Chapter III: Part I: Peace (3)

There was no need for her to linger and draw out her caresses, no need to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's request, had had her cot moved up into the night nursery.

VIII

Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie out to this time, when the Boer War came and solved his problem.

Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South Africa, to enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.

Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders, solving, perhaps, another problem.

"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.

Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was what Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't come back? Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances hated problems when they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems when they bothered Frances.

And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went on.

"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."

"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.

Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said, "what else could he do? His only chance was to go away and do something so jolly plucky that _we_'re ashamed of ourselves, and never to come back again to spoil it. You don't want him to spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"

Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging over them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over them. It hung over a country that, except once when it had conveniently swallowed up Morrie, they had never thought about and could not care for, a landscape that they could not see. The war was not even part of that landscape; it refused to move over it in any traceable course. It simply hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another. It was not their fault. They tried to see it. They bought the special editions of the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial; it was all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very blood of it ran grey.

It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the open wings of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of Heaven were real; so were Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow on the Hill; morning and noon and night were real, and getting up and dressing and going to bed; most real of all the sight and sound and touch of her husband and her children.

Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances carried about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she could attach the rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an immense slender muzzle, tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out Maurice.

Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.

"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy said he ought to be shut up somewhere."

"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."

"Or drink, ducky."

"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"

"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I shouldn't mind whether he came back or didn't. _You_'re cruel. You ought to think of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edie."

"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle Morrie."

She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had been, as a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two years younger than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted, who contrived, nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to want by crying for them, though everybody else went without. And in the grown-up Morrie's place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky.

For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.

"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss it."

Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and Nicky, mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High Street with flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a Pro-Boer and flew no flags. All these things irritated Maurice.

He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all the chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in hospital throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had missed the sortie of his squadron and the taking of the guns for which Ferdie Cameron got his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come back in the middle of the war with nothing but a bullet wound in his left leg to prove that he had taken part in it.

The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only depressed him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence broke down the sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a period of sobriety beyond its natural limits.

For there were two kinds of drinking: great drinking that came seldom and was the only thing that counted, and ordinary drinking that, though it went on most of the time, brought no satisfaction and didn't count at all. And there were two states of drunkenness to correspond: one intense and vivid, without memory, transcending all other states; and one that was no more remarkable than any other. Before the war Morrie's great drinking came seldom, by fits and bursts and splendid unlasting uprushes; after the war the two states tended to approach till they merged in one continual sickly soaking. And while other important and outstanding things, and things that he really wanted to remember, disappeared in the poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he never for one moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not Anthony, his brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded.

He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the war. He was furious with Frances and Anthony. Not realizing the war meant not realizing what he had been through. He swore by some queer God of his that he would make them realize it. The least they could do for him was to listen to what he had to say.

"You people here don't know what war is. You think it's all glory and pluck, and dashing out and blowing up the enemy's guns, and the British flag flying, and wounded pipers piping all the time and not caring a damn. Nobody caring a damn.

"And it isn't. It's dirt and funk and stinks and more funk all the time. It's lying out all night on the beastly veldt, and going to sleep and getting frozen, and waking up and finding you've got warm again because your neighbour's inside's been fired out on the top of you. You get wounded when the stretcher-bearers aren't anywhere about, and you crawl over to the next poor devil and lie back to back with him to keep warm. And just when you've dropped off to sleep you wake up shivering, because he's died of a wound he didn't know he'd got.

"You'll find a chap lying on his back all nice and comfy, and when you start to pick him up you can't lift him because his head's glued to the ground. You try a bit, gently, and the flesh gives way like rotten fruit, and the bone like a cup you've broken and stuck together without any seccotine, and you heave up a body with half a head on it. And all the brains are in the other half, the one that's glued down. That's war.

"Huh!" He threw out his breath with a jerk of contempt. It seemed to him that neither Frances nor Anthony was listening to him. They were not looking at him. They didn't want to listen; they didn't want to look at him. He couldn't touch them; he couldn't evoke one single clear image in their minds; there was no horror he could name that would sting them to vision, to realization. They had not been there.

Dorothy and Michael and Nicky were listening. The three kids had imagination; they could take it in. They stared as if he had brought those horrors into the room. But even they missed the reality of it. They saw everything he meant them to see, except him. It was as if they were in the conspiracy to keep him out of it.

