"And he," she said, "has still a chance if—I fail you?"
"Of course—if you fail me."
"And supposing that I hadn't got a book?"
"But you have."
"Supposing?"
"Then I should fall back on Mr. Tanqueray."
"Fall back on him!—The date is settled."
"But I thought——"
"I've settled it."
"Oh. And it can't be unsettled?"
"It can't—possibly."
"Why not?"
She meditated. "Because—it would spoil the chances of the book."
"I see. The chances of the book."
Their eyes met in conflict. It was as if they were measuring each other's moral value.
"I should make you a bigger offer, Miss Holland," he said; "only I believe you don't want that."
"No. Certainly I don't want that."
He paused. "Do you mind telling me if you've any other chance?"
"None. Not the ghost of one."
"So that, but for this all-important question of the date, I might have had you?"
"You might have had me."
"I'm almost glad," he said, "to have lost you—that way."
"Which way?" said she.
At that moment a servant of the house brought in tea. She announced that Mr. Nicholson was down-stairs and would like to see Miss Holland.
"Very well. You'll stay?" Jane said to Brodrick.
He did. He was, Jane reflected, the sort of man who stayed.
"Here's Mr. Brodrick," said she, as Nicky entered. "He's going to make all our fortunes."
"His own, too, I hope," said Brodrick. But he looked sulky, as if he resented Nicholson's coming in.
"Of course," he said, "they tell me the whole thing's a dream, a delusion, that it won't pay. But I know how to make it pay. The reason why magazines go smash is because they're owned by men with no business connections, no business organization, no business capacity. I couldn't do it if I hadn't the 'Telegraph' at my back. Practically I make the paper pay for the magazine."
And he went into it, in his quick, quiet voice, expounding and expanding his scheme, laying it down fairly and squarely, with lucidity but no apparent ardour.
It was Nicky who was excited. Jane could see cupidity in Nicky's eyes as Brodrick talked about his magazine. Brodrick dwelt now on the commercial side of it which had no interest for Nicky. Yet Nicky was excited. He wanted badly to get into Brodrick's magazine, and Brodrick wanted, Brodrick was determined to keep him out. There was a brief struggle between Nicky's decency and his desire; and then Nicky's desire and Brodrick's determination fairly skirmished together in the open. Brodrick tried heavily to keep Nicky off it. But Nicky hovered airily, intangibly about it. He fanned it as with wings; when Brodrick dropped it he picked it up, he sustained it, he kept it flying high. Every movement intimated in Nicky's most exquisite manner that if Brodrick really meant it, if he had positively surrendered to the expensive dream, if he wanted, in short, to keep it up and keep it high, he couldn't be off letting Nicky in.
Brodrick's shameless intention had been to out-stay Nicky. And as long as Nicky's approaches were so delicate as to provoke only delicate evasions, Brodrick stayed. But in the end poor Nicky turned desperate and put it to him point-blank. "Was there, or was there not to be a place for poets in the magazine?"
At that Brodrick got up and went.
"Nicky," said Jane, as the door closed on the retreating editor, "he came for my book, and I've made him take George Tanqueray's instead."
"I wish," said he, "you'd make him take my poems. But you can't. Nobody can make Brodrick do anything he doesn't want to."
"Oh——" said Jane, and dismissed Brodrick. "It's ages since I've seen you."
"I heard that you were immersed, and so I kept away."
"That was very good of you," said she.
It struck her when she had said it that perhaps it was not altogether what Nicky would have liked her to say.
"I was immersed," she said, "in Hambleby."
"Is he finished?"
"All but. I'm waiting to put a crown upon his head."
"Were you by any chance making it—the crown?"
"I haven't even begun to make it."
"I shan't spoil him then if I stay?"
"No. I doubt if anything could spoil him now."
"You've got him so safe?"
"So safe. And yet, Nicky, there are moments when I can hardly bear to think of Hambleby for fear he shouldn't be all right. It's almost as if he came too easily."
"He couldn't. All my best things come," said Nicky "—like that!"
A furious sweep of Nicky's arm simulated the onrush of his inspiration.
"Oh, Nicky, how splendid it must be to be so certain."
"It is," said Nicky solemnly.
After all, it argued some divine compensation somewhere that a thing so destitute should remain unaware of its destitution, that a creature so futile and diminutive should be sustained by this conviction of his greatness. For he was certain. Nothing could annihilate the illusion by which Nicky lived. But it was enough to destroy all certainty in anybody else, and there were moments when the presence of Nicky had this shattering effect on Jane. She could not have faced him until Hambleby was beyond his power to slay.
But Nicky, so far from enlarging on his certainty, meditated with his eyes fixed on the clock.
"You don't dine, do you," he said suddenly, "till half-past seven?"
"You'll stay, won't you?"
"I think I mustn't, thanks. I only wanted to know how long I had."
"You've really half-an-hour, if you won't dine."
"I say, you're not expecting anybody else?"
"I didn't expect Mr. Brodrick. I've kept everybody out so long that they've left off coming."
"I wonder," said he, still meditating, "if I've come too soon."
She held her breath. Nicky's voice was charged with a curious emotion.
"I knew," he went on, "it wasn't any use my coming as long as you were immersed. I wouldn't for worlds do anything that could possibly injure your career."
"Oh—my career——"
"The question is," he meditated, "would it?"
"Your coming, Nicky?"
"My not keeping away. I suppose I ought to be content to stand aside and watch it, your genius, when it's so tremendous. I've no right to get in its way——"
"You don't—you don't."
"I wouldn't. I always should be standing aside and watching. That," said Nicky, "would be, you see, my attitude."
"Dear Nicky," she murmured, "it's a beautiful attitude. It couldn't—your attitude—be anything but beautiful."
"Only, of course," he added, "I'd be there."
"But you are. You are there. And it's delightful to have you."
His face, which had turned very white, flushed, but not with pleasure. It quivered with some sombre and sultry wave of pain.
"I meant," he said, "if I were always there."
His eyes searched her. She would not look at him.
"Nobody," she said, "can be—always."
"You wouldn't know it. You wouldn't see me—when you were immersed."
"I'm afraid," she said, "I always am, I always shall be—immersed."
"Won't there be moments?"
"Oh, moments! Very few."
"I wouldn't care how few there were," he said. "I know there can't be many."
She understood him. There was nothing on earth like Nicky's delicacy. He was telling her that he would accept any terms, the very lowest; that he knew how Tanqueray had impoverished her; that he could live on moments, the moments Tanqueray had left.
"There are none, Nicky. None," she said.
"I see this isn't one of them."
"All the moments—when there are any—will be more or less like this. I'm sorry," she said.
"So am I," said he. It was as if they were saying they were sorry he could not dine.
So monstrous was Nicky's capacity for illusion that he went away thinking he had given Jane up for the sake of her career.
And Jane tried to think of Nicky and be sorry for him. But she couldn't. She was immoderately happy. She had given up Brodrick's magazine and Brodrick's money for Tanqueray's sake. Tanks would have his chance. He would be able to take a house, and then that little wife of his wouldn't have to sit with her hands before her, fretting her heart away because of Tanks. She was pleased, too, because she had made Brodrick do what he hadn't meant and didn't want to do.
But as she lay in bed that night, not thinking of Brodrick, she saw suddenly Brodrick's eyes fixed on her with a look in them which she had not regarded at the time; and she heard him saying, in that queer, quiet voice of his, "I'm almost glad to have lost you this way."
"I wonder," she said to herself, "if he really spotted me."
XIX
Brodrick's house, Moor Grange, stood on the Roehampton side of Putney Heath, just discernible between the silver and green of the birches. With its queer, red-tiled roofs, pitched at every possible slope, white, rough-cast, many-cornered walls, green storm-shutters, lattice windows of many sorts and sizes, Brodrick's house had all the brilliant eccentricity of the twentieth century.
But Brodrick's garden was at least a hundred years older than his house. It had a beautiful green lawn with a lime-tree in the middle and a stone-flagged terrace at the back overlooking the north end of the Heath. Behind the house there was a kitchen garden that had survived modernity.
Brodrick's garden was kept very smooth and very straight, no impudent little flowers hanging out of their beds, no dissolute straggling of creepers upon walls. Even the sweet-peas at the back were trained to a perfect order and propriety.
And in Brodrick's house propriety and order were carried to the point of superstition. Nothing in that queer-cornered, modern exterior was ever out of place. No dust ever lay on floor or furniture. All the white-painted woodwork was exquisitely white. Time there was measured by a silver-chiming clock that struck the quiet hours with an infallible regularity.
And yet Brodrick was not a tidy nor a punctual man. In his library the spirit of order contended against fearful odds. For Brodrick lived in his library, the long, book-lined, up-stairs room that ran half the length of the house on the north side. But even there, violate as he would his own sanctuary, the indestructible propriety renewed itself by a diurnal miracle. He found books restored to their place, papers sorted, everything an editor could want lying ready to his hand. For the spirit of order rose punctually to perform its task.
But in the drawing-room its struggles and its triumph were complete.
It had been, so Brodrick's sisters told him, a man's idea of a drawing-room. And now there were feminine touches, so incongruous and scattered that they seemed the work of a person establishing herself tentatively, almost furtively, by small inconspicuous advances and instalments. A little work-table stood beside the low settle in the corner by the fireplace. Gay, shining chintz covered the ugly chairs. There were cushions here and there where a woman's back most needed them. Books, too, classics in slender duo-decimo, bought for their cheapness, novels (from the circulating library), of the kind that Brodrick never read. On the top of a writing-table, flagrantly feminine in its appointments, there stood, well in sight of the low chair, a photograph of Brodrick which Brodrick could not possibly have framed and put there.
The woman who entered this room now had all the air of being its mistress; she moved in it so naturally and with such assurance, as in her sphere. You would have judged her occupied with some mysterious personal predilections with regard to drawing-rooms. She paused in her passage to reinstate some article dishonoured by the parlour-maid, to pat a cushion into shape and place a chair better to her liking. At each of these small fastidious operations she frowned like one who resents interference with the perfected system of her own arrangements.
She sat down at the writing-table and took from a pigeonhole a sheaf of tradesmen's bills. These she checked and docketed conscientiously, after entering their totals in a book marked "Household." From all these acts she seemed to draw some secret enjoyment and satisfaction. Here she was evidently in a realm secure from the interference of the incompetent.
With a key attached to her person she now unlocked the inmost shrine of the writing-table. A small squat heap of silver and of copper sat there like the god of the shrine. She took it in her hand and counted it and restored it to its consecrated seat. She then made a final entry: "Cash in Hand, thirty-five shillings."
She sat smiling in tender contemplation of this legend. It stood for the savings of the last month, effected by her deft manipulation of the household. There was no suggestion of cupidity in her smile, nor any hint of economy adored and pursued for its own sake.
She was Gertrude Collett, the lady who for three years had acted as Brodrick's housekeeper, or, as she now preferred to call herself, his secretary. She had contrived, out of this poor material of his weekly bills, to fashion for herself a religion and an incorporeal romance.
She raised her face to the photograph of Brodrick, as if spiritually she rendered her account to him. And Brodrick's face, from the ledge of the writing-table, looked over Gertrude's head with an air of being unmoved by it all, with eyes intent on their own object.
She, Brodrick's secretary, might have been about five-and-thirty. She was fair with the fairness which is treacherous to women of her age, which suffers when they suffer. But Gertrude's skin still held the colours of her youth as some strong fabric holds its dye. Her face puzzled you; it was so broad across the cheek-bones that you would have judged it coarse; it narrowed suddenly in the jaws, pointing her chin to subtlety. Her nose, broad also across the nostrils and bridge, showed a sharp edge in profile; it was alert, competent, inquisitive. But there was mystery again in the long-drawn, pale-rose lines of her mouth. A wide mouth with irregular lips, not coarse, but coarsely finished. Its corners must once have drooped with pathos, but this tendency was overcome or corrected by the serene habit of her smile.
It was not the face of a dreamer. Yet at the moment you would have said she dreamed. Her eyes, light coloured, slightly prominent, stared unsheltered under their pale lashes and insufficient brows. They were eyes that at first sight had no depths in them. Yet they seemed to hold vapour. They dreamed. They showed her dream.
She started as the silver-chiming clock struck the quarter.
She went up-stairs to the room that was her own, and examined herself carefully in the looking-glass. Then she did something to her hair. Waved slightly and kept in place by small amber-coloured combs, Gertrude's hair, though fragile, sustained the effect of her almost Scandinavian fairness. Next she changed her cotton blouse for an immaculate muslin one. As she drew down the blouse and smoothed it under the clipping belt, she showed a body flat in the back, sharp-breasted, curbed in the waist; the body of a thoroughly competent, serviceable person. Her face now almost suggested prettiness, as she turned and turned its little tilted profile between two looking-glasses.
At half-past three she was seated at her place in Brodrick's library. A table was set apart for her and her type-writer on a corner by the window.
The editor was at work at his own table in the centre of the room. He did not look up at her as she came in. His eyes were lowered, fixed on the proof he was reading. Once, as he read, he shrugged his shoulders slightly, and once he sighed. Then he called her to him.
She rose and came, moving dreamily as if drawn, yet holding herself stiffly and aloof. He continued to gaze at the proof.
"You sat up half the night to correct this, I suppose?"
"Have I done it very badly?"
He did not tell her that she had, that he had spent the best part of his morning correcting her corrections. She was an inimitable housekeeper, and a really admirable secretary. But her weakness was that she desired to be considered admirable and inimitable in everything she undertook. It would distress her to know that this time she had not succeeded, and he did not like distressing people who were dependent on him. It used to be so easy, so mysteriously easy, to distress Miss Collett; but she had got over that; she was used to him now; she had settled down into the silent and serene performance of her duties. And she had brought to her secretarial work a silence and serenity that were invaluable to a man who detested argument and agitation.
So, instead of insisting on her failure, he tried to diminish her disturbing sense of it; and when she inquired if she had done her work very badly, he smiled and said, No, she had done it much too well.
"Too well?" She flushed as she echoed him.
"Yes. You've corrected all Mr. Tanqueray's punctuation and nearly all his grammar."
"But it's all wrong. Look there—and there."
"How do you know it's all wrong?"
"But—it's so simple. There are rules."
"Yes. But Mr. Tanqueray's a great author, and great authors are born to break half the rules there are. What you and I have got to know is when they may break them, and when they mayn't."
A liquid film swam over Gertrude's eyes, deepening their shallows. It was the first signal of distress.
"It's all right," he said. "I wanted you to do it. I wanted to see what you could do." He considered her quietly. "It struck me you might perhaps prefer it to your other duties."
"What made you think that?"
"I didn't think. I only wondered. Well——"
The next half-hour was occupied with the morning's correspondence, till Brodrick announced that they had no time for more.
"It's only just past four," she said.
"I know; but——Is there anything for tea?" He spoke vaguely like a man in a dream.
"What an opinion you have of my housekeeping," she said.
"Your housekeeping, Miss Collett, is perfection."
She flushed with pleasure, so that he kept it up.
"Everything," he said, "runs on greased wheels. I don't know how you do it."
