PART III

VICTORY

XVIII

It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles

because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political

atmosphere due to the fine weather.

Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his family

that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and that the mere

off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the striker. And when

Michael asked him contentiously what the weather had to do with Home

Rule, he answered that it had everything to do with it by increasing

parliamentary blood-pressure.

"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how long

the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to Mr.

Redmond then."

Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew that Home

Rule had never been a part of practical politics and never would be.

And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own views about

the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they could have told

Anthony what the answers were going to be; only they said it wasn't any

good talking to Father; when he got an idea into his dear old head it

stuck there.

Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make some

impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could get

them out.

Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children, had time

for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent woman than the

Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago, informed herself of the

affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming of the _Times_. In the last

four years the affairs of the nation had thrust themselves violently

upon her attention. She had even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement

as a vivid and vital affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the

fighting and had gone to prison.

Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the

_Times_, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn't

happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any reason to

complain that nothing happened.

It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and Ireland were

on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the

head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael's

insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green Review.

For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly thirteen

when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be

glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still. His poem was the

green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country.

Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the

imminence of civil war (only that they didn't really believe in it),

when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else.

In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of

Ireland's freedom was a secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew

shared it but Lawrence Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him

hot and restless and intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish

crisis when she said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own

business. This excitement is very bad for Michael."

And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of

them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two,

Anthony and the boys would be out of it.

Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour. There was,

indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this

particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was being

disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.

So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his

idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had even

thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the

Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of

last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme

measure was unnecessary.

And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy. For the

children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what

was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever. Michael

and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete

ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year

each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from

Michael. Nicholas was doing the chauffeur's work in his absence; and

John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it

on his father as his contribution to the family economies.

Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through

Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's and

Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her poor

little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.

There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike. Her mind

refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of

exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and

Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was

arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like

Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in

the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before,

and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of

mind or Anthony's prosperity.

The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony

Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the

twenty-fifth of July.

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

Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of those slight

changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a

change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of

exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate

trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at

first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get

used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it

seriously. It had been forced on her. Dorothea had decided that she must

have a Day, like other people.

She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come out in the

spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday

evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at Michael's

father's house.

Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this

palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful,

energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred the air about him

and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices,

and of their laughter. And when the house was quiet and Anthony had

Frances to himself he liked that, too.

But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so often--if only

I could have my children sometimes to myself!"

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

There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted and

diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd of

tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves over the

whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent happiness to the

"Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and

Edith Fleming, who figured as essential parts of the social event. She

meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in the inconceivability of their absence

on Frances's Bay, wondered more than ever why their daughter Rosalind

found them so impossible. She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the

office, and their wives and children, and Anthony's secretary, Miss

Lathom. If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she

soon would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and

guileless faces.

Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from India for

good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more dangerous than

his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was genuinely invalided,

who had come back from California for the last time and would never be

sent out anywhere again.

Dorothea had said: "Let's kill them all off in one awful day." Frances

had said: "Yes, but we must do it decently. We must be kind to them,

poor dears!"

Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to Uncle

Morrie and Uncle Bartie. That was the only burden she had laid on her

children. It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth constrained

them. They had received so much, and they had been let off so much; not

one of them had inherited the taint that made Maurice and Emmeline

Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased and irresponsible. They

could afford to be pitiful and merciful.

And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to be

pitiful and merciful herself. She could even afford to be grateful to

the poor dears. She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and Bartie as

scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose affliction left her

children clean. She thought of them more and more in this sacred and

sacrificial character. At fifty-two Frances could be gentle over the

things that had worried and irritated her at thirty-three. Like Anthony

she was still young and strong through the youth and strength of

her children.

And the poor dears were getting weak and old. Grannie was seventy-nine,

and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was forty-nine, and he

looked sixty. Every year Frances was more acutely aware of their pathos,

their futility, their mortality. They would be broken and gone so soon

and so utterly, leaving no name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only

living in the memories of her children who would remain.

And, with an awful sense of mortality surrounding them, her children had

learned that they must be kind because the old people would be gone

while they endured and remained.

This Saturday being the last of the season, they had all come; not only

the Flemings, but the Jervises and Verekers and Norrises, and Uncle

Bartie. The fine weather alone would have brought them.

Bartie, more morose and irritable than ever, sat under the tree of

Heaven and watched the triumphal progress of the Day. He scowled darkly

and sourly at each group in turn; at the young men in white flannels

playing tennis; at Mr. and Mr. Jervis and the Verekers and Norrises; at

the Flemings, old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith, and

the disgraceful Maurice, all five of them useless pensioners on his

brother's bounty; Maurice a thing of battered, sodden flesh hanging

loose on brittle bone, a rickety prop for the irreproachable summer

suit bought with Anthony's money. He scowled at the tables covered with

fine white linen, and at the costly silver and old china, at the

sandwiches and cakes and ices, and the piled-up fruits and the claret

cup and champagne cup glowing and shining in the tall glass jugs, and at

the pretty maidservants going to and fro in their accomplished service.

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

joy to Bartie.

Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed it, and

Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr. Vereker and Mr.

Norris, who held that a strike was a downright serious matter, also

wondered. But they were sustained by their immense belief in Mr.

Anthony. Mr. Anthony knew what he was doing; he always had known. A

strike might be serious while it lasted, but it didn't last. And Mr.

Nicholas was in the business now, and Mr. John was coming into it next

year, and Mr. Nicholas might be married again by that time; and the

chances were that the firm of Harrison and Harrison would last long

enough to provide for a young Vereker and a still younger Norris.

In spite of the strike, Mr. and Mrs. Vereker and Mr. and Mrs. Norris,

like Frances and Anthony, were extraordinarily cheerful that afternoon.

So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.

"I can't think why I feel so happy," said Mrs. Vereker to Mrs. Norris.

She was looking at her son George.

"Nor I, either," said Miss Lathom, who was trying suddenly to look at

nothing in particular.

Miss Lathom lied and Mrs. Vereker lied; they knew perfectly well why

they were happy. Each knew that the other lied; each knew that the other

knew she knew; and neither of them could have said why she found it so

necessary to lie.

And to Frances this happiness of Mrs. Vereker, and of young Vereker and

Miss Lathom was significant and delightful, as if she had been

personally responsible for it.

* * * * *

A day flashed out of her memory on a trail of blue larkspurs and of

something that she had forgotten, something that was mixed up with Mr.

and Mrs. Jervis and Rosalind. She stared at the larkspurs as if they

held the clue--Nicky's face appeared among the tall blue spires, Nicky's

darling face tied up in a scarf, brown stripes and yellow

stripes--something to do with a White Cake--it must have been somebody's

birthday. Now she had it--Mr. Jervis's cricket scarf. It was the day of

Nicky's worst earache, the day when Mr. Vereker climbed the tree of

Heaven--was it possible that Mr. Vereker had ever climbed that

tree?--the day when Michael wouldn't go to the party--Rosalind's

birthday.

Eight candles burning for Rosalind. Why, it was nineteen years ago.

Don-Don was a baby then, and Michael and Nicky were only little boys.

And look at them now!

She fed her arrogance by gazing on the tall, firmly knit, slender bodies

of her sons, in white flannels, playing furiously and well.

"Dorothy is looking very handsome," Mrs. Jervis said. Yes, certainly

Dorothy was looking handsome; but Frances loved before all things the

male beauty of her sons. In Michael and Nicholas it had reached

perfection, the clean, hard perfection that would last, as Anthony's

had lasted.

She thought of their beauty that had passed from her, dying many deaths,

each death hurting her; the tender mortal beauty of babyhood, of

childhood, of boyhood; but this invulnerable beauty of their young

manhood would be with her for a long time. John would have it. John was

only a fairer Nicholas; but as yet his beauty had not hardened; his

boyhood lingered in the fine tissues of his mouth, and in his eyelids

and the soft corners of his eyes; so that in John she could still see

what Nicky had been.

