"Mine," said Caro suavely, "was a purely abstract proposition."
But the terrible youth went on. "Mine isn't. Uncle Hugh's done a good thing for himself, I know. But it would have been a jolly sight better thing for literature if he'd married Gee-Gee, or somebody like that."
For there was nothing that young Eddy did not permit himself to say.
Little Hugh had begun to cry bitterly, as if he had understood that there had been some reflection on his mother. And from crying he went on to screaming, and Gertrude carried him, struggling violently, from the room.
The screams continued in the nursery overhead. Jane sat for a moment in agony, listening, and then rushed up-stairs.
Gertrude appeared, serene and apologetic.
"Can't anything be done," Brodrick said irritably, "to stop that screaming?"
"It's stopped now," said Winny.
"You've only got to give him what he wants," said Gertrude.
"Yes, and he knows he's only got to scream for it."
Gertrude's eyebrows, raised helplessly, were a note on the folly and infatuation of the child's mother.
Caro Bickersteth and Laura left, hopeless of Jane's return to them. Prothero stayed on, conferring with the editor. Later, he found himself alone in the garden with Jane. He asked then (what they were all longing to know) when she was going to give them another book?
"Never again, Owen, never again."
He reproached her.
"Ah—you don't know what it's been, this last year," she said. "George told me I should have to pay for it. So did Nina. And you see how I've paid."
His eyes questioned her.
"Through my child."
He turned to her. His eyes were pitiful but incredulous.
"Owen—Nina said there'd be no end to my paying. But there shall be an end to it. For a year it's been one long fight for his little life, and I've won; but he'll never be strong; never, I'm afraid, like other children. He'll always remind me——"
"Remindyou?"
"Yes. They say I'm responsible for him. It's the hard work I've done. It's my temperament—my nerves."
"Yournerves?"
"Yes. I'm supposed to be hopelessly neurotic."
"But you're not. Your nerves are very highly-strung—they're bound to be, or they wouldn't respond as perfectly as they do—but they're thesoundestnerves I know. I should say you were sound all over."
"Shouldyou?"
"Certainly."
"Then" (she almost cried it) "why should he suffer?"
"Do you mean to say you don't know what's the matter with him?"
"Owen——"
"He's a Brodrick. He's got their nerves."
"Theirnerves? I didn't know they had any."
"They've all got them except Mrs. Levine. It's the family trouble. Weak nerves and weak stomachs."
"But Henry——"
"Hehas to take no end of care of himself."
"How do you know?"
"It's my business," he said, "to know."
"I keep on forgetting that you're a doctor too." She meditated. "But Sophy's children are all strong."
"No, they're not. Levine told me the other day that they were very anxious about one of them."
"Is it—the same thing that my child has?"
"Precisely the same."
"And it comes," she said, "from them. And they never told me."
"They must have thought you knew."
"I didn't. They made me think it was my fault. They let me go through all that agony and terror. I can't forgive them."
"They couldn't have known."
"There was Henry. He must have known. And yet he made me think it. He made me give up writing because of that."
"You needn't think it any more. Jacky gets his constitution from you, and it was you who saved the little one."
"He made me think I'd killed him. It's just as well," she said, "that I should have thought it. If I hadn't I mightn't have fought so hard to make him live. I might have been tormented with another book. It was the only thing that could have stopped me."
She paused. "Perhaps—they knew that."
"It's all right," she said presently. "After all, if there is anything wrong with the child, I'd rather Hugh didn't think it came from him."
She had now another fear. It made her very tender to Brodrick when, coming to him in the drawing-room after their guests had departed, she found him communing earnestly with Gertrude. A look passed between them as she entered.
"Well, what are you two putting your heads together about?" she said.
Gertrude's head drew back as if a charge had been brought against it.
"Well," said Brodrick, "it was about the child. Something must be done. You can't go on like this."
She seated herself. Her very silence implied that she was all attention.
"It's bad for him and it's bad for you."
"What's bad for him?"
"The way you've given yourself up to him. There's no moderation about your methods."
"If there had been," said she, "he wouldn't be alive now."
"Yes, yes, I know that. But he's all right now. He doesn't want that perpetual attention. It's ruining him. He thinks he's only got to scream loud enough for anything and he gets it. Every time he screams you rush to him. It's preposterous."
