Chapter 3

VICTORY

XVIII

It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political atmosphere due to the fine weather.

Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his family that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and that the mere off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the striker. And when Michael asked him contentiously what the weather had to do with Home Rule, he answered that it had everything to do with it by increasing parliamentary blood-pressure.

"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how long the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to Mr. Redmond then."

Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew that Home Rule had never been a part of practical politics and never would be.

And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own views about the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they could have told Anthony what the answers were going to be; only they said it wasn't any good talking to Father; when he got an idea into his dear old head it stuck there.

Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make some impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could get them out.

Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children, had time for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent woman than the Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago, informed herself of the affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming of the _Times_. In the last four years the affairs of the nation had thrust themselves violently upon her attention. She had even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement as a vivid and vital affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the fighting and had gone to prison.

Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the _Times_, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn't happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any reason to complain that nothing happened.

It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and Ireland were on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael's insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green Review.

For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly thirteen when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still. His poem was the green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country. Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the imminence of civil war (only that they didn't really believe in it), when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else. In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of Ireland's freedom was a secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew shared it but Lawrence Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him hot and restless and intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish crisis when she said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own business. This excitement is very bad for Michael."

And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two, Anthony and the boys would be out of it.

Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour. There was, indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was being disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.

So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had even thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme measure was unnecessary.

And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy. For the children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever. Michael and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from Michael. Nicholas was doing the chauffeur's work in his absence; and John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it on his father as his contribution to the family economies.

Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's and Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her poor little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.

There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike. Her mind refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before, and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of mind or Anthony's prosperity.

The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the twenty-fifth of July.

Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of it.

Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of those slight changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it seriously. It had been forced on her. Dorothea had decided that she must have a Day, like other people.

She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come out in the spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at Michael's father's house.

Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful, energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred the air about him and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices, and of their laughter. And when the house was quiet and Anthony had Frances to himself he liked that, too.

But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so often--if only I could have my children sometimes to myself!"

It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and suckled them.

There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted and diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd of tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves over the whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent happiness to the "Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith Fleming, who figured as essential parts of the social event. She meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in the inconceivability of their absence on Frances's Bay, wondered more than ever why their daughter Rosalind found them so impossible. She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the office, and their wives and children, and Anthony's secretary, Miss Lathom. If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she soon would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and guileless faces.

Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from India for good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more dangerous than his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was genuinely invalided, who had come back from California for the last time and would never be sent out anywhere again.

Dorothea had said: "Let's kill them all off in one awful day." Frances had said: "Yes, but we must do it decently. We must be kind to them, poor dears!"

Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to Uncle Morrie and Uncle Bartie. That was the only burden she had laid on her children. It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth constrained them. They had received so much, and they had been let off so much; not one of them had inherited the taint that made Maurice and Emmeline Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased and irresponsible. They could afford to be pitiful and merciful.

And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to be pitiful and merciful herself. She could even afford to be grateful to the poor dears. She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and Bartie as scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose affliction left her children clean. She thought of them more and more in this sacred and sacrificial character. At fifty-two Frances could be gentle over the things that had worried and irritated her at thirty-three. Like Anthony she was still young and strong through the youth and strength of her children.

And the poor dears were getting weak and old. Grannie was seventy-nine, and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was forty-nine, and he looked sixty. Every year Frances was more acutely aware of their pathos, their futility, their mortality. They would be broken and gone so soon and so utterly, leaving no name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only living in the memories of her children who would remain.

And, with an awful sense of mortality surrounding them, her children had learned that they must be kind because the old people would be gone while they endured and remained.

This Saturday being the last of the season, they had all come; not only the Flemings, but the Jervises and Verekers and Norrises, and Uncle Bartie. The fine weather alone would have brought them.

Bartie, more morose and irritable than ever, sat under the tree of Heaven and watched the triumphal progress of the Day. He scowled darkly and sourly at each group in turn; at the young men in white flannels playing tennis; at Mr. and Mr. Jervis and the Verekers and Norrises; at the Flemings, old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith, and the disgraceful Maurice, all five of them useless pensioners on his brother's bounty; Maurice a thing of battered, sodden flesh hanging loose on brittle bone, a rickety prop for the irreproachable summer suit bought with Anthony's money. He scowled at the tables covered with fine white linen, and at the costly silver and old china, at the sandwiches and cakes and ices, and the piled-up fruits and the claret cup and champagne cup glowing and shining in the tall glass jugs, and at the pretty maidservants going to and fro in their accomplished service.

Bartie wondered how on earth Anthony managed it. His wonder was a savage joy to Bartie.

Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed it, and Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris, who held that a strike was a downright serious matter, also wondered. But they were sustained by their immense belief in Mr. Anthony. Mr. Anthony knew what he was doing; he always had known. A strike might be serious while it lasted, but it didn't last. And Mr. Nicholas was in the business now, and Mr. John was coming into it next year, and Mr. Nicholas might be married again by that time; and the chances were that the firm of Harrison and Harrison would last long enough to provide for a young Vereker and a still younger Norris.

In spite of the strike, Mr. and Mrs. Vereker and Mr. and Mrs. Norris, like Frances and Anthony, were extraordinarily cheerful that afternoon.

So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.

"I can't think why I feel so happy," said Mrs. Vereker to Mrs. Norris. She was looking at her son George.

"Nor I, either," said Miss Lathom, who was trying suddenly to look at nothing in particular.

Miss Lathom lied and Mrs. Vereker lied; they knew perfectly well why they were happy. Each knew that the other lied; each knew that the other knew she knew; and neither of them could have said why she found it so necessary to lie.

And to Frances this happiness of Mrs. Vereker, and of young Vereker and Miss Lathom was significant and delightful, as if she had been personally responsible for it.

* * * * *

A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and of something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up with Mr. and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind. She stared at the larkspurs as if they held the clue--Nicky's face appeared among the tall blue spires, Nicky's darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and yellow stripes--something to do with a White Cake--it must have been somebody's birthday. Now she had it--Mr. Jervis's cricket scarf. It was the day of Nicky's worst earache, the day when Mr. Vereker climbed the tree of Heaven--was it possible that Mr. Vereker had ever climbed that tree?--the day when Michael wouldn't go to the party--Rosalind's birthday.

Eight candles burning for Rosalind. Why, it was nineteen years ago. Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only little boys. And look at them now!

She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit, slender bodies of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously and well.

"Dorothy is looking very handsome," Mrs. Jervis said. Yes, certainly Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before all things the male beauty of her sons. In Michael and Nicholas it had reached perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last, as Anthony's had lasted.

She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many deaths, each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of babyhood, of childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of their young manhood would be with her for a long time. John would have it. John was only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had not hardened; his boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his mouth, and in his eyelids and the soft corners of his eyes; so that in John she could still see what Nicky had been.

She had adored Anthony's body, as if she had foreseen that it would give her such sons as these; and in her children she had adored the small bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she foresaw the beauty of their manhood. These were the same bodies, the same faces that she had loved in them as children; nothing was blurred or twisted or overlaid.

Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had foreseen him. Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other moments she was proud of his genius; but at this particular moment, sitting beside her friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was chiefly aware of his body.

Michael's body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but austere and tranquil satisfaction. It was when she looked at her second son that something caught at her breath and held it. She saw him as the lover and bridegroom of Veronica. Her sense of his virility was terrible to her and delightful.

Perhaps they were engaged already.

And Frances was sorry for Mrs. Jervis, who had borne no sons, who had only borne one unattractive and unsatisfactory daughter. She used to be sorry for her because Rosalind was pink and fat and fluffy; she was sorry for her now because Rosalind was unsatisfactory. She was sorry for Mrs. Norris because her boy could never grow up like Michael or Nicholas or John. She was sorry for Mrs. Vereker because George, though he looked all right when he was by himself, became clumsy and common at once beside Michael and Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels; he played furiously and well; he played too furiously and too consciously well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp and excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang.

Her arrogance nourished itself on these contrasts.

Mrs. Jervis looked wistfully at the young men as they played. She looked still more wistfully at Dorothy.

"What do you do," she said, "to keep your children with you?"

"I do nothing," Frances said. "I don't try to keep them. I've never appealed to their feelings for my own purposes, or taken advantage of their affection, that's all.

"They know that if they want to walk out of the house to-morrow, and stay out, they can. Nobody'll stop them."

There was a challenging, reminiscent glint in Mr. Jervis's eyes, and his wife was significantly silent. Frances knew what they were thinking.

"Nicky," she said, "walked out; but he came back again as soon as he was in trouble. Michael walks out and goes abroad every year; but he comes back again. Dorothy walks out, but she's never dreamed of not coming back again."

"Of course, if you aren't afraid of taking risks," said Mr. Jervis.

"I am afraid. But I've never shown it."

"It's very strange that Dorothy hasn't married." Mrs. Jervis spoke. She derived comfort from the thought that Dorothy was eight-and-twenty and not married.

"Dorothy," said Frances, "could marry to-morrow if she wanted to; but she doesn't want."

She was sorry for her friend, but she really could not allow her that consolation.

"Veronica is growing up very good-looking," said Mrs. Jervis then.

But it was no use. Frances was aware that Veronica was grown up, and that she was good-looking, and that Nicky loved her; but Mrs. Jervis's shafts fell wide of all her vulnerable places. Frances was no longer afraid.

"Veronica," she said, "is growing up very good." It was not the word she would have chosen, yet it was the only one she could think of as likely to convey to Mrs. Jervis what she wanted her to know, though it left her obtuseness without any sense of Veronica's mysterious quality.

She herself had never tried to think of a word for it before; she was only driven to it now because she detected in her friend's tone a challenge and a warning. It was as if Rosalind's mother had said, extensively and with pointed reference to the facts: "Veronica is dangerous. Her mother has had adventures. She is grown-up and she is good-looking, and Nicky is susceptible to that sort of thing. If you don't look out he will be caught again. The only difference between Phyllis Desmond and Veronica is in their skins."

So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs. Jervis should understand, once for all, that she was not in the least like her mother or like Phyllis Desmond.

That was enough for Mrs. Jervis. But it was not enough for Frances, who found her mind wandering off from Rosalind's mother and looking for the word of words that would express her own meaning to her own satisfaction.

Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation that flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs. Vereker and Mrs. Norris on her left.

Veronica was good. But she was not wrapped up in other people's lives as Frances was wrapped up. She was wrapped up, not in herself, but in some life of her own that, as Frances made it out, had nothing in the world to do with anybody else's.

And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were thinking, and what you were going to do, and what was happening to you. (She had really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky when Desmond made him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls that divide every soul from every other soul were made of some thin and porous stuff that let things through. And in this life of yours, for the moments that she shared it, she lived intensely, with uncanny delight and pain that were her own and not her own.

And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile these extremes of penetration and detachment.

She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that. He saw things. He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights. She supposed it was the Highland blood in both of them.

Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr. Bartholomew was better. Frances said he never would be better till chemists were forbidden to advertise and the _British Medical Journal_ and _The Lancet_ were suppressed. Bartie would read them; and they supplied him with all sorts of extraordinary diseases.

She thought: Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and Veronica in her innermost life was happy. She had been happy when she came back from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky cared for her, before Nicky knew it himself.

Supposing she had known it all the time? But that, Frances said to herself, was nonsense. If she had known as much as all that, why should she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of it? Unless--supposing--it had been his suffering that she had nearly died of?

Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr. Maurice looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that Morrie hadn't been fit for anything since he was in South Africa.

Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme sustained itself. She thought: Then, Nicky had suffered. And Veronica was the only one who knew. She knew more about Nicky than Nicky's mother. This thought was disagreeable to Frances.

It was all nonsense. She didn't really believe that these things happened. Yet, why not? Michael said they happened. Even Dorothy, who didn't believe in God and immortality or anything, believed that.

She gave it up; it was beyond her; it bothered her.

"Yes. Seventy-nine her last birthday."

Mrs. Norris had said that Mrs. Fleming was wonderful.

Frances thought: "It's wonderful what Veronica does to them."

* * * * *

The sets had changed. Nicholas and a girl friend of Veronica's played against George Vereker and Miss Lathom; John, with Mr. Jervis for his handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The very young Norris fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to distinguish himself by catching some ball in full flight as it went "out." It was a pure and high ambition, for he knew he was so young and unimportant that only the eyes of God and of his mother watched him.

Michael had dropped out of it. He sat beside Dorothy under the tree of Heaven and watched Veronica.

"Veronica's wonderful," he said. "Did you see that?"

Dorothy had seen.

Veronica had kept Aunt Emmeline quiet all afternoon. She bad made Bartie eat an ice under the impression that it would be good for him. And now she had gone with Morrie to the table where the drinks were, and had taken his third glass of champagne cup from him and made him drink lemonade instead.

"How does she do it?" said Michael.

"I don't know. She doesn't know herself. I used to think I could manage people, but I'm not in it with Ronny. She ought to be a wardress in a lunatic asylum."

"Now look at that!"

Veronica had returned to the group formed by Grannie and the Aunties and some strangers. The eyes of the four Fleming women had looked after her as she went from them; they looked towards her now as if some great need, some great longing were appeased by her return.

Grannie made a place by her side for the young girl; she took her arm, the young white arm, bare from the elbow in its short sleeve, and made it lie across her knees. From time to time Grannie's yellow, withered hand stroked the smooth, warm white arm, or held it. Emmeline and Edith squatted on the grass at Veronica's feet; their worn faces and the worn face of Louie looked at her. They hung on her, fascinated, curiously tranquillized, as if they drank from her youth.

"It's funny," Dorothy said, "when you think how they used to hate her."

"It's horrible," said Michael.

He got up and took Veronica away.

He was lying at her feet now on the grass in the far corner of the lawn under the terrace.

"Why do you go to them?" he said.

"Because they want me."

"You mustn't go when they want you. You mustn't let them get hold of you."

"They don't get hold of me--nothing gets hold of me. I want to help them. They say it does them good to have me with them."

"I should think it did do them good! They feed on you, Ronny. I can see it by the way they look at you. You'll die of them if you don't give it up."

"Give what up?"

"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it? Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to have been dead years ago.

"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can remember them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin sacrificed to them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're making them go on."

"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael, when you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without being happy, without loving.

"They used to hate me because I'm Vera's daughter. They don't hate me now."

"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires. They'll suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of them.

"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a kid and Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky house they live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's ghost I funked. But I know now it wasn't. It was those four terrible women. They're ghosts. I thought you were afraid of ghosts."

"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see how awful it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living people. Everybody afraid of them--not wanting them."

"Michael--it would be better to be dead!"

* * * * *

Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its appearance and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's friends played singles with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting the partners offered them and disdaining inferior antagonists; they played, Ellis against Mitchell and Monier-Owen against Nicholas.

They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.

It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could not go on for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had done so much for Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of Michael's Poems had made an end of that old animosity a year ago. Practically, they had had to choose between Bartie and Lawrence Stephen as the turning point of honour. Michael had made them see that it was possible to overvalue Bartie; also that it was possible to pay too high a price for a consecrated moral attitude. In all his life the wretched Bartie had never done a thing for any of them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather extraordinary success absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made his father bankrupt he would owe his very means of livelihood to Lawrence Stephen.

Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most frightfully to go on living in the same house with people who disliked him.

If, Michael said, they chose to dissociate themselves altogether from their eldest son and his career, very well. They could go on ignoring and tacitly insulting Mr. Stephen. He could understand their taking a consistently wrong-headed line like that; but so long as they had any regard, either for him or his career, he didn't see how they could very well keep it up any longer. He was sorry, of course, that his career had let them in for Stephen if they didn't like him; but there it was.

And beyond a doubt it was there.

"You might vindicate Bartie gloriously," Michael said, "by turning me out of the house and disinheriting me. But would it be worth while? I'm not asking you to condone Stephen's conduct--if you can't condone it; I'm asking you either to acknowledge _or_ repudiate your son's debts.

"After all, if _he_ can condone your beastly treatment of him--I wouldn't like him if he was the swine you think him."

And Anthony had appealed to Michael's mother.

To his "Well, Frances, what do you think? Ought we or oughtn't we?" she had replied: "I think we ought to stand solid behind Michael."

It was Michael's life that counted, for it was going on into a great future. Bartie would pass and Michael would remain.

Their nervous advances had ended in a complete surrender to Stephen's charm.

Vera and Stephen seemed to think that the way to show the sincerity and sweetness of their reconciliation was to turn up as often as possible on Frances's Day. They arrived always at the same hour, a little late; they came by the road and the front door, so that when Bartie saw them coming he could retreat through the garden door and the lane. The Flemings and the Jervises retreated with him; and presently, when it had had a good look at the celebrities, the rest of the party followed.

This Saturday Frances's Day dwindled and melted away and closed, after its manner; only Vera and Stephen lingered. They stayed on talking to Michael long after everybody else had gone.

Stephen said he had come to say good-bye to Michael's people and to make a proposal to Michael himself. He was going to Ireland.

Vera interrupted him with passion.

"He isn't. He hasn't any proposal to make. He hasn't come to say good-bye."

Her restless, unhappy eyes turned to him incessantly, as if, more than ever, she was afraid that he would escape her, that he would go off God knew where.

God knew where he was going, but Vera did not believe that he was going to Ireland. He had talked about going to Ireland for years, and he had never gone.

Stephen looked as if he did not see her; as if he did not even see Michael very distinctly.

"I'm going," he said, "to Ireland on Monday week, the third of August. I mayn't come back for long enough. I may not come back at all."

"That's the sort of thing he keeps on saying."

"I may not come back _at all_. So I want you to take over the _Review_ for me. Ellis and my secretary will show you how it stands. You'll know what to do. I can trust you not to let it down."

"He doesn't mean what he says, Michael. He's only saying it to frighten me. He's been holding it over me for years.

"_Say_ you'll have nothing to do with it. _Say_ you won't touch his old _Review_."

"Could I go to Ireland for you?"

"You couldn't."

"Why not? What do you think you're going to do there?"

"I'm going to pull the Nationalists together, so that if there's civil war in Ireland, the Irish will have a chance to win. Thank God for Carson! He's given us the opportunity we wanted."

"Tell him he's not to go, Michael. He won't listen to me, but he'll mind what you say."

"I want to go instead of him."

"You can't go instead of me. Nobody can go instead of me."

"I can go with you."

"You can't."

"Larry, if you take Michael to Ireland, Anthony and Frances will never forgive you. _I_'ll never forgive you."

"I'm not taking Michael to Ireland, I'm telling you. There's no reason why Michael should go to Ireland at all. It isn't _his_ country."

"You needn't rub _that_ in," said Michael.

"It isn't _yours_," said Vera. "Ireland doesn't want you. The Nationalists don't want you. You said yourself they've turned you out of Ireland. When you've lived in England all these years why should you go back to a place that doesn't want you?"

"Because if Carson gets a free hand I see some chance of Ireland being a free country."

Vera wailed and entreated. She said it showed how much he cared for her. It showed that he was tired of her. Why couldn't he say so and have done with it?

"It's not," she said, "as if you could really do anything. You're a dreamer. Ireland has had enough of dreamers." And Stephen's eyes looked over her head, into the high branches of the tree of Heaven, as if he saw his dream shining clear through them like a moon.

The opportunist could see nothing but his sublime opportunity.

Michael went back with him to dine and talk it over. There was to be civil war in Ireland then?

He thought: If only Lawrence would let him go with him. He wanted to go to Ireland. To join the Nationalists and fight for Ireland, fight for the freedom he was always dreaming about--_that_ would be a fine thing. It would be a finer thing than writing poems about Ireland.

Lawrence Stephen went soberly and steadily through the affair of the _Review_, explaining things to Michael. He wanted this done, and this. And over and over again Michael's voice broke through his instructions. Why couldn't he go to Ireland instead of Lawrence? Or, if Lawrence wouldn't let him go instead of him, he might at least take him with him. He didn't want to stay at home editing the _Review_. Ellis or Mitchell or Monier-Owen would edit it better than he could. Even the wretched Wadham would edit it just as well. He wanted to go to Ireland and fight.

But Lawrence wouldn't let him go. He wasn't going to have the boy's blood on his hands. His genius and his youth were too precious.

Besides, Ireland was not his country.

* * * * *

It was past ten o'clock. Frances was alone in the drawing-room. She sat by the open window and waited and watched.

The quiet garden lay open to her sight. Only the inner end of the farther terrace, under the orchard wall, was hidden by a high screen of privet.

It seemed hours to Frances since she had seen Nicky and Veronica go down the lawn on to the terrace.

And then Anthony had gone out too. She was vexed with Anthony. She could see him sitting under his ash-tree, her tree of heaven; his white shirt-front gave out an oblong gleam like phosphorous in the darkness under the tree. She was watching to see that he didn't get up and go on to the terrace. Anthony had no business in the garden at all. He was catching cold in it. He had sneezed twice. She wanted Nicholas and Veronica to have the garden to themselves to-night, and the perfect stillness of the twilight to themselves, every tree and every little leaf and flower keeping quiet for them; and there was Anthony sneezing.

She was restless and impatient, as if she carried the burden of their passion in her own heart.

Presently she could bear it no longer. She got up and called to Anthony to come in. He came obediently. "What are you thinking of," she said, "planting yourself out there and sneezing? I could see your shirt-front a mile off. It's indecent of you."

"Why indecent?"

"Because Nicky and Veronica are out there."

"I don't see them."

"Do you suppose they want you to see them?"

She turned the electric light on full, to make darkness of their twilight out there.

* * * * *

Nicky and Veronica talked together in the twilight, sitting on the seat under the orchard well behind the privet screen. They did not see Anthony sitting under the ash-tree, they did not hear him, they did not hear Frances calling to him to come in. They were utterly unaware of Frances and Anthony.

"Ronny," he said, "did Michael say anything to you?"

"When?"

"This afternoon, when he made you come with him here?"

"How do you mean, 'say anything'?"

"You know what I mean."

"_Mick_?"

"Yes. Did he ask you to marry him?"

"No. He said a lot of funny things, but he didn't say that. He wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't he?"

"Because--he just wouldn't."

"Well, he says he understands you."

"Then," said Veronica conclusively, "of course he wouldn't."

"Yes; but he says _I_ don't."

"Dear Nicky, you understand me when nobody else does. You always did."

"Yes, when we were kids. But supposing _now_ I ever didn't, would it matter? You see, I'm stupid, and caring--caring awfully--might make me stupider. _Have_ people got to understand each other?"

To that she replied astonishingly, "Are you quite sure you understand about Ferdie?"

"Ferdie?"

"Yes." She turned her face full to him. "I don't know whether you know about it. _I_ didn't till Mother told me the other day. I'm Ferdie's daughter.

"Did you know?"

"Oh, Lord, yes. I've known it for--oh, simply ever so long."

"Who told you?"

"Dorothy, I think. But I guessed it because of something he said once about seeing ghosts."

"I wonder if you know how I feel about it? I want you to understand that. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I'm proud. I'm _glad_ I'm Ferdie's daughter, not Bartie's.... I'd take his name, so that everybody should know I was his daughter, only that I like Uncle Anthony's name best. I'm glad Mother loved him."

"So am I, Ronny. I know I shouldn't have liked Bartie's daughter. Bartie's daughter wouldn't have been you."

He took her in his arms and held her face against his face. And it was as if Desmond had never been.

A little while ago he had hated Desmond because she had come before Veronica; she had taken what belonged to Veronica, the first tremor of his passion, the irrecoverable delight and surprise. And now he knew that, because he had not loved her, she had taken nothing.

* * * * *

"Do you love me?"

"Do you love _me_?"

"You know I love you."

"You know. You know."

What they said was new and wonderful to them as if nobody before them had ever thought of it.

Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the birch-trees, and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in each other's arms and said the same thing in the same words: "Do you love me?" "You know I love you!" over and over, in voices drowsy and thick with love.

* * * * *

"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And that's that damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to wait goodness knows how long. Ages we may have to."

"I'd wait all my life if I could have you in the last five seconds of it. And if I couldn't, I'd still wait."

And presently Veronica remembered Michael.

"Why did you ask me whether Mick had said anything?"

"Because I thought you ought to know about it before you--Besides, if he _had_, we should have had to wait a bit before we told him."

It seemed that there was nothing to prevent them marrying to-morrow if they liked. The strike, Anthony said, couldn't hit him as badly as all that.

He and Frances sat up till long past midnight, talking about their plans, and the children's plans. It was all settled. The first week in August they would go down to Morfe for the shooting. They would stay there till the first week in September. Nicky and Veronica would be married the first week in October. And they would go to France and Belgium and Germany for their honeymoon.

XIX

They did not go down to Morfe the first week in August for the shooting.

Neither did Lawrence Stephen go to Ireland on Monday, the third. At the moment when he should have been receiving the congratulations of the Dublin Nationalists after his impassioned appeal for militant consolidation, Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson were shaking hands dramatically in the House of Commons. Stephen's sublime opportunity, the civil war, had been snatched from him by the unforeseen.

And there was no chance of Nicky and Veronica going to Belgium and France and Germany for their honeymoon.

For within nine days of Frances's Day Germany had declared war on France and Russia, and was marching over the Belgian frontier on her way to Paris.

Frances, aroused at last to realization of the affairs of nations, asked, like several million women, "What does it mean?"

And Anthony, like several million men, answered, "It means Armageddon." Like several million people, they both thought he was saying something as original as it was impressive, something clear and final and descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative people went about saying it to each other. The sound of the word thrilled them, intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that was at the same time, in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them with a solemn and sombre passion. They said "Armageddon. It means Armageddon." Yet nobody knew and nobody asked or thought of asking what Armageddon meant.

"Shall We come into it?" said Frances. She was thinking of the Royal Navy turning out to the last destroyer to save England from invasion; of the British Army most superfluously prepared to defend England from the invader, who, after all, could not invade; of Indian troops pouring into England if the worst came to the worst. She had the healthy British mind that refuses and always has refused to acknowledge the possibility of disaster. Yet she asked continually, "Would England be drawn in?" She was thankful that none of her sons had gone into the Army or the Navy. Whoever else was in, they would be out of it.

At first Anthony said, "No. Of course England wouldn't be drawn in."

Then, on the morning of England's ultimatum, the closing of the Stock Exchange and the Banks made him thoughtful, and he admitted that it looked as if England might be drawn in after all. The long day, without any business for him and Nicholas, disturbed him. There was a nasty, hovering smell of ruin in the air. But there was no panic. The closing of the Banks was only a wise precaution against panic. And by evening, as the tremendous significance of the ultimatum sank into him, he said definitively that England would not be drawn in.

Then Drayton, whom they had not seen for months (since he had had his promotion) telephoned to Dorothy to come and dine with him at his club in Dover Street. Anthony missed altogether the significance of _that_.

He had actually made for himself an after-dinner peace in which coffee could be drunk and cigarettes smoked as if nothing were happening to Europe.

"England," he said, "will not be drawn in, because her ultimatum will stop the War. There won't be any Armageddon."

"Oh, won't there!" said Michael. "And I can tell you there won't be much left of us after it's over."

He had been in Germany and he knew. He carried himself with a sort of stern haughtiness, as one who knew better than any of them. And yet his words conveyed no picture to his brain, no definite image of anything at all.

But in Nicholas's brain images gathered fast, one after another; they thickened; clear, vivid images with hard outlines. They came slowly but with order and precision. While the others talked he had been silent and very grave.

"_Some_ of us'll be left," he said. "But it'll take us all our time."

Anthony looked thoughtfully at Nicholas. A sudden wave of realization beat up against his consciousness and receded.

"Well," he said, "we shall know at midnight."

* * * * *

An immense restlessness came over them.

At a quarter-past eight Dorothy telephoned from her club in Grafton street. Frank had had to leave her suddenly. Somebody had sent for him. And if they wanted to see the sight of their lives they were to come into town at once. St. James's was packed with people from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace. It was like nothing on earth, and they mustn't miss it. She'd wait for them in Grafton Street till a quarter to nine, but not a minute later.

Nicky got out his big four-seater Morss car. They packed themselves into it, all six of them somehow, and he drove them into London. They had a sense of doing something strange and memorable and historic. Dorothy, picked up at her club, showed nothing but a pleasurable excitement. She gave no further information about Frank. He had had to go off and see somebody. What did he think? He thought what he had always thought; only he wouldn't talk about it.

Dorothy was not inclined to talk about it either. The Morss was caught in a line blocked at the bottom of Albemarle Street by two streams of cars, mixed with two streams of foot passengers, that poured steadily from Piccadilly into St. James's Street.

Michael and Dorothy got out and walked. Nicholas gave up his place to Anthony and followed with Veronica.

Their restlessness had been a part of the immense restlessness of the crowd. They were drawn, as the crowd was drawn; they went as the crowd went, up and down, restlessly, from Trafalgar Square and Whitehall to Buckingham Palace; from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall and Trafalgar Square. They drifted down Parliament Street to Westminster and back again. An hour ago the drifting, nebulous crowd had split, torn asunder between two attractions; its two masses had wheeled away, one to the east and the other to the west; they had gathered themselves together, one at each pole of the space it now traversed. The great meeting in Trafalgar Square balanced the multitude that had gravitated towards Buckingham Palace, to see the King and Queen come out on their balcony and show themselves to their people.

And as the edges of the two masses gave way, each broke and scattered, and was mixed again with the other. Like a flood, confined and shaken, it surged and was driven back and surged again from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace, from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall. It looked for an outlet in the narrow channels of the side-streets, or spread itself over the flats of the Green Park, only to return restlessly upon itself, sucked back by the main current in the Mall.

It was as if half London had met there for Bank Holiday. Part of this crowd was drunk; it was orgiastic; it made strange, fierce noises, like the noises of one enormous, mystically excited beast; here and there, men and women, with inflamed and drunken faces, reeled in each other's arms; they wore pink paper feathers in their hats. Some, only half intoxicated, flicked at each other with long streamers of pink and white paper, carried like scourges on small sticks. These were the inspired.

But the great body of the crowd was sober. It went decorously in a long procession, young men with their sweethearts, friends, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers with their children; none, or very few, went alone that night.

It was an endless procession of faces; grave and thoughtful faces; uninterested, respectable faces; faces of unmoved integrity; excited faces; dreaming, wondering, bewildered faces; faces merely curious, or curiously exalted, slightly ecstatic, open-mouthed, fascinated by each other and by the movements and the lights; laughing, frivolous faces, and faces utterly vacant and unseeing.

On every other breast there was a small Union Jack pinned; every other hand held and waggled a Union Jack. The Union Jack flew from the engine of every other automobile. In twelve hours, out of nowhere, thousands and thousands of flags sprang magically into being; as if for years London had been preparing for this day.

And in and out of this crowd the train of automobiles with their flags dashed up and down the Mall for hours, appearing and disappearing. Intoxicated youths with inflamed faces, in full evening dress, squatted on the roofs of taxi-cabs or rode astride on the engines of their cars, waving flags.

All this movement, drunken, orgiastic, somnambulistic, mysteriously restless, streamed up and down between two solemn and processional lines of lights, two solemn and processional lines of trees, lines that stretched straight from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace in a recurrent pattern of trees and lamps, dark trees, twilit trees, a lamp and a tree shining with a metallic unnatural green; and, at the end of the avenue, gilded gates and a golden-white façade.

The crowd was drifting now towards the Palace. Michael and Dorothea, Nicholas and Veronica, went with it. In this eternal perambulation they met people that they knew; Stephen and Vera; Mitchell, Monier-Owen; Uncle Morrie and his sisters. Anthony, looking rather solemn, drove past them in his car. It was like impossible, grotesque encounters in a dream.

Outside the Palace the crowd moved up and down without rest; it drifted and returned; it circled round and round the fountain. In the open spaces the intoxicated motor-cars and taxi-cabs darted and tore with the folly of moths and the fury of destroyers. They stung the air with their hooting. Flags, intoxicated flags, still hung from their engines. They came flying drunkenly out of the dark, like a trumpeting swarm of enormous insects, irresistibly, incessantly drawn to the lights of the Palace, hypnotized by the golden-white façade.

Suddenly, Michael's soul revolted.

"If this demented herd of swine is a great people going into a great war, God help us! Beasts--it's not as if _their_ bloated skins were likely to be punctured."

He called back over his shoulders to the others.

"Let's get out of this. If we don't I shall be sick."

He took Dorothy by her arm and shouldered his way out.

The water had ceased playing in the fountain.

Nicholas and Veronica stood by the fountain. The water in the basin was green like foul sea-water. The jetsam of the crowd floated there. A small child leaned over the edge of the basin and fished for Union Jacks in the filthy pool. Its young mother held it safe by the tilted edge of its petticoats. She looked up at them and smiled. They smiled back again and turned away.

It was quiet on the south side by the Barracks. Small, sober groups of twos and threes strolled there, or stood with their faces pressed close against the railings, peering into the barrack yard. Motionless, earnest and attentive, they stared at the men in khaki moving about on the other side of the railings. They were silent, fascinated by the men in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing, they stared at them with an awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in khaki stared back, proud, self-conscious, as men who know that the hour is great and that it is their hour.

"Nicky," Veronica said, "I wish Michael wouldn't say things like that."

"He's dead right, Ronny. That isn't the way to take it, getting drunk and excited, and rushing about making silly asses of themselves. They _are_ rather swine, you know."

"Yes; but they're pathetic. Can't you see how pathetic they are? Nicky, I believe I love the swine--even the poor drunken ones with the pink paper feathers--just because they're English; because awful things are going to happen to them, and they don't know it. They're English."

"You think God's made us all like that? He _hasn't_."

They found Anthony in the Mall, driving up and down, looking for them. He had picked up Dorothy and Aunt Emmeline and Uncle Morrie.

"We're going down to the Mansion House," he said, "to hear the Proclamation. Will you come?"

But Veronica and Nicholas were tired of crowds, even of historic crowds. Anthony drove off with his car-load, and they went home.

"I never saw Daddy so excited," Nicky said.

