Michael’s family made no comment on the appearance of his poems.  The book lay about in the same place on the drawing-room table for weeks.  When Nanna dusted she replaced it with religious care; none of his people had so much as taken it up to glance inside it, or hold it in their hands.  It seemed to Michael that they were conscious of it all the time, and that they turned their faces away from it pointedly.  They hated it.  They hated him for having written it.

He remembered that it had been different when his first book had come out two years ago.  They had read that; they had snatched at all the reviews of it and read it again, trying to see what it was that they had missed.

They had taken each other aside, and it had been: 

“Anthony, do you understand Michael’s poems?”

“Dorothy, do you understand Michael’s poems?”

“Nicky, do you understand Michael’s poems?”

He remembered his mother’s apology for not understanding them:  “Darling, I do see that they’re very beautiful.”  He remembered how he had wished that they would give up the struggle and leave his poems alone.  They were not written for them.  He had been amused and irritated when he had seen his father holding the book doggedly in front of him, his poor old hands twitching with embarrassment whenever he thought Michael was looking at him.

And now he, who had been so indifferent and so contemptuous, was sensitive to the least quiver of his mother’s upper lip.

Veronica’s were the only eyes that were kind to him; that did not hunt him down with implacable suggestion and reminder.

Veronica had been rejected too.  She was not strong enough to nurse in the hospitals.  She was only strong enough to work from morning to night, packing and carrying large, heavy parcels for the Belgian soldiers.  She wanted Michael to be sorry for her because she couldn’t be a nurse.  Rosalind Jervis was a nurse.  But he was not sorry.  He said he would very much rather she didn’t do anything that Rosalind did.

“So would Nicky,” he said.

And then:  “Veronica, do you think I ought to enlist?”

The thought was beginning to obsess him.

“No,” she said; “you’re different.

“I know how you feel about it.  Nicky’s heart and soul are in the War.  If he’s killed it can only kill his body. Your soul isn’t in it.  It would kill your soul.”

“It’s killing it now, killing everything I care for.”

“Killing everything we all care for, except the things it can’t kill.”

That was one Sunday evening in October.  They were standing together on the long terrace under the house wall.  Before them, a little to the right, on the edge of the lawn, the great ash-tree rose over the garden.  The curved and dipping branches swayed and swung in a low wind that moved like quiet water.

“Michael,” she said, “do look what’s happening to that tree.”