The Tree of Heaven Part 64

Monday was like Sunday, except that he walked up Karva Hill in the morning and up Greffington Edge in the afternoon, instead of Renton Moor. Whichever way he went his thoughts went the same way as yesterday.

The images were, if anything, more crowded and more horrible; but they had lost their hold. He was tired of looking at them.

About five o'clock he turned abruptly and went back to the village the same way by which he came.

And as he swung down the hill road in sight of Renton, suddenly there was a great clearance in his soul.

When he went into the cottage he found Veronica there waiting for him.

She sat with her hands lying in her lap, and she had the same look he had seen when she was in the train.

"Ronny--"

She stood up to greet him, as if it had been she who was staying there and he who had incredibly arrived.

"They told me you wouldn't be long," she said.

"I? You haven't come because you were ill or anything?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. Not for anything like that."

"I didn't write, Ronny. I couldn't."

"I know." Their eyes met, measuring each other's grief. "That's why I came. I couldn't bear to leave you to it."

"I'd have come before, Michael, if you'd wanted me."

They were sitting together now, on the settle by the hearth-place.

"I can't understand your being able to think of me," he said.

"Because of Nicky? If I haven't got Nicky it's all the more reason why I should think of his people."

He looked up. "I say--how are they? Mother and Father?"

"They're very brave.

"It's worse for them than it is for me," she said. "What they can't bear is your going."

"Mother got my letter, then?"

"Yes. This morning."

"What did she say?"

"She said: 'Oh, no. _Not_ Michael.'

"It was a good thing you wrote, though. Your letter made her cry. It made even Dorothy cry. They hadn't been able to, before."

"I should have thought if they could stand Nicky's going--"

"That was different. They know it was different."

"Do you suppose _I_ don't know how different it was? They mean I funked it and Nicky didn't."

"They mean that Nicky got what he wanted when he went, and that there was nothing else he could have done so well, except flying, or engineering."

"It comes to the same thing, Nicky simply wasn't afraid."

"Yes, Michael, he _was_ afraid."

"What _of_?"

"He was most awfully afraid of seeing suffering."

"Well, so am I. And I'm afraid of suffering myself too. I'm afraid of the whole blessed thing from beginning to end."

"That's because you keep on seeing the whole blessed thing from beginning to end. Nicky only saw little bits of it. The bits he liked.

Machine-guns working beautifully, and sh.e.l.ls dropping in the right places, and trenches being taken.

"And then, remember--Nicky hadn't so much to give up."

"He had you."

"Oh, no. He knew that was the way to keep me."

"Ronny--if Nicky had been like me could he have kept you?"

She considered it.

"Yes--if he could have been himself too."

"He couldn't, you see. He never could have felt like that."

"I don't say He could."

"Well--the awful thing is 'feeling like that.'"

"And the magnificent thing is 'feeling like that,' and going all the same. Everybody knows that but you, Michael."

"Yes," he said. "I'm _going_. But I'm not going to lie about it and say I don't funk it. Because I do."

"You don't _really_."

"I own I didn't the first night--the night I knew Nicky was killed.

Because I couldn't think of anything else _but_ Nicky.

"It was after I'd written to Mother that it came on. Because I knew then I couldn't back out of it. That's what I can't get over--my having to do that--to clinch it--because I was afraid."