But Anthony was not excited. He had never felt calmer or cooler in his life.

He returned some time after midnight. By that time it had sunk into him. Germany _had_ defied the ultimatum and England _had_ declared war on Germany.

He said it was only what was to be foreseen. He had known all the time that it would happen--really.

The tension of the day of the ultimatum had this peculiar psychological effect that all over England people who had declared up to the last minute that there would be no War were saying the same thing as Anthony and believing it.

Michael was disgusted with the event that had put an end to the Irish Revolution. It was in this form that he conceived his first grudge against the War.

This emotion of his was like some empty space of horror opened up between him and Nicholas; Nicky being the only one of his family who was as yet aware of its existence.

For the next three days, Nicholas, very serious and earnest, shut himself up in his workshop at the bottom of the orchard and laboured there, putting the last touches to the final, perfect, authoritative form of the Moving Fortress, the joint creation of his brain and Drayton's, the only experiment that had survived the repeated onslaughts of the Major's criticism. The new model was three times the size of the lost original; it was less like a battleship and more like a racing-car and a destroyer. It was his and Drayton's last word on the subject of armaments.

It was going to the War Office, this time, addressed to the right person, and accompanied by all sorts of protective introductions, and Drayton blasting its way before it with his new explosive.

In those three days Nick found an immense distraction in his Moving Fortress. It also served to blind his family to his real intentions. He knew that his real intentions could not be kept from them very long. Meanwhile the idea that he was working on something made them happy. When Frances saw him in his overalls she smiled and said: "Nicky's got _his_ job, anyhow." John came and looked at him through the window of the workshop and laughed.

"Good old Nicky," he said. "Doing his bit!"

In those three days John went about with an air of agreeable excitement. Or you came upon him sitting in solitary places like the dining-room, lost in happy thought. Michael said of him that he was unctuous. He exuded a secret joy and satisfaction. John had acquired a sudden remarkable maturity. He shone on each member of his family with benevolence and affection, as if he were its protector and consoler, and about to confer on it some tremendous benefit.

"Look at Don-Don," Michael said. "The bloodthirsty little brute. He's positively enjoying the War."

"You might leave me alone," said Don-Don. "I shan't have it to enjoy for long."

He was one of those who believed that the War would be over in four months.

Michael, pledged to secrecy, came and looked at the Moving Fortress. He was interested and intelligent; he admired that efficiency of Nicky's that was so unlike his own.

Yet, he wondered, after all, was it so unlike? He, too, was aiming at an art as clean and hard and powerful as Nicky's, as naked of all blazonry and decoration, an art which would attain its objective by the simplest, most perfect adjustment of means to ends.

And Anthony was proud of that hidden wonder locked behind the door of the workshop in the orchard. He realized that his son Nicholas had taken part in a great and important thing. He was prouder of Nicholas than he had been of Michael.

And Michael knew it.

Nicky's brains could be used for the service of his country.

But Michael's? Anthony said to himself that there wasn't any sense--any sense that he could endure to contemplate--in which Michael's brains could be of any use to his country. When Anthony thought of the mobilization of his family for national service, Michael and Michael's brains were a problem that he put behind him for the present and refused to contemplate. There would be time enough for Michael later.

Anthony was perfectly well aware of his own one talent, the talent which had made "Harrison and Harrison" the biggest timber-importing firm in England. If there was one thing he understood it was organization. If there was one thing he could not tolerate it was waste of good material, the folly of forcing men and women into places they were not fit for. He had let his eldest son slip out of the business without a pang, or with hardly any pang. He had only taken Nicholas into it as an experiment. It was on John that he relied to inherit it and carry it farther.

As a man of business he approved of the advertised formula: "Business as Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which England expected every man to do was to stay in the place he was most fitted for and to go where he was most wanted. Nothing but muddle and disaster could follow any departure from this rule.

It was fitting that Frances and Veronica should do Red Cross work. It was fitting that Dorothy should help to organize the relief of the Belgium refugees. It was fitting that John should stay at home and carry on the business, and that he, Anthony, should enlist when he had settled John into his place. It was, above all, fitting that Nicky should devote himself to the invention and manufacture of armaments. He could not conceive anything more wantonly and scandalously wasteful than a system that could make any other use of Nicky's brains. He thanked goodness that, with a European War upon us, such a system, if it existed, would not be allowed to live a day.

As for Michael, it might be fitting later--very much later--perhaps. If Michael wanted to volunteer for the Army then, and if it were necessary, he would have no right to stop him. But it would not be necessary. England was going to win this War on the sea and not on land. Michael was practically safe.

And behind Frances's smile, and John's laughter, and Michael's admiration, and Anthony's pride there was the thought: "Whatever happens, Nicky will he safe."

And the model of the Moving Fortress was packed up--Veronica and Nicky packed it--and it was sent under high protection to the War Office. And Nicky unlocked the door of his workshop and rested restlessly from his labour.

And there was a call for recruits, and for still more recruits.

Westminster Bridge became a highway for regiments marching to battle. The streets were parade-grounds for squad after squad of volunteers in civilian clothes, self-conscious and abashed under the eyes of the men in khaki.

And Michael said: "This is the end of all the arts. Artists will not be allowed to exist except as agents for the recruiting sergeant. We're dished."

That was the second grudge he had against the War. It killed the arts in the very hour of their renaissance. "Eccentricities" by Morton Ellis, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, and the "New Poems" of Michael Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to have come out in September. But it was not conceivable that they should come out.

At the first rumour of the ultimatum Michael and Ellis had given themselves up for lost.

Liége fell and Namur was falling.

And the call went on for recruits, and for still more recruits. And Nicky in five seconds had destroyed his mother's illusions and the whole fabric of his father's plans.

It was one evening when they were in the drawing-room, sitting up after Veronica had gone to bed.

"I hope you won't mind, Father," he said; "but I'm going to enlist to-morrow."

He did not look at his father's face. He looked at his mother's. She was sitting opposite him on the couch beside Dorothy. John balanced himself on the head of the couch with his arm round his mother's shoulder. Every now and then he stooped down and rubbed his cheek thoughtfully against her hair.

A slight tremor shook her sensitive, betraying upper lip; then she looked back at Nicholas and smiled.

Dorothy set her mouth hard, unsmiling.

Anthony had said nothing. He stared before him at Michael's foot, thrust out and tilted by the crossing of his knees. Michael's foot, with its long, arched instep, fascinated Anthony. He seemed to be thinking: "If I look at it long enough I may forget what Nicky has said."

"I hope you won't mind, Father; but I'm enlisting too."

John's voice was a light, high echo of Nicky's.

With a great effort Anthony roused himself from his contemplation of Michael's foot.

"I--can't--see--that my minding--or not minding--has anything--to do--with it."

He brought his words out slowly and with separate efforts, as if they weighed heavily on his tongue. "We've got to consider what's best for the country all round, and I doubt if either of you is called upon to go."

"Some of us have got to go," said Nicky.

"Quite so. But I don't think it ought to be you, Nicky; or John, either."

"I suppose," said Michael, "you mean it ought to be me."

"I don't mean anything of the sort. One out of four's enough."

"One out of four? Well then--"

"That only leaves me to fight," said Dorothy.

"I wasn't thinking of you, Michael. Or of Dorothy."

They all looked at him where he sat, upright and noble, in his chair, and most absurdly young.

Dorothy said under her breath: "Oh, you darling Daddy."

"_You_ won't be allowed to go, anyhow," said John to his father. "You needn't think it."

"Why not?"

"Well--." He hadn't the heart to say: "Because you're too old."

"Nicky's brains will be more use to the country than my old carcass."

Nicky thought: "You're the very last of us that can be spared." But he couldn't say it. The thing was so obvious. All he said was: "It's out of the question, your going."

"Old Nicky's out of the question, if you like," said John. "He's going to be married. He ought to be thinking of his wife and children."

"Of course he ought," said Anthony. "Whoever goes first, it isn't Nicky."

"You ought to think of Mummy, Daddy ducky; and you ought to think of _us_," said Dorothy.

"I," said John, "haven't got anybody to think of. I'm not going to be married, and I haven't any children."

"I haven't got a wife and children yet," said Nicky.

"You've got Veronica. You ought to think of her."

"I am thinking of her. You don't suppose Veronica'd stop me if I wanted to go? Why, she wouldn't look at me if I didn't want to go."

Suddenly he remembered Michael.

"I mean," he said, "after my _saying_ that I was going."

Their eyes met. Michael's flickered. He knew that Nicky was thinking of him.

"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.

"Of course she knows. _You_ aren't going to try to stop me, Mother?"

"No," she said. "I'm not going to try to stop you--this time."

She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would be safe now, with the Army in India."

One by one they got up and said "Good night" to each other.

But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.

He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not enlisting. At any rate, _not yet_. Don't worry about Don and Daddy. They won't take Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his heart that he doesn't know about. He's going to be jolly well sold, poor chap. And they won't take the guv'nor because he's too old; though the dear old thing thinks he can bluff them into it because he doesn't look it.

"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned, the War's a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the Army. You know how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now I'm going in and nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me out. Soon they'll all be as pleased as Punch about it.

"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want to stick bayonets into German tummies, just _because_ they're so large and oodgy. You'd think of that first and all the time and afterwards. And I shan't think of it at all.

"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons that I can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect yourself if you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I stayed out."

"I wonder," Michael said, "if you really see it."

"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing chaps. You seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves."

When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really does see? Or if he made it all up?"

They had not said to each other all that they had really meant. Of Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered vividly, "Not yet."

Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up between him and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the two words: "Not yet."

XX

It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn't know about.

The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was under thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if he'd left it at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than most of 'em when he was stripped. But they'd given him so good an innings that the poor old thing got above himself, and spun them a yarn about his hair having gone grey from a recent shock. That dished him. They said they knew that sort of hair; they'd been seeing a lot of it lately.

Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape," and declared that if that was the way things were going to be managed it was a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He said the man who examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know his own rotten business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to tell him they didn't want him dropping down dead when he went into action, or fainting from sheer excitement after they'd been to the trouble and expense of training him. As if he'd be likely to do a damn silly thing like that. He'd never been excited in his life. It was enough to _give_ him heart-disease.

So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they learned to their disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.

At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business by a sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the War would be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate message for him was that business must be attended to. He had not attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories. He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the glamour of the Front. The particular business in hand had great issues and a fascination of its own.

And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and abstracted soul.

And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through the first courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder every day.

And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael widened.

With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's entire family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained and ready when the moment of the summons came. Strong young girls hustled for the best places at the ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained by their extraordinary illusion.

Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if nobody else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral excitement, while still struggling to find each other's arteries, declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no earthly reason why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor. He got mixed up with his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders to go to the Front.

They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each other's hopes.

For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a curious gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael's study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline's head, and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie's little, clumsy, pinching fingers. It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.

And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out her lower lip at them.

"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every woman in England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have enough socks for his Army."

Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted conspicuously, as a protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be unravelled overnight, to save the wool.

"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting khaki!"

Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were interfering with them.

Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men. The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture and embarassment.

The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and went into uniform.

And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it. Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon Street Station.

She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery of Belgium poured and was congested.

Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with the scene.

Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a ghastly, ruinous life.

The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of carriages packed tight with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.

For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding wounds and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this one incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon Street Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the sequences of which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of men, women and children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they were staggering under those bundles along their straight, flat roads between the everlasting rows of poplars; their towns and villages flamed and smoked behind them; some of them, goaded like tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at their backs--yesterday. And this morning they were here, brave and gay, smiling at Dorothea as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their small children in her arms.

And they were still proud of themselves.

A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a large pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other a cage with a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and smiled, proud of herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A Belgium boy carried a paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He grinned at Dorothea, proud of himself because he had saved his grandfather. A young Flemish peasant woman pushed back the shawl that covered her baby's face to show her how pretty he was; she laughed because she had borne him and saved him.

And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women and girls idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in trying to throw himself into a moving train because he thought his lost mother was in it. The ring screening the agony of a woman giving birth to her child on the platform. A death in the train; stiff, upturned feet at the end of a stretcher that the police-ambulance carried away.

And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the shells burst, and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger. She was not feeling anything now except the shame of her immunity.

She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I were dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."

Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were in Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could walk."

Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians, because it was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate, were safe. Her father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not in it--yet; though of course he would be in it some time. She tried not to think too much about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next six months. And Frank was safe. Frank was training recruits. He had told her he might be kept indefinitely at that infernal job. But for that he would be fighting now. He wanted her to be sorry for him; and she was sorry for him. And she was glad too.

One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she found him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting for her by himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.

"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait up here."

She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.

He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was the first time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust and dirt of her; and he smiled. His smile had none of the cynical derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant suffragist.

"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe me now."

"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.

"Not _yet_--worse luck."

"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas, or what?"

"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair off?"

"They might. They might do anything. This is a most extraordinary war."

"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."

"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in him.

"What did you think?"

"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like business. Do you really mean it? Are you really going to Flanders?"

"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she wasn't going _some_where?"

He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And then: "It makes you look about eighteen."

"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."

"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that you're not eighteen? You're eight and twenty."

"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you did, you wouldn't say so."

"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made a pretty mess of each other's lives."

"Have I made a mess of _your_ life?'

"A beastly mess."

"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known. You know I wouldn't.

"But one doesn't know things."

"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully well; but not the things that matter."

"Well--but what could I do?" she said.

"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married me. And we would have had three years of each other."

"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't manage it."

"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.

"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I get leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three days."

"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three days--No, it wasn't worth while.

"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn't change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change. So, you see, it's got to be one thing or another."

And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not worth while?

"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There really isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what you like and do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I shan't care if you'll only marry me."

"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love me. You never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all that."

"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine years--ten years?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go off and get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.

"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my face--filthy--you mustn't--"

"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't care."

The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she keeps it on _now_!"

She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.

He said to himself, "She _shall_ come alive. She _shall_ feel. She _shall want_ me. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten years ago."

Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands. And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing something happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him now--to-night."

Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.

She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me if he knew."

Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?

* * * * *

They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.

"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there was anything that could have prevented it."

"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the difference. And there we were."

"It didn't--really."

She shook her head. "We thought it did."

"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?

"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."

"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that we seemed to go wrong.

"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or wondered what you were feeling? _That's_ what put me off. It hurt so atrociously that I couldn't say anything.

"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about nothing else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.

"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't true. I was listening like anything."

"Darling--what did I tell you?"

"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your adventure, or something."

"My adventure?"

"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's beyond me now."

"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"

"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something big and important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to bother me. I kept on trying to get it, and not getting it."

"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully big and important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had happened to somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."

"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of that business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."

"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the War."

"You're not swallowed up."

"Perhaps I shall be."

"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you to know that I understand what you were driving at. It was this way, wasn't it? You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You couldn't keep out of it any more than I can keep out of this War."

"You couldn't stay out just for me any more than I can stay out for just you."

"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way you were in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."

"How clever of you," she said, "to see it!"

"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a war on. We've both had to pay for my stupidity."

"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see, or risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."

"Well, anyhow, we've got this evening."

"We haven't. I've got to drive Belgians from nine till past midnight."

"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married in. I say--how about to-morrow evening?"

"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know who'll drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married in, too."

She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out. If he is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."

It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch at their happiness and secure it, before their hour came.

She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the British line was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of course it would recover. We always began like that. We went back to go forwards faster, when we got into our stride.

* * * * *

The next evening, Thursday, the girl she knew drove for Dorothea.

When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her with two frocks over her arm.

"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell whether to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if it mattered more than anything. More than anything on earth."

Frances considered it--Dorothea in her uniform, and the white frock and the blue frock.

"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose to you in that get-up--"

"Can't you see that I want to make up for _that_ and for all the things he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only I was as beautiful as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."

"My dear--my dear--"

Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as Nicky with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up Dorothy in khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and blue frocks, made Frances want to cry.

* * * * *

Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy that he couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only have one hour to give her.

Frances and Anthony looked at each other. But Dorothy looked at Veronica.

"What's the matter, Ronny? You look simply awful."

"Do I? My head's splitting. I think I'll go and lie down."

"You'd better."

"Go straight to bed," said Frances. "and let Nanna bring you some hot soup."

But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to take herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.

"Well," said Anthony, "if she's going to worry herself sick about Nicky now--"

Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.

It was nine o'clock.

At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought: "Supposing he hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely. If he hadn't got leave he would have said so when he telephoned.

The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would hold her in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be afraid, and she would be afraid, and he would let her go.

The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud and quick on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room to them, holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes shone with excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that narrowed his eyes and jerked his mouth slightly crooked.

They all spoke at once. "You've got leave?" "_He's_ got it all right." "What kept you?" "You _have_ got leave?"

His eyes still shone; his mouth still jerked, laughing.

"Well, no," he said. "That's what I haven't got. In fact, I'm lucky to be here at all."

Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat down on the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his spoon, and smiling as if at something pleasant that he knew, something that he would tell them presently when Nanna left the room.

The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening intently for the click of the latch.

"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off till you come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then they say they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that day.

"Twelve hours isn't much notice to give a fellow."

