It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn't know about.
The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was under thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if he'd left it at that, because he looked a jolly sight better than most of 'em when he was stripped. But they'd given him so good an innings that the poor old thing got above himself, and spun them a yarn about his hair having gone grey from a recent shock. That dished him. They said they knew that sort of hair; they'd been seeing a lot of it lately.
Anthony was depressed. He said bitter things about "red tape," and declared that if that was the way things were going to be managed it was a bad look-out for the country. John was furious. He said the man who examined him was a blasted idiot who didn't know his own rotten business. He'd actually had the beastly cheek to tell him they didn't want him dropping down dead when he went into action, or fainting from sheer excitement after they'd been to the trouble and expense of training him. As if he'd be likely to do a damn silly thing like that. He'd never been excited in his life. It was enough togivehim heart-disease.
So John and Anthony followed the example of their women, and joined the ambulance classes of the Red Cross. And presently they learned to their disgust that, though they might possibly be accepted as volunteers for Home Service, their disabilities would keep them forever from the Front.
At this point Anthony's attention was diverted to his business by a sudden Government demand for timber. As he believed that the War would be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal significance of this. Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate message for him was that business must be attended to. He had not attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories. He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the glamour of the Front. The particular business in hand had great issues and a fascination of its own.
And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and abstracted soul.
And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener's Army, went rapidly through the first courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder every day.
And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael widened.
With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony's entire family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances and Anthony down to the very Aunties. In those days there were few Red Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be sent to the Front. Their only fear was that they might not be trained and ready when the moment of the summons came. Strong young girls hustled for the best places at the ambulance classes. Fragile, elderly women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless ones and were pushed to the rear. Yet they went on contending, sustained by their extraordinary illusion.
Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if nobody else was. Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral excitement, while still struggling to find each other's arteries, declared that they were going to the Front. They saw no earthly reason why they should not go there. Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor. He got mixed up with his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders to go to the Front.
They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each other's hopes.
For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had ceased from mutual recrimination. They were shocked into a curious gentleness to each other. Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael's study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline's head, and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie's little, clumsy, pinching fingers. It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.
And Grannie, immutable in her aged wisdom and malevolence, pushed out her lower lip at them.
"If you three would leave off that folly and sit down and knit, you might be some use," said Grannie. "Kitchener says that if every woman in England knitted from morning till night he wouldn't have enough socks for his Army."
Grannie knitted from morning till night. She knitted conspicuously, as a protest against bandage practice; giving to her soft and gentle action an air of energy inimical to her three unmarried daughters. And not even Louie had the heart to tell her that all her knitting had to be unravelled overnight, to save the wool.
"A set of silly women, getting in Kitchener's way, and wasting khaki!"
Grannie behaved as if the War were her private and personal affair, as if Kitchener were her right-hand man, and all the other women were interfering with them.
Yet it looked as if all the women would be mobilized before all the men. The gates of Holloway were opened, and Mrs. Blathwaite and her followers received a free pardon on their pledge to abstain from violence during the period of the War. And instantly, in the first week of war, the Suffrage Unions and Leagues and Societies (already organized and disciplined by seven years' methodical resistance) presented their late enemy, the Government, with an instrument of national service made to its hand and none the worse because originally devised for its torture and embarassment.
The little vortex of the Woman's Movement was swept without a sound into the immense vortex of the War. The women rose up all over England and went into uniform.
And Dorothea appeared one day wearing the khaki tunic, breeches and puttees of the Women's Service Corps. She had joined a motor-ambulance as chauffeur, driving the big Morss car that Anthony had given to it. Dorothea really had a chance of being sent to Belgium before the end of the month. Meanwhile she convoyed Belgian refugees from Cannon Street Station.
She saw nothing before her as yet. Her mind was like Cannon Street Station--a dreadful twilit terminus into which all the horror and misery of Belgium poured and was congested.
Cannon Street Station. Presently it was as if she were spending all of her life that counted there; as if for years she had been familiar with the scene.
Arch upon iron arch, and girder after iron girder holding up the blurred transparency of the roof. Iron rails running under the long roof, that was like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again to a ghastly, ruinous life.
The iron breasts of engines, huge and triumphant, advancing under the immense fanlight of the open arch. Long trains of carriages packed tight with packages, with, enormous bundles; human heads appearing, here and there, above the swollen curves of the bundles; human bodies emerging in the struggle to bring forth the bundles through the narrow doors.
