The Tree of Heaven

by May Sinclair

Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the Times, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn't happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any reason to complain that nothing happened.

It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and Ireland were on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael's insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green Review.

For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly thirteen when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still. His poem was the green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country. Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the imminence of civil war (only that they didn't really believe in it), when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else. In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of Ireland's freedom was a secret and solitary dream. Nobody he knew shared it but Lawrence Stephen. The passion he brought to it made him hot and restless and intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish crisis when she said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own business. This excitement is very bad for Michael."

And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two, Anthony and the boys would be out of it.

Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour. There was, indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was being disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.

So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had even thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme measure was unnecessary.

And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy. For the children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever. Michael and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from Michael. Nicholas was doing the chauffeur's work in his absence; and John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it on his father as his contribution to the family economies.

Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's and Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her poor little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.

There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike. Her mind refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before, and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of mind or Anthony's prosperity.

The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the twenty-fifth of July.