The Tree of Heaven. Sinclair May
pretended. In secret she was afraid of every moment she would have to live with them. She had lived with them too long. She foresaw what would happen this afternoon, how they would look, what they would say and do, and with what gestures. It would be like the telling, for the thirteenth time, of a dull story that you know every word of.
She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she had only asked them to come early in order that they might go early and leave her to her happiness.
She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and Dorothy were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought that she wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if they were coming early. It struck her that this was sad.
Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope under the Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the sallow grass and the yellow clay of the Heath.
"How little they look," Michael said.
Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was the difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always would be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never would be sorry for being what she was. She seemed to be saying, already, in her clearness and hardness, "What I am I am, and you can't change me." The utmost you could wring from her was that she couldn't help it.
Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black came nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the garden and the lane.
II
Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the lane to the tree of Heaven.
She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace, advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really belonging to each other, as if they had been strangers associated by some accident. It had grown on them in their efforts to carry off the embarrassment of appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie carried it off best. Sharp and rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never lent itself to any group. But for her black gown she really might not have belonged.
Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was only sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was wrapped up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed, fascinated by her sacred sense of bereavement. She moved as if hypnotized by her own sorrow.
To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of mystic hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she suspected them of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if they could. But to her one married daughter and to her grand-children she was soft and gentle. So that, when they happened to be all together, her moods changed so rapidly that she seemed a creature of unaccountable caprice. One minute her small, white, dry face quivered with softness and gentleness, and the next it stiffened, or twitched with the inimical, disapproving look it had for Louie and Emmeline and Edith.
The children lifted up their pure, impassive faces to be kissed at. Old Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother's knee. Dorothy and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party. Michael forgot all about playing with himself. He stayed where he was, drawn by the spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties. Grannie was clucking and chuckling to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled to her own babies long ago. Her under lip made itself wide and full; it worked with an in and out movement very funny and interesting to Michael. The movement meant that Grannie chuckled under protest of memories that were sacred to Grandpapa.
"Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo--tchoo! Chuckaboo! Beautiful boy!" said Grannie.
Auntie Louie looked at her youngest nephew. She smiled her downward, sagging smile, wrung from a virginity sadder than Grannie's grief. She spoke to Baby John.
"You really are rather a nice boy," Auntie Louie said.
But Edie, the youngest Auntie, was kneeling on the grass before him, bringing her face close to his. Baby John's new and flawless face was cruel to Auntie Edie's. So was his look of dignity and wisdom.
"Oh, she says you're only rather nice," said Auntie Edie. "And you're the beautifullest, sweetest, darlingest that ever was. Wasn't she a nasty Auntie Louie? Ten little pink toes. And there he goes. Five little tootsies to each of his footsies."
She hid herself behind the Times disturbing Jane.
"Where's John-John?" she cried. "Where's he gone to? Can anybody tell me where to find John-John? Where's John-John? Peep-bo--there he is! John-John, look at Auntie Edie. Oh, he won't pay any attention to poor me."
Baby John was playing earnestly with Grannie's watch-chain.
"You might leave the child alone," said Grannie. "Can't you see he doesn't want you?"
Auntie Edie made a little pouting face, like a scolded, pathetic child. Nobody ever did want Auntie Edie.
And all the time Auntie Emmy was talking to Frances very loud and fast.
"Frances, I do think your garden's too beautiful for words. How clever of you to think of clearing away the old flower-beds. I hate flower-beds on a lawn. Yet I don't suppose I should have had the strength of mind to get rid of them if it bad been me."
As she talked Auntie Emmy opened her eyes very wide; her eyebrows jerked, the left one leaping up above the right; she thrust out her chin at you and her long, inquiring nose. Her thin face was the play of agitated nerve-strings that pulled it thus into perpetual, restless movements; and she made vague gestures with her large, bony hands. Her tongue went tick-tack, like a clock. Anthony said you-could hear Emmy's tongue striking the roof of her-mouth all thee time.
"And putting those delphiniums all together like that--Massing the blues. Anthony? I do think Anthony has perfect taste. I adore delphiniums."
Auntie Emmy was behaving as if neither Michael nor Baby John was there.
"Don't you think John-John's too beautiful for words?" said Frances. "Don't you like him a little bit too?"
Auntie Emmy winced as if Frances had flicked something in her face.
"Of course I like him too. Why shouldn't I?"
"I don't think you do, Auntie Emmy," Michael said.
Auntie Emmy considered him as for the first time.
"What do you know about it?" she said.
"I can tell by the funny things your face does."
"I thought," said Frances, "you wanted to play by yourself."
"So I do," said Michael.
"Well then, go and play."
He went and to a heavenly place that he knew of. But as he played with Himself there he thought: "Auntie Emmy doesn't tell the truth. I think it is because she isn't happy."
Michael kept his best things to himself.
"I suppose you're happy," said Grannie, "now you've got the poor child sent away."
Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as much as to say she was helpless under her mother's stupidity.
"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good for him to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."
It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her sisters.
"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it yourself."
When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put her word in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the peace.
Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her babies in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight