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Tree of Heaven

<h2>XXIII</h2> Nicholas had applied for a commission, and he had got it, and Frances was glad. She had been proud of him because he had chosen the ranks instead of the Officers' Training Corps; but she persisted in the belief that, when it came to the trenches, second lieutenants stood a better chance. "For goodness' sake," Nicholas had said, "don't tell her that they're over the parapet first." That was in December. In February he got a week's leave--sudden, unforeseen and special leave. It had to be broken to her this time that leave as special as that meant war-leave. She said, "Well, if it does, I shall have him for six whole days." She had learned how to handle time, how to prolong the present, drawing it out minute by minute; thus her happiness, stretched to the snapping point, vibrated. She had a sense of its vibration now, as she looked at Nicholas. It was the evening of the day he had come home, and they were all in the drawing-room together. He was standing before her, straight and tall, on the hearthrug, where he had lifted the Persian cat, Timmy, out of his sleep and was holding him against his breast. Timmy spread himself there, softly and heavily, hanging on to Nicky's shoulder by his claws; he butted Nicky's chin with his head, purring. "I don't know how I'm to tear myself away from Timmy. I should like to wear him alive as a waistcoat. Or hanging on my shoulder like a cape, with his tail curled tight round my neck. He'd look uncommonly chic with all his khaki patches." "Why don't you take him with you?" Anthony said. "'Cos he's Ronny's cat." "He isn't. I've given him to you," Veronica said. "When?" "Now, this minute. To sleep on your feet and keep you warm." Frances listened and thought: "What children--what babies they are, after all." If only this minute could be stretched out farther. "I mustn't," Nicky said. "I should spend hours in dalliance; and if a shell got him it would ruin my morale." Timmy, unhooked from Nicky's shoulder, lay limp in his arms. He lay on his back, in ecstasy, his legs apart, showing the soft, cream-white fur of his stomach. Nicky rubbed his face against the soft, cream-white fur. "I say, what a heavenly death it would be to die--smothered in Timmies." "Nicky, you're a beastly sensualist. That's what's the matter with you," John said. And they all laughed. The minute broke, stretched to its furthest. <hr style="width: 25%;"> Frances was making plans now for Nicky's week. There were things they could do, plays they could see, places they could go to. Anthony would let them have the big car as much as they wanted. For you could stretch time out by filling it; you could multiply the hours by what they held. "Ronny and I are going to get married to-morrow," Nicky said. "We settled it that we would at once, if I got war-leave. It's the best thing to do." "Of course," Frances said, "it's the best thing to do." But she had not allowed for it, nor for the pain it gave her. That pain shocked her. It was awful to think that, after all her surrenders, Nicky's happiness could give her pain. It meant that she had never let go her secret hold. She had been a hypocrite to herself. Nicky was talking on about it, excitedly, as he used to talk on about his pleasures when he was a child. If Dad'll let us have the racing car, we'll go down to Morfe. We can do it in a day." "My dear boy," Anthony said, "don't you know I've lent the house to the Red Cross, and let the shooting?" "I don't care. There's the little house in the village we can have. And Harker and his wife can look after us." "Harker gone to the War, and his wife's looking after his brother's children somewhere. And I've put two Belgian refugees into it." "They can look after us," said Nicky. "We'll stay three days, run back, and have one day at home before I sail." Frances gave up her play with time. She was beaten. And still she thought: "At least I shall have him one whole day." And then she looked across the room to Michael, as if Michael's face had signalled to her. His clear, sun-burnt skin showed blotches of white where the blood had left it. A light sweat was on his forehead. When their eyes met, he shifted his position to give himself an appearance of ease. Michael had not reckoned on his brother's marriage, either. It was when he asked himself: "On what, then, had he been reckoning?" that the sweat broke out on his forehead. He had not reckoned on anything. But the sudden realization of what he might have reckoned on made him sick. He couldn't bear to think of Ronny married. And yet again, he couldn't bear to think of Nicky not marrying her. If he had had a hold on her he would have let her go. In this he knew himself to be sincere. He had had no hold on her, and to talk about letting her go was idiotic; still, there was a violent pursuit and possession by the mind--and Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy, that psychic assault and outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual surrender of her was so perfect that his very imagination gave her up to Nicky. He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing could take their three days from them, even when the War had done its worst. And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she think I was reckoning on that?" <hr style="width: 25%;"> Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead Town Hall, before the Registrar. They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying and circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky said, whole handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals, with a clear run before him, he let out the racing car to its top speed on the Great North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed like some immense, nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all its weight were purged from it by speed. It flew up and down the hills of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat country round Peterborough and Grantham, a country of silver green and emerald green grass and purple fallow land and bright red houses; and so on to the great plain of York, and past Reyburn up towards the bare hill country netted with grey stone walls. Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road. It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed enormous and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen moon. Other hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous, stood piled up in front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale. Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was as if, ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that incredibly high, immense obstruction. They were thrilled, mysteriously, as before the image of monstrous and omnipotent disaster. Then the dale widened; it made way for them and saved them. The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a coronet and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights of the village below, the village they were making for, showed as if dropped out of the pattern on the hill. One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage chamber. Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch to receive them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage torches. The old woman held her light low down, lighting the flagstone of the threshold. The old man lifted his high, showing the lintel of the door. It was so low that Nicholas had to stoop to go in. <hr style="width: 25%;"> In the morning they read the date cut in the wall above the porch: 1665. The house was old and bent and grey. Its windows were narrow slits in the stone mullions. It crouched under the dipping boughs of the ash-tree that sheltered it. Inside there was just room for Veronica to stand up. Nicholas had to stoop or knock his head against the beams. It had only four rooms, two for Nicholas and Veronica, and two for Jean and Suzanne. And it was rather dark. But it pleased them. They said it was their apple-tree-house grown up because they were grown up, and keeping strict proportions. You had to crawl into it, and you were only really comfortable sitting or lying down. So they sat outside it, watching old Suzanne through the window as she moved about the house place, cooking Belgian food for them, and old Jean as he worked in the garden. Veronica loved Jean and Suzanne. She had found out all about them the first morning. "Only think, Nicky. They're from Termonde, and their house was burnt behind them as they left it. They saw horrors, and their son was killed in the War. "Yet they're happy and at peace. Almost as if they'd forgotten. He'll plant flowers in his garden." "They're old, Ronny. And perhaps they were tired already when it happened." "Yes, that must be it. They're old and tired." <hr style="width: 25%;"> And now it was the last adventure of their last day. They were walking on the slope of Renton Moor that looks over Rathdale towards Greffington Edge. The light from the west poured itself in vivid green down the valley below them, broke itself into purple on Karva Hill to the north above Morfe, and was beaten back in subtle blue and violet from the stone rampart of the Edge. Nicholas had been developing, in fancy, the strategic resources of the country. Guns on Renton Moor, guns along Greffington Edge, on Sarrack Moor. The raking lines of the hills were straight as if they had been measured with a ruler and then planed. "Ronny," he said at last, "we've licked 'em in the first round, you and I. The beastly Boche can't do us out of these three days." "No. We've been absolutely happy. And we'll never forget it. Never." "Perhaps it was a bit rough on Dad and Mummy, our carting ourselves up here, away from them. But, you see, they don't really mind. They're feeling about it now just as we feel about it. I knew they would." There had been a letter from Frances saying she was glad they'd gone. She was so happy thinking how happy they were. "They're angels, Nicky." "Aren't they? Simply angels. That's the rotten part of it. I wish-- "I wish I could tell them what I think of them. But you can't, somehow. It sticks in your throat, that sort of thing." "You needn't," she said; "they know all right." She thought: "This is what he wants me to tell them about--afterwards." "Yes, but--I must have hurt them--hurt them horribly--lots of times. I wish I hadn't. "But" he went on, "they're funny, you know. Dad actually thought it idiotic of us to do this. He said it would only make it harder for us when I had to go. They don't see that it's just piling it on--going from one jolly adventure to another. "I'm afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on you; because the rest of it's all my show." "But it isn't all your show, Nicky darling. It's mine, and it's theirs--because we haven't grudged you your adventure." "That's exactly how I want you to feel about it." "And they're assuming that I shan't come back. Which, if you come to think of it, is pretty big cheek. They talk, and they think, as though nobody ever got through. Whereas I've every intention of getting through and of coming back. I'm the sort of chap who does get through, who does come back." "And even if I wasn't, if they studied statistics they'd see that it's a thousand chances to one against the Boches getting me--just me out of all the other chaps. As if I was so jolly important. "No; don't interrupt. Let's get this thing straight while we can. Supposing--just supposing I didn't