She had adored Anthony's body, as if she had foreseen that it would give

her such sons as these; and in her children she had adored the small

bodies through whose clean, firm beauty she foresaw the beauty of their

manhood. These were the same bodies, the same faces that she had loved

in them as children; nothing was blurred or twisted or overlaid.

Michael at six-and-twenty was beautiful and serious as she had foreseen

him. Frances knew that Michael had genius, and at other moments she was

proud of his genius; but at this particular moment, sitting beside her

friend and conscious of her jealousy, she was chiefly aware of his body.

Michael's body was quiescent; its beauty gave her a proud, but austere

and tranquil satisfaction. It was when she looked at her second son that

something caught at her breath and held it. She saw him as the lover

and bridegroom of Veronica. Her sense of his virility was terrible to

her and delightful.

Perhaps they were engaged already.

And Frances was sorry for Mrs. Jervis, who had borne no sons, who had

only borne one unattractive and unsatisfactory daughter. She used to be

sorry for her because Rosalind was pink and fat and fluffy; she was

sorry for her now because Rosalind was unsatisfactory. She was sorry for

Mrs. Norris because her boy could never grow up like Michael or Nicholas

or John. She was sorry for Mrs. Vereker because George, though he looked

all right when he was by himself, became clumsy and common at once

beside Michael and Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels;

he played furiously and well; he played too furiously and too

consciously well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp

and excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang.

Her arrogance nourished itself on these contrasts.

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

still more wistfully at Dorothy.

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

"I do nothing," Frances said. "I don't try to keep them. I've never

appealed to their feelings for my own purposes, or taken advantage of

their affection, that's all.

"They know that if they want to walk out of the house to-morrow, and

stay out, they can. Nobody'll stop them."

There was a challenging, reminiscent glint in Mr. Jervis's eyes, and his

wife was significantly silent. Frances knew what they were thinking.

"Nicky," she said, "walked out; but he came back again as soon as he

was in trouble. Michael walks out and goes abroad every year; but he

comes back again. Dorothy walks out, but she's never dreamed of not

coming back again."

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

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

"It's very strange that Dorothy hasn't married." Mrs. Jervis spoke. She

derived comfort from the thought that Dorothy was eight-and-twenty and

not married.

"Dorothy," said Frances, "could marry to-morrow if she wanted to; but

she doesn't want."

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

consolation.

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

But it was no use. Frances was aware that Veronica was grown up, and

that she was good-looking, and that Nicky loved her; but Mrs. Jervis's

shafts fell wide of all her vulnerable places. Frances was no

longer afraid.

"Veronica," she said, "is growing up very good." It was not the word she

would have chosen, yet it was the only one she could think of as likely

to convey to Mrs. Jervis what she wanted her to know, though it left her

obtuseness without any sense of Veronica's mysterious quality.

She herself had never tried to think of a word for it before; she was

only driven to it now because she detected in her friend's tone a

challenge and a warning. It was as if Rosalind's mother had said,

extensively and with pointed reference to the facts: "Veronica is

dangerous. Her mother has had adventures. She is grown-up and she is

good-looking, and Nicky is susceptible to that sort of thing. If you

don't look out he will be caught again. The only difference between

Phyllis Desmond and Veronica is in their skins."

So when Frances said Veronica was good, she meant that Mrs. Jervis

should understand, once for all, that she was not in the least like her

mother or like Phyllis Desmond.

That was enough for Mrs. Jervis. But it was not enough for Frances, who

found her mind wandering off from Rosalind's mother and looking for the

word of words that would express her own meaning to her own

satisfaction.

Her thoughts went on deep down under the stream of conversation that

flowed through her from Mrs. Jervis on her right hand to Mrs. Vereker

and Mrs. Norris on her left.

Veronica was good. But she was not wrapped up in other people's lives as

Frances was wrapped up. She was wrapped up, not in herself, but in some

life of her own that, as Frances made it out, had nothing in the world

to do with anybody else's.

And yet Veronica knew what you were feeling and what you were thinking,

and what you were going to do, and what was happening to you. (She had

really known, in Dresden, what was happening to Nicky when Desmond made

him marry her.) It was as if in her the walls that divide every soul

from every other soul were made of some thin and porous stuff that let

things through. And in this life of yours, for the moments that she

shared it, she lived intensely, with uncanny delight and pain that were

her own and not her own.

And Frances wanted some hard, tight theory that would reconcile these

extremes of penetration and detachment.

She remembered that Ferdinand Cameron had been like that. He saw things.

He was a creature of queer, sudden sympathies and insights. She supposed

it was the Highland blood in both of them.

Mrs. Vereker on her right expressed the hope that Mr. Bartholomew was

better. Frances said he never would be better till chemists were

forbidden to advertise and the _British Medical Journal_ and _The

Lancet_ were suppressed. Bartie would read them; and they supplied him

with all sorts of extraordinary diseases.

She thought: Seeing things had not made poor Ferdie happy; and Veronica

in her innermost life was happy. She had been happy when she came back

from Germany, before she could have known that Nicky cared for her,

before Nicky knew it himself.

Supposing she had known it all the time? But that, Frances said to

herself, was nonsense. If she had known as much as all that, why should

she have suffered so horribly that she had nearly died of it?

Unless--supposing--it had been his suffering that she had nearly

died of?

Mrs. Norris on her left was saying that she was sorry to see Mr. Maurice

looking so sadly; and Frances heard herself replying that Morrie hadn't

been fit for anything since he was in South Africa.

Between two pop-gun batteries of conversation the serious theme

sustained itself. She thought: Then, Nicky had suffered. And Veronica

was the only one who knew. She knew more about Nicky than Nicky's

mother. This thought was disagreeable to Frances.

It was all nonsense. She didn't really believe that these things

happened. Yet, why not? Michael said they happened. Even Dorothy, who

didn't believe in God and immortality or anything, believed that.

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

"Yes. Seventy-nine her last birthday."

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

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

* * * * *

The sets had changed. Nicholas and a girl friend of Veronica's played

against George Vereker and Miss Lathom; John, with Mr. Jervis for his

handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The very young Norris

fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to distinguish himself by catching

some ball in full flight as it went "out." It was a pure and high

ambition, for he knew he was so young and unimportant that only the eyes

of God and of his mother watched him.

Michael had dropped out of it. He sat beside Dorothy under the tree of

Heaven and watched Veronica.

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

Dorothy had seen.

Veronica had kept Aunt Emmeline quiet all afternoon. She bad made Bartie

eat an ice under the impression that it would be good for him. And now

she had gone with Morrie to the table where the drinks were, and had

taken his third glass of champagne cup from him and made him drink

lemonade instead.

"How does she do it?" said Michael.

"I don't know. She doesn't know herself. I used to think I could manage

people, but I'm not in it with Ronny. She ought to be a wardress in a

lunatic asylum."

"Now look at that!"

Veronica had returned to the group formed by Grannie and the Aunties and

some strangers. The eyes of the four Fleming women had looked after her

as she went from them; they looked towards her now as if some great

need, some great longing were appeased by her return.

Grannie made a place by her side for the young girl; she took her arm,

the young white arm, bare from the elbow in its short sleeve, and made

it lie across her knees. From time to time Grannie's yellow, withered

hand stroked the smooth, warm white arm, or held it. Emmeline and Edith

squatted on the grass at Veronica's feet; their worn faces and the worn

face of Louie looked at her. They hung on her, fascinated, curiously

tranquillized, as if they drank from her youth.

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

"It's horrible," said Michael.

He got up and took Veronica away.

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

under the terrace.

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

"Because they want me."

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

you."

