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

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

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

And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He would remind them that it was not his subject.

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

As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So would Nicky," he said.

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

The thought was beginning to obsess him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I see," he said.

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

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

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

Michael remembered something.

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you ever seen me?"

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

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

And she said again: "Not yet."

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

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

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

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

And John was depressed after he had gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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



XXII

Michael had gone to Stephen's house.

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

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

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

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

"No--but how?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"His death?"

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

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

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

"I'm certain he wouldn't."

"And I'm certain he would."

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

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

"You're not--"

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

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

"Perhaps not. But it's Irish."

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

"Because I want to be in it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think it matters to the whole world."

"What's changed you?" said Michael.

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity.

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

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

Veronica said, "You must let him go."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_I_ used to be what he wanted most."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lying--lying--lying."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

She knew; and Lawrence knew.

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

And she was frightened and held her tongue.

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

He came to her, furious.

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

"I took care of that, Larry."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Was there nothing to be said for her?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."

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

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

"Veronica, then."

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

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

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

He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.

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

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

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

"That's how--by getting older.

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

She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

"8.30. It is all over.

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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



XXIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The minute broke, stretched to its furthest.

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They're angels, Nicky."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You don't know what it would do," he said.

She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but you."

"That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of kin--the one
they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way; it'll only make him
madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid of you or Mummy or Dad, or
Michael being told first."

"It doesn't matter a bit who's _told_ first. I shall _know_ first," she
said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't kill either me or the baby.
If a shock could kill me I should have died long ago."

"When?"

"When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear it any
longer, something happened."

"What?"

"I don't know. I don't know what it _is_ now; I only know what it does.
It always happens--always--when you want it awfully. And when you're
quiet and give yourself up to it."

"It'll happen again."

He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite interested;
puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if something had come
between him and her.

"You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so that when
things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to happen to
Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she was absolutely
happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came to her. And, Nicky,
they were the same queer things that came to me. It was like something
getting through to her."

"I say--did you ever do it to me?"

"Only once, when you wanted it awfully."

"When? When?"

Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her trail.

"When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it didn't
matter, it wasn't the end."

"But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself. It looks
as if it worked, then?"

"It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with _you_ it would
always come; because you're more _me_ than other people; I mean I care
more for you."

She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother about me,
Nicky. If _the_ most awful thing happened, and you didn't come back, It
would come."

"I wish I knew what It was," he said.

"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's God."

"That's why _they're_ so magnificently brave--Dorothy and Aunt Frances
and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't know it's there;
even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and still they go on bearing
and bearing; and they were glad to give you up."

"I know," he said; "lots of people _say_ they're glad, but they really
_are_ glad."

He meditated.

"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's praying or
something; and if you're going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you'd
be careful; because it seems to me that if there's anything in it at
all, there might be hitches. I mean to say, you might work it just
enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from
being blown off. Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might
bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic.

"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I thought
about it. Luckily one doesn't think."

"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than I tried
before."

"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"

"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin with, I
won't believe that you're not going to get through.

"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't believe
you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to something
else. It doesn't end him.'"

He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a
pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to.

Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind talking about
it?" she said.

"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I believe
in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling, that you go on.
You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't care. They used to
think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn't care. But I really
didn't. Things, most things, don't much matter, because there's always
something else. You go on to it.

"I care for _you_. _You_ matter most awfully; and my people; but most of
all you. You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the
first time I heard you calling out to me to come and sit on your bed
because you were frightened. You always will matter.

"But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make me
_think_ she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her because she
was going to have a baby. And _that_ was because I remembered you and
the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would have kept me straight
with women if nothing else did.

"Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying you till
Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too late.

"That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby."

"Yes, Nicky.

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The cottage
belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?"

"I think he'd give it to you if you asked him."

"For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll give it to
me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where it's all quiet
and you'd never know there was a war at all--even the Belgians have
forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look at that hill, because
it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I simply won't think of anything
that isn't straight and beautiful. And I shall get strong. Then the baby
will be straight and beautiful and strong, too.

"I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like you."