Jane listened.
"The fact is," said Brodrick, bracing himself, "you have him too much with you."
"Imusthave him with me."
"You mustn't," said Brodrick, with his forced gentleness.
"You think I'm bad for him?"
He did not answer.
"Gertrude—doyouthink I'm bad for him?"
Gertrude smiled. She did not answer any more than Brodrick.
"Miss Collett agrees with me," said Brodrick.
"She always does. What do I do to him?"
"You excite him."
"Do I, Gertrude?"
Gertrude's face seemed to be imploring Brodrick to be pitiful, and not to rub it in.
"Do I?"
"The child," said Gertrude evasively, "is very sensitive."
"And you create," Brodrick said, "an atmosphere——"
"A what?"
"An atmosphere of perpetual agitation—of emotion——"
"You mean my child is fond of me."
"Much too fond of you. It's playing the devil with him."
"Poor mite—athisage! Well—what do you propose?"
"I propose that he should be with somebody who hasn't that effect, who can keep him quiet. Miss Collett very kindly offered——"
"Dear Gertrude, you can't. You've got your hands full."
"Not so full that they can't hold a little more." Gertrude said it with extreme sweetness.
"Can they hold Hughy?"
"They've held Jacky," said Brodrick, "for the last year.Henever gives any trouble."
"He never feels it. Poor Baby has got nerves——"
"Well, my dear girl, isn't it all the more reason why he should be with somebody who hasn't got 'em?"
"Poor Gertrude, she'll have more nerves than any of us if she has to look after the house, and the accounts, and Jacky, and Hughy, andyou——"
"She doesn't look after me," said Brodrick stiffly, and left the room.
Jane turned to Gertrude.
"Was that your idea, or his?"
"How can any idea be mine," said Gertrude, "if I always agree with Mr. Brodrick? As a matter of fact it was the Doctor's."
"Yes. It was very like him."
"He spoke to Mr. Brodrick yesterday. And I am glad he did."
"Why are you glad?"
"Because it was taken out of my hands. I don't want you to think that I interfere, that I put myself forward, that I suggested this arrangement about the children. If it's to be, you must understand distinctly that I and my ideas and my wishes have nothing to do with it. If I offered myself it was because I was compelled. Mr. Brodrick was at his wits' end."
("Poor dear,Idrove him there," said Jane.)
"It's put me in a very difficult position. I have to appear to be taking everything on myself, to be thrusting myself in everywhere, whereas the truth is I can only keep on" (she closed her eyes, as one dizzied with the perilous path she trod) "by ignoring myself, putting myself altogether on one side."
"Do you hate it?" Jane said softly.
"No. It's the only way. But sometimes one is foolish—one looks for a little recognition and reward——"
Jane put her hands on the other woman's shoulders and gazed into her face.
"We do recognize you," she said, "even if we don't reward you. How can we, when you've done so much?"
"My reward would be—not to be misunderstood."
"Do I misunderstand you? Doeshe?"
"Mr. Brodrick? Never."
"I, then?"
"You? I think you thought I wanted to come between you and the children."
"I never thought you wanted to come between me and anything."
Her hands that held her dropped.
"But you're right, Gertrude. I'm a brute and you're an angel."
She turned from her and left her there.
She knew that she had dealt a wound, and she was sorry for it. It was awful to see Gertrude going about the house in her flagrant secrecy. It was unbearable to Jane, Gertrude's soft-flaming, dedicated face, and that little evasive, sacred look of hers, as if she had her hand for ever on her heart, hiding her wound. It was a look that reminded Jane, and was somehow, she felt, intended to remind her, that Gertrude was pure spirit as well as pure womanhood in her too discernible emotion. Was it not spiritual to serve as she served, to spend as she spent herself, so angelically, bearing the dreadful weight of Brodrick's marriage—the consequences, so to speak, of that corporeal tie—on her winged shoulders?
She could see that Hugh looked at it in that light (as well he might) when one evening he spoke remorsefully of the amount they put on her.
A month had passed since he had given the care of his children into Gertrude's hands. She was up-stairs now superintending their disposal for the night. He and Jane were alone in a half-hour before dinner, waiting for John and Henry and the Protheros to come and dine. The house was very still. Brodrick could not have believed that it was possible, the perfection of the peace that had descended on them. He appealed to Jane. She couldn't deny that it was peace.
