lawyer's clerk who sticks his cigarette behind his ear. (We
+used to wonder what he'd do with his revolver till we saw what he did
+with it.) They all love thinking of what they've been and telling you
+about it. I almost wish I'd gone into Daddy's business. Then perhaps I'd
+know what it feels like to go straight out of a shop or an office into
+the most glorious Army in history.
+
+I forgot the Jew pawnbroker at least we _think_ he's a pawnbroker--who's
+always inventing things; stupendous and impossible things. His last idea
+was machine-howitzers fourteen feet high, that take in shells exactly as
+a machine-gun takes in bullets. He says "You'll see them in the next
+War." When you ask him how he's going to transport and emplace and hide
+his machine-howitzers, he looks dejected, and says "I never thought of
+_that_," and has another idea at once, even more impossible.
+
+That reminds me. I've seen the "Tanks" (Nicky's Moving Fortresses) in
+action. I'd give my promotion if only he could have seen them too. We
+mustn't call them Fortresses any more--they're most violently for
+attack. As far as I can make out Nicky's and Drayton's thing was
+something between these and the French ones; otherwise one might have
+wondered whether their plans and models really did go where John says
+they did! I wish I could believe that Nicky and Drayton really _had_ had
+a hand in it.
+
+I'm most awfully grieved to hear that young Vereker's reported missing.
+Do you remember how excited he used to be dashing about the lawn at
+tennis, and how Alice Lathom used to sit and look at him, and jump if
+you brought her her tea too suddenly? Let's hope we'll have finished up
+this damned War before they get little Norris.
+
+Love to Dorothy and Don and Ronny.--Your loving, MICK.
+
+When Frances read that letter she said, "I wonder if he really is all
+right. He says very little about himself."
+
+And Anthony said, "Then you may be sure he is."
+
+          May 31st, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad Mummy and Father have got all my letters. They
+won't mind my writing to you this time. It really _is_ your turn now.
+Thanks for Wadham's "Poems" (I wish they'd been Ellis's). It's a shame
+to laugh at Waddy--but--he _has_ spread himself over Flanders, hasn't
+he? Like the inundations round Ypres.
+
+I'm most awfully touched at Dad and Mummy wanting to publish mine. Here
+they all are--just as I wrote them, in our billet, at night or in the
+early morning, when the others were sleeping and I wasn't. I don't know
+whether they're bad or good; I haven't had time to think about them. It
+all seems so incredibly far away. Even last week seems far away. You go
+on so fast here.
+
+I'd like Ellis and Monier-Owen to see them and to weed out the bad ones.
+But you mustn't ask them to do anything. They haven't time, either. I
+think you and Dorothy and Dad will manage it all right among you. If you
+don't I shan't much care.
+
+Of course I'm glad that they've taken you on at the Hampstead Hospital,
+if it makes you happier to nurse. And I'm glad Dad put his foot down on
+your going to Vera. She gave you up to my people and she can't take you
+back now. I'm sorry for her though; so is he.
+
+Have I had any adventures "by myself"? Only two. (I've given up what
+Mother calls my "not wanting to go to the party.") One came off in "No
+Man's Land" the other night. I went out with a "party" and came back by
+myself--unless you count a damaged Tommy hanging on to me. It began in
+pleasurable excitement and ended in some perturbation, for I had to get
+him in under cover somehow, and my responsibility weighed on me--so did
+he. The other was ages ago in a German trench. I was by myself, because
+I'd gone in too quick, and the "party" behind me took the wrong turning.
+I did manage to squeeze a chilly excitement out of going on alone. Then
+I bumped up against a fat German officer and his revolver. That really
+was an exquisite moment, and I was beast enough to be glad I had it all
+to myself. It meant a bag of fifteen prisoners--all my own. But that was
+nothing; they'd have surrendered to a mouse. There was no reason why
+they shouldn't, because I'd fired first and there was no more officer to
+play up to.
+
+But the things you don't do by yourself are a long way the best.
+Nothing--not even poetry--can beat an infantry charge when you're
+leading it. That's because of your men. It feels as if you were drawing
+them all up after you. Of course you aren't. They're coming on their
+own, and you're simply nothing, only a little unimportant part of
+them--even when you're feeling as if you were God Almighty.
+
+I'm afraid it _does_ look awfully as if young Vereker were killed. They
+may hear, you know, in some roundabout way--through the Red Cross, or
+some of his men. I've written to them.