For the first few weeks the War meant to Dorothea, not bleeding wounds and death, but just these train-loads of refugees--just this one incredible spectacle of Belgium pouring itself into Cannon Street Station. Her clear hard mind tried and failed to grasp the sequences of which the final act was the daily unloading of tons of men, women and children on Cannon Street platform. Yesterday they were staggering under those bundles along their straight, flat roads between the everlasting rows of poplars; their towns and villages flamed and smoked behind them; some of them, goaded like tired cattle, had felt German bayonets at their backs--yesterday. And this morning they were here, brave and gay, smiling at Dorothea as she carried their sick on her stretcher and their small children in her arms.
And they were still proud of themselves.
A little girl tripped along the platform, carrying in one hand a large pasteboard box covered with black oilcloth, and in the other a cage with a goldfinch in it. She looked back at Dorothea and smiled, proud of herself because she had saved her goldfinch. A Belgium boy carried a paralyzed old man on his shoulders. He grinned at Dorothea, proud of himself because he had saved his grandfather. A young Flemish peasant woman pushed back the shawl that covered her baby's face to show her how pretty he was; she laughed because she had borne him and saved him.
And there were terrible things significant of yesterday. Women and girls idiotic with outrage and grief. A young man lamed in trying to throw himself into a moving train because he thought his lost mother was in it. The ring screening the agony of a woman giving birth to her child on the platform. A death in the train; stiff, upturned feet at the end of a stretcher that the police-ambulance carried away.
And as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the shells burst, and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger. She was not feeling anything now except the shame of her immunity.
She thought: "I can't look at a Belgian woman without wishing I were dead. I shall have no peace till I've gone."
Her surface self was purely practical. She thought: "If I were in Belgium I could get them out of it quicker than they could walk."
Dorothea could bring all her mind to bear on her Belgians, because it was at ease about her own people. They, at any rate, were safe. Her father and poor Don were out of it. Michael was not in it--yet; though of course he would be in it some time. She tried not to think too much about Michael. Nicky was safe for the next six months. And Frank was safe. Frank was training recruits. He had told her he might be kept indefinitely at that infernal job. But for that he would be fighting now. He wanted her to be sorry for him; and she was sorry for him. And she was glad too.
One afternoon, late in August, she had come home, to sleep till dinner-time between her day's work and her night's work, when she found him upstairs in her study. He had been there an hour waiting for her by himself. The others were all at bandage practice in the schoolroom.
"I hope you don't mind," he said. "Your mother told me to wait up here."
She had come in straight from the garage; there was a light fur of dust on her boots and on the shoulders of her tunic, and on her face and hair. Her hands were black with oil and dirt from her car.
He looked at her, taking it all in: the khaki uniform (it was the first time he had seen her in it), the tunic, breeches and puttees, the loose felt hat turned up at one side, its funny, boyish chin-strap, the dust and dirt of her; and he smiled. His smile had none of the cynical derision which had once greeted her appearances as a militant suffragist.
"And yet," she thought, "if he's consistent, he ought to loathe me now."
"Dorothea. Going to the War," he said.
"Notyet--worse luck."
"Are you going as part of the Canadian contingent from overseas, or what?"
"I wish I was. Do you think they'd take me if I cut my hair off?"
"They might. They might do anything. This is a most extraordinary war."
"It's a war that makes it detestable to be a woman."
"I thought--" For a moment his old ungovernable devil rose in him.
"What did you think?"
"No matter. That's all ancient history. I say, you look like business. Do you really mean it? Are you really going to Flanders?"
"Do you suppose any woman would go and get herself up like this if she wasn't goingsomewhere?"
He said (surprisingly), "I don't see what's wrong with it." And then: "It makes you look about eighteen."
"That's because you can't see my face for the dirt."
"For the chin-strap, you mean. Dorothy--do you realize that you're not eighteen? You're eight and twenty."
"I do," she said. "But I rather hoped you didn't; or that if you did, you wouldn't say so."
"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made a pretty mess of each other's lives."
"Have I made a mess ofyourlife?'
"A beastly mess."
"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known. You know I wouldn't.
"But one doesn't know things."
"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully well; but not the things that matter."
"Well--but what could I do?" she said.
"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married me. And we would have had three years of each other."
"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't manage it."
"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.
"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I get leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three days."
"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three days--No, it wasn't worth while.
"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn't change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change. So, you see, it's got to be one thing or another."
And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not worth while?
"For God's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There really isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what you like and do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I shan't care if you'll only marry me."
"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love me. You never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all that."
"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine years--ten years?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go off and get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.