Jane didn't deny it. She had nothing whatever to say against an arrangement that had turned out so entirely for the children's good. She kept her secret to herself. Her secret was that she would have given all the peace and all the perfection for one scream of Hughy's and the child's arms round her neck.
"You wouldn't know," Brodrick said, "that there was a child in the house."
Jane agreed. Ah, yes, ifthatwas peace, they had it.
Well, wasn't it? After that infernal row he made? You couldn't say anything when the poor little chap was ill and couldn't help it, but you couldn't have let him cultivate screaming as a habit. It was wonderful the effect that woman had on him. He couldn't think how she did it. It was as if her mere presence in a room——
He thought that Jane was going to admit that as she had admitted everything, but as he looked at her he saw that her mouth had lifted at its winged corners, and her eyes were darting their ominous light.
"It's awful of me, I know," she said, "but her presence in a room—in the house, Hugh—makes me feel as ifIcould scream the roof off."
(He glanced uneasily at her.)
"She makes me want todothings."
"What things?" he inquired mildly.
"The things I mustn't—to break loose—to kick over the traces——"
"You don't surprise me." He smoothed his face to the expression proper to a person unsurprised, dealing imperturbably with what he had long ago foreseen.
"Sometimes I think that if Gertrude were not so good, I might be more so. You're all so good," she said. "Youare so good, so very, very good."
"I observe," said Brodrick, "a few elementary rules, as you do yourself."
"But I don't want," she said, "to observe them any more. I want to put my foot through all the rules."
The front door bell rang as the chiming clock struck eight.
"That's John," he said, "and Henry."
"Did you ever put your foot through a rule? Did John? Did Henry? Fancy John setting out on an adventure with his hair brushed like that and his spectacles on——"
They were announced. She rose to greet them. They waited. The clock with its soft silver insistence struck the quarter. It was awful, she said, to have to live with a clock that struck the quarter; and Henry shook his head at her and said, "Nerves, Jinny, nerves."
John looked at his watch. "I thought," said John, "you dined at eight."
"So did I," said Brodrick. He turned to Jane. "Your friend Prothero does not observe the rule of punctuality."
"If they won't turn up in time," said Henry, "I should dine without them."
They did dine ultimately. Prothero turned up at a quarter to nine, entering with the joint. Laura was not with him. Laura couldn't, he said, "get off."
He was innocent and unconscious of offence. They were not to bring back the soup or fish. Roast mutton was enough for him. He expected he was a bit late. He had been detained by Tanqueray. Tanqueray had just come back.
Involuntarily Brodrick looked at Jane.
Prothero had to defend her from a reiterated charge of neurosis brought against her by Henry, who observed with disapproval her rejection of roast mutton.
Over coffee and cigarettes Prothero caught him up and whirled him in a fantastic flight around his favourite subject.
There were cases, he declared, where disease was a higher sort of health. "Take," he said, "a genius with a pronounced neurosis. His body may be a precious poor medium for all ordinary purposes. But he couldn't have a more delicate, more lyrical, more perfectly adjusted instrument forhispurposes than the nervous system you call diseased."
When he had gone Henry shook off the discomfort of him with a gesture.
"I've no patience with him," he said.
"He wouldn't expect you to have any," said Jane. "But you've no idea of the patience he would have withyou."
She herself was conscious of a growing exasperation.
"I've no use for him. A man who deliberately constructs his own scheme of the universe, in defiance," said Henry, "of the facts."
"Owen couldn't construct a scheme of anything if he tried. Either he sees that it's so, or he feels that it's so, or he knows that it's so, and there's nothing more to be said. It's not a bit of good arguing with him."
"I shouldn't attempt to argue with him, any more than I should argue with a lunatic."
"You consider him a lunatic, do you?"
"I consider him a very bad neurotic."
"If you can't have genius without neurosis," said Jane, "give me neurosis. You needn't look at me like that, Henry. I know you think I've got it."
"My dear Jane——"
"You wouldn't call me your dear Jane if you didn't."
"We're wandering from the point. I think all I've ever said was that Prothero may be as great a poet, and as neurotic as you please, but he's nothing of a physiologist, nor, I should imagine, of a physician."