"Oh, it's easy enough to do."
"And it doesn't matter if a lady comes to tea?"
He took up a pencil and began to sharpen it.
"Is there," said Miss Collett, "a lady coming to tea?"
"Yes. And we'll have it in the garden. Tea, I mean."
"And who," said she, "is the lady?"
"Miss Jane Holland." Brodrick did not look up. He was absorbed in his pencil.
"Another author?"
"Another author," said Brodrick to his pencil.
She smiled. The editor's attitude to authors was one of prolonged amusement. Prodigious people, authors, in Brodrick's opinion. More than once, by way of relieving his somewhat perfunctory communion with Miss Collett, he had discussed the eccentricity, the vanity, the inexhaustible absurdity of authors. So that it was permissible for her to smile.
"You are not," he said, "expecting either of my sisters?"
He said it in his most casual, most uninterested voice. And yet she detected an undertone of anxiety. He did not want his sisters to be there when Miss Holland came. She had spent three years in studying his inflections and his wants.
"Not specially to-day," she said.
Brodrick became manifestly entangled in the process of his thought. The thought itself was as yet obscure to her. She inquired, therefore, where Miss Holland was to be "shown in." Was she a drawing-room author or a library author?
In the perfect and unspoken conventions of Brodrick's house the drawing-room was Miss Collett's place, and the library was his. Tea in the drawing-room meant that he desired Miss Collett's society; tea in the library that he preferred his own. There were also rules for the reception of visitors. Men were shown into the library and stayed there. Great journalistic ladies like Miss Caroline Bickersteth were shown into the drawing-room. Little journalistic ladies with dubious manners, calling, as they did, solely on business, were treated as men and confined strictly to the library.
Brodrick's stare of surprise showed Gertrude that she had blundered. He had a superstitious reverence for those authors who, like Mr. Tanqueray, were great.
"My dear Miss Collett, do you know who she is? The drawing-room, of course, and all possible honour."
She laughed. She had cultivated for Brodrick's sake the art of laughter, and prided herself upon knowing the precise moments to be gay.
"I see," she said. And yet she did not see. How could there be any honour if he did not want his sisters to be there? "That means the best tea-service and my best manners?"
He didn't know, he said, that she had any but the best.
How good they were she let him see when he presented Miss Holland on her arrival, her trailing, conspicuous arrival. Gertrude had never given him occasion to feel that his guests could have a more efficient hostess than his secretary. She spoke of the pleasure it gave her to see Miss Holland, and of the honour that she felt, and of how she had heard of Miss Holland from Mr. Brodrick. There was no becoming thing that Gertrude did not say. And all the time she was aware of Brodrick's eyes fixed on Miss Holland with that curious lack of diffuseness in their vision.
Brodrick was carrying it off by explaining Gertrude to Miss Holland.
"Miss Collett," he said, "is a wonderful lady. She's always doing the most beautiful things, so quietly that you never knew they're done."
"Does anybody," said Jane, "know how the really beautiful things are done?"
"There's a really beautiful tea," said Miss Collett gaily, "in the garden. There are scones and the kind of cake you like."
"You see," Brodrick said, "how she spoils me, how I lie on roses."
"You'd better come," said Miss Collett, "while the scones are still hot."
"While," said Jane, "the roses are still fresh."
He held the door open for her, and on the threshold she turned to Miss Collett who followed her.
"Are you sure," said she, "that he's the horrid Sybarite you think him?"
"I am," said Brodrick, "whatever Miss Collett thinks me. If it pleases her to think I'm a Sybarite I've got to be a Sybarite."
"I see. And when the rose-leaves are crumpled you bring them to Miss Collett, and she irons them out, and makes them all smooth again, so that you don't know they're the same rose-leaves?"
"The rose-leaves never are crumpled."
"Except by some sudden, unconsidered movement of your own?"
"My movements," said Brodrick, "are never sudden and unconsidered."
"What? Never?"
Miss Collett looked a little surprised at this light-handed treatment of the editor.
And Jane observed Brodrick with a new interest as they sat there in the garden and Miss Collett poured out tea. "Mr. Brodrick," she said to herself, "is going to marry Miss Collett, though he doesn't know it."
By the end of the afternoon it seemed to her an inevitable consummation, the marriage of Mr. Brodrick and Miss Collett. She could almost see it working, the predestined attraction of the eternally compatible, the incomparably fit. And when Brodrick left off taking any notice of Miss Collett, and finally lured Jane away into the library on the flimsiest pretence, she wondered what game he was up to. Perhaps in his innocence he was blind to Miss Collett's adoration. He was not sure of Miss Collett. He was trying to draw her.
Jane, intensely interested, advanced from theory to theory of Brodrick and Miss Collett while Brodrick removed himself to the writing-table, and turned on her a mysterious back.
"I want to show you something," he said.
She went to him. In the bared centre of the writing-table he had placed a great pile of manuscript. He drew out his chair for her, so that she could sit down and look well at the wonder.
Her heart leaped to the handwriting and to George Tanqueray's name on the title-page.
"You've seen it?" he said.
"No. Mr. Tanqueray never shows his work."
From some lair in the back of the desk he swept forward a prodigious array of galley proofs. Tanqueray's novel was in the first number of the "Monthly Review."
"Oh!" she cried, looking up at him.
"I've pleased you?" he said.
"You have pleased me very much."
She rose and turned away, overcome as by some desired and unexpected joy. He followed her, making a cushioned place for her in the chair by the hearth, and seated himself opposite her.
"I was very glad to do it," he said simply.
"It will do you more good than Hambleby," she said.
"You know I did not think so," said he. And there was a pause between them.
"Mr. Brodrick," she said presently, "do you really want a serial from me?"
"Do I want it!"
"As much as you think you do?"
"I always," said he, "want things as much as I think I do."
She smiled, wondering whether he thought he wanted Miss Collett as much as he obviously did.
"What?" he said. "Are you going to let me have the next?"
"I had thought of it. If you really do——"
"Have you had any other offers?"
"Yes; several. But——"
"You must remember mine is only a new venture. And you may do better——"
It was odd, but a curious uncertainty, a modesty had come upon him since she last met him. He had been then so absurd, so arrogant about his magazine.
"I don't want to do better."
"Of course, if it's only a question of terms——"
It was incredible, Brodrick's depreciating himself to a mere question of terms. She flushed at this dreadful thought.
"It isn't," she said. "Oh! I didn't mean that."
"You never mean that. Which is why I must think of it for you. I can at least offer you higher terms."
"But," she persisted, "I should hate to take them. I want you to have the thing. That's to say I want you to have it. You must not go paying me more for that."
"I see," he said, "you want to make up."
She looked at him. He was smiling complacently, in the fulness of his understanding of her.
"My dear Miss Holland," he went on, "there must be no making up. Nothing of that sort between you and me."
"There isn't," she said. "What is there to make up for? For your not getting me?"
He smiled again as if that idea amused him.
"Or," said she, "for my making you take Mr. Tanqueray?"
"You didn't make me," he said. "I took him to please you."
"Well," she said; "and you'll take me now, to please me."
She rose.
"I must say good-bye to Miss Collett. How nice," she said, "Miss Collett is."
"Isn't she?" said he.
He saw her politely to the station.
That evening he drank his coffee politely in the drawing-room with Miss Collett.
"Do you know," he said, "Miss Holland thinks you're nice."
To his wonder Miss Collett did not look as if the information gave her any joy.
"Did she say so?"
"Yes. Do you think her nice?"
"Of course I do."
"What," said he, "do you really think of her?" He was in the habit of asking Miss Collett what she thought of people. It interested him to know what women thought, especially what they thought of other women.
It was in the spirit of their old discussions that she now replied.
"You can see she is a great genius. They say geniuses are bad to live with. But I do not think she would be."
He did not answer. He was considering very profoundly the question she had raised.
Which was precisely what Miss Collett meant that he should do.
As the silver-chiming clock struck ten she rose and said good-night. She never allowed these sittings to be prolonged past ten. Neither did Brodrick.
"And I am not to read any more proofs?" she said.
"Do you like reading them?"
She smiled. "It's not because I like it. I simply wanted to save you."
"You do save me most things."
"I try," she said sweetly, "to save you all."
He smiled now. "There are limits," he said, "even to your power of saving me. And to my capacity for being saved."
The words were charged with a significance that Brodrick himself was not aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for the utterance of a divination not his own.
His secretary understood him better than he did himself. She had spent three years in understanding him. And now, for the first time in three years, her lucidity was painful.
She could not contemplate serenely the thing she thought she had seen. Therefore she drew a veil over it and refused to believe that it was there.
"He did not mean anything," said Gertrude to herself. "He is not the sort of man who means things." Which was true.
XX
Brodrick, living on Putney Heath, was surrounded by his family. It was only fifteen minutes' walk from his front door to his brother John's house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon; only five minutes from his back door to Henry's house in Roehampton Lane. You went by a narrow foot-track down the slope to get to Henry. You crossed the Heath by Wimbledon Common to get to John. If John and Henry wanted to get to each other, they had to pass by Brodrick's house.
Moor Grange was a half-way house, the great meeting-place of all the Brodricks.
One fine warm Sunday in mid-May, about four o'clock, all the Brodricks except Hugh were assembled on Hugh's lawn. There was Mr. John Brodrick, the eldest brother, the head of the firm of Brodrick and Brodrick, Electrical Engineers. There was Dr. Henry Brodrick, who came next to John. He had brought Mrs. Heron, their sister (Mrs. Heron lived with Henry, because Mr. Heron had run away with the governess, to the unspeakable scandal of the Brodricks). There was Mrs. Louis Levine, who came next to Mrs. Heron. There was Mrs. John Brodrick, not to be separated from her husband, who, in a decorous dumbness and secrecy, adored her; and Mr. Louis Levine, who owed his position among the Brodricks to the very properly apparent devotion of his wife.
And there were children about. Eddy and Winny Heron, restless, irrepressible in their young teens, sprawled at their mother's feet and hung over her in attitudes of affection. One very small Levine trotted to and fro on fat legs over the lawn. The other, too small to run, could be seen in the background, standing in Gertrude Collett's lap and trampling on her.
The Levines had come over from St. John's Wood, packed tight in their commodious brand-new motor-car, the symbol of Levine's prosperity. So that all Brodrick's family were at Putney this afternoon.
They were sitting in the delicate shadow of the lime-tree. Outside, the lawn was drenched with light, light that ran quivering into the little inlets and pools among the shadows. The cropped grass shone clear as emerald, and all the garden showed clear-cut and solid and stable in its propriety and order.
Still more distinct, more stable and more solid, more ineradicably fixed in order and propriety, were the four figures of the Brodricks. Sitting there, in a light that refused, in spite of the lime-tree, to lend itself to any mystery or enchantment, they maintained themselves in a positively formidable reality. All these Brodricks had firm, thick-skinned faces in which lines came slowly, and were few but strong. Faces, they were, of men who have lived in absolute sobriety and sanity, untorn by any temptation to live otherwise; faces of women to whom motherhood has brought the ultimate content.
Comfortably material persons, sitting in a deep peace, not to be rapt from it by any fantasy, nor beguiled by any dream, they paid only in a high morality their debt to the intangible.
This afternoon, in spite of themselves, they were roused somewhat from the peace they sat in. They were expecting somebody.
"I suppose, when she arrives, we shall all have to sit at the lady's feet," said Mrs. Levine.
"I've no objection," said the Doctor; "after what she's done."
"It was pretty decent of her," said Levine. He was dark, nervous and solemn-eyed, a lean man of his race, and handsome. Sophy Brodrick had not loved her husband when she married him. She adored him now, because of the beauty that had passed from him into her children.
"I say, Uncle Louis, you might tell me what she did do," said Eddy Heron.
"She got your Uncle Hughy out of a tight place, my boy."
"I say, what's he been doing?"
Mr. Levine smiled inscrutably, while his wife shook her head at him.
"He's been going it, has he? Good old Uncle Hughy!"
Eddy's mother thought it would be nice if he and Winny went down the Heath road to meet Uncle Hughy and Miss Holland. Whereupon Eddy embraced his mother, being unable to agree with her.
"You really believe," said Mr. John Brodrick, who seemed anxious to be sure of his facts before he committed himself, "you really believe that if it had not been for this lady he'd have had to give it up?"
"Well," said Levine judicially, "she practically saved it. You see he would start it with George Tanqueray. And who cares about George Tanqueray? That's what wrecked him. I told him at the time it was sheer lunacy, but he wouldn't listen to me. Why" (Levine spoke in a small excited voice with sudden high notes), "he hadn't subscriptions enough to float the thing for twenty-four hours. As soon as he gets Miss Holland they go up by leaps and bounds, and it's bin goin' steady ever since. How long it'll keep goin's another thing."
"I understood Hugh to say," said John, "that the arrangements involved some considerable sacrifice to the lady."
"Well, you see, he'd been a bit of an ass. He'd made her a ridiculous offer, an offer we simply couldn't afford, and we had to tell her so."
"And then," said Sophy, "you might as well mention that she gave it him for what you could afford."
"She certainly let him have it very cheap." He ruminated. "Uncommonly cheap—considering what her figure is."
Eddy wanted to know what Miss Holland's figure had to do with his Uncle Hughy. Winny, round-eyed with wonder, inquired if it was beautiful, and was told that it was fairly beautiful, a tidy figure, a nice round figure, like her Aunt Sophy's.
"That," said John, "was very decent of her."
"Very," said the gentle lady, Mrs. John.
"It was splendid," said Mrs. Heron.
The Doctor meditated. "I wonder why she did it," said the Doctor.
His brother-in-law explained. "Oh, she thought she'd let him in for Tanqueray."
"Let him in?"
"Don't you see," said Mrs. Heron, "it was her idea of honour."
"A woman's idea of honour," said the Doctor.
"You needn't criticize it," said his sister Sophy.
"I don't," said the Doctor.
"I can tell you," said Levine, "what with her idea of honour and Hugh's idea of honour, the office had a pretty rough time of it till they got the business fixed."
"With Hugh's ideas," said John, "he's hardly likely to make this thing pay, is he? Especially if he's going to bar politics."
He said it importantly. By a manner, by wearing spectacles, and brushing his hair back in two semi-circles from his forehead, Mr. John Brodrick contrived to appear considerably more important than he was.
"Ah, he's made a mistake there," said the Doctor.
"That's what I tell him." Levine was more excited than ever.
"I should think he might be allowed to do what he likes," said Sophy. "After all, it's his magazine."
Mr. Levine's face remained supernaturally polite while it guarded his opinion that it wasn't his brother-in-law's magazine at all. They had disagreed about Tanqueray. They had disagreed about everything connected with the magazine, from the make-up of the first number to the salary of the sub-editor. They had almost quarreled about what Levine called "Miss Holland's price." And now, when his wife said that it was Sunday—and if they were going to talk business all the afternoon—she was told that Hugh's magazine wasn't business. It was Hugh's game. (His dreadfully expensive, possibly ruinous game.)
"Then," she said, "you might let him play it. I'm sure he works hard enough on your horrid old 'Telegraph.'"
