The idea of removing Michael was Anthony's own inspiration.

Drayton's advice was that he should give Nicky his choice between Oxford
and Germany, the big School of Forestry at Aschaffenburg. If he chose
Germany, he would be well grounded; he could specialize and travel
afterwards.

"Now _that's_ all over," Anthony said, "you two had better come and have
tea with me somewhere."

But there was something in their faces that made him consult his watch
and find that "Oh dear me, no! he was afraid he couldn't." He had an
appointment at five.

When they were well out of sight he locked up his toys in his cabinet,
left the appointment at five to Mr. Vereker, and went home to tell
Frances about the letters he had written to Cambridge and the plans that
had been made for Nicky's future.

"He'll choose Germany," Anthony said. "But that can't be helped."

Frances agreed that they could hardly have hit upon a better plan.

So the affair of Nicky and "Booster's" wife was as if it had never been.
And for that they thanked the blessed common sense and sanity of
Captain Drayton.

And yet Anthony's idea was wrecked by "Booster's" wife. It had come too
late. Anthony had overlooked the fact that his son had seventeen hours'
start of him. He was unaware of the existence of Nicky's own idea; and
he had not allowed for the stiff logic of his position.

When he drove down in his car to St. John's Wood to fetch Nicky, he
found that he had left that afternoon for Chelsea, where, Vera told him,
he had taken rooms.

She gave him the address. It had no significance for Anthony.

Nicky refused to be fetched back from his rooms in Chelsea. For he had
not left his father's house in a huff; he had left it in his wisdom, to
avoid the embarrassment of an incredible position. His position, as he
pointed out to his father, had not changed. He was as big a blackguard
to-day as he was yesterday; the only difference was, that to-morrow or
the next day he would be a self-supporting blackguard.

He wouldn't listen to his father's plan. It was a beautiful plan, but it
would only mean spending more money on him. He'd be pretty good, he
thought, at looking after machinery. He was going to try for a job as a
chauffeur or foreman mechanic. He thought he knew where he could get
one; but supposing he couldn't get it, if his father cared to take him
on at the works for a bit he'd come like a shot; but he couldn't stay
there, because it wouldn't be good enough.

He was absolutely serious, and absolutely firm in the logic of his
position. For he argued that, if he allowed himself to be taken back as
though nothing had happened, this, more than anything he could well
think of, would be giving Peggy away.

He sent his love to his mother and Dorothy, and promised to come out and
dine with them as soon as he had got his job.

So Anthony drove back without him. But as he drove he smiled. And
Frances smiled, too, when he told her.

"There he is, the young monkey, and there he'll stay. It's magnificent,
but of course he's an ass."

"If you can't be an ass at twenty," said Frances, "when can you be?"

They said it was so like Nicky. For all he knew to the contrary his
career was ruined; but he didn't care. You couldn't make any impression
on him. They wondered if anybody ever would.

Dorothy wondered too.

"What sort of rooms has he got, Anthony?" said Frances.

"Very nice rooms, at the top of the house, looking over the river."

"Darling Nicky, I shall go and see him. What are you thinking of,
Dorothy?"

Dorothy was thinking that Nicky's address at Chelsea was the address
that Desmond had given her yesterday.



XIII

When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with the
painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and see her.
She could never bring herself to go to the St. John's Wood house that
was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen's house than it was Vera's.

The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back on
Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with their
liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged that
frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen's society that
otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.

Vera understood that her husband's brother and sister-in-law could
hardly be expected to condone her last aberration. Her attachment to
Ferdie Cameron had been different. It was inevitable, and in a sense
forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by Bartie's sheer
impossibility. Besides, the knowledge of it had dawned on them so
gradually and through so many stages of extenuating tragedy, that, even
when it became an open certainty, the benefit of the long doubt
remained. And there was Veronica. There was still Veronica. Even without
Veronica Vera would have had to think of something far worse than
Lawrence Stephen before Frances would have cast her off. Frances felt
that it was not for her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree
of Heaven. Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had
Ferdie, could she have lived without him? For Frances nothing in the
world had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her
children; her children first, and Anthony after them. For Vera nothing
in the world counted but her lover.

"If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!" she would
say.

Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously, through the
very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.

Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made up for
it by an incorruptible adoration of the living. And she had been made
notorious chiefly through Stephen's celebrity, which was, you might say,
a pure accident.

Thus Frances made shelter for her friend. Only Vera must be made to
understand that, though _she_ was accepted Lawrence Stephen was not. He
was the point at which toleration ceased.

