*       *       *       *       *

Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall
to receive the prisoners.

The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue of the
Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned banners. The
silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage Leagues and
Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged along three
walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and heroic colours,
purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and royal blue, black, white
and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure white, dead-black, orange and
scarlet and magenta.

From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent tables
decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In the centre of
the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the tricolour, were set
like three thrones for the three leaders. They were flanked by nine
other chairs on the right and nine on the left for the eighteen other
prisoners.

There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to the high
table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged sound of rustling
as the three hundred and fifty turned in their places.

The twenty-one prisoners came in.

A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself up in
the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to their feet.

And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a savage
and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as of glass or
thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of
small, slender-throated animals were held together by ringing,
vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins playing in the treble. And
now a woman's voice started off on its own note and tore the delicate
tissue of this sound with a solitary scream; and now a man's voice
filled up a pause in the shrill hurrahing with a solitary boom.

To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right hand, to
Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among the crowd, that
collective sound was frightful.

From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one on each
side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing them, she
saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.

It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.

       *       *       *       *       *

The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The crowd was
on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their high places.

Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and seventy-nine
women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of the
Militant Women.

     Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,
     Our army moves from east to west.
         Follow on! Follow on!

     With flag and sword from south and north,
     The sounding, shining hosts go forth.
         Follow on! Follow on!

     Do you not bear our marching feet,
     From door to door, from street to street?
         Follow on! Follow on!

Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying, excited
crowd.

Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top of
their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang from the
back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently open; she
sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever it might cost
her and other people.

Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its utmost, was
overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang shrill and loud;
her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a fantastic march. With one
large, long hand raised she beat the measure of the music. Her head was
thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy
rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane.

Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.

The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her
old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion threatened her.
She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its
nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her
soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd
in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by
the Vortex. She felt the rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her
breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing
almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.

She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the same
awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at Emmeline she
saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and hard and sane.

She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and
Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul.
The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as needles, tortured him.
Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom. His fair, handsome face was
set clear and hard. His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his
head like a cap of solid, polished metal. Weariness and disgust made a
sort of cloud over his light green eyes. When Nicky looked at him
Nicky's face twitched and twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as
Michael hated it.

She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they stuck
it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria Threlfall
were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from Blackfriars Bridge
along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall and
Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and Nicholas would march
beside them to hold up the poles of the standard which, after all, they
were not strong enough to carry.

She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same time
she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison cell. She
had told him the most real thing that had ever happened to her, and he
had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would have listened. Michael
would have cared intensely.

She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The sword
was between her and her lover.

She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the Vortex,
but between him and her vision which was more than either of them or
than all this.

She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in the
hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her lover. She
wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could have done as
much, supposing they had had a choice?

Then she looked at Veronica.

Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was slender and
beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin. Presently she would be
marching in the Procession. She would carry a thin, tall pole, with a
round olive wreath on the top of it, and a white dove sitting in the
ring of the olive wreath. And she would look as if she was not in the
Procession but in another place.

When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane ecstasy
and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of Veronica went
alone in utter freedom.

     Follow on! Follow on!

     For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,
     And Love's our mighty battle-lord.
     Follow on! Follow on!

     And Justice is our flag unfurled,
     The flaming flag that sweeps the world.
     Follow on! Follow on!

     And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;
     For Freedom we will fight and die.
     Follow on! Follow on!

The Procession was over a mile long.

It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge to
Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and the
Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside Cleopatra's
Needle and the Sphinxes.

Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to Northumberland
Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and Societies and Leagues,
of the trades and the professions and the arts, carrying their banners,
the purple and the blue, the black, white and gold, the green, the
orange and the scarlet and magenta.

Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady Victoria
Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense tricolour
standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them. Behind the
prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of young girls
dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying a pole with the
olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the obviousness of extreme
innocence, the peace that follows victory. They were led by Veronica.

She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because of her
youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought that the Union
had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged to Dorothea.

From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the big red,
white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady Victoria
Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria, white and tense,
would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation, hardly knowing where
she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would go in pride, and in disdain
for the proceedings in which her honour forced her to take part; she
would have an awful knowledge of what she was doing and of where she
was; she would drink every drop of the dreadful cup she had poured out
for herself, hating it.

Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she thought
that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But she did not
hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful and too big to
hate, and her part in it was too little.

