"George," she said ... "I love you for defending him."
"Love me for something else. He doesn't need defending."
"Not he! But all the same I love you."
It was as if she had drawn aside a fold of her pretty garment and shown him, where the scar had been, a jewel, a pearl with fire in the white of it.
LVII
They were right. Worse things were reserved for Prothero than had happened to him yet. Even Caro Bickersteth had turned. Caro had done her best to appreciate competently this creator adored by creators. Caro, nourished on her "Critique of Pure Reason," was trying hard to hold the balance of justice in the "Morning Telegraph"; and according to Caro there was a limit. She had edited Shelley and she knew. She was frankly, as she said, unable to follow Mr. Prothero in his latest flight. There was a limit even to the imagination of the mystic, and to the poet's vision of the Transcendent. There were, Caro said, regions of ether too subtle to sustain even so imponderable a poet as Mr. Prothero. So there wasn't much chance, Tanqueray remarked, of their sustaining Caro.
But the weight of Caro's utterances increased, as they circulated, formidably, among the right people. All the little men on papers declared that there was a limit, and that Prothero had passed it.
It was barely a year since the publication of his last volume, and they were annoyed with Prothero for daring to show his face again so soon in the absence of encouragement. It looked as if he didn't care whether they encouraged him or not. Such an attitude in a person standing on his trial amounted to contempt of court. When his case came up for judgment in the papers, the jury were reminded that the question before them was whether Mr. Prothero, in issuing a volume, at three and six net, with the title of "Transparences," and the sub-title of "Poems," was or was not seeking to obtain money under false pretenses. And judgment in Prothero's case was given thus: Any writer who wilfully and deliberately takes for his subject a heap of theoretical, transcendental stuff, stuff that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet. He stands condemned in the interests of Reality.
Laura knew it didn't matter what they said about him, but that last touch kindled her to flame. It even drew fire from Owen.
"If I gave them the reality they want," he cried; "if I brought them the dead body of God with the grave-clothes and worms about it, they'd call that poetry. I bring them the living body of God rejoicing in life, and they howl at me. What their own poets, their Wordsworths and Tennysons and Brownings showed them in fits and flashes, I show them in one continuous ecstasy, and they can't stand it. They might complain, the beggars, if I'd given them a dramatic trilogy or an epic. But when I've let them off, Laura, with a few songs!"
They were alone in his big room. Nina and Tanqueray and Jane had come and praised him, and Laura had been very entertaining over Prothero's reviews. But, when they had gone, she came and crouched on the floor beside him, as her way was, and leaned her face against his hand. Prothero, with the hand that was not engaged with Laura, turned over the pages of his poems. He was counting them, to prove the slenderness of his offence.
"Listen to this," he said. "They can't say it's not a song."
He read and she listened, while her hand clutched his, as if she held him against the onslaught of the world.
Her grip slackened as she surrendered to his voice. She lay back, as it were, and was carried on the strong wave of the rhythm. It was the questing song of the soul, the huntress, on the heavenly track; the song of the soul, the fowler, who draws after her the streaming worlds, as a net, to snare the wings of God. It was the song of her outcasting, of the fall from heaven that came of the too great rapture of the soul, of her wantoning in the joy of the supernal, who forgot God in possessing him. It was the song of birth, of the soul's plunging into darkness and fire, of the weaving round her of the fleshy veils, the veils of separation, the veils of illusion; the song of her withdrawal into her dim house, of her binding and scourging, and of her ceaseless breaking on the wheel of time, till she renews her passion and the desire of her return. It was the song of the angels of mortal life, sounding its secrets; angels of terror and pain, carding the mortal stuff, spinning it out, finer and yet more fine, till every nerve becomes vibrant, a singing lyre of God; angels of the passions and the agonies, moving in the blood, ministers of the flame that subtilizes flesh to a transparent vehicle of God; strong angels of disease and dissolution, undermining, pulling down the house of pain.
He paused and she raised her head.
"Owen—that's what you once tried to make me see. Do you remember?"
"Yes, and you said that I was intoxicated and that it was all very dim and disagreeable and sad."
"I didn't understand it then," she said.
"You don't understand it now. You feel it."
"Why didn't I feel it then? When you said it?"
"I didn't say it. How could I? There's no other way of saying it but this. It isn't a theory or a creed; if it were it could be stated in a thousand different ways. It's the supreme personal experience, and this is the only form in which it could possibly be conveyed. These words were brought together from all eternity to say this thing."
"I'm not sure that I'm convinced of the truth of it, even now. I only feel the passion of it. It's the passion of it, Owen, that'll make it live."
"The truth and the passion of it are the same thing," he said.
He went on chanting. The music gathered and rose and broke over her in the last verse, in the song of consummation, of the soul's passion, jubilant, transcendent, where, of the veils of earth and heaven, the veils of separation and illusion, she weaves the veil of the last bridal, the fine veil of immortality.
In the silence Laura stirred at his side. She had possessed herself of his hand again and held it firmly, as if she were afraid that he might be taken from her in his ecstasy.
She was thinking: He used that theme before, in the first poem of his I ever heard. He was mistaken. There was more than one way of saying the same thing. She reminded him of this earlier poem. Surely, she said, it was the same thing, the same vision, the same ecstasy, or, if he liked, the same experience?
He did not answer all at once; he seemed to be considering her objection, as if he owned that it might have weight.
No, he said presently, it was not the same thing. Each experience was solitary, unique, it had its own incommunicable quality. He rose and found the earlier poem, and brought it to her that she might see the difference.
She shook her head; but she had to own that the difference was immense. It was the difference (so she made it out) between a vision that you were sure of, and a vision of which you were not so sure. And—yes—it was more than that; it was as if his genius had suffered incarnation, and its flame were intenser for having passed through flesh and blood. It was the incorruptible spirit that cried aloud; but there was no shrill tenuity in its cry. The thrill it gave her was unlike the shock that she remembered receiving from the poem of his youth, the shiver they had all felt, as at the passing by of the supersensual. Her husband's genius commanded all the splendours, all the tumultuous energies of sense. His verse rose, and its wings shed the colours of flame, blue, purple, red, and gold that kindled into white; it dropped and ran, striking earth with untiring, impetuous feet, it slackened; and still it throbbed with the heat of a heart driving vehement blood. But, she insisted, it was the same vision. How could she forget it? Did he suppose that she had forgotten the moment, four years ago, when Tanqueray had read the poem to them, and it had flashed on her——?
"Oh yes," he said; "it flashed all right. It flashed on me. But it did no more. There was always the fear of losing it. The difference is that—now—there isn't any fear."
She said, "Ah, I remember how afraid you were."
"I was afraid," he said, "of you."
She rose and lifted her arms to him and laid her hand on his shoulders. He had to stoop to let her do it. So held, he couldn't hope to escape from her candid, searching eyes.
"You aren't afraid of me now? I haven't made it go? You haven't lost it through me?"
"You've made it stay."
"Have I? Have I done that for you?"
He drew in his breath with a sob of passion. "Ah—the things you do!"
"None of them matter except that," she said.
She left him with that, turning on the threshold to add, "Why bother, then, about the other stupid things?"
It was as if she had said to him that since he owed that to her, a debt so unique, so enormous that he could never dream of paying it back in one lifetime, wasn't it rather absurd and rather mean of him to make a fuss about the rest? How could he think of anything but that? Didn't the one stupendous obligation cover everything, and lay him, everlastingly abject, at her feet? The only graceful act left him was to kneel down and kiss her feet. And that was what, in spirit, he was always doing. As for her, she would consider herself paid if she saw the difference and knew that she had made it.