He glared at Frances and Anthony. What was the good of telling them, of trying to make them realize it? If they'd only given some sign, made some noise or some gesture, or looked at him, he might have spared them. But the stiff, averted faces of Frances and Anthony annoyed him.

"And if you're a poor wretched Tommy like me, you'll have to sweat in a brutal sun, hauling up cases of fizz from the railway up country to Headquarters, with a thirst on you that frizzles your throat. You see the stuff shining and spluttering, and you go mad. You could kill the man if you were to see him drink it, when you know there's nothing for _you_ but a bucket of green water with typhoid germs swimming about in it. That's war.

"You think you're lucky if you're wounded and get bumped down in a bullock wagon thirty miles to the base hospital. But the best thing you can do then is to pop off. For if you get better they make you hospital orderly. And the hospital orderly has to clean up all the muck of the butcher's shop from morning to night. When you're so sick you can't stand you get your supper, dry bread and bully beef. The bully beef reminds you of things, and the bread--well, the bread's all nice and white on the top. But when you turn it over on the other side--it's red. That's war."

Frances looked at him. He thought: "At last she's turned; at last I've touched her; she can realize that."

"Morrie dear, it must have been awful," she said. "It's _too_ awful. I don't mind your telling me and Anthony about it; but I'd rather you did it when the children aren't in the room."

"Is that all you think about? The children? The children. You don't care a tinker's cuss about the war. You don't care a damn what happens to me or anybody else. What does it matter who's wounded or who's killed, as long as it isn't one of your own kids?

"I'm simply trying to tell you what war _is_. It's dirt and stink and funk. That's all it is. And there's precious little glory in it, Nicky."

"If the Boers won there would be glory," Michael said.

"Not even if the Boers won," said Maurice.

"Certainly not if the Boers won," said Anthony.

"You'll say next there'd be no glory if there was war between England and Ireland and the Irish won. And yet there would be glory."

"Would there? Go and read history and don't talk rot."

"I have read it," said Michael.

Frances thought: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why should he? He's barely thirteen. I can't think where he gets these ideas from. But he'll grow out of them."

It was not Maurice that she saw in Maurice's war-pictures. But he had made them realize what war was; and they vowed that as long as they lived not one of their sons should have anything to do with it.

* * * * *

In the spring of nineteen-one Anthony sent Maurice out to California. The Boer War was ended.

Another year, and the vision of war passed from Frances as if it had never been.

IX

Michael was unhappy.

The almond trees flowered in front of the white houses in the strange white streets.

White squares, white terraces, white crescents; at the turn of the roads the startling beauty of the trees covered with pink blossoms, hot against the hot white walls.

After the pink blossoms, green leaves and a strange white heat everywhere. You went, from pavements burning white, down long avenues grey-white under the shadows of the limes.

A great Promenade going down like a long green tunnel, from the big white Hotel at the top to the High Street at the bottom of the basin where the very dregs of the heat sank and thickened.

Promenade forbidden for no earthly reason that Michael could see, except that it was beautiful. Hotel where his father gave him dinner on his last day of blessed life, telling him to choose what he liked best, as the condemned criminal chooses his last meal on the day they hang him.

Cleeve Hill and Battledown and Birdlip, and the long rampart of Leckhampton, a thin, curling bristle of small trees on the edge of it; forms that made an everlasting pattern on his mind; forms that haunted him at night and tempted and tormented him all day. Memory which it would have been better for him if he had not had, of the raking open country over the top, of broad white light and luminous blue shadows, of white roads switchbacking through the sheep pastures; fields of bright yellow mustard in flower on the lower hills; then, rectangular fir plantations and copses of slender beech trees in the hollows. Somewhere, far-off, the Severn, faint and still, like a river in a dream.

Memory of the round white town in the round pit of the valley, shining, smoking through the thick air and the white orchard blossoms; memory saturated by a smell that is like no other smell on earth, the delicate smell of the Midland limestone country, the smell of clean white dust, and of grass drying in the sun and of mustard flowers.

Michael was in Cheltenham.