He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was speaking to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions about trains and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if he were not conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat, slowly stirring his coffee without drinking it. The vibration of her nerves made his answers sound muffled and far-off.

She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing from her minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable longing to be alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what she had felt yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in yesterday, and refused to move on into to-day.

Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they stopped talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would be the end.

Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup he had not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea that for a moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small sound. She saw her mother take the cup from him and set it on the table.

One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they were guilty, and left her alone with him.

It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He sat there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance. He seemed to be wondering how she was going to take it.

He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to make her want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left it."

And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.

She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be ready to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness he required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes implored her to put away from her.

There was something more.

He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is hard luck on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard for me." (She could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He knew she was brave; he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he knew he hadn't got to say the obvious things.

There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her with the power and sweetness of first passion; but without its fear. She no longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her as he had held her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it vibrated to an intenser rhythm.

She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that they were seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more than they. When realization passed it would endure.

Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it, to say to each other what it was they felt and saw.

* * * * *

He said, "I shall have to go soon."

And she said, "I know. Is there anything I can do?"

"I wish you'd go and see my mother some time. She'd like it."

"I should love to go and see her. What else?"

"Well--I've no business to ask you, but I wish you'd give it up."

"I'll give anything up. But what?"

"That ambulance of yours that's going to get into the firing line."

"Oh--"

"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the hardest and most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it easier for us to win the War. You can't expect us to fight so comfy, and to be killed so comfy, if we know our womenkind are being pounded to bits in the ground we've just cleared. If I thought _you_ were knocking about anywhere there--"

"It would make it too hard?"

"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much time to think about it, but when I did--"

"You'd think 'She might have spared me _that_.'"

"Yes. And you might think of your people. It's bad enough for them, Nicky going."

"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and where he'll be. That was natural."

"It's also natural that we should like to find you here when we come back."

"I was thinking of those Belgian women, and the babies--and England; so safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."

"I know. Leaving the children in the burning house?"

(She had said that once and he had remembered.)

"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you to take the hardest job, really."

"It isn't; if it's what you want most."

He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and they were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous thing.

"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about it. I want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."

"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it's _your_ War, too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"

"I know," she said.

And then: "Have you got all your things?"

"Somebody's got 'em."

"I haven't given you anything. You must have my wrist-watch."

She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.

"My wrist's a whopper."

"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's phosphorous," she said. "You can see the time by it in the dark."

"I've nothing for _you_. Except--" he fumbled in his pockets--"I say--here's the wedding-ring."

They laughed.

"What more could you want?" she said.

He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he stooped and kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But it was not like yesterday.

Suddenly his face stiffened. "Tell them," he said, "that I'm going."

The British were retreating from Mons.

The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like the travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There was no end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no end to the German people. And there was no news of British reinforcements, or rumour of reinforcements.

"They come on like waves. Like waves," said Dorothea, reading from the papers.

"I wouldn't read about it if I were you, darling," said Frances.

"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we don't."

Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.

Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours' notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it. They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least we could do for _them_ was to trust them, and not believe any tales of their retreating.

And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home, listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing of the bell.

She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child for me that my son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to come and see me; but not just yet."

She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter from his Colonel.

* * * * *

After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into Cannon Street Station.

Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly, beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept, worn out with her hard day's driving.

She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.

"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered. He said 'It's _your_ War--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's killed in it.

"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for one night.

"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was a coward. He got nothing."

His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion. She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.

Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had dreamed it or made it up.

Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and it would take her car with it and a new driver.

Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.

"If I could only help you."

"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more often she hid away somewhere by herself.

Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's Veronica."

But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He couldn't have had five hours' fighting.

"And to be killed--Retreating.

"He got nothing out of it but agony."

Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know what he may have got in the last minute of it."

"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me. But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.

"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"

"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you, more alive."

"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."

* * * * *

One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:

"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must have known that he would not come back."

* * * * *

"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I want you to see that my memory is fairly good."

* * * * *

The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."

The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah xxxv. and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:

"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight."...

"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...

... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."

And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet and powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold again on the Reality they had seen and felt together.

The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it lasted she was at peace.

But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of remorse for all that she had wasted.

XXI

After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had ceased to feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in vain for them. They did not believe that it had saved Paris.

Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was no more Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were only a question of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there would be no more France. They were face to face with the further possibility of there being no more England.

In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances were changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before the War, Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she would, after careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I like England. But I dislike the English people. They are narrow and hypocritical and conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs." At the time of the Boer War, beyond thinking that the British ought to win, and that they would win, and feeling a little spurt as of personal satisfaction when they did win, she had had no consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for loving it, she loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of mild, cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as well talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once sat in peace under the tree of Heaven with her _Times_ newspaper, and flicked the affairs of the nation from her as less important than the stitching on her baby's frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else. She was sad, not because her son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling week by week, but because England was in danger; she was worried, not because Lord Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son Michael, but because she had found that the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she left her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City with Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office, receiving, packing, and sending off great cases of food and clothing to the Belgian soldiers.

Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all well under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the Government persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber that swelled and shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and because officials wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them what he knew about timber, and because the head of a department had talked to _him_ about private firms and profiteering. As if any man with three sons under twenty-seven would want to make a profit out of the War; and as if they couldn't cut down everybody's profits if they took the trouble. They might cut his to the last cent so long as we had gun-carriages that would carry guns and rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was talking about and they didn't.

And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who had once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it now. She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at the head of departments we should win the War. We were losing it for want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud of him, not because he was her husband and the father of her children, but because he was a man who could help England. They were both proud of Michael and Nicholas and John, not because they were their sons, but because they were men who could fight for England.

They found that they loved England with a secret, religious, instinctive love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man might stand and fight for, became, mysteriously and magically, dearer to them than their home. They loved England more than their own life or the lives of their children. Long ago they had realized that fathers do not beget children nor mothers bear them merely to gratify themselves. Now, in September and October, they were realizing that children are not begotten and born for their own profit and pleasure either.

When they sat together after the day's work they found themselves saying the most amazing things to each other.

Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better. I shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had been pleasant to him.

And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of three, we ought to send them all."

"Positively," said Anthony. "I believe I'd let Dorothy go out now if she insisted."

"Oh, no, I think we might be allowed to keep Dorothy."

She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I grudged giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if he went out to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how splendid it was of him."

"I wish poor Dorothy could feel that way about Drayton."

"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was his profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."

He did not remind her that Frank's free will had counted in his choice of a profession.

"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count more than the whole Army put together."

They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing that sooner or later they must speak of it.

Frances was the braver of the two. She spoke first.

"There's Michael. I don't know what to make of him. He doesn't seem to want to go."

That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably in secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something must be done about Michael.

"I wish you'd say something to him, Anthony."

"I would if I were going myself. But how can I?"

"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you were young enough."

"I can't say anything. You'll have to."

"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky is the only one of us who has any right to."

"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her way."

"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."

But in the end she did say something.

She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding himself away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she thought, "as if he were ashamed of himself."

Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious beauty of his young face; at the thick masses of his hair that would not stay as they were brushed back, but fell over his forehead; it was still yellow, and shining as it shone when he was a little boy.

He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of verse on the white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came in lest she should see them. That hurt her.

"Michael," she said, "I wonder if you _ever_ realize that we are at war."

"The War isn't a positive obsession to me, if that's what you mean."

"It isn't what I mean. Only--that when other people are doing so much--

"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."

"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If George Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."

"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason, when so much more has been done for you than was ever done for him?"

"It's no use trying to get at me."

"England's fighting for her life," said Frances.

"So's Germany.

"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker hates Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear old Frau Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and Carl, and make Hedwig and Löttchen cry."

"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George and Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."

"Bayonetting isn't my business."

"Your own safety is. How can you bear to let other men fight for you?"

"They're not fighting for _me_, Mother. You ask them if they are, and see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God knows what; but they're no more fighting for me than they're fighting for Aunt Emmeline."

"They _are_ fighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting for everything that's weak and defenceless."

"Well, then, they're not fighting for me. I'm not weak and defenceless," said Michael.

"All the more shame for you, then."

He smiled, acknowledging her score.

"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the opening for a repartee. It was quite a nice one."

"If," she said, "you were only _doing_ something. But you go on with your own things as though nothing had happened."

"I _am_ doing something. I'm keeping sane. And I'm keeping sanity alive in other people."

"Much you care for other people," said Frances as she left the room.

But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him again. She went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his room.

"_Well?_" he said.

"It's no use. He won't go."

And Frances, quite suddenly and to her own surprise, burst into tears.

He drew her to him, and she clung to him, sobbing softly.

"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's as obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."

He pressed her tighter to him. He loved her in her unfamiliar weakness, crying and clinging to him.

"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm glad he didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to him, I couldn't bear to be the one who made him go."

After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.

They were silent.

"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.

But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.

"He must know that _public_ feeling's pretty strong against him. To say nothing of _my_ feeling and _your_ feeling."

* * * * *

He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his father and his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't bear to look at Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her way as much as possible.

As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he against it.

But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go. Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had always offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul. From his very first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one monstrous soul.

And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment, was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you and you were done for. He was determined that it shouldn't get him. They couldn't see--and that was Michael's grievance--that his resistance was his strength and not his weakness.

Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the same entity as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the party, who had wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted to remember." He was Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the other fellows were doing. He objected to being suddenly required to feel patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.

Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.

He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that he resented. There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and tyranny about it all.

It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to fight. He had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight any day in a cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a cause that had not been messed about so much by other people. Other people had not put pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact they had tried to stop him. Michael was also aware that in the matter of Ireland his emotions, though shared by considerable numbers of the Irish people, were not shared by his family or by many people whom he knew; to all intents and purposes he had them to himself.

It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and mother, for they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the more he would seem to them to be a shirker.

He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff, reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's silence when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their eyes--his mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the unspoken question: "Why don't you go and get killed--for England--like other people?"

Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible, palpable; he knew where he was with them. What he could not stand was that empty spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him where he was most vulnerable--in his imagination.

* * * * *

And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.

It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion, and your religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored Beauty as the supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else; if you lived, impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive; and for no other end, how could you consent to take part in this bloody business? That would be the last betrayal, the most cowardly surrender.

And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one of the leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the world, of all the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.

* * * * *

For Michael, even more than Ellis, had given himself up as lost.

And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect. When the young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed it with a calm, high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on, without pay, without praise, without any sort of recognition. Any fool could fight; but, if you were an artist, your honour bound you to ignore the material contest, to refuse, even to your country, the surrender of the highest that you knew. They believed with the utmost fervour and sincerity that they defied Germany more effectually, because more spiritually, by going on and producing fine things with imperturbability than if they went out against the German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they were restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.

They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly, on Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease (but rather less than more) in Stephen's study.

They had asked each other: "Are _you_ going to fight for your country?"

And Ellis had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country; and Mitchell had said he hadn't got a country, so there was no point in his fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could show him a country that cared for the arts before anything he'd fight for it; but that England was very far from being that country.

And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.

And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not listening to what was said.

And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral. Michael said to himself that he could stand these massed war emotions if they were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral who had never cared a damn about either before the War.

Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired whether Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral?

Michael shrugged his shoulders. "Why bother," he said, "about Rheims Cathedral and Louvain? From your point of view it's all right. If Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the enemy's artillery they've got to go. They didn't happen to be in the way of ours, that's all."

Michael's mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its malady. He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of the Allies and to justify the acts of Germany.

"It's up to the French to defend Paris. And what have we got to do with Alsace-Lorraine? As if every inteligent Frenchman didn't know that Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt. No. I'm not pro-German. I simply see things as they are."

"I think," Frances would say placably, "we'd better not talk about the War."

He would remind them that it was not his subject.

And John laughed at him. "Poor old Nick hates the War because it's dished him. He knows his poems can't come out till it's over."

As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.

After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris. As Stephen pointed out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael. In magnificent defiance of the enemy, the "New Poems" of Michael Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as forthcoming in October; and Morton Ellis's "Eccentricities," with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month. Even Wadham's poems would come out some time, perhaps next spring.

Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War Office as posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the morale of the Allied Armies. "If England could afford to publish Michael--"

Michael's family made no comment on the appearance of his poems. The book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for weeks. When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none of his people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or hold it in their hands. It seemed to Michael that they were conscious of it all the time, and that they turned their faces away from it pointedly. They hated it. They hated him for having written it.

He remembered that it had been different when his first book had come out two years ago. They had read that; they had snatched at all the reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was that they had missed.

They had taken each other aside, and it had been:

"Anthony, do you understand Michael's poems?"

"Dorothy, do you understand Michael's poems?"

"Nicky, do you understand Michael's poems?"

He remembered his mother's apology for not understanding them: "Darling, I _do_ see that they're very beautiful." He remembered how he had wished that they would give up the struggle and leave his poems alone. They were not written for them. He had been amused and irritated when he had seen his father holding the book doggedly in front of him, his poor old hands twitching with embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was looking at him.

And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was sensitive to the least quiver of his mother's upper lip.

Veronica's were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did not hunt him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.

Veronica had been rejected too. She was not strong enough to nurse in the hospitals. She was only strong enough to work from morning to night, packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the Belgian soldiers. She wanted Michael to be sorry for her because she couldn't be a nurse. Rosalind Jervis was a nurse. But he was not sorry. He said he would very much rather she didn't do anything that Rosalind did.

"So would Nicky," he said.

And then: "Veronica, do _you_ think I ought to enlist?"

The thought was beginning to obsess him.

"No," she said; "you're different.

"I know how you feel about it. Nicky's heart and soul are in the War. If he's killed it can only kill his body. _Your_ soul isn't in it. It would kill your soul."

"It's killing it now, killing everything I care for."

"Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can't kill."

That was one Sunday evening in October. They were standing together on the long terrace under the house wall. Before them, a little to the right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree rose over the garden. The curved and dipping branches swayed and swung in a low wind that moved like quiet water.

"Michael," she said, "do look what's happening to that tree."

"I see," he said.

It made him sad to look at the tree; it made him sad to look at Veronica--because both the tree and Veronica were beautiful.

"When I was a little girl I used to sit and look and look at that tree till it changed and got all thin and queer and began to move towards me.

"I never knew whether it had really happened or not; I don't know now--or whether it was the tree or me. It was as if by looking and looking you could make the tree more real and more alive."

Michael remembered something.

"Dorothy says you saw Ferdie the night he died."

"So I did. But that's not the same thing. I didn't have to look and look. I just saw him. I _sort_ of saw Frank that last night--when the call came--only sort of--but I knew he was going to be killed.

"I didn't see him nearly so distinctly as I saw Nicky-"

"Nicky? You didn't see him--as you saw Ferdie?"

"No, no, no! it was ages ago--in Germany--before he married. I saw him with Desmond."

"Have you ever seen me?"

"Not yet. That's because you don't want me as they did."

"Don't I! Don't I!"

And she said again: "Not yet."

Nicky had had leave for Christmas. He had come and gone.

Frances and Anthony were depressed; they were beginning to be frightened.

For Nicky had finished his training. He might be sent out any day.

Nicky had had some moments of depression. Nothing had been heard of the Moving Fortress. Again, the War Office had given no sign of having received it. It was hard luck, he said, on Drayton.

And John was depressed after he had gone.

"They'd much better have taken me," he said.

"What's the good of sending the best brains in the Army to get pounded? There's Drayton. He ought to have been in the Ordnance. He's killed.

"And here's Nicky. Nicky ought to be in the engineers or the gunners or the Royal Flying Corps; but he's got to stand in the trenches and be pounded.

"Lot they care about anybody's brains. Drayton could have told Kitchener that we can't win this war without high-explosive shells. So could Nicky.

"You bet they've stuck all those plans and models in the sanitary dust-bin behind the War Office back door. It's enough to make Nicky blow his brains out."

"Nicky doesn't care, really," Veronica said. "He just leaves things--and goes on."

That night, after the others had gone to bed, Michael stayed behind with his father.

"It must look to you," he said, "as if I ought to have gone instead of Nicky."

"I don't say so, Michael. And I'm sure Nicky wouldn't."

"No, but you both think it. You see, if I went I shouldn't be any good at it. Not the same good as Nicky. He wants to go and I don't. Can't you see it's different?"

"Yes," said Anthony, "I see. I've seen it for some time."

And Michael remembered the night in August when his brother came to him in his room.

* * * * *

Beauty--the Forlorn Hope of God--if he cared for it supremely, why was he pursued and tormented by the thought of the space between him and Nicky?

XXII

Michael had gone to Stephen's house.

He was no longer at his ease there. It seemed to him that Lawrence's eyes followed him too; not with hatred, but with a curious meditative wonder.

To-night Stephen said to him, "Did you know that Réveillaud's killed?"

"Killed? Killed? I didn't even know he was fighting."

Lawrence laughed. "What did you suppose he was doing?"

"No--but how?"

"Out with the patrol and shot down. There you are--"

He shoved the _Times_ to him, pointing to the extract from _Le Matin_: "It is with regret that we record the death of M. Jules Réveillaud, the brilliant young poet and critic--"

Michael stared at the first three lines; something in his mind prevented him from going on to the rest, as if he did not care to read about Réveillaud and know how he died.