Sophy invariably stood up for her family against her husband. But she would have stood up for her husband against all the world.
"Thank you, my pet." She stooped to the little three-year-old girl who trotted to and fro, offering to each of these mysteriously, deplorably preoccupied persons a flower without a stalk.
It was at this moment that Brodrick arrived from the station with Miss Holland.
"Is it a garden-party?" Jane inquired.
"No," said Brodrick, "it's my family."
She came on with him over the lawn. And the group rose to its feet; it broke up with little movements and murmurs, in a restrained, dignified expectancy. Jane had the sense of being led towards some unaccountable triumph and acclamation.
They closed round her, these unknown Brodricks, inaudibly stirred, with some unspoken, incomprehensible emotion in the men's gaze and in the women's touch. The big boy and girl shared it as they came forward in their shyness, with affectionate faces and clumsy, abortive encounters of the hand.
It was the whole Brodrick family moved to its depths, feeling as one. It could only be so moved by the spectacle of integrity and honour and incorruptible loyalty to It.
Still moved, it was surrounding Jane when a maid arrived with the tea-table, and the white cloth waved a signal to Miss Collett across the lawn. There was then a perceptible pause in the ovation as Brodrick's secretary appeared.
Even across the lawn Jane could discern trouble in Miss Collett's face. But Miss Collett's face was plastic in readjustments, and by the time she was fairly on the scene it had recaptured the habit of its smile. The smile, in greeting, covered and carried off the betraying reluctance of her hand. It implied that, if Miss Holland was to be set up in a high place and worshipped, Miss Collett was anxious to observe the appropriate ritual. Having observed it, she took, with her quiet, inconspicuous assurance, the place that was her own. She gave but one sign of her trouble when Dr. Brodrick was heard congratulating their guest on the great serial which, said he, by "saving" the magazine, had "saved" his brother. Then Gertrude quivered slightly, and the blood flushed in her set face and passed as fierce heat passes through iron.
While they were talking Jane had opportunity to watch and wonder at the firm, consolidated society that was Brodrick's family. These faces proclaimed by their resemblance the material link. Mr. John Brodrick was a more thick-set, an older, graver-lined, and grizzled Hugh, a Hugh who had lost his sombre fixity of gaze. Dr. Henry Brodrick was a tall, attenuated John, with a slightly, ever so slightly receding chin. Mrs. Heron was Hugh again made feminine and slender. She had Hugh's features, refined and diminished. She had Hugh's eyes, filled with some tragic sorrow of her own. Her hair was white, every thread of it, though she could not have been more than forty-five.
These likenesses were not so apparent at first sight in Mrs. Levine, the golden, full-blown flower of the Brodricks. They had mixed so thoroughly and subtly that they merged in her smoothness and her roundness. And still the facial substance showed in the firm opacity of her skin, the racial soul asserted itself in her poised complacence and decision.
"You don't know," she was saying, "how we're all sitting at your feet."
"We are indeed," said Mr. John Brodrick.
"Very much so," said the Doctor.
"Even little Cissy," said Hugh.
For little Cissy was bringing all her stalkless flowers to Jane; smiling at her as if she alone possessed the secret of this play. Brodrick watched, well-pleased, the silent traffic of their tendernesses.
The others were talking about Hambleby now. They had all read him. They had all enjoyed him. They all wanted more of him.
"If we could only have had Hambleby, Miss Holland," said Levine. "It wasn't my fault that we didn't get him."
Jane remembered that this was the brother-in-law whom Brodrick had wanted to keep out. He had the air of being persistently, permanently in.
"Of course it wasn't your fault," said she.
Levine then thought it necessary to say things about Jane's celebrity till Brodrick cut him short.
"Miss Holland," he said, "doesn't like her celebrity. You needn't talk about it."
John and Henry looked graver than ever, and Sophy made sweet eyes at Jane. Sophy's eyes—when they looked at you—were very sweet. It was through her eyes only that she apologized for her husband, whose own eyes were manifestly incapable of apologizing for anything. The Brodricks seemed to tolerate their brother-in-law; and he seemed, more sublimely, to tolerate their tolerance.
Great efforts were now made to divert Levine from the magazine. Mr. John Brodrick headed him off with motors and their makers; the Doctor kept his half-resentful spirit moving briskly round the Wimbledon golf-links; and Hugh, with considerable dexterity, landed him securely on the fiscal question, where he might be relied upon to stay.
But it was the Baby who saw what was to be done if his parent was to be delivered from his own offensiveness.
"Oh, look!" cried Winny. "Look at Baby. Making such a ducky angel of himself."
The Baby, having sat down abruptly on the grass, was making a ducky angel of himself by wriggling along it, obliquely, as he sat.
At the sight of him all the Brodricks instantaneously lost their seriousness and sanity. He was captured and established as the centre of the group. And, in the great act of adoration of the Baby, Levine was once more united to his wife's family.
His wife's family, like his wife, could forgive anything to Louis Levine because of the babies. It reserved its disapproval for Mrs. John Brodrick who had never had any; who had never done anything that was expected of her. Mrs. John looked as if she had cried a great deal because of the things she had not done. She had small hazel eyes with inflamed lids, and a small high nose that was always rather red. She was well born, and she carried her low-browed, bird-like head among the Brodricks with a solitary grace, and the motions of a dignified, distinguished bird.
And now, in mute penitence and wistful worship, she prostrated herself before their divinity, the Baby.
And in the middle of it all, with amazing smiles and chuckles, the Baby suddenly renounced his family and held out his arms to Jane. And suddenly all the Brodricks laughed. His mother laughed more than any of them. She took the Baby, and set him at Jane's feet; and he sat there, looking at Jane, as at some object of extraordinary interest and wonder and fascination. And Brodrick looked at both of them with something of the same naïf expression, and the Doctor, the attenuated, meditative Doctor, looked at all three, but especially at his brother. Gertrude Collett looked, now at Brodrick and now at Jane.
Brodrick did not see the Doctor or Gertrude either. It had just struck him that Jane was not in the least like her portrait, the portrait. He was thinking, as Tanqueray had once thought, that Gisborne, R. A., was an ass, and that if he could have her painted he would have her painted as she looked now.
As he was trying to catch the look, Gertrude came and said it was the Baby's tea-time, and carried him away. And the look went from Jane's face, and Brodrick felt annoyed with Gertrude because she had made it go.
Then Mrs. John came up and tried very hard to talk to Jane. She was nervously aware that conversation was expected of her as the wife of the head of the family, and that in this thing also she had failed him. She was further oppressed by Miss Holland's celebrity, and by the idea she had that Miss Holland must be always thinking of it and would not like to see it thus obscured by any other interest.
And while Mrs. John sat beside her, painfully and pensively endeavouring to converse, Jane heard Brodrick talking to Mrs. Levine.
"Where's Gertrude gone?" he said.
And Mrs. Levine answered, "She's indoors with the children."
Mrs. John was saying that Miss Holland must have known Hambleby; and then again that no, that wasn't likely. That was what made it so wonderful that she should know. Mrs. John could not have done it. She recounted sorrowfully the number of things she could not do. And through it all Jane heard the others talking about Gertrude.
"Gertrude looks very ill," said Mrs. Levine. "What's the matter with her?"
"How should I know?" said Brodrick. "Ask Henry."
"Miss Collett," said the Doctor solemnly, "has not consulted me."
At this point Mrs. Heron delivered Jane from Mrs. John. She said she wanted Miss Holland to see the sweet-peas in the kitchen garden.
And in the kitchen garden, among the sweet-peas, Mrs. Heron thanked Jane on her own account for what she had done, while Jane kept on saying that she had done nothing. All down the kitchen garden there was an alley of sweet-peas with a seat at the end of it, and there they sat while Mrs. Heron talked about her brother Hugh who had been so good to her and to her children. This praise of Brodrick mingled with the scent of the sweet-peas, so that Jane could never again smell sweet-peas in a hot garden without hearing Brodrick's praise.
Mrs. Heron stopped abruptly, as if she could say no more, as if, indeed, she had said too much, as if she were not used to saying such things.
"My brother thinks I may ask you to come and see me. Will you? Will you come some day and stay with me?"
In spite of the voice that told her that she was being drawn, that this family of Brodrick's was formidable, that she must be on her guard against all arms, stretched out to her, before she knew what she was doing Jane had said, Yes; she would be very glad.
Voices came to them then, and down the long alley between the sweet-peas she saw Brodrick coming towards them with Miss Collett and Winny Heron; and Jane was suddenly aware that it was getting late.
It was cold, too. She shivered. Miss Collett offered a wrap.
For a moment, in the hall of the house, Jane was alone with Brodrick's secretary. Through the open door they could see Brodrick standing on the lawn, talking to his sister. Mrs. Heron held him by one arm, Winny dragged on the other.
"Those two seem devoted to Mr. Brodrick," said Jane.
"They ought to be," said Miss Collett, "with all he does for them. And they are. The Brodricks are all like that." She looked hard at Jane. "If you've done anything for them, they never forget it. They keep on paying back."
Jane smiled.
"I imagine Mr. Hugh Brodrick would be quite absurd about it."
"Oh, he——" Gertrude raised her head. Her eyes adored him.
As if her pause were too profoundly revealing, she filled it up. "He'll always give more than he gets. It isn't for you he gives, it's for himself. He likes giving. And when it comes to paying him back——."
"That's where he has you?"
"Yes."
And Jane thought, "My dear lady, if you wouldn't treat him quite so like a god, he might have a chance to discover that he's mortal."
She would have liked to have said that to Miss Collett. She would have liked to have taken Brodrick to the seat at the end of the alley and have said to him, "It's all perfectly right. Don't be an idiot and miss it. You can't do a better thing for yourself than marry her, and it's the only way, you know, you can pay her back. Don't you see that you're cruel to her? That it's you that's making her ill? She can't look pretty when she's ill, but she'd be quite pretty if you made her happy."
But all she said was, "He's like that, is he?" And she went out to where he waited for her.
"Have you got to go?" he said.
She said, Yes, she was half expecting Nina Lempriere.
"The fiery lady?"
"Yes."
"You may as well stay. She won't be there," said Brodrick.
But Jane did not stay.
The whole family turned out on to the Heath to see them go. At the end of the road they looked back and saw it there. Sophy Levine was holding up the Baby to make him wave to Jane.
"Why did you tell them?" she said reproachfully to Brodrick.
"Because I wanted them to like you."
"Am I so disagreeable that they couldn't—without that?"
"I wanted you," he said, "to like them."
"I do like them."
He glanced at her sidelong and softly.
"Tell me," she said. "What have they done to look so happy, and so perfectly at peace?"
"That's it. They haven't done anything."
"Not to do things—that's the secret, is it?"
"Yes," he said, "I almost think it is."
"I wonder," said she.
XXI
Brodrick was right. Nina was not there.
At the moment when Jane arrived, anxious and expectant, in Kensington Square, Nina and Tanqueray were sitting by the window of the room in Adelphi Terrace.
They were both silent, both immobile in the same attitude, bowed forward, listening intently, the antagonistic pair made one in their enchantment, their absorption.
A young man stood before Tanqueray. He stood a little behind Nina where she sat in the window-seat. One shoulder leaned beside her against the shutter. He was very tall, and as he stood there his voice, deep and rhythmic, flowed and vibrated above them, giving utterance to the thing that held them.
Nina could not see him where she sat. It was Tanqueray who kept on looking at him with clear, contemplative eyes under brows no longer irritable.
He was, Tanqueray thought, rather extraordinary to look at. Dressed in a loosely-fitting suit of all seasons, he held himself very straight from the waist, as if in defiance of the slackness of his build. His eyes, his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face showed a sunburn whitening. It had passed through strange climates. He had the look, this poet, of a man who had left some stupendous experience behind him; who had left many things behind him, to stride, star-gazing, on. His face revealed him as he chanted his poems. Unbeautiful in detail, its effect as a whole was one of extraordinary beauty, as of some marvellously pure vessel for the spiritual fire. Beside him, it struck Tanqueray that Nina showed more than ever a murky flame.
The voice ceased, but the two remained silent for a moment.
Then Tanqueray spoke one word, "Splendid!"
Nina turned her head and looked up at the poet. His eyes were still following his vision. Her voice recalled him.
"Owen," she said, "will you bring the rest? Bring down all you've got."
Tanqueray saw as she spoke to him that there came again that betraying tenderness about her mouth; as she looked at him, her eyes lifted their hoods, revealing the sudden softness and surrender.
And as Tanqueray watched her he was aware that the queer eyes of the man were turned on him, rather than on Nina. They looked through him, as if they saw with a lucidity even more unendurable than his, what was going on in Tanqueray's soul.
He said something inaudible to Nina and went out of the room with a light, energetic stride.
"How can you stand his eyes?" said Tanqueray; "it's like being exposed to the everlasting stare of God."
"It is, rather."
"What's his name again?"
"Owen Prothero."
"What do you know about him."
She told him what she knew. Prothero was, as Tanqueray saw, an unlicked Celt. He had been, if Tanqueray would believe it, in the Indian Medical Service, and had flung it up before he got his pension. He had been to British Central Africa on a commission for investigating sleeping sickness; he spoke of it casually as if it were the sort of thing you naturally were on. He had volunteered as a surgeon in the Boer War. And with it all he was what Tanqueray saw.
"And his address?" Tanqueray inquired.
"He lives here."
"Why shouldn't he?" He answered her challenging eyes. They shot light at him.
"He is a great poet? I was right?"
"Absolutely. He's great enough for anybody. How on earth did you get hold of him?"
She was silent. She seemed to be listening for the sound of Prothero's feet on the stair.
He was soon with them, bringing his sheaf of manuscript. He had brought all he had got. The chanting began again and continued till the light failed.
And as Tanqueray listened the restless, irritable devilry passed from his face. Salient, thrust forward toward Prothero, it was the face of a winged creature in adoration, caught suddenly into heaven, breasting the flood of the supernal light. For Tanqueray could be cruel in his contempt for all clevernesses and littlenesses, for all achievements that had the literary taint; but he was on his knees in a moment before the incorruptible divinities. He had the immortal's scent for immortality.
When the chanting ceased they talked.
Tanqueray warned Prothero of the horrors of premature renown. Prothero declared that he had none. Nobody knew his name.
"Good," said Tanqueray. "Celebrity's all very well at the end, when you've done the things you want to do. It's a bad beginning. It doesn't matter quite so much if you live in the country where nobody's likely to know you're celebrated till you're dead. But if you will live in London, your only chance is to remain obscure."
"There are in London at this moment," he continued, "about one thousand celebrated authors. There are, I imagine, about fifty distinct circles where they meet. Fifty distinct hells where they're bound to meet each other. Hells where they're driven round and round, meeting each other. Steaming hells where they sit stewing in each other's sweat——"
"Don't, George!" cried Nina.
"Loathsome hells, where they swarm and squirm and wriggle in and out of each other. Sanguinary, murderous hells, where they're all tearing at each other's throats. How can you hope, how can you possibly hope to do anything original, if you're constantly breathing that atmosphere? Horrid used-up air that authors—beasts!—have breathed over and over and over again."