get through--didn't come back--supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to think of that, not as a clumsy accident, but just another awfully interesting thing I'd done. "Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you took the thing as a shock instead of--of what it probably really is, and went and got cut up about it, you might start the little beggar with a sort of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that it would be jumpy all its life. "It ought," said Nicky, "to sit in its little house all quiet and comfy till it's time for it to come out." He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might be, what probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted more than anything, next to Veronica. "It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy." "If that came off all right," he said, "it would make it up to Mother no end." "It wouldn't make it up to me." "You don't know what it would do," he said. She thought: "I don't want it. I don't want anything but you." "That's why," he went on, "I'm giving Don as the next of kin--the one they'll wire to; because it won't take him that way; it'll only make him madder to get out and do for them. I'm afraid of you or Mummy or Dad, or Michael being told first." "It doesn't matter a bit who's told first. I shall know first," she said. "And you needn't be afraid. It won't kill either me or the baby. If a shock could kill me I should have died long ago." "When?" "When you went to Desmond. Then, when I thought I couldn't bear it any longer, something happened." "What?" "I don't know. I don't know what it is now; I only know what it does. It always happens--always--when you want it awfully. And when you're quiet and give yourself up to it." "It'll happen again." He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite interested; puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if something had come between him and her. "You can make it happen to other people," she was saying; "so that when things get too awful they can bear them. I wanted it to happen to Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did. She said she was absolutely happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came to her. And, Nicky, they were the same queer things that came to me. It was like something getting through to her." "I say--did you ever do it to me?" "Only once, when you wanted it awfully." "When? When?" Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her trail. "When Desmond did--that awful thing. I wanted you to see that it didn't matter, it wasn't the end." "But that's just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself. It looks as if it worked, then?" "It doesn't always. It comes and goes. But I think with you it would always come; because you're more me than other people; I mean I care more for you." She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother about me, Nicky. If the most awful thing happened, and you didn't come back, It would come." "I wish I knew what It was," he said. "I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's God." "That's why they're so magnificently brave--Dorothy and Aunt Frances and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't know it's there; even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and still they go on bearing and bearing; and they were glad to give you up." "I know," he said; "lots of people say they're glad, but they really are glad." He meditated. "There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's praying or something; and if you're going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you'd be careful; because it seems to me that if there's anything in it at all, there might be hitches. I mean to say, you might work it just enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from being blown off. Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic. "That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I thought about it. Luckily one doesn't think." "But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than I tried before." "You wouldn't? Honour bright?" "Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin with, I won't believe that you're not going to get through. "But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't believe you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to something else. It doesn't end him.'" He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to. Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind talking about it?" she said. "Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I believe in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling, that you go on. You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't care. They used to think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn't care. But I really didn't. Things, most things, don't much matter, because there's always something else. You go on to it. "I care for you. You matter most awfully; and my people; but most of all you. You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the first time I heard you calling out to me to come and sit on your bed because you were frightened. You always will matter. "But Desmond didn't a little bit. You need'nt have tried to make me think she didn't. She really didn't. I only married her because she was going to have a baby. And that was because I remembered you and the rotten time you'd had. I believe that would have kept me straight with women if nothing else did. "Of course I was an idiot about it. I didn't think of marrying you till Vera told me I ought to have waited. Then it was too late. "That's why I want you most awfully to have a baby." "Yes, Nicky. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I know it's coming. The cottage belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn't it?" "Yes." "Well, I love it. Do you think he'd let me live in it?" "I think he'd give it to you if you asked him." "For my very own. Like the apple-tree house. Very well, he'll give it to me--I mean to both of us--and I shall come up here where it's all quiet and you'd never know there was a war at all--even the Belgians have forgotten it. And I shall sit out here and look at that hill, because it's straight and beautiful. I won't--I simply won't think of anything that isn't straight and beautiful. And I shall get strong. Then the baby will be straight and beautiful and strong, too. "I shall try--I shall try hard, Nicky--to make him like you." <hr style="width: 25%;"> Frances's one Day was not a success. It was taken up with little things that had to be done for Nicky. Always they seemed, he and she, to be on the edge of something great, something satisfying and revealing. It was to come in a look or a word; and both would remember it afterwards for ever. In the evening Grannie, and Auntie Louie, and Auntie Emmeline, and Auntie Edie, and Uncle Morrie, and Uncle Bartie came up to say good-bye. And in the morning Nicholas went off to France, excited and happy, as he had gone off on his wedding journey. And between Frances and her son the great thing remained unsaid. Time itself was broken. All her minutes were scattered like fine sand. <blockquote>     February 27th, 1915.           B.E.F., FRANCE.</blockquote> Dearest Mother and Dad,--I simply don't know how to thank you all for the fur coat. It's pronounced the rippingest, by a long way, that's been seen in these trenches. Did Ronny really choose it because it "looked as if it had been made out of Timmy's tummy?" It makes me feel as if I was Timmy. Timmy on his hind legs, rampant, clawing at the Boches. Just think of the effect if he got up over the parapet! The other things came all right, too, thanks. When you can't think what else to send let Nanna make another cake. And those tubes of chutney are a good idea. No; it's no earthly use worrying about Michael. If there was no English and no Allies and no Enthusiasm, and he had this War all to himself, you simply couldn't keep him out of it. I believe if old Mick could send himself out by himself against the whole German Army he'd manage to put in some first rate fancy work in the second or two before they got him. He'd be quite capable of going off and doing grisly things that would make me faint with funk, if he was by himself, with nothing but the eye of God to look at him. And then he'd rather God wasn't there. He always was afraid of having a crowd with him. The pity is he's wasting time and missing such a lot. If I were you two, I should bank on Don. He's the sensiblest of us, though he is the youngest. And don't worry about me. Do remember that even in the thickest curtain fire there are holes; there are more holes than there is stuff; and the chances are I shall be where a hole is. Another thing, Don's shell, the shell you see making straight for you like an express train, isn't likely to be the shell that's going to get you; so that if you're hit you don't feel that pang of personal resentment which must be the worst part of the business. Bits of shells that have exploded I rank with bullets which we knew all about before and were prepared for. Really, if you're planted out in the open, the peculiar awfulness of big shell-fire--what is it more than the peculiar awfulness of being run over by express trains let loose about the sky? Tell Don that when shrapnel empties itself over your head like an old tin pail, you might feel injured, but the big shell has a most disarming air of not being able to help itself, of not looking for anybody in particular. It's so innocent of personal malice that I'd rather have it any day than fat German fingers squeezing my windpipe. That's an answer to his question. And Dorothy wanted to know what it feels like going into action. Well--there's a lot of it that perhaps she wouldn't believe in if I told her--it's the sort of thing she never has believed; but Stephen was absolutely right. You aren't sold. It's more than anything you could have imagined. I'm not speaking only for myself. There's just one beastly sensation when you're half way between your parapet and theirs--other fellows say they've felt it too--when you're afraid it (the feeling) should fizzle out before you get there. But it doesn't. It grows more and more so, simply swinging you on to them, and that swing makes up for all the rotten times put together. You needn't be sorry for us. It's waste of pity. I know Don and Dorothy and Dad and Ronny aren't sorry for us. But I'm not so sure of Michael and Mother.--Always your loving, <blockquote>     NICKY.           May, 1915.                B.E.F., FRANCE</blockquote> My Dear Mick,--It's awfully decent of you to write so often when you loathe writing, especially about things that bore you. But you needn't do that. We get the news from the other fronts in the papers more or less; and I honestly don't care a damn what Asquith is saying or what Lloyd George is doing or what Northcliffe's motives are. Personally, I should say he was simply trying, like most of us, to save his country. Looks like it. But you can tell him from me, if he gets them to send us enough shells out in time we shan't worry about his motives. Anyhow that sort of thing isn't in your line, old man, and Dad can do it much better than you, if you don't mind my saying so. What I want to know is what Don and Dorothy are doing, and the last sweet thing Dad said to Mother--I'd give a day's rest in my billet for one of his worst jokes. And I like to hear about Morrie going on the bust again, too--it sounds