It was a matter of many unhappinesses, not one unhappiness. A sudden intolerable unhappiness, the flash and stab of the beauty of the almond-flowers, seen in passing and never seized, beauty which it would have been better for him if he had not seen; the knowledge, which he ought never to have had, that this beauty had to die, was killed because he had not seized it, when, if he could but have held it for one minute, it would have been immortal. A vague, light unhappiness that came sometimes, could not for the life of him think why, from the sight of his own body stripped, and from the feeling of his own muscles. There was sadness for him in his very strength. A long, aching unhappiness that came with his memory of the open country over the tops of the hills, which, in their incredible stupidity and cruelty, they had let him see. A quick, lacerating unhappiness when he thought of his mother, and of the garden on the Heath, and the high ridge of the Spaniards' Road, and London below it, immense and beautiful.

The unhappiness of never being by himself.

He was afraid of the herd. It was with him night and day. He was afraid of the thoughts, the emotions that seized it, swaying, moving the multitude of undeveloped souls as if they had been one monstrous, dominating soul. He was afraid of their voices, when they chanted, sang and shouted together. He loathed their slang even when he used it. He disliked the collective, male odour of the herd, the brushing against him of bodies inflamed with running, the steam of their speed rising through their hot sweaters; and the smell of dust and ink and india-rubber and resinous wood in the warm class-rooms.

Michael was at school.

The thing he had dreaded, that had hung over him, threatening him for years before it happened, had happened. Nothing could have prevented it; their names had been down for Cheltenham long ago; first his, then Nicky's. Cheltenham, because Bartie and Vera lived there, and because it had a college for girls, and Dorothy, who wanted to go to Roedean, had been sent to Cheltenham, because of Bartie and Vera and for no other reason. First Dorothy; then, he, Michael; then, the next term, Nicky. And Nicky had been sent (a whole year before his time) because of Michael, in the hope that Michael would settle down better if he had his brother with him. It didn't seem reasonable.

Not that either Dorothy or Nicky minded when they got there. All that Nicky minded was not being at Hampstead. Being at Cheltenham he did not mind at all. He rather liked it, since Major Cameron had come to stay just outside it--on purpose to annoy Bartie--and took them out riding. Even Michael did not mind Cheltenham more than any other place his people might have chosen. He was not unreasonable. All he asked was to be let alone, and to have room to breathe and get ahead in. As it was, he had either to go with the school mass, or waste energy in resisting its poisonous impact.

He had chosen resistance.

TUDOR HOUSE.
CHELTENHAM,
_Sunday_.

DEAREST MOTHER:

I've put Sunday on this letter, though it's really Friday, because I'm supposed to be writing it on Sunday when the other fellows are writing. That's the beastly thing about this place, you're expected to do everything when the other fellows are doing it, whether you want to or not, as if the very fact that they're doing it too didn't make you hate it.

I'm writing now because I simply must. If I waited till Sunday I mightn't want to, and anyhow I shouldn't remember a single thing I meant to say. Even now Johnson minor's digging his skinny elbows into one side of me, and Hartley major's biting the feathers off his pen and spitting them out again on the other. But they're only supposed to be doing Latin verse, so it doesn't matter so much. What I mean is it's as if their beastly minds kept on leaking into yours till you're all mixed up with them. That's why I asked Daddy to take me away next term. You see--it's more serious than he thinks--it is, really. You've no idea what it's like. You've got to swot every blessed thing the other fellows swot even if you can't do it, and whether it's going to be any good to you or not. Why, you're expected to sleep when they're sleeping, even if the chap next you snores. Daddy _might_ remember that it's Nicky who likes mathematics, not me. It's all very well for Nicky when he wants to go into the Army all the time. There are things _I_ want to do. I want to write and I'm going to write. Daddy can't keep me off it. And I don't believe he'd want to if he understood. There's nothing else in the world I'll ever be any good at.

And there are things I want to know. I want to know Greek and Latin and French and German and Italian and Spanish, and Old French and Russian and Chinese and Japanese, oh, and Provençal, and every blessed language that has or has had a literature. I can learn languages quite fast. Do you suppose I've got a chance of knowing one of them--really knowing--even if I had the time? Not much. And that's where being here's so rotten. They waste your time as if it was theirs, not yours. They've simply no notion of the value of it. They seem to think time doesn't matter because you're young. Fancy taking three months over a Greek play you can read in three hours. That'll give you some idea.