"As if," said Nina, "we weren't authors."
"My dear Nina, nobody would think it of us. Nobody would have thought it of Jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated."
"You'll be celebrated yourself some day."
"I shall be dead," said he. "I shan't know anything about it."
At this point Prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he wanted to get work on a paper. He was not, he intimated, looking to his poems to keep him. On the contrary, he would have to keep them.
Tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were. He had no doubt about Nina's poet. But there were poets and poets. There were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of immortality. And there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things most transitory. Prothero was one of these. There was not much chance for him in his generation. His poems were too portentously inspired. They were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. He stood alone on the ultimate, untrodden shores, watching strange tides and the courses of unknown worlds. On any reasonable calculation he could not hope to make himself heard for half a century, if then. There was something about him alien and terrible, inaccessibly divine. The form of his poems was uncouth, almost ugly. Their harmonies, stupendous and unforeseen, struck the ear with the shock of discord.
It was, of course, absurd that he should want work on a paper; still more absurd that he should think, or that Nina should think, that Tanqueray could get it for him.
He didn't, it appeared, expect anybody to get it for him. He just wrote things, things that he thought were adequately imbecile, and shot them into letter-boxes. As to what became of them, Tanqueray had never seen anybody more unsolicitous, more reckless of the dark event.
He went away with Prothero's poems in his pocket.
Nina followed him and held him on the doorstep.
"You do believe in him?" she said.
"What's the good of my believing in him? I can't help him. I can't help myself. He's got to wait, Nina, like the rest of us. It won't hurt him."
"It will. He can't wait, George. He's desperately poor. You must do something."
"What can I do?"
"There are things," she said, "that people always do."
"I could offer him a five-pound note; but he wouldn't take it."
"No. He wouldn't take it. You can do better than that. You can get him to meet that man of yours."
"What man?"
"That magazine man, Brodrick."
He laughed. "Considering that I all but did for him and his magazine! Brodrick's Jane Holland's man, not mine, you know. Have you told Jane about Prothero?"
"No."
A faint flame leaped in her face and died.
"You'd better," he said. "She can do anything with Brodrick. She could even make him take a poem. Why didn't you ask Prothero to meet her?"
"I haven't seen her for six months."
"Is that your fault or hers?"
"Neither."
"He's had to wait, then, six months?"
There was no escaping his diabolical lucidity.
"Go and see her at once," he went on, "and take Prothero. That's more to the point, you know, than his seeing me. Jinny is a powerful person, and then she has a way with her."
Again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture.
"Even Laura can do more for him than I. She knows people on papers. Take him to see Laura." He was backing out of the doorway.
"It was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. I promised him."
Her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves, was as a wild book for him to read. He was sorry for her torture. He lingered.
"I'd go and speak to Brodrick to-morrow, only he loathes the sight of me, and I can't blame him, poor devil."
"It's no matter," she said. "I'll write to Jane Holland."
"Do. She'll get him work on Brodrick's paper."
He went away, meditating on Nina and her medical, surgical poet. She would have to write to Jinny now. But she wouldn't take him to see her. She was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness, was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good deal to know what Prothero thought of Nina.
Prothero could have told him that he thought of Nina as he thought of his own youth.
He was of her mother's race and from her country of the Marches. He knew more about Nina than Tanqueray had ever known. He knew the Lemprieres, a family of untamed hereditary wildness. He knew Nina as the survival of a hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. He knew that it had left her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves.
It was of all things most improbable that he should be here in London, lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and Nina Lempriere.
The improbability of it struck Nina as she went to and fro in the inner room, preparing their supper.
There had been no acquaintance between her and young Prothero, the medical student. If their ways met it was only by accident, at long intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains. They used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own dream. That was fifteen years ago. In all that time she had not seen him.
He had drawn her now by his shyness, his horror of other people, his perfect satisfaction in their solitary communion. Virgin from his wild places, he had told her that she was the only woman he was not afraid of. He had attached himself to her manifestly, persistently, with the fidelity of a wild thing won by sheer absence of pursuit. She had let him come and go, violently aware of him, but seeming unaware. He would sit for hours in her room, reading while she wrote, forgetting that up-stairs his fire was dying in the grate.
He had embraced Poverty like a saint. He regarded it as the blessed state of every man who desired to obey his own genius at all costs. He was all right, he said. He had lived on rice in the jungle. He could live on rice at a pinch now. And he could publish his poems if he got work on the papers. On this point Nina found him engagingly, innocently open to suggestion. She had suggested a series of articles on the problem of the East. He had written the articles, but in such a style and in such a spirit that no editor had as yet dared to publish them.
It was possible that he would have a chance with Brodrick who was braver than other editors. Brodrick was his one chance.
She would have suggested his meeting Brodrick, but that the way to Brodrick lay through Jane Holland. She remembered that the gods had thrust Jane Holland between her and George Tanqueray; and she was determined that they should put no woman between her and Owen Prothero. She had taken possession of him and she meant to keep him to herself. The supreme, irresistible temptation was to keep him to herself. It dominated her desire to serve his interests. But she had not refused him when he owned, shyly, that he would like to see George Tanqueray, the only living writer, he maintained, who had any passion for truth, any sweep, any clearness of vision.
It was Tanqueray, with that passion, that diabolical lucidity, that vision of his, who had made her realize the baseness of her secrecy. She had no right to keep Owen to herself. He was too valuable.
His innocence had given a sting to her remorse. He had remained so completely satisfied with what she had done for him, so wholly unaware of having been kept obscure when celebrity was possible. Things came, he seemed to say, or they didn't come. If you were wise you waited.
With his invincible patience he was waiting now, in her room up-stairs, standing before the bookcase with his back to the door. He stood absolutely still, his head and shoulders bowed over the book he was manifestly not reading. In this attitude he had an air of masterly indifference to time, of not caring how long he waited, being habituated to extravagant expenditure of moments and of days. Absorbed in some inward and invisible act, he was unaware of Nina as she entered.
She called him to the supper she had made ready for him. He swung round, returning as it were from an immense distance, and followed her.
He was hungry, and she had a fierce maternal joy in seeing him eat. It was after supper that they talked, as they sat by the window in the outer room, looking at the river, a river of night, lamp-starred.
Nina began it. "Owen," she said, "how did George Tanqueray strike you?"
He paused before he spoke. "I think," he said, "I never in my life saw anybody more on the look-out. It's terrible, that prowling genius, always ready to spring."
"I know," she said, "he sees everything."
"No, Nina, he doesn't. He's a man whose genius has made away with one half of his capacity for seeing. That's his curse! If your eyes are incessantly looking out they lose the power of looking in."
"And yet, he's the only really great psychologist we've got. He and Jane Holland."
"Yes, as they go, your psychologists. Tanqueray sees so much inside other people that he can't see inside himself. What's worse, I shouldn't think he'd see far inside the people who really touch him. It comes of perpetually looking away."
"You don't know him. How can you tell?"
"Because I never look away."
"Can you see what's going on inside me?"
"Sometimes. I don't always look."
"Can you help looking?"
"Of course you can."
"You may look. I don't think I mind your looking. Why," she asked abruptly, "don't I mind?"
Her voice had an accent that betrayed her.
"Because there's nothing inside you that you're ashamed of."
She reddened with shame; shame of the fierce, base instinct that had made her keep him to herself. She knew that nothing escaped him. He had the keen, comprehending eyes of the physician who knows the sad secrets of the body; and he had other eyes that saw inward, that held and drew to confession the terrified, reluctant soul. She had an insane longing to throw herself at his feet in confession.
"Yes," she said, "but there are things——And yet——"
He stopped her. "Nothing, Nina, if you really knew yourself."
"Owen—it's not that. It's not because I don't know myself. It's because I know you. I know that, whatever there might be in me, whatever I did, however low I sank—if I could sink—your charity would be there to hold me up. And it wouldn't be your charity, either. I couldn't stand your charity. It wouldn't even be understanding. You don't understand me. It would be some knowledge of me that I couldn't have myself, that nobody but you could have. As if whatever you saw you'd say, 'That isn't really Nina.'"
"I should say, 'That's really Nina, so it's all right.'"
She paused, brooding on the possibilities he saw, that he was bound to see, if he saw anything. Did he, she wondered, really see what was in her, her hidden shames and insanities, the course of the wild blood that he knew must flow from all the Lemprieres to her? She lived, to be sure, the life of an ascetic and took it out in dreams. Yet he must see how her savage, solitary passion clung to him, and would not let go. Did he see, and yet did he not condemn her?
"Owen," she said suddenly, "do you mind seeing?"
"Sometimes I hate it. These aren't the things, you know, I want to see."
She lowered her eyes. Her nervous hand moved slowly to and fro along the window-sill, measuring her next words.
"What—do you want—to see?"
He rose to his feet and looked at her. At her, not through her, and she wondered, had he seen enough? It was as if he withdrew himself before some thought that stirred in her, menacing to peace.
"I can't tell you," he said. "I can't talk about it."
Then she knew what he meant. He was thinking of his vision, his vision of God.
He could not speak of it to her. She had never known him. This soul, with which her own claimed kindred, was hidden from her by all the veils of heaven.
"I know," she said. "Only tell me one thing. Was that what you went out to India and Central Africa to see?"
That drew him.
"No. I went out not to see it. To get away from it. I meant to give things their chance. That's why I went in for medicine. I wasn't going to shirk. I wanted to be a man. Not a long-haired, weedy thing in a soft hat."
"Was it any good?"
"Yes. I proved the unreality of things. I proved it up to the hilt. And I didn't shirk."
"But you wanted to escape, all the time?"
"I didn't escape. I couldn't. I couldn't catch cholera, or plague, or sleeping sickness. I couldn't catch anything."
"You tried?"
"Oh, yes, I gave myself a chance. That was only fair. But it was no use. I couldn't even get frightened."
"Owen—some people would say you were morbid."
"No, they wouldn't. They'd say I was mad. They will say it when I've published those poems."
"Did you mind my showing them to George Tanqueray?"
"No. But it's no use. Nobody knows my name."
"May I show them to Jane Holland?"
"Show them to any one you like. It'll be no use either."
"Owen—does it never occur to you that any human being can be of use?"
"No." He considered the point. "No, I can't say it ever does."
He stood before her, wrapped in his dream, removed from her, utterly forgetful.
She had her moment of pain in contemplating him. He saw it in her face, and as it were came back to her.
"Don't imagine," he said, "that I don't know what you've done. Now that I do know you."
She turned, almost in anger. "I've done nothing. You don't know me." She added, "I am going to write to Jane Holland."
When he had left her she sat a long while by the window, brooding on the thing that had happened to her a second time.
She had fallen in love; fallen with the fatality of the Lemprieres, and with the fine precipitate sweep of her own genius. And she had let herself go, with the recklessness of a woman unaware of her genius for loving, with the superb innocence, too, of all spontaneous forces. Owen's nature had disarmed her of all subterfuges, all ordinary defences of her sex. They were absurd in dealing with a creature so remote and disembodied.
She knew that in his way, his remote and disembodied way, he cared for her. She knew that in whatever place he held her she was alone there. She was the only woman for whom as yet he had cared. His way was not Tanqueray's way. It was a way that kept her safe. She had sworn that there were to be no more George Tanquerays; and there were none. She had done with that.
Not but that she was afraid of Owen. She had taken possession of him in fear, a secret, unallowed possession, a holding with hands invisible, intangible. For she had wisdom, the sad wisdom of the frustrate; it, and the insight of her genius, told her that Owen would not endure a tie less spiritual than friendship. She knew George Tanqueray's opinion of her. He was justified.
But though she sacrificed so far to spirit, it was her flesh and blood that shrank from the possible communion of Owen Prothero and Jane Holland. For Jinny, as Tanqueray said, had a way with her; and she knew Jinny's way. Jinny would take Owen Prothero from her as she had taken George, not deliberately, not because she wanted to, but because she was Jinny and had a way. Besides, Jane could do for him what she with her bare genius could not do, and that thought was insupportable to Nina. Yesterday she had been everything to him. Tomorrow Jane would be as much, or more.
And there were other women. They would be as ready as she to take possession. They would claim his friendship, and more than she had claimed, as the reward of having recognized him. There was no reason why she should give Owen up, and hand him over to them. And this was what she would do if she wrote that letter to Jane Holland.
She rose, and went to her desk and wrote it.
XXII
Jane answered at once. If Nina would bring Prothero to Kensington on Friday at four o'clock he would meet Hugh Brodrick.
But Prothero refused to be taken anywhere. He would not go hanging about women's drawing-rooms. It was the sort of thing, he said, that did you harm. He wanted to hold on to what he'd got. It was tricky; it came and went; it was all he could do to hold on to it; and if he got mixed up with women he was done for. Of course he was profoundly grateful.
Nina assured Jane that Mr. Prothero was profoundly grateful. But he was, she said, a youth of an untamable shyness. He was happy in an Indian jungle or an African swamp, but civilized interiors seemed to sadden him. She therefore proposed that Tanqueray, who had the manuscript, should read it to an audience, chosen with absolute discretion. Two or three people, not a horrid crowd. For the poems, she warned her fairly, were all about God; and nowadays people didn't care about God. Owen Prothero didn't seem to care much about anything else. It was bound, she said, to handicap him.
Jane consented. After all, the poems were the thing. For audience she proposed Hugh Brodrick, Caro Bickersteth, Laura, and Arnott Nicholson. Dear Nicky, who really was an angel, could appreciate people who were very far from appreciating him. He knew a multitude of little men on papers, men who write you up if they take a fancy to you and go about singing your praises everywhere. Nicky himself, if strongly moved to it, might sing. Nicky was a good idea, and there was Laura who also wrote for the papers.
The reading was fixed for Friday at four o'clock. Tanqueray, who detested readings, had overcome his repugnance for Prothero's sake. His letter to Jane was one fiery eulogy of the poet. Brodrick and the others had accepted the unique invitation, Laura Gunning provisionally. She would come like a shot, if she could get off, she said, but things were going badly at the moment.
Laura, however, was the first to arrive.
"Who is this man of Nina's?" said she.
"I don't know, my dear. I never heard of him till the other day."
She showed her Nina's letter.
Laura's face was sullen. It indicated that things were going very badly indeed; that Laura was at the end of her tether.
"But why God?" was her profane comment.
"Because, I imagine, he believes in him."
Laura declared that it was more than she did. She preferred not to believe in him, after the things that had been done to Papa. Her arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by the arrival of George Tanqueray.
Nina appeared next. She was followed by Hugh Brodrick and by Caro Bickersteth. Nicky came last of all.
He greeted Jane a little mournfully. It was impossible for Nicky to banish altogether from his manner the delicate reproach he felt, impossible not to be alive to the atrocious irony that brought him here to be, as Jane said, an angel, to sit and listen to this fellow Prothero. He understood that they were all there to do something for Prothero. Brodrick had been brought solely for that purpose. Tanqueray, too, and Miss Bickersteth and Miss Gunning, and he. Jane Holland was always asking him to do things, and she had never done anything for him. There was Brodrick's magazine that he had never got into. Jane Holland had only got to speak to Brodrick, only got to say to him that Arnott Nicholson was a rather fine poet and the thing was done. It was a small thing and an easy thing for her to do.