And Vera did understand. She understood that Frances and Anthony
disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie's and
Veronica's account than on Bartie's. Even family loyalty could not
espouse Bartie's cause with any zest. For Bartie showed himself
implacable. Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her so
that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had refused.
His idea was to assert himself by refusals. In that way he could still
feel that he had power over her and a sort of possession. It was he who
was scandalous. Even now neither Frances nor Anthony had a word to
say for him.

So Vera consented to be received surreptitiously, by herself, and
without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn. It had hurt her; but
Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so distinguished
that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either, would ever have
been received by him without Vera. She came, looking half cynical, half
pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a little beaten after seventeen
years of passion and danger, saying that she wasn't going to force Larry
down their throats if they didn't like him; and she went away sustained
by her sense of his distinction and _his_ repudiations.

And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances and
Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn't. Michael and
Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he knew; and
he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be seen at the
parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself distinction. Vera
had never forgotten and never would forget what Anthony and Frances had
done for her and Ferdie when they took Veronica. She wanted to make up,
to pay back, to help their children as they had helped her child; to
give the best she had, and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't
possibly have done. Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was
lamentable. In his family and in the dull round of their acquaintance
there was not anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael;
not anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old
attitude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had promised
her that he would help Michael.

And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas and
Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm, well-ordered
sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral vortex that to her was
the most redoubtable of all. She hid her fear, because in her wisdom she
knew that to show fear was not the way to keep her children. She hid her
strength because she knew that to show it was not the way. Her strength
was in their love of her. She had only used it once when she had stopped
Nicky from going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will
never do that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a
treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be bargained
with. She tried to hold the balance even between their youth and
their maturity.

So Frances fought her fear.

She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in spite of
everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and she did not know
that he had sensibilities and prejudices and scruples like her own, and
that he and Vera distinguished very carefully between the people who
would be good for Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who
would not. She did not know that they both drew the line at Desmond.

Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's fault
that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet each other.
She did not deny that it was in her house they _had_ met; but she had
not introduced them. Desmond had introduced herself, on the grounds that
she knew Dorothy. Vera suspected that, from the first moment when she
had seen him there--by pure accident--she had marked him down. Very
likely she had wriggled into Dorothy's Suffrage meeting on purpose. She
was capable of anything.

Not that Vera thought there was any need for Frances to worry. It was
most unlikely that Desmond's business with Nicky could be serious. For
one thing she was too young herself to care for anybody as young as
Nicky. For another she happened to be in the beginning, or the middle,
certainly nowhere near the end of a tremendous affair with Headley
Richards. As she was designing the dresses and the scenery for the new
play he was putting on at the Independent Theatre, Vera argued very
plausibly that the affair had only just started, and that Frances must
allow it a certain time to run.

"I hope to goodness that the Richards man will marry her."

"My dear, how can he? He's married already to a nice little woman that
he isn't half tired of yet. Desmond was determined to have him and she's
got him; but he's only taken her in his stride, as you may say. I don't
suppose he cares very much one way or another. But with Desmond it's a
point of honour."

"What's a point of honour?"

"Why, to have him. Not to be left out. Besides, she always said she
could take him from poor little Ginny Richards, and she's done it. That
was another point of honour."

With a calmness that was horrible to Frances Vera weighed her friend
Desmond's case. To Frances it was as if she had never known Vera. Either
Vera had changed or she had never known her. She had never known women,
or men either, who discussed such performances with calmness. Vera
herself hadn't made her infidelities a point of honour.

These were the passions and the thoughts of Lawrence Stephen's and of
Desmond's world; these were the things it took for granted. These people
lived in a moral vortex; they whirled round and round with each other;
they were powerless to resist the swirl. Not one of them had any other
care than to love and to make love after the manner of the Vortex. This
was their honour, not to be left out of it, not to be left out of the
vortex, but to be carried away, to be sucked in, and whirl round and
round with each other and the rest.

The painter girl Desmond was horrible to Frances.

And all the time her mind was busy with one question: "Do you think
Nicky knows?"

"I'm perfectly sure he doesn't."

"Perhaps--if he did--"

"No, my dear, that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe it.
You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting into his
head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And you'll be
putting it into Desmond's head."

       *       *       *       *       *

Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him alone." Those
painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You couldn't take them
seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything that Vera Harrison said
she was. He didn't think, though, that the idea of making love to her
would enter Nicky's head if they left him alone. Nicky's head had more
important ideas in it.