"There you're wrong. He did splendid work out in Africa and India. He's got as good a record as you have in your own profession. It's no use your looking as if you wished he hadn't, for he has."
"You mistake me. I am delighted to hear it. In that case, why doesn't he practise, instead of living on his wife?"
"He doesn't live on her. His journalism pays for his keep—if we're going to be as vulgar as all that."
Jinny was in revolt.
"I imagine all the same," said John, "that Prothero's wife is considerably the better man."
"She'd hate you if she knew you'd said so."
"Prothero's wife," said Henry, "is a lady for whom I have the very highest admiration. But Prothero is impossible.Im—possible."
Jane left the room.
It seemed to have struck everybody all at once that Prothero was impossible. That conviction was growing more and more upon his publishers. His poems, they assured him, were no longer worth the paper they were written on. As for his job on the "Morning Telegraph," he was aware that he held it only on sufferance, drawing a momentary and precarious income. He owed everything to Brodrick. He depended on Brodrick. He knew what manner of men these Brodricks were. Inexhaustibly kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence, implacable to continuous idiocy. Prothero they regarded as a continuous idiot.
His impossibility appeared more flagrant in the face of Laura's marvellous achievement. Laura's luck persisted (she declared) because she couldn't bear it, because it was a fantastic refinement of torture to be thrust forward this way in the full blaze, while Owen, withdrawn into the columns of the "Morning Telegraph," became increasingly obscure. It made her feel iniquitous, as if she had taken from him his high place and his praise. Of course she knew that it was nothisplace orhispraise that she had taken; degradation at the hands of her appraisers set him high. Obscurity, since it meant secrecy, was what he had desired for himself, and what she ought to have desired for him. She knew the uses of unpopularity. It kept him perfect; sacred in a way, and uncontaminated. It preserved, perpetually, the clearness of his vision. His genius was cut loose from everything extraneous. It swung in ether, solitary and pure, a crystal world, not yet breathed upon.
She would not have had it otherwise. It was through Owen's obscurity that her happiness had become so secure and so complete. It made her the unique guardian of a high and secret shrine. She had never been one who could be carried away by emotion in a crowd. The presence of her fellow-worshippers had always checked her impulse to adore. It was as much as she could do to admit two or three holy ones, Nina or Jane or Tanqueray, to a place beside her where she knelt.
As for the wretched money that he worried about, she wouldn't have liked him to have made it, if he could. An opulent poet was ridiculous, the perversion of the sublime. If one of them was to be made absurd by the possession of a large and comfortable income she preferred that it should be she.
The size of Laura's income, contrasted, as Prothero persisted in contrasting it, with her own size, was excessively absurd. Large and comfortable as it appeared to Prothero, it was not yet so large nor was it so comfortable that Laura could lie back and rest on it. She was heartrending, irritating, maddening to Prothero in her refusals to lie back on it and rest. She toiled prodigiously, incessantly, indefatigably. She implored Prothero to admit that if she was prodigious and incessant, shewasindefatigable, she never tired. There was nothing wonderful in what she did. She had caught the silly trick of it. It could be done, she assured him, standing on your head. She enjoyed doing it. The wonderful thing was that she should be paid for her enjoyment, instead of having to pay for it, like other people. He argued vainly that once you had achieved an income it was no longer necessary to set your teeth and go at it like that.
And the more he argued the more Laura laughed at him. "I can't help it," she said; "I've got the habit. You'll never break me of it, after all these years."
For the Kiddy, even in her affluence, was hounded and driven by the memory of her former poverty. She had no illusions. She had never had them; and there was nothing spectral about her fear. After all, looking at it sanely, it didn't amount to so very much, what she had made. And it wasn't really an income; it was only a little miserable capital. It had no stability. It might at any moment cease. She might have an illness, or Owen might have one; he very probably would, considering the pacehewent at it. Or the "Morning Telegraph" might throw him over. All sorts of things might happen. In her experience they generally did.