It all comes of being in a beastly form and having to go with the other fellows. Say they're thirty fellows in your form, and twenty-nine stick; you've got to stick with them, if it's terms and terms. They can't do it any other way. It's _because_ I'm young, Mummy, that I mind so awfully. Supposing I died in ten years' time, or even fifteen? It simply makes me hate everybody.

Love to Daddy and Don.

Your loving MICK.

P.S.-I don't mean that Hartley major isn't good at Latin verse. He is. He can lick me into fits when he's bitten _all_ the feathers off.

TUDOR HOUSE.
CHELTENHAM,
_Tuesday_.

DARLING MUMMY:

Daddy _doesn't_ understand. You only think he does because you like him. It's all rot what he says about esprit de corps, the putridest rot, though I know he doesn't mean it.

And he's wrong about gym, and drill and games and all that. I don't mind gym, and I don't mind drill, and I like games. I'm fairly good at most of them--except footer. All the fellows say I'm fairly good--otherwise I don't suppose they'd stick me for a minute. I don't even mind Chapel. You see, when it's only your body doing what the other chaps do, it doesn't seem to matter. If esprit de corps _was_ esprit de corps it would be all right. But it's esprit d'esprit. And it's absolutely sickening the things they can do to your mind. I can't stand another term of it.

Always your loving
MICK.
P.S.-How do you know I shan't be dead in ten or
fifteen years' time? It's enough to make me.

P.P.S.-It's all very well for Daddy to talk--_he_ doesn't want to learn Chinese.

TUDOR HOUSE.
CHELTENHAM,
_Thursday_.

DEAR FATHER:

All right. Have it your own way. Only I shall kill myself. You needn't tell Mother that--though it won't matter so much as she'll very likely think. And perhaps then you won't try and stop Nicky going into the Army as you've stopped me.

I don't care a "ram", as Nicky would say, whether you bury me or cremate me; only you might give my Theocritus to old Parsons, and my revolver to Nicky if it doesn't burst. He'd like it.

MICHAEL.

P.S.--If Parsons would rather have my _Æschylus_ he can, or both.

TUDOR HOUSE.
CHELTENHAM,
_Sunday_.

DARLING MUMMY:

It's your turn for a letter. Do you think Daddy'd let me turn the hen-house into a workshop next holidays, as there aren't any hens? And would he give me a proper lathe for turning steel and brass and stuff for my next birthday I'm afraid it'll cost an awful lot; but he could take it out of my other birthdays, I don't mind how many so long as I can have the lathe this one.

This place isn't half bad once you get used to it. I like the fellows, and all the masters are really jolly decent, though I wish we had old Parsons here instead of the one we have to do Greek for. He's an awful chap to make you swot.

I don't know what you mean about Mick being seedy. He's as fit as fit. You should see him when he's stripped. But he hates the place like poison half the time. He can't stand being with a lot of fellows. He's a rum chap because they all like him no end, the masters and the fellows, though they think he's funny, all except Hartley major, but he's such a measly little blighter that he doesn't count.

We had a ripping time last Saturday. Bartie went up to town, and Major Cameron took Dorothy and Ronny and Vera and me and Mick to Birdlip in his dog-cart, only Mick and me had to bike because there wasn't room enough. However we grabbed the chains behind and the dog-cart pulled us up the hills like anything, and we could talk to Dorothy and Ronny without having to yell at each other. He did us jolly well at tea afterwards.

Dorothy rode my bike stridelegs coming back, so that I could sit in the dog-cart. She said she'd get a jolly wigging if she was seen. We shan't know till Monday.

You know, Mummy, that kid Ronny's having a rotten time, what with Bartie being such a beast and Vera chumming up with Ferdie and going off to country houses where he is. I really think she'd better come to us for the holidays. Then I could teach her to ride. Bartie won't let her learn here, though Ferdie'd gone and bought a pony for her. That was to spite Ferdie. He's worse than ever, if you can imagine that, and he's got three more things the matter with him.

I must stop now.

Love to Dad and Don and Nanna. Next year I'm to go into physics and stinks--that's chemistry.

Your loving NICKY.

THE LEAS. PARABOLA ROAD.
CHELTENHAM,
_Sunday_.