"They don't get hold of me--nothing gets hold of me. I want to help

them. They say it does them good to have me with them."

"I should think it did do them good! They feed on you, Ronny. I can see

it by the way they look at you. You'll die of them if you don't give

it up."

"Give what up?"

"Your game of keeping them going. That is your game, isn't it?

Everybody's saying how wonderful Grannie is. They mean she ought to have

been dead years ago.

"They were all old, horribly old and done for, ages ago. I can remember

them. But they know that if they can get a young virgin sacrificed to

them they'll go on. You're the young virgin. You're making them go on."

"If I could--it wouldn't hurt me. Nothing hurts you, Michael, when

you're happy. It's awful to think how they've lived without being happy,

without loving.

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

now."

"You don't hate what you feed on. You love it. They're vampires. They'll

suck your life out of you. I wonder you're not afraid of them.

"I'm afraid of them. I always was afraid of them; when I was a kid and

Mother used to send me with messages to that beastly spooky house they

live in. I used to think it was poor old Grandpapa's ghost I funked. But

I know now it wasn't. It was those four terrible women. They're ghosts.

I thought you were afraid of ghosts."

"I'm much more afraid of you, when you're cruel. Can't you see how awful

it must be for them to be ghosts? Ghosts among living people. Everybody

afraid of them--not wanting them."

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

* * * * *

Towards the end of the afternoon Frances's Day changed its appearance

and its character. In the tennis courts Michael's friends played singles

with an incomparable fury, frankly rejecting the partners offered them

and disdaining inferior antagonists; they played, Ellis against Mitchell

and Monier-Owen against Nicholas.

They had arrived late with Vera and Lawrence Stephen.

It had come to that. Anthony and Frances found that they could not go on

for ever refusing the acquaintance of the man who had done so much for

Michael. Stephen's enthusiastic eulogy of Michael's Poems had made an

end of that old animosity a year ago. Practically, they had had to

choose between Bartie and Lawrence Stephen as the turning point of

honour. Michael had made them see that it was possible to overvalue

Bartie; also that it was possible to pay too high a price for a

consecrated moral attitude. In all his life the wretched Bartie had

never done a thing for any of them, whereas he, Michael, owed his rather

extraordinary success absolutely to Lawrence Stephen. If the strike made

his father bankrupt he would owe his very means of livelihood to

Lawrence Stephen.

Besides, he liked Stephen, and it complicated things most frightfully to

go on living in the same house with people who disliked him.

If, Michael said, they chose to dissociate themselves altogether from

their eldest son and his career, very well. They could go on ignoring

and tacitly insulting Mr. Stephen. He could understand their taking a

consistently wrong-headed line like that; but so long as they had any

regard, either for him or his career, he didn't see how they could very

well keep it up any longer. He was sorry, of course, that his career had

let them in for Stephen if they didn't like him; but there it was.

And beyond a doubt it was there.

"You might vindicate Bartie gloriously," Michael said, "by turning me

out of the house and disinheriting me. But would it be worth while? I'm

not asking you to condone Stephen's conduct--if you can't condone it;

I'm asking you either to acknowledge _or_ repudiate your son's debts.

"After all, if _he_ can condone your beastly treatment of him--I

wouldn't like him if he was the swine you think him."

And Anthony had appealed to Michael's mother.

To his "Well, Frances, what do you think? Ought we or oughtn't we?" she

had replied: "I think we ought to stand solid behind Michael."

It was Michael's life that counted, for it was going on into a great

future. Bartie would pass and Michael would remain.

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

charm.

Vera and Stephen seemed to think that the way to show the sincerity and

sweetness of their reconciliation was to turn up as often as possible on

Frances's Day. They arrived always at the same hour, a little late; they

came by the road and the front door, so that when Bartie saw them

coming he could retreat through the garden door and the lane. The

Flemings and the Jervises retreated with him; and presently, when it had

had a good look at the celebrities, the rest of the party followed.

This Saturday Frances's Day dwindled and melted away and closed, after

its manner; only Vera and Stephen lingered. They stayed on talking to

Michael long after everybody else had gone.

Stephen said he had come to say good-bye to Michael's people and to make

a proposal to Michael himself. He was going to Ireland.

Vera interrupted him with passion.

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

good-bye."

Her restless, unhappy eyes turned to him incessantly, as if, more than

ever, she was afraid that he would escape her, that he would go off God

knew where.

God knew where he was going, but Vera did not believe that he was going

to Ireland. He had talked about going to Ireland for years, and he had

never gone.

Stephen looked as if he did not see her; as if he did not even see

Michael very distinctly.

"I'm going," he said, "to Ireland on Monday week, the third of August. I

mayn't come back for long enough. I may not come back at all."

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

"I may not come back _at all_. So I want you to take over the _Review_

for me. Ellis and my secretary will show you how it stands. You'll know

what to do. I can trust you not to let it down."

"He doesn't mean what he says, Michael. He's only saying it to frighten

me. He's been holding it over me for years.

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

_Review_."

"Could I go to Ireland for you?"

"You couldn't."

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

"I'm going to pull the Nationalists together, so that if there's civil

war in Ireland, the Irish will have a chance to win. Thank God for

Carson! He's given us the opportunity we wanted."

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

what you say."

"I want to go instead of him."

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

"I can go with you."

"You can't."

"Larry, if you take Michael to Ireland, Anthony and Frances will never

forgive you. _I_'ll never forgive you."

"I'm not taking Michael to Ireland, I'm telling you. There's no reason

why Michael should go to Ireland at all. It isn't _his_ country."

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

"It isn't _yours_," said Vera. "Ireland doesn't want you. The

Nationalists don't want you. You said yourself they've turned you out of

Ireland. When you've lived in England all these years why should you go

back to a place that doesn't want you?"

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

free country."

Vera wailed and entreated. She said it showed how much he cared for her.

It showed that he was tired of her. Why couldn't he say so and have

done with it?

"It's not," she said, "as if you could really do anything. You're a

dreamer. Ireland has had enough of dreamers." And Stephen's eyes looked

over her head, into the high branches of the tree of Heaven, as if he

saw his dream shining clear through them like a moon.

The opportunist could see nothing but his sublime opportunity.

Michael went back with him to dine and talk it over. There was to be

civil war in Ireland then?

He thought: If only Lawrence would let him go with him. He wanted to go

to Ireland. To join the Nationalists and fight for Ireland, fight for

the freedom he was always dreaming about--_that_ would be a fine thing.

It would be a finer thing than writing poems about Ireland.

Lawrence Stephen went soberly and steadily through the affair of the

_Review_, explaining things to Michael. He wanted this done, and this.

And over and over again Michael's voice broke through his instructions.

Why couldn't he go to Ireland instead of Lawrence? Or, if Lawrence

wouldn't let him go instead of him, he might at least take him with him.

He didn't want to stay at home editing the _Review_. Ellis or Mitchell

or Monier-Owen would edit it better than he could. Even the wretched

Wadham would edit it just as well. He wanted to go to Ireland and fight.

But Lawrence wouldn't let him go. He wasn't going to have the boy's

blood on his hands. His genius and his youth were too precious.

Besides, Ireland was not his country.

* * * * *

It was past ten o'clock. Frances was alone in the drawing-room. She sat

by the open window and waited and watched.

The quiet garden lay open to her sight. Only the inner end of the

farther terrace, under the orchard wall, was hidden by a high screen

of privet.

It seemed hours to Frances since she had seen Nicky and Veronica go down

the lawn on to the terrace.

And then Anthony had gone out too. She was vexed with Anthony. She could

see him sitting under his ash-tree, her tree of heaven; his white

shirt-front gave out an oblong gleam like phosphorous in the darkness

under the tree. She was watching to see that he didn't get up and go on

to the terrace. Anthony had no business in the garden at all. He was

catching cold in it. He had sneezed twice. She wanted Nicholas and

Veronica to have the garden to themselves to-night, and the perfect

stillness of the twilight to themselves, every tree and every little

leaf and flower keeping quiet for them; and there was Anthony sneezing.