+
+Love to everybody. Certainly you may kiss Nanna for me, if she'd like
+it. I wish I liked Waddy more--when you've given him to me.--Always your
+affectionate,
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+P.S.--I don't sound pleased about the publication; but I am. I can't get
+over their wanting to do it. I thought they didn't care.
+
+Ronny--I've been such a beast to them--when Father tried to read my
+stuff--bless him!--and couldn't, I used to wish to God he'd leave it
+alone. And now I'd give anything to see his dear old paws hanging on to
+it and twitching with fright, and his eyes slewing round to see if I'm
+looking at him.
+
+          June 14th, 1916.
+     B.E.F., FRANCE.
+
+MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad you like them, and I'm glad Father thinks he
+"understands Michael's poems" this time, and I'm glad they've made
+Mother and Dorothy feel happier about me--BUT--they must get it out of
+their heads that they're my "message," or any putrescent thing of that
+sort. The bare idea of writing a message, or of being supposed to write
+a message, makes me sick. I know it's beastly of me, but, really I'd
+rather they weren't published at all, if there's the smallest chance of
+their being taken that way.
+
+But if Ellis is doing the introduction there isn't the smallest chance.
+Thank God for Ellis.
+
+There--I've let off all my beastliness.
+
+And now I'll try to answer your letter. Yes; the "ecstasy" in the last
+two poems _is_ Nicky's ecstasy. And as Ellis says it strikes him as
+absolutely real, I take it that some of Nicky's "reality" has got
+through. It's hard on Ellis that he has to take _his_ ecstasy from me,
+instead of coming out and getting it for himself.
+
+But you and Nicky and Lawrence are right. It _is_ absolutely real. I
+mean it has to do with absolute reality. With God. It hasn't anything to
+do with having courage, or not having courage; it's another state of
+mind altogether. It isn't what Nicky's man said it was--you're not
+ashamed of it the next day. It isn't excitement; you're not excited. It
+isn't a tingling of your nerves; they don't tingle. It's all curiously
+quiet and steady. You remember when you saw Nicky--how everything stood
+still? And how two times were going on, and you and Nicky were in one
+time, and Mother was in the other? Well--it's like that. Your body and
+its nerves aren't in it at all. Your body may be moving violently, with
+other bodies moving violently round it; but _you_'re still.
+
+But suppose it is your nerves. Why should they tingle at just that
+particular moment, the moment that makes _animals_ afraid? Why should
+you be so extraordinarily happy? Why should the moment of extreme danger
+be always the "exquisite" moment? Why not the moment of safety?
+
+Doesn't it look as if danger were the point of contact with reality, and
+death the closest point? You're through. Actually you lay hold on
+eternal life, and you know it.
+
+Another thing--it always comes with that little shock of recognition.
+It's happened before, and when you get near to it again you know what it
+is. You keep on wanting to get near it, wanting it to happen again. You
+may lose it the next minute, but you know. Lawrence knew what it was.
+Nicky knew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     June 19th.
+
+I'm coming back to it--after that interruption--because I want to get
+the thing clear. I have to put it down as I feel it; there's no other
+way. But they mustn't think it's something that only Lawrence and Nicky
+and I feel. The men feel it too, even when they don't know what it is.
+And some of them _do_ know.
+
+Of course we shall be accused of glorifying War and telling lies about
+it. Well--there's a Frenchman who has told the truth, piling up all the
+horrors, faithfully, remorselessly, magnificently. But he seems to think
+people oughtn't to write about this War at all unless they show up the
+infamy of it, as a deterrent, so that no Government can ever start
+another one. It's a sort of literary "frightfulness." But who is he
+trying to frighten? Does he imagine that France, or England, or Russia
+or Belgium, or Serbia, will want to start another war when this is over?
+And does he suppose that Germany--if we don't beat her--will be deterred
+by his frightfulness? Germany's arrogance will be satisfied when she
+knows she's made a Frenchman feel like that about it.
+
+He's got his truth all right. As Morrie would say: "That's War." But a
+peaceful earthquake can do much the same thing. And if _our_ truth--what
+_we_'ve seen--isn't War, at any rate it's what we've got out of it, it's
+our "glory," our spiritual compensation for the physical torture, and
+there would be a sort of infamy in trying to take it from us. It isn't
+the French Government, or the British that's fighting Germany; it's
+we--all of us. To insist on the world remembering nothing but these
+horrors is as if men up to their knees in the filth they're clearing
+away should complain of each other for standing in it and splashing
+it about.
+
+The filth of War--and the physical torture--Good God! As if the world
+was likely to forget it. Any more than we're likely to forget what
+_we_ know.