It was only now, in the hour of achievement, that, looking back and counting all his flashes and his failures, he realized the difference she had made. It had seemed to him once that he held his gift, his vision, on a fragile and uncertain tenure, that it could not be carried through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and difficulty. The thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears.
He now perceived that, from the beginning, the thing that had been most hostile, most dangerous to his vision was this fear. Time after time it had escaped him when he had hung on to it too hard, and time after time it had returned when he had let it go, to follow the thundering batteries of the world. He had not really lost it when he had left off clutching at it or had flung himself with it into the heart of the danger. He could not say that he had seen it in the reeking wards, and fields bloody with battle, or when his hands were at their swift and delicate work on the bodies of the wounded. But it had the trick of coming back to him in moments when he least looked for it. He saw now that its brief vanishings had been followed by brief and faint appearances, and that when it had left him longest it had returned to stay. The times of utter destitution were succeeded by perfect and continuous possession. He saw that nothing had been fatal to it except his fear.
He had tested it because of his fear. He had chosen his profession as the extreme test, because of his fear. He had given up his profession, again because of his fear, fear of success in it, fear of the world's way of rewarding heroism, the dreadful fear of promotion, of being caught and branded and tied down. He had thought that to be forced into a line, to be committed to medicine and surgery, was to burn the ships of God, to cut himself off for ever from his vision.
Looking back, he saw that his fear of the world had been nothing to his fear of women, of the half-spiritual, half-sensual snare. He had put away this fear, and stood the ultimate test. He had tied himself to a woman and bowed his neck for her to cling to. He would have judged this attitude perilous in the extreme, incompatible with vision, with seeing anything but two diminutive feet and the inches of earth they stood in. And it was only since he had done this dangerous thing and done it thoroughly, only since he had staked his soul to redeem his body, that his vision had become secure. It really stayed. He could turn from it, but it was always with him; he could hold and command it at his will.
She was right. If he could take that from her, if he was in for it to that extent, why did he bother about the other stupid things?
And yet he bothered. All that autumn he worked harder than ever at his journalism. He seemed to gather to himself all the jobs that were going on the "Morning Telegraph." He went the round of the theatres on first nights, reporting for the "Morning Telegraph" on plays that were beneath the notice of its official dramatic critic. He reviewed poetry and belles lettres for the "Morning Telegraph;" and he did a great deal of work for it down in Fleet Street with a paste-pot and a pair of scissors.
Prothero's genius had liberated itself for the time being in his last poem; it was detached from him; it wandered free, like a blessed spirit invisible, while Prothero's brain agonized and journalized as Laura said. There was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. He plunged from his heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take a pleasure in seeing how much he could pile on without extinguishing it.
In December he caught cold coming out of a theatre on a night of north wind and sleet, and he was laid up for three weeks with bronchitis.
And at night, that winter, when sounds of coughing came from the Consumption Hospital, they were answered through the open windows of the house with the iron gate. And Laura at Owen's side lay awake in her fear.
LVIII
There was one thing that Prothero, in his journalism, drew the line at. He would not, if they paid him more than they had ever paid him, more than they had ever dreamed of paying anybody, he would not review another poet's work. For some day, he said, Nicky will bring out a volume of his poems, and in that day he will infallibly turn to me. If, in that day, I can lay my hand upon my heart and swear that I never review poetry, that I never have reviewed it and never shall, I can look Nicky in his innocent face with a clean soul.
But when Nicky actually did it (in the spring of nineteen-nine) Prothero applied to Brodrick for a holiday. He wanted badly to get out of town. He could not—when it came to the agonizing point—he could not face Nicky.
At least that was the account of the matter which Tanqueray gave to Brodrick when the question of Prothero's impossibility came up again at Moor Grange. Brodrick was indignant at Prothero's wanting a holiday, and a month's holiday. It was preposterous. But Jane had implored him to let him have it.
Jinny would give a good deal, Tanqueray imagined, to get out of town too. It was more terrible for her to face Nicky than for any of them. Tanqueray himself was hiding from him at that moment in Brodrick's study. But Jinny, with that superb and incomprehensible courage that women have, was facing him down there in the drawing-room.
It was in the drawing-room, later on in the afternoon, that Brodrick found his wife, shrunk into a corner of the sofa and mopping her face with a pocket-handkerchief. Tanqueray had one knee on the sofa and one arm flung tenderly round Jinny's shoulder. He met, smiling, the husband's standstill of imperturbable inquiry.
"It's all right, Brodrick," he said. "I've revived her. I've been talking to her like a father."
He stood looking down at her, and commented—
"Nicky brought a book of poems out and Jinny cried."
"It was th—th—the last straw," sobbed Jinny.
Brodrick left them together, just to show how imperturbable he was.
"George," she said, "it was horrible. Poor Nicky stood there where you are, waiting for me to say things. And I couldn't, I couldn't, and he saw it. He saw it and turned white——"
"He is white," said Tanqueray.
"He turned whiter. And he burst out into a dreadful perspiration. And then—oh, don't laugh—it was so awful—he took my hand and wrung it, and walked out of the room, very dignified and stiff."
"My dear child, he only thought you were speechless with emotion."
But Jane was putting on her hat and coat which lay beside her.
"Let's get out somewhere," she said, "anywhere away from this intolerable scene. Let's tear over the Heath."
She tore and he followed. Gertrude saw them go.
She turned midway between Putney and Wimbledon. "Oh, how my heart aches for that poor lamb."
"It needn't. The poor lamb's heart doesn't ache for itself."
"It does. I stabbed it."
"Not you!"
"But, George—they were dedicated to me. Could my cup of agony be fuller?"
"I admit it's full."
"And how about Nicky's?"
"Look here, Jinny. If you or I or Prothero had written those poems we should be drinking cups of agony. But there is no cup of agony for Nicky. He believes that those poems are immortal, and that none of us can rob them of their immortality."
"But if he's slaughtered—and he will be—if they fall on him and tear him limb from limb, poor innocent lamb!"
"He isn't innocent, your lamb. He deserves it. So he won't get it. It's only poets like Prothero who are torn limb from limb."
"I don't know. There are people who'd stick a knife into him as soon as look at him."
"If there are he'll be happy. He'll believe that there's a plot against him to write him down. He'll believe that he's Keats. He'll believe anything. You needn't be sorry for him. If only you or I had Nicky's hope of immortality—if we only had the joy he has even now, in the horrible act of creation. Why, he's never tired. He can go on for ever without turning a hair, whereas look at our hair after a morning's work. Think what it must be to feel that you never can be uninspired, never to have a doubt or a shadowy misgiving. Neither you nor I nor Prothero will ever know a hundredth part of the rapture Nicky knows. We get it for five minutes, an hour, perhaps, and all the rest is simply hard, heavy, heartbreaking, grinding labour."
Their wild pace slackened.
"It's a dog's life, yours and mine, Jinny. Upon my soul, for mere sensation, if I could choose I'd rather be Nicky."
He paused.
"And then—when you think of his supreme illusion——"
"Has he another?"
"You know he has. If all of us could believe that when the woman we love refuses us she only does it because of her career——"
"If he did believe that——"
"Believe it? He believes now that she didn't even refuse him. He thinks he renounced her—for the sake of her career. It's quite possible he thinks she loves him; and really, considering her absurd behaviour——"
"Oh, I don't mind," she moaned, "he can believe anything he likes if it makes him happier."
"He is happy," said George tempestuously. "If I were to be born again, I'd pray to the high gods, the cruel gods, Jinny, to make me mad—like Nicky—to give me the gift of indestructible illusion. Then, perhaps, I might know what it was to live."
She had seen him once, and only once, in this mood, the night he had dined with her in Kensington Square six weeks before he married Rose.