It was not so much that he wanted her to do things. He even now shrank, in his delicacy, from the bare idea of her doing them. For all his little palpitating ambition, Nicky shrank. What hurt him was the unavoidable inference he drew. When a woman cares for a man she does not doom him to obscurity by her silence, and Jane least of all women. He knew her. He knew what she had done for Tanqueray because she cared.
And now she was going to do things for Owen Prothero. Nicky sat dejected in the sorrow of this thought.
Brodrick also was oppressed. He was thinking of his magazine. It had been saved by Jane Holland, but he was aware that at this rate it could also be ruined by her. He knew what he was there for. He could see, with the terrible foreknowledge of the editor, that Prothero was to be pressed on him. He was to take him up as he had taken up Tanqueray. And from all that he had heard of Prothero he very much doubted whether he could afford to take him up. It was becoming a serious problem what he could afford. Levine was worrying him. Levine was insisting on concessions to the public, on popular articles, on politics. He had threatened, if his views were disregarded, to withdraw his financial co-operation, and Brodrick realized that he could not as yet afford to do without Levine. He might have to refuse to take Prothero up, and he hated to refuse Jane Holland anything.
As for Laura, she continued in her sullenness, anticipating with resentment the assault about to be made upon her soul.
And Jane, who knew what passed in Brodrick's mind, was downcast in her turn. She did not want Brodrick to think that she was making use of him, that she was always trying to get at him.
Tanqueray, a transformed, oblivious Tanqueray, had unrolled the manuscript. They grouped themselves for the reading, Nina on a corner of the sofa; Jane lying back in the other corner; Laura looking at Tanqueray over Nina's shoulder, with her chair drawn close beside her; Nicholson and Brodrick on other chairs, opposite the sofa, where they could look at Jane.
It was to this audience that Tanqueray first read young Prothero's poems of the Vision of God; to Laura, who didn't believe in God; to Jane, absorbed in her embarrassments; to Nina, tortured by many passions; to Hugh Brodrick, bearing visibly the financial burden of his magazine; to Caro Bickersteth, dubious and critical; to Nicky, struggling with the mean hope that Prothero might not prove so very good.
They heard of the haunting of the divine Lover; of the soul's mortal terror; of the divine pursuit, of the flight and the hiding of the soul, of its crying out in its terror; of its finding; of the divine consummation; of its eternal vision and possession of God.
Nicky's admirable judgment told him that as a competitive poet he was dished by Prothero. He maintained his attitude of extreme depression. His eyes, fixed on Jane, were now startled out of their agony into a sudden wonder at Prothero, now clouded again as Nicky manifestly said to himself, "Dished, dished, dished." He was dished by Prothero, dished by Tanqueray, reduced to sitting there, like an angel, conquering his desire, sublimely renouncing.
Brodrick's head was bowed forward on his chest. His eyes, under his lowering brows, looked up at Jane's, gathering from them her judgment of Owen Prothero. Prothero's case defied all rule and precedent, and Brodrick was not prepared with a judgment of his own. Now and then a gleam of comprehension, caught from Jane, illuminated his face and troubled it. He showed, not as a happy creature of the flesh, but as a creature of the flesh made uncontent, divinely pierced by the sharp flame of the spirit.
It was so that Jane saw him, once, when his persistent gaze drew hers for an inconsiderable moment. Now and then, at a pause in the reader's voice, Brodrick sighed heavily and shifted his position.
Nina leaned back as she listened, propping her exhausted body, her soul surrendered as ever to the violent rapture; caught now and carried away into a place beyond pain, beyond dreams, beyond desire.
And Laura, who did not believe in God, Laura sat motionless, her small insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. Over her face there passed strange lights, strange tremors, a strange softening of the small indomitable mouth. It was more than ever the face of a child, of a flower, of all things innocent and open. But her eyes were the eyes of a soul whom vision makes suddenly mature. They stared at Tanqueray without seeing him, held by the divine thing they saw.
She still sat so, while Brodrick and Nicholson, like men released, came forward and congratulated the novelist as on some achievement of his own. They did it briefly, restrained by the silence that his voice had sunk into. Everybody's nerves were tense, troubled by the vibrating passage of the supersensual. The discussion that followed was spasmodic and curt.
Nicky charged into the silence with a voice of violent affirmation. "He is great," said poor Nicky.
"Too great," said Brodrick, "for the twentieth century."
Nina reminded him that the twentieth century had only just begun, and Jane remarked that it hadn't done badly since it had begun with him.
Laura said nothing; but, as they parted outside in the square, she turned eastwards with Nina.
"Does he really mind seeing people?" she said.
"It depends," said Nina. "He's seen George."
"Would he mind your bringing him to see me some day? I want to know him."
Nina's face drew back as if Laura had struck her. Its haggard, smitten look spoke as if Nina had spoken. "What do you want to know him for?" it said.
"He hasn't got to be seen," said Nina herself savagely. She was overwrought. "He's got to be heard. You've heard him."
"It's because I've heard him that I want to see him."
Nina paused in her ferocious stride and glanced at the little thing. The small face of her friend had sunk from its ecstasy to its sullen suffering, its despondency, its doubt.
Nina was stung by compassion.
"Do you want to see him very much?" she said.
"I wouldn't ask you if I didn't."
"All right. You shall. I'll make him come."
XXIII
Within a fortnight of that reading Prothero received a letter from George Tanqueray. It briefly told him that the lady whom he had refused to meet had prevailed upon her publishers to bring out his poems in the autumn, at their own and not Prothero's expense.
How the miracle had been worked he couldn't conceive, and Tanqueray was careful to leave him unenlightened. It had been simply a stock instance of Jinny's way. Jinny, whose affairs were in Tanqueray's hands, had been meditating an infidelity to Messrs. Molyneux, by whom Tanqueray vehemently assured her she had been, and always would be, "had." They had "had" her this time by the sacrificial ardour with which they soared to her suggestion that Mr. Prothero should be published. Miss Holland must, they urged, be aware that Mr. Prothero had been rejected by every other firm in London. They were sure that she realized the high danger of their enterprise and that she appreciated the purity of their enthusiasm. The poems were, as she knew, so extraordinary that Mr. Prothero had not one chance in a thousand even with the small public that read poetry. Still, they were giving Mr. Prothero his fractional opportunity, because of their enthusiasm and their desire to serve Miss Holland. They understood that Miss Holland was thinking of leaving them. They would not urge her to remain, but they hoped that, for her own sake, she would reconsider it.
Jane had reconsidered it and had remained.
"You understand clearly, Jinny," Tanqueray had said, "that you're paying for Prothero's poems?"
To that Jinny had replied, "It's what I wanted to do, and there wasn't any other way."
Owen Prothero could no longer say that nobody knew his name. His innocence was unaware of the secret processes by which names are made and unmade; but he had gathered from Nina that her friends had created for him a rumour and reputation which he persistently refused to incarnate by his presence among them. He said he wanted to preserve his innocence. Tanqueray's retirement was not more superb or more indignant; Tanqueray had been fortuitously and infrequently "met"; but nobody met Prothero anywhere. Even Jane Holland, the authentic fount of rumour, had not met him.
It was hard on Jane that she who was, as she piteously pleaded, the prey of all the destroyers, should not be allowed a sight of this incomparable creator. But she respected the divine terror that kept Nina's unlicked Celt outside women's drawing-rooms.
She understood, however, that he was to be seen and seen more often than not, at Tanqueray's rooms in Torrington Square. Tanqueray's wife did not count. She was not the sort of woman Prothero could be afraid of, and she was guiltless of having any drawing-room. Jane remembered that it was a long time since she had seen Tanqueray's wife.
One afternoon, about five o'clock, she called in Torrington Square. She approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy little face of Tanqueray's wife looking out of the ground-floor window.
But Rose was not at the window. The curtains were drawn across, obviously for the purpose of concealing Rose. A brougham waited before the door.
Jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the house. There was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with Mrs. Tanqueray.
She was going away when Tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the doctor was.
"Don't go, Jinny," he said.
She searched his face.
"Oh, George, is anything the matter?"
He raised his eyebrows. His moustache tilted with them, upwards. She recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from him.
"Oh, dear me, no," he said.
"May I see her—afterwards?"
"Of course you may see her. But"—he smiled—"if you'll come up-stairs you'll see Prothero."
She followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high above Rose and her movements and her troubles.
He paused at the door.
"He may thank his stars, Jinny, that he came across Nina instead of you."
"You think I'd better keep clear of him?"
"No. I think he'd better keep clear of you."
"George, is he really there?"
"Yes, he's there all right. He's caught. He's trapped. He can't get away from you."
"I won't," she said. "It's dishonourable."
He laughed and they went in.
The poet was sitting in Tanqueray's low chair, facing them. He rose at some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct of savage flight. She herself would have turned and fled, but for the singularity of such precipitance. She was afraid before this shyness of the unlicked Celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by the guile she judged dishonourable.
Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.
They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. It was intimate, rather, and vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.
It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had passed through strange climates.
It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself secretly defining it. Tuberculosis—that was it; that was the certain and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion. When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made swift by hunger.
Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also suggested the thing she at last said.
"I'm distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it's nothing serious."
Prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray's had been.
"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn't cut out for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint and——"
She filled his blank, "And a martyr?"
"What can you expect when a man mates like that?"
"It's natural," she pleaded.
"Natural? It's one of the most unnatural marriages I've ever come across. It's a crime against nature for a man like Tanqueray to have taken that poor little woman—who is nature pure and simple—and condemn her to——"
She drew back visibly. "I know. He doesn't see it," she said.
"He doesn't see anything. He doesn't even know she's there. How can he? His genius runs to flesh and blood, and he hasn't room for any more of it outside his own imagination. That's where you are with your great realists."
She gazed at him, astonished, admiring. This visionary, this poet so estranged from flesh and blood, had put his finger on the fact.
"You mean," she said, "a visionary would see more?"
He shrugged his shoulders at her reference.
"He would have more room," he said, "that would be all. He could at any rate afford to take more risks."
They were silent again.
"I believe," he said presently, "somebody's coming. I shall have to go."
Jane turned her head. The sounds he heard so distinctly were inaudible to her.
They proved to be footsteps on the staircase, footsteps that could never have been Rose's nor yet Tanqueray's. They paused heavily at the door. Some one was standing there, breathing.
A large woman entered very slowly, and Jane arrived, also slowly, at the conclusion that it must be Mrs. Eldred, George's wife's aunt.
Mrs. Eldred acknowledged her presence and Prothero's by a vague movement of respect. It was not till Prothero had gone that she admitted that she would be glad to take a chair. She explained that she was Rose's aunt, and that she had never been up them stairs before and found them tryin'.
Jane expressed sorrow for that fact and for Rose's illness.
Mrs. Eldred sighed an expository sigh.
"She's frettin' an' she's worritin'. She's worritin' about 'Im. It isn't natch'ral, that life 'E leads, and it's tellin' on 'er."
"Something's telling on her."
Mrs. Eldred leaned forward and lowered her voice. "It's this way, miss. 'E isn't properly a 'usban' to 'er."
"You shouldn't say that, Mrs. Eldred. He's very fond of her."
"Fond of 'er I dare say 'E may be. But 'E neglec's 'er."
"You shouldn't say that, either."
"Well, miss, I can't 'elp sayin' it. Wot else is it, when 'E shuts 'imself up with 'is writin' all day long and 'alf the night, and she a-settin' and a-frettin'?"
She looked round the room, apparently recognizing with resentment the scene of Tanqueray's perpetual infidelity.
"But," said Jane, "he'd be away as much if he was in business."
"'Ef 'E was in business there'd be the evenin's to look forward to. And there'd be 'is Saturdays and Sundays. As it is, wot is there for her to look forward to?"
"At any rate she knows he's there."
"It's knowin' that 'E's there wot does it. It's not as if she 'ad a 'ouse to look after, or a little baby to take 'er mind orf of 'im."
"No, it isn't."
A sound of yapping came faintly up from the ground-floor.
"That's Joey," said Mrs. Eldred tearfully, "'er Pom as she was so fond of. I've brought 'im. And I've brought Minny too."
"Minny?" Jane had not heard of Minny.
"The cat, miss. They'll keep 'er company. It's but right as she should 'ave them."
Jane assented warmly that it was but right.
"It's not," Mrs. Eldred continued, "as if she came reg'lar, say once in a week, to see 'er uncle and me. She'll go to Camden Town and set with that poor old Mr. Gunning. Give Rose any one that's ill. But wot is that but settin'? And now, you see, with settin' she's ill. It's all very well when you're brought up to it, but she isn't. Rose'd be well if she 'ad a 'ouse and did the work in it. And 'E won't let 'er 'ave it. 'E won't 'ear of 'er workin', 'E says."
"Well, naturally, he wouldn't like to see his wife working."
"Then, miss, 'E should 'ave married a lady 'as wouldn't want to work. That's wot 'E should have done. We were always against it from the first, 'er uncle and me was. But they was set, bein' young-like."
Mrs. Eldred's voice ceased suddenly as Tanqueray entered. Jane abstained from all observation of their greeting. She was aware of an unnatural suavity in Tanqueray's manner. He carried it so far as to escort Mrs. Eldred all the way down to the ground-floor sitting-room where Rose was.
He returned with considerable impetus to Jane.
"Well, Jinny, so you've seen my aunt-in-law?"
"I have," said Jinny contumaciously, "and I like her."
"What do you think? She's brought a dog on a chain and a beast of a cat in a basket."
Jinny abstained from sympathy, and Tanqueray grew grave.
"I wish I knew what was the matter with Rose," he said. "She doesn't seem to get much better. The doctor swears it's only liver; but he's a silly ass."
"Tanks, there's nothing the matter really, except—the poor little bird wants to build its nest. It wants sticks and straws and feathers and things——"
"Do you mean I've got to go and find a beastly house?"
"Let her go and find it."
"I would in a minute—only I'm so hard up."
"Of course you'll be hard up if you go on living in rooms like this."
"That's what she says. But when she talks about a house she means that she'll do all the work in it."
"Why not?" said Jane.
"Why not? I married her because I wasn't going to have her worked to death in that damned lodging-house of her uncle's."
"You married her because you loved her," said Jane quietly.
"Well—of course. And I'm not going to let my wife cook my dinner and make my bed and empty my slops. How can I?"
"She'll die if you don't, George."
"Die?"
"She'll get horribly ill. She's ill now because she can't run about and sweep and dust and cook dinners. She's dying for love of all the beautiful things you won't let her have—pots and pans and carpet-sweepers and besoms. You don't want her to die of an unhappy passion for a besom?"
"I don't want to see her with a besom."
Jane pleaded. "She'd look so pretty with it, George. Just think how pretty she'd look in a little house, playing with a carpet-sweeper."
