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Tree of Heaven

<h2>XXI</h2> 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 her Times newspaper, 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 to him about 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 you ever realize 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 for me, 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." "They are fighting 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 only doing something. But you go on with your own things as though nothing had happened." "I am doing 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 that public feeling's pretty strong against him. To say nothing of my feeling and your feeling." <hr style="width: 25%;"> 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. <hr style="width: 25%;"> 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. <hr style="width: 25%;"> 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: "Are you going 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, I do see 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, do you think 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. Your soul 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. I sort of 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. <hr style="width: 25%;"> 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? <hr style="width: 35%;"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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