The Tree of Heaven Part 48

"I realize that I'm thirty-eight, and that between us we've made a pretty mess of each other's lives."

"Have I made a mess of _your_ life?'

"A beastly mess."

"I'm sorry. I wouldn't have done it for the world if I'd known. You know I wouldn't.

"But one doesn't know things."

"One doesn't if one's Dorothea. One knows some things awfully well; but not the things that matter."

"Well--but what could I do?" she said.

"You could have done what you can do now. You could have married me. And we would have had three years of each other."

"You mean three centuries. There was a reason why we couldn't manage it."

"There wasn't a reason. There isn't any reason now.

"Look here--to-day's Wednesday. Will you marry me on Friday if I get leave and a licence and fix it up tomorrow? We shall have three days."

"Three days." She seemed to be saying to herself that for three days--No, it wasn't worth while.

"Well, three months perhaps. Perhaps six, if my rotten luck doesn't change. Because, I'm doing my level best to make it change. So, you see, it's got to be one thing or another."

And still she seemed to be considering: Was it or was it not worth while?

"For G.o.d's sake don't say you're going to make conditions. There really isn't time for it. You can think what you like and say what you like and do what you like, and wear anything--wear a busby--I shan't care if you'll only marry me."

"Yes. That's the way you go on. And yet you don't, say you love me. You never have said it. You--you're leaving me to do all that."

"Why--what else have I been doing for seven years? Nine years--ten years?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. You just seem to think that I can go off and get married to a man without knowing whether he cares for me or not.

"And now it's too late. My hands are all dirty. So's my face--filthy--you mustn't--"

"I don't care. They're your hands. It's your face. I don't care."

The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she keeps it on _now_!"

She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast to him, straight against his own straightness, till the pa.s.sion and the youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.

He said to himself, "She _shall_ come alive. She _shall_ feel. She _shall want_ me. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten years ago."

Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands.

And fear came with her pa.s.sion. She thought, "Supposing something happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him now--to-night."

Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.

She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me if he knew."

Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?

They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.

"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there was anything that could have prevented it."

"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the difference. And there we were."

"It didn't--really."

She shook her head. "We thought it did."

"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?

"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it.

I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."

"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that we seemed to go wrong.

"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or wondered what you were feeling? _That's_ what put me off. It hurt so atrociously that I couldn't say anything.

"It wasn't true that I didn't think about you. I thought about nothing else when I wasn't working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.

"And you said I didn't listen to what you told me. That wasn't true. I was listening like anything."

"Darling--what did I tell you?"

"Oh--about the thing you called your experience, or your adventure, or something."

"My adventure?"

"That's what you called it. A sort of dream you had in prison. I couldn't say anything because I was stupid. It was beyond me. It's beyond me now."

"Never mind my adventure. What does it matter?"

"It matters awfully. Because I could see that it meant something big and important that I couldn't get the hang of. It used to bother me. I kept on trying to get it, and not getting it."

"You poor dear! And I've forgotten it. It did feel frightfully big and important and real at the time. And now it's as if it had happened to somebody else--to Veronica or somebody--not me."

"It was much more like Veronica. I do understand the rest of that business. Now, I mean. I own I didn't at the time."

"It's all over, Frank, and forgotten. Swallowed up in the War."

"You're not swallowed up."