"Ver-onica?"
You needn't be frightened. Nicky's affection for Ronny is purely paternal."
"I'm not frightened," said Frances. But she left the room. She did not care for the turn the talk had taken. Besides, she wanted Vera to see that she was not afraid to leave her alone with Anthony.
"I'm glad Frances has gone," said Vera, "because I want to talk to you. You'd never have known each other if it hadn't been for me. She couldn't have married you. It was I who saw you both through."
He assented.
"And you said if there was ever anything you could do for me--You haven't by any chance forgotten?"
"I have not."
"Well, if anything should happen to me--"
"But, my dear girl, what should happen to you?"
"Things do happen, Anthony."
"Yes, but how about Bartie?"
"That's it. Supposing we separated."
"Good Heavens, you're not contemplating that, are you?"
"I'm not contemplating anything. But Bartie isn't very easy to live with, is he?"
"No, he's not. He never was. All the same--"
Bartie was impossible. Between the diseases he had and thought he hadn't and the diseases he hadn't and thought he had, he made life miserable for himself and other people. He was a jealous egoist; he had the morbid coldness of the neurotic, and Vera was passionate. She ought never to have married him. All the same--"
"All the same I shall stick to Bartie as long as it's possible. And as long as it's possible Bartie'll stick to me. But, if anything happens I want you to promise that you'll take Ronny."
"You must get Frances to promise."
"She'll do anything you ask her to, Anthony."
When Frances came into the room again Vera was crying.
And so Frances promised.
"'London Bridge is broken down
(Ride over My Lady Leigh!) "'Build it up with stones so strong-- "'Build it up with gold so fine'"--
It was twenty to eight and Ronny had not so much as begun to say Good night. She was singing her sons to spin out the time.
"'London Bridge--'"
"That'll do, Ronny, it's time you were in bed."
There was no need for her to linger and draw out her caresses, no need to be afraid of going to bed alone. Frances, at Vera's request, had had her cot moved up into the night nursery.
VIII
Anthony had begun to wonder where on earth he should send Morrie out to this time, when the Boer War came and solved his problem.
Maurice, joyous and adventurous again, sent himself to South Africa, to enlist in the Imperial Light Horse.
Ferdie Cameron went out also with the Second Gordon Highlanders, solving, perhaps, another problem.
"It's no use trying to be sorry, Mummy," Dorothy said.
Frances knew what Anthony was thinking, and Anthony knew it was what Frances thought herself: Supposing this time Morrie didn't come back? Then that problem would be solved for ever. Frances hated problems when they worried Anthony. Anthony detested problems when they bothered Frances.
And the children knew what they were thinking. Dorothy went on.
"It's all rot pretending that we want him to come back."
"It was jolly decent of him to enlist," said Nicky.
Dorothy admitted that it was jolly decent. "But," she said, "what else could he do? His only chance was to go away and do something so jolly plucky that we're ashamed of ourselves, and never to come back again to spoil it. You don't want him to spoil it, Mummy ducky, do you?"
Anthony and Frances tried, conscientiously and patriotically, to realize the Boer War. They said it was terrible to have it hanging over them, morning, noon and night. But it didn't really hang over them. It hung over a country that, except once when it had conveniently swallowed up Morrie, they had never thought about and could not care for, a landscape that they could not see. The war was not even part of that landscape; it refused to move over it in any traceable course. It simply hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another. It was not their fault. They tried to see it. They bought the special editions of the evening papers; they read the military dispatches and the stories of the war correspondents from beginning to end; they stared blankly at the printed columns that recorded the disasters of Nicholson's Nek, and Colenso and Spion Kop. But the forms were grey and insubstantial; it was all fiat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very blood of it ran grey.
It wasn't real. For Frances the brown walls of the house, the open wings of its white shutters, the green garden and tree of Heaven were real; so were Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow on the Hill; morning and noon and night were real, and getting up and dressing and going to bed; most real of all the sight and sound and touch of her husband and her children.
Only now and then the vision grew solid and stood firm. Frances carried about with her distinct images of Maurice, to which she could attach the rest. Thus she had an image of Long Tom, an immense slender muzzle, tilted up over a high ridge, nosing out Maurice.
Maurice was shut up in Ladysmith.
"Don't worry, Mummy. That'll keep him out of mischief. Daddy said he ought to be shut up somewhere."
"He's starving, Dorothy. He won't have anything to eat."
"Or drink, ducky."
"Oh, you're cruel! Don't be cruel!"
"I'm not cruel. If I didn't care so awfully for you, Mummy, I shouldn't mind whether he came back or didn't. You're cruel. You ought to think of Grannie and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edie."
"At the moment," said Frances, "I am thinking of Uncle Morrie."
She was thinking of him, not as he actually was, but as he had been, as a big boy like Michael, as a little boy like John, two years younger than she; a little boy by turns spoiled and thwarted, who contrived, nevertheless, to get most things that he happened to want by crying for them, though everybody else went without. And in the grown-up Morrie's place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky.
For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army.
"And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss it."
Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and Nicky, mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High Street with flags flying from their handlebars. Michael was a Pro-Boer and flew no flags. All these things irritated Maurice.
He had come back again. He had missed it, as he had missed all the chances that were ever given him. A slight wound kept him in hospital throughout the greater part of the siege, and he had missed the sortie of his squadron and the taking of the guns for which Ferdie Cameron got his promotion and his D.S.O. He had come back in the middle of the war with nothing but a bullet wound in his left leg to prove that he had taken part in it.
The part he had taken had not sobered Maurice. It had only depressed him. And depression after prolonged, brutal abstinence broke down the sheer strength by which sometimes he stretched a period of sobriety beyond its natural limits.
For there were two kinds of drinking: great drinking that came seldom and was the only thing that counted, and