       *       *       *       *       *

Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little things
that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and she, to be on
the edge of something great, something satisfying and revealing. It was
to come in a look or a word; and both would remember it afterwards
for ever.

In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline, and
Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say good-bye.
And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited and happy, as he
had gone off on his wedding journey. And between Frances and her son the
great thing remained unsaid.

Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine sand.


     _February 27th, 1915._
          B.E.F., FRANCE.

Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you all for
the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long way, that's been
seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it because it "looked as
if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It makes me feel as if I
_was_ Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs, rampant, clawing at the Boches.
Just think of the effect if he got up over the parapet!

The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't think what
else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those tubes of chutney are
a good idea.

No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no English
and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to himself, you
simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old Mick could send
himself out by himself against the whole German Army he'd manage to put
in some first rate fancy work in the second or two before they got him.
He'd be quite capable of going off and doing grisly things that would
make me faint with funk, if he was by himself, with nothing but the eye
of God to look at him. And _then_ he'd rather God wasn't there. He
always _was_ afraid of having a crowd with him.

The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were you two,
I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he is
the youngest.

And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest curtain
fire there _are_ holes; there are more holes than there is stuff; and
the chances are I shall be where a hole is.

Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight for you
like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's going to get
you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of personal
resentment which must be the worst part of the business. Bits of shells
that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew all about before
and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted out in the open, the
peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is it more than the peculiar
awfulness of being run over by express trains let loose about the sky?
Tell Don that when shrapnel empties itself over your head like an old
tin pail, you might feel injured, but the big shell has a most disarming
air of not being able to help itself, of not looking for anybody in
particular. It's so innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it
any day than fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe.

That's an answer to his question.

And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action.
Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I told
her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but Stephen was
absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than anything you could
have imagined. I'm not speaking only for myself.

There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between your
parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it too--when you're
afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before you get there. But it
doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply swinging you on to them, and
that swing makes up for all the rotten times put together. You needn't
be sorry for us. It's waste of pity.

I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us. But I'm
not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving,

     NICKY.

               May, 1915.
          B.E.F., FRANCE

My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when you
loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you needn't
do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the papers more or
less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith is saying or what
Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's motives are. Personally, I
should say he was simply trying, like most of us, to save his country.
Looks like it. But you can tell him from me, if he gets them to send us
enough shells out _in time_ we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow
that sort of thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much
better than you, if you don't mind my saying so.

What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the last
sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my billet for
one of his _worst_ jokes. And I like to hear about Morrie going on the
bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if it really is anxiety
about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd leave off thinking about me,
poor old thing.

More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's looking and
what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot, and she may tell
you things she won't tell the others. That's why I'm glad you're there
and not here.

And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel about it. I
think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were a "putrid
Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes me like
religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say,
but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't
take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that
expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it
isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead
of the Government, you'd have been in at the start, before me.

Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never can
tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those of us who
are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a long way. There's
no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the finish; so that the
patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to join up will be jolly well
sold, poor devils. Take me, for instance. If I'd got what I wanted and
been out in Flanders in 1914, ten to one I should have been in the
retreat from Mons, like Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have
given my head to have gone to Gallipoli; but _now_, well, I'm just as
glad I'm not mixed up in that affair.

Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you can get
out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to win the War.
At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the Rhine, while all
the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash on the way there. So
if you're going to be converted let's hope you'll be converted quick.

If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight away.
There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a Tommy. For
instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your brother Tommies. I
slept for three months next to a beastly blighter who used to come in
drunk and tread on my face and be ill all over me.

Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything that's
happened out here. But that's because at home your mind isn't adjusted
to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise to me every time.
I _couldn't_ get used to him. Whereas out here everything's shifted in
the queerest way. Your mind shifts. You funk your first and your second
sight, say, of a bad stretcher case; but when it comes to the third and
the fourth you don't funk at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit
surprised. It's all in the picture, and you're in the picture too.
There's a sort of horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly
dream which doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the
beastliness.

No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what d'you
think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run over the
other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian at that.
There were two or three women round it, crying and gesticulating. It
looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath of blood. That made me
sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the picture. I hadn't
bargained for him.