"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my face--filthy--you mustn't--"
"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't care."
The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she keeps it onnow!"
She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.
He said to himself, "Sheshallcome alive. Sheshallfeel. Sheshall wantme. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten years ago."
Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands. And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing something happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him now--to-night."
Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.
She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me if he knew."
Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?
They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.
"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there was anything that could have prevented it."
"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the difference. And there we were."
"It didn't--really."
She shook her head. "We thought it did."
"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?
"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."
"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that we seemed to go wrong.
"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or wondered what you were feeling?That'swhat put me off. It hurt so atrociously that I couldn't say anything.
"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about nothing else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.
"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't true. I was listening like anything."
"Darling--what did I tell you?"
"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your adventure, or something."
"My adventure?"
"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's beyond me now."
"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"
"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something big and important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to bother me. I kept on trying to get it, and not getting it."
"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully big and important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had happened to somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."
"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of that business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."
"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the War."
"You're not swallowed up."
"Perhaps I shall be."
"Well, if you are--if I am--all the more reason why I want you to know that I understand what you were driving at. It was this way, wasn't it? You'd got to fight, just as I've got to fight. You couldn't keep out of it any more than I can keep out of this War."
"You couldn't stay out just for me any more than I can stay out for just you."
"And in a sort of way I'm in it for you. And in a sort of way you were in it--in that damnable suffrage business--for me."
"How clever of you," she said, "to see it!"
"I didn't see it then," he said simply, "because there wasn't a war on. We've both had to pay for my stupidity."
"And mine. And my cowardice. I ought to have trusted you to see, or risked it. We should have had three--no, two--years."
"Well, anyhow, we've got this evening."
"We haven't. I've got to drive Belgians from nine till past midnight."
"We've got Friday. Suppose they'll give me leave to get married in. I say--how about to-morrow evening?"
"I can't. Yes, I can. At least, I shall. There's a girl I know who'll drive for me. They'll have to give me leave to get married in, too."
She thought: "I can't go to Flanders now, unless he's sent out. If he is, nothing shall stop me but his coming back again."
It seemed to her only fair and fitting that they should snatch at their happiness and secure it, before their hour came.
She tried to turn her mind from the fact that at Mons the British line was being pressed back and back. It would recover. Of course it would recover. We always began like that. We went back to go forwards faster, when we got into our stride.
The next evening, Thursday, the girl she knew drove for Dorothea.
When Frances was dressing for dinner her daughter came to her with two frocks over her arm.
"Mummy ducky," she said, "I think my head's going. I can't tell whether to wear the white thing or the blue thing. And I feel as if it mattered more than anything. More than anything on earth."
Frances considered it--Dorothea in her uniform, and the white frock and the blue frock.
"It doesn't matter a little bit," she said. "If he could propose to you in that get-up--"
"Can't you see that I want to make up forthatand for all the things he's missed, the things I haven't given him. If only I was as beautiful as you, Mummy, it wouldn't matter."
"My dear--my dear--"
Dorothy had never been a pathetic child--not half so pathetic as Nicky with his recklessness and his earache--but this grown-up Dorothy in khaki breeches, with her talk about white frocks and blue frocks, made Frances want to cry.
Frank was late. And just before dinner he telephoned to Dorothy that he couldn't be with her before nine and that he would only have one hour to give her.
Frances and Anthony looked at each other. But Dorothy looked at Veronica.
"What's the matter, Ronny? You look simply awful."
"Do I? My head's splitting. I think I'll go and lie down."
"You'd better."
"Go straight to bed," said Frances. "and let Nanna bring you some hot soup."
But Veronica did not want Nanna and hot soup. She only wanted to take herself and her awful look away out of Dorothy's sight.
"Well," said Anthony, "if she's going to worry herself sick about Nicky now--"
Frances knew that she was not worrying about Nicky.
It was nine o'clock.
At any minute now Frank might be there. Dorothy thought: "Supposing he hasn't got leave?" But she knew that was not likely. If he hadn't got leave he would have said so when he telephoned.
The hour that was coming had the colour of yesterday. He would hold her in his arms again till she trembled, and then he would be afraid, and she would be afraid, and he would let her go.
The bell rang, the garden gate swung open; his feet were loud and quick on the flagged path of the terrace. He came into the room to them, holding himself rather stiffly and very upright. His eyes shone with excitement. He laughed the laugh she loved, that narrowed his eyes and jerked his mouth slightly crooked.
They all spoke at once. "You've got leave?" "He'sgot it all right." "What kept you?" "Youhavegot leave?"
