The Tree of Heaven Part 36

"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."

"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if you mean going.

"What time is it?"

"A quarter to eight."

"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't make me late for that infernal banquet. You _are_ going to drive me there?"

"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with you."

"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"

He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it burnished and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the broad red, white and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union slanting across her breast.

He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial Hotel, Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too much for speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there was that queer exaltation that had sustained her in prison.

He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and Nicholas waited to receive her.

Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated it, but they went in.

Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red, white and blue ribbons.

"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you through."

"How can he when he feels like that about it?"

"As if we didn't feel!"

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

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

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

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

The twenty-one prisoners came in.

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

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

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

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

It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.

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

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

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

Follow on! Follow on!

With flag and sword from south and north, The sounding, s.h.i.+ning hosts go forth.

Follow on! Follow on!

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

Follow on! Follow on!

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

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

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

Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.

The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her old terror of the collective soul. Its ma.s.sed emotion threatened her.

She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by the Vortex. She felt the rus.h.i.+ng of the whirlwind; it sucked at her breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.

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

She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul.

The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as needles, tortured him.

Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom. His fair, handsome face was set clear and hard. His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his head like a cap of solid, polished metal. Weariness and disgust made a sort of cloud over his light green eyes. When Nicky looked at him Nicky's face twitched and twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as Michael hated it.

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

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

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

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

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

Then she looked at Veronica.

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

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