She was restless and impatient, as if she carried the burden of their

passion in her own heart.

Presently she could bear it no longer. She got up and called to Anthony

to come in. He came obediently. "What are you thinking of," she said,

"planting yourself out there and sneezing? I could see your shirt-front

a mile off. It's indecent of you."

"Why indecent?"

"Because Nicky and Veronica are out there."

"I don't see them."

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

She turned the electric light on full, to make darkness of their

twilight out there.

* * * * *

Nicky and Veronica talked together in the twilight, sitting on the seat

under the orchard well behind the privet screen. They did not see

Anthony sitting under the ash-tree, they did not hear him, they did not

hear Frances calling to him to come in. They were utterly unaware of

Frances and Anthony.

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

"When?"

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

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

"You know what I mean."

"_Mick_?"

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

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

wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't he?"

"Because--he just wouldn't."

"Well, he says he understands you."

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

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

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

"Yes, when we were kids. But supposing _now_ I ever didn't, would it

matter? You see, I'm stupid, and caring--caring awfully--might make me

stupider. _Have_ people got to understand each other?"

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

about Ferdie?"

"Ferdie?"

"Yes." She turned her face full to him. "I don't know whether you know

about it. _I_ didn't till Mother told me the other day. I'm

Ferdie's daughter.

"Did you know?"

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

"Who told you?"

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

about seeing ghosts."

"I wonder if you know how I feel about it? I want you to understand

that. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I'm proud. I'm _glad_ I'm Ferdie's

daughter, not Bartie's.... I'd take his name, so that everybody should

know I was his daughter, only that I like Uncle Anthony's name best. I'm

glad Mother loved him."

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

Bartie's daughter wouldn't have been you."

He took her in his arms and held her face against his face. And it was

as if Desmond had never been.

A little while ago he had hated Desmond because she had come before

Veronica; she had taken what belonged to Veronica, the first tremor of

his passion, the irrecoverable delight and surprise. And now he knew

that, because he had not loved her, she had taken nothing.

* * * * *

"Do you love me?"

"Do you love _me_?"

"You know I love you."

"You know. You know."

What they said was new and wonderful to them as if nobody before them

had ever thought of it.

Yet that night, all over the Heath, in hollows under the birch-trees,

and on beds of trampled grass, young lovers lay in each other's arms and

said the same thing in the same words: "Do you love me?" "You know I

love you!" over and over, in voices drowsy and thick with love.

* * * * *

"There's one thing I haven't thought of," said Nicky. "And that's that

damned strike. If it hits Daddy badly we may have to wait goodness knows

how long. Ages we may have to."

"I'd wait all my life if I could have you in the last five seconds of

it. And if I couldn't, I'd still wait."

And presently Veronica remembered Michael.

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

"Because I thought you ought to know about it before you--Besides, if he

_had_, we should have had to wait a bit before we told him."

It seemed that there was nothing to prevent them marrying to-morrow if

they liked. The strike, Anthony said, couldn't hit him as badly as

all that.

He and Frances sat up till long past midnight, talking about their

plans, and the children's plans. It was all settled. The first week in

August they would go down to Morfe for the shooting. They would stay

there till the first week in September. Nicky and Veronica would be

married the first week in October. And they would go to France and

Belgium and Germany for their honeymoon.

XIX

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

Neither did Lawrence Stephen go to Ireland on Monday, the third. At the

moment when he should have been receiving the congratulations of the

Dublin Nationalists after his impassioned appeal for militant

consolidation, Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson were shaking hands

dramatically in the House of Commons. Stephen's sublime opportunity, the

civil war, had been snatched from him by the unforeseen.

And there was no chance of Nicky and Veronica going to Belgium and

France and Germany for their honeymoon.

For within nine days of Frances's Day Germany had declared war on France

and Russia, and was marching over the Belgian frontier on her way

to Paris.

Frances, aroused at last to realization of the affairs of nations,

asked, like several million women, "What does it mean?"

And Anthony, like several million men, answered, "It means Armageddon."

Like several million people, they both thought he was saying something

as original as it was impressive, something clear and final and

descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative people went about

saying it to each other. The sound of the word thrilled them,

intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that was at the same time,

in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them with a solemn and sombre

passion. They said "Armageddon. It means Armageddon." Yet nobody knew

and nobody asked or thought of asking what Armageddon meant.

"Shall We come into it?" said Frances. She was thinking of the Royal

Navy turning out to the last destroyer to save England from invasion; of

the British Army most superfluously prepared to defend England from the

invader, who, after all, could not invade; of Indian troops pouring into

England if the worst came to the worst. She had the healthy British mind

that refuses and always has refused to acknowledge the possibility of

disaster. Yet she asked continually, "Would England be drawn in?" She

was thankful that none of her sons had gone into the Army or the Navy.

Whoever else was in, they would be out of it.

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

Then, on the morning of England's ultimatum, the closing of the Stock

Exchange and the Banks made him thoughtful, and he admitted that it

looked as if England might be drawn in after all. The long day, without

any business for him and Nicholas, disturbed him. There was a nasty,

hovering smell of ruin in the air. But there was no panic. The closing

of the Banks was only a wise precaution against panic. And by evening,

as the tremendous significance of the ultimatum sank into him, he said

definitively that England would not be drawn in.

Then Drayton, whom they had not seen for months (since he had had his

promotion) telephoned to Dorothy to come and dine with him at his club

in Dover Street. Anthony missed altogether the significance of _that_.

He had actually made for himself an after-dinner peace in which coffee

could be drunk and cigarettes smoked as if nothing were happening

to Europe.

"England," he said, "will not be drawn in, because her ultimatum will

stop the War. There won't be any Armageddon."

"Oh, won't there!" said Michael. "And I can tell you there won't be much

left of us after it's over."

He had been in Germany and he knew. He carried himself with a sort of

stern haughtiness, as one who knew better than any of them. And yet his

words conveyed no picture to his brain, no definite image of anything

at all.

But in Nicholas's brain images gathered fast, one after another; they

thickened; clear, vivid images with hard outlines. They came slowly but

with order and precision. While the others talked he had been silent and

very grave.

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

Anthony looked thoughtfully at Nicholas. A sudden wave of realization

beat up against his consciousness and receded.

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

* * * * *

An immense restlessness came over them.

At a quarter-past eight Dorothy telephoned from her club in Grafton

street. Frank had had to leave her suddenly. Somebody had sent for him.

And if they wanted to see the sight of their lives they were to come

into town at once. St. James's was packed with people from Whitehall to

Buckingham Palace. It was like nothing on earth, and they mustn't miss

it. She'd wait for them in Grafton Street till a quarter to nine, but

not a minute later.

Nicky got out his big four-seater Morss car. They packed themselves into

it, all six of them somehow, and he drove them into London. They had a

sense of doing something strange and memorable and historic. Dorothy,

picked up at her club, showed nothing but a pleasurable excitement. She

gave no further information about Frank. He had had to go off and see

somebody. What did he think? He thought what he had always thought; only

he wouldn't talk about it.

Dorothy was not inclined to talk about it either. The Morss was caught

in a line blocked at the bottom of Albemarle Street by two streams of

cars, mixed with two streams of foot passengers, that poured steadily

from Piccadilly into St. James's Street.

Michael and Dorothy got out and walked. Nicholas gave up his place to

Anthony and followed with Veronica.