His eyes still shone; his mouth still jerked, laughing.
"Well, no," he said. "That's what I haven't got. In fact, I'm lucky to be here at all."
Nanna came in with the coffee. He took his cup from her and sat down on the sofa beside Frances, stirring his coffee with his spoon, and smiling as if at something pleasant that he knew, something that he would tell them presently when Nanna left the room.
The door closed softly behind her. He seemed to be listening intently for the click of the latch.
"Funny chaps," he said meditatively. "They keep putting you off till you come and tell them you want to get married to-morrow. Then they say they're sorry, but your marching orders are fixed for that day.
"Twelve hours isn't much notice to give a fellow."
He had not looked at Dorothy. He had not spoken to her. He was speaking to Anthony and John and Frances who were asking questions about trains and boats and his kit and his people. He looked as if he were not conscious of Dorothy's eyes fixed on him as he sat, slowly stirring his coffee without drinking it. The vibration of her nerves made his answers sound muffled and far-off.
She knew that her hour was dwindling slowly, wasting, passing from her minute by minute as they talked. She had an intolerable longing to be alone with him, to be taken in his arms; to feel what she had felt yesterday. It was as if her soul stood still there, in yesterday, and refused to move on into to-day.
Yet she was glad of their talking. It put off the end. When they stopped talking and got up and left her alone with him, that would be the end.
Suddenly he looked straight at her. His hands trembled. The cup he had not drunk from rattled in its saucer. It seemed to Dorothea that for a moment the whole room was hushed to listen to that small sound. She saw her mother take the cup from him and set it on the table.
One by one they got up, and slunk out of the room, as if they were guilty, and left her alone with him.
It was not like yesterday. He did not take her in his arms. He sat there, looking at her rather anxiously, keeping his distance. He seemed to be wondering how she was going to take it.
He thought: "I've made a mess of it again. It wasn't fair to make her want me--when I might have known. I ought to have left it."
And suddenly her soul swung round, released from yesterday.
She knew what he had wanted yesterday: that her senses should be ready to follow where her heart led. But that was not the readiness he required from her to-day; rather it was what his anxious eyes implored her to put away from her.
There was something more.
He wasn't going to say the obvious things, the "Well, this is hard luck on both of us. You must be brave. Don't make it too hard for me." (She could have made it intolerable.) It wasn't that. He knew she was brave; he knew she wouldn't make it hard for him; he knew he hadn't got to say the obvious things.
There was something more; something tremendous. It came to her with the power and sweetness of first passion; but without its fear. She no longer wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her as he had held her yesterday. Her swinging soul was steady; it vibrated to an intenser rhythm.
She knew nothing now but that what she saw was real, and that they were seeing it together. It was Reality itself. It was more than they. When realization passed it would endure.
Never as long as they lived would they be able to speak of it, to say to each other what it was they felt and saw.
He said, "I shall have to go soon."
And she said, "I know. Is there anything I can do?"
"I wish you'd go and see my mother some time. She'd like it."
"I should love to go and see her. What else?"
"Well--I've no business to ask you, but I wish you'd give it up."
"I'll give anything up. But what?"
"That ambulance of yours that's going to get into the firing line."
"Oh--"
"I know why you want to get there. You want to tackle the hardest and most dangerous job. Naturally. But it won't make it easier for us to win the War. You can't expect us to fight so comfy, and to be killed so comfy, if we know our womenkind are being pounded to bits in the ground we've just cleared. If I thoughtyouwere knocking about anywhere there--"
"It would make it too hard?"
"It would make me jumpy. The chances are I shouldn't have much time to think about it, but when I did--"
"You'd think 'She might have spared methat.'"
"Yes. And you might think of your people. It's bad enough for them, Nicky going."
"It isn't only that I'd have liked to be where you'll be, and where he'll be. That was natural."
"It's also natural that we should like to find you here when we come back."
"I was thinking of those Belgian women, and the babies--and England; so safe, Frank; so disgustingly safe."
"I know. Leaving the children in the burning house?"
(She had said that once and he had remembered.)
"You can do more for them by staying in England--I'm asking you to take the hardest job, really."
"It isn't; if it's what you want most."
He had risen. He was going. His hands were on her shoulders, and they were still discussing it as if it were the most momentous thing.
"Of course," she said, "I won't go if you feel like that about it. I want you to fight comfy. You mustn't worry about me."
"Nor you about me. I shall be all right. Remember--it'syourWar, too--it's the biggest fight for freedom--"
"I know," she said.
