On her return Jane went at once to Brodrick in his study. The editor was gloomy and perturbed. He made no response to her regrets, nor yet to her excuse that Tanqueray had kept her. Presently, after some moments of heavy silence, she learned that her absence was not the cause of his gloom. He was worried about the magazine. Levine was pestering him. When she reminded him that Louis had nothing to do with it, that she thought he was going to be kept out, he replied that that was all very well in theory; you couldn't keep him out when he'd got those infernal Jews behind him, and they were running the concern. You could buy him out, you could buy out the whole lot of them if you had the money; but, if you hadn't, where were you? It had been stipulated that the editor was to have a free hand; and up till now, as long as the thing had paid its way, his hand had been pretty free. But it wasn't paying; and Levine was insisting that the free hand was the cause of the deficit.
He did not tell her that Levine's point was that they had not bargained for his wife's hand, which was considerably freer than his own. If they were prepared to run the magazine at a financial loss they were not prepared to run it for the exclusive benefit of his wife's friends; which, Levine said, was about what it amounted to.
That was what was bothering Brodrick; for it was Jane's hand, in its freedom, that had kept the standard of the magazine so high. It had helped him to realize his expensive dream. The trouble, this time, he told her, was a tale of Nina Lempriere's.
Jane gave an excited cry at this unexpected flashing forth of her friend's name.
"What, Nina? Has she——?"
Brodrick answered, almost with anger, that she had. And Levine had put his silly foot down. He had complained that the tale was gruesome (they had set it up; it was quite a short thing); Nina's tales usually were gruesome; and Nina's price was stiff. He didn't know about the price; perhaps it was a trifle stiff; you might even say it crackled; but the tale——! Brodrick went on in the soft, even voice that was a sign with him of profound excitement—the tale was a corker. He didn't care if itwasgruesome. It was magnificent.
"More so than her last?" Jane murmured.
"Oh, miles more." He rummaged among his papers for the proofs. He'd be eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn't publish it. He wished she'd look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn't be.
She looked and admired his judgment. The tale was everything that he had said. Nina had more than found herself.
"Of course," she said, "you'll publish it."
"Of course I shall. I'm not going to knuckle under to Louis and his beastly Jews—with a chance like that. I don't care if the priceisstiff. It's a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don't get once in a hundred years. It'll send up the standard. That's of course why he funks it."
He pondered. "There's something queer about it. Whenever that woman gets away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing like this."
Jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer.
They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.
She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.
Nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane. She hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it. Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only save herself by keeping clear of her.
"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough—after that last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."
"You're the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always just ahead of me. I'm exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if I never could keep up."
"But why? There's no comparison between your pace and mine."
"It's not your pace, Jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me."
"My handicap?"
"Well—a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I've got to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart out of me."
"If I did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you thought it?"
Nina said nothing. She was thinking that it must be pretty serious if Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.
"That's what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn't any handicap. That's why I want to win."
Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions. She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said) that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time, every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.
But the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own. She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative artwasa handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.
The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.
"Does it seem to you, then, thatI've defeated my end?" Nina pressed her point home implacably.
Jane strung herself to the pain of it.
"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."
She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina's eyes.
Nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy.
It might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of Jinny to pretend that she could live surrounded and hemmed in by Brodricks and do what she had done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without encountering the vengeance of the jealous god. Nina could not suppose that Jinny's god was less jealous than George Tanqueray's or her own. And Jinny must be perpetually offending him. She recognized the righteousness of the artist in Jinny's plea to be judged only by the results. That, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. But she, Nina, was judging, like posterity, by the results. The largeness and the perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor Jinny must have been torn in pieces. Her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. She had not gone so far in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of Jinny. That was how she measured her.
It looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn't stop Jinny, any more than you could stop George Tanqueray. Jinny, if you came to think of it, had the superior impetus. George, after all, had carefully removed obstruction from his path. Jinny had taken the risk, and had swept on, reckless, regardless.
It was beautiful, her pretending not to see it; beautiful, too, her not letting you allow for it in appraising her achievement, lest it should seem somehow, to diminish yours. As if she had not said herself that the idea of rivalry was absurd.