Their restlessness had been a part of the immense restlessness of the

crowd. They were drawn, as the crowd was drawn; they went as the crowd

went, up and down, restlessly, from Trafalgar Square and Whitehall to

Buckingham Palace; from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall and Trafalgar

Square. They drifted down Parliament Street to Westminster and back

again. An hour ago the drifting, nebulous crowd had split, torn asunder

between two attractions; its two masses had wheeled away, one to the

east and the other to the west; they had gathered themselves together,

one at each pole of the space it now traversed. The great meeting in

Trafalgar Square balanced the multitude that had gravitated towards

Buckingham Palace, to see the King and Queen come out on their balcony

and show themselves to their people.

And as the edges of the two masses gave way, each broke and scattered,

and was mixed again with the other. Like a flood, confined and shaken,

it surged and was driven back and surged again from Whitehall to

Buckingham Palace, from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall. It looked for an

outlet in the narrow channels of the side-streets, or spread itself over

the flats of the Green Park, only to return restlessly upon itself,

sucked back by the main current in the Mall.

It was as if half London had met there for Bank Holiday. Part of this

crowd was drunk; it was orgiastic; it made strange, fierce noises, like

the noises of one enormous, mystically excited beast; here and there,

men and women, with inflamed and drunken faces, reeled in each other's

arms; they wore pink paper feathers in their hats. Some, only half

intoxicated, flicked at each other with long streamers of pink and white

paper, carried like scourges on small sticks. These were the inspired.

But the great body of the crowd was sober. It went decorously in a long

procession, young men with their sweethearts, friends, brothers and

sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers with their children;

none, or very few, went alone that night.

It was an endless procession of faces; grave and thoughtful faces;

uninterested, respectable faces; faces of unmoved integrity; excited

faces; dreaming, wondering, bewildered faces; faces merely curious, or

curiously exalted, slightly ecstatic, open-mouthed, fascinated by each

other and by the movements and the lights; laughing, frivolous faces,

and faces utterly vacant and unseeing.

On every other breast there was a small Union Jack pinned; every other

hand held and waggled a Union Jack. The Union Jack flew from the engine

of every other automobile. In twelve hours, out of nowhere, thousands

and thousands of flags sprang magically into being; as if for years

London had been preparing for this day.

And in and out of this crowd the train of automobiles with their flags

dashed up and down the Mall for hours, appearing and disappearing.

Intoxicated youths with inflamed faces, in full evening dress, squatted

on the roofs of taxi-cabs or rode astride on the engines of their cars,

waving flags.

All this movement, drunken, orgiastic, somnambulistic, mysteriously

restless, streamed up and down between two solemn and processional lines

of lights, two solemn and processional lines of trees, lines that

stretched straight from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace in a recurrent

pattern of trees and lamps, dark trees, twilit trees, a lamp and a tree

shining with a metallic unnatural green; and, at the end of the avenue,

gilded gates and a golden-white façade.

The crowd was drifting now towards the Palace. Michael and Dorothea,

Nicholas and Veronica, went with it. In this eternal perambulation they

met people that they knew; Stephen and Vera; Mitchell, Monier-Owen;

Uncle Morrie and his sisters. Anthony, looking rather solemn, drove

past them in his car. It was like impossible, grotesque encounters in

a dream.

Outside the Palace the crowd moved up and down without rest; it drifted

and returned; it circled round and round the fountain. In the open

spaces the intoxicated motor-cars and taxi-cabs darted and tore with the

folly of moths and the fury of destroyers. They stung the air with their

hooting. Flags, intoxicated flags, still hung from their engines. They

came flying drunkenly out of the dark, like a trumpeting swarm of

enormous insects, irresistibly, incessantly drawn to the lights of the

Palace, hypnotized by the golden-white façade.

Suddenly, Michael's soul revolted.

"If this demented herd of swine is a great people going into a great

war, God help us! Beasts--it's not as if _their_ bloated skins were

likely to be punctured."

He called back over his shoulders to the others.

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

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

The water had ceased playing in the fountain.

Nicholas and Veronica stood by the fountain. The water in the basin was

green like foul sea-water. The jetsam of the crowd floated there. A

small child leaned over the edge of the basin and fished for Union Jacks

in the filthy pool. Its young mother held it safe by the tilted edge of

its petticoats. She looked up at them and smiled. They smiled back again

and turned away.

It was quiet on the south side by the Barracks. Small, sober groups of

twos and threes strolled there, or stood with their faces pressed close

against the railings, peering into the barrack yard. Motionless,

earnest and attentive, they stared at the men in khaki moving about on

the other side of the railings. They were silent, fascinated by the men

in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing, they stared at them with an

awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in khaki stared back, proud,

self-conscious, as men who know that the hour is great and that it is

their hour.

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

"He's dead right, Ronny. That isn't the way to take it, getting drunk

and excited, and rushing about making silly asses of themselves. They

_are_ rather swine, you know."

"Yes; but they're pathetic. Can't you see how pathetic they are? Nicky,

I believe I love the swine--even the poor drunken ones with the pink

paper feathers--just because they're English; because awful things are

going to happen to them, and they don't know it. They're English."

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

They found Anthony in the Mall, driving up and down, looking for them.

He had picked up Dorothy and Aunt Emmeline and Uncle Morrie.

"We're going down to the Mansion House," he said, "to hear the

Proclamation. Will you come?"

But Veronica and Nicholas were tired of crowds, even of historic crowds.

Anthony drove off with his car-load, and they went home.

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

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

life.

He returned some time after midnight. By that time it had sunk into him.

Germany _had_ defied the ultimatum and England _had_ declared war

on Germany.

He said it was only what was to be foreseen. He had known all the time

that it would happen--really.

The tension of the day of the ultimatum had this peculiar psychological

effect that all over England people who had declared up to the last

minute that there would be no War were saying the same thing as Anthony

and believing it.

Michael was disgusted with the event that had put an end to the Irish

Revolution. It was in this form that he conceived his first grudge

against the War.

This emotion of his was like some empty space of horror opened up

between him and Nicholas; Nicky being the only one of his family who was

as yet aware of its existence.

For the next three days, Nicholas, very serious and earnest, shut

himself up in his workshop at the bottom of the orchard and laboured

there, putting the last touches to the final, perfect, authoritative

form of the Moving Fortress, the joint creation of his brain and

Drayton's, the only experiment that had survived the repeated onslaughts

of the Major's criticism. The new model was three times the size of the

lost original; it was less like a battleship and more like a racing-car

and a destroyer. It was his and Drayton's last word on the subject of

armaments.

It was going to the War Office, this time, addressed to the right

person, and accompanied by all sorts of protective introductions, and

Drayton blasting its way before it with his new explosive.

In those three days Nick found an immense distraction in his Moving

Fortress. It also served to blind his family to his real intentions. He

knew that his real intentions could not be kept from them very long.

Meanwhile the idea that he was working on something made them happy.

When Frances saw him in his overalls she smiled and said: "Nicky's got

_his_ job, anyhow." John came and looked at him through the window of

the workshop and laughed.

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

In those three days John went about with an air of agreeable excitement.

Or you came upon him sitting in solitary places like the dining-room,

lost in happy thought. Michael said of him that he was unctuous. He

exuded a secret joy and satisfaction. John had acquired a sudden

remarkable maturity. He shone on each member of his family with

benevolence and affection, as if he were its protector and consoler, and

about to confer on it some tremendous benefit.

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

positively enjoying the War."

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

long."

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

months.

Michael, pledged to secrecy, came and looked at the Moving Fortress. He

was interested and intelligent; he admired that efficiency of Nicky's

that was so unlike his own.

Yet, he wondered, after all, was it so unlike? He, too, was aiming at an

art as clean and hard and powerful as Nicky's, as naked of all blazonry

and decoration, an art which would attain its objective by the simplest,

most perfect adjustment of means to ends.