She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the Procession.
She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements, pressing closer
and closer, pushed back continually by the police. Her soul was by
itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the soul of the crowd
and the soul of the Procession; only it was not proud; it was
simply happy.

The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the music
sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the march.

Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release, and the
whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard music, to the
rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.

They went through what were once streets between walls of houses, and
were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The visible aspect
of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted. The houses stood
farther back behind the walls of people; they were hung with people; a
swarm of people clung like bees to the house walls.

All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still and
stationary world the Procession was the only thing that moved.

She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was friendly.

A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the
cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign
expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman was
friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.

Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary Procession
should be allowed to fill the streets of a great capital, and that a
body of the same police that arrested the insurgents should go with it
to protect them, to clear their triumphal way before them, holding up
the entire traffic of great thoroughfares that their bands and their
banners and their regiments should go through. She said to herself "What
a country! It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France,
or anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in England."

Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly. The band
was playing the Marseillaise.

And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down from its
place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they played the
Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the Procession to the
ends of the world; she could march into battle to the Marseillaise; she
could fight to that music and die.

The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang the
words of the Women's Marseillaise.

And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another song.
She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.

     "'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl Гјber mein Grab,
     Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;
      Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--
      Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schГјtzen!'"

The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn Hill.

Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that they were
there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the standard that they
carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and front of the Procession,
the purple and the blue, the gold and white, the green, the scarlet and
orange and magenta standards rocked and staggered; they bent forwards;
they were flung backwards as the west wind took them. But the red, white
and blue standard that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her,
steady and straight and high.

And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the olive
wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the ring of the
wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine sounding in
her soul.



XVII

Another year passed.

Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in. Because
of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children who had most
hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide himself from her to
the very end.

Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and gone into
his father's business for a while, to see whether he could stand it.
John was going into the business too when he left Oxford. John was even
looking forward to his partnership in what he called "the Pater's old
tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get my hand well in. Won't we
make it rip!"

John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble. He had no
genius for adventure. He would never strike out for himself any strange
or dangerous line. He had settled down at Cheltenham; he had settled
down at Oxford.

And Dorothea had settled down.

The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution.
Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and
down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer
bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into
pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in
barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from
infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons
and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show
what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or
two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed
by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering seriously the
very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British
sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in some drastic and
terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.

And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind. It
would never suck her in. She worked now in the office of the Social
Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for _The New
Commonwealth_ on Economics and the Marriage Laws.

Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the revolution
was all in Dorothea's brain.

When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was
being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances
confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged
it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it was _the_ Vortex,
the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever
do anything.

And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.

Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she
did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on
him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help
him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his
_Review_. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would
give a whole article to that book in his _Review_. If Michael's prose
should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on
the _Review_.

In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the
revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems
were beginning to appear, one after another, in the _Green Review_. He
had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year;
they were better than those that RГ©veillaud had approved of two years
ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in the _Green Review_.

Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he said, who
would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.

And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence Stephen she
was afraid.

"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.

For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand
Cameron's place.

Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland
with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was
a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be
compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's
body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit
hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation
for himself.

He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken
from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the
English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to
love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in
Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn;
he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get
his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn
in England's side.

And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his
talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but
he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one
of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland
produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels
like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny
as itself. Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the
material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.

He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner
settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled with this
mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim
where his people married.

Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have
been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too
wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary politics
and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own. And yet
few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on the House of
Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic politician he ran
Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists
nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief.
In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a
novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed
not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men
of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated
by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there
was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.

Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he would, he
fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and
England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike,
and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and
every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men
were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet
on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.

A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It would at
any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he presented to two
countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with
violence in a dead straight line. He moved so fast that to a stationary
on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended. It
was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a
complete all-round view of the amazing man.

But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious
brilliance.

And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet
forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men
of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all England you could not
have found a lonelier man.

The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations
of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison
and yet he was not married. He was neither bound nor free.

All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.

And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the
Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera,
after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for
everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.

All his life _his_ passions had been at the service of ideas. All his
life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction
and consummation; and he had not found it.

In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was
still waiting for his supreme opportunity.

Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.

But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily
on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture,
to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had put his political
failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as an artist or not at
all." They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.