Nina knew it. Her fear lay deeper than the idea of rivalry. She had no vision of failure in her career as long as she kept to it. The great thing was to be certain of the designs of destiny; so certain that you acquiesced. And she was certain now; she was even thankful for the hand and its scourge on her shoulders, turning her back again on to the splendid course. It marked her honourably; it was the sign and certificate of her fitness. She was aware also that, beyond the splendid course, there was no path for her. She would have been sure of herself there but that her nerves remembered how she had once swerved. She had instincts born of that experience; they kept her on the look-out for danger, for the sudden starting up of the thing that had made her swerve. What she dreaded now was some irreparable damage to her genius.
She was narrowed down to that, her bare genius. Since there was nothing else; since, as she had said long ago, she had been made to pay for it with all she had and all she might have had, she cherished it fiercely now. Her state was one of jealousy and fear, a perpetual premonition of disaster. She had tried to forget the existence of Jane's book, because Tanqueray had said it was tremendous, and she felt that, if it were as tremendous as all that, it was bound to obscure for a moment her vision of her own.
If the designs of destiny were clear, it was equally evident that her friends were bent on frustrating them. Within five minutes after Jane Brodrick had removed her disturbing presence, Nina received a telegram from Owen Prothero. He was coming to see her at five o'clock. It was now half-past four.
This was what she had dreaded more than anything. Her fear of it had kept her out of London for two years.
Owen had been considerate in notifying her of his coming. It suggested that it was open to her to escape if she did not want to see him, while it warned her not to miss him if she did. She debated the point for the half hour he had left her, and decided that she would see him.
Prothero arrived punctually to his hour. She found no change in his aspect or his manner. If he looked happy, he looked it in his own supersensual way. Marriage had not abridged his immeasurable remoteness, nor touched his incorruptible refinement.
He considered her with a medical eye, glad to see her bearing the signs of life lived freely and robustly in the open air. Her mountains, he said, evidently agreed with her.
She inquired after Laura, and was told that she would not know her. The Kiddy, he said, smiling, had grown up. She was almost plump; she had almost a colour.
"She wants to see you," he said. "She told me I was to bring you back with me."
Ages passed before she answered. "I don't think, really, Owen, that I can come."
"Why not?" he said.
She would have told him that she was too busy, but for her knowledge that with Owen lying was no good. She resented his asking her why not, when he knew perfectly well why.
"Why ever not," he repeated, "when we want you?"
She smiled. "You seem determined to get everything you want."
She had a good mind to tell him straight out, there and then, that he couldn't have everything he wanted, not with her, at any rate. He couldn't have it both ways. But you do not say these things; and if she could judge by the expression of his face what she had said had hit him hard enough.
He sheltered himself behind a semblance of irrelevance. "Laura is very fond of you."
The significance of the statement lay in its implication that he was very fond of Laura. Taken that way it was fuel heaped on to Nina's malignant fire. Under it she smouldered darkly.
"She's getting unhappy about you," he went on. "You don't want to make her unhappy, do you?"
"Did I ever want to make her unhappy?" she answered, with a flash. "And if it comes to that, why should it?"
"The Kiddy has a very tender conscience."
She saw what he meant now. He was imploring her not to put it into Laura's head that she had come between them. That would hurt Laura. His wife was never to suspect that her friend had suffered. Nina, he seemed secretly to intimate, was behaving in a manner likely to give rise to that suspicion. He must have been aware that she did it to save herself more suffering; but his point was that it didn't matter how much she suffered, provided they saved Laura. There must be no flaw in that perfect happiness.
"You mean," she said, "she won't understand it if I don't come?"
"I'm afraid I mean she will understand it if you keep on not coming. But of course you'll come. You're coming with me now."
It was the same voice that had told her three years ago that she was not coming with him, that she was going to stay and take care of Laura, because that was all that she could do for him. And as she had stayed then she went with him now, and for the same reason.