And then: "Have you got all your things?"
"Somebody's got 'em."
"I haven't given you anything. You must have my wrist-watch."
She unstrapped the leather band and put it on him.
"My wrist's a whopper."
"So's mine. It'll just meet--at the last hole. It's phosphorous," she said. "You can see the time by it in the dark."
"I've nothing foryou. Except--" he fumbled in his pockets--"I say--here's the wedding-ring."
They laughed.
"What more could you want?" she said.
He put it on her finger; she raised her face to him and he stooped and kissed her. He held her for a minute in his arms. But it was not like yesterday.
Suddenly his face stiffened. "Tell them," he said, "that I'm going."
The British were retreating from Mons.
The German attack was not like the advance of an Army but like the travelling of an earthquake, the bursting of a sea-wall. There was no end to the grey battalions, no end to the German Army, no end to the German people. And there was no news of British reinforcements, or rumour of reinforcements.
"They come on like waves. Like waves," said Dorothea, reading from the papers.
"I wouldn't read about it if I were you, darling," said Frances.
"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we don't."
Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.
Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours' notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it. They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least we could do forthemwas to trust them, and not believe any tales of their retreating.
And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home, listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing of the bell.
She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child for me that my son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to come and see me; but not just yet."
She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter from his Colonel.
After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into Cannon Street Station.
Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly, beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept, worn out with her hard day's driving.
She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.
"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered. He said 'It'syourWar--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's killed in it.
"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for one night.
"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was a coward. He got nothing."
His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion. She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.
Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had dreamed it or made it up.
Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and it would take her car with it and a new driver.
Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.
"If I could only help you."
"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more often she hid away somewhere by herself.
Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's Veronica."
But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He couldn't have had five hours' fighting.
"And to be killed--Retreating.
"He got nothing out of it but agony."
Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know what he may have got in the last minute of it."
"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me. But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.
"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"
"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you, more alive."
"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."
One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:
"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must have known that he would not come back."
"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I want you to see that my memory is fairly good."
The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."
The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah xxxv. and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:
"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight."...
"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...
... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."
And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet and powerful passion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold again on the Reality they had seen and felt together.
The moment passed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it lasted she was at peace.
But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of remorse for all that she had wasted.
After Drayton's death Frances and Anthony were sobered and had ceased to feed on illusions. The Battle of the Marne was fought in vain for them. They did not believe that it had saved Paris.
Then came the fall of Antwerp and the Great Retreat. There was no more Belgium. The fall of Paris and the taking of Calais were only a question of time, of perhaps a very little time. Then there would be no more France. They were face to face with the further possibility of there being no more England.
In those months of September and October Anthony and Frances were changed utterly to themselves and to each other. If, before the War, Frances had been asked whether she loved England, she would, after careful consideration, have replied truthfully, "I like England. But I dislike the English people. They are narrow and hypocritical and conceited. They are snobbish; and I hate snobs." At the time of the Boer War, beyond thinking that the British ought to win, and that they would win, and feeling a little spurt as of personal satisfaction when they did win, she had had no consciousness of her country whatsoever. As for loving it, she loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of mild, cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as well talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury. She who once sat in peace under the tree of Heaven with herTimesnewspaper, and flicked the affairs of the nation from her as less important than the stitching on her baby's frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else. She was sad, not because her son Nicholas's time of safety was dwindling week by week, but because England was in danger; she was worried, not because Lord Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son Michael, but because she had found that the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers. Every morning she left her household to old Nanna's care and went down to the City with Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office, receiving, packing, and sending off great cases of food and clothing to the Belgian soldiers.
Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all well under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the Government persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber--timber that swelled and shrank again--for rifles and gun-carriages, and because officials wouldn't listen to him when he tried to tell them what he knew about timber, and because the head of a department had talked tohimabout private firms and profiteering. As if any man with three sons under twenty-seven would want to make a profit out of the War; and as if they couldn't cut down everybody's profits if they took the trouble. They might cut his to the last cent so long as we had gun-carriages that would carry guns and rifles that would shoot. He knew what he was talking about and they didn't.
And Frances said he was right. He always had been right. She who had once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it now. She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at the head of departments we should win the War. We were losing it for want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of organization in which Anthony excelled. She was proud of him, not because he was her husband and the father of her children, but because he was a man who could help England. They were both proud of Michael and Nicholas and John, not because they were their sons, but because they were men who could fight for England.