DEAREST MUMMY:

I'm awfully sorry you don't like my last term's school report. I know it wasn't what it ought to have been. I have to hold myself in so as to keep in the same class with Rosalind when we're moved up after Midsummer. But as she's promised me faithfully she'll let herself rip next term, you'll see it'll be all right at Xmas. We'll both be in I A the Midsummer after, and we can go in for our matic, together. I wish you'd arrange with Mrs. Jervis for both of us to be at Newnham at the same time. Tell her Rosalind's an awful slacker if I'm not there to keep her up to the mark. No--don't tell her that. Tell her _I'm_ a slacker if she isn't there.

I was amused by your saying it was decent of Bartie to have us so often. He only does it because things are getting so tight between him and Vera that he's glad of anything that relaxes the strain a bit. Even us. He's snappier than ever with Ronny. I can't think how the poor kid stands it.

You know that ripping white serge coat and skirt you sent me? Well, the skirt's not nearly long enough. It doesn't matter a bit though, because I can keep it for hockey. It's nice having a mother who _can_ choose clothes. You should see the last blouse Mrs. Jervis got for Rosalind. She's burst out of _all_ the seams already. You could have heard her doing it.

Much love to you and Daddy and Don-Don. I can't send any to Mr. Parsons now my hair's up. But you might tell him I'm going in strong for Sociology and Economics.--

Your loving
DOROTHY.

P.S.--Vera asked me if I thought you'd take her and Ronny in at Midsummer. I said of course you would--like a shot.

LANSDOWN LODGE.
CHELTENHAM,
_Friday._

MY DEAREST FRANCES:

I hope you got my two wires in time. You needn't come down, either of you. And you needn't worry about Mick. Ferdie went round and talked to him like a fa--I mean a big brother, and the revolver (bless his heart!) is at present reposing at the bottom of my glove-box.

All the same we both think you'd better take him away at Midsummer. He says he can stick it till then, but not a day longer. Poor Mick! He has the most mysterious troubles.

I daresay it's the Cheltenham climate as much as anything. It doesn't suit me or Bonny either, and it's simply killing Ferdie by inches. I suppose that's why Bartie makes us stay here--in the hope--

Oh! my dear, I'm worried out of my life about him. He's never got over that fever he had in South Africa. He's looking ghastly.

And the awful thing is that I can't do a thing for him. Not a thing. Unless--

You haven't forgotten the promise you made me two years ago, have you?

Dorothy seemed to think you could put Bonny and me up--again!--at Midsummer. Can you? And if poor Ferdie wants to come and see us, you won't turn him off your door-mat, will you?

Your lovingest
"VERA."

Frances said, "Poor Vera! She even makes poor Mick an excuse for seeing Ferdie."

X

Three more years passed and Frances had fulfilled her promise. She had taken Veronica.

The situation had become definite. Bartie had delivered his ultimatum. Either Vera must give up Major Cameron, signing a written pledge in the presence of three witnesses, Frances, Anthony and Bartie's solicitor, that she would neither see him nor write to him, nor hold any sort or manner of communication with him, direct or indirect, or he would obtain a judicial separation. It was to be clearly understood by both of them that he would not, in any circumstances, divorce her. Bartie knew that a divorce was what they wanted, what they had been playing for, and he was not going to make things easy for them; he was going to make things hard and bitter and shameful He had based his ultimatum on the calculation that Vera would not have the courage of her emotions; that even her passion would surrender when she found that it had no longer the protection of her husband's house and name. Besides Vera was expensive, and Cameron was a spendthrift on an insufficient income; he could not possibly afford her. If Bartie's suspicions were correct, the thing had been going on for the last twelve years, and if in twelve years' time they had not forced his hand that was because they had counted the cost, and decided that, as Frances had put it, the "game was not worth the scandal."

For when suspicion became unendurable he had consulted Anthony who assured him that Frances, who ought to know, was convinced that there was nothing in it except incompatibility, for which Bartie was superlatively responsible.

Anthony's manner did not encourage confidence, and he gathered that his own more sinister interpretation would be dismissed with contemptuous incredulity. Anthony was under his wife's thumb and Frances had been completely bamboozled by her dearest friend. Still, when once their eyes were opened, he reckoned on the support of Anthony and Frances. It was inconceivable, that, faced with a public scandal, his brother and his sister-in-law would side with Vera.

It was a game where Bartie apparently held all the cards. And his trump card was Veronica.

He was not going to keep Veronica without Vera. That had been tacitly understood between them long ago. If Vera went to Cameron she could not take Veronica with her without openly confirming Bartie's worst suspicion.