There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was
in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just
behind him. To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution
in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was
happening without him. He was not the primal energy in the movement of
the Vortex. In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he
was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther
than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was attracted to the
young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had
rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own
youth. They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction,
his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity. A prosperous,
well-established Stephen would have revolted them. He gave the
revolutionaries the shelter of his _Review_, the support of his name,
and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in
return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their
merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
abominated.

"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
Swinburne."

Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.

He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew that the
young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his
dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when
he made place for the new.

       *       *       *       *       *

Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
Stephen's study.

He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated,
half affable affection.

The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that house in
St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera Harrison. They
were at home there. Their books stood in his bookcase; they laid their
manuscripts on his writing table and left them there; they claimed his
empty spaces for the hanging of their pictures yet unsold.

Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at the top
of the house, and they talked.

Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet them there,
and to listen and to talk.

To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were Austen
Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young sculptor,
and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton Ellis's disciples.

Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean and
dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses, smooth and
straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and a bitter,
sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard drawn, while the
lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and protested and recanted, was
sceptical and sensitive and tender. His short, high nose had wide yet
fastidious nostrils.

It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes followed
with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he
might escape her, might be off, God knew where.

Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of
his mistress and his friends.

"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I
want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in
Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley
and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their
imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in
destroying them."

"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They breed
the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a stinking
suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if we're to get
rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new and clean. There
isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So long as old masters are
kow-towed to as masters people will go on imitating them. When a poet
ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go."

Michael said, "How about _us_ when people imitate us? Have we got to
go?"

Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't
got to go."

"I don't see how you get out of it."

"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."

There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It
made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.

"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.

"Nobody, so far, _has_ imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have
_succeeded_ in imitating me."

There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the
imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by
his contemporaries.

"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy
Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."

"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does
come down out of heaven. You _can_ trace my sources, thank God, because
they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine
like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions)
"have made filthy with their paddling."

He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised, Harrison, is
absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then, supposing the
revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because it's come. We
_are_ the revolution--the revolution means that we've made a clean sweep
of the past. In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody. No
artist will be allowed to exist unless he's prepared to be buried alive
or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the
processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.

"That's why violence is right.

     "'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo
     Sanguigno, stupra le albe,
     irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,
     fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,
     fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,
     fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'

"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right because it's
necessary."

"You mean it's necessary because it's right."

Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of great
strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair grow long
and cultivating two beards instead of one.

"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy must be
got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy instead of
standing still. The difference between Pastism and Futurism is the
difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist art is simply art that
has gone on, that, has left off being static and become dynamic. It
expresses movement. Owen will tell you better than I can why it
expresses movement."

A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul Monier-Owen had
curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes of a young wild animal
roused in its lair.

Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little distance he
had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black panther, half cub,
half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of his prominent eyes, his
eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted slightly upwards and backwards.
Under his slender, mournful nose his restless smile showed the white
teeth of a young animal.

Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded incessantly
to any childish provocation, the intelligence of Monier-Owen watched in
his calm and beautiful forehead and in his eyes.

He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as
cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into
the lines and masses that compose them, and project those lines and
masses into space on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes
you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to
express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By
decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of
figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can
represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the
cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to
escape the eye.

"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It
can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitchell breaks them
up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It
can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and masses as I dislocate
them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact
body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.

"By taking time into account as well as space we produce rhythm.

"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the
Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the
sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are
supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because
arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of
arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.

"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body
which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in
movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and
in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I
wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."

"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out
against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw
a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and
nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of
Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality
what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.
But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present
rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."

He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted
language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely
arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and
individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more
than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver
the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas.
Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is
the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.

"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the
innocence of the eye."

       *       *       *       *       *

Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and
broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on
the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and
scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high
adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences
over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for
an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute
ineptitudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and
---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet,
Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the
Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.

Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in
Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than he
believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules
RГ©veillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all
the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of
qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.

But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old
horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
unanimity. The vortex--_the_ Vortex--was like the little vortex of
school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a
herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the
same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective
and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry
was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the
fugitive, solitary private soul.

And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had
the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing
some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away
from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.

Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a
great longing to break loose and get away.

He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think
they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come
of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't
see what's coming. Yet something must come. _They_ can't be the end."

He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.
It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have
helped to clear it."

He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and
of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.





PART III

VICTORY



XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So were young George Vereker and Miss Lathom.

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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