"But you and I have been faithful to reality—true, as they say, to life. If the idiots who fling that phrase about only knew what it meant! You've been more faithful than I. You've taken such awful risks. You fling your heart down, Jinny, every time."
"Do you never take risks? Do you never fling your heart down?"
He looked at her. "Not your way. Not unless I know that I'll get what I want."
"And haven't you got it?"
"I've got most of it, but not all—yet."
His tone might or might not imply that getting it was only a question of time.
"I say, where are you going?"
She was heading rapidly for Augustus Road. She wanted to get away from George.
"Not there," he protested, perceiving her intention.
"I must."
He followed her down the long road where the trees drooped darkly, and he stood with her by the gate.
"How long will you be?" he said.
"I can't say. Half-an-hour—three-quarters—ever so long."
He waited for an hour, walking up and down, up and down the long road under the trees. She reappeared as he was turning at the far end of it. He had to run to overtake her.
Her face had on it the agony of unborn tears.
"What is it, Jinny?" he said.
"Mabel Brodrick."
She hardly saw his gesture of exasperation.
"Oh, George, she suffers. It's terrible. There's to be an operation—to-morrow. I can think of nothing else."
"Oh, Jinny, is there no one to take care of you? Is there no one to keep you from that woman?"
"Oh don't—if you had seen her——"
"I don't want to see her. I don't want you to see her. You should never have anything to do with suffering. It hurts you. It kills you. You ought to be taken care of. You ought to be kept from the sight and sound of it." He gazed wildly round the Heath. "If Brodrick was any good he'd take you out of this damned place."
"I wouldn't go. Poor darling, she can't bear me out of her sight. I believe I've worn a path going and coming."
They had left the beaten path. Their way lay in a line drawn straight across the Heath from Brodrick's house. It was almost as if her feet had made it.
"Jinny's path," he said.
They were silent, and he gathered up, as it were, the burden of their silence when he stopped and faced her with his question—
"How are you going on?"
LIX
A YEAR passed and half a year, and she had not found an answer to Tanqueray's question.
She had gone on somehow. He himself had made it easier for her by his frequent disappearances. He had found a place somewhere on Dartmoor where he hid himself from the destroyers, from the dreadful little people, where he hid himself from Rose. It helped her—not to have the question raised.
Now (they were in August of nineteen-ten) Tanqueray was back again with his question. He had left her, about eleven o'clock in the evening, in her study, facing it. Not but that he had provided her with a solution, a positive solution. "Jinny," he had said, "why don't you do as I do? Why don't you go away, if it was only for a few months every year?"
It seemed so simple, Tanqueray's solution, that at first she wondered why it had not occurred to her before. But as she looked back over the last three years she saw why. It could not have occurred to her as long as she had had the charge of her own children. She would not be entertaining it now if Gertrude were not there, looking after them. And it would not have been possible if the baby, the little girl, her third child, had lived. She had wanted to have a little girl, just to show what she could do. She had said, "There shall be one happy woman in the world and she shall be my daughter."
But the little girl had never lived at all. She had been brought forth dead in the night that followed Mabel Brodrick's death. Jane had been with Mabel when she died. That was in January six months ago.
After that there had come the great collapse, the six weeks when she lay quiet and Gertrude, like an angel, waited on her. She had been allowed to have the little boys with her for hours at a time then, she being utterly unable to excite them. Sometimes, when she was not well enough to have them very long, Gertrude would bring them in to look at her, the little solemn-eyed, quiet boys, holding Gertrude's hands. Every day brought her a moment of pain when she saw them going out of the room with Gertrude, led by her hand.
For six weeks Brodrick had been left very much to Gertrude. And Gertrude's face in that time had flowered softly, as if she had entered herself into the peace she made.
But in March Jane was on her feet again. In April Brodrick took her to the Riviera, and her return (in May) was the return of that brilliant and distracting alien who had invaded Brodrick's house seven years ago. Jane having nothing to do but to recover had done it so completely that Henry admitted that he would not have known her. To which she had rather ominously replied that she knew herself, only too well.
Even before she went away, even lying quiet, she had been aware that life was having its triumphant will of her. She had known all along, of course, that (as Owen Prothero had told her) she was sound through and through. Her vitality was unconquerable. Nothing could wreck her. Even Henry would own that her body, when they gave it a chance, was as fine a physical envelope as any woman could wish to have. Lying quiet, she had been inclined to agree with Henry that genius—her genius at any rate—was a neurosis; and she was not going to be neurotic any more. Whatever it was, it had made things terribly complicated. And to Jane lying quiet they had become absurdly simple. She herself was simplified. She had been torn in pieces; and in putting herself together again she had left out the dangerous, disintegrating, virile element. Whatever happened now, she would no longer suffer from the presence in her of two sexes contending for the mastery. Through it all, through all her dreadful virility, she had always been persistently and preposterously feminine. And lying quiet she was more than ever what George Tanqueray had said she was not to be—a mere woman.
Therefore to Jane, lying quiet, there had been no question of how she was to go on.
But to Jane on her feet again, in all her ungovernable, disastrous energy, the question was as insistent as Tanqueray himself. Her genius had recognized its own vehicle in her body restored to perfect health, and three years' repression had given it ten times its power to dominate and torture. It had thriven on the very tragedies that had brought her low.
It knew its hour and claimed her. She was close upon thirty-nine. It would probably claim her without remission for the next seven years. It had been relentless enough in its youth; it would be terrible in its maturity. The struggle, if she struggled, would tear her as she had never yet been torn. She would have to surrender, or at any rate to make terms with it. It was useless to fall back upon the old compromises and adjustments. Tanqueray's solution was the only possible, the only tolerable one. But it depended perilously upon Hugh's consent.
She went to him in his study where he sat peaceably smoking in the half-hour before bed-time.
Brodrick merely raised his eyebrows as she laid it before him—her monstrous proposal to go away—for three months. He asked her if three months was not rather a long time for a woman to leave her home and her children?
"I know," she said, "but if I don't——"
"Well?"
"I shall go to pieces."
He looked at her critically, incredulously.
"Why can't you say at once what's wrong?" he said. "Is there anything you want that you don't have here? Is there any mortal thing that can be done that isn't done?"
"Not any mortal thing."
"What is it then?"
"Hugh dear, did it never strike you that you are a very large family? And that when it comes down on me it's in the proportion of about seven to one?"
"Whoever does come down on you?"
"John," said she, "was with me for two hours yesterday."
Brodrick lent his ear as to a very genuine grievance. John, since his bereavement, was hardly ever out of the house.
"And I suppose," he said, "he bored you?"
"No, but he will call when I'm writing."
"Why on earth don't you send him away?"
"I would, if Mabel hadn't died. But how can you when he's unhappy? It would hurt him so. And yet, supposing you were to die, what would John say if I were to call on him at the works every day, and play with his dynamos to distract my mind, or sit with him in his office rumpling his hair, and dislocating his ideas till he didn't know the difference between a steam-roller and an internal combustion engine? That's more or less what John does to me. The only thing is to get away."
However, it was for Brodrick to decide, she said. And Brodrick said he couldn't decide until he had thought it over.
She was very soon aware that she had caused a scandal in her husband's family by her proposal to go away for three months. The scandal was not altogether unconnected with George Tanqueray, since it was at his suggestion that she proposed to take this unprecedented step. If she had proposed to take it with him they could hardly have shown themselves more horrified.
She knew how monstrous her conduct must appear to them. She could see it all so clearly from their point of view. That had always been after all her poor merit, that she could see things from other people's point of view. Her vision indeed of them, of the way they took things, was apt to be so vivid, so engrossing that it left her with no point of view of her own. She carried into life itself and all its relations her virtue as an artist, that effacement of her observing self in favour of the thing observed.