And yet all these things, so inconceivable to Bartie, happened. When it came to the stabbing point the courage of Vera's emotions was such that she defied her husband and his ultimatum, and went to Cameron. By that time Ferdie was so ill that she would have been ashamed of herself if she had not gone. And though Anthony's house was not open to the unhappy lovers, Frances and Anthony had taken Veronica.

Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie came over to West End House when they heard that it had been decided. It was time, they said, that somebody should protest, that somebody should advise Frances for her own good and for the good of her children.

They had always detested and distrusted Vera Harrison; they had always known what would happen. The wonder was it had not happened before. But why Frances should make it easy for her, why Frances should shoulder Vera Harrison's responsibilities, and burden herself with that child, and why Anthony should give his consent to such a proceeding, was more than they could imagine.

Once Frances had stood up for the three Aunties, against Grannie; now Grannie and the three Aunties were united against Frances.

"Frances, you're a foolish woman."

"My folly is my own affair and Anthony's."

"You'll have to pay for it some day."

"You might have thought of your own children first."

"I did. I thought, How would I like _them_ to be forsaken like poor Ronny?"

"You should have thought of the boys. Michael's growing up; so is Nicky."

"Nicky is fifteen; Ronny is eleven, if you call that growing up."

"That's all very well, but when Nicky is twenty-one and Ronny is seventeen what are you going to do?"

"I'm not going to turn Ronny out of doors for fear Nicky should fall in love with her, if that's what you mean."

"It _is_ what I mean, now you've mentioned it."

"He's less likely to fall in love with her if I bring them up as brother and sister."

"You might think of Anthony. Bartholomew's wife leaves him for another man, and you aid and abet her by taking her child, relieving her of her one responsibility."

"Bartie's wife leaves him, and we help Bartie by taking care of his child--who is _our niece_, not yours."

"My dear Frances, that attitude isn't going to deceive anybody. If you don't think of Anthony and your children, you might think of us. We don't want to be mixed up in this perfectly horrible affair."

"How are you mixed up in it?"

"Well, after all, Frances, we are the family. We are your sisters and your mother and your children's grand-mother and aunts."

"Then," said Frances with decision, "you must try to bear it. You must take the rough with the smooth, as Anthony and I do."

And as soon as she had said it she was sorry. It struck her for the first time that her sisters were getting old. It was no use for Auntie Louie, more red and more rigid than ever, to defy the imminence of her forty-ninth birthday. Auntie Emmy's gestures, her mouthings and excitement, only drew attention to the fact that she was forty-seven. And Edie, why, even poor little Auntie Edie was forty-five. Grannie, dry and wiry, hardly looked older than Auntie Edie.

They left her, going stiffly, in offence. And again the unbearable pathos of them smote her. The poor Aunties. She was a brute to hurt them. She still thought of them as Auntie Louie, Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edie. It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed upon them a colour and vitality that, but for her and for her children, they would not have had. They were helpless, tiresome, utterly inefficient. In all their lives they had never done anything vigorous or memorable. They were doomed to go out before her children; when they were gone they would be gone altogether. Neither Auntie Louie, nor Auntie Emmy, nor Auntie Edie would leave any mark or sign of herself. But her children gave them titles by which they would be remembered after they were gone. It was as if she had bestowed on them a little of her own enduring life.

It was absurd and pathetic that they should think that they were the Family.

But however sorry she was for them she could not allow them to dictate to her in matters that concerned her and Anthony alone. If they were so worried, about the scandal, why hadn't they the sense to see that the only way to meet it was to give it the lie by taking Ronny, by behaving as if Ronny were unquestionably Bartie's daughter and their niece? They were bound to do it, if not for Vera's sake, for the dear little girl's sake. And that was what Vera had been thinking of; that was why she had trusted them.

But her three sisters had always disliked Vera. They disliked her because, while they went unmarried, Vera, not content with the one man who was her just and legal portion, had taken another man whom she had no right to. And Auntie Emmeline had been in love with Ferdie.