so peaceful. Only if it really is anxiety about me that makes him do it, I wish he'd leave off thinking about me, poor old thing. More than anything I want to know how Ronny is; how she's looking and what she's feeling; you'll be able to make out a lot, and she may tell you things she won't tell the others. That's why I'm glad you're there and not here. And as for that--why go on worrying? I do know how you feel about it. I think I always did, in a way. I never thought you were a "putrid Pacifist." Your mind's all right. You say the War takes me like religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say, but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead of the Government, you'd have been in at the start, before me. Well--there's such a thing as conversion, isn't there? You never can tell what may happen to you, and the War isn't over yet. Those of us who are in it now aren't going to see the best of it by a long way. There's no doubt the very finest fighting'll be at the finish; so that the patriotic beggars who were in such a hurry to join up will be jolly well sold, poor devils. Take me, for instance. If I'd got what I wanted and been out in Flanders in 1914, ten to one I should have been in the retreat from Mons, like Frank, and never anywhere else. Then I'd have given my head to have gone to Gallipoli; but now, well, I'm just as glad I'm not mixed up in that affair. Still, that's not the way to look at it, calculating the fun you can get out of it for yourself. And it's certainly not the way to win the War. At that rate one might go on saving oneself up for the Rhine, while all the other fellows were getting pounded to a splash on the way there. So if you're going to be converted let's hope you'll be converted quick. If you are, my advice is, try to get your commission straight away. There are things you won't be able to stand if you're a Tommy. For instance, having to pig it on the floor with all your brother Tommies. I slept for three months next to a beastly blighter who used to come in drunk and tread on my face and be ill all over me. Even now, when I look back on it, that seems worse than anything that's happened out here. But that's because at home your mind isn't adjusted to horrors. That chap came as a shock and a surprise to me every time. I couldn't get used to him. Whereas out here everything's shifted in the queerest way. Your mind shifts. You funk your first and your second sight, say, of a bad stretcher case; but when it comes to the third and the fourth you don't funk at all; you're not shocked, you're not a bit surprised. It's all in the picture, and you're in the picture too. There's a sort of horrible harmony. It's like a certain kind of beastly dream which doesn't frighten you because you're part of it, part of the beastliness. No, the thing that got me, so far, more than anything was--what d'you think? A little dog, no bigger than a kitten, that was run over the other day in the street by a motor-cyclist--and a civilian at that. There were two or three women round it, crying and gesticulating. It looked as if they'd just lifted it out of a bath of blood. That made me sick. You see, the little dog wasn't in the picture. I hadn't bargained for him. Yet the things Morrie saw in South Africa--do you remember how he would tell us about them?--weren't in it with the things that happened here. Pounding apart, the things that corpses can do, apparently on their own, are simply unbelievable--what the war correspondents call "fantastic postures." But I haven't got to the point when I can slap my thighs, and roar with laughter--if they happen to be Germans. In between, the boredom is so awful that I've heard some of our men say they'd rather have things happening. And, of course, we're all hoping that when those shells come along there won't be quite so much "between." Love to Ronny and Mother and all of them.--Your very affectionate, <blockquote>     NICHOLAS.           June 1st, 1915.                B.E.F., FRANCE.</blockquote> My Darling Ronny,--Yes, I think all your letters must have come, because you've answered everything. You always tell me just what I want to know. When I see the fat envelopes coming I know they're going to be chock-full of the things I've happened to be thinking about. Don't let's ever forget to put the dates, because I make out that I've always dreamed about you, too, the nights you've written. And so the Aunties are working in the War Hospital Supply Depôt? It's frightfully funny what Dorothy says about their enjoying the War and feeling so important. Don't let her grudge it them, though; it's all the enjoyment, or importance, they're ever had in their lives, poor dears. But I shall know, if a swab bursts in my inside, that it's Auntie Edie's. As for Auntie Emmeline's, I can't even imagine what they'd be like--monstrosities--or little babies injured at birth. Aunt Louie's would be well-shaped and firm, but erring a little on the hard side, don't you think? That reminds me, I suppose I may tell you now since it's been in the papers, that we've actually got Moving Fortresses out here. I haven't seen them yet, but a fellow who has thinks they must be uncommonly like Drayton's and my thing. I suspect, from what he says, they're a bit better, though. We hadn't got the rocking-horse idea. It's odd--this time last year I should have gone off my head with agony at the mere thought of anybody getting in before us; and now I don't care a bit. I do mind rather for Drayton's sake, though I don't suppose he cares, either. The great thing is that it's been done, and done better. Anyway we've been lucky. Supposing the Germans had got on to them, and trotted them out first, and one of our own guns had potted him or me, that would have been a jolly sell. What makes you ask after Timmy? I hardly like to tell you the awful thing that's happened to him. He had to travel down to the base hospital on a poor chap who was shivering with shell-shock, and--he never came back again. It doesn't matter, because the weather's so warm now that I don't want him. But I'm sorry because you all gave him to me and it looks as if I hadn't cared for him. But I did.... <blockquote>June 10th.