"On her knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor——"
"You'd have a woman in to scrub."
"Carrying the coals?"
"You'd carry the coals, George."
"By Jove, I never thought of that. I suppose I could." He pondered.
"You see," he said, "she wants to live at Hampstead."
"You can't cut her off from her own people."
"I'm not cutting her off. She goes to see them."
"She'll go to see them if you live at Hampstead. If you live here they'll come and see you. For she'll be ill and they'll have to."
Tanqueray looked at her, not without admiration.
"Jinny, you're ten times cleverer than I."
"In some things, Tanks, I am. And so is that wife of yours."
"She's—very sensible. I suppose it's sensible to be in love with a carpet-sweeper."
She shook her head at him.
"Much more sensible than being in love with you."
His eyes evaded her. She rose.
"Oh, Tanks, you goose. Can't you see that it's you she's in love with—and that's why she must have a carpet-sweeper?"
With that she left him.
He followed her to the doorstep where he turned abruptly from her departure.
Rose in the sitting-room was kneeling by the hearth where she had just set a saucer of milk. With one hand she was loosening very gently from her shoulder the claws of Minny, the cat, who clung to her breast, scrambling, with the passion and desperation of his kind. Her other hand restrained with a soft caressing movement Joey's approaches to the saucer. Joey, though trembling with excitement, sat fascinated, obedient to her gesture. Joey was puny and hairless as ever, but in Rose's face as she looked at him there was a flush of maternal tenderness and gravity. A slightly sallow tinge under its sudden bloom told how Rose had suffered from the sedentary life.
All this Tanqueray saw as he entered. It held him on the threshold, unmoved by the rushing assault and lacerating bark of the little dog, who resented his intrusion.
Rose got up and came to him, lifting a frightened, pleading face.
"Oh, George," she said, "don't make me send them away. Let me keep them."
"I suppose you must keep them if you want them."
"I never said I wanted them. Aunt would bring them. She thought they'd be something to occupy my mind, like."
Tanqueray smiled, in spite of his gentleness, at the absurd idea of Rose having a mind.
Rose made a little sound in her throat like a laugh. She had not laughed, she had hardly smiled, for many months now.
"The doctor—'e's fair pleased. 'E says I'll 'ave to go out walkin' now, for Joey's sake."
"Poor Joey."
He stooped and stroked the little animal, who stood on ridiculous hind-legs, straining to lick his hand.
"His hair doesn't come on, Rose——"
"It hasn't been brushed proper. You should brush a Pom's 'air backwards——"
"Of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. He can bark all right, anyhow. There's nothing wrong with his lungs."
"He won't bark at you no more, now he knows you."
She leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized Minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. Minny was not beautiful.
"It's Minny," she said. "You used to like Minny."
It struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child at her breast. She saw his look and smiled up at him.
"I may keep him, too?"
At that he kissed her.
By the end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him like this and destroyed his peace.
It wasn't the idea of the house. The house was bad enough; the house indeed was abominable. It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and pressure of life.
It was all very well for Prothero to talk. His genius was safe, it was indestructible. It had the immunity of the transcendent. It worked, not in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. Whatever Prothero did it remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. Prothero could afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. He, Tanqueray, could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. To immerse himself was suicidal; it was the dyer plunging into his own vat.
Because his genius was a thing of flesh and blood, flesh and blood was the danger always at its threshold, the enemy in its house. For the same reason it was sufficient to itself. It fulfilled the functions, it enjoyed the excitements and the satisfactions of sense. It reproduced reality so infallibly, so solidly, so completely, that it took reality's place; it made him unconscious of his wife's existence and of the things that went on beneath him in the ground-floor sitting-room.
Yet he was not and had never been indifferent to life itself. He approached it, not with precaution or prejudice or any cold discretion, but with the supreme restraint of passion on guard against its own violence. If he had given himself to it, what a grip it would have had on him, what a terrible, destructive grip; if, say, he had found his mate; if he had married a woman, who, exulting in life, would have drawn him into it.
Rose had not drawn him in. She had done nothing assailing and destructive. She was, in some respects, the most admirable wife a man bent on solitude could have selected. The little thing had never got in his way. She was no longer disturbing to the intellect, nor agitating to the heart; and she satisfied, sufficiently, the infrequent craving of his senses. Up till now he would hardly have known that he was married; it had been so easy to ignore her.
But to-day she had been forced on his attention. The truth about Rose had been presented to him very plainly and boldly by Prothero, by the doctor, by Mrs. Eldred and by Jane. It was the same naked truth that in his novels he himself presented with the utmost plainness and boldness to the British public. His genius knew no other law but truth to Nature, trust in Nature, unbroken fidelity to Nature. And now it was Nature that arraigned his genius for its frustration of her purposes in Rose. His genius had made Rose the victim of its own incessant, inextinguishable lust and impulse to create.
Eleven o'clock struck and he had not written a line. Through his window he heard the front door open and Rose's little feet on the pavement, and Rose's voice calling into the darkness her old call, "Puss—Puss—Puss. Minny—Min—Min—Minny. Puss—Puss—Puss."
He sighed. He had realized for the first time that he was married.
XXIV
Nina kept her promise, although Prothero protested that he saw no reason why he should be taken to see Laura Gunning. He was told that he need not be afraid of Laura. She was too small, Nina said, to do him any harm. Refusing to go and see Laura was like refusing to go and see a sick child. Ultimately, with extreme unwillingness, he consented.
Laura was the poorest of them all, and she lived on a top-floor in Albert Street, Camden Town, under desperate restrictions of time and space. For she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of Laura's family was that it was always there. She spoke of it briefly as Papa.
It was four years now since Mr. Gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy; for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them.
And yet Laura was cruel to her small genius. It was delicate, and she drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. She would turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. It had not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. But it was threatened. They were beginning, Nina said, to wonder how long Laura would hold out.
It was not Poverty that had wrecked her. She could bear that. Poverty had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test, justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. She rejoiced in her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing. For there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, Papa would not have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in Camden Town.
It was May and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity. There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window. There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of the fireplace next the window. On the other, the dark side, was Laura's writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. Another book-shelf faced the fireplace. That was all.
Here, for three years, Laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and hardly ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair.
Some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or spiritual squalor. Ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret. Prothero, coming into Laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof, drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to cling.
Laura was at home. She was writing, snatching at the few golden moments of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the old man dozed by the fireside. From time to time she glanced at him, and then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching, an immovable, perpetual fear.
Prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy, childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat, slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment before Laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder.
He took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the fragile thing.
He knew what Nina had meant when she said that he need not be afraid of her, that she couldn't do him any harm.
He saw a mere slender slip of a body, a virginal body, straight-clad; the body and the face of a white child. Her almost rudimentary features cast no shade; her lips had kept the soft, low curve of their childhood, their colourless curl flattened against her still, white face. He saw all that, and he saw the sleeping tenderness in her eyes; deep-down it slept, under dark blue veils. Her eyes made him forgive her forehead, the only thing about her which was not absurdly small.
And of all this he was afraid, afraid for the wonder and mystery it evoked in him. He saw that Nina watched him and that she was aware of his fear.
She was dangerously, uncontrollably aware of it, and aware of her own folly in bringing him to Laura against his judgment and his will. She might have known that for him there would be a charm, a perfection in her very immaturity, that she would have for him all the appealing, pathetic beauty of her type. For him, Nina, watching with a fierce concentration, saw that she was virginity reduced to its last and most exquisite simplicity.
They had said nothing to each other. Laura, in the wonderful hour of his coming, could find nothing to say to him. He noticed that she and Nina talked in low, rapid voices, as if they feared that at any moment the old man might awake.
Then Laura arose and began to get tea ready, moving very softly in her fear.
"You'd better let me cut the bread and butter," said Prothero.
Laura let him.
Nina heard them talking over the bread and butter while Laura made the tea. She saw that his eyes did not follow her about the room, but that they rested on her when she was not looking.
"You were hard at work when we came," he was saying.
Laura denied it.
"If I may say so, you look as if you'd been at it far too long."
"No. I'm never at it long enough. The bother is getting back to where you were half-an-hour ago. It seems to take up most of the time."
"Then I oughtn't—ought I—to take up any of it?"
"Oh, please," said Laura, "take it. I can't do anything with it."
She had the air of offering it to him like bread and butter on a plate.
"Time," she said, "is about all we've got here. At any rate there will be time for tea." She examined the cupboard. "It looks as if time were about all we were going to have for tea." She explored the ultimate depth of the cupboard. "I wonder if I could find some jam. Do you like jam?"
"I adore it."
That was all they said.
"Need you," said Nina to Prothero, "spread the butter quite so thick?" Even in her agony she wondered how much, at the rate he was spreading it, would be left for the Kiddy's supper.
"He shall spread it," said the Kiddy superbly, "as thick as ever he likes."
They called Nina to the table. She ate and drank; but Laura's tea scalded her; Laura's bread and butter choked her; she sickened at it; and when she tried to talk her voice went dry in her throat.
And in his chair by the fireside, the old man dropped from torpor to torpor, apart and unaware of them. When he waked they would have to go.
"Do you think," said Laura, "I'd better wake Papa?"
That was a question which this decided little person had never been able to decide for herself. It was too momentous.
"No," said Nina, "I think you'd better not."
It was then that Mr. Gunning waked himself, violently; starting and staring, his pale eyes round with terror; for his sunstroke had made him dream dreams.
Laura gave an inarticulate murmur of compassion. She knelt by him, and held his hands in hers and stroked them.
"What is it, Papa dear, have you had a little dream? Poor darling," she said, "he has such horrid ones."
Mr. Gunning looked about him, still alarmed, still surrounded as in his dream, by appalling presences. He was a little man, with a weak, handsome face, worn and dragged by emotion.
"What's all this? What's all this?" he reiterated, until out of the throng of presences he distinguished dimly a woman's form. He smiled at it. He was almost wide awake now.
"Is it Rose?" he said.
"No, Papa. It's Nina."
Mr. Gunning became dejected. If it had been Rose she would have sat beside him and talked to him a little while.
He was perfectly wide awake now; he had seen Prothero; and the sight of Prothero revived in him his one idea. His idea was that every man who saw Laura would want to pick the little thing up and carry her away from him. He was haunted by the fear of losing Laura. He had lost everything he had and had forgotten it; but a faint memory of disaster persisted in his idea.
"What are you going to do with my little girl?" he said. "You're not going to take her away? I won't have that. I won't have that."
"Isn't he funny?" said Laura, unabashed. And from where she knelt, there on the verge of her terror, she looked up at the young man and laughed. She laughed lest Prothero should feel uncomfortable.
Nina had risen for departure, and with a slow, reluctant movement of his long body, Prothero rose too. Nina could have sworn that almost he bowed his head over Laura's hand.
"May I come and see you again some day?" he said. And she said she would be very glad.
That was all.
Outside in the little dull street he turned to Nina.
"It wasn't fair, Nina; you didn't tell me I was going to have my heart wrung."
"How could I know," she said fiercely, "what would wring your heart?"
He looked away lest he should seem to see what was in her.
But she knew he saw.
XXV
Three weeks passed. Prothero had been four times to see Miss Gunning. He had been once because she said he might come again; once because of a book he had promised to lend her; once because he happened to be passing; and once for no reason whatsoever. It was then borne in on him that what he required was a pretext. Calling late one evening he caught Miss Gunning in the incredible double act of flinging off a paragraph for the papers while she talked to Mr. Gunning.
His pretext, heaven-sent, unmistakable, stared him in the face. He could not write paragraphs for the papers (they wouldn't take his paragraphs), but he could talk to Mr. Gunning. It was not so difficult as he would have at first supposed. He had already learnt the trick of it. You took a chair. You made a statement. Any statement would do. You had only to say to Mr. Gunning, "Isn't that so?" and he would bow and assure you, with a solemn courtesy, that it was, and sit up waiting patiently for you to do it again; and you went on talking to Miss Gunning until he showed signs of restlessness. When you had done this several times running he would sink back in his chair appeased. But Prothero had discovered that if you concentrated your attention on Mr. Gunning, if you exposed him to a steady stream of statements, he invariably went to sleep; and while he slept Laura wrote.
And while Laura wrote, Owen could keep on looking at her as much as he liked.
From where he sat his half-closed eyes could take in rather more than a side view of Laura. He could see her head as it bent and turned over her work, showing, now the two low waves of its dark hair, now the flat coils at the back that took the beautiful curve of Laura's head. From time to time she would look up at him and smile, and he would smile back again under his eyelids with a faint quiver of his moustache.
And Laura said to herself, "He is rather ugly, but I like him."
It was not odd that she should like him; but what struck her as amazing was the peace that in his presence settled on Papa. Once he had got over the first shock of his appearance, it soothed Mr. Gunning to see Prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. It established him in the illusion of continued opulence, for Mr. Gunning was not aware of the things that had happened to him four years ago. But there had been lapses and vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. In the days of opulence people had come to see him; now they only came to see Laura. They were always the same people, Miss Holland and Miss Lempriere and Mr. Tanqueray. They did no positive violence to the illusion; in their way they ministered to it. They took their place among the company of brilliant and indifferent strangers whom he had once entertained with cold ceremony and a high and distant courtesy. They stayed for a short time by his chair, they drifted from it into remote corners of the room, they existed only for each other and for Laura. Thus one half of his dream remained incomprehensible to Mr. Gunning. He did not really know these people.
But he knew Mr. Prothero, who took a chair beside him and stayed an hour and smoked a pipe with him. He had known him intimately and for a long time. His figure filled the dark and empty places in the illusion, and made it warm, tangible and complete. And because the vanished smokers, the comrades of the days of opulence, had paid hardly any attention to Laura, therefore Mr. Gunning's mind ceased to connect Prothero with his formidable idea.
Laura, who had once laughed at it, was growing curiously sensitive to the idea. She waited for it in dreadful pauses of the conversation; she sat shivering with the expectation of its coming. Sooner or later it would come, and when it did come Papa would ask Mr. Prothero his intentions, and Mr. Prothero, having of course no intentions, would go away and never have anything to do with them again.
Prothero had not yet asked himself his intentions or even wondered what he was there for, since, as it seemed, it was not to talk to Laura. There had been opportunities, moments, pauses in the endless procession of paragraphs, when he had tried to draw Laura out; but Laura was not to be drawn. She had a perfect genius for retreating, vanishing from him backwards, keeping her innocent face towards him all the time, but backing, backing into her beloved obscurity. He felt that there were things behind her that forbade him to pursue.
Of the enchantment that had drawn her in the beginning, she had not said a word. When it came to that they were both silent, as by a secret understanding and consent. They were both aware of his genius as a thing that was and was not his, a thing perpetually present with them but incommunicable, the very heart of their silence.
One evening, calling about nine o'clock, he found her alone. She told him that Papa was very tired and had gone to bed. "It is very good of you," she said, "to come and sit with him."
Prothero smiled quietly. "May I sit with you now?"
"Please do."
They sat by the fireside, for even in mid-June the night was chilly. A few scattered ashes showed at the lowest bar of the grate. Laura had raked out the fire that had been lit to warm her father.