So they left him alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of Desmond. Too
busy with his assistant manager's job at the Morss Motor Works; too busy
with one of the little ideas to which he owed the sudden rise in his
position: the little idea of making the Morss cars go faster; too busy
with his big Idea which had nothing whatever to do with the Morss
Company and their cars.

His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a French
engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the _forteresse mobile_, had
become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality for his idea. It was a
composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with
caterpillar wheels and the motor-car. These things had welded themselves
together gradually in Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge.
The table in Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was
now covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made
them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him,
and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little
ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day
in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless
spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took
shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had
conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image
of the _forteresse mobile_, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost that
stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the vision.

But the image of Desmond was there.

At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder when
Desmond will have finished the drawings."

The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond's caprice.

The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before these
could be fitted together and the permanent model of the Moving Fortress
set up. The Moving Fortress itself waited upon Desmond.

For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not draw his
plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who understood engines to
draw them. He was haunted, almost insanely, by the fear that somebody
else would hit upon the idea of the Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so
obvious that no gunner and no engineer could miss it. And the drawings
Desmond made for him, the drawings in black and white, the drawings in
grey wash, and the coloured drawings were perfect. Nicky, unskilled in
everything but the inventing and building up of engines, did not know
how perfect the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the
extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the easels in
her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he took Desmond
into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on her.

He didn't care. He liked Desmond. He couldn't help it if Drayton
disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn't like her. She was, he said to
himself, a ripping good sort. She might be frightfully clever; Nicky
rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she never talked
that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy's other friends talked. She
let you think.

It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn't like her and that
Frank Drayton disapproved of her.

"They wouldn't," said Nicky, "if they knew you." And he turned again to
the subject of his Moving Fortress.

For Desmond's intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was perfect,
and her way of listening was perfect. She sat on the floor, on the
orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience, embracing her
knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms, while Nicky stamped up
and down her studio and talked to her, like a monomaniac, about his
Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have
to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at
him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she
liked his young naïveté and monomania; she liked his face and all his
gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.

And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled eyes and in
her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It
was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its
long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven
with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body
than to her spirit and her mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early summer,
when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent him motoring
about the country on their business, he took Desmond with him and
Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on the grass borders
of the high roads and on the edges of the woods and moors, and Desmond
painted her extraordinary pictures while Nicky lay on his back beside
her with his face turned up to the sky and dreamed of flying machines.

For he had done with his Moving Fortress. It only waited for Desmond to
finish the last drawing.

When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank Drayton
before he sent them to the War Office.

He lived for that moment of completion.

       *       *       *       *       *

And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of nineteen-eleven
Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased and flowered and
ripened to its fulfilment. And in the early summer she found that things
had happened as she had meant that they should happen.

She had always meant it. She had always said, and she had always thought
that women were no good unless they had the courage of their opinions;
the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice that prevented them
from getting what they wanted.

Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked her in.
Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought that by simply
spinning round faster and faster she added her own energy to the whirl.
It was not Dorothy's vortex, or the vortex of the fighting Suffrage
woman. Desmond didn't care very much about the Suffrage; or about any
kind of freedom but her own kind; or about anybody's freedom but her
own. Maud Blackadder's idea of freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and
physical insanity. Yet each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and
Mrs. Blathwaite and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own
particular swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century. If you had
youth and life in you, you were in revolt.

Desmond's theories were Dorothy's theories too; only that while Dorothy,
as Rosalind had said, thought out her theories in her brain without
feeling them, Desmond felt them with her whole being; and with her whole
being, secret, subtle and absolutely relentless, she was bent on
carrying them out.

And in the summer, in the new season, Headley Richards decided that he
had no further use for Desmond. The new play had run its course at the
Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards had been
disappointed. He put down the failure mainly to the queerness of the
dresses and the scenery she had designed for him. Desmond's new art was
too new; people weren't ready yet for that sort of thing. At the same
time he discovered that he was really very much attached to his own wife
Ginny, and when Ginny nobly offered to give him his divorce he had
replied nobly that he didn't want one. And he left Desmond to face
the music.

Desmond's misery was acute; but it was not so hopeless as it would have
been if she could have credited Ginny Richards with any permanent power
of attraction for Headley. She knew he would come back to her. She knew
the power of her own body. She held him by the tie that was never broken
so long as it endured. He would never marry her; yet he would come back.

But in the interval between these acts there was the music.

And the first sound of the music, the changed intonations of her
landlady, frightened Desmond; for though she was older than Nicky she
was very young. And there were Desmond's people. You may forget that you
have people and behave as if they weren't there; but, if they are there,
sooner or later they will let you know it. An immense volume of sound
and some terrifying orchestral effects were contributed by Desmond's
people. So that the music was really very bad to bear.

