The Tree of Heaven Part 56

"I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's over age.

He's no more fit than I am."

"You'll have to, sooner or later."

"Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let them come and take him."

"It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll tear at you if you keep him."

"He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his tearing.

I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded, paralysed, broken to pieces."

"You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully."

"I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once. But he came back. He can't really do without me."

"You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and what he wants most."

"_I_ used to be what he wanted most."

"Well--it's his honour now."

"That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy. They're men and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a woman.

"But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep him--they say you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the way you go on!"

"I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have kept Nicky for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him. She wants Michael to go."

"She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are lying.

Either they don't care--they're just _lumps_, with no hearts and no nerves in them--or they lie.

"It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each other, like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael sick."

"Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut about and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and sentimentalizing--

"Lying--lying--lying."

"Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it sends them off happy?"

"But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever happened to us.

I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my life."

"It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up. You were a miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you look as if every drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens. If that's your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself. It seems to be all you've got."

"If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it _would_ have been all I've got."

Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really was. The child was not a child any more. She was a woman, astonis.h.i.+ngly and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in; they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with perfect accuracy.

"Poor little Ronny. I've been a beastly mother to you. Still, you can thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony."

Veronica thought: "How funny she is about it!" She said, "It's your beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're keeping him for."

She knew; and Lawrence knew.

That night he told her that if he hadn't wanted to enlist he'd be driven to it to get away from her.

And she was frightened and held her tongue.

Then she got desperate. She did things. She intrigued behind his back to keep him; and he found her out.

He came to her, furious.

"You needn't lie about it," he said. "I know what you've done. You've been writing letters and getting at people. You've told the truth about my age and you've lied about my health. You've even gone round cadging for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press Bureau and the Intelligence Department, and G.o.d only knows whether I'm supposed to have put you up to it."

"I took care of that, Larry."

"You? You'd no right to interfere with my affairs."

"Hadn't I? Not after living with you seven years?"

"If you'd lived with me seven centuries you'd have had no right to try to keep a man back from the Army."

"I'm trying to keep a man's brain for my country."

"You lie. It's my body you're trying to keep for yourself. As you did when I was going to Ireland."

"Oh, then--I tried to stop you from being a traitor to England. They'd have hanged you, my dear, for that."

"Traitor? It's women like you that are the traitors. My G.o.d, if there was a Government in this country that could govern, you'd be strung up in a row, all of you, and hanged."

"No wonder you think you're cut out for a soldier. You're cruel enough."

"_You're_ cruel. I'd rather be hanged than live with you a day longer after what you've done. A Frenchman shot his _wife_ the other day for less than that."

"What was 'less than that'?" she said.

"She crawled after him to the camp, like a b.i.t.c.h.

"He sent her away and she came again and again. He _had_ to shoot her."

"Was there nothing to be said for her?"

"There was. She knew it was a big risk and she took it. _You_ knew you were safe while you slimed my honour."

"She loved him, and he shot her, and you think that's a fine thing.

_How_ she must have loved him!"

"Men don't want to be loved that way. That's the mistake you women will make."