And Anthony was proud of that hidden wonder locked behind the door of

the workshop in the orchard. He realized that his son Nicholas had taken

part in a great and important thing. He was prouder of Nicholas than he

had been of Michael.

And Michael knew it.

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

But Michael's? Anthony said to himself that there wasn't any sense--any

sense that he could endure to contemplate--in which Michael's brains

could be of any use to his country. When Anthony thought of the

mobilization of his family for national service, Michael and Michael's

brains were a problem that he put behind him for the present and refused

to contemplate. There would be time enough for Michael later.

Anthony was perfectly well aware of his own one talent, the talent which

had made "Harrison and Harrison" the biggest timber-importing firm in

England. If there was one thing he understood it was organization. If

there was one thing he could not tolerate it was waste of good material,

the folly of forcing men and women into places they were not fit for. He

had let his eldest son slip out of the business without a pang, or with

hardly any pang. He had only taken Nicholas into it as an experiment.

It was on John that he relied to inherit it and carry it farther.

As a man of business he approved of the advertised formula: "Business as

Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which England expected

every man to do was to stay in the place he was most fitted for and to

go where he was most wanted. Nothing but muddle and disaster could

follow any departure from this rule.

It was fitting that Frances and Veronica should do Red Cross work. It

was fitting that Dorothy should help to organize the relief of the

Belgium refugees. It was fitting that John should stay at home and carry

on the business, and that he, Anthony, should enlist when he had settled

John into his place. It was, above all, fitting that Nicky should devote

himself to the invention and manufacture of armaments. He could not

conceive anything more wantonly and scandalously wasteful than a system

that could make any other use of Nicky's brains. He thanked goodness

that, with a European War upon us, such a system, if it existed, would

not be allowed to live a day.

As for Michael, it might be fitting later--very much later--perhaps. If

Michael wanted to volunteer for the Army then, and if it were necessary,

he would have no right to stop him. But it would not be necessary.

England was going to win this War on the sea and not on land. Michael

was practically safe.

And behind Frances's smile, and John's laughter, and Michael's

admiration, and Anthony's pride there was the thought: "Whatever

happens, Nicky will he safe."

And the model of the Moving Fortress was packed up--Veronica and Nicky

packed it--and it was sent under high protection to the War Office. And

Nicky unlocked the door of his workshop and rested restlessly from

his labour.

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

Westminster Bridge became a highway for regiments marching to battle.

The streets were parade-grounds for squad after squad of volunteers in

civilian clothes, self-conscious and abashed under the eyes of the

men in khaki.

And Michael said: "This is the end of all the arts. Artists will not be

allowed to exist except as agents for the recruiting sergeant.

We're dished."

That was the second grudge he had against the War. It killed the arts in

the very hour of their renaissance. "Eccentricities" by Morton Ellis,

with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, and the "New Poems" of Michael

Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to have come out

in September. But it was not conceivable that they should come out.

At the first rumour of the ultimatum Michael and Ellis had given

themselves up for lost.

Liége fell and Namur was falling.

And the call went on for recruits, and for still more recruits. And

Nicky in five seconds had destroyed his mother's illusions and the whole

fabric of his father's plans.

It was one evening when they were in the drawing-room, sitting up after

Veronica had gone to bed.

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

to-morrow."

He did not look at his father's face. He looked at his mother's. She was

sitting opposite him on the couch beside Dorothy. John balanced himself

on the head of the couch with his arm round his mother's shoulder. Every

now and then he stooped down and rubbed his cheek thoughtfully

against her hair.

A slight tremor shook her sensitive, betraying upper lip; then she

looked back at Nicholas and smiled.

Dorothy set her mouth hard, unsmiling.

Anthony had said nothing. He stared before him at Michael's foot, thrust

out and tilted by the crossing of his knees. Michael's foot, with its

long, arched instep, fascinated Anthony. He seemed to be thinking: "If I

look at it long enough I may forget what Nicky has said."

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

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

With a great effort Anthony roused himself from his contemplation of

Michael's foot.

"I--can't--see--that my minding--or not minding--has anything--to

do--with it."

He brought his words out slowly and with separate efforts, as if they

weighed heavily on his tongue. "We've got to consider what's best for

the country all round, and I doubt if either of you is called upon

to go."

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

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

either."

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

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

"One out of four? Well then--"

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

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

They all looked at him where he sat, upright and noble, in his chair,

and most absurdly young.

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

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

needn't think it."

"Why not?"

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

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

Nicky thought: "You're the very last of us that can be spared." But he

couldn't say it. The thing was so obvious. All he said was: "It's out of

the question, your going."

"Old Nicky's out of the question, if you like," said John. "He's going

to be married. He ought to be thinking of his wife and children."

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

Nicky."

"You ought to think of Mummy, Daddy ducky; and you ought to think of

_us_," said Dorothy.

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

married, and I haven't any children."

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

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

"I am thinking of her. You don't suppose Veronica'd stop me if I wanted

to go? Why, she wouldn't look at me if I didn't want to go."

Suddenly he remembered Michael.

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

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

him.

"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.

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

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

She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would be safe

now, with the Army in India."

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

But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.

He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not enlisting. At

any rate, _not yet_. Don't worry about Don and Daddy. They won't take

Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his heart that he doesn't know

about. He's going to be jolly well sold, poor chap. And they won't take

the guv'nor because he's too old; though the dear old thing thinks he

can bluff them into it because he doesn't look it.

"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned, the War's

a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the Army. You know

how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now I'm going in and

nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me out. Soon they'll all

be as pleased as Punch about it.

"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want to stick

bayonets into German tummies, just _because_ they're so large and oodgy.

You'd think of that first and all the time and afterwards. And I shan't

think of it at all.

"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons that I

can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect yourself if

you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I stayed out."

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

"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing chaps. You

seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves."

When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really does see?

Or if he made it all up?"

They had not said to each other all that they had really meant. Of

Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered vividly,

"Not yet."

Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up between him

and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the two words:

"Not yet."

XX

It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on

account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn't

know about.

The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was under

thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if he'd left it

at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than most of 'em when he

was stripped. But they'd given him so good an innings that the poor old

thing got above himself, and spun them a yarn about his hair having gone

grey from a recent shock. That dished him. They said they knew that sort

of hair; they'd been seeing a lot of it lately.

Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape," and

declared that if that was the way things were going to be managed it was

a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He said the man who

examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know his own rotten

business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to tell him they didn't

want him dropping down dead when he went into action, or fainting from

sheer excitement after they'd been to the trouble and expense of

training him. As if he'd be likely to do a damn silly thing like that.

He'd never been excited in his life. It was enough to _give_ him

heart-disease.

So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the

ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they learned to their

disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for

Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.

At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business by a

sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the War would

be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal

significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate

message for him was that business must be attended to. He had not

attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay

there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories.

He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the

glamour of the Front. The particular business in hand had great issues

and a fascination of its own.

And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a

brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and

abstracted soul.

And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through the first

courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind

and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in

earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder

every day.

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

With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's entire

family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances

and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red

Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be

sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained

and ready when the moment of the summons came. Strong young girls

hustled for the best places at the ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly

women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless

ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained

by their extraordinary illusion.

Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with

bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if nobody

else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral

excitement, while still struggling to find each other's arteries,

declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no earthly reason

why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency

class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage

round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor. He got mixed up with

his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a

lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders

to go to the Front.

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

hopes.

For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had

ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a curious

gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael's

study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the

queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith

over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline's head,

and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie's little, clumsy,

pinching fingers. It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and

charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.

And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out

her lower lip at them.

"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you

might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every woman in

England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have enough socks

for his Army."

Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted conspicuously, as a

protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action

an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even

Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be

unravelled overnight, to save the wool.

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

Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as

if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were

interfering with them.

Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men.