She felt, miserably, that her reluctance damned her; it proved her coarse, or at any rate not fine enough for the communion he had offered her, the fineness of which she had once accepted as the sanction of their fellowship. She must seem to him preposterous in her anxiety to break with him, to make an end of what had never been. All the same, what he was forcing on her now was the fact of separation. As they approached the house where he and Laura lived she had an increasing sense of estrangement from him and of distance.
He drew her attention to the iron gate that guarded their sanctuary, and the untrodden grass behind it. His dreams came in by that gate, and all other things by the postern door, which, he said, was the way he and she must go.
Nina paused by the gate. "It won't open, Owen."
"No. The best dreams come through the gates that never open."
"It looks as if a good south wind would bring it down."
"It will last my time," he said.
Laura received her as if Prothero were not there; as if he never had been, never would be there. She looked up from their embrace with a blue-eyed innocence that ignored him in its perfect assurance that they had kept their pledge, that nothing had ever come or would come between them.
It struck Nina that he had no grounds for his anxiety. Laura was not suffering; she was not going to suffer. She had no consciousness or conscience in the matter.
It was made clear to Nina that she was too happy for that, too much in love with Owen, too much aware that Owen was in love with her, though their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their state. They evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to themselves and their affairs. They suggested charmingly that what excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of Tanqueray, of Jane, of Nina. In her smiling protest that she no longer counted Laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. She surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and benignly from her bliss. She was not so remote, she seemed to say, but that she remembered. She knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could be. Nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. If Nina cared for the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers.
It seemed to Nina's morbid sense that Laura overdid it; that the two of them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. In every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove her on.
Nina was then aware that she hated Laura. The hatred was not active in her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress.
And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all shehadstood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand. But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coarsened a little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose, the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster. She accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. Laura saw her doing it now.
"I like your face," was her comment.
"It's more than I do," said Nina. "But I like my hands."
She began washing them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant subject. She could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. But they brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her wrist, reminding her of Owen. She was aware of the beast in her blood that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent Laura.
At the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, Laura, in her innocence, was babbling about Owen.
"He's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "He got fifteen pounds for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? Look there!"
She had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the wardrobe and laid it on the bed for Nina to admire.
"He went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. He said he thought I should look nice in it. Wasn't it clever of him to know? And who ever would have thought that he'd have cared?"
Nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when Laura had gone shabby.
"He cares so much," said Laura, "that I have to put it on every evening."
"Put it on now," said Nina.
"Shall I?" She was longing to. "No, I don't think I will."
"You must," said Nina.
Laura put it on, baring her white neck and shoulders, and turned for Nina to "fasten her up the back."
Nina had a vision of Prothero standing over the little thing, his long deft hands trembling as he performed this office.
The Kiddy, divinely unconscious, babbled on of Owen and the wonderful gown.
"Conceive," she said, "the darling going out all by himself to get it! How he knew one gown from another—how he knew the shops—what hand guided him—I can't think. It must have been his guardian angel."
"Or yours."
"Yes—when you think of the horrors he might have got."
Laura had stroked the velvet to smoothness about her waist, and now she was pulling up a fold of lace above her breasts. As she did this she looked at her own image in the glass and smiled softly, unaware. Nina saw then that her breasts were slightly and delicately rounded; she recognized the work of life, shaping Laura's womanhood; it was the last touch of the passion that had made her body the sign and symbol of its perfection. Her own breasts heaved as the wild fang pierced them.
Then, as her fingers brushed the small white back, there surged up in her a sudden virile tenderness and comprehension. She looked at Laura with Prothero's eyes, she touched her almost with Prothero's touch. There was, after all, some advantage in being made so very like a man, since it compelled her to take Prothero's view of a little woman in a mouse-coloured velvet gown.
The gown was fastened, and the Kiddy in an innocent vanity was looking over her left shoulder and admiring her mouse-coloured tail. Of a sudden she caught sight of Nina's eyes in the glass regarding her sombrely. She turned and put up her face to Nina's, and paused, wavering. She closed her eyes and felt Nina's arms about her neck, and Nina's hands touching her hair with a subtle, quick caress, charged with confession. Laura's nerves divined it. She opened her eyes and looked at Nina.
"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me."