+
+You remember because you've known it before and it all hangs together.
+It's not as if danger were the only point of contact with reality. You
+get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition, and the same utter
+satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing. At least to me it's like
+that. You know what Nicky thought it was like. You know what it was like
+when you used to sit looking and looking at Mother's "tree of Heaven."
+
+It's odd, Ronny, to have gone all your life trying to get reality,
+trying to get new beauty, trying to get utter satisfaction; to have
+funked coming out here because you thought it was all obscene ugliness
+and waste and frustration, and then to come out, and to find what
+you wanted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     June 25th.
+
+I wrote all that, while I could, because I want to make them see it.
+It's horrible that Dorothy should think that Drayton's dead and that
+Mother should think that Nicky's dead, when they wouldn't, if they
+really knew. If they don't believe Lawrence or me, can't they believe
+Nicky? I'm only saying what he said. But I can't write to them about it
+because they make me shy, and I'm afraid they'll think I'm only gassing,
+or "making poetry"--as if poetry wasn't the most real thing there is!
+
+If anybody can make them see it, you can.--Always your affectionate,
+
+     MICHAEL.
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Anthony was going into the house to take back the key of the workshop.
+
+He had locked the door of the workshop a year ago, after Nicky's death,
+and had not opened it again until to-day. This afternoon in the orchard
+he had seen that the props of the old apple-tree were broken and he had
+thought that he would like to make new ones, and the wood was in
+the workshop.
+
+Everything in there was as it had been when Nicky finished with his
+Moving Fortress. The brass and steel filings lay in a heap under the
+lathe, the handle was tilted at the point where he had left it; pits in
+the saw-dust showed where his feet had stood. His overalls hung over the
+bench where he had slipped them off.
+
+Anthony had sat down on the bench and had looked at these things with
+remembrance and foreboding. He thought of Nicky and of Nicky's pleasure
+and excitement over the unpacking of his first lathe--the one he had
+begged for for his birthday--and of his own pleasure and excitement as
+he watched his boy handling it and showing him so cleverly how it
+worked. It stood there still in the corner. Nicky had given it to
+Veronica. He had taught her how to use it. And Anthony thought of
+Veronica when she was little; he saw Nicky taking care of her, teaching
+her to run and ride and play games. And he remembered what Veronica's
+mother had said to him and Frances: "Wait till Nicky has children of
+his own."
+
+He thought of John. John had volunteered three times and had been three
+times rejected. And now conscription had got him. He had to appear
+before the Board of Examiners that afternoon. He might be rejected
+again. But the standard was not so exacting as it had been--John
+might be taken.
+
+He thought of his business--John's business and his, and Bartie's. Those
+big Government contracts had more than saved them. They were making tons
+of money out of the War. Even when the Government cut down their
+profits; even when they had given more than half they made to the War
+funds, the fact remained that they were living on the War. Bartie,
+without a wife or children, was appallingly rich.
+
+If John were taken. If John were killed--
+
+If Michael died--
+
+Michael had been reported seriously wounded.
+
+He had thought then of Michael. And he had not been able to bear
+thinking any more. He had got up and left the workshop, locking the door
+behind him, forgetting what he had gone in for; and he had taken the key
+back to the house. He kept it in what his children used to call the
+secret drawer of his bureau. It lay there with Nicky's last letter of
+June, 1915, and a slab of coromandel wood.
+
+It was when he was going into the house with the key that John met him.
+
+"Have they taken you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+John's face was hard and white. They went together into Anthony's room.
+
+"It's what you wanted," Anthony said.
+
+"Of course it's what I wanted. I want it more than ever now.
+
+"The wire's come, Father. Mother opened it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was five days now since they had heard that Michael had died of his
+wounds. Frances was in Michael's room. She was waiting for Dorothea and
+Veronica to help her to find his papers. It was eight o'clock in the
+evening, and they had to be sorted and laid out ready for Morton Ellis
+to look over them to-morrow. To-morrow Morton Ellis would come, and he
+would take them away.
+
+The doors of Michael's and of Nicky's rooms were always kept shut;
+Frances knew that, if she were to open the door on the other side of the
+corridor and look in, every thing in Nicky's room would welcome her with
+tenderness even while it inflicted its unique and separate wound. But
+Michael's room was bare and silent. He had cleared everything away out
+of her sight last year before he went. The very books on the shelves
+repudiated her; reminded her that she had never understood him, that he
+had always escaped her. His room kept his secret, and she felt afraid
+and abashed in it, knowing herself an intruder. Presently all that was
+most precious in it would be taken from her and given over to a stranger
+whom he had never liked.
