Chapter 2

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.