They found that they loved England with a secret, religious, instinctive love. Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man might stand and fight for, became, mysteriously and magically, dearer to them than their home. They loved England more than their own life or the lives of their children. Long ago they had realized that fathers do not beget children nor mothers bear them merely to gratify themselves. Now, in September and October, they were realizing that children are not begotten and born for their own profit and pleasure either.
When they sat together after the day's work they found themselves saying the most amazing things to each other.
Anthony said, "Downham thinks John's heart is decidedly better. I shouldn't wonder if he'd have to go." Almost as if the idea had been pleasant to him.
And Frances: "Well, I suppose if we had thirteen sons instead of three, we ought to send them all."
"Positively," said Anthony. "I believe I'd let Dorothy go out now if she insisted."
"Oh, no, I think we might be allowed to keep Dorothy."
She pondered. "I suppose one will get used to it in time. I grudged giving Nicky at first. I don't grudge him now. I believe if he went out to-morrow, and was killed, I should only feel how splendid it was of him."
"I wish poor Dorothy could feel that way about Drayton."
"She does--really. But that's different. Frank had to go. It was his profession. Nicky's gone in of his own free will."
He did not remind her that Frank's free will had counted in his choice of a profession.
"Once," said Frances, "volunteers didn't count. Now they count more than the whole Army put together."
They were silent, each thinking the same thing; each knowing that sooner or later they must speak of it.
Frances was the braver of the two. She spoke first.
"There's Michael. I don't know what to make of him. He doesn't seem to want to go."
That was the vulnerable place; there they had ached unbearably in secret. It was no use trying to hide it any longer. Something must be done about Michael.
"I wish you'd say something to him, Anthony."
"I would if I were going myself. But how can I?"
"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you were young enough."
"I can't say anything. You'll have to."
"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky is the only one of us who has any right to."
"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her way."
"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."
But in the end she did say something.
She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding himself away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she thought, "as if he were ashamed of himself."
Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious beauty of his young face; at the thick masses of his hair that would not stay as they were brushed back, but fell over his forehead; it was still yellow, and shining as it shone when he was a little boy.
He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of verse on the white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came in lest she should see them. That hurt her.
"Michael," she said, "I wonder if youeverrealize that we are at war."
"The War isn't a positive obsession to me, if that's what you mean."
"It isn't what I mean. Only--that when other people are doing so much--
"George Vereker enlisted yesterday."
"I don't care what other people are doing. I never did. If George Vereker chooses to enlist it is no reason why I should."
"My darling Mick, I'm not so sure. Isn't it all the more reason, when so much more has been done for you than was ever done for him?"
"It's no use trying to get at me."
"England's fighting for her life," said Frances.
"So's Germany.
"You see, I can't feel it like other people. George Vereker hates Germany; I don't. I've lived there. I don't want to make dear old Frau Henschel a widow, and stick a bayonet into Ludwig and Carl, and make Hedwig and Löttchen cry."
"I see. You'd rather Carl and Ludwig stuck bayonets into George and Nicky, and that Ronny and Dorothy and Alice Lathom cried."
"Bayonetting isn't my business."
"Your own safety is. How can you bear to let other men fight for you?"
"They're not fighting forme, Mother. You ask them if they are, and see what they'll say to you. They're fighting for God knows what; but they're no more fighting for me than they're fighting for Aunt Emmeline."
"Theyarefighting for Aunt Emmeline. They're fighting for everything that's weak and defenceless."
"Well, then, they're not fighting for me. I'm not weak and defenceless," said Michael.
"All the more shame for you, then."
He smiled, acknowledging her score.
"You don't mean that, really, Mummy. You couldn't resist the opening for a repartee. It was quite a nice one."
"If," she said, "you were onlydoingsomething. But you go on with your own things as though nothing had happened."
"Iamdoing something. I'm keeping sane. And I'm keeping sanity alive in other people."
"Much you care for other people," said Frances as she left the room.
But when she had shut the door on him her heart turned to him again. She went down to Anthony where he waited for her in his room.
"Well?" he said.
"It's no use. He won't go."
And Frances, quite suddenly and to her own surprise, burst into tears.
He drew her to him, and she clung to him, sobbing softly.
"My dear--my dear. You mustn't take it to heart like this. He's as obstinate as the devil; but he'll come round."
He pressed her tighter to him. He loved her in her unfamiliar weakness, crying and clinging to him.
"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm glad he didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to him, I couldn't bear to be the one who made him go."
After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.
They were silent.
"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.
But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.