Desmond couldn't bear it. And in her fright she thought of Nicky.

She knew that she hadn't a chance so long as he was absorbed in the
Moving Fortress. But the model was finished and set up and she was at
work on the last drawing. And no more ideas for engines were coming into
Nicky's head. The Morss Company and Nicky himself were even beginning to
wonder whether there ever would be any more.

Then Nicky thought of Desmond. And he showed that he was thinking of her
by sitting still and not talking when he was with her. She did not fill
that emptiness and spaciousness of Nicky's head, but he couldn't get her
out of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Vera noticed the silence of the two she became uneasy, and judged
that the time had come for discreet intervention.

"Nicky," she said, "is it true that Desmond's been doing drawings for
you?"

"Yes," said Nicky, "she's done any amount."

"My dear boy, have you any idea of the amount you'll have to pay her?"

"I haven't," said Nicky, "I wish I had. I hate asking her, and yet I
suppose I'll have to."

"Of course you'll have to. _She_ won't hate it. She's got to earn her
living as much as you have."

"Has she? You don't mean to say she's hard up?"

He had never thought of Desmond as earning her own living, still less as
being hard up.

"I only wish she were," said Vera, "for your sake."

"Why on earth for my sake?"

"Because _then_, my dear Nicky, you wouldn't have to pay so stiff a
price."

"I don't care," said Nicky, "how stiff the price is. I shall pay it."

And Vera replied that Desmond, in her own queer way, really was a rather
distinguished painter. "Pay her," she said. "Pay her for goodness sake
and have done with it. And if she wants to give you things don't
let her."

"As if," said Nicky, "I should dream of letting her."

And he went off to Chelsea to pay Desmond then and there.

Vera thought that she had been rather clever. Nicky would dash in and do
the thing badly. He would be very proud about it, and he would revolt
from his dependence on Desmond, and he would show her--Vera hoped that
he would show her--that he did not want to be under any obligation to
her. And Desmond would be hurt and lose her temper. The hard look would
get into her face and destroy its beauty, and she would say detestable
things in a detestable voice, and a dreadful ugliness would come between
them, and the impulse of Nicky's yet unborn passion would be checked,
and the memory of that abominable half-hour would divide them for ever.

       *       *       *       *       *

But Vera herself had grown hard and clever. She had forgotten Nicky's
tenderness, and she knew nothing at all about Desmond's fright. And, as
it happened, neither Nicky nor Desmond did any of the things she thought
they would do.

Nicky was not impetuous. He found Desmond in her studio working on the
last drawing of the Moving Fortress, with the finished model before her.
That gave him his opening, and he approached shyly and tentatively.

Desmond put on an air of complete absorption in her drawing; but she
smiled. A pretty smile that lifted the corners of her mouth and made it
quiver, and gave Nicky a queer and unexpected desire to kiss her.

He went on wanting to know what his debt was--not that he could ever
really pay it.

"Oh, you foolish Nicky," Desmond said.

He repeated himself over and over again, and each time she had an
answer, and the answers had a cumulative effect.

"There isn't any debt. You don't pay anything--"

"I didn't do it for _that_, you silly boy."

"What did I do it for? I did it for fun. You couldn't draw a thing like
that for anything else. Look at it--"

--"Well, if you want to be horrid and calculating about it, think of the
lunches and the dinners and the theatre tickets and the flowers you've
given _me_. Oh, and the gallons and gallons of petrol. How am I ever to
pay you back again?"

Thus she mocked him.

"Can't you see how you're spoiling it all?"

And then, passionately: "Oh, Nicky, please don't say it again. It
hurts."

She turned on him her big black looking-glass eyes washed bright, each
with one tear that knew better than to fall just yet. He must see that
she was holding herself well in hand. It would be no use letting herself
go until he had forgotten his Moving Fortress. He was looking at the
beastly thing now, instead of looking at her.

"Are you thinking of another old engine?"

"No," said Nicky. "I'm not thinking of anything."

"Then you don't want me to do any more drawings?"

"No."

"Well then--I wonder whether you'd very much mind going away?"

"Now?"

"No. Not now. But soon. From here. Altogether."

"Go? Altogether? Me? Why?"

He was utterly astonished. He thought that he had offended Desmond past
all forgiveness.

"Because I came here to be alone. To work. And I can't work. And I want
to be alone again."

"Am I--spoiling it?"