Papa, she explained, was not always as Mr. Prothero saw him now. His illness came from a sunstroke.
He said, yes; he had seen cases like that in India.
"Then, do you think——"
She paused, lest she should seem to be asking for a professional opinion.
"Do I think? What do I think?"
"That he'll get better?"
He was silent a long time.
"No," he said. "But he need never be any worse. You mustn't be afraid."
"I am afraid. I'm afraid all the time."
"What of?"
"Of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face it."
"You've nerve enough for anything."
"You don't know me. I'm an utter coward. I can't face things. Especially the thing I'm afraid of."
"What is it? Tell me." He leaned nearer to her, and she almost whispered.
"I'm afraid of his having a fit—epilepsy. He might have it."
"He might. But he won't. You mustn't think of it."
"I'm always thinking of it. And the most—the most awful thing is that—I'm afraid of seeing it."
She bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to an unpardonable shame.
"Poor child. Of course you are," said Prothero. "We're all afraid of something. I'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood."
"You?"
"I."
"Oh—but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it."
"Wouldn't I?"
"No. Or you couldn't go and be a doctor. Why," she asked suddenly, "did you?"
"Because I was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way. My father was a country doctor—a surgeon. One day he sent me into his surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me—I was a boy about fifteen at the time—to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?"
"You fainted?—You were ill on the spot?"
"No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away."
A slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for the vibration of some spiritual recoil.
"What do you say to that?"
"I don't say anything."
"My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."
"They might have known," she said.
"They might have known what?"
"That you were different."
"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that I was a man—that I wasn't different after all."
"Well—you proved it."
"If I did my father never knew it."
"And your mother?" she said softly.
"I believe she knew."
"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"
"I never let her know, really, how different I was."
"You kept it to yourself?"
"It was the only way to keep it."
"Your genius?"
"If you choose to call it that."
"The thing," she said, "that made you different."
"You see," he said, "they didn't understand that that was where I was most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."
"You couldn't lose it."
"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in Bombay; and it went again."
She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of something more than it.
"You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and there's the terror—the most awful terror there is—of never getting back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of it without seeing it—seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else matters. Nothing else is."
She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.
"And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the other part remains where it got to."
"I see."
Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit surer than she was now.
No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself that he put to the test.
And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them, he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his soul and its exultant, processional vision of God.
"The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'm still afraid of the sight of blood."
"So I suppose I shall go on being afraid."
"Probably. But you won't turn tail any more than I should. You never ran away."
"There are worse things than running away. All the things that go on inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries. Things that come of never being alone. I have to sit up at night to be alone."
"My child, you mustn't. It's simply criminal."
"If I didn't," she said, "I should never get it in."
He understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift.
"I know it's criminal, with Papa depending on me, and yet I do it. Sometimes I'm up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own things; things, I mean, that won't sell, just to gratify my vanity in having done them."
"To satisfy your instinct for perfection. God made you an artist."
She sighed. "He's made me so many things besides. That's where the misery comes in."
"And a precious poor artist you'd be if he hadn't, and if the misery didn't come in."
She shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "Misery's all very well for the big, tragic people like Nina, who can make something out of it. Why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?"
"And if you're being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection that you're not aware of——?"
She shook her head again.
"I'm certainly not aware of it. Still, I can understand that. I mean I can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and trying things too big for it and their not coming off. But—look at Papa."
She held her hands out helplessly. The gesture smote his heart.
"If Papa had been one of its experiments—but he wasn't. It had got him all right at first. You've no idea how nice Papa was. You've only to look at him now to see how nice he is. But he was clever. Not very clever," (she wasn't going to claim too much for him), "but just clever enough. He used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. And he can't say them any more."
She paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went.
"And to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you'd made as fine as it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away—it doesn't look like an Instinct for Perfection, does it?"
"The finest bits aren't thrown away. It's what you still have with you, what you see, that's being thrown away—broken up by some impatient, impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its instinct for perfection. Do you see?"
"I see that you're trying to make me happier about Papa. It's awfully nice of you."
"I'm trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body. To you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. To me it is simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual energies. We're nowhere near understanding the real function of disease. It probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies. It's a sign of their approaching freedom. Especially those diseases which are most like death—the horrible diseases that tear down the body from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and leaving the viscera exuberant with life. And if you knew the mystery of the building up—why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful than you can conceive. But, if you really knew, that would be nothing to the secret—the mystery—the romance of dissolution."
His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the darkness that wrapped her.
"If you could see through it you'd understand, you'd see that this body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium, transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside what we give."
Laura looked grave. "I can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that I understand."
"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts, infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable forces, and that we—we—unmake the work of millions of æons in a moment, that we charge it with our will, our instincts, our memories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ of us—so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when they scatter, is the seed of our universe, flung heaven knows where."
For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura's eyes. "Do you know," she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and I can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to know how you know about it."
A change passed over his face. It became suddenly still and incommunicable.
"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad."
"What won't I tell you?"
"What's become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"
"I've been trying to tell you. I've been trying to make you see."
"I can only see that they've gone."
"And I can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely than ever. Too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them."
"Ah——"
"And I should say the same of a still-born baby that I had never seen alive, or of a lunatic whom I had not once seen sane."
"How do you know?" she reiterated.
"I can't tell you."
"You can't tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when I look at it."
"I can't tell you anything," he said gently. "I can only talk to you like an intoxicated medical student, and it's time for me to go."
She did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent.
It was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech.
"I'm glad I've seen you," she said at last.
He ignored the valediction of her tone.
"And when am I to see you again?" he said.
This time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause.
He asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted his preposterous pretext? Up till now she had appeared to be taking him and his pretext simply, as they came. Her silence, her pause had had no expectation in it. It evidently had not occurred to her that the deep could open up. That was how she had struck him, more and more, as never looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look forward. She regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that might turn upon her at any time and hurt her.
He rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. He turned.
"Well," he said, "have you seen enough of me?"
They were outside the threshold now, and she stood there, one arm holding her lamp, the other stretched across the doorway, as if she would keep him from ever entering again.
"Or," said he, "may I come again? Soon?"
"Do," she said, "and bring Nina with you."
She set her lamp on the floor at the stairhead, and backed, backed from him into the darkness of the room.
XXVI
It was the twenty-seventh of June, Laura's birthday. Tanqueray had proposed that they should celebrate it by a day on Wendover Hill. For the Kiddy's increasing pallor cried piteously for the open air.
Nina was to bring Owen Prothero; and Jane, in Prothero's interests, was to bring Brodrick; and Tanqueray, Laura insisted, was to bring his wife.
Rose had counted the days, the very hours before Laura's birthday. She had plenty to do for once on the morning of the twenty-seventh, making rock cakes and cutting sandwiches and packing them beautifully in a basket. Over-night she had washed and ironed the white blouse she was to wear. The white blouse lay on her bed, wonderful as a thing seen in a happy dream. Rose could hardly permit herself to believe that the dream would come true, and that Tanqueray would really take her.
It all depended on whether Laura could get off. Getting Laura off was the difficulty they encountered every time she had a birthday.
So uncertain was the event that Nina and Prothero called at the house in Albert Street before going on to the station. They found Tanqueray, and Rose in her white blouse, waiting outside on the pavement. They heard that Jane Holland was in there with Laura, bringing pressure to bear on the obstinate Kiddy who was bent on the renunciation of her day.
Jane's voice on the landing called to them to come up-stairs. Without them it was impossible, she said, to get Laura off.
The whole house was helping, in a passionate publicity; for every one in it loved Laura. Mr. Baxter, the landlord, was on the staircase, bringing Laura's boots. The maid of all work was leaning out of the window on the landing, brushing Laura's skirt. A tall girl was standing by the table in the sitting-room. She had a lean, hectic face, and prominent blue eyes under masses of light hair. She was Addy Ranger, the type-writer on the ground-floor, who had come up from her typewriting to see what she could do. She was sewing buttons on Laura's blouse while Jane brought pressure upon Laura. "Of course you're going," Jane was saying. "It's not as if you had a birthday every day."
For Laura still sat at her writing-table, labouring over a paragraph, white lipped and heavy eyed. Shuffling all over the room and round about her was Mr. Gunning. He was pouring out the trouble that had oppressed him for the last four years.
"She won't stop scribbling. It's scribble—scribble—scribble all day long. If I didn't lie awake to stop her she'd be at it all night. I've caught her—in her nightgown. She'll get out of her bed to do it."
"Papa, dear, you know Miss Lempriere and Mr. Prothero?"
His mind adjusted itself instantly to its vision of them. He bowed to each. He was the soul of courtesy and hospitality, and they were his guests; they had come to luncheon.
"Lolly, my dear, have you ordered luncheon?—You must tell Mrs. Baxter to give us a salmon mayonnaise, and a salad and lamb cutlets in aspic. And, Lolly! Tell her to put a bottle of champagne in ice."
For in his blessed state, among the fragments of old splendours that still clung to him, Mr. Gunning had preserved indestructibly his sense of power to offer his friends a bottle of champagne on a suitable occasion, and every occasion now ranked with him as suitable.
"Yes, darling," said Laura, and dashed down a line of her paragraph.
He shuffled feebly toward the door. "I have to see to everything myself," he said. "That child there has no more idea how to order a luncheon than the cat. There should be," he reverted, "lamb cutlets in aspic. I must see to it myself."
He wandered out of the room and in again, driven, by his dream.
"Oh," cried Laura, "somebody else must have my birthday. I can't have it. I must sit tight and finish my paragraph."
"You'll spoil it if you do," said Prothero.
"Besides spoiling everybody's day," said Jane judiciously.
That brought Laura round. She reflected that, if she sat tight from ten that evening till two in the morning, she could save their day.
But first she had to finish her paragraph and then to hide it and lock it up. Then she put the pens and ink on a high shelf out of Mr. Gunning's reach. He had been known to make away with the materials of Lolly's detestable occupation when he got the chance. He attributed to it that mysterious, irritating semblance of poverty in which they moved.
He smiled at her, a happy, innocent smile.
"That's right, that's right. Put it away, my dear, put it away."
"Yes, Papa," said Laura. She took the blouse from Addy Ranger, and she and Jane Holland disappeared with it into a small inner room. From the voices that came to him Prothero gathered that Jane Holland was "buttoning her up the back."
"Don't say," cried Laura, "that it won't meet!"
"Meet? It'll go twice round you. You don't eat enough."
Silence.
"It's no good," he heard Jane Holland say, "not eating. I've tried both."
"I," said Laura in a voice that penetrated, "over-eat. Habitually."
"I must go," said Mr. Gunning, "and find my hat and stick." His idea now was that Laura was going to take him for a walk.
Addy Ranger began to talk to Prothero. He liked Addy. She had an amusing face with a long nose and wide lips, restless and cynical. She confided to him the trouble of her life, the eternal difficulty of finding anywhere a permanent job. Addy's dream was permanence.
Then they talked of Laura.
"Do you know what her dream is?" said Addy. "To be able to afford wine, and chicken, and game and things—for him."
"When you think of her work!" said Nina. "It's charming; it's finished, to a point. How on earth does she do it?"
"She sits up half the night to do it," said Prothero; "when he isn't there."
"And it's killing her," said Addy, who had her back to the door.
Mr. Gunning had come in again and he heard her. He gazed at them with a vague sweetness, not understanding what he heard.
Then Laura ran in among them, in a tremendous hurry. She wasn't ready yet. It was a maddening, protracted agony, getting Laura off. She had forgotten to lock the cupboard where the whisky was (a shilling's worth in a medicine bottle); and poor Papa might find it. Since he had had his sunstroke you couldn't trust him with anything, not even with a jam-pot. Then Addy, at Laura's request, rushed out of the room to find Laura's hat and her handkerchief and her gloves—not the ones with the holes in them. And then Laura looked at her hands.
"Oh," she cried, "look at my poor hands. I can't go like that. I hate an inky woman."
And she dashed out to wash the ink off.
And then the gloves found by Addy had all holes in them. And at that Laura stamped her foot and said, "Damn!"
The odds against Laura's getting off were frightful.
But she was putting on her hat. She was really ready just as Tanqueray's voice was heard calling on the stairs, "You must hurry up if you want to catch that train." And now they had to deal seriously with Mr. Gunning, who stood expectant, holding his hat and stick.
"Good-bye, Papa dear," said she.
"Am I not to come, too?" said Mr. Gunning.
"Not to-day, dear."
She was kissing him while Jane and Nina waited in the open doorway. Their eyes signed to her to be brave and follow them. But Laura lingered.
Prothero looked at Laura, and Mr. Gunning looked at Prothero. His terrible idea had come back to him at the sight of the young man, risen, and standing beside Laura for departure.
"Are you going to take my little girl away from me?" he said.
"Poor little Papa, of course he isn't. I'm going with Jane, and Nina. You know Nina?"
"And who," he cried, "is going to take me for my walk?"
He had her there. She wavered.
"Addy's coming in to give you your tea. You like Addy." (He bowed to Miss Ranger with a supreme courtesy.) "And I'll be back in time to see you in your little bed."
She ran off. Addy Ranger took Mr. Gunning very tenderly by the arm and led him to the stairs to see her go.
Outside on the pavement Tanqueray gave way to irritation.
"If," said he, "it would only please Heaven to take that old gentleman to itself."
"It won't," said Nina.
"How she would hate us if she heard us," said Jane.
"There ought to be somebody to take care of 'im," said Rose, moved to compassion. "'E might go off in a fit any day. She can't be easy when 'e's left."
"He must be left," said Tanqueray with ferocity.
"Here she is," said Jane.
There she was; and there, too, was her family. For, at the sight of Laura running down-stairs with Prothero after her, Mr. Gunning broke loose from Addy's arm and followed her, perilously followed her. Addy was only just in time to draw him back from the hall door as Prothero closed it.
And then little Laura, outside, heard a cry as of a thing trapped, and betrayed, and utterly abandoned.
"I can't go," she cried. "He thinks I'm leaving him—that I'm never coming back. He always thinks it."
"You know," said Nina, "he never thinks anything for more than five minutes."
"I know—but——"
Nina caught her by the shoulder. "You stupid Kiddy, you must forget him when he isn't there."
"But he is there," said Laura. "I can't leave him."
Between her eyes and Prothero's there passed a look of eternal patience and despair. Rose saw it. She saw how it was with them, and she saw what she could do. She turned back to the door.
"You go," she said. "I'll stay with him."
From the set of her little chin you saw that protest and argument were useless.
"I can take care of him," she said. "I know how."
And as she said it there came into her face a soft flame of joy. For Tanqueray was looking at her, and smiling as he used to smile in the days when he adored her. He was thinking in this moment how adorable she was.
"You may as well let her," he said. "She isn't happy if she can't take care of somebody."
And, as they wondered at her, the door opened and closed again on Rose and her white blouse.
XXVII
They found Brodrick waiting for them at the station. Imperturbable, on the platform, he seemed to be holding in leash the Wendover train whose engines were throbbing for flight.