"It is with regret that we record the death. It is with regret that we record--with regret--"

Then he read on, slowly and carefully, to the end. It was a long paragraph.

"To think," he said at last, "that this revolting thing should have happened to him."

"His death?"

"No--_this_. The _Matin_ never mentioned Réveillaud before. None of the big papers, none of the big reviews noticed his existence except to sneer at him. He goes out and gets killed like any little bourgeois, and the swine plaster him all over with their filthy praise. He'd rather they'd spat on him."

He meditated fiercely. "Well--he couldn't help it. He was conscripted."

"You think he wouldn't have gone of his own accord?"

"I'm certain he wouldn't."

"And I'm certain he would."

"I wish to God we'd got conscription here. I'd rather the Government commandeered my body than stand this everlasting interference with my soul."

"Then," said Lawrence, "you'll not be surprised at my enlisting."

"You're not--"

"I am. I'd have been in the first week if I'd known what to do about Vera."

"But--it's--it's not sane."

"Perhaps not. But it's Irish."

"Irish? I can understand ordinary Irishmen rushing into a European row for the row's sake, just because they haven't got a civil war to mess about in. But you--of all Irishmen--why on earth should _you_ be in it?"

"Because I want to be in it."

"I thought," said Michael, "you were to have been a thorn in England's side?"

"So I was. So I am. But not at this minute. My grandmother was a hard Ulster woman and I hated her. But I wouldn't be a thorn in my grandmother's side if the old lady was assaulted by a brutal voluptuary, and I saw her down and fighting for her honour.

"I've been a thorn in England's side all my life. But it's nothing to the thorn I'll be if I'm killed fighting for her."

"Why--why--if you want to fight in the civil war afterwards?"

"Why? Because I'm one of the few Irishmen who can reason straight. I was going into the civil war last year because it was a fight for freedom. I'm going into this War this year because it's a bigger fight for a bigger freedom.

"You can't have a free Ireland without a free England, any more than you can have religious liberty without political liberty. If the Orangemen understood anything at all about it they'd see it was the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners that'll help them to put down Catholicism in Ireland."

"You think it matters to Ireland whether Germany licks us or we lick Germany?"

"I think it matters to the whole world."

"What's changed you?" said Michael.

He was angry with Lawrence. He thought: "He hasn't any excuse for failing us. He hasn't been conscripted."

"Nothing's changed me. But supposing it didn't matter to the whole world, or even to Europe, and supposing the Allies were beaten in the end, you and I shouldn't be beaten, once we'd stripped ourselves, stripped our souls clean, and gone in.

"Victory, Michael--victory is a state of mind."

* * * * *

The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity.

He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he had said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not making it easy now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered about him, fluttering with anxiety.

When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for Veronica.

Veronica said, "You must let him go."

"I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's over age. He's no more fit than I am."

"You'll have to, sooner or later."

"Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let them come and take him."

"It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll tear at you if you keep him."

"He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his tearing. I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded, paralysed, broken to pieces."

"You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully."

"I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once. But he came back. He can't really do without me."

"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and what he wants most."

"_I_ used to be what he wanted most."

"Well--it's his honour now."

"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy. They're men and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a woman.

"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep him--they say you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the way you go on!"

"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have kept Nicky for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him. She wants Michael to go."

"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are lying. Either they don't care--they're just _lumps_, with no hearts and no nerves in them--or they lie.

"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each other, like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael sick."

"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut about and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and sentimentalizing--

"Lying--lying--lying."

"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it sends them off happy?"

"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever happened to us. I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my life."

"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up. You were a miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you look as if every drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens. If that's your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself. It seems to be all you've got."

"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it _would_ have been all I've got."

Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really was. The child was not a child any more. She was a woman, astonishingly and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in; they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with perfect accuracy.

"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still, you can thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony."

Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's your beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're keeping him for."

* * * * *

She knew; and Lawrence knew.

That night he told her that if he hadn't wanted to enlist he'd be driven to it to get away from her.

And she was frightened and held her tongue.

Then she got desperate. She did things. She intrigued behind his back to keep him; and he found her out.

He came to her, furious.

"You needn't lie about it," he said. "I know what you've done. You've been writing letters and getting at people. You've told the truth about my age and you've lied about my health. You've even gone round cadging for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press Bureau and the Intelligence Department, and God only knows whether I'm supposed to have put you up to it."

"I took care of that, Larry."

"You? You'd no right to interfere with my affairs."

"Hadn't I? Not after living with you seven years?"

"If you'd lived with me seven centuries you'd have had no right to try to keep a man back from the Army."

"I'm trying to keep a man's brain for my country."

"You lie. It's my body you're trying to keep for yourself. As you did when I was going to Ireland."

"Oh, then--I tried to stop you from being a traitor to England. They'd have hanged you, my dear, for that."

"Traitor? It's women like you that are the traitors. My God, if there was a Government in this country that could govern, you'd be strung up in a row, all of you, and hanged."

"No wonder you think you're cut out for a soldier. You're cruel enough."

"_You're_ cruel. I'd rather be hanged than live with you a day longer after what you've done. A Frenchman shot his _wife_ the other day for less than that."

"What was 'less than that'?" she said.

"She crawled after him to the camp, like a bitch.

"He sent her away and she came again and again. He _had_ to shoot her."

"Was there nothing to be said for her?"

"There was. She knew it was a big risk and she took it. _You_ knew you were safe while you slimed my honour."

"She loved him, and he shot her, and you think that's a fine thing. _How_ she must have loved him!"

"Men don't want to be loved that way. That's the mistake you women will make."

"It's the way you've taught us. I should like to know what other way you ever want us to love you?"

"The way Veronica loves Nicky, and Dorothy loved Drayton and Frances loves Anthony."

"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."

"Men's lives aren't ruined that way. And not all women's."

"Well, anyhow, if she'd loved him she'd have married him. And Frances loves her children better than Anthony, and Anthony knows it."

"Veronica, then."

"Veronica doesn't know what passion is. The poor child's anæmic."

"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have more passion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."

"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her eyelashes instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."

He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.

"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the Front. It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and pose as heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and mistresses--they're tired of because the poor things aren't young or pretty any longer."

She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her. "I'm old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and uglier. And I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How _can_ I keep you when I'm old and ugly?"

He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always worked in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained with crying.

"That's how--by getting older.

"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were when I first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm sure I love you."

She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.

"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they believe you; but not me."

"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were married to me I should have enlisted months ago.

"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm sick and tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with it. I'd rather be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house of yours."

"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it now?"

"Everything. Those damned lime-trees all round it. And that damned white wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.

"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.

"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.

"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones, drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk's the divinest thing in God's universe.

"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my life--the one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from it."

They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the next. And Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to train it upwards in the way she hated.

* * * * *

One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the moustache stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He was another man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she hated him or not.

But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best gown to do honour to his khaki.

She said, "It'll be like living with another man."

"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.

And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her passion for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to violence, to perversity.

And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out of her reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where he was stationed.

"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot me?"

"I might shoot _myself_. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear from me again."

* * * * *

He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.

She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent, till she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he had gone she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a sort of peace. She told herself that she would rather he were killed soon than that she should be tortured any longer with suspense.

"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind. That would end it."

And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers for fear lest she should see his name in the lists.

But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement, and died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.

The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before he died. She gave details and a message.

* * * * *

"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to forgive him and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought it would be (he means the fighting) only much more so--all except this last bit.

"He wants you to tell Michael and Dicky?--Nicky?--that. He says: 'It's odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'

"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go to the War.)"

* * * * *

"8.30. It is all over.

"He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his love."

* * * * *

Vera said to herself: "He didn't. She made that up."

She hated the Red Cross woman who had been with Lawrence and had seen so much; who had dared to tell her what he meant and to make up messages.

XXIII

Nicholas had applied for a commission, and he had got it, and Frances was glad.

She had been proud of him because he had chosen the ranks instead of the Officers' Training Corps; but she persisted in the belief that, when it came to the trenches, second lieutenants stood a better chance. "For goodness' sake," Nicholas had said, "don't tell her that they're over the parapet first."

That was in December. In February he got a week's leave--sudden, unforeseen and special leave. It had to be broken to her this time that leave as special as that meant war-leave.

She said, "Well, if it does, I shall have him for six whole days." She had learned how to handle time, how to prolong the present, drawing it out minute by minute; thus her happiness, stretched to the snapping point, vibrated.

She had a sense of its vibration now, as she looked at Nicholas. It was the evening of the day he had come home, and they were all in the drawing-room together. He was standing before her, straight and tall, on the hearthrug, where he had lifted the Persian cat, Timmy, out of his sleep and was holding him against his breast. Timmy spread himself there, softly and heavily, hanging on to Nicky's shoulder by his claws; he butted Nicky's chin with his head, purring.

"I don't know how I'm to tear myself away from Timmy. I should like to wear him alive as a waistcoat. Or hanging on my shoulder like a cape, with his tail curled tight round my neck. He'd look uncommonly _chic_ with all his khaki patches."

"Why don't you take him with you?" Anthony said.

"'Cos he's Ronny's cat."

"He isn't. I've given him to you," Veronica said.

"When?"

"Now, this minute. To sleep on your feet and keep you warm."

Frances listened and thought: "What children--what babies they are, after all." If only this minute could be stretched out farther.

"I mustn't," Nicky said. "I should spend hours in dalliance; and if a shell got him it would ruin my morale."

Timmy, unhooked from Nicky's shoulder, lay limp in his arms. He lay on his back, in ecstasy, his legs apart, showing the soft, cream-white fur of his stomach. Nicky rubbed his face against the soft, cream-white fur.

"I say, what a heavenly death it would be to die--smothered in Timmies."

"Nicky, you're a beastly sensualist. That's what's the matter with you," John said. And they all laughed.

The minute broke, stretched to its furthest.

* * * * *

Frances was making plans now for Nicky's week. There were things they could do, plays they could see, places they could go to. Anthony would let them have the big car as much as they wanted. For you could stretch time out by filling it; you could multiply the hours by what they held.

"Ronny and I are going to get married to-morrow," Nicky said. "We settled it that we would at once, if I got war-leave. It's the best thing to do."

"Of course," Frances said, "it's the best thing to do."

But she had not allowed for it, nor for the pain it gave her. That pain shocked her. It was awful to think that, after all her surrenders, Nicky's happiness could give her pain. It meant that she had never let go her secret hold. She had been a hypocrite to herself.

Nicky was talking on about it, excitedly, as he used to talk on about his pleasures when he was a child.

If Dad'll let us have the racing car, we'll go down to Morfe. We can do it in a day."

"My dear boy," Anthony said, "don't you know I've lent the house to the Red Cross, and let the shooting?"

"I don't care. There's the little house in the village we can have. And Harker and his wife can look after us."

"Harker gone to the War, and his wife's looking after his brother's children somewhere. And I've put two Belgian refugees into it."

"_They_ can look after us," said Nicky. "We'll stay three days, run back, and have one day at home before I sail."

Frances gave up her play with time. She was beaten.

And still she thought: "At least I shall have him one whole day."

And then she looked across the room to Michael, as if Michael's face had signalled to her. His clear, sun-burnt skin showed blotches of white where the blood had left it. A light sweat was on his forehead. When their eyes met, he shifted his position to give himself an appearance of ease.

Michael had not reckoned on his brother's marriage, either. It was when he asked himself: "On what, then, _had_ he been reckoning?" that the sweat broke out on his forehead.

He had not reckoned on anything. But the sudden realization of what he might have reckoned on made him sick. He couldn't bear to think of Ronny married. And yet again, he couldn't bear to think of Nicky not marrying her. If he had had a hold on her he would have let her go. In this he knew himself to be sincere. He had had no hold on her, and to talk about letting her go was idiotic; still, there was a violent pursuit and possession by the mind--and Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy, that psychic assault and outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual surrender of her was so perfect that his very imagination gave her up to Nicky.

He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing could take their three days from them, even when the War had done its worst.

And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she think I was reckoning on that?"

* * * * *

Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead Town Hall, before the Registrar.

They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying and circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky said, whole handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals, with a clear run before him, he let out the racing car to its top speed on the Great North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed like some immense, nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all its weight were purged from it by speed. It flew up and down the hills of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat country round Peterborough and Grantham, a country of silver green and emerald green grass and purple fallow land and bright red houses; and so on to the great plain of York, and past Reyburn up towards the bare hill country netted with grey stone walls.

Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road.

It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed enormous and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen moon. Other hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous, stood piled up in front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale.

Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was as if, ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that incredibly high, immense obstruction. They were thrilled, mysteriously, as before the image of monstrous and omnipotent disaster. Then the dale widened; it made way for them and saved them.

The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a coronet and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights of the village below, the village they were making for, showed as if dropped out of the pattern on the hill.

One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage chamber. Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch to receive them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage torches. The old woman held her light low down, lighting the flagstone of the threshold. The old man lifted his high, showing the lintel of the door. It was so low that Nicholas had to stoop to go in.

* * * * *

In the morning they read the date cut in the wall above the porch: 1665.

The house was old and bent and grey. Its windows were narrow slits in the stone mullions. It crouched under the dipping boughs of the ash-tree that sheltered it. Inside there was just room for Veronica to stand up. Nicholas had to stoop or knock his head against the beams. It had only four rooms, two for Nicholas and Veronica, and two for Jean and Suzanne. And it was rather dark.

But it pleased them. They said it was their apple-tree-house grown up because they were grown up, and keeping strict proportions. You had to crawl into it, and you were only really comfortable sitting or lying down. So they sat outside it, watching old Suzanne through the window as she moved about the house place, cooking Belgian food for them, and old Jean as he worked in the garden.

Veronica loved Jean and Suzanne. She had found out all about them the first morning.

"Only think, Nicky. They're from Termonde, and their house was burnt behind them as they left it. They saw horrors, and their son was killed in the War.

"Yet they're happy and at peace. Almost as if they'd forgotten. He'll plant flowers in his garden."

"They're old, Ronny. And perhaps they were tired already when it happened."

"Yes, that must be it. They're old and tired."

* * * * *

And now it was the last adventure of their last day. They were walking on the slope of Renton Moor that looks over Rathdale towards Greffington Edge. The light from the west poured itself in vivid green down the valley below them, broke itself into purple on Karva Hill to the north above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle blue and violet from the stone rampart of the Edge.

Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources of the country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge, on Sarrack Moor. The raking lines of the hills were straight as if they had been measured with a ruler and then planed.

"Ronny," he said at last, "we've licked 'em in the first round, you and I. The beastly Boche can't do us out of these three days."

"No. We've been absolutely happy. And we'll never forget it. Never."

"Perhaps it was a bit rough on Dad and Mummy, our carting ourselves up here, away from them. But, you see, they don't really mind. They're feeling about it now just as we feel about it. I knew they would."

There had been a letter from Frances saying she was glad they'd gone. She was so happy thinking how happy they were.

"They're angels, Nicky."

"Aren't they? Simply angels. That's the rotten part of it. I wish--

"I wish I could tell them what I think of them. But you can't, somehow. It sticks in your throat, that sort of thing."

"You needn't," she said; "they know all right."

She thought: "This is what he wants me to tell them about--afterwards."

"Yes, but--I must have hurt them--hurt them horribly--lots of times. I wish I hadn't.

"But" he went on, "they're funny, you know. Dad actually thought it idiotic of us to do this. He said it would only make it harder for us when I had to go. They don't see that it's just piling it on--going from one jolly adventure to another.

"I'm afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on you; because the rest of it's all my show."

"But it isn't all your show, Nicky darling. It's mine, and it's theirs--because we haven't grudged you your adventure."

"That's exactly how I want you to feel about it."

"And they're assuming that I shan't come back. Which, if you come to think of it, is pretty big cheek. They talk, and they think, as though nobody ever got through. Whereas I've every intention of getting through and of coming back. I'm the sort of chap who does get through, who does come back."

"And even if I wasn't, if they studied statistics they'd see that it's a thousand chances to one against the Boches getting me--just me out of all the other chaps. As if I was so jolly important.

"No; don't interrupt. Let's get this thing straight while we can. Supposing--just supposing I didn't get through--didn't come back--supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to think of _that_, not as a clumsy accident, but just another awfully interesting thing I'd done.

"Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you took the thing as a shock instead of--of what it probably really is, and went and got cut up about it, you might start the little beggar with a sort of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that it would be jumpy all its life.

"It ought," said Nicky, "to sit in its little house all quiet and comfy till it's time for it to come out."

He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might be, what probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted more than anything, next to Veronica.

"It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy."

"If _that_ came off all right," he said, "it would make it up to Mother no end."

"It wouldn't make it up to me."

"You don't know what it would do," he said.

She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but you."

"That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of kin--the one they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way; it'll only make him madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid of you or Mummy or Dad, or Michael being told first."

"It doesn't matter a bit who's _told_ first. I shall _know_ first," she said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't kill either me or the baby. If a shock could kill me I should have died long ago."

"When?"

"When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear it any longer, something happened."