That, Nina told her, was her danger. Nina happened to be with her on the day when another family committee met and sat upon her case. They were sitting on it now, up-stairs with Brodrick in his study. She knew infallibly what their judgment would be. Just as she had seemed to them so long a creature of uncertain health, she must seem now inconstant, insincere, the incarnation of heartlessness, egotism and caprice. She said to herself that it was all very well for Nina to talk. This insight was a curse. It was terrible to know what people were thinking, to feel what they were feeling. And they were seven to one, so that when she gave them pain she had to feel seven times the pain she gave.
But after all they, her judges, could take care of themselves. This family, that was one consolidated affection, was like a wall, it would shelter and protect her so long as she was content to be sheltered and protected; if she dashed herself against it it would break her in pieces.
And Nina was saying, "Can't you take it into your own hands? Why should you let these people decide your fate for you?"
"Hugh will decide it," she said. "He's with them up-stairs now."
"Is he asking their advice?"
"No, they're giving it him. That's my chance, Nina."
"Your chance?"
"My one chance. They'll put his back up and, if it's only to show them, he'll let me go."
"Do you mean to say, Jinny, that if he didn't you wouldn't go?"
"I don't even know that I'd go if he minded very much."
"I wish to goodness George Tanqueray was here. He might make you——"
"What has he ever made me do?"
"He might make you see it."
"I do see it," said Jane.
She closed her eyes as one tired with much seeing. Nina's presence hardly helped her. Nina was even more profoundly disturbing than George Tanqueray; she had even less of consolation to offer to one torn and divided, she herself being so supreme an instance of the glory of the single flame.
The beauty and the wonder of it—in Nina—was its purity. Nina showed to what a pitch it had brought her, the high, undivided passion of her genius. Under it every trace of Nina's murkiness had vanished. She had lost that look of restless, haggard adolescence, that horrible intentness, as if her hand was always on the throat of her wild beast. You saw, of course, that she had suffered; but you saw too that her genius was appeased by her suffering. It was just, it was compassionate; it had rewarded her for every pang.
Jane found herself saying beautiful things about Nina's genius. It was the flame, unmistakably the pure flame. If solitude, if virginity, if frustration could do that——She knew what it had cost Nina, but it was worth it, seeing what she had gained.
Nina faced her with the eyes that had grown so curiously quiet.
"Ah, Jinny," she said, "could you have borne to pay my price?"
She owned that she could not.
Up-stairs Brodrick faced his family where it sat in judgment upon Jane.
"What does she complain of?" said John.
"Interruption," said Hugh. "She says she never has any time to herself, with people constantly running in and out."
"She doesn't mind," said Sophy, "how much time she gives to the Protheros and the rest of them. Nina Lempriere's with her now. She's been here three solid hours. As for George Tanqueray——"
John shook his head.
"That's what I don't like, Hugh, Tanqueray's hanging about the house at all hours of the day and night. However you look at it, it's a most undesirable thing."
"Oh—Tanqueray," said Brodrick, "he's all right."
"He's anything but all right," said Henry. "A fellow who notoriously neglects his wife."
"Well," said Brodrick, "I don't neglect mine."
"If you give her her head," said Henry.
He scowled at Henry.
"You know, Hugh," said Frances, "she really will be talked about."
"She's being talked about now," said Brodrick, "and I don't like it."
"There's no use talking," said John sorrowfully, and he rose to go.
They all rose then. Two by two they went across the Heath to John's house, Sophy with Henry and Frances with John; and as they went they leaned to each other, talking continuously about Hugh, and Tanqueray, and Jane.
"If Hugh gives in to her in this," said Henry, "he'll always have to give in."
"I could understand it," said Sophy, "if she had too much to do in the house."
"It's not," said Frances, "as if there was any struggle to make ends meet. She has everything she wants."
"Children——" said John.
"It's preposterous," said Henry.
When Nina had gone Brodrick came to Jane.
"Well," he said, "do you still want to go away for three months?"
"It's not that I want to, but I must."
"If you must," he said, "of course you may. I dare say it will be a very good thing for you."
"Shall you mind, Hugh?"
"Oh dear me, no. I shall be very comfortable here with Gertrude."
"And Gertrude," she murmured, "will be very comfortable here with you."
That evening, about nine o'clock, the parlour-maid announced to Brodrick in his study that Miss Winny and Mr. Eddy had called. They were in the dining-room. When Brodrick asked if Mrs. Brodrick was with them he was told that the young gentlemen had said expressly that it was Mr. Brodrick whom they wished to see.
Brodrick desired that they should be brought to him. They were going away, to stay somewhere with a school-fellow of Winny's, and he supposed that they had looked in to say good-bye.
As they entered something told him, as he had not been told before, that his young niece and nephew had grown up. It was not Winny's ripening form and trailing gown, it was not the golden down on Eddy's upper lip; it was not altogether that the outline of their faces had lost the engaging and tender indecision of its youth. It was their unmistakable air of inward assurance and maturity.
After the usual greetings (Brodrick was aware of a growing restraint in this particular) Eddy, at the first opening, made for his point—their point, rather. His uncle had inquired with urbane irony at what hour the family was to be bereaved of their society, and how long it would have to languish——
They were going, Eddy said, at ten in the morning, and a jolly good thing too. They weren't coming back, either, any sooner than they could help. They—well, they couldn't "stick it" at home just now.
They'd had (Winny interpolated) a row with Uncle Henry, a gorgeous row (the colour of it was in Winny's face).
Brodrick showed no sign of surprise, not so much as a raised eyebrow. He asked in quiet tones what it was all about?
Eddy, standing up before his uncle and looking very tall and manly, gazed down his waistcoat at his boots.
"It was about Jin-Jin," Winny said.
(Eddy could almost have sworn that his uncle suffered a slight shock.)
"We can't stick it, you know, the way they're going on about her. The fact is," said the tall youth, "we told Uncle Henry that, and he didn't like it."
"You did, did you?"
"Yes. I know you'll say it isn't our business, but you see——"
"You see" (Winny explained), "we're so awfully fond of her."
Brodrick knew that he ought to tell the young rascals that their being fond of her didn't make it any more their business. But he couldn't.
"What did you say to your Uncle Henry?"
He really wanted to know.
"Oh, we said it was all humbug about Jinny being neurotic. He's neurotic himself and so he thinks everybody else is. He's got it regularly on the brain."
(If, Brodrick thought, Henry could have heard him!)
"You can't think," said Winny, "how he bores us with it."
"I said he couldn't wonder if she was neurotic, when you think what she's got to stand. The boresomeness——" He left the idea to its own immensity.
"Of what?" said Brodrick.
"Well, for one thing, you know, of living everlastingly with Gertrude."
Brodrick said, "Gertrude doesn't bore anybody."
"She doesn't bore you, Uncle Hugh, of course, because you're a man."
(Winny said that.)
"Then," said Eddy, "there's us. You know, we're an awful family for a woman like Jinny to have married into. There isn't one of us fit to black her boots. And I believe Uncle Henry thinks she wasn't made for anything except to bring more of us into the world."
Brodrick's face displayed a fine flush.
"You're all right, Uncle Hugh."
Brodrick lowered his eyelids in modest acceptance of this tribute.
"I keep forgetting you're one of them, because you married her."
"What else did you say to him?"
Eddy became excited. "Oh—I got in one before we left—I landed him neatly. I asked him why on earth—if he thought she was neurotic—he let her shut herself up for a whole year with that screaming kid, when any fat nurse would have done the job as well? And why he let her break her neck, running round after Aunt Mabel? I had him there."
