The Tree of Heaven Part 51

"Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we don't."

Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.

Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours'

notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it.

They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least we could do for _them_ was to trust them, and not believe any tales of their retreating.

And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home, listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing of the bell.

She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message came from his mother to her mother: "Tell your dear child for me that my son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to come and see me; but not just yet."

She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter from his Colonel.

After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into Cannon Street Station.

Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly, beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept, worn out with her hard day's driving.

She thought: "I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.

"I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered.

He said 'It's _your_ War--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's killed in it.

"I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for one night.

"How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was a coward. He got nothing."

His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion.

She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.

Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had dreamed it or made it up.

Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and it would take her car with it and a new driver.

Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.

"If I could only help you."

"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more often she hid away somewhere by herself.

Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's Veronica."

But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He couldn't have had five hours' fighting.

"And to be killed--Retreating.

"He got nothing out of it but agony."

Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know what he may have got in the last minute of it."

"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me.

But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.

"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"

"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you, more alive."

"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."

One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:

"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must have known that he would not come back."

"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I want you to see that my memory is fairly good."

The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."

The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah x.x.xv.

and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:

"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight."...

"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...

... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."

And their last hour came back to her with its mysterious, sweet and powerful pa.s.sion that had no fear in it; and she laid hold again on the Reality they had seen and felt together.

The moment pa.s.sed. She wanted it to come back, for as long as it lasted she was at peace.

But it did not come back. Nothing came back but her anguish of remorse for all that she had wasted.

XXI

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 sn.o.bbish; and I hate sn.o.bs." 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 st.i.tching on her baby's frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else.