Still, there was a certain dreadful truth in their reproaches; and it stung. Frances said to herselv that she had not been wise. She had done a risky thing in taking Ronny. It was not fair to her children, to Michael and Nicholas and John. She was afraid. She had been afraid when Vera had talked to her about Nicky and Veronica; and when she had seen Veronica and Nicky playing together in the apple-tree house; and when she had heard Ronny's voice outside the schoolroom door crying, "Where's Nicky? I want him. Will he be very long?"

Supposing Veronica should go on wanting Nicky, and supposing Nicky--

Frances was so worried that, when Dorothy came striding across the lawn to ask her what the matter was, and what on earth Grannie and the Aunties had been gassing about all that time, she told her.

Dorothy was nineteen. And Dorothy at nineteen, tall and upright, was Anthony's daughter. Her face and her whole body had changed; they were Anthony's face and body made feminine. Her little straight nose had now a short high bridge; her brown eyes were keen and alert; she had his hawk's look. She put her arm in Frances's, protecting her, and they walked up and down the terrace path, discussing it. In the distance Grannie and the Aunties could be seen climbing the slope of the Heath to Judges' Walk. They were not, Dorothy protested, pathetic; they were simply beastly. She hated them for worrying her mother.

"They think I oughtn't to have taken Ronny. They think Nicky'll want to marry her."

"But Ronny's a kid--"

"When she's not a kid."

"He won't, Mummy ducky, he won't. She'll be a kid for ages. Nicky'll have married somebody else before she's got her hair up."

"Then Ronny'll fall in love with _him_, and get her little heart broken."

"She won't, Mummy, she won't. They only talk like that because they think Ferdie's Ronny's father."

"Dorothy!"

Frances, in horror, released herself from that protecting arm. The horror came, not from the fact, but from her daughter's knowledge of it.

"Poor Mummy, didn't you know? That's why Bartie hates her."

"It isn't true."

"What's the good of that as long as Bartie thinks it is?" said Dorothy.

"London Bridge is broken down
(_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)"

Veronica was in the drawing-room, singing "London Bridge."

Michael, in all the beauty of his adolescence, lay stretched out on the sofa, watching her. Her small, exquisite, childish face between the plaits of honey-coloured hair, her small, childish face thrilled him with a singular delight and sadness. She was so young and so small, and at the same time so perfect that Michael could think of her as looking like that for ever, not growing up into a tiresome, bouncing, fluffy flapper like Rosalind Jervis.

Aunt Louie and Aunt Emmeline said that Rosalind was in love with him. Michael thought that was beastly of them and he hoped it wasn't true.

"'Build it up with gold so fine'"--

Veronica was happy; for she knew herself to be a cause of happiness. Like Frances once, she was profoundly aware of her own happiness, and for the same reason. It was, if you came to think of it, incredible. It had been given to her, suddenly, when she was not looking for it, after she had got used to unhappiness.

As long as she could remember Veronica had been aware of herself. Aware of herself, chiefly, not as a cause of happiness, but as a cause of embarrassment and uncertainty and trouble to three people, her father, her mother and Ferdie, just as they were causes of embarrassment and trouble and uncertainty to her. They lived in a sort of violent mystery that she, incomprehensibly, was mixed up with. As long as she could remember, her delicate, childish soul had quivered with the vibration of their incomprehensible and tiresome passions. You could never tell what any of them really wanted, though among them they managed to create an atmosphere of most devastating want. Only one thing she knew definitely--that they didn't want _her_.

She was altogether out of it except as a meaningless counter in their incomprehensible, grown-up game. Her father didn't want her; her mother didn't want her very much; and though now and then Ferdie (who wasn't any relation at all) behaved as if he wanted her, _his_ wanting only made the other two want her less than ever.

There had been no peace or quietness or security in her little life of eleven years. Their places (and they had had so many of them!) had never had any proper place for her. She seemed to have spent most of her time in being turned out of one room because her father had come into it, and out of another because her mother wanted to be alone in it with Ferdie. And nobody, except Ferdie sometimes, when they let him, ever wanted to be alone in any room with her. She was so tired of the rooms where she was obliged to be always alone with herself or with the servants, though the servants were always kind.

Now, in Uncle Anthony's house, there was always peace and quietness and an immense security. She knew that, having taken her, they wouldn't give her up.

She was utterly happy.