Of course, in a way Owen was right. They didn't want all the money. But what he didn't see was that you had to make ten times more than you wanted, in order to secure, ultimately, an income. And then, in the first excitement of it, she had rather launched out. To begin with, she had bought the house, to keep out the other lodgers. They were always bringing coughs and colds about the place and giving them to Owen. And she had had two rooms thrown into one so as to give Owen's long legs space to ramp up and down in. The den he had chosen had been too small for him. He was better, she thought, since he had had his great room. The house justified itself. It was reassuring to know that whatever happened they would have a roof over their heads. But it could not be denied that she had been extravagant.
And Owen had been the least shade extravagant too. He had found a poet even more unpopular, more impecunious than himself, a youth with no balance, and no power to right himself when he toppled over; and he had given him a hundred pounds in one lump sum to set him on his legs again. And on the top of that he had routed out a tipsy medical student from a slum, and "advanced him," as the medical student put it, twenty pounds to go to America with.
He had just come to her in her room where she sat toiling, and had confessed with a childlike, contrite innocence the things that he had done.
"It was a sudden impulse," he said. "I yielded to it."
"Oh, Owen dear, don't have another soon. These impulses are ruinous."
He sat down, overburdened with his crime, a heartrending spectacle to Laura.
"Well," she said, "I suppose it was worth it. It must have given you an exquisite pleasure."
"It did. That's where the iniquity comes in. It gave me an exquisite pleasure at your expense."
"Yougive me an exquisite pleasure," she said, "in everything you do."
Her lips made a sign for him to come to her, and he came and knelt at her feet and took her hands in his. He bowed his head over them and kissed them.
"Do you know what you are?" she said. "You're a divine prodigal."
"Yes," he said, kissing her, "I'm a prodigal, a dissolute, good-for-noting wastrel. I adore you and your little holy hands; but I'm not the least use to you. You ink your blessed little fingers to the bone for me, and I take your earnings and fling them away—in—in——" He grew incoherent with kissing.
"In one night's spiritual debauchery," said she. She was pleased with her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably pleased with him.
But Owen was not pleased in the very least.
"That," said he, "is precisely what I do."
He rose and stood before her, regarding her with troubled, darkening eyes. He was indeed a mark for the immortal ironies. He had struggled to support and protect her, this unspeakably dear and inconceivably small woman; he looked on her still as a sick child whom he had made well, and here he was, living on her, living on Laura. The position was incredible, abominable, but it was his.
She looked at him with deep-blue, adoring eyes, and there was a pain in her heart as she saw how thin his hands were, and how his clothes hung away from his sunken waist.
"Oh," she cried, "what a little beast I am, to make you feel like that, when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your own savings that you flung. Itwas, dear," she insisted.
"Yes, and as I've flung them, I'll have to live on you for a year at least. It all comes back to that."
"I wishyouwouldn't come back to it. Can't you see, can't you see," she implored, "how, literally, I'm living on you?"
"If you only did!"
"But I do, I do. In the real things, the things that matter. I cling and suck like a vampire. Why can't you have the courage of your opinions?"
"My opinions? I haven't any. Hence, no doubt, my lack of courage."
"Your convictions, then, whatever you call the things youdohave. You think, andIthink, that money doesn't matter. You won't even allow that it exists, and for you it doesn't exist, it can't. Well then, why make such a fuss about it? And what does it matter which of us earns it, or who spends it?"
He seemed to be considering her point. Then he put it violently from him.
"That's the argument of all the humbugs, all the consecrated hypocrites that have ever been. All the lazy, long-haired, rickety freaks and loafers who go nourishing their damned spirituality at some woman's physical expense. The thing's indecent, it's unspeakable. Those Brodricks are perfectly right."
Laura raised her head. "They? What have they got to do with you and me?"
"A good deal. They supply me with work, which they don't want me to do, in order to keep me from sponging on my wife. They are admirable men. They represent the sanity and decency of the world pronouncing judgment on the fact. No Brodrick ever blinked a fact. When people ask the Brodricks, What does that fellow Prothero do? they shrug their shoulders and say, 'He has visions, and his wife pays for them.'"
"But I don't. It's the public that pays for them. And your wife has a savage joy in making it pay. If it wasn't for that I should loathe my celebrity more than Jinny ever loathed hers. It makes me feel sillier."
"Poor little thing," said Prothero.
"Well—it's hard thatIshould have to entertain imbeciles who wouldn't readyouif they were paid."