</blockquote> Sorry I couldn't finish this last week. Things developed rather suddenly. I wish I could tell you what, but we mustn't let on what happens, not even now, when it's done happening. Still, there are all the other things I couldn't say anything about at the time. If you must know, I've been up "over the top" three times now since I came out in February. So, you see, one gets through all right. Well--I tried ages ago to tell Dorothy what it was like. It's been like that every time (except that I've got over the queer funky feeling half-way through). It'll be like that again next time, I know. Because now I've tested it. And, Ronny--I couldn't tell Dorothy this, because she'd think it was all rot--but when you're up first out of the trench and stand alone on the parapet, it's absolute happiness. And the charge is--well, it's simply heaven. It's as if you'd never really lived till then; I certainly hadn't, not up to the top-notch, barring those three days we had together. That's why--this part's mostly for Michael--there's something rotten about that poem he sent me that somebody wrote, making out that this gorgeous fight-feeling (which is what I suppose he's trying for) is nothing but a form of sex-madness. If he thinks that's all there is in it, he doesn't know much about war, or love either. Though I'm bound to say there's a clever chap in my battalion who thinks the same thing. He says he feels the ecstasy, or whatever it is, all right, just the same as I do; but that it's simply submerged savagery bobbing up to the top--a hidden lust for killing, and the hidden memory of having killed, he called it. He's always ashamed of it the next day, as if he had been drunk. And my Sergeant-Major, bless him, says there's nothing in it but "a ration of rum." Can't be that in my case because I always give mine to a funny chap who knows he's going to have collywobbles as soon as he gets out into the open. But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it, because they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of being killed. That--when you realize it--well, it's like the thing you told me about that you said you thought must be God because it's so real. I didn't understand it then, but I do now. You're bang up against reality--you're going clean into it--and the sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while one half of you is feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill and doing its best to keep on this side reality. But I've been near enough to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick. He'd write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's a sin that I should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't do anything with it. Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your loving, <blockquote>     NICKY.</blockquote> P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and Dorothy and Mother. It would save them half the misery they're probably going through. <hr style="width: 25%;"> The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the garden, weeding the delphinium border. It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was digging in the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering green peas and fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came through the open door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace with the piled up baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to Veronica. It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came, Veronica could time it by the striking of the clock heard through the open doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and then, almost on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious happiness. Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity made each small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged at the weeds, and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the palms of her hand smoothed over the places where they had been. She thought of old Jean and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at Renton, and of that tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest thing she had ever seen. And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the half-hour, not out of herself or out of her thoughts, but mysteriously and from somewhere a long way off. <hr style="width: 25%;"> She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through the door with her basket, and it was then that she saw Nicholas. He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised between her and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested in the act of looking back to see if she were following him. His eyes shone, vivid and blue, as they always shone when he was happy. He smiled at her, but with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to her, but with no sound. Everything was still; her body and her soul were still; her heart was still; it beat steadily. She had started forwards to go to him when the tree thrust itself between them, and he was gone. And Frances was still coming through the door as Veronica had seen her when she turned. She was calling to her to come in out of the sun. <hr style="width: 35%;"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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