"What?"

"I don't know. I don't know what it _is_ now; I only know what it does. It always happens--always--when you want it awfully. And when you're quiet and give yourself up to it."

"It'll happen again."

He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite interested; puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if something had come between him and her.

"You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so that when things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to happen to Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she was absolutely happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came to her. And, Nicky, they were the same queer things that came to me. It was like something getting through to her."

"I say--did you ever do it to me?"

"Only once, when you wanted it awfully."

"When? When?"

Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her trail.

"When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it didn't matter, it wasn't the end."

"But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself. It looks as if it worked, then?"

"It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with _you_ it would always come; because you're more _me_ than other people; I mean I care more for you."

She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother about me, Nicky. If _the_ most awful thing happened, and you didn't come back, It would come."

"I wish I knew what It was," he said.

"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's God."

"That's why _they're_ so magnificently brave--Dorothy and Aunt Frances and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't know it's there; even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and still they go on bearing and bearing; and they were glad to give you up."

"I know," he said; "lots of people _say_ they're glad, but they really _are_ glad."

He meditated.

"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's praying or something; and if you're going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you'd be careful; because it seems to me that if there's anything in it at all, there might be hitches. I mean to say, you might work it just enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from being blown off. Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic.

"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I thought about it. Luckily one doesn't think."

"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than I tried before."

"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"

"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin with, I won't believe that you're not going to get through.

"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't believe you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to something else. It doesn't end him.'"

He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to.

Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind talking about it?" she said.

"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I believe in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling, that you go on. You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't care. They used to think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn't care. But I really didn't. Things, most things, don't much matter, because there's always something else. You go on to it.

"I care for _you_. _You_ matter most awfully; and my people; but most of all you. You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the first time I heard you calling out to me to come and sit on your bed because you were frightened. You always will matter.

"But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make me _think_ she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her because she was going to have a baby. And _that_ was because I remembered you and the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would have kept me straight with women if nothing else did.

"Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying you till Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too late.

"That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby."

"Yes, Nicky.

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The cottage belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?"

"I think he'd give it to you if you asked him."

"For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll give it to me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where it's all quiet and you'd never know there was a war at all--even the Belgians have forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look at that hill, because it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I simply won't think of anything that isn't straight and beautiful. And I shall get strong. Then the baby will be straight and beautiful and strong, too.

"I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like you."

* * * * *

Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little things that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and she, to be on the edge of something great, something satisfying and revealing. It was to come in a look or a word; and both would remember it afterwards for ever.

In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline, and Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say good-bye. And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited and happy, as he had gone off on his wedding journey. And between Frances and her son the great thing remained unsaid.

Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine sand.

_February 27th, 1915._ B.E.F., FRANCE.

Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you all for the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long way, that's been seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it because it "looked as if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It makes me feel as if I _was_ Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs, rampant, clawing at the Boches. Just think of the effect if he got up over the parapet!

The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't think what else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those tubes of chutney are a good idea.

No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no English and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to himself, you simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old Mick could send himself out by himself against the whole German Army he'd manage to put in some first rate fancy work in the second or two before they got him. He'd be quite capable of going off and doing grisly things that would make me faint with funk, if he was by himself, with nothing but the eye of God to look at him. And _then_ he'd rather God wasn't there. He always _was_ afraid of having a crowd with him.

The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were you two, I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he is the youngest.

And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest curtain fire there _are_ holes; there are more holes than there is stuff; and the chances are I shall be where a hole is.

Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight for you like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's going to get you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of personal resentment which must be the worst part of the business. Bits of shells that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew all about before and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted out in the open, the peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is it more than the peculiar awfulness of being run over by express trains let loose about the sky? Tell Don that when shrapnel empties itself over your head like an old tin pail, you might feel injured, but the big shell has a most disarming air of not being able to help itself, of not looking for anybody in particular. It's so innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it any day than fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe.

That's an answer to his question.

And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action. Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I told her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but Stephen was absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than anything you could have imagined. I'm not speaking only for myself.

There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between your parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it too--when you're afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before you get there. But it doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply swinging you on to them, and that swing makes up for all the rotten times put together. You needn't be sorry for us. It's waste of pity.

I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us. But I'm not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving,

NICKY.

May, 1915. B.E.F., FRANCE

My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when you loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you needn't do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the papers more or less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith is saying or what Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's motives are. Personally, I should say he was simply trying, like most of us, to save his country. Looks like it. But you can tell him from me, if he gets them to send us enough shells out _in time_ we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow that sort of thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much better than you, if you don't mind my saying so.

What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the last sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my billet for one of his _worst_ jokes. And I like to hear about Morrie going on the bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if it really is anxiety about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd leave off thinking about me, poor old thing.

More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's looking and what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot, and she may tell you things she won't tell the others. That's why I'm glad you're there and not here.

And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel about it. I think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were a "putrid Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes me like religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say, but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead of the Government, you'd have been in at the start, before me.

Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never can tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those of us who are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a long way. There's no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the finish; so that the patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to join up will be jolly well sold, poor devils. Take me, for instance. If I'd got what I wanted and been out in Flanders in 1914, ten to one I should have been in the retreat from Mons, like Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have given my head to have gone to Gallipoli; but _now_, well, I'm just as glad I'm not mixed up in that affair.

Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you can get out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to win the War. At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the Rhine, while all the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash on the way there. So if you're going to be converted let's hope you'll be converted quick.

If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight away. There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a Tommy. For instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your brother Tommies. I slept for three months next to a beastly blighter who used to come in drunk and tread on my face and be ill all over me.

Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything that's happened out here. But that's because at home your mind isn't adjusted to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise to me every time. I _couldn't_ get used to him. Whereas out here everything's shifted in the queerest way. Your mind shifts. You funk your first and your second sight, say, of a bad stretcher case; but when it comes to the third and the fourth you don't funk at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit surprised. It's all in the picture, and you're in the picture too. There's a sort of horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly dream which doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the beastliness.

No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what d'you think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run over the other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian at that. There were two or three women round it, crying and gesticulating. It looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath of blood. That made me sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the picture. I hadn't bargained for him.

Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa--do you remember how he _would_ tell us about them?--weren't in it with the things that happened here. Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do, apparently on their own, are simply unbelievable--what the war correspondents call "fantastic postures." But I haven't got to the point when I can slap my thighs, and roar with laughter--if they happen to be Germans.

In between, the boredom is so awful that I've heard some of our men say they'd rather have things happening. And, of course, we're all hoping that when those shells come along there won't be quite so much "between."

Love to Ronny and Mother and all of them.--Your very affectionate,

NICHOLAS.

June 1st, 1915. B.E.F., FRANCE.

My Darling Ronny,--Yes, I think all your letters must have come, because you've answered everything. You always tell me just what I want to know. When I see the fat envelopes coming I know they're going to be chock-full of the things I've happened to be thinking about. Don't let's ever forget to put the dates, because I make out that I've always dreamed about you, too, the nights you've written.

And so the Aunties are working in the War Hospital Supply Depôt? It's frightfully funny what Dorothy says about their enjoying the War and feeling so important. Don't let her grudge it them, though; it's all the enjoyment, or importance, they're ever had in their lives, poor dears. But I shall know, if a swab bursts in my inside, that it's Auntie Edie's. As for Auntie Emmeline's, I can't even imagine what they'd be like--monstrosities--or little babies injured at birth. Aunt Louie's would be well-shaped and firm, but erring a little on the hard side, don't you think?

That reminds me, I suppose I may tell you now since it's been in the papers, that we've actually got Moving Fortresses out here. I haven't seen them yet, but a fellow who has thinks they must be uncommonly like Drayton's and my thing. I suspect, from what he says, they're a bit better, though. We hadn't got the rocking-horse idea.

It's odd--this time last year I should have gone off my head with agony at the mere thought of anybody getting in before us; and now I don't care a bit. I do mind rather for Drayton's sake, though I don't suppose he cares, either. The great thing is that it's been done, and done better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the Germans had got on to them, and trotted them out first, and one of our own guns had potted him or me, _that_ would have been a jolly sell.

What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the awful thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the base hospital on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock, and--_he never came back again_. It doesn't matter, because the weather's so warm now that I don't want him. But I'm sorry because you all gave him to me and it looks as if I hadn't cared for him. But I did....

June 10th.

Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather suddenly. I wish I could tell you _what_, but we mustn't let on what happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still, there are all the other things I couldn't say anything about at the time.

If you _must_ know, I've been up "over the top" three times now since I came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all right.

Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's been like that every time (except that I've got over the queer funky feeling half-way through). It'll be like that again next time, I know. Because now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't tell Dorothy this, because she'd think it was all rot--but when you're up first out of the trench and stand alone on the parapet, it's absolute happiness. And the charge is--well, it's simply heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till then; I certainly hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three days we had together.

That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something rotten about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's trying for) is nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks that's all there is in it, he doesn't know much about war, or love either. Though I'm bound to say there's a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing. He says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same as I do; but that it's simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the top--a hidden lust for killing, and the hidden memory of having killed, he called it. He's always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had been drunk.

And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but "a ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give mine to a funny chap who _knows_ he's going to have collywobbles as soon as he gets out into the open.

But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it, because they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of being killed. _That_--when you realize it--well, it's like the thing you told me about that you said you thought must be God because it's so real. I didn't understand it then, but I do now. You're bang up against reality--you're going clean into it--and the sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while one half of you is feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill and doing its best to keep on _this_ side reality. But I've been near enough to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick. _He_'d write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's a sin that I should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't do anything with it.

Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your loving,

NICKY.

P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and Dorothy and Mother. It would save them half the misery they're probably going through.

* * * * *

The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the garden, weeding the delphinium border.

It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was digging in the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering green peas and fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came through the open door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace with the piled up baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to Veronica.

It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came, Veronica could time it by the striking of the clock heard through the open doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and then, almost on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious happiness.

Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity made each small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged at the weeds, and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the palms of her hand smoothed over the places where they had been. She thought of old Jean and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at Renton, and of that tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest thing she had ever seen.

And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the half-hour, not out of herself or out of her thoughts, but mysteriously and from somewhere a long way off.

* * * * *

She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through the door with her basket, and it was then that she saw Nicholas.

He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised between her and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested in the act of looking back to see if she were following him. His eyes shone, vivid and blue, as they always shone when he was happy. He smiled at her, but with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to her, but with no sound.

Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her heart was still; it beat steadily.

She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust itself between them, and he was gone.

And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had seen her when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of the sun.

XXIV

The young men had gone--Morton Ellis, who had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country; and Austin Mitchell who had said he hadn't got a country; and Monier-Owen, who had said that England was not a country you could fight for. George Wadham had gone long ago. That, Michael said, was to be expected. Even a weak gust could sweep young Wadham off his feet--and he had been fairly carried away. He could no more resist the vortex of the War than he could resist the vortex of the arts.

Michael had two pitiful memories of the boy: one of young Wadham swaggering into Stephen's room in uniform (the first time he had it on), flushed and pleased with himself and talking excitedly about the "Great Game"; and one of young Wadham returned from the Front, mature and hard, not talking about the "Great Game" at all, and wincing palpably when other people talked; a young Wadham who, they said, ought to be arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act as a quencher of war-enthusiasms.

The others had gone later, one by one, each with his own gesture: Mitchell and Monier-Owen when Stephen went; Ellis the day after Stephen's death. It had taken Stephen's death to draw him.

Only Michael remained.

He told them they were mistaken if they thought their going would inspire him to follow them. It, and Stephen's death, merely intensified the bitterness he felt towards the War. He was more than ever determined to keep himself pure from it, consecrated to his Forlorn Hope. If they fell back, all the more reason why be should go on.

And, while he waited for the moment of vision, he continued Stephen's work on the _Green Review_. Stephen had left it to him when he went out. Michael tried to be faithful to the tradition he thus inherited; but gradually Stephen's spirit disappeared from the _Review_ and its place was taken by the clear, hard, unbreakable thing that was Michael's mind.

And Michael knew that he was beginning to make himself felt.

But Stephen's staff, such as it was, and nearly all his contributors had gone to the War, one after another, and Michael found himself taking all their places. He began to feel a strain, which he took to be the strain of overwork, and he went down to Renton to recover.

That was on the Tuesday that followed Veronica's Sunday.

He thought that down there he would get away from everything that did him harm: from his father's and mother's eyes; from his sister's proud, cold face; and from his young brother's smile; and from Veronica's beauty that saddened him; and from the sense of Nicky's danger that brooded as a secret obsession over the house. He would fill up the awful empty space. He thought: "For a whole fortnight I shall get away from this infernal War."

But he did not get away from it. On every stage of the journey down he encountered soldiers going to the Front. He walked in the Park at Darlington between his trains, and wounded soldiers waited for him on every seat, shuffled towards him round every turning, hobbled after him on their crutches down every path. Their eyes looked at him with a shrewd hostility. He saw the young Yorkshire recruits drinking in the open spaces. Sergeants' eyes caught and measured him, appraising his physique. Behind and among them he saw Drayton's, and Réveillaud's, and Stephen's eyes; and young Wadham's eyes, strange and secretive and hard.

* * * * *

At Reyburn Michael's train was switched off to a side platform in the open. Before he left Darlington, a thin, light rain had begun to fall from a shred of blown cloud; and at Reyburn the burst mass was coming down. The place was full of the noise of rain. The drops tapped on the open platform and hissed as the wind drove them in a running stream. They drummed loudly on the station roof. But these sounds went out suddenly, covered by the trampling of feet.

A band of Highlanders with their bagpipes marched into the station. They lined up solemnly along the open platform with their backs to Michael's train and their faces to the naked rails on the other side. Higher up Michael could see the breast of an engine; it was backing, backing, towards the troop-train that waited under the cover of the roof. He could hear the clank of the coupling and the recoil. At that sound the band had their mouths to their bagpipes and their fingers ready on the stops. Two or three officers hurried down from the station doors and stood ready.

The train came on slowly, packed with men; men who thrust their heads and shoulders through the carriage windows, and knelt on the seats, and stood straining over each other's backs to look out; men whose faces were scarlet with excitement; men with open mouths shouting for joy.

The officers saluted as it passed. It halted at the open platform, and suddenly the pipers began to play.

Michael got out of his train and watched.

Solemnly, in the grey evening of the rain, with their faces set in a sort of stern esctasy, the Highlanders played to their comrades. Michael did not know whether their tune was sad or gay. It poured itself into one mournful, savage, sacred cry of salutation and valediction. When it stopped the men shouted; there were voices that barked hoarsely and broke; voices that roared; young voices that screamed, strung up by the skirling of the bagpipes. The pipers played to them again.

And suddenly Michael was overcome. Pity shook him and grief and an intolerable yearning, and shame. For one instant his soul rose up above the music, and was made splendid and holy, the next he cowered under it, stripped and beaten. He clenched his fists, hating this emotion that stung him to tears and tore at his heart and at the hardness of his mind.

As the troop-train moved slowly out of the station the pipers, piping more and more shrilly, swung round and marched beside it to the end of the platform. The band ceased abruptly, and the men answered with shout after shout of violent joy; they reared up through the windows, straining for the last look--and were gone.

Michael turned to the porter who lifted his luggage from the rack. "What regiment are they?" he said.

"Camerons, sir. Going to the Front."

The clear, uncanny eyes of Veronica's father pursued him now.

* * * * *

At last he had got away from it.

In Rathdale, at any rate, there was peace. The hills and their pastures, and the flat river fields were at peace. And in the villages of Morfe and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few men had gone from them. The rest were tied to the land, and they were more absorbed in the hay-harvest than in the War. Even the old Belgians in Veronica's cottage were at peace. They had forgotten.

For three days Michael himself had peace.

He went up to Veronica's hill and sat on it; and thought how for hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was not a soul whom he knew. In all his life he had never been more by himself.

This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael's mind. So far from having got away from the War he had never been more conscious of it than he was now. What he had got away from was other people's consciousness. From the beginning the thing that threatened him had been, not the War but this collective war-spirit, clamouring for his private soul.

For the first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found himself thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity, about the War. He had really known, half the time, that it was the greatest War of Independence that had ever been. As for his old hatred of the British Empire, he had seen long ago that there was no such thing, in the continental sense of Empire; there was a unique thing, the rule, more good than bad, of an imperial people. He had seen that the strength of the Allies was in exact proportion to the strength and the enlightenment of their democracies. Reckoning by decades, there could be no deadlock in the struggle; the deadlock meant a ten years' armistice and another war. He could not help seeing these things. His objection to occupying his mind with them had been that they were too easy.

Now that he could look at it by himself he saw how the War might take hold of you like a religion. It was the Great War of Redemption. And redemption meant simply thousands and millions of men in troop-ships and troop-trains coming from the ends of the world to buy the freedom of the world with their bodies. It meant that the very fields he was looking over, and this beauty of the hills, those unused ramparts where no batteries were hid, and the small, silent villages, Morfe and Renton, were bought now with their bodies.

He wondered how at this moment any sane man could be a Pacifist. And, wondering, he felt a reminiscent sting of grief and yearning. But he refused, resolutely, to feel any shame.