Nina bowed her head. "Poor Kiddy, dear Kiddy," she whispered. "How could I?"
How could she?
She couldn't, even if she tried; not even afterwards, when she sat alone in that room of hers that reminded her so intolerably of Prothero. To-night it reminded her still more intolerably of her dreadful self. She had been afraid to enter it lest it should put her to the torture. It was the place where her beast had gone out and in with her. It still crouched in the corner where she had kicked it. It was an unhappy beast, but it was not cruel any more. It could have crawled to Laura's feet and licked them.
For the Kiddy was such a little thing. It was impossible to feel hatred for anything so soft and so unintentionally sweet and small. Life had been cruel enough to Laura, before Owen married her. If it came to suffering, it was not conceivable that she should have been allowed to suffer more.
Nina put it to herself, beast or no beast, if she had had the power to take Owen from the Kiddy, to make the Kiddy suffer as she had suffered, could she have done it? Could she have borne to be, really, such a beast as that? Even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own torture and the Kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? Of course she couldn't.
And since she felt like that about it, beast or no beast, wouldn't even Owen say that she was not so dreadful after all?
She remembered then that, though he had seen through her, he had never at any time admitted that she was dreadful. He had spoken rather as if, seeingthroughher, he had seen things she could not see, fine things which he declared to be the innermost truth of her.
He must have known all the time that she would feel like that when she could bring herself to see Laura.
She saw throughhimnow. That was why he had insisted on her coming. It was as if he had said to her, "I'm not thinking so tremendously of her. What I mean is that it'll be all right for you if you'll trust yourself to me; if you'll only come." He seemed to say frankly, "That beast of yours is really dreadful. It must be a great affliction to have to carry it about with you. I'll show you how to get rid of it altogether. You've only got to see her, Nina, in her heartrending innocence, wearing, if you would believe it, a mouse-coloured velvet gown."
That night Laura stood silent and thoughtful while Prothero's hands fumbled gently over the many little hooks and fastenings of the gown. She let it slide with the soft fall of its velvet from her shoulders to her feet.
"I wish," she said, "I hadn't put it on."
He stooped and kissed her where the silk down of her hair sprang from her white neck.
"Does it think," he said, "that it crushed poor Nina with its beauty?"
She shook her head. She would not tell him what she thought. But the tears in her eyes betrayed her.
It was April in a week of warm weather, of blue sky, of white clouds, and a stormy south-west wind. Brodrick's garden was sweet with dense odours of earth and sunken rain, of young grass and wallflowers thick in the borders, and with the pure smells of virgin green, of buds and branches and of lime-leaves fallen open to the sun. Outside, among the birch-trees, there was a flashing of silver stems, a shaking of green veils, and a triumphing of bright grass over the blown dust of the suburb, as the spring gave back its wildness to the Heath.
Brodrick was coming back. He had been away a fortnight, on his holiday. He was to have taken Jane with him but at the last moment she had been kept at home by some ailment of the child's. They had been married more than three years now, and they had not been separated for as many nights and days. In all his letters Brodrick had stated that he was enjoying himself immensely and could do with three months of it; and at the end of a fortnight he had sent Jane a telegram to say that he was coming back.
She was waiting for him, walking in the garden, as she used to wait for him more than three years ago, in excitement and ecstasy. The spring made her wild with the wildness of her girlhood when the white April evenings met her on her Dorset moors.
She knew again the virgin desire of desire, the poignant, incommunicable passion, when the soul knows the body's mystery and the body half divines the secret of the soul. She felt again that keen stirring of the immortal spirit in mortal sense, her veins were light, they ran fire and air, and the fine nerves aspired and adored. At moments it was as if the veils of being shook, and in their commotion all her heights and depths were ringing, reverberant to the indivisible joy.
It was so until she heard Brodrick calling to her at the gate. And at his voice her wedded blood remembered, and she came to him with the swift feet, and the flushed face uplifted, and the eyes and mouth of a bride.
Up-stairs Gertrude Collett was dressing for dinner. She looked out at her window and saw them walking up and down the long alley of the kitchen garden, like children, hand in hand.