"Yes. You're spoiling it damnably."

"I'm sorry, Desmond. I didn't mean to. I thought--" But he hadn't the
heart to say what he had thought.

She looked at him and knew that the moment was coming.

It had come.

She turned away from the table where the Moving Fortress stood,
threatening her with its mimic guns, and reminding Nicky of the things
she most wanted him to forget. She withdrew to her crouching place at
the other end of the studio, among the cushions.

He followed her there with slow, thoughtful steps, steps full of
brooding purpose and of half-unconscious meaning.

"Nicky, I'm so unhappy. I didn't know it was possible for anybody to be
so unhappy in this world."

She began to cry quietly.

"Desmond--what is it? What is it? Tell me. Why can't you tell me?"

       *       *       *       *       *

She thought, "It will be all right if he kisses me once. If he holds me
in his arms once. Then I can tell him."

For then he would know that he loved her. He was not quite sure now. She
knew that he was not quite sure. She trusted to the power of her body to
make him sure.

Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor pitied
it.

He had kissed her. He had held her in his arms and kissed her more than
once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow of his arm.
She was weak and small. She was like some small, soft, helpless animal
and she was hurt. Her sobbing and panting made her ribs feel fragile
like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless animal under the pressure of
his arms. And she was frightened.

He couldn't stand the sight of suffering. He had never yet resisted the
appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and pain. He could feel
Desmond's heart going thump, thump, under the blue thing he called her
pinafore. Her heart hurt him with its thumping.

And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was smooth and
sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf. And Desmond knew that he knew it.
His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over the long, polished
bands of her black hair; and he thought that he loved her. Desmond knew
that he thought it.

And still she waited. She said to herself, "It's no good his thinking
it. I daren't tell him till he says it. Till he asks me to marry him."

       *       *       *       *       *

He had said it at last. And he had asked her to marry him. And then she
had told him.

And all that he said was, "I don't care." He said it to Desmond, and he
said it to himself.

The funny thing was that he did not care. He was as miserable as it was
well possible to be, but he didn't really care. He was not even
surprised. It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in the back
of his head behind all the ideas.

And yet he couldn't have known it all the time. Either it must have gone
away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not to see it.

She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her mouth
and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief, controlling herself,
crying quietly.

She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn't love her. If
he had loved her he would have cared intolerably. He didn't care about
Headley Richards because he didn't care about Desmond any more. He was
only puzzled.

"Why did you do it?"

"I can't think why. I must have been off my head. I didn't know what it
was like. I didn't know. I thought it would be wonderful and beautiful.
I thought he was wonderful and beautiful."

"Poor little Desmond."

"Oh, Nicky, do you think me a beast? Does it make you hate me?"

"No. Of course it doesn't. The only awful thing is--"

"What? Tell me."

"Well--you see--"

"You mean the baby? I know it's awful. You needn't tell me that, Nicky."

He stared at her.

"I mean it's so awful for _it_."

She thought he had been thinking of himself and her.

"Why should it be?"

"Why? There isn't any why. It just is. I _know_ it is."

He was thinking of Veronica.

"You see," he said simply, "that's why this sort of thing is such a
rotten game. It's so hard on the kiddy. I suppose you didn't think of
that. You couldn't have, or else you wouldn't--"

He paused. There was one thing he had to know. He must get it out of
her.

"It hasn't made you feel that you don't want it?"

"Oh--I don't know what I want--_now_. I don't know what it makes me
feel!"

"Don't let it, Desmond. Don't let it. It'll be all right. You won't feel
like that when you've married me. Can't you see that _that's_ the
wonderful and beautiful part?"

"_What_ is?" she said in her tired drawl.

"_It_--the poor kiddy."

Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.

       *       *       *       *       *

Veronica's mother was the first to hear about it. Desmond told her.

Veronica's mother was determined to stop it for the sake of everybody
concerned.

She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her one
evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else. (Lawrence
Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where Vera was not
received; but sometimes, when the occasion was political, or otherwise
important, he had to. That was her punishment, as Bartholomew had meant
that it should be.)

Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt's assaults and
manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.

"You mustn't do it; you simply mustn't."

He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.

"It isn't. It's the affair of everybody who cares for you."

"Their caring isn't my affair," said Nicky.

And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.

"It's absurd of you," she said, "to treat her as if she was an innocent
child. She isn't a child, and she isn't innocent. She knew perfectly
well what she was about. There's nothing she doesn't know. She meant it
to happen, and she made it happen. She said she would. She meant you to
marry her, and she's making you marry her. I daresay she said she would.
She's as clever and determined as the devil. Neither you nor Headley
Richards ever had a chance against her."