His religion also was good; and, anyhow, you didn't choose your religion; it chose you.

And on Saturday the letters came: John's letter enclosing the wire from the War Office, and the letter that Nicky's Colonel had written to Anthony.

Nicky was killed.

Michael took in the fact, and the date (it was last Sunday). There were some official regrets, but they made no impression on him. John's letter made no impression on him. Last Sunday Nicky was killed.

He had not even unfolded the Colonel's letter yet. The close black lines showed through the thin paper. Their closeness repelled him. He did not want to know how his brother had died; at least not yet. He was afraid of the Colonel's letter. He felt that by simply not reading it he could put off the unbearable turn of the screw.

He was shivering with cold. He drew up his chair to the wide, open hearth-place where there was no fire; he held out his hands over it. The wind swept down the chimney and made him colder; and he felt sick.

He had been sitting there about an hour when Suzanne came in and asked him if he would like a little fire. He heard himself saying, "No, thank you," in a hard voice. The idea of warmth and comfort was disagreeable to him. Suzanne asked him then if he had had bad news? And he heard himself saying: "Yes," and Suzanne trying, trying very gently, to persuade him that it was perhaps only that Monsieur Nicky was wounded?

"No? _Then_," said the old woman, "he is killed." And she began to cry.

Michael couldn't stand that. He got up and opened the door into the outer room, and she passed through before him, sobbing and whimpering. Her voice came to him through the closed door in a sharp cry telling Jean that Monsieur Nicky was dead, and Jean's voice came, hushing her.

Then he heard the feet of the old man shuffling across the kitchen floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and through the windows at the back of the room, he saw, without heeding, as the Belgians passed and went up into the fields together, weeping, leaving him alone.

They had remembered.

It was then that Michael read the Colonel's letter, and learned the manner of his brother's death: "... About a quarter past four o'clock in the afternoon his battalion was being pressed back, when he rallied his men and led them in as gallant an attack as was ever made by so small a number in this War. He was standing on the enemy's parapet when he was shot through the heart and fell. By a quarter to five the trench was stormed and taken, owing to his personal daring and impetus and to the affection and confidence he inspired.... We hear it continually said of our officers and men that 'they're all the same,' and I daresay as far as pluck goes they are. But, if I may say so, we all felt that your son had something that we haven't got...."

* * * * *

Michael lay awake in the bed that had been his brother's marriage bed. The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him. For three nights the room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had never gone from it. They had compelled him to think of them. They had lain where he lay, falling asleep in each other's arms.

The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them had in no way troubled him. It had been simply there like some exquisite atmosphere, intensifying his peace. He had had the same feeling he always had when Veronica was with him. He had liked to lie with his head on their pillow, to touch what they had touched, to look at the same things in the same room, to go in and out through the same doors over the same floors, remembering their hands and feet and eyes, and saying to himself: "They did this and this"; or, "That must have pleased them."

It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine why it was not.

And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of Nicky and Veronica together. The room had emptied itself of its own memory and significance. He was aware of nothing but the bare, spiritual space between him and Nicky. He lay contemplating it steadily and without any horror.

He thought: "This ends it. Of course I shall go out now. I might have known that this would end it. _He_ knew."

He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night in August. He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed, half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.

Nicky had taken it for granted even then that he would go out some time. He remembered how he had said, "Not yet."

He thought: "Of course; this must have been what he meant."

And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time appeased.

* * * * *

It was morning.

Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as he struggled to wake.

Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came clear out of this drowning.

Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last Sunday. He knew that. But that wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed on--

Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be killed too. And because he was going out, and because he would be killed, he was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should have thought he would have felt it. He had been let off that.

He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do, feeling a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and Réveillaud and Lawrence had gone out, and they had been killed. Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen were going out and they would certainly be killed. Wadham had gone out and young Vereker, and they also would be killed.

Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.

His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without concern. It was aware that his going depended on his own will. But never in all his life had he brought so little imagination to the act of willing.

He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast. He accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or concern.

Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other things: "I know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know how you cared for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not bear it, Michael, if we were not so proud of him."

He answered this letter at once. He wrote: "I couldn't bear it either, if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now."

As he signed himself, "Your loving Michael," he thought: "That settles it." Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it he would have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night had settled it; that his resolution had been absolutely self-determined and absolutely irrevocable then, and that his signature gave it no more sanctity or finality than it had already. If he was conscript, he was conscript to his own will.

He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the post did not leave Renton for another five hours.

It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the letter-box that shook him into realization of what he had done and of what was before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to write that letter and to post it. By those two slight acts, not dreadful nor difficult in themselves, he had put it out of his power to withdraw from the one supremely difficult and dreadful act. A second ago, while the letter was still in his hands, he could have backed out, because he had not given any pledge. Now he would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly for the first time what it was that he would have to go through.

He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along the top for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and seeing nothing before him but his own act and what must come afterwards. By to-morrow, or the next day at the latest, he would have enlisted; by six months, at the latest, three months if he had what they called "luck," he would be in the trenches, fighting and killing, not because he chose, but because he would be told to fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that letter to his mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.

And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying that he didn't funk it.

Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked looking on at fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn't think he would really mind that so much. It would come--it must come--as a relief from the horrors he would have to see before it came. Nicky had said that they were unbelievable; he had seemed to think you couldn't imagine them if you hadn't seen them. But Michael could. He had only to think of them to see them now. He could make war-pictures for himself, in five minutes, every bit as terrifying as the things they said happened under fire. Any fool, if he chose to think about it, could see what must happen. Only people didn't think. They rushed into it without seeing anything; and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it, before and during and afterwards and all the time.

Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that the others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very well to say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as their phrase was, "Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far as he was concerned, the end of beauty and of the making of beauty, and of everything worth caring for; but it was also the beginning of a life that Michael dreaded more than fighting and killing and being killed: a life of boredom, of obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection. For of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he could smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.

Of course he was going through with it; only--this was the thought his mind turned round and round on in horror at itself--he funked it. He funked it so badly that he would really rather die than go through with it. When he was actually killed that would be his second death; months before it could happen he would have known all about it; he would have been dead and buried and alive again in hell.

What shocked Michael was his discovering, not that he funked it now, which was natural, almost permissible, but that he had funked it all the time. He could see now that, since the War began, he had been struggling to keep out of it. His mind had fought every suggestion that he should go in. It had run to cover, like a mad, frightened animal before the thoughts that hunted it down. Funk, pure funk, had been at the bottom of all he had said and thought and done since August, nineteen-fourteen; his attitude to the War, his opinion of the Allies, and of the Government and of its conduct of the War, all his wretched criticisms and disparagements--what had they been but the very subterfuges of funk?

His mother had known it; his father had known it; and Dorothy and John. It was not conceivable that Nicky did not know it.

That was what had made the horror of the empty space that separated them.

Lawrence Stephen had certainly known it.

He could not understand his not knowing it himself, not seeing that he struggled. Yet he must have seen that Nicky's death would end it. Anyhow, it _was_ ended; if not last night, then this morning when he posted the letter.

But he was no longer appeased by this certainty of his. He was going out all right. But merely going out was not enough. What counted was the state of mind in which you went. Lawrence had said, "Victory--Victory is a state of mind."

Well--it was a state that came naturally to Nicky, and did not come naturally to him. It was all very well for Nicky: he had wanted to go. He had gone out victorious before victory. Michael would go beaten before defeat.

He thought: "If this is volunteering, give me compulsion." All the same he was going.

All morning and afternoon, as he walked and walked, his thoughts went the same round. And in the evening they began again, but on a new track. He thought: "It's all very well to say I'm going; but how _can_ I go?" He had Lawrence Stephen's work to do; Lawrence's Life and Letters were in his hands. How could he possibly go and leave Lawrence dead and forgotten? This view seemed to him to be sanity and common sense.

As his mind darted up this turning it was driven back. He saw Lawrence Stephen smiling at him as he had smiled at him when Réveillaud died. Lawrence would have wanted him to go more than anything. He would have chosen to be dead and forgotten rather than keep him.

At night these thoughts left him. He began to think of Nicky and of his people. His father and mother would never be happy again. Nicky had been more to them than he was, or even John. He had been more to Dorothy. It was hard on Dorothy to lose Nicky and Drayton too.

He thought of Nicky and Veronica. Poor little Ronny, what would she do without Nicky? He thought of Veronica, sitting silent in the train, and looking at him with her startling look of spiritual maturity. He thought of Veronica singing to him over and over again:

"London Bridge is broken down--

* * * * *

"Build it up with gold so fine--

* * * * *

"Build it up with stones so strong--"

He thought of Veronica running about the house and crying, "Where's Nicky? I want him."

Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in the morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of Renton Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way as yesterday. The images were, if anything, more crowded and more horrible; but they had lost their hold. He was tired of looking at them.

About five o'clock he turned abruptly and went back to the village the same way by which he came.

And as he swung down the hill road in sight of Renton, suddenly there was a great clearance in his soul.

When he went into the cottage he found Veronica there waiting for him. She sat with her hands lying in her lap, and she had the same look he had seen when she was in the train.

"Ronny--"

She stood up to greet him, as if it had been she who was staying there and he who had incredibly arrived.

"They told me you wouldn't be long," she said.

"I? You haven't come because you were ill or anything?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. Not for anything like that."

"I didn't write, Ronny. I couldn't."

"I know." Their eyes met, measuring each other's grief. "That's why I came. I couldn't bear to leave you to it."

* * * * *

"I'd have come before, Michael, if you'd wanted me."

They were sitting together now, on the settle by the hearth-place.

"I can't understand your being able to think of me," he said.

"Because of Nicky? If I haven't got Nicky it's all the more reason why I should think of his people."

He looked up. "I say--how are they? Mother and Father?"

"They're very brave.

"It's worse for them than it is for me," she said. "What they can't bear is your going."

"Mother got my letter, then?"

"Yes. This morning."

"What did she say?"

"She said: 'Oh, no. _Not_ Michael.'

"It was a good thing you wrote, though. Your letter made her cry. It made even Dorothy cry. They hadn't been able to, before."

"I should have thought if they could stand Nicky's going--"

"That was different. They know it was different."

"Do you suppose _I_ don't know how different it was? They mean I funked it and Nicky didn't."

"They mean that Nicky got what he wanted when he went, and that there was nothing else he could have done so well, except flying, or engineering."

"It comes to the same thing, Nicky simply wasn't afraid."

"Yes, Michael, he _was_ afraid."

"What _of_?"

"He was most awfully afraid of seeing suffering."

"Well, so am I. And I'm afraid of suffering myself too. I'm afraid of the whole blessed thing from beginning to end."

"That's because you keep on seeing the whole blessed thing from beginning to end. Nicky only saw little bits of it. The bits he liked. Machine-guns working beautifully, and shells dropping in the right places, and trenches being taken.

"And then, remember--Nicky hadn't so much to give up."

"He had you."

"Oh, no. He knew that was the way to keep me."

"Ronny--if Nicky had been like me could he have kept you?"

She considered it.

"Yes--if he could have been himself too."

"He couldn't, you see. He never could have felt like that."

"I don't say He could."

"Well--the awful thing is 'feeling like that.'"

"And the magnificent thing is 'feeling like that,' and going all the same. Everybody knows that but you, Michael."

"Yes," he said. "I'm _going_. But I'm not going to lie about it and say I don't funk it. Because I do."

"You don't _really_."

"I own I didn't the first night--the night I knew Nicky was killed. Because I couldn't think of anything else _but_ Nicky.

"It was after I'd written to Mother that it came on. Because I knew then I couldn't back out of it. That's what I can't get over--my having to do that--to clinch it--because I was afraid."

"My dear, my dear, thousands of men do that every day for the same reason, only they don't find themselves out; and if they did they wouldn't care. You're finding yourself out all the time, and killing yourself with caring."

"Of course I care. Can't you see it proves that I never meant to go at all?"

"It proves that you knew you'd have to go through hell first and you were determined that even hell shouldn't keep you back."

"Ronny--that's what it _has_ been. Simply hell. It's been inconceivable. Nothing--absolutely nothing out there could be as bad. It went on all yesterday and to-day--till you came."

"I know, Michael. That's why I came."

"To get me out of it?"

"To get you out of it.

"It's all over," she said.

"It may come back--out there."

"It won't. Out there you'll be happy. I saw Nicky on Sunday--the minute before he was killed, Michael. And he was happy."

"He would be." He was silent for a long time.

"Ronny. Did Nicky know I funked it?"

"Never! He knew you wouldn't keep out. All he minded was your missing any of it."

She got up and put on her hat. "I must go. It's getting late. Will you walk up to Morfe with me? I'm sleeping there. In the hotel."

"No, I say--I'm not going to let you turn out for me. _I_'ll sleep at the hotel."

She smiled at him with a sort of wonder, as if she thought: "Has he forgotten, so soon?" And he remembered.

"I can't stop here," she said. "That would be more than even _I_ can bear."

He thought: "She's gone through hell herself, to get me out of it."

May, 1916. B.E.F., FRANCE.

DEAREST MOTHER AND FATHER,--Yes, "Captain," please. (I can hardly believe it myself, but it is so.) It was thundering good luck getting into dear old Nicky's regiment. The whole thing's incredible. But promotion's nothing. Everybody's getting it like lightning now. You're no sooner striped than you're starred.

I'm glad I resisted the Adjutant and worked up from the ranks. I own it was a bit beastly at the time--quite as beastly as Nicky said it would be; but it was worth while going through with it, especially living in the trenches as a Tommy. There's nothing like it for making you know your men. You can tell exactly what's going to bother them, and what isn't. You've got your finger on the pulse of their morale--not that it's jumpier than yours; it isn't--and their knowing that they haven't got to stand anything that you haven't stood gives you no end of a pull. Honestly, I don't believe I could have faced them if it wasn't for that. So that _your_ morale's the better for it as well as theirs. You know, if you're shot down this minute it won't matter. The weediest Tommy in your Company can "carry on."

_We_'re a funny crowd in my billet all risen from the ranks except my Senior. John would love us. There's a chap who writes short stories and goes out very earnestly among the corpses to find copy; and there's another who was in the publishing business and harks back to it, now and then, in a dreamy nostalgic way, and rather as if he wanted to rub it into us writing chaps what he _could_ do for us, only he wouldn't; and there's a tailor who swears he could tell a mile off where my tunic came from; and a lawyer's clerk who sticks his cigarette behind his ear. (We used to wonder what he'd do with his revolver till we saw what he did with it.) They all love thinking of what they've been and telling you about it. I almost wish I'd gone into Daddy's business. Then perhaps I'd know what it feels like to go straight out of a shop or an office into the most glorious Army in history.

I forgot the Jew pawnbroker at least we _think_ he's a pawnbroker--who's always inventing things; stupendous and impossible things. His last idea was machine-howitzers fourteen feet high, that take in shells exactly as a machine-gun takes in bullets. He says "You'll see them in the next War." When you ask him how he's going to transport and emplace and hide his machine-howitzers, he looks dejected, and says "I never thought of _that_," and has another idea at once, even more impossible.

That reminds me. I've seen the "Tanks" (Nicky's Moving Fortresses) in action. I'd give my promotion if only he could have seen them too. We mustn't call them Fortresses any more--they're most violently for attack. As far as I can make out Nicky's and Drayton's thing was something between these and the French ones; otherwise one might have wondered whether their plans and models really did go where John says they did! I wish I could believe that Nicky and Drayton really _had_ had a hand in it.

I'm most awfully grieved to hear that young Vereker's reported missing. Do you remember how excited he used to be dashing about the lawn at tennis, and how Alice Lathom used to sit and look at him, and jump if you brought her her tea too suddenly? Let's hope we'll have finished up this damned War before they get little Norris.

Love to Dorothy and Don and Ronny.--Your loving, MICK.

When Frances read that letter she said, "I wonder if he really is all right. He says very little about himself."

And Anthony said, "Then you may be sure he is."

May 31st, 1916. B.E.F., FRANCE.

MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad Mummy and Father have got all my letters. They won't mind my writing to you this time. It really _is_ your turn now. Thanks for Wadham's "Poems" (I wish they'd been Ellis's). It's a shame to laugh at Waddy--but--he _has_ spread himself over Flanders, hasn't he? Like the inundations round Ypres.

I'm most awfully touched at Dad and Mummy wanting to publish mine. Here they all are--just as I wrote them, in our billet, at night or in the early morning, when the others were sleeping and I wasn't. I don't know whether they're bad or good; I haven't had time to think about them. It all seems so incredibly far away. Even last week seems far away. You go on so fast here.

I'd like Ellis and Monier-Owen to see them and to weed out the bad ones. But you mustn't ask them to do anything. They haven't time, either. I think you and Dorothy and Dad will manage it all right among you. If you don't I shan't much care.

Of course I'm glad that they've taken you on at the Hampstead Hospital, if it makes you happier to nurse. And I'm glad Dad put his foot down on your going to Vera. She gave you up to my people and she can't take you back now. I'm sorry for her though; so is he.