They were late for dinner, which was the reason, Brodrick thought, why the Angel of the Dinner (as Jane called her) looked annoyed.
They were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised and elaborated for her diversion.
Gertrude was manifestly not diverted. She congratulated Brodrick on his brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a little longer. Brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer. He thought Gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would do her good. She had better take one.
"I wish you would," said Jane.
"We both," said Brodrick, "wish you would."
Gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. She got on better without them. Jane looked at Brodrick.
"I might have gone with you," she said. "After all, Baby never did have convulsions."
"I knew he wouldn't," said Brodrick, and remembered that it was Gertrude who had said he would.
A pause in the dialogue robbed Gertrude's next remark of any relevance it might have had.
"We've seen," said she, "a good deal of Mr. Tanqueray." (Another pause.) "I wonder how Mrs. Tanqueray gets on."
"I imagine," said Brodrick, "that she never did get on with him."
"I meant—without him."
"Oh." He caused the conversation to flourish round another subject.
In the drawing-room, where Gertrude did not follow them all at once, Jane turned to him.
"Hugh," she said, "was I unkind to her?"
"Unkind?"
"Well, was I kind enough?"
"You are always kind," he said.
"Do you think so? Do you really think so?"
"Don't talk about her, Jinny, I've got other things to attend to."
"What things?"
He put his arm round her and drew her to their seat beside the hearth. So drawn, so held, she looked in his face and smiled that singular smile of hers that he found so adorable and incomprehensible.
"I'm tired of being made love to. I'm going," she said, "to fling off all maidenly reserve and make love to you."
She put away his arm from her and rose and seated herself with audacity on his knees.
"The devil gets into me when I have to talk to Gertrude."
She put her arm lightly and shyly about him.
"Do you mind?" she said.
"No, Jinny, I rather like it."
Her arms tightened ever so little.
"It gives you, doesn't it, an agreeable sense of impropriety at your own fireside?"
She did something to his hair which made him look unlike himself or any Brodrick.
"Supposing," she said, "you repulse me? Could you repulse me?"
"No, Jinny; I don't think I ever could."
"What, not this outrageous hussy, flinging herself at your head, and rumpling your nice collar?"
She let him go that she might look at him and see how he really took it. He drew her and held her close to him in arms that trembled violently, while her lips brushed his with skimming, fugitive kisses, and kisses that lingered a moment in their flight.
"Do you like the way I make love?" she said. "And do you like my gown and the way I do my hair?"
His voice shook. "Jinny, why aren't you always like this? Why aren't you always adorable?"
"I can't be anything—always. Don't you adore me in my other moods?"
"Can you," said he, "adore a little devil when it teases?"
"I never tease you when you're tired."
"No, but I'm sometimes tired when you tease me. You are, darling, just a little bit exhausting for one man."
"Yes," said Jinny complacently; "I can exhaust you. But you can never, never exhaust me. There's always more where I came from."
"The trouble is, Jinny, that I can't always make you out. I never know where I am with you."
"But, my dear, think of having to live with a woman whom youhadmade out. Think of knowing exactly what she's going to do before she does it, and anticipating all her conversation!"
"Think," said he, "of living with a woman and never knowing precisely whether she's your wife or not your wife."
"But it solves all the matrimonial problems—how to be the exemplary father of a family and yet to slip the noose and be a bachelor again—how to break the seventh commandment——"
"Jinny!"
"The seventh commandment and yet be faithful to your marriage vows—how to obtain all the excitement of polygamy, all the relief of the divorce court without the bother and the scandal and the expense. Why can't you look at it in that light?"
"Perhaps, Jinny, because I'm not polygamous."
"You never know what you are until you're tried. Supposing you'd married Gertrude—you'd have had Gertrude, all there is of Gertrude, always Gertrude, and nothing but Gertrude. Could you have stood it?"
"Probably."
"You couldn't. Before you'd been married to Gertrude six months you'd have gone, howling, to the devil. Whereas with me you've got your devil at home."
His smile admitted that there was truth in what she said. She had appealed to the adventurous and lawless spirit in him, the spirit that marked his difference from his family.
She went on with her air of reasonableness and wisdom. "I am really, though you mayn't know it, the thing you need."