"She hasn't got a dog's chance against all you people yelping at her now
she's down. I should have thought--"

"You mean _I_'ve no business to? That was different. I didn't take any
other woman's husband, or any other woman's lover, Nicky."

"If you had," said Nicky, "I wouldn't have interfered."

"I wouldn't interfere if I thought you cared _that_ for Desmond. But you
don't. You know you don't."

"Of course I care for her."

He said it stoutly, but he coloured all the same, and Vera knew that he
was vulnerable.

"Oh, Nicky dear, if you'd only waited--"

"What do you mean?"

His young eyes interrogated her austerely; and she flinched. "I don't
know what I mean. Unless I mean that you're just a little young to
marry anybody."

"I don't care if I am. I don't _feel_ young, I can tell you. Anyhow
Desmond's years younger."

"Desmond is twenty-three. You're twenty. It's Veronica who's years
younger."

"Veronica?"

"She's sixteen. You don't imagine Desmond is as young as that, do you?
Wait till she's twenty-five and you're twenty-two."

"It wouldn't do poor Desmond much good if I did. I could kill Headley
Richards."

"What for?"

"For leaving her."

Vera smiled. "That shows how much you care. You wouldn't have felt like
killing him if he'd stuck to her. Why should you marry Headley Richards'
mistress and take on his child? It's preposterous."

"It isn't. If the other fellow's a brute it's all the more reason why I
shouldn't be. I want to be some use in this rotten world where people
are so damnably cruel to each other. And there's that unhappy kiddy.
You've forgotten the kiddy."

"Do you mean to say it's Desmond's child _you_'re thinking of?"

"I can't understand any woman not thinking of it," said Nicky.

He looked at her, and she knew that he remembered Veronica.

Then she gave him back his own with interest, for his good.

"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for your own
children?"

It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why don't
you marry _her_?"

"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.

Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry
Desmond.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards. "Nothing I said
made the least impression on him."

That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true.
But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to
it that Desmond's affair would have made no impression on him if it had
not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor's wife. And it
would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made
love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry
Phyllis Desmond.

These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of
Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.

Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not been
removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of apology and
restitution came. But both apology and restitution came too late.

For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.



XIV

After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.

Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their house,
one on each side of the fireplace. They had it all to themselves, except
for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on the hearthrug at their
feet. Frances's forehead and her upper lip were marked delicately with
shallow, tender lines; Anthony's eyes had crow's-feet at their corners,
pointing to grey hairs at his temples. To each other their faces were as
they had been fifteen years ago. The flight of time was measured for
them by the generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry.
For still in secret they refused to think of their children as grown-up.

Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the Women's
Franchise Union. They owed it to her magnanimity that they had one child
remaining with them in the house. John was at Cheltenham; Veronica was
in Dresden. Michael was in Germany, too, at that School of Forestry at
Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant for Nicky. They couldn't bear to
think where Nicky was.

When Frances thought about her children now her mind went backwards. If
only they hadn't grown-up; if only they could have stayed little for
ever! In another four years even Don-Don would be grown-up--Don-Don who
was such a long time getting older that at fourteen, only two years
ago, he had been capable of sitting in her lap, a great long-legged,
flumbering puppy, while mother and son rocked dangerously together in
each other's arms, like two children, laughing together, mocking
each other.

She was going to be wiser with Don-Don than she had been with Nicky. She
would be wiser with Michael when he came back from Germany. She would
keep them both out of the Vortex, the horrible Vortex that Lawrence
Stephen and Vera had let Nicky in for, the Vortex that seized on youth
and forced it into a corrupt maturity. After Desmond's affair Anthony
and Frances felt that to them the social circle inhabited by Vera and
Lawrence Stephen would never be anything but a dirty hell.

As for Veronica, the longer she stayed in Germany the better.

Yet Frances knew that they had not sent Veronica to Dresden to prevent
her mother from getting hold of her. When she remembered the fear she
had had of the apple-tree house, she said to herself that Desmond was a
judgment on her for sending little Veronica away.

And yet it was the kindest thing they could have done for her. Veronica
was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and studying music and
the language. She had no idea that music and the language were mere
blinds, and that she had been sent to the German family to keep her out
of Nicky's way.

They would have them all back again at Christmas. Frances counted the
days. From to-night, the seventh of June, to December the twentieth was
not much more than six months.