The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers

received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during

the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the

Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and

disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late

enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to

its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture

and embarassment.

The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into

the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and

went into uniform.

And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and

puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance

as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it.

Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of

the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon

Street Station.

She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street

Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery

of Belgium poured and was congested.

Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of

her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with

the scene.

Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred

transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that

was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light,

filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes,

hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and

large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a

ghastly, ruinous life.

The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the

immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of carriages packed tight

with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and

there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in

the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.

For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding wounds

and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this one

incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon Street

Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the sequences of

which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of men, women and

children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they were staggering under

those bundles along their straight, flat roads between the everlasting

rows of poplars; their towns and villages flamed and smoked behind them;

some of them, goaded like tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at

their backs--yesterday. And this morning they were here, brave and gay,

smiling at Dorothea as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their

small children in her arms.

And they were still proud of themselves.

A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a large

pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other a cage with

a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and smiled, proud of

herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A Belgium boy carried a

paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He grinned at Dorothea, proud of

himself because he had saved his grandfather. A young Flemish peasant

woman pushed back the shawl that covered her baby's face to show her how

pretty he was; she laughed because she had borne him and saved him.

And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women and girls

idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in trying to throw

himself into a moving train because he thought his lost mother was in

it. The ring screening the agony of a woman giving birth to her child on

the platform. A death in the train; stiff, upturned feet at the end of a

stretcher that the police-ambulance carried away.

And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect

safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and

bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous

longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the shells burst,

and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads

between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and

flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger. She was not

feeling anything now except the shame of her immunity.

She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I were

dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."

Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were in

Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could walk."

Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians, because it

was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate, were safe. Her

father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not in it--yet; though

of course he would be in it some time. She tried not to think too much

about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next six months. And Frank was

safe. Frank was training recruits. He had told her he might be kept

indefinitely at that infernal job. But for that he would be fighting

now. He wanted her to be sorry for him; and she was sorry for him. And

she was glad too.

One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till

dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she found

him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting for her by

himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.

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

She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust

on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and

hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.

He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was the first

time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose

felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust

and dirt of her; and he smiled. His smile had none of the cynical

derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant

suffragist.

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

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

"Not _yet_--worse luck."

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

what?"

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

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

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

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

"What did you think?"

"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like business.

Do you really mean it? Are you really going to Flanders?"

"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she

wasn't going _some_where?"

He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And then:

"It makes you look about eighteen."

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

"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that you're not

eighteen? You're eight and twenty."

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

you wouldn't say so."

"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made a

pretty mess of each other's lives."

"Have I made a mess of _your_ life?'

"A beastly mess."

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

I wouldn't.

"But one doesn't know things."

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

not the things that matter."

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

"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married me. And

we would have had three years of each other."

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

it."

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

"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I get

leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three days."

"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three

days--No, it wasn't worth while.

"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn't

change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change. So, you see,

it's got to be one thing or another."

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

while?

"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There really

isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what you like and

do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I shan't care if

you'll only marry me."

"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love me. You

never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all that."

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

years?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go off and

get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.

"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my

face--filthy--you mustn't--"

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

The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He

said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she

keeps it on _now_!"

She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a

Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over

her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her

shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast

to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the

youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.

He said to himself, "She _shall_ come alive. She _shall_ feel. She

_shall want_ me. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten

years ago."

Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands.

And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing something

happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him

now--to-night."

Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what

she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had

made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.

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

knew."

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

* * * * *

They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and

hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.

"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there

was anything that could have prevented it."

"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it

made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the

difference. And there we were."

"It didn't--really."

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

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

"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it.

I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."

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

to go wrong.

"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand

going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I

didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or

wondered what you were feeling? _That's_ what put me off. It hurt so

atrociously that I couldn't say anything.

"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about nothing

else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.

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

was listening like anything."

"Darling--what did I tell you?"

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

something."

"My adventure?"

"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I

couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's

beyond me now."

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

"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something big and

important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to bother me. I kept

on trying to get it, and not getting it."

"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully big and

important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had happened to

somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."

"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of that

business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."

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

"You're not swallowed up."

"Perhaps I shall be."

"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you to know

that I understand what you were driving at. It was this way, wasn't it?

You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You couldn't keep out of

it any more than I can keep out of this War."

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

you."

"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way you were

in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."

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

"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a war on.

We've both had to pay for my stupidity."

"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see, or

risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."

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

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

"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married in. I

say--how about to-morrow evening?"

"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know who'll

drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married in, too."

She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out. If he

is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."

It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch at their

happiness and secure it, before their hour came.

She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the British line

was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of course it would

recover. We always began like that. We went back to go forwards faster,

when we got into our stride.

* * * * *

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

When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her with two

frocks over her arm.

"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell whether

to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if it mattered

more than anything. More than anything on earth."

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

the blue frock.

"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose to you

in that get-up--"

"Can't you see that I want to make up for _that_ and for all the things

he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only I was as beautiful

as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."

"My dear--my dear--"

Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as Nicky

with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up Dorothy in

khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and blue frocks, made

Frances want to cry.

* * * * *

Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy that he

couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only have one hour

to give her.

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

Veronica.

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

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

"You'd better."

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

soup."

But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to take

herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.

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

now--"

Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.

It was nine o'clock.

At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought: "Supposing he

hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely. If he hadn't got

leave he would have said so when he telephoned.

The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would hold her

in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be afraid, and

she would be afraid, and he would let her go.

The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud and quick

on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room to them,

holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes shone with

excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that narrowed his eyes and

jerked his mouth slightly crooked.

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

"What kept you?" "You _have_ got leave?"

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

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

be here at all."

Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat down on

the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his spoon, and smiling

as if at something pleasant that he knew, something that he would tell

them presently when Nanna left the room.

The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening intently

for the click of the latch.

"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off till you

come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then they say

they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that day.

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

He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was speaking

to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions about trains

and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if he were not

conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat, slowly stirring his

coffee without drinking it. The vibration of her nerves made his answers

sound muffled and far-off.

She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing from her

minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable longing to be

alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what she had felt

yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in yesterday, and

refused to move on into to-day.

Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they stopped

talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would be the end.

Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup he had

not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea that for a

moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small sound. She saw

her mother take the cup from him and set it on the table.

One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they were

guilty, and left her alone with him.

It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He sat

there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance. He seemed

to be wondering how she was going to take it.

He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to make her

want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left it."

And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.

She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be ready

to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness he

required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes implored

her to put away from her.

There was something more.

He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is hard luck

on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard for me." (She

could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He knew she was brave;

he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he knew he hadn't got to say

the obvious things.

There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her with the

power and sweetness of first passion; but without its fear. She no

longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her as he had held

her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it vibrated to an

intenser rhythm.

She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that they were

seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more than they. When

realization passed it would endure.

Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it, to say to

each other what it was they felt and saw.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh--"

"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the hardest and

most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it easier for us to win

the War. You can't expect us to fight so comfy, and to be killed so

comfy, if we know our womenkind are being pounded to bits in the ground

we've just cleared. If I thought _you_ were knocking about

anywhere there--"

"It would make it too hard?"

"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much time to

think about it, but when I did--"

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

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

Nicky going."

"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and where

he'll be. That was natural."

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

back."

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

safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."

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

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

"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you to take

the hardest job, really."

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

He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and they

were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous thing.

"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about it. I

want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."

"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it's _your_ War,

too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"

"I know," she said.

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

"Somebody's got 'em."

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

She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.

"My wrist's a whopper."

"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's phosphorous," she

said. "You can see the time by it in the dark."

"I've nothing for _you_. Except--" he fumbled in his pockets--"I

say--here's the wedding-ring."

They laughed.

"What more could you want?" she said.

He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he stooped and

kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But it was not like

yesterday.