+
+Her mind turned and fastened on one object--the stiff, naked wooden
+chair standing in its place before the oak table by the window. She
+remembered how she had come to Michael there and found him writing at
+his table, and how she had talked to him as though he had been a shirker
+and a coward.
+
+She had borne Nicky's death. But she could not bear Michael's. She stood
+there in his room, staring, hypnotized by her memory. She heard Dorothea
+come in and go out again. And then Veronica came in.
+
+She turned to Veronica to help her.
+
+She clung to Veronica and was jealous of her. Veronica had not come
+between her and Nicky as long as he was alive, but now that he was dead
+she came between them. She came between her and Michael too. Michael's
+mind had always been beyond her; she could only reach it through
+Veronica and through Veronica's secret. Her mind clutched at Veronica's
+secret, and flung it away as useless, and returned, clutching at
+it again.
+
+It was as if Veronica held the souls of Michael and Nicholas in her
+hands. She offered her the souls of her dead sons. She was the mediator
+between her and their souls.
+
+"I could bear it, Veronica, if I hadn't made him go. I came to him,
+here, in this room, and bullied him till he went. I said horrible things
+to him--that he must have remembered.
+
+"He wasn't like Nicky--it was infinitely worse for him. And I was cruel
+to him. I had no pity. I drove him out--to be killed.
+
+"And I simply cannot bear it."
+
+"But--he didn't go then. He waited till--till he was free. If anybody
+could have made him, Nicky could. But it wasn't even Nicky. It was
+himself."
+
+"If he'd been killed as Nicky was--but to die like that, in the
+hospital--of those horrible wounds."
+
+"He was leading a charge, just as Nicky was. And you know he was happy,
+just as Nicky was. Every line he's written shows that he was happy."
+
+"It only shows that they were both full of life, that they loved their
+life and wanted to live.
+
+"It's no use, Ronny, you're saying you know they're there. I don't. I'd
+give anything to believe it. And yet it wouldn't be a bit of good if I
+did. I don't _want_ them all changed into something spiritual that I
+shouldn't know if it was there. I want their bodies with me just as they
+used to be. I want to hear them and touch them, and see them come in in
+their old clothes.
+
+"To see Nicky standing on the hearthrug with Timmy in his arms. I want
+things like that, Ronny. Even if you're right, it's all clean gone."
+
+Her lips tightened.
+
+"I'm talking as if I was, the only one. But I know it's worse for you,
+Ronny. I _had_ them all those years. And I've got Anthony. You've had
+nothing but your poor three days."
+
+Veronica thought: "How can I tell her that I've got more than she
+thinks? It's awful that I should have what she hasn't." She was ashamed
+and beaten before this irreparable, mortal grief.
+
+"And it's worse," Frances said, "for the wretched mothers whose sons
+haven't fought."
+
+For her pride rose in her again--the pride that uplifted her
+supernaturally when Nicky died.
+
+"You mustn't think I grudge them. I don't. I don't even grudge John."
+
+The silence of Michael's room sank into them, it weighed on their hearts
+and they were afraid of each other's voices. Frances was glad when
+Dorothy came and they could begin their work there.
+
+But Michael had not left them much to do. They found his papers all in
+one drawer of his writing-table, sorted and packed and labelled, ready
+for Morton Ellis to take away. One sealed envelope lay in a place by
+itself. Frances thought: "He didn't want any of us to touch his things."
+
+Then she saw Veronica's name on the sealed envelope. She was glad when
+Veronica left them and went to her hospital.
+
+And when she was gone she wanted her back again.
+
+"I wish I hadn't spoken that way to Veronica," she said.
+
+"She won't mind. She knows you couldn't help it."
+
+"I could, Dorothy, if I wasn't jealous of her. I mean I'm jealous of her
+certainty. If I had it, too, I shouldn't be jealous."
+
+"She wants you to have it. She's trying to give it you.
+
+"Mother--how do we know she isn't right? Nicky said she was. And Michael
+said Nicky was right.
+
+"If it had been only Nicky--_he_ might have got it from Veronica. But
+Michael never got things from anybody. And you _do_ know things in queer
+ways. Even I do. At least I did once--when I was in prison. I knew
+something tremendous was going to happen. I saw it, or felt it, or
+something. I won't swear I knew it was the War. I don't suppose I did.