To-night, the seventh of June, was Nicky's wedding-night. But they did
not know that. Nicky had kept the knowledge from them, in his mercy, to
save them the agony of deciding whether they would recognize the
marriage or not. And as neither Frances nor Anthony had ever faced
squarely the prospect of disaster to their children, they had turned
their backs on Nicky's marriage and supported each other in the hope
that at the last minute something would happen to prevent it.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ten o'clock post, and two letters from Germany. Not from Michael,
not from Veronica. One from Frau Schäfer, the mother of the German
family. It was all in German, and neither Anthony nor Frances could make
out more than a word here and there. "Das süsse, liebe Mädchen" meant
Veronica. But certain phrases: "traurige Nachrichten" ... "furchtbare
Schwächheit" ... "... eine entsetzliche Blutleere ..." terrified them,
and they sent for Dorothy to translate.

Dorothy was a good German scholar, but somehow she was not very fluent.
She scowled over the letter.

"What does it mean?" said Frances. "Hæmorhage?"

"No. No. Anæmia. Severe anæmia. Heart and stomach trouble."

"But 'traurige Nachrichten' is 'bad news.' They're breaking it to us
that she's dying."

(It was unbearable to think of Nicky marrying Ronny; but it was more
unbearable to think of Ronny dying.)

"They don't say they're sending _us_ bad news; they say they think
Ronny must have had some. To account for her illness. Because they say
she's been so happy with them."

"But what bad news could she have had?"

"Perhaps she knows about Nicky."

"But nobody's told her, unless Vera has."

"She hasn't. I know she hasn't. She didn't want her to know."

"Well, then--"

"Mummy, you don't _have_ to tell Ronny things. She always knows them."

"How on earth could she know a thing like that?"

"She might. She sort of sees things--like Ferdie. She may have seen him
with Desmond. You can't tell."

"Do they say what the doctor thinks?"

"Yes. He thinks it's worry and Heimweh--homesickness. They want us to
send for her and take her back. Not let her have another term."

Though Frances loved Veronica she was afraid of her coming back. For she
was more than ever convinced that something would happen and that Nicky
would not marry Desmond.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other letter was even more difficult to translate or to understand
when translated.

The authorities at Aschaffenburg requested Herr Harrison to remove his
son Michael from the School of Forestry. Michael after his first few
weeks had done no good at the school. In view of the expense to Herr
Harrison involved in his fees and maintenance, they could not honestly
advise his entering upon another term. It would only be a deplorable
throwing away of money on a useless scheme. His son Michael had no
thoroughness, no practical ability, and no grasp whatever of theoretic
detail. From Herr Harrison's point of view this was the more regrettable
inasmuch as the young man had colossal decision and persistence and
energy of his own. He was an indefatigable dreamer. Very likely--when
his dreams had crystallized--a poet. But the idea Herr Harrison had had
that his son Michael would make a man of business, or an expert in
Forestry, was altogether fantastic and absurd. And from the desperate
involutions of the final sentence Dorothy disentangled the clear fact
that Michael's personal charm, combined with his hostility to
discipline, his complete indifference to the aims of the authorities,
and his utter lack of any sense of responsibility, made him a dangerous
influence in any school.

That was the end of Anthony's plans for Michael.

The next morning Nicky wired from some village in Sussex: "Married
yesterday.--NICKY."

After that nothing seemed to matter. With Nicky gone from them they were
glad to have Michael back again. Frances said they might be thankful for
one thing--that there wasn't any German Peggy or any German Desmond in
Michael's problem.

And since both Michael and Veronica were to be removed at once, the
simplest arrangement was that he should return to Dresden and bring her
back with him.

Frances had never been afraid for Michael.

Michael knew that he had made havoc of his father's plans. He couldn't
help that. His affair was far too desperate. And any other man but his
father would have foreseen that the havoc was inevitable and would have
made no plans. He knew he had been turned into the tree-travelling
scheme that had been meant for Nicky, because, though Nicky had slipped
out of it, his father simply couldn't bear to give up his idea. And no
wonder, when the dear old thing had so few of them.

He had been honest with his father about it; every bit as honest as
Nicky had been. He had wanted to travel if he could go to China and
Japan, just as Nicky had wanted to travel if he could go to places like
the West Indies and the Himalaya. And he didn't mind trying to get the
trees in when he was there. He was even prepared to accept Germany and
the School for Forestry if Germany was the only way to China and Japan.
But he had told his father not to mind if nothing came of it at the end
of all the travelling. And his father had said he would take the risk.
He preferred taking the risk to giving up his idea.

