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Tree of Heaven

<h2>XXII</h2> Michael had gone to Stephen's house. He was no longer at his ease there. It seemed to him that Lawrence's eyes followed him too; not with hatred, but with a curious meditative wonder. To-night Stephen said to him, "Did you know that Réveillaud's killed?" "Killed? Killed? I didn't even know he was fighting." Lawrence laughed. "What did you suppose he was doing?" "No--but how?" "Out with the patrol and shot down. There you are--" He shoved the Times to him, pointing to the extract from Le Matin: "It is with regret that we record the death of M. Jules Réveillaud, the brilliant young poet and critic--" Michael stared at the first three lines; something in his mind prevented him from going on to the rest, as if he did not care to read about Réveillaud and know how he died. "It is with regret that we record the death. It is with regret that we record--with regret--" Then he read on, slowly and carefully, to the end. It was a long paragraph. "To think," he said at last, "that this revolting thing should have happened to him." "His death?" "No--this. The Matin never mentioned Réveillaud before. None of the big papers, none of the big reviews noticed his existence except to sneer at him. He goes out and gets killed like any little bourgeois, and the swine plaster him all over with their filthy praise. He'd rather they'd spat on him." He meditated fiercely. "Well--he couldn't help it. He was conscripted." "You think he wouldn't have gone of his own accord?" "I'm certain he wouldn't." "And I'm certain he would." "I wish to God we'd got conscription here. I'd rather the Government commandeered my body than stand this everlasting interference with my soul." "Then," said Lawrence, "you'll not be surprised at my enlisting." "You're not--" "I am. I'd have been in the first week if I'd known what to do about Vera." "But--it's--it's not sane." "Perhaps not. But it's Irish." "Irish? I can understand ordinary Irishmen rushing into a European row for the row's sake, just because they haven't got a civil war to mess about in. But you--of all Irishmen--why on earth should you be in it?" "Because I want to be in it." "I thought," said Michael, "you were to have been a thorn in England's side?" "So I was. So I am. But not at this minute. My grandmother was a hard Ulster woman and I hated her. But I wouldn't be a thorn in my grandmother's side if the old lady was assaulted by a brutal voluptuary, and I saw her down and fighting for her honour. "I've been a thorn in England's side all my life. But it's nothing to the thorn I'll be if I'm killed fighting for her." "Why--why--if you want to fight in the civil war afterwards?" "Why? Because I'm one of the few Irishmen who can reason straight. I was going into the civil war last year because it was a fight for freedom. I'm going into this War this year because it's a bigger fight for a bigger freedom. "You can't have a free Ireland without a free England, any more than you can have religious liberty without political liberty. If the Orangemen understood anything at all about it they'd see it was the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners that'll help them to put down Catholicism in Ireland." "You think it matters to Ireland whether Germany licks us or we lick Germany?" "I think it matters to the whole world." "What's changed you?" said Michael. He was angry with Lawrence. He thought: "He hasn't any excuse for failing us. He hasn't been conscripted." "Nothing's changed me. But supposing it didn't matter to the whole world, or even to Europe, and supposing the Allies were beaten in the end, you and I shouldn't be beaten, once we'd stripped ourselves, stripped our souls clean, and gone in. "Victory, Michael--victory is a state of mind." <hr style="width: 25%;"> The opportunist had seen his supreme opportunity. He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he had said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not making it easy now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered about him, fluttering with anxiety. When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for Veronica. Veronica said, "You must let him go." "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, astonishingly 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." <hr style="width: 25%;"> 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 God 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 God, 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 bitch. "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." "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 passion is. The poor child's anæmic." "Another mistake. Veronica, and 'children' like Veronica have more passion 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 sexual 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 damned lime-trees all round it. And that damned 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 God'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. <hr style="width: 25%;"> 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 passion 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." <hr style="width: 25%;"> 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. <hr style="width: 25%;"> "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 Dicky?--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.)" <hr style="width: 25%;"> "8.30. It is all over. "He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his love." <hr style="width: 25%;"> Vera said to herself: "He didn't. She made that up." She hated the Red Cross woman who had been with Lawrence and had seen so much; who had dared to tell her what he meant and to make up messages. <hr style="width: 35%;"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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