And the house, with its long, wainscoted rooms, its whiteness and darkness, with its gay, clean, shining chintzes, the delicate, faded rose stuffs, the deep blue and purple and green stuffs, and the blue and white of the old china, and its furniture of curious woods, the golden, the golden-brown, the black and the wine-coloured, bought by Anthony in many countries, the round concave mirrors, the pictures and the old bronzes, all the things that he had gathered together and laid up as treasure for his Sons; and the garden on the promontory, with its buttressed walls and its green lawn, its flower borders, and its tree of Heaven, saturated with memories, became for her, as they had become for Frances, the sanctuary, crowded with visible and tangible symbols, of the Happiness she adored.

"Sing it again, Ronny."

She sang it again.

"'London Bridge is broken down'"--

It was funny of Michael to like the silly, childish song; but if he wanted it he should have it. Veronica would have given any of them anything they wanted. There was nothing that she had ever wanted that they had not given to her.

She had wanted to be strong, to be able to run and ride, to play tennis and cricket and hockey, and Nicky had shown her how. She had wanted books of her own, and Auntie Frances, and Uncle Anthony and Dorothy and Michael had given her books, and Nicky had made her a bookcase. Her room (it was all her own) was full of treasures. She had wanted to learn to sing and play properly, and Uncle Anthony had given her masters. She had wanted people to love her music, and they loved it. She had wanted a big, grown-up sister like Dorothy, and they had given her Dorothy; and she had wanted a little brother of her own age, and they had given her John. John had a look of Nicky. His golden white hair was light brown now; his fine, wide mouth had Nicky's impudence, even when, like Frances, he kept it shut to smile her unwilling, twitching, mocking smile. She had wanted a father and mother like Frances and Anthony; and they had given her themselves.

And she had wanted to live in the same house with Nicky always.

So if Michael wanted her to sing "London Bridge" to him twenty times over, she would sing it, provided Nicky didn't ask her to do anything else at the same time. For she wanted to do most for Nicky, always.

And yet she was aware of something else that was not happiness. It was not a thing you could name or understand, or seize, or see; you were simply aware of it, as you were aware of ghosts in your room at night. Like the ghosts, it was not always there; but when it was there you knew.

It felt sometimes as if Auntie Frances was afraid of her; as if she, Veronica, was a ghost.

And Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I am not good. She thinks I'll worry her. But I shan't."

That was before the holidays. Now that they had come and Nicky was back, "it" seemed to her something to do with Nicky; and Veronica said to herself, "She is afraid I'll get in his way and worry him, because he's older. But I shan't."

As if she had not been taught and trained not to get in older people's ways and worry them. And as if she wasn't growing older every minute herself!

"'Build it up with gold so fine--
(_Ride over my Lady Leigh_!)

* * * * *

"'Build it up with stones so strong'"--

She had her back to the door and to the mirror that reflected it, yet she knew that Nicky had come in.

"That's the song you used to sing at bed-time when you were frightened," he said.

She was sitting now in the old hen-house that was Nicky's workshop, watching him as he turned square bars of brass into round bars with his lathe. She had plates of steel to polish, and pieces of wood to rub smooth with glass-paper. There were sheets of brass and copper, and bars and lumps of steel, and great poles and planks of timber reared up round the walls of the workshop. The metal filings fell from Nicky's lathe into sawdust that smelt deliciously.

The workshop was nicer than the old apple-tree house, because there were always lots of things to do in it for Nicky.

"Nicky," she said suddenly, "do you believe in ghosts?"

"Well--" Nicky caught his bar as it fell from the lathe and examined it critically.

"You remember when I was afraid of ghosts, and you used to come and sit with me till I went to sleep?"

"Rather."

"Well--there _are_ ghosts. I saw one last night. It came into the room just after I got into bed."

"You _can_ see them," Nicky said. "Ferdie's seen heaps. It runs in his family. He told me."

"He never told _me_."

"Rather not. He was afraid you'd be frightened."

"Well, I wasn't frightened. Not the least little bit."

"I shall tell him that. He wanted most awfully to know whether you saw them too."

"_Me_? But Nicky--it was Ferdie I saw. He stood by the door and looked at me. Like he does, you know."

The next morning Frances had a letter of two lines from Veronica's mother:

"Ferdie died last evening at half past eight.

"He wants you to keep Ronny.

"VERA."

It was not till years later that Veronica knew that "He wanted most awfully to know whether you saw them too" meant "He wanted most awfully to know whether you really were his daughter."