The Tree of Heaven Part 24

Dorothy was thinking that Nicky's address at Chelsea was the address that Desmond had given her yesterday.

XIII

When Frances heard that Nicholas was going about everywhere with the painter girl they called Desmond, she wrote to Vera to come and see her.

She could never bring herself to go to the St. John's Wood house that was so much more Mr. Lawrence Stephen's house than it was Vera's.

The three eldest children went now and then, refusing to go back on Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with their liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged that frustration might create an appet.i.te for Mr. Stephen's society that otherwise they might not, after all, acquire.

Vera understood that her husband's brother and sister-in-law could hardly be expected to condone her last aberration. Her attachment to Ferdie Cameron had been different. It was inevitable, and in a sense forgivable, seeing that it had been brought about by Bartie's sheer impossibility. Besides, the knowledge of it had dawned on them so gradually and through so many stages of extenuating tragedy, that, even when it became an open certainty, the benefit of the long doubt remained. And there was Veronica. There was still Veronica. Even without Veronica Vera would have had to think of something far worse than Lawrence Stephen before Frances would have cast her off. Frances felt that it was not for her to sit in judgment under the shelter of her tree of Heaven. Supposing she could only have had Anthony as Vera had had Ferdie, could she have lived without him? For Frances nothing in the world had any use or interest or significance but her husband and her children; her children first, and Anthony after them. For Vera nothing in the world counted but her lover.

"If only I were as sure of Lawrence as you are of Anthony!" she would say.

Yet she lived the more intensely, if the more dangerously, through the very risks of her exposed and forbidden love.

Vera was without fidelity to the unreturning dead; but she made up for it by an incorruptible adoration of the living. And she had been made notorious chiefly through Stephen's celebrity, which was, you might say, a pure accident.

Thus Frances made shelter for her friend. Only Vera must be made to understand that, though _she_ was accepted Lawrence Stephen was not. He was the point at which toleration ceased.

And Vera did understand. She understood that Frances and Anthony disapproved of her last adventure considerably more on Ferdie's and Veronica's account than on Bartie's. Even family loyalty could not espouse Bartie's cause with any zest. For Bartie showed himself implacable. Over and over again she had implored him to divorce her so that Lawrence might marry her, and over and over again he had refused.

His idea was to a.s.sert himself by refusals. In that way he could still feel that he had power over her and a sort of possession. It was he who was scandalous. Even now neither Frances nor Anthony had a word to say for him.

So Vera consented to be received surrept.i.tiously, by herself, and without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn. It had hurt her; but Stephen's celebrity was a dressing to her wound. He was so distinguished that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either, would ever have been received by him without Vera. She came, looking half cynical, half pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a little beaten after seventeen years of pa.s.sion and danger, saying that she wasn't going to force Larry down their throats if they didn't like him; and she went away sustained by her sense of his distinction and _his_ repudiations.

And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances and Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn't. Michael and Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he knew; and he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be seen at the parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself distinction. Vera had never forgotten and never would forget what Anthony and Frances had done for her and Ferdie when they took Veronica. She wanted to make up, to pay back, to help their children as they had helped her child; to give the best she had, and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't possibly have done. Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was lamentable. In his family and in the dull round of their acquaintance there was not anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael; not anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old att.i.tude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had promised her that he would help Michael.

And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas and Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm, well-ordered sanct.i.ties, a little nearer to the unclean moral vortex that to her was the most redoubtable of all. She hid her fear, because in her wisdom she knew that to show fear was not the way to keep her children. She hid her strength because she knew that to show it was not the way. Her strength was in their love of her. She had only used it once when she had stopped Nicky from going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will never do that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be bargained with. She tried to hold the balance even between their youth and their maturity.

So Frances fought her fear.

She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in spite of everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and she did not know that he had sensibilities and prejudices and scruples like her own, and that he and Vera distinguished very carefully between the people who would be good for Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who would not. She did not know that they both drew the line at Desmond.

Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's fault that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet each other.

She did not deny that it was in her house they _had_ met; but she had not introduced them. Desmond had introduced herself, on the grounds that she knew Dorothy. Vera suspected that, from the first moment when she had seen him there--by pure accident--she had marked him down. Very likely she had wriggled into Dorothy's Suffrage meeting on purpose. She was capable of anything.