Have I had any adventures "by myself"? Only two. (I've given up what Mother calls my "not wanting to go to the party.") One came off in "No Man's Land" the other night. I went out with a "party" and came back by myself--unless you count a damaged Tommy hanging on to me. It began in pleasurable excitement and ended in some perturbation, for I had to get him in under cover somehow, and my responsibility weighed on me--so did he. The other was ages ago in a German trench. I was by myself, because I'd gone in too quick, and the "party" behind me took the wrong turning. I did manage to squeeze a chilly excitement out of going on alone. Then I bumped up against a fat German officer and his revolver. That really was an exquisite moment, and I was beast enough to be glad I had it all to myself. It meant a bag of fifteen prisoners--all my own. But that was nothing; they'd have surrendered to a mouse. There was no reason why they shouldn't, because I'd fired first and there was no more officer to play up to.

But the things you don't do by yourself are a long way the best. Nothing--not even poetry--can beat an infantry charge when you're leading it. That's because of your men. It feels as if you were drawing them all up after you. Of course you aren't. They're coming on their own, and you're simply nothing, only a little unimportant part of them--even when you're feeling as if you were God Almighty.

I'm afraid it _does_ look awfully as if young Vereker were killed. They may hear, you know, in some roundabout way--through the Red Cross, or some of his men. I've written to them.

Love to everybody. Certainly you may kiss Nanna for me, if she'd like it. I wish I liked Waddy more--when you've given him to me.--Always your affectionate,

MICHAEL.

P.S.--I don't sound pleased about the publication; but I am. I can't get over their wanting to do it. I thought they didn't care.

Ronny--I've been such a beast to them--when Father tried to read my stuff--bless him!--and couldn't, I used to wish to God he'd leave it alone. And now I'd give anything to see his dear old paws hanging on to it and twitching with fright, and his eyes slewing round to see if I'm looking at him.

June 14th, 1916. B.E.F., FRANCE.

MY DEAR RONNY,--I'm glad you like them, and I'm glad Father thinks he "understands Michael's poems" this time, and I'm glad they've made Mother and Dorothy feel happier about me--BUT--they must get it out of their heads that they're my "message," or any putrescent thing of that sort. The bare idea of writing a message, or of being supposed to write a message, makes me sick. I know it's beastly of me, but, really I'd rather they weren't published at all, if there's the smallest chance of their being taken that way.

But if Ellis is doing the introduction there isn't the smallest chance. Thank God for Ellis.

There--I've let off all my beastliness.

And now I'll try to answer your letter. Yes; the "ecstasy" in the last two poems _is_ Nicky's ecstasy. And as Ellis says it strikes him as absolutely real, I take it that some of Nicky's "reality" has got through. It's hard on Ellis that he has to take _his_ ecstasy from me, instead of coming out and getting it for himself.

But you and Nicky and Lawrence are right. It _is_ absolutely real. I mean it has to do with absolute reality. With God. It hasn't anything to do with having courage, or not having courage; it's another state of mind altogether. It isn't what Nicky's man said it was--you're not ashamed of it the next day. It isn't excitement; you're not excited. It isn't a tingling of your nerves; they don't tingle. It's all curiously quiet and steady. You remember when you saw Nicky--how everything stood still? And how two times were going on, and you and Nicky were in one time, and Mother was in the other? Well--it's like that. Your body and its nerves aren't in it at all. Your body may be moving violently, with other bodies moving violently round it; but _you_'re still.

But suppose it is your nerves. Why should they tingle at just that particular moment, the moment that makes _animals_ afraid? Why should you be so extraordinarily happy? Why should the moment of extreme danger be always the "exquisite" moment? Why not the moment of safety?

Doesn't it look as if danger were the point of contact with reality, and death the closest point? You're through. Actually you lay hold on eternal life, and you know it.

Another thing--it always comes with that little shock of recognition. It's happened before, and when you get near to it again you know what it is. You keep on wanting to get near it, wanting it to happen again. You may lose it the next minute, but you know. Lawrence knew what it was. Nicky knew.

* * * * *

June 19th.

I'm coming back to it--after that interruption--because I want to get the thing clear. I have to put it down as I feel it; there's no other way. But they mustn't think it's something that only Lawrence and Nicky and I feel. The men feel it too, even when they don't know what it is. And some of them _do_ know.

Of course we shall be accused of glorifying War and telling lies about it. Well--there's a Frenchman who has told the truth, piling up all the horrors, faithfully, remorselessly, magnificently. But he seems to think people oughtn't to write about this War at all unless they show up the infamy of it, as a deterrent, so that no Government can ever start another one. It's a sort of literary "frightfulness." But who is he trying to frighten? Does he imagine that France, or England, or Russia or Belgium, or Serbia, will want to start another war when this is over? And does he suppose that Germany--if we don't beat her--will be deterred by his frightfulness? Germany's arrogance will be satisfied when she knows she's made a Frenchman feel like that about it.

He's got his truth all right. As Morrie would say: "That's War." But a peaceful earthquake can do much the same thing. And if _our_ truth--what _we_'ve seen--isn't War, at any rate it's what we've got out of it, it's our "glory," our spiritual compensation for the physical torture, and there would be a sort of infamy in trying to take it from us. It isn't the French Government, or the British that's fighting Germany; it's we--all of us. To insist on the world remembering nothing but these horrors is as if men up to their knees in the filth they're clearing away should complain of each other for standing in it and splashing it about.

The filth of War--and the physical torture--Good God! As if the world was likely to forget it. Any more than we're likely to forget what _we_ know.

You remember because you've known it before and it all hangs together. It's not as if danger were the only point of contact with reality. You get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition, and the same utter satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing. At least to me it's like that. You know what Nicky thought it was like. You know what it was like when you used to sit looking and looking at Mother's "tree of Heaven."

It's odd, Ronny, to have gone all your life trying to get reality, trying to get new beauty, trying to get utter satisfaction; to have funked coming out here because you thought it was all obscene ugliness and waste and frustration, and then to come out, and to find what you wanted.

* * * * *

June 25th.

I wrote all that, while I could, because I want to make them see it. It's horrible that Dorothy should think that Drayton's dead and that Mother should think that Nicky's dead, when they wouldn't, if they really knew. If they don't believe Lawrence or me, can't they believe Nicky? I'm only saying what he said. But I can't write to them about it because they make me shy, and I'm afraid they'll think I'm only gassing, or "making poetry"--as if poetry wasn't the most real thing there is!

If anybody can make them see it, you can.--Always your affectionate,

MICHAEL.

XXV

Anthony was going into the house to take back the key of the workshop.

He had locked the door of the workshop a year ago, after Nicky's death, and had not opened it again until to-day. This afternoon in the orchard he had seen that the props of the old apple-tree were broken and he had thought that he would like to make new ones, and the wood was in the workshop.

Everything in there was as it had been when Nicky finished with his Moving Fortress. The brass and steel filings lay in a heap under the lathe, the handle was tilted at the point where he had left it; pits in the saw-dust showed where his feet had stood. His overalls hung over the bench where he had slipped them off.

Anthony had sat down on the bench and had looked at these things with remembrance and foreboding. He thought of Nicky and of Nicky's pleasure and excitement over the unpacking of his first lathe--the one he had begged for for his birthday--and of his own pleasure and excitement as he watched his boy handling it and showing him so cleverly how it worked. It stood there still in the corner. Nicky had given it to Veronica. He had taught her how to use it. And Anthony thought of Veronica when she was little; he saw Nicky taking care of her, teaching her to run and ride and play games. And he remembered what Veronica's mother had said to him and Frances: "Wait till Nicky has children of his own."

He thought of John. John had volunteered three times and had been three times rejected. And now conscription had got him. He had to appear before the Board of Examiners that afternoon. He might be rejected again. But the standard was not so exacting as it had been--John might be taken.

He thought of his business--John's business and his, and Bartie's. Those big Government contracts had more than saved them. They were making tons of money out of the War. Even when the Government cut down their profits; even when they had given more than half they made to the War funds, the fact remained that they were living on the War. Bartie, without a wife or children, was appallingly rich.

If John were taken. If John were killed--

If Michael died--

Michael had been reported seriously wounded.

He had thought then of Michael. And he had not been able to bear thinking any more. He had got up and left the workshop, locking the door behind him, forgetting what he had gone in for; and he had taken the key back to the house. He kept it in what his children used to call the secret drawer of his bureau. It lay there with Nicky's last letter of June, 1915, and a slab of coromandel wood.

It was when he was going into the house with the key that John met him.

"Have they taken you?"

"Yes."

John's face was hard and white. They went together into Anthony's room.

"It's what you wanted," Anthony said.

"Of course it's what I wanted. I want it more than ever now.

"The wire's come, Father. Mother opened it."

* * * * *

It was five days now since they had heard that Michael had died of his wounds. Frances was in Michael's room. She was waiting for Dorothea and Veronica to help her to find his papers. It was eight o'clock in the evening, and they had to be sorted and laid out ready for Morton Ellis to look over them to-morrow. To-morrow Morton Ellis would come, and he would take them away.

The doors of Michael's and of Nicky's rooms were always kept shut; Frances knew that, if she were to open the door on the other side of the corridor and look in, every thing in Nicky's room would welcome her with tenderness even while it inflicted its unique and separate wound. But Michael's room was bare and silent. He had cleared everything away out of her sight last year before he went. The very books on the shelves repudiated her; reminded her that she had never understood him, that he had always escaped her. His room kept his secret, and she felt afraid and abashed in it, knowing herself an intruder. Presently all that was most precious in it would be taken from her and given over to a stranger whom he had never liked.

Her mind turned and fastened on one object--the stiff, naked wooden chair standing in its place before the oak table by the window. She remembered how she had come to Michael there and found him writing at his table, and how she had talked to him as though he had been a shirker and a coward.

She had borne Nicky's death. But she could not bear Michael's. She stood there in his room, staring, hypnotized by her memory. She heard Dorothea come in and go out again. And then Veronica came in.

She turned to Veronica to help her.

She clung to Veronica and was jealous of her. Veronica had not come between her and Nicky as long as he was alive, but now that he was dead she came between them. She came between her and Michael too. Michael's mind had always been beyond her; she could only reach it through Veronica and through Veronica's secret. Her mind clutched at Veronica's secret, and flung it away as useless, and returned, clutching at it again.

It was as if Veronica held the souls of Michael and Nicholas in her hands. She offered her the souls of her dead sons. She was the mediator between her and their souls.

"I could bear it, Veronica, if I hadn't made him go. I came to him, here, in this room, and bullied him till he went. I said horrible things to him--that he must have remembered.

"He wasn't like Nicky--it was infinitely worse for him. And I was cruel to him. I had no pity. I drove him out--to be killed.

"And I simply cannot bear it."

"But--he didn't go then. He waited till--till he was free. If anybody could have made him, Nicky could. But it wasn't even Nicky. It was himself."

"If he'd been killed as Nicky was--but to die like that, in the hospital--of those horrible wounds."

"He was leading a charge, just as Nicky was. And you know he was happy, just as Nicky was. Every line he's written shows that he was happy."

"It only shows that they were both full of life, that they loved their life and wanted to live.

"It's no use, Ronny, you're saying you know they're there. I don't. I'd give anything to believe it. And yet it wouldn't be a bit of good if I did. I don't _want_ them all changed into something spiritual that I shouldn't know if it was there. I want their bodies with me just as they used to be. I want to hear them and touch them, and see them come in in their old clothes.

"To see Nicky standing on the hearthrug with Timmy in his arms. I want things like that, Ronny. Even if you're right, it's all clean gone."

Her lips tightened.

"I'm talking as if I was, the only one. But I know it's worse for you, Ronny. I _had_ them all those years. And I've got Anthony. You've had nothing but your poor three days."

Veronica thought: "How can I tell her that I've got more than she thinks? It's awful that I should have what she hasn't." She was ashamed and beaten before this irreparable, mortal grief.

"And it's worse," Frances said, "for the wretched mothers whose sons haven't fought."

For her pride rose in her again--the pride that uplifted her supernaturally when Nicky died.

"You mustn't think I grudge them. I don't. I don't even grudge John."

The silence of Michael's room sank into them, it weighed on their hearts and they were afraid of each other's voices. Frances was glad when Dorothy came and they could begin their work there.

But Michael had not left them much to do. They found his papers all in one drawer of his writing-table, sorted and packed and labelled, ready for Morton Ellis to take away. One sealed envelope lay in a place by itself. Frances thought: "He didn't want any of us to touch his things."

Then she saw Veronica's name on the sealed envelope. She was glad when Veronica left them and went to her hospital.

And when she was gone she wanted her back again.

"I wish I hadn't spoken that way to Veronica," she said.

"She won't mind. She knows you couldn't help it."

"I could, Dorothy, if I wasn't jealous of her. I mean I'm jealous of her certainty. If I had it, too, I shouldn't be jealous."

"She wants you to have it. She's trying to give it you.

"Mother--how do we know she isn't right? Nicky said she was. And Michael said Nicky was right.

"If it had been only Nicky--_he_ might have got it from Veronica. But Michael never got things from anybody. And you _do_ know things in queer ways. Even I do. At least I did once--when I was in prison. I knew something tremendous was going to happen. I saw it, or felt it, or something. I won't swear I knew it was the War. I don't suppose I did. But I knew Frank was all mixed up with it. And it was the most awfully real thing. You couldn't go back on it, or get behind it. It was as if I'd seen that he and Lawrence and Nicky and Michael and all of them would die in it to save the whole world. Like Christ, only that they really _did_ die and the whole world _was_ saved. There was nothing futile about it."

"Well--?"

"Well, _they_ might see their real thing the same way--in a flash. Aren't they a thousand times more likely to know than we are? What right have we--sitting here safe--to say it isn't when they say it is?"

"But--if there's anything in it--why can't I see it as well as you and Veronica? After all, I'm their mother."

"Perhaps that's why it takes you longer, Mummy. You think of their bodies more than we do, because they were part of your body. Their souls, or whatever it is, aren't as real to you just at first."

"I see," said Frances, bitterly. "You've only got to be a mother, and give your children your flesh and blood, to be sure of their souls going from you and somebody else getting them."

"That's the price you pay for being mothers."

"Was Frank's soul ever more real to _you_, Dorothy?"

"Yes. It was once--for just one minute. The night he went away. That's another queer thing that happened."

"It didn't satisfy you, darling, did it?"

"Of course it didn't satisfy me. I want more and more of it. Not just flashes."

"You say it's the price we pay for being mothers. Yet if Veronica had had a child--"

"You needn't be so sorry for Veronica."

"I'm not. It's you I'm sorriest for. You've had nothing. From beginning to end you had nothing.

"I might at least have seen that you had it in the beginning."

"_You_, Mummy?"

"Yes. Me. You _shall_ have it now. Unless you want to leave me."

"I wouldn't leave you for the world, Mummy ducky. Only you must let me work always and all the time."

"Let you? I'll let you do what you like, my dear."

"You always have let me, haven't you?"

"It was the least I could do."

"Poor Mummy, did you think you had to make up because you cared for them more than me?"

"I wonder," said Frances, thoughtfully, "if I did."

"Of course. Of course you did. Who wouldn't?"

"I never meant you to know it, Dorothy."

"Of course I knew it. I must have known it ever since Michael was born. I knew you couldn't help it. You had to. Even when I was a tiresome kid I knew you had to. It was natural."

"Natural or unnatural, many girls have hated their mothers for less. You've been very big and generous.

"Perhaps--if you'd been little and weak--but you were always such an independent thing. I used to think you didn't want me."

"I wanted you a lot more than you thought. But, you see, I've learned to do without."

She thought: "It's better she should have it straight."

"If you'd think less about me, Mother," she said, "and more about Father--"

"Father?"

"Yes. Father isn't independent--though he looks it. He wants you awfully. He always has wanted you. And he hasn't learned to do without."

"Where is he?"

"He's sitting out there in the garden, all by himself, in the dark, under the tree."

Frances went to him there.

"I wondered whether you would come to me," he said.

"I was doing something for Michael."

"Is it done?"

"Yes. It's done."

* * * * *

Five months passed. It was November now.

In the lane by the side door, Anthony was waiting in his car. Rain was falling, hanging from the trees and falling. Every now and then he looked at his watch.

He had still a quarter of an hour before he need start. But he was not going back into the house. They were all in there saying good-bye to John: old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith. And Maurice. And his brother Bartie.

The door in the garden wall opened and they came out: the four women in black--the black they still wore for Michael--and the two men.

They all walked slowly up the lane. Anthony could see Bartie's shoulders hunched irritably against the rain. He could see Morrie carrying his sodden, quivering body with care and an exaggerated sobriety. He saw Grannie, going slowly, under the umbrella, very upright and conscious of herself as wonderful and outlasting.

He got down and cranked up his engine.

Then he sat sternly in his car and waited, with his hands on the steering-wheel, ready.

The engine throbbed, impatient for the start.

John came out very quickly and took his seat beside his father. And the car went slowly towards the high road.

Uncle Morrie stood waiting for it by the gate at the top of the lane. As it passed through he straightened himself and put up his hand in a crapulous salute.

The young man smiled at him, saluted, and was gone