He knew that that was the sting of it for her.
"They're all right," he said. "It's your funny little humour that they like. I like it, too."
But Laura snapped her teeth and said, "Damn! Damn my humour! Well—when they use it as a brickbat to hurl at your head."
She quoted furiously, "'While her husband still sings to deaf ears, Mrs. Prothero has found the secret of capturing her public. She has made her way straight to its heart. And the heart of Mrs. Prothero's public is unmistakably in the right place.' Oh—if Mrs. Prothero's public knew what Mrs. Prothero thinks of it. I give them what they want, do I? As if I gave it them because they want it. If they only knew why I give it, and how I'm fooling them all the time! How I make them pay—foryou! Just think, Owen, of the splendid, the diabolical irony of it!"
"So very small," he murmured, "and yet so fierce."
"Just think," she went on, "how I'm enjoying myself."
"Just think," said Prothero, "how I am not."
"Then" (she returned it triumphantly), "you're paying for my enjoyment, which is what you want."
The clock struck six. She went out of the room, and returned, bringing an overcoat which she said had grown miles too big for him. She warmed it at the fire and helped him on with it, and disappeared for a moment under its flapping wings, so large was that overcoat.
All the way to Fleet Street, Prothero, wrapped in his warm overcoat, meditated tenderly on his wife's humour.
Nothing, Tanqueray said, could be more pathetic than the Kiddy spreading her diminutive skirts before Prothero, to shelter that colossal figure.
But the Kiddy, ever since Tanqueray had known her, had refused to be pathetic; she had clenched her small fists to repel the debilitating touch of sympathy. She was always breaking loose from the hands that tried to restrain her, always facing things in spite of her terror, always plunging, armoured, indomitable, into the thick of the fight. And she had always come through somehow, unconquered, with her wounds in front. The wounds he had divined rather than seen, ever since he, in their first deplorable encounter, had stuck a knife into her. She had turned that defeat, he remembered, into a brilliant personal triumph; she had forced him to admire her; she had worn over that mark, as it were, a gay and pretty gown.
And now, again, Tanqueray was obliged to abandon his vision of her pathos. The spectacle she presented inspired awe rather and amazement; though all that she called on you to observe, at the moment, was merely an insolent exhibition of a clever imp. The Kiddy was minute, but her achievements were enormous; she was ridiculous, but she was sublime.
She sat tight, tighter than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them," was her reiterated comment on her own performances.
Tanqueray exulted over them. They all went to Prothero's profit and his peace. It was not in him to make light of her popularity, or cast it in her hilarious face. Nor could he hope to equal her own incomparable levity. She would come to him, laughing, with the tale of her absurdly soaring royalties, and he would shout with her when she cried, "The irony of it, Tanks, the delicious irony! It all goes down to his account."
"He's got another ready for them," she announced one day.
She always spoke of her husband's poems as if they were so many bombs, hurled in the face of the enemy, her public. There was nothing like the pugnacity of the Kiddy in these years of Prothero's disaster.
She came to Tanqueray one evening, the evening before publication; she came secretly, while Owen was in Fleet Street. Her eyes blazed in a premature commencement of hostilities. She had come forth, Tanqueray knew, to brave it out, to show her serenity, and the coolness of her courage on the dreadful eve.
It was impossible to blink the danger. Prothero could not possibly escape this time. He had gone, as Tanqueray said, one better than his recent best. And Laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. It looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together. Financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this indiscretion. Laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for Prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in London now who would take the risk of him. But as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they cared what was said about them.
Laura was inclined to be reticent, but Tanqueray drew her out by congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up.
"Oh," she cried, "as if I didn't know what you think of it. Me and my popularity!"
"You don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful Kiddy."
She lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not care.
"I think your popularity,andyou, my child, the most beautiful sight I've ever seen for many a long year."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"You may laugh at me," she said.
"'E isn't laughin' at you," Rose interjected. She was generally admitted to Tanqueray's conferences with Laura. She sat by the fire with her knees very wide apart, nursing Minny.
"He isn't, indeed," said Tanqueray. "He thinks you a marvellous Kiddy; and he bows his knee before your popularity. How you contrive to turn anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never will know."
"Dear me. I'm only dumping down earth for Owen's roses."
