The Tree of Heaven Part 57

"It's the way you've taught us. I should like to know what other way you ever want us to love you?"

"The way Veronica loves Nicky, and Dorothy loved Drayton and Frances loves Anthony."

"Dorothy? She ruined Drayton's life."

"Men's lives aren't ruined that way. And not all women's."

"Well, anyhow, if she'd loved him she'd have married him. And Frances loves her children better than Anthony, and Anthony knows it."

"Veronica, then."

"Veronica doesn't know what pa.s.sion is. The poor child's anaemic."

"Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have more pa.s.sion in one eyelash than you have in your whole body."

"It's a pity," she said, "you can't have Veronica and her eyelashes instead of me. She's young and she's pretty."

He sighed with pain as her nerves lashed into his.

"That's what it all amounts to--your wanting to get out to the Front.

It's what's the matter with half the men who go there and pose as heroes. They want to get rid of the wives--and mistresses--they're tired of because the poor things aren't young or pretty any longer."

She dropped into the mourning voice that made him mad with her. "I'm old--old--old. And the War's making me older every day, and uglier. And I'm not married to you. Talk of keeping you! How _can_ I keep you when I'm old and ugly?"

He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity. Compunction always worked in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained with crying.

"That's how--by getting older.

"I've never tired of you. You're more to me now than you were when I first knew you. It's when I see you looking old that I'm sure I love you."

She smiled, too, in her sad s.e.xual wisdom.

"There may be women who'd believe you, Larry, or who'd say they believe you; but not me."

"It's the truth," he said. "If you were young and if you were married to me I should have enlisted months ago.

"Can't you see it's not you, it's this life we lead that I'm sick and tired of? I tell you I'd rather be hanged than go on with it. I'd rather be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house of yours."

"Poor little house. You used to like it. What's wrong with it now?"

"Everything. Those d.a.m.ned lime-trees all round it. And that d.a.m.ned white wall round the lime-trees. Shutting me in.

"And those curtains in your bed-room. Shutting me in.

"And your mind, trying to shut mine in.

"I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones, drinking tea and talking. I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis are sitting there--talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk's the divinest thing in G.o.d's universe.

"And over there's the one thing I've been looking for all my life--the one thing I've cared for. And you're keeping me from it."

They left it. But it began all over again the next day and the next. And Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to train it upwards in the way she hated.

One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the moustache stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He was another man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she hated him or not.

But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best gown to do honour to his khaki.

She said, "It'll be like living with another man."

"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.

And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her pa.s.sion for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to violence, to perversity.

And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out of her reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where he was stationed.

"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot me?"

"I might shoot _myself_. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear from me again."

He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.

She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent, till she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he had gone she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a sort of peace.

She told herself that she would rather he were killed soon than that she should be tortured any longer with suspense.

"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind. That would end it."

And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers for fear lest she should see his name in the lists.

But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement, and died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.

The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before he died.

She gave details and a message.

"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to forgive him and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought it would be (he means the fighting) only much more so--all except this last bit.

"He wants you to tell Michael and d.i.c.ky?--Nicky?--that. He says: 'It's odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'

"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go to the War.)"

"8.30. It is all over.