"What did your Uncle say to that?" (Brodrick's voice was rather faint.)
"He didn't say anything. He couldn't—oh—well, he did say my impertinence was unendurable. And I said his was, when you think what Jinny is."
He meditated on it. He had become, suddenly, a grave and reverent youth.
"We really came," Winny said, "to know whether Jinny is going away?"
"She is going away," said Brodrick, "for three months."
He rose and held out the hand of parting. To his surprise Winny kissed him and kept her face against his as she whispered, "And if—she has to stay a year?"
"She shall stay," Brodrick said.
LX
She went down to Devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor. Tanqueray had rooms there which were his and nobody else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as long as she cared to stay. She would be safe there, he said. Nobody would find her.
Certainly it would be hard to find her, so remote and hidden was the place. The farm, which was small and humble, stood in a deep lane cut off from Chagford by a hill. The lane dipped abruptly from the hillside; it plunged; it went down, at noon, as into a pit of darkness. The white-washed house, lodged on a flat break in the descent, sucked light through its high ring of ash-trees. Below it the lane went headlong to the hill-bottom. It was perched on a hill, hugged in a valley, according as you approached it from the north-east or the south-west.
The doorway was guarded by a deep, white-walled porch. You came straight into an ancient low-roofed, white-washed kitchen, now the living-room for the eccentric stranger who had made his lodging there. A stairway led up from it into the bedroom overhead. This living-room had a door that opened into a passage joining it to further and dimmer parts of the house; but the bedroom was inaccessible save by its own stair.
By the deep-set window of each room there stood a firm, solid oak table, at which, the woman of the farm had told her, Mr. Tanqueray wrote. Both windows looked on to the lane. That was the beauty of it, Tanqueray had said. There would be nothing to distract her. You couldn't trust Jinny on the open moor.
For the first week Jinny, cut off from her husband and children, was assailed by a poignant and perpetual misery. As one who has undergone a surgical operation, she suffered an inveterate nerve-aching after the severed flesh. She was haunted by Brodrick's face as she had seen it from her corner of the rail-way carriage, looking in at her through the window, silent and overcast, and by his look, his unforgettable look as the train carried her away. And the children, their faces and their soft forms and their voices haunted her. She did no work that week.
Then the country claimed her. Dartmoor laid on her its magic of wild earth and wild skies. She tried to write and could not. Something older and more powerful than her genius had her. She suffered a resurgence of her youth, her young youth that sprang from the moors, and had had its joy in them and knew its joy again. It was on the moors that earth had most kinship and communion with the sky. It took the storms of heaven. Its hills were fused with heaven in fires of sunset; they wore the likeness of the clouds, of vapour and fine air. On the moors it was an endless passing of substance into shadow and of shadow into substance.
And she had her own kinship and communion with them. She remembered these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the sweet earth of the south-west.
Tanqueray was right. She was not to be trusted on the open moors. She was out of doors all day. And out of doors the Idea that had driven her forth withdrew itself. Its very skirts, only half-discerned, were beyond her grasp. She was oppressed at times by a sense of utter frustration and futility. If this was all; if she was simply there enjoying herself, tramping the hills all day, a glorious animal set free; if she was not going to accomplish anything, then she had no business to be there at all. It would be better to give it up, to give in, to go back again.
There was a day in her third week when she nearly did go back, when it seemed to her that she would be obeying a wise instinct if she went. She got as far as looking up the trains to Waterloo.
Then, on the brink of it, something that announced itself as a wiser and profounder instinct, an instinct of self-preservation, told her not to go. It told her to wait, to trust to Nature's way, and to Nature's wisdom in bringing back her youth. Nature's way was to weave over again the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the impact of other lives. Nature's wisdom was to make her simple and strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more virgin to the world. In short, Nature's beneficent intention was to restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of Nature's plan.
And all the time good news of Brodrick and the children reached her every other day. Punctually, every other day Gertrude Collett wrote, assuring her that all was going well at home and urging her to stay. Brodrick wrote (at rather longer intervals) saying how happy the children were, and how entirely comfortable he was with Gertrude. His letters contained little besides praise of Gertrude. There was no reason, he reiterated, why she should not stay.
She stayed, and in her fifth week she received the reward of her staying. Walking back to the farm late one evening, the moors veiled from her passion by the half-darkness, her Idea came back to her. It came, not yet with the vividness of flesh and blood, but like a ghost. It had ghostly hands and feet, and like a ghost it walked the road with her. But through its presence she felt in herself again that nascent ecstasy which foretold, infallibly, the onset of the incredible act and labour of creation.
When she reached the farm she found George Tanqueray sitting in the porch. The lamp-light through the open door revealed him.
"Whatever brought you here?" she said.
"What always brings me."
She understood him to mean that he also had been driven forth, and was in subjection to the Idea.
"Have you come to turn me out?" she said.
"No, Jinny."
He explained that he was staying in the village, at the Three Crowns. He had arrived that evening and had walked over.
He followed her into the deep kitchen. At the supper-table his place had been laid for him already. He had ordered it so.
He looked at her, smiling an apology.
"Is it all right?" he said.
"Perfectly all right, George."
They talked all evening and far into the night. She parted from him at the gate of the lane under the ash-trees. Under the ash-trees her Idea showed in its immense and luminous perfection. It trembled into life. It drew her, palpitating, into the lamp-light of the room.
She had found what she had come for.
That was the effect he always had on her.
LXI
Brodrick had been alone in the first fortnight that followed Jane's extraordinary departure. Instead of settling down to be comfortable with Gertrude, he had packed her off to the seaside with the children and their nurse. He had often wondered what he should do without Gertrude. Now he knew. He knew by incontrovertible experiment that he could not do without her at all. Everything, even the silver-chiming clock, went wrong in her absence.
If, before that fortnight, Brodrick had been asked suddenly with what feelings he regarded Gertrude Collett, he would have replied that he was unaware of regarding the lady with any feelings, or indeed of regarding her intimately at all. And he would have told the simple truth; for Brodrick was of all men the most profoundly unaware.
Of course, there was gratitude. He had always been aware of that. But in that fortnight his gratitude took on immense proportions, it became a monstrous and indestructible indebtedness. He would have said that such a feeling, so far from making him comfortable with Gertrude, would have made him very uncomfortable, much more uncomfortable than he cared to be. But curiously it was not so. In his renewed intercourse with Gertrude he found a vague, exquisite satisfaction. The idea of not paying Gertrude back in any way would have been intolerable; but what he felt now was so very like affection that it counted as in some measure a return. It was as if he had settled it in his own mind that he could now meet the innocent demands which the angelic woman seemed to make. Goodness knew it wasn't much to ask, a little attention, a little display of the feeling so very like affection, after all that she had done.
It pleased him now when he came, mooning drearily, into the drawing-room, to find Gertrude in possession. He was almost always tired now, and he was glad to lie back in an easy-chair and have his tea handed to him by Gertrude. He looked forward, in fancy, to the children's hour that followed tea-time, and he had made a great point at first of having them to himself. But as a matter of fact, being almost always tired, he enjoyed their society far more sincerely when Gertrude was there to keep them in order.
That was her gift. She had been the genius of order ever since she had come into his house—good gracious, was it ten years ago? Her gift made her the most admirable secretary an editor could have. But she was more than that now. She was a perfect companion to a physically fatigued and intellectually slightly deteriorated man. He owned to the deterioration. Jane had once told him that his intellect was a "lazy, powerful beast." It seemed to him now, humbly regarding it, that the beast was and always had been much more lazy than powerful. It required constant stimulus to keep it going. His young ambition and his young passion for Jane Holland had converged to whip it up. It flagged with the dying down of passion and ambition. Things latterly had come a bit too late. His dream had been realized too late. And he hadn't realized it, either. Jane had realized it for him. No sooner had he got his wonderful magazine into his own hands than he found out how little he cared about it. He had become more and more absorbed in its external and financial aspects. He showed more and more as the man of business, the slightly hustled and harassed father of a family. He had put off intellectual things. His deterioration weighed on him when he thought of Jane. But Gertrude's gentleness stood between him and any acute perception of his state.