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

The British were retreating from Mons.

The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like the

travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There was no

end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no end to the

German people. And there was no news of British reinforcements, or

rumour of reinforcements.

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

papers.

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

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

Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way

before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat

from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.

Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours'

notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it.

They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least

we could do for _them_ was to trust them, and not believe any tales of

their retreating.

And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By

letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home,

listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing

of the bell.

She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message

came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child for me that my

son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to

come and see me; but not just yet."

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

his Colonel.

* * * * *

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

Station.

Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she

could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned

it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly,

beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept,

worn out with her hard day's driving.

She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have

had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.

"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a

brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died

for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered.

He said 'It's _your_ War--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's

killed in it.

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

night.

"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was

a coward. He got nothing."

His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that

prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a

contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion.

She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.

Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they

had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had

dreamed it or made it up.

Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The

Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and

it would take her car with it and a new driver.

Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.

"If I could only help you."

"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave

the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more

often she hid away somewhere by herself.

Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go

to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's

Veronica."

But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to

Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been

killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He

couldn't have had five hours' fighting.

"And to be killed--Retreating.

"He got nothing out of it but agony."

Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know

what he may have got in the last minute of it."

"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to

Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me.

But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.

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

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

alive."

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

* * * * *

One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with

it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:

"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must

have known that he would not come back."

* * * * *

"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I

want you to see that my memory is fairly good."

* * * * *

The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for

markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."

The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah xxxv.

and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:

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

fingers to fight."...

"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and

the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...

... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall

mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they

shall walk and not faint."

And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet and

powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold again on the

Reality they had seen and felt together.

The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it lasted

she was at peace.

But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of remorse

for all that she had wasted.

XXI

After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had ceased to

feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in vain for them.

They did not believe that it had saved Paris.

Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was no more

Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were only a question

of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there would be no more

France. They were face to face with the further possibility of there

being no more England.

In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances were

changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before the War,

Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she would, after

careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I like England. But I

dislike the English people. They are narrow and hypocritical and

conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs." At the time of the Boer

War, beyond thinking that the British ought to win, and that they would

win, and feeling a little spurt as of personal satisfaction when they

did win, she had had no consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for

loving it, she loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of

mild, cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her

house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as well

talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once sat in

peace under the tree of Heaven with her _Times_ newspaper, and flicked

the affairs of the nation from her as less important than the stitching

on her baby's frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else.

She was sad, not because her son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling

week by week, but because England was in danger; she was worried, not

because Lord Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son

Michael, but because she had found that the race was to the swift and

the battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent

sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she left

her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City with

Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office, receiving,

packing, and sending off great cases of food and clothing to the

Belgian soldiers.

Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all well

under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the Government

persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber that swelled and

shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and because officials

wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them what he knew about

timber, and because the head of a department had talked to _him_ about

private firms and profiteering. As if any man with three sons under

twenty-seven would want to make a profit out of the War; and as if they

couldn't cut down everybody's profits if they took the trouble. They

might cut his to the last cent so long as we had gun-carriages that

would carry guns and rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was

talking about and they didn't.

And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who had

once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it

now. She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at

the head of departments we should win the War. We were losing it for

want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of

organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud of him, not

because he was her husband and the father of her children, but because

he was a man who could help England. They were both proud of Michael and

Nicholas and John, not because they were their sons, but because they

were men who could fight for England.

They found that they loved England with a secret, religious, instinctive

love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man might stand and

fight for, became, mysteriously and magically, dearer to them than their

home. They loved England more than their own life or the lives of their

children. Long ago they had realized that fathers do not beget children

nor mothers bear them merely to gratify themselves. Now, in September

and October, they were realizing that children are not begotten and born

for their own profit and pleasure either.

When they sat together after the day's work they found themselves saying

the most amazing things to each other.

Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better. I

shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had been

pleasant to him.

And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of three,

we ought to send them all."

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

insisted."

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

She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I grudged

giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if he went out

to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how splendid it was

of him."

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

"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was his

profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."

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

of a profession.

"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count more than

the whole Army put together."

They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing that sooner

or later they must speak of it.

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

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

want to go."

That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably in

secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something must be

done about Michael.

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

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

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

enough."

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

"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky is the

only one of us who has any right to."

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

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

But in the end she did say something.

She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding himself

away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she thought, "as if he

were ashamed of himself."

Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious beauty of his

young face; at the thick masses of his hair that would not stay as they

were brushed back, but fell over his forehead; it was still yellow, and

shining as it shone when he was a little boy.

He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of verse on the

white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came in lest she

should see them. That hurt her.

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

war."

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

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

"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."

"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If George

Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."

"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason, when so

much more has been done for you than was ever done for him?"

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

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

"So's Germany.

"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker hates

Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear old Frau

Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and Carl, and make

Hedwig and Löttchen cry."

"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George and

Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."

"Bayonetting isn't my business."

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

"They're not fighting for _me_, Mother. You ask them if they are, and

see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God knows what; but

they're no more fighting for me than they're fighting for Aunt

Emmeline."

"They _are_ fighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting for everything

that's weak and defenceless."

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

said Michael.

"All the more shame for you, then."

He smiled, acknowledging her score.

"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the opening for

a repartee. It was quite a nice one."

"If," she said, "you were only _doing_ something. But you go on with

your own things as though nothing had happened."

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

in other people."

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

But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him again. She

went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his room.

"_Well?_" he said.

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

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

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

"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's as

obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."

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

crying and clinging to him.

"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm glad he

didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to him, I couldn't

bear to be the one who made him go."

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

They were silent.

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

But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.

"He must know that _public_ feeling's pretty strong against him. To say

nothing of _my_ feeling and _your_ feeling."

* * * * *

He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his father and

his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't bear to look at

Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her

way as much as possible.

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

it.

But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these

antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go.

Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had always

offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul. From his very

first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had

seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective

emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils

and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that

challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of

what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more

appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their

Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one

monstrous soul.

And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment,

was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the

awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and

from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine

emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you

and you were done for. He was determined that it shouldn't get him. They

couldn't see--and that was Michael's grievance--that his resistance was

his strength and not his weakness.

Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize

that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the same entity

as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the party, who had

wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of

forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted to remember." He was

Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about

shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the

other fellows were doing. He objected to being suddenly required to feel

patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that

Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was

in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.

Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.

He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that

he resented. There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and

tyranny about it all.

It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to fight. He

had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight any day in a

cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a cause that had not

been messed about so much by other people. Other people had not put

pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact they had tried to stop

him. Michael was also aware that in the matter of Ireland his emotions,

though shared by considerable numbers of the Irish people, were not

shared by his family or by many people whom he knew; to all intents and

purposes he had them to himself.

It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and mother, for

they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the more he would

seem to them to be a shirker.

He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff,

reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's silence

when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their eyes--his

mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the unspoken question:

"Why don't you go and get killed--for England--like other people?"

Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible, palpable; he

knew where he was with them. What he could not stand was that empty

spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him where he was most

vulnerable--in his imagination.

* * * * *

And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.

It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion, and your

religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored Beauty as the

supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else; if you lived,

impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive; and for no other end,

how could you consent to take part in this bloody business? That would

be the last betrayal, the most cowardly surrender.

And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one of the

leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the world, of all

the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.

* * * * *

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

And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect. When the

young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed it with a calm,

high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on, without pay, without

praise, without any sort of recognition. Any fool could fight; but, if

you were an artist, your honour bound you to ignore the material

contest, to refuse, even to your country, the surrender of the highest

that you knew. They believed with the utmost fervour and sincerity that

they defied Germany more effectually, because more spiritually, by going

on and producing fine things with imperturbability than if they went out

against the German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they

were restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.