+But I knew Frank was all mixed up with it. And it was the most awfully
+real thing. You couldn't go back on it, or get behind it. It was as if
+I'd seen that he and Lawrence and Nicky and Michael and all of them
+would die in it to save the whole world. Like Christ, only that they
+really _did_ die and the whole world _was_ saved. There was nothing
+futile about it."
+
+"Well--?"
+
+"Well, _they_ might see their real thing the same way--in a flash.
+Aren't they a thousand times more likely to know than we are? What right
+have we--sitting here safe--to say it isn't when they say it is?"
+
+"But--if there's anything in it--why can't I see it as well as you and
+Veronica? After all, I'm their mother."
+
+"Perhaps that's why it takes you longer, Mummy. You think of their
+bodies more than we do, because they were part of your body. Their
+souls, or whatever it is, aren't as real to you just at first."
+
+"I see," said Frances, bitterly. "You've only got to be a mother, and
+give your children your flesh and blood, to be sure of their souls going
+from you and somebody else getting them."
+
+"That's the price you pay for being mothers."
+
+"Was Frank's soul ever more real to _you_, Dorothy?"
+
+"Yes. It was once--for just one minute. The night he went away. That's
+another queer thing that happened."
+
+"It didn't satisfy you, darling, did it?"
+
+"Of course it didn't satisfy me. I want more and more of it. Not just
+flashes."
+
+"You say it's the price we pay for being mothers. Yet if Veronica had
+had a child--"
+
+"You needn't be so sorry for Veronica."
+
+"I'm not. It's you I'm sorriest for. You've had nothing. From beginning
+to end you had nothing.
+
+"I might at least have seen that you had it in the beginning."
+
+"_You_, Mummy?"
+
+"Yes. Me. You _shall_ have it now. Unless you want to leave me."
+
+"I wouldn't leave you for the world, Mummy ducky. Only you must let me
+work always and all the time."
+
+"Let you? I'll let you do what you like, my dear."
+
+"You always have let me, haven't you?"
+
+"It was the least I could do."
+
+"Poor Mummy, did you think you had to make up because you cared for them
+more than me?"
+
+"I wonder," said Frances, thoughtfully, "if I did."
+
+"Of course. Of course you did. Who wouldn't?"
+
+"I never meant you to know it, Dorothy."
+
+"Of course I knew it. I must have known it ever since Michael was born.
+I knew you couldn't help it. You had to. Even when I was a tiresome kid
+I knew you had to. It was natural."
+
+"Natural or unnatural, many girls have hated their mothers for less.
+You've been very big and generous.
+
+"Perhaps--if you'd been little and weak--but you were always such an
+independent thing. I used to think you didn't want me."
+
+"I wanted you a lot more than you thought. But, you see, I've learned to
+do without."
+
+She thought: "It's better she should have it straight."
+
+"If you'd think less about me, Mother," she said, "and more about
+Father--"
+
+"Father?"
+
+"Yes. Father isn't independent--though he looks it. He wants you
+awfully. He always has wanted you. And he hasn't learned to do without."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"He's sitting out there in the garden, all by himself, in the dark,
+under the tree."
+
+Frances went to him there.
+
+"I wondered whether you would come to me," he said.
+
+"I was doing something for Michael."
+
+"Is it done?"
+
+"Yes. It's done."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Five months passed. It was November now.
+
+In the lane by the side door, Anthony was waiting in his car. Rain was
+falling, hanging from the trees and falling. Every now and then he
+looked at his watch.
+
+He had still a quarter of an hour before he need start. But he was not
+going back into the house. They were all in there saying good-bye to
+John: old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith. And Maurice.
+And his brother Bartie.
+
+The door in the garden wall opened and they came out: the four women in
+black--the black they still wore for Michael--and the two men.
+
+They all walked slowly up the lane. Anthony could see Bartie's shoulders
+hunched irritably against the rain. He could see Morrie carrying his
+sodden, quivering body with care and an exaggerated sobriety. He saw
+Grannie, going slowly, under the umbrella, very upright and conscious of
+herself as wonderful and outlasting.
+
+He got down and cranked up his engine.
+
+Then he sat sternly in his car and waited, with his hands on the
+steering-wheel, ready.
+
+The engine throbbed, impatient for the start.
+
+John came out very quickly and took his seat beside his father. And the
+car went slowly towards the high road.
+
+Uncle Morrie stood waiting for it by the gate at the top of the lane. As
+it passed through he straightened himself and put up his hand in a
+crapulous salute.
+
+The young man smiled at him, saluted, and was gone
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREE OF HEAVEN***
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