Sometimes when they sat together over her fire, lit in the September evenings, there would be long silences. Gertrude never broke a silence. She was conscious of it; she, as it were, held it—he could almost feel her holding it—tenderly, as if she loved it; she handled it gently as if she were afraid that it would break. She gave him so much sense of her presence and no more. She kept before him, humbly, veiled from his vision, the fact that she was there to serve him.
Sometimes a curious shyness would come on her. It was not the poignant shyness of her youth which Brodrick had once found so distressing. It conveyed no fear and no embarrassment, only (so he made it out) the quietest, subtlest hint of possible flight. Its physical sign was the pale, suffused flame in Gertrude's face, and that web of air across her eyes. There was a sort of charm about it.
Sometimes, coming upon Gertrude alone and unaware of him, he would find her sad. He said to himself then that she had no great cause for gaiety. It was a pretty heavy burden for her, this shouldering of another woman's responsibilities. He thought that Jane had sometimes been a little hard on her. He supposed that was her (Jane's) feminine way. The question was whether he himself might not have been kinder; whether there wasn't anything that he might yet do to make life sweeter to her. He was, in fact, profoundly sorry for Gertrude, more profoundly sorry than he had been ten years ago, when she had come to him, and he had kept her, though he didn't want her, because he was sorry for her. Well, he wanted her enough now in all conscience.
Then the horrible thought would occur to him: supposing Gertrude were to go? It was not conceivable, her going.
For, above all her gifts, Gertrude was an incomparable mother to those unfortunate children (since Jane's departure Brodrick had begun to think definitely of his children as unfortunate). It was distinctly pleasurable the feeling with which he watched her ways in gathering them to her side and leading them softly from the room when "Daddy was busy," or when "poor Daddy was so tired." More than once he found himself looking out of his study window at her quiet play with the little boys in the garden. Solemn little boys they were; and sometimes he wondered whether little Jacky were not too solemn, too preternaturally quiet for four and a half, and rather too fond of holding Gertrude's hand. He remembered how the little beggar used to romp and laugh when Jinny——And remembering he would turn abruptly from the window with a sore heart and a set face.
Three weeks passed thus. There was a perceptible increase in Gertrude's shyness and sadness.
One evening after dinner she came to him in his study. He rose and drew forward a chair for her. She glanced at his writing-table and at the long proof-sheets that hung from it, streaming.
"I mustn't," she said. "You're busy."
"Well—not so busy as all that. What is it?"
"I've been thinking that it would perhaps be better if I were to leave."
"To leave? What's put that into your head?"
She did not answer. She appeared to him dumb with distress.
"Have the children been too much for you?"
"Poor little darlings—no."
"Little monkeys. Send them to me if you can't manage them."
"It isn't that. It is—I don't think it's right for me to stay."
"Not right?"
"On the children's account, I mean."
He looked at her and a shade, a tremor, of uneasiness passed over his face.
"I say," he said, "you don't think they're unhappy?"
(She smiled).
"—Without their mother?" He jerked it out with a visible effort.
"No. If they were I shouldn't be so uneasy."
"Come, you don't want them to be unhappy, do you?"
"No. I don't want anybody to be unhappy. That's why I think I'd better go."
"On their account?" he repeated, hopelessly adrift.
"Theirs, and their mother's."
"But it's on their account—and—their mother's—that we want you."
"I know; but it isn't fair to them or to—Mrs. Brodrick that they should be so dependent on me."
"But—they're babies."
"Not quite—now. It isn't right that I should be taking their mother's place, that they should look to me for everything."
"But," he broke in irritably, "they don't. Why should they?"
"They do. They must. You see, it's because I'm on the spot."
"I see." He hid his frowning forehead with one hand.
"I know," she continued, "it can't be helped. It isn't anybody's fault. It's—it's inevitable."
"Yes. For the present it's—inevitable."
They both paused on that word.
"I suppose," he said, "you're really afraid that they'll get too fond of you?"
"Yes."
"They're very fond of their mother, aren't they?"
"Yes—if she were always here."
"Of course, it does make your position a little difficult. Still, we don't want them to fret for her—we don't want them not to be fond of you. Besides, if you went, what on earth would they do without you?"
"They must learn to do without me. They would have some one else."
"Yes, and they'll be fond of her."
"Not in the same way. I think perhaps I've given myself too much to them. There's something unusual, something tragic in the way they cling to me. I know it's bad for them. I try to check it, and I can't. And I've no right to let it go on. Nobody has a right except their mother."
"Well, it's awfully nice of you to feel like that about it. But as you say, I don't see how it's to be helped. I think you're taking an exaggerated view—conscientiously exaggerated. They're too young, you know, to be very tragic."
She smiled as through tears.
"I don't think you'll save tragedy by going. Besides, what should I do?"
"You?"
"Yes. You don't appear to have thought of me."
"Don't I?" She smiled again, as if at some secret, none too happy, of her own.
"If I had not thought of you I should never have come here a second time. If I had not thought of you I should not have thought of going."
"Did you think I wanted you to go?"
"I—was not quite sure."
He laughed. "Are you sure now?"
She looked at him again.
"I do help you by staying?"
He was overwhelmed by his indebtedness.
"Most certainly you do. I must have been very ungracious if you haven't realized how indispensable you are."
"If you're sure of that—I'll stay."
"Good."
He held out his hand and detained hers for a moment. "Are you sure you don't want to leave us? I'm not asking too much of you?"
She withdrew her hand.
"You have never asked too much."
Thus Gertrude uncovered the knees of the gods.
LXII
Four days in every week Jane had a letter from Gertrude and once a week a letter from Brodrick. She was thus continually assured that all was well and that Brodrick was very comfortable with Gertrude.
She was justified in staying on, since her genius had come back to her, divinely placable, divinely propitiated and appeased.
She knew that in a measure she owed this supreme reconciliation to George Tanqueray. Her genius was virile. He could not give it anything, nor could it have taken anything he gave. He was passive to her vision and humble, on his knees, as he always had been, before a kindred immortality. What he did for her was to see her idea as she saw it, but so that through his eyes she saw steadily and continuously its power and perfection. She was aware that in the last five years she had grown dependent on him for that. For five years he had lifted her out of the abyss when she had found herself falling. Through all the surgings and tossings that had beset her he had kept her from sinking into the trough of the wave. Never once had he let go his hold till he had seen her riding gaily on the luminous crest.
His presence filled her with a deep and strong excitement. For two years, in their long separations, she had found that her craving for it was at times unbearable. She knew that when her flame died down and she was in terror of extinction, she had only to send for him to have her fear taken from her. She had only to pick up a book of his, to read a sentence of his, and she would feel herself afire again. Everything about him, his voice, his look, the touch of his hand, had this penetrating, life-giving quality.
Three weeks passed and Tanqueray was still staying in his inn at Chagford. In the mornings they worked, he on his book and she on hers. She saw him every afternoon or evening. Sometimes they took long walks together over the moors. Sometimes they wandered in the deep lanes. Sometimes, in rainy weather, they sat indoors, talking. In the last five years Tanqueray (who never used to show his work) had brought all his manuscripts for her to read. He brought them now. Sometimes she read to him what she had written. Sometimes he read to her. Sometimes he left his manuscript with her and took hers away with him. They discussed every doubtful point together, they advised each other and consulted. Sometimes they talked of other things. She was aware that the flame he kindled leaned to him, drawn by his flame. She kept it high. She wanted him to see how divine it was, and how between him and her there could be no question of passion that was not incorruptible, a fiery intellectual thing.