"He must know thatpublicfeeling's pretty strong against him. To say nothing ofmyfeeling andyourfeeling."
He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his father and his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't bear to look at Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her way as much as possible.
As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he against it.
But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go. Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had always offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul. From his very first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one monstrous soul.
And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment, was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you and you were done for. He was determined that it shouldn't get him. They couldn't see--and that was Michael's grievance--that his resistance was his strength and not his weakness.
Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the same entity as the little Michael who hadn't wanted to go to the party, who had wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted to remember." He was Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the other fellows were doing. He objected to being suddenly required to feel patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.
Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.
He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that he resented. There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and tyranny about it all.
It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to fight. He had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight any day in a cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a cause that had not been messed about so much by other people. Other people had not put pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact they had tried to stop him. Michael was also aware that in the matter of Ireland his emotions, though shared by considerable numbers of the Irish people, were not shared by his family or by many people whom he knew; to all intents and purposes he had them to himself.
It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and mother, for they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the more he would seem to them to be a shirker.
He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff, reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's silence when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their eyes--his mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the unspoken question: "Why don't you go and get killed--for England--like other people?"
Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible, palpable; he knew where he was with them. What he could not stand was that empty spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him where he was most vulnerable--in his imagination.
And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.
It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion, and your religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored Beauty as the supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else; if you lived, impersonally, to make Beauty and to keep it alive; and for no other end, how could you consent to take part in this bloody business? That would be the last betrayal, the most cowardly surrender.
And you were all the more bound to faithfulness if you were one of the leaders of a forlorn hope, of the forlorn hope of all the world, of all the ages, the forlorn hope of God himself.
For Michael, even more than Ellis, had given himself up as lost.
And yet somehow they all felt curiously braced by the prospect. When the young men met in Lawrence Stephen's house they discussed it with a calm, high heroism. This was the supreme test: To go on, without pay, without praise, without any sort of recognition. Any fool could fight; but, if you were an artist, your honour bound you to ignore the material contest, to refuse, even to your country, the surrender of the highest that you knew. They believed with the utmost fervour and sincerity that they defied Germany more effectually, because more spiritually, by going on and producing fine things with imperturbability than if they went out against the German Armies with bayonets and machine-guns. Moreover they were restoring Beauty as fast as Germany destroyed it.
They told each other these things very seriously and earnestly, on Friday evenings as they lay about more or less at their ease (but rather less than more) in Stephen's study.
They had asked each other: "Areyougoing to fight for your country?"
And Ellis had said he was damned if he'd fight for his country; and Mitchell had said he hadn't got a country, so there was no point in his fighting, anyhow; and Monier-Owen that if you could show him a country that cared for the arts before anything he'd fight for it; but that England was very far from being that country.
And Michael had sat silent, thinking the same thoughts.
And Stephen had sat silent, thinking other thoughts, not listening to what was said.
And now people were whining about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral. Michael said to himself that he could stand these massed war emotions if they were sincere; but people whined about Louvain and Rheims Cathedral who had never cared a damn about either before the War.
Anthony looked up over the edge of his morning paper, inquired whether Michael could defend the destruction of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral?
Michael shrugged his shoulders. "Why bother," he said, "about Rheims Cathedral and Louvain? From your point of view it's all right. If Louvain and Rheims Cathedral get in the way of the enemy's artillery they've got to go. They didn't happen to be in the way of ours, that's all."
Michael's mind was showing certain symptoms, significant of its malady. He was inclined to disparage the military achievements of the Allies and to justify the acts of Germany.
"It's up to the French to defend Paris. And what have we got to do with Alsace-Lorraine? As if every inteligent Frenchman didn't know that Alsace-Lorraine is a sentimental stunt. No. I'm not pro-German. I simply see things as they are."
"I think," Frances would say placably, "we'd better not talk about the War."
He would remind them that it was not his subject.
And John laughed at him. "Poor old Nick hates the War because it's dished him. He knows his poems can't come out till it's over."
As it happened, his poems came out that autumn.
After all, the Germans had been held back from Paris. As Stephen pointed out to him, the Battle of the Marne had saved Michael. In magnificent defiance of the enemy, the "New Poems" of Michael Harrison, with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were announced as forthcoming in October; and Morton Ellis's "Eccentricities," with illustrations by Austin Mitchell, were to appear the same month. Even Wadham's poems would come out some time, perhaps next spring.