Not that Vera thought there was any need for Frances to worry. It was most unlikely that Desmond's business with Nicky could be serious. For one thing she was too young herself to care for anybody as young as Nicky. For another she happened to be in the beginning, or the middle, certainly nowhere near the end of a tremendous affair with Headley Richards. As she was designing the dresses and the scenery for the new play he was putting on at the Independent Theatre, Vera argued very plausibly that the affair had only just started, and that Frances must allow it a certain time to run.

"I hope to goodness that the Richards man will marry her."

"My dear, how can he? He's married already to a nice little woman that he isn't half tired of yet. Desmond was determined to have him and she's got him; but he's only taken her in his stride, as you may say. I don't suppose he cares very much one way or another. But with Desmond it's a point of honour."

"What's a point of honour?"

"Why, to have him. Not to be left out. Besides, she always said she could take him from poor little Ginny Richards, and she's done it. That was another point of honour."

With a calmness that was horrible to Frances Vera weighed her friend Desmond's case. To Frances it was as if she had never known Vera. Either Vera had changed or she had never known her. She had never known women, or men either, who discussed such performances with calmness. Vera herself hadn't made her infidelities a point of honour.

These were the pa.s.sions and the thoughts of Lawrence Stephen's and of Desmond's world; these were the things it took for granted. These people lived in a moral vortex; they whirled round and round with each other; they were powerless to resist the swirl. Not one of them had any other care than to love and to make love after the manner of the Vortex. This was their honour, not to be left out of it, not to be left out of the vortex, but to be carried away, to be sucked in, and whirl round and round with each other and the rest.

The painter girl Desmond was horrible to Frances.

And all the time her mind was busy with one question: "Do you think Nicky knows?"

"I'm perfectly sure he doesn't."

"Perhaps--if he did--"

"No, my dear, that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe it.

You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting into his head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And you'll be putting it into Desmond's head."

Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him alone." Those painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You couldn't take them seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything that Vera Harrison said she was. He didn't think, though, that the idea of making love to her would enter Nicky's head if they left him alone. Nicky's head had more important ideas in it.

So they left him alone.

And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of Desmond. Too busy with his a.s.sistant manager's job at the Morss Motor Works; too busy with one of the little ideas to which he owed the sudden rise in his position: the little idea of making the Morss cars go faster; too busy with his big Idea which had nothing whatever to do with the Morss Company and their cars.

His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a French engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the _forteresse mobile_, had become Nicky's pa.s.sion. He claimed no originality for his idea. It was a composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with caterpillar wheels and the motor-car. These things had welded themselves together gradually in Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge.

The table in Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was now covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him, and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image of the _forteresse mobile_, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost that stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the vision.

But the image of Desmond was there.

At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder when Desmond will have finished the drawings."

The model of the Moving Fortress waited upon Desmond's caprice.

The plans of the parts and sections had to be finished before these could be fitted together and the permanent model of the Moving Fortress set up. The Moving Fortress itself waited upon Desmond.

For, though Nicky could make and build his engine, he could not draw his plans properly; and he could not trust anybody who understood engines to draw them. He was haunted, almost insanely, by the fear that somebody else would hit upon the idea of the Moving Fortress; it seemed to him so obvious that no gunner and no engineer could miss it. And the drawings Desmond made for him, the drawings in black and white, the drawings in grey wash, and the coloured drawings were perfect. Nicky, unskilled in everything but the inventing and building up of engines, did not know how perfect the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the easels in her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he took Desmond into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on her.

He didn't care. He liked Desmond. He couldn't help it if Drayton disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn't like her. She was, he said to himself, a ripping good sort. She might be frightfully clever; Nicky rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she never talked that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy's other friends talked. She let you think.

It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn't like her and that Frank Drayton disapproved of her.

"They wouldn't," said Nicky, "if they knew you." And he turned again to the subject of his Moving Fortress.

For Desmond's intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was perfect, and her way of listening was perfect. She sat on the floor, on the orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience, embracing her knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms, while Nicky stamped up and down her studio and talked to her, like a monomaniac, about his Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she liked his young navete and monomania; she liked his face and all his gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.

And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled eyes and in her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body than to her spirit and her mind.

In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early summer, when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent him motoring about the country on their business, he took Desmond with him and Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on the gra.s.s borders of the high roads and on the edges of the woods and moors, and Desmond painted her extraordinary pictures while Nicky lay on his back beside her with his face turned up to the sky and dreamed of flying machines.