But every day Tanqueray walked up from the village to the farm. She looked on his coming as the settled, natural thing. Brodrick continued to assure her that the children were happy without her, and that he was very comfortable with Gertrude; and Tanqueray reiterated that it was all right, all perfectly right.
One day he arrived earlier than usual, about eleven o'clock. He proposed that they should walk together over the moor to Post Bridge, lunch at the inn there and walk back. Distance was nothing to them.
They set out down the lane. There had been wind at dawn. Southwards, over the hills, the clouds were piled up to the high sun in a riot and glory of light and storm. The hills were dusk under their shadow.
The two swung up the long slopes at a steady pace, rejoicing in the strong movement of their limbs. It was thus that they used to set out together long ago, on their "days," over the hills of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. Jane remarked that her state now was almost equal to that great freedom. And they talked of Brodrick.
"There aren't many husbands," she said, "who would let their wives go off like this for months at a time."
"Not many. He has his merits."
"When you think of the life I lead him at home it takes heaps off his merit. The kindest thing I can do to him is to go away and stay away. George, you don't know how I've tormented the poor darling."
"I can imagine."
"He was an angel to bear it."
She became pensive at the recollection.
"Sometimes I wonder whether I ought, really, to have married. You told me that I oughtn't."
"When?"
"Six years ago."
"Well—I'm inclined to say so still. Only, the unpardonable sin in a great artist—isn't so much marrying as marrying the wrong person."
"He isn't the wrong person for me. But I'm afraid I'm the wrong person for him."
"It comes to the same thing."
"Not altogether." She pondered. "No doubt God had some wise purpose when he made Hugh marry me. I can see the wise purpose in Owen's marrying Laura, and the wise purpose in his not marrying Nina; but when it comes to poor, innocent Hugh tying himself up for ever and ever with a woman like me——"
"Don't put it on God. His purpose was wise enough."
"What was it?"
"Why—obviously—that I should have married you, that Hugh should have married Gertrude, and that some reputable young draper should have married Rose."
"Poor little Rose!"
"Poor little Rose would have been happy with her draper; Gertrude would have been happy with Brodrick; you—no, I, would have been divinely happy with you."
She laughed. "Oh, would you!"
"That was the heaven-appointed scheme. And there we were, all five of us, bent on frustrating the divine will—I beg Gertrude's pardon—Gertrude's will was entirely in accord."
"It sounds delightfully simple, but I doubt if it would have worked out so. We've all got as much of each other as we want."
"That's what we haven't got. Very large, important pieces of each of us have been taken and given to the wrong person. Look at you—look at me."
She looked at him. "My dear, the largest and most important part of you is kept well out of the reach of Rose's little fingers. You and I have quite as much of each other as is good for us. If we were to tear each other to pieces there'd be nothing left of us."
Thus lightly they handled it, setting out in the morning.
Their pace slackened. They had begun to think.
She had always been a little hard on him about Rose, Tanqueray thought. It was as if she accused him, or rather his genius, of a monstrous egoism. Surely that only meant that it was indomitably sound and sane. A reckless sanity it had, a soundness capable of any risks. There never was any man who so defied the forces of dissolution, who had so profound an instinct of self-preservation.
Such a nature was bound to be inhospitable to parasites. By the very ease with which it assimilated all food of earth and heaven, it starved them at the roots.
It was not that he deliberately cast off any tender thing that clung to him. It was that the sheer impulse of growth in him was so tremendous that it burst through and out-soared the embracing and aspiring bonds. His cruelty (for it was cruelty from the poor parasite's point of view) was like Nature's, unconscious and impersonal.
It was not his fault, therefore, if Rose's arms, try as she would, could never hold him. It was not that he was indifferent to Rose or to her suffering, or that he shrank in moral cowardice from dealing with it as a man should deal. It was that the voice of implacably wise, and indubitably sane instincts warned him that he would accomplish no great thing if he turned to contemplate her tragedy, still less if he accepted it as his own. Incorruptible impulses urged him to evasion. And it was thus that in the seven years of his marriage he had achieved almost complete oblivion of her.
But Jane—Jane was a creature of like impulses and of the same stature as he. Her dependence on him, if she was dependent, was for such things as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. And she gave as superbly as she received. There was nothing in the least parasitic about Jane. She had the freedom of all the spaces of earth and heaven. She could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride.
He had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. She sprang to it and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his arm. She kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting.
Watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given to it the beauty that it had lacked. She was more feminine than ever. She had added that invincible quality to the sexless charm that had drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from disaster.
(He had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.)
They lunched at Post Bridge, at the little inn that Tanqueray knew. They drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to Merivale and back. They stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of the return. It was evening when they reached the last moor that lay between them and the farm lane.
The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold.
Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly. She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of perished streams, the green grass ran like water.
"I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're talking."
"If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk."
The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw everything must see.
A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise.
Then Tanqueray spoke.
"Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and I and Brodrick and poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?"
"Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura."
"Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while it makes us poor devils blind as bats."
"There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy."
"Ah—you should see him trying to fly by daylight."
Silence and the lucid twilight held them close.
"Jinny—do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from Wendover?"
She did not answer him.
"Jinny—we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between."
It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time and circumstance, all that had come between. It was part of their vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made.
"We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said.
"Don't let's talk about it any more."
"It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns it to poison."
"Yes."
"And haven't we always told the truth to each other?"
"Not in the beginning. If we only had——"
"We didn't know it then."
"I knew it," she said.
"Why didn't you tell me, then?"
"You know what you'd have thought of me if I had."
"You shouldn't have cared what I thought. You should have risked it."
"Risked it?"
"Risked it."
"But I risked losing you altogether. What did you risk?"
He was silent.
"Why do you blame me? It was your fault, your choice."
"Was it really mine? Was it I who went wrong?"
"Yes," she said. "In the beginning. You knew I cared for you."
"If you'd let me see it."
"Oh, you saw it. I didn't tell you in as many words. But I let you see it. That was where I went wrong."
"Yes, yes." He assented, for it was truth's hour. "You should have made me feel it."
"How could I?"
"That was it. You couldn't."
"I couldn't when I knew you'd seen it."
"How did you know?"
"Oh—you took good care of that."
"Was I a brute? Was I a brute to you, Jinny?"
She smiled.
"Not as men go. You couldn't help it. There was no deceiving me."
"Why, after all, shouldn't you have told me?"
"Why indeed?"
"It's a preposterous convention that leaves all the truth-telling to the unhappy man."
"Still—there it is. We can't get over it."
"You could have got over it. It wasn't made for you."
"It was made for all women. And for one who has been wrecked by it there are millions who have been saved. It was made for me more than any of them."
"If you prefer other women's conventions to your own happiness."
"Would it have been happiness to have given my heart and my soul to somebody who had no use for them and showed it?"
"You insist that I showed it?"
"You showed me plainly that it wasn't my heart and my soul you wanted."
"There you're wrong. There was a moment—if you'd only known it."
"I did know."
"What did you know?"
"I knew there was some power I had, if I had known how to use it."
"And didn't you?"
"I don't know. You see, I didn't try."
"You know how to use it now, I can tell you, with a vengeance."
"No. It isn't the same power, I think."
"At any rate you knew that it was touch and go with me? That if you'd chosen you might have done anything with me?"
"I knew that any other woman could have done the same."