And Michael had been honest with himself. He had told himself that he
too must take some risks, and the chances were that a year or two in
Germany wouldn't really hurt him. Things never did hurt you as much as
you thought they would. He had thought that Cambridge would do all sorts
of things to him, and Cambridge had not done anything to him at all. As
for Oxford, it had given him nearly all the solitude and liberty he
wanted, and more companionship than he was ever likely to want. At
twenty-two Michael was no longer afraid of dying before he had finished
his best work. In spite of both Universities he had done more or less
what he had meant to do before he went to Germany. His work had not yet
stood the test of time, but to make up for that he himself, in his
uneasy passion for perfection, like Time, destroyed almost as much as he
created. Still, after some pitiless eliminations, enough of his verse
remained for one fine, thin book.

It would be published if Lawrence Stephen approved of the selection.

So, Michael argued, even if he died to-morrow there was no reason why he
should not go to Germany to-day.

He was too young to know that he acquiesced so calmly because his soul
was for a moment appeased by accomplishment.

He was too young to know that his soul had a delicate, profound and
hidden life of its own, and that in secret it approached the crisis of
transition. It was passing over from youth to maturity, like a
sleep-walker, unconscious, enchanted, seeing its way without seeing it,
safe only from the dangers of the passage if nobody touched it, and if
it went alone.

Michael had no idea of what Germany could and would do to his soul.

Otherwise he might have listened to what Paris had to say by way of
warning.

For his father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to Germany,
as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's point of view)
was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old Pater be expected to
know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no sort of way even to South
Germany? He should have gone to Brussels, if he was ever, spiritually
speaking, to get there at all.

And neither Anthony nor Frances knew that Lawrence Stephen had plans for
Michael.

Michael went to Paris with his unpublished poems in his pocket and a
letter of introduction from Stephen to Jules Réveillaud. He left it with
revolution in his soul and the published poems of Réveillaud and his
followers in his suit-case, straining and distending it so that it burst
open of its own accord at the frontier.

Lawrence Stephen had said to him: "Before you write another line read
Réveillaud and show him what you've written."

Jules Réveillaud was ten years older than Michael, and he recognized the
symptoms of the crisis. He could see what was happening and what had
happened and would happen in Michael's soul. He said: "One third of each
of your poems is good. And there are a few--the three last--which are
all good."

"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."

"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is why they
are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do not publish
these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more experiments. And
whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School of Forestry would be
very bad for you. Why not," said Réveillaud, "stay where you are?"

Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris with
Jules Réveillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because his conscience
kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a blackguard if he
stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.

In the train, going into Germany, he read Réveillaud's "Poèmes" and the
"Poèmes" of the young men who followed him. He had read in Paris
Réveillaud's "Critique de la Poésie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he
read his poems, he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with
"la poésie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had supposed,
alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms, doing new
things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other people, in a
world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen, understood or cared for
what he did, it was pure illusion. These young Frenchmen, with Jules
Réveillaud at their head, were doing the same thing, making the same
experiment, believing in the experiment, caring for nothing but the
experiment, and carrying it farther than he had dreamed of carrying it.
They were not so far ahead of him in time; Réveillaud himself had only
two years' start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that
he must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of rottenness,
"la poésie anglaise contemporaine."

He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse" before he
left England, after he had said he would go to Germany, even after the
final arrangements had been made. His father had given him a month to
"turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had turned completely round.

He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what to
think of them himself. But he could see, when once Réveillaud had
pointed it out to him, that they were the stuff that counted.

In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things that
Réveillaud had said: "Nous avons trempé la poésie dans la peinture et la
musique. Il faut la délivrer par la sculpture. Chaque ligne, chaque
vers, chaque poème taillé en bloc, sans couleur, sans decor, sans
rime."... "La sainte pauvresse du style dépouillé."... "Il faut de la
dureté, toujours de la dureté."

He thought of Réveillaud's criticism, and his sudden startled spurt of
admiration: "Mais! Vous l'avez trouvée, la beauté de la ligne droite."

And Réveillaud's question: "Vraiment? Vous n'avez jamais lu un seul vers
de mes poèmes? Alors, c'est étonnant." And then: "C'est que la réalité
est plus forte que nous."

The revolting irony of it! After stumbling and fumbling for years by
himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard Reality; trying
not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary rottenness; and,
suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had got it, so that, but for
Réveillaud, he might easily have died in his ignorance; and then, in the
incredible moment of realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on
Paris, where he wanted to live, and on Réveillaud whom he wanted to
know, and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off
to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.