Prothero suffered, painfully, the inevitable introduction. Tanqueray had told him that if he still wanted work on the papers Brodrick was his man. Brodrick had an idea. On the long hill-road going up from Wendover station Prothero, at Tanqueray's suggestion, tried to make himself as civil as possible to Miss Holland.
Tentatively and with infinite precautions Jane laid before him Brodrick's idea. The War Correspondent of the "Morning Telegraph" was coming home invalided from Manchuria. She understood that his place would be offered to Mr. Prothero. Would he care to take it?
He did not answer.
She merely laid the idea before him to look at. He must weigh, she said, the dangers and the risks. From the expression of his face she gathered that these were the last things he would weigh.
And yet he hesitated. She looked at him. His eyes were following the movements of Laura Gunning where, well in front of them, the marvellous Kiddy, in the first wildness of her release from paragraphs, darted and plunged and leaped into the hedges.
Jane allowed some moments to lapse before she spoke again. The war, she said, would not last for ever; and if he took this berth, it would lead almost certainly to a regular job on the "Telegraph" at home.
He saw all that, he said, and he was profoundly grateful. His eyes, as they turned to her, showed for a moment a film of tears. Then they wandered from her.
He asked if he might think it over and let her know.
"When," she said, "can you let me know?"
"I think," he said, "probably, before the end of the day."
The day was drawing to its end when the group drifted and divided. Brodrick, still imperturbable, took possession of Jane, and Prothero, with his long swinging stride, set off in pursuit of the darting Laura.
Tanqueray, thus left behind with Nina, watched him as he went.
"He's off, Nina. Bolted." His eyes smiled at her, suave, deprecating, delighted eyes and recklessly observant.
"So has Jane," said Nina, with her dangerous irony.
Apart from them and from their irony, Prothero was at last alone with Laura on the top of Wendover Hill. She had ceased to dart and to plunge.
He found for her a hidden place on the green slope, under a tree, and there he stretched himself at her side.
"Do you know," he said, "this is the first time I've seen you out of doors."
"So it is," said she in a strange, even voice.
She drew off her gloves and held out the palms of her hands as if she were bathing them in the pure air. Her face was turned from him and lifted; her nostrils widened; her lips parted; her small breasts heaved; she drank the air like water. To his eyes she was the white image of mortal thirst.
"Is it absolutely necessary for you to live in Camden Town?" he said.
She sat up very straight and stared steadily in front of her, as if she faced, unafraid, the invincible necessity.
"It is. Absolutely." She explained that Baxter, her landlord, had been an old servant of Papa's, and that the important thing was to be with people who would be nice to him and not mind, she said, his little ways.
He sighed.
"Do you know what I should do with you if I could have my way? I should turn you into a green garden and keep you there from nine in the morning till nine at night. I should make you walk a mile with me twice a day—not too fast. All the rest of the time you should lie on a couch on a lawn, with a great rose-bush at your head and a bed of violets at your feet. I should bring you something nice to eat every two hours."
"And how much work do you suppose I should get through?"
"Work? You wouldn't do any work for a year at least—if I had my way."
"It's a beautiful dream," said she. She closed her eyes, but whether to shut the dream out or to keep it in he could not say.
"I don't want," she said presently, "to lie on a couch in a garden with roses at my head and violets at my feet, as if I were dead. You don't know how tre—mend—ously alive I am."
"I know," he said, "how tremendously alive you'd be if I had my way—if you were happy."
She was still sitting up, nursing her knees, and staring straight in front of her at nothing.
"You don't know what it's like," she said; "the unbearable pathos of Papa."
"It's your pathos that's unbearable."
"Oh don't! Don't be nice to me. I shall hate you if you're nice to me." She paused, staring. "I was unkind to him yesterday. I see how pathetic he is, and yet I'm unkind. I snap like a little devil. You don't know what a devil, what a detestable little devil I can be."
She turned to him, sparing herself no pain in her confession.
"I was cruel to him. It's horrible, like being cruel to a child." The horror of it was in her stare.
"It's your nerves," he said; "it's because you're always frightened." He seemed to meditate before he spoke again. "How are you going on?"
"You see how."
"I do indeed. It's unbearable to think of your having to endure these things. And I have to stand by and see you at the end of your tether, hurt and frightened, and to know that I can do nothing for you. If I could have my way you would never be hurt or frightened any more."
As he spoke something gave way in her. It felt like a sudden weakening and collapse of her will, drawing her heart with it.
"But," he went on, "as I can't have my way, the next best thing is—to stand by you."
She struggled as against physical faintness, struggled successfully.
"Since I can't take you out of it," he said, "I shall come and live in Camden Town too."
"You couldn't live in Camden Town."
"I can live anywhere I choose. I shouldn't see Camden Town."
"You couldn't," she insisted. "And if you could I wouldn't let you."
"Why not?"
"Because—it wouldn't do."
He smiled.
"It would be all right. I should get a room near you and look after your father."
"It wouldn't do," she said again. "I couldn't let you."
"I can do anything I choose. Your little hands can't stop me."
She looked at him gravely. "Why do you choose it?"
"Because I can choose nothing else."
"Ah, why are you so good to me?"
"Because"—he mocked her absurd intonation.
"Don't tell me. It's because you are good. You can't help it."
"No; I can't help it."
"But—" she objected, "I'm so horrid. I don't believe in God and I say damn when I'm angry."
"I heard you."
"You said yourself I wanted violets to sweeten me and hammers to soften me—you think I'm so bitter and so hard."
"You know what I think of you. And you know," he said, "that I love you."
"You mustn't," she whispered. "It's no good."
He seemed not to have heard her. "And some day," he said, "I shall marry you. I'd marry you to-morrow if I'd enough money to buy a hat with."
"It's no use loving me. You can't marry me."
"I know I can't. But it makes no difference."
"No difference?"
"Not to me."
"If you could," she said, "I wouldn't let you. It would only be one misery more."
"How do you know what it would be?"
"I won't even let you love me. That's misery too."
"You don't know what it is."
"I do know, and I don't want any more of it. I've been hurt with it."
With a low cry of pity and pain he took her in his arms and held her to him.
She writhed and struggled in his clasp. "Don't," she cried, "don't touch me. Let me alone. I can't bear it."
He turned her face to his to find the truth in her eyes. "And yet," he said, "you love me."
"No, no. It's no use," she reiterated; "it's no use. I won't have it. I won't let you love me."
"You can't stop me."
"I can stop you torturing me!"
She was freed from his arms now. She sat up. Her small face was sullen and defiant in its expression of indomitable will.
"Of course," he said, "you can stop me touching you. But it makes no difference. I shall go on caring for you. It's no use struggling and crying against that."
"I shall go on struggling."
"Go on as long as you like. It doesn't matter. I can wait."
She rose. "Come," she said. "It's time to be going back."
He obeyed her. When they reached the rise on the station road they turned and waited for the others to come up with them. They looked back. Their hill was on their left, to their right was the great plain, grey with mist. They stood silent, oppressed by their sense of a sad and sudden beauty. Then with the others they swung down the road to the station.
Before the end of the day Brodrick heard that his offer was accepted.
XXVIII
It was Tanqueray who took Laura home that night. Prothero parted from her at the station and walked southwards with Nina Lempriere.
"Why didn't you go with her?" she said.
"I couldn't have let you walk home by yourself."
"As if I wasn't always by myself."
Her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with its involuntary surrender.
He edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the passers by. But the pace he set was terrific.
"You've no idea, Owen, how odd you look careering through the streets."
"Not odder than you, do I? You ought to be swinging up a mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. That's how I used to see you."
"Do you remember?"
"I remember the first time I ever saw you, fifteen years ago. I'd gone up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. I was beating my way up through the undergrowth when I came on you. You were above me, hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper ledge down on to the track. Your hair—you had lots of hair, all tawny—some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over your eyes. They gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there were green lights in them. You dropped at my feet and dashed down the mountain. I had found my wild cat."
"I remember. You frightened me. Your eyes were so queer."
"Not queerer than yours, Nina. Yours had all the enchantment and all the terror of the mountains in them."
"And yours—yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now."
"That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams."
"Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press on you and hurt you?"
They were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses, houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night.
"Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there—you and I could go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would simply disappear."
They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion.
"Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she.
"I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back."
"Isn't it—horrible?"
"No," he said. "It isn't."
They plunged down a steep side-street off the Strand, and turned on to their terrace. He let her in with his latchkey and followed her up-stairs. He stopped at her landing.
"May I come in?" he said. "Or is it too late?"
"It isn't late at all," said she. And he followed her into the room.
He did not see the seat she offered him, but stood leaning his shoulders against the chimney-piece. She knew that he had something to say to her that must be said instantly or not at all. And yet he kept silence. Whatever it was that he had to say it was not an easy thing.
"You'd like some coffee?" she said curtly, by way of breaking his dumb and dangerous mood.
He roused himself almost irritably.
"Thanks, no. Don't bother about it."
She left him and went into the inner room to make it. She was afraid of him; afraid of what she might have to hear. She had the sense of things approaching, of separation, of the snapping of the tense thread of time that bound them for her moment. It was as if she could spin it out by interposing between the moment and its end a series of insignificant acts.
Through the open doors she saw him as he turned and wandered to the bookcase and stood there, apparently absorbed. You would have said that he had come in to look for a book, and that when he had found what he wanted he would go. She saw him take her book, "Tales of the Marches," from its shelf and open it.
She became aware of this as she was about to lift the kettle from the gas-ring burning on the hearth. Her thin sleeve swept the ring. She was stooping, but her face was still raised; her eyes were fixed on Prothero, held by what they saw. The small blue jets of the ring flickered and ran together and soared as her sleeve caught them. Nina made no sound. Prothero turned and saw her standing there by the hearth, motionless, her right arm wrapped in flame.
He leaped to her, and held her tight with her arm against his breast, and beat out the fire with his hands. He dressed the burn and bandaged it with cool, professional dexterity, trembling a little, taking pain from her pain.
"Why didn't you call out?" he said.
"I didn't want you to know."
"You'd have been burnt sooner?"
He had slung her arm in a scarf; and, as he tied the knot on her shoulder, his face was brought close to hers. She turned her head and her eyes met his.
"I'd have let my whole body burn," she whispered, "sooner than hurt—your hands."
His hands dropped from her shoulder. He thrust them into his pockets out of her sight.
She followed him into the outer room, struggling against her sense of his recoil.
"If you had a body like mine," she said, "you'd be glad to get rid of it on any terms." She wondered if he saw through her pitiable attempt to call back the words that had flung themselves upon him.
"There's nothing wrong with your body," he answered coldly.
"No, Owen, nothing; except that I'm tired of it."
"The tiredness will pass. Is that burn hurting you?"
"Not yet. I don't mind it."
He stooped and picked up the book he had dropped in his rush to her. She saw now that he looked at it as a man looks at the thing he loves, and that his hands as they touched it shook with a nervous tremor.
She came and stood by him, without speaking, and he turned and faced her.
"Nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? If you hadn't written it, I should never have been here."
"That's why, then, isn't it?"
"I suppose so. You had to write it, and I had to come."
"Yes, Owen," she said gently.
"You brought me here," he said.
"I can't understand it."
"Can't understand what?"
"The fascination I had for you."
He closed the book and laid it down.
"You were my youth, Nina."
He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that forbade her to touch him.
"My youth was dumb. It couldn't make itself immortal. You did that for it."
"But the people of those tales are not a bit like you."
"No. They are me. They are what I was. Your people are not people, they are not characters, they are incarnate passions."
"So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony.
"You don't know me. You don't remember me. But I know and remember you. You asked me once how I knew. That's how. I've been where you were."
He paused.
"If my youth were here, Nina, it would be at your feet. As it is, it rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like an unhappy ghost."
It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him.
Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood.
She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say.
He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him.
She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow. Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat.
He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to between them.
She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart.
At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all passion of flesh and blood.
In the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated; eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable, not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing was accomplished.
Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it.
"This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go."
She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself; behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.
She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual appeal. Her passion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration, sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any one of them would kill her.
She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality of passion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all.
Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. And this terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she preferred a brutality like Tanqueray's which would have made short work of her.
As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the throat of the beast.
She was now at the end of Owen's last day. He had come and gone. She had endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised her courage.
"It'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. But when it hurts most it's healing."
That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back, above hers.
Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street. The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion.
The beast was falling now upon Laura's image and destroying it. It hated Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast, though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray's devilry. It had pursued Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen's feet and under the pity of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura's little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed, unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh.
The sound of Owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging, rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow, lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her, like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering.
It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble.
She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen's door, and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room.
His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut her in.
"What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarrassment or surprise. It was as if he had foreseen that she would do this.
"You're ill," he said. "Go down-stairs; I'll come to you."
"I'm not ill and I'm not mad. Please shut that door."
He shut it.
"Won't you sit down?"
She smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself. Prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour.
Her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of the room. On his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of surgical instruments lay in a litter of manuscripts. A drawer, pulled from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at her feet. With a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few new things bought yesterday for his journey. An overcoat lay on the bed beside her. He had not had anything like that before. She put out her hand and felt the stuff.
"It ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly.
He rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her sobbing ceased suddenly. She looked up at him and was still, under his touch.
"You don't want to go," she said. "Why are you going?"
"Because I have to. It's the only thing, you see, there is to do."
"If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have to. If you die out there it will be my doing."
"Won't it be the proprietors of the 'Morning Telegraph' who'll be responsible—if I die?"
"I set them on to you."
"Did you? I rather hoped they'd pitched on me because I was the best man for the job."
"The best man—to die?"
"War correspondents don't die. At least they don't set out with that intention."
"You will die," she said slowly; "because everything I care for does."
"Why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?"
"I care—because they die."
Her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality's desire. Having uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done.
"Why shouldn't I tell you that I care for you? What does it matter? That ends it."
She rose.
"I know," she said, "I've broken all the rules. A woman shouldn't come and tell a man she cares for him."
"Why not?" he said simply.
"I tell you, I don't know why not. I only know that I'm so much more like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. Why shouldn't I tell you? You know it—as God knows it."
"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there."
"Owen—shall I ever be where you are now?"
"I had to die first. I told you my youth was dead. That, Nina, was what you cared for."
It was not. Yet she yearned for it—his youth that was made to love her, his youth that returning, a dim ghost, followed her and loved her still.
"No," she said, "it isn't only that."
She paused in her going and knelt down by his half-packed portmanteau. With her free left hand she lifted up, folded and laid smooth the new suit he had flung in and crushed. Her back was now towards him and the door he was about to open.
"Owen," she said, "since I'm breaking all the rules, why can't I go out, too, and look after you?"
He shook his head. "It's not the place for women," he said.
"Women? Haven't I told you that I'm like a man? I'm like you, Owen, if it comes to that."
He smiled. "If you were like me, you'd stay at home."
"What should I stay for?"
"To look after Laura Gunning. That's what you'd want to do, if you were—I. And," he said quietly, "it's what you're going to do."
She rose to her feet and faced him, defying the will that he laid on her.