"Then why not you?"
"I? I didn't want to hold you that way. I had some decency. I loved my poor friend too much to take him at a disadvantage."
"Good God! So that was your view of it? I was sacrificed to your invincible ignorance."
"Oh no, to my knowledge. Or shall we say to an honourable scruple?"
"Honourable?"
"Yes. The whole honour of women lies in that."
"I hope you see where the whole honour of women has landed us at last."
They had reached the lane leading to their farm. Its depth held them closer than the twilight held. The trees guarded them. Every green branch roofed a hollow deep with haze.
"If you were a cold woman I could understand it."
"I couldn't. It's because I was anything but cold."
"I know. You were afraid then."
"Yes. I was mortally afraid."
Above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. A dim green field opened out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. It seemed to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near.
"George," she said, "you know women as God knows them; why didn't you know me? Can't you see what I was afraid of? What we're all afraid of? What we're eternally trying to escape from? The thing that hunts us down, that turns again and rends us."
"You thought you saw that in me?"
"I don't see it now."
"Not now," he whispered.
They had come to the porch of the farmhouse. The door stood open. The lamp-light drew them in. He closed the door behind them. She stood facing him as one who waits.
"Not now," he said aloud.
He glanced round. The house and all about it was still.
"If we could always be here, Jinny——"
She turned from him, afraid.
"Why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms.
He pressed back her head with one hand. His face sought hers, the face she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed. It leaned now, swift to its desire. It covered her face. Its lips were pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in their drinking, after their long thirst. She pushed it from her with her two hands and cried out, "Rose, little Rose!"
She struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep stairs. A door opened and shut. He heard her feet go slowly on the floor of her room above him. They reached the bed. She seemed to sink there.
LXIII
That night she knew that she must leave Dartmoor, and go somewhere where George Tanqueray could not follow her and find her. She was mortally afraid of him. He had tracked and hunted her down swiftly and more inevitably than any destroyer or pursuer.
In spite of him, indeed because of him, her passion for this solitude of the moors was strong upon her, and she planned to move on the next day into Somerset, to a place on Exmoor that she knew. She would leave very early in the morning before Tanqueray could come to her.
She lay all night staring with hot eyes at the white walls that held her. At daylight she dropped asleep and slept on into the morning. When she woke she faced her purpose wide-eyed and unflinching. Her fear was there also and she faced it.
She was down too late for any train that could take her away before noon, and Tanqueray might come now at any time.
She was so late that the day's letters waited for her on the window-sill. In her agitation she nearly missed seeing them. One was from Gertrude, fulfilling punctually her pledge, assuring her as usual that all was well. The other was from her brother-in-law, Henry. It was very brief. Henry, after expressing the hope that she continued to benefit by the air of Dartmoor, supposed that she would have heard that Hugh was suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an overcoat.
She had not heard it. She read Gertrude's letter again to make sure. Among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that Gertrude had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. She had broken her pledge.
They kept things from her, then. Heaven only knew what they had kept.
She read Henry's letter again. There were no details, but her mind supplied them as it grasped the sense of what he had written. There rose before her instantly a vision of Hugh lying in his bed ill. He had a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. He was in for gastritis, at the least, if it was not pneumonia. She saw with intolerable vividness a long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill, down to their remotest consequences. Her imagination never missed one.
And instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. It was as if it owned that it was beaten. She had no more fear of it. And she had no more fear of George Tanqueray.
Nothing existed for her but the fear that hung round Brodrick in his bed. This vision of calamity was unspeakable, it was worse than all the calamities that had actually been. It was worse through its significance and premonition than the illness of her little son; it was worse than the loss of her little dead-born daughter; it brought back to her with a more unendurable pang that everlasting warning utterance of Nina's, "With you—there'll be no end to your paying." Her heart cried out to powers discerned as implacable, "Anything but that! Anything but that!"
She had missed the first possible train to Waterloo, but there was another from a station five miles distant which would bring her home early in the evening. She packed hurriedly and sent one of the farm people to the village for a fly. Then she paced the room, maddening over the hours that she had still to spare.
Once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Hugh was not so very ill. If he had been Henry would have told her. He would have suggested the propriety of her return. And Henry's brief reference to Dartmoor had suggested continuance rather than return.
But her fear remained with her. It made her forget all about George Tanqueray.
It was the sudden striking of ten o'clock that recalled to her her certainty that he would come. And he was there in the doorway before her mind had time to adjust itself to his appearance.
She fell on him with Hugh's illness as if it were a weapon and she would have slain him with it.
He stood back and denied the fact she hurled at him. As evidence supporting his denial, he produced his recent correspondence with the editor. He had heard from him that morning, and he was all right then. Jinny was being "had," he said.
He had not come there to talk about Brodrick, or to think about him. He was not going to let Jinny think about him either.
He had come early because he wanted to find her with all the dreams of the night about her, before her passion (he was sure of it) could be overtaken by the mood of the cool morning.
Jinny had begun to pack her manuscript (she had forgotten it till now) in the leather case it travelled in. She had a hat with a long veil on. Tanqueray's gaze took in all this and other more unmistakable signs of her departure.
"What do you think you're doing?" he said.
"I'm going back."
"Why?"
"Haven't I told you?"
Positively he had forgotten Brodrick.
He began all over again and continued, tenderly, patiently, with all his cold, ascendant, dispassionate lucidity, till he had convinced her that her fear was folly.
She was grateful to him for that.
"All the same," she said, "I'm going. I wasn't going to stay here in any case."
"You were going?"
"Yes."
"And do you suppose I'm going to let you go? After last night?"
"After—last—night—I must go. And I must go back."
"No. Remember what you said to me last night. We know ourselves and we know each other now as God knows us. We're not afraid of ourselves or of each other any more."
"No," she said. "I am not afraid."
"Well—you've had the courage to get so far, why haven't you the courage to go on?"
"You think I'm a coward still?"
"A coward." He paused. "I beg your pardon. I forgot that you had the courage to go back."
Her face hardened as they looked at each other.
"I believe after all," he said, "you're a cold little devil. You stand there staring at me and you don't care a damn."
"As far as damns go, it was you, if you remember, that didn't care."
"Are you always going to bring that up against me? I suppose you'll remind me next that you're a married woman and the mother of two children."
"We do seem rather to have forgotten it," she said.
"Jinny—that ought never to have happened. You should have left that to the other women."
"Why, George, that's what you said six years ago, if you remember."
"You are——"
"Yes, I know I am. You've just said so."
"My God. I don't care what you are."
He came to her and stood by her, with his face close to her, not touching hers, but very close. His eyes searched her. She stood rigid in her supernatural self-possession.
"Jinny, you knew. You knew all the time I cared."
"I thought I knew. I did know you cared in a way. But not in this way. This—this is different."
She was trying to tell him that hitherto his passion had been to her such a fiery intellectual thing that it had saved her—as by fire.
"It isn't different," he said gravely. "Jinny—if I only wanted you for myself—but that doesn't count as much as you think it does. If you didn't suffer——"
"I'm not suffering."
"You are. Every nerve's in torture. Haven't I seen you? You're ill with it now, with the bare idea of going back. I want to take you out of all that."
"No, no. It isn't that. I want to go."
"You don't. You don't want to own that you're beaten."
"No. It's simpler than that. I don't care for you, George, not—not as you want me to."
He smiled. "How do you think I want you to?"
"Well—you know."
"I know that I care so much that it doesn't matter how you care, or whether you care or not, so long as I can put a stop to that brutality."
"There isn't any brutality. I've got everything a woman can want."
"You've got everything any other woman can want."
She closed her eyes. "I'm quite happy."