Stephen said the advertisements should be offered to the War Office as posters, to strike terror into Germany and sustain the morale of the Allied Armies. "If England could afford to publish Michael--"
Michael's family made no comment on the appearance of his poems. The book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for weeks. When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none of his people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or hold it in their hands. It seemed to Michael that they were conscious of it all the time, and that they turned their faces away from it pointedly. They hated it. They hated him for having written it.
He remembered that it had been different when his first book had come out two years ago. They had read that; they had snatched at all the reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was that they had missed.
They had taken each other aside, and it had been:
"Anthony, do you understand Michael's poems?"
"Dorothy, do you understand Michael's poems?"
"Nicky, do you understand Michael's poems?"
He remembered his mother's apology for not understanding them: "Darling, Idosee that they're very beautiful." He remembered how he had wished that they would give up the struggle and leave his poems alone. They were not written for them. He had been amused and irritated when he had seen his father holding the book doggedly in front of him, his poor old hands twitching with embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was looking at him.
And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was sensitive to the least quiver of his mother's upper lip.
Veronica's were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did not hunt him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.
Veronica had been rejected too. She was not strong enough to nurse in the hospitals. She was only strong enough to work from morning to night, packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the Belgian soldiers. She wanted Michael to be sorry for her because she couldn't be a nurse. Rosalind Jervis was a nurse. But he was not sorry. He said he would very much rather she didn't do anything that Rosalind did.
"So would Nicky," he said.
And then: "Veronica, doyouthink I ought to enlist?"
The thought was beginning to obsess him.
"No," she said; "you're different.
"I know how you feel about it. Nicky's heart and soul are in the War. If he's killed it can only kill his body.Yoursoul isn't in it. It would kill your soul."
"It's killing it now, killing everything I care for."
"Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can't kill."
That was one Sunday evening in October. They were standing together on the long terrace under the house wall. Before them, a little to the right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree rose over the garden. The curved and dipping branches swayed and swung in a low wind that moved like quiet water.
"Michael," she said, "do look what's happening to that tree."
"I see," he said.
It made him sad to look at the tree; it made him sad to look at Veronica--because both the tree and Veronica were beautiful.
"When I was a little girl I used to sit and look and look at that tree till it changed and got all thin and queer and began to move towards me.
"I never knew whether it had really happened or not; I don't know now--or whether it was the tree or me. It was as if by looking and looking you could make the tree more real and more alive."
Michael remembered something.
"Dorothy says you saw Ferdie the night he died."
"So I did. But that's not the same thing. I didn't have to look and look. I just saw him. Isortof saw Frank that last night--when the call came--only sort of--but I knew he was going to be killed.
"I didn't see him nearly so distinctly as I saw Nicky-"
"Nicky? You didn't see him--as you saw Ferdie?"
"No, no, no! it was ages ago--in Germany--before he married. I saw him with Desmond."
"Have you ever seen me?"
"Not yet. That's because you don't want me as they did."
"Don't I! Don't I!"
And she said again: "Not yet."
Nicky had had leave for Christmas. He had come and gone.
Frances and Anthony were depressed; they were beginning to be frightened.
For Nicky had finished his training. He might be sent out any day.
Nicky had had some moments of depression. Nothing had been heard of the Moving Fortress. Again, the War Office had given no sign of having received it. It was hard luck, he said, on Drayton.
And John was depressed after he had gone.
"They'd much better have taken me," he said.
"What's the good of sending the best brains in the Army to get pounded? There's Drayton. He ought to have been in the Ordnance. He's killed.
"And here's Nicky. Nicky ought to be in the engineers or the gunners or the Royal Flying Corps; but he's got to stand in the trenches and be pounded.
"Lot they care about anybody's brains. Drayton could have told Kitchener that we can't win this war without high-explosive shells. So could Nicky.
"You bet they've stuck all those plans and models in the sanitary dust-bin behind the War Office back door. It's enough to make Nicky blow his brains out."
"Nicky doesn't care, really," Veronica said. "He just leaves things--and goes on."
That night, after the others had gone to bed, Michael stayed behind with his father.
"It must look to you," he said, "as if I ought to have gone instead of Nicky."
"I don't say so, Michael. And I'm sure Nicky wouldn't."
"No, but you both think it. You see, if I went I shouldn't be any good at it. Not the same good as Nicky. He wants to go and I don't. Can't you see it's different?"
"Yes," said Anthony, "I see. I've seen it for some time."
And Michael remembered the night in August when his brother came to him in his room.
Beauty--the Forlorn Hope of God--if he cared for it supremely, why was he pursued and tormented by the thought of the space between him and Nicky?