"That's what I mean. That's the miracle. Every novel you write blossoms into a splendid poem."
It was what she meant. She had never meant anything so much. It was the miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of divine transmutation, by which her work passed into Owen's and became perfect. It passed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was transmuted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. She touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage.
"I'm glad you see it as I do," she said. She had not thought that he would see.
"Of course I see it." He sat silent a moment regarding his vision; smooth-browed, close-lipped, a purified and transmuted Tanqueray.
"What do you expect," he said presently, "to happen?"
"I expect what always has happened, and worse."
"So do I. I said in the beginning that he hadn't a chance. There isn't a place for him anywhere in his own generation. He might just as well go on the Stock Exchange and try to float a company by singing to the brokers. It's a generation of brokers."
"Beasts!"
"Aunt's lodger is a broker," said Rose. "Old furniture—real—and pictures is'isline."
"Aunt's lodger, I assure you, will be thoroughly well damned if he takes any stock in Owen."
"'E 'asn't seen Mr. Prothero," said Rose, "and you'll frighten Minny if you use such language."
Tanqueray ignored the interruption. "Owen, you see, is dangerous. He regards the entire Stock Exchange as a bankrupt concern. The Stock Exchange resents the imputation and makes things dangerous for Owen. If a man will insist on belonging to all the centuries that have been, and all the centuries that will be, he's bound to have a bad time in his own. You can't have it both ways."
"I know. He knows it. We'd rather have it this way. I oughtn't to talk as if he minded, as if it could touch him where he is. It's me it hurts, not him."
"It hurts me, too, Kiddy. I can't stand it when I see the filthy curs rushing at him. They've got to be kicked into a corner. I'm prepared for them, this time."
He rose and went to his desk and returned with an article in proof which he gave to her.
"Just look through that and see if it's any good."
It was his vindication of Owen Prothero.
"Oh——"
She drew in her breath. "How youhavefought for him."
"I'm fighting for my own honour and glory, too."
He drew her attention to a passage where he called upon Heaven to forbid that he should appear to apologize for so great a man. He was only concerned with explaining why Prothero was and would remain unacceptable to a generation of brokers; which was not so much a defence of Prothero as an indictment of his generation. She would see how he had rubbed it in.
She followed, panting a little in her excitement, the admirable points he made. There, where he showed that there was no reason why this Celt should be an alien to the Saxon race. Because (her heart leaped as she followed) his genius had all the robust and virile qualities. He was not the creature of a creed, or a conviction, or a theory; neither was he a fantastic dreamer. He was a man of realities, the very type (Tanqueray had rubbed that well in) that hard-headed Englishmen adore, a surgeon, a physician, a traveller, a fighter among fighting men. He had never blinked a fact (Laura smiled as she remembered how Owen had said that that was what a Brodrick never did); he had never shirked a danger. But (Tanqueray, in a new paragraph, had plunged into the heart of his subject) on the top of it all he was a seer; a man who sawthroughthe things that other men see. And to say that he saw, that he saw through things, was the humblest and simplest statement of his case. To him the visible world was a veil worn thin by the pressure of the reality behind it; it had the translucence that belongs to it in the form of its eternity. He was in a position to judge. He had lived face to face and hand to hand with all forms of corporeal horror, and there was no mass of disease or of corruption that he did not see in its resplendent and divine transparency. It was simple and self-evident to him that the world of bodies was made so and not otherwise. It was also clear as daylight that the entire scheme of things existed solely to unfold and multiply and vary the everlasting-to-everlasting-world-without-end communion between God and the soul. To him this communion was a fact, a fact above all facts, the supremely and only interesting fact. It was so natural a thing that he sang about it as spontaneously as other poets sing about their love and their mistresses. So simple and so self-evident was it that he had called his latest and greatest poems "Transparences."
"It sounds," she said, "as if you saw what he sees."
"I don't," said Tanqueray. "I only seehim."
At that, all of a sudden, the clever imp broke down.
"George," she said, "I love you—I don't care if Rosedoeshear—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.
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'snota 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, whydidhe 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 andbelles lettresfor 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.
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——"
"Heiswhite," 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 isnocup 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 atourhair 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 hedidbelieve 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."
"Heishappy," 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 Iknowthat 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 wantyouto 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?"