He saw his advantage in her mood.
"Andyou, Jinny? Don't you know that you're happiest like this?"
"Yes. I know it."
"And that when you're working like ten horses you're in misery half the time?"
"In torture." She agreed.
"And don't you know that it makes little lines come, little lines of agony on your forehead, Jinny, and purple patches under your dear eyes; and your mouth hardens."
"I know," she moaned. "I know it does. And you don't love me when I look like that?"
"I love you whatever you look like, and you know it. I love you even when you wander."
"Even? Do you mind so very much—my wandering?"
"Sometimes, perhaps, a little."
"You didn't mind at all before you married me."
"I didn't realize it then."
"Didn't realize what?"
"Your genius, Jinny, and the things it does to you."
"But you did—you did—you knew all about it."
"I knew what it meant to me."
"Whatdidit mean—to you?"
He appeared to plunge into deep memories before he answered her.
"To me it was simplythesupreme intellectual interest. It was the strongest and the strangest intellectual influence I had ever felt. You'll never quite know what it meant to me."
"And it means nothing now—you don't like it—my poor genius? And they used to say you were in love with it."
"So I was, Jinny, before I saw you."
"You were in love enough to marry it."
"I didn't marry it. It wouldn't marry me."
"Is that why you hate it? Darling, you can't hate it as much as I do."
"I don't hate it. But you can't expect me to love it as I love my wife."
"But I'm not your wife. Your wife wouldn't behave like this. Would you like me better if I didn't?"
He held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her.
"If," she said, "I was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?"
"Jinny—if Gertrude were to hear you!"
She loosened his arms and sat up and listened.
"I hear Gertrude," she said. "Darling, your hair's all any way. Let me straighten it. It might be used in evidence against us."
Gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who suspects a vision of iniquity. She took her place on the other side of the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. A thin stream of conversation flowed from Brodrick and from Jane, and under it she divined, she felt the tide that drew them.
She herself sat silent and smooth and cool. She sat like one removed from mortality's commotion. But it was as if she were listening to the blood that beat in Brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end.
At ten o'clock Jane rose and held out her hand to Gertrude. She was saying good-night. Brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. Presently he rose also and followed her with shining eyes.
Gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing.
Before long Brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him the thing he most desired. He was appeased again with the hope of fatherhood. It tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the intolerable hours that Levine was giving him in the office of the "Monthly Review." It softened for him the hard fact that he could no longer afford his expensive dream. The old, reckless, personal ambition, the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of race. He wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have more and more children like the solid little son they had called John Henry Brodrick.
The child justified the double name. The blood of the Brodricks ran in him pure. He flattered the racial and paternal pride. He grew more and more the image of what Brodrick had been at his age. It was good to think that there would be more like him. Brodrick's pride in beholding him was such that he had almost forgotten that in this question of race there would be Jane to reckon with.
In December, in the last night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell him that.
Not that he could think of it just then. He could think of nothing but Jinny pausing again, uncertain, though for a shorter time, before the dreadful open door.
Nineteen-eight was the year when everything happened. Jinny was hardly out of danger when there was a crisis in the affairs of the "Monthly Review." Levine who had been pestering his brother-in-law for the last eighteen months, was pressing him hard now. The Review was passing out of Brodrick's hands. When it came to the point he realized how unwilling he was to let it go. He could only save it by buying Levine out. And he couldn't do that. As the father of a family he had no business to risk more money on his unprofitable dream.
It was impossible to conceal from Jane the fact that he was worried. She saw it in his face. She lay awake, retarded somewhat in her recovery by the thought that she was responsible for that and all his worries. He had lost money over the Review and now he was going to lose the Review itself, owing, she could perfectly well see, to her high-handed editorship. It would go to his heart, she knew, to give it up; he had been so attached to his dream. It would go to her heart, too. It was in his dream, so to speak, that he had first met her; it had held them; they had always been happy together in his dream. It was his link with the otherwise inaccessible and intangible elements in her, the elements that made for separation. She was determined that, whatever went, his dream should not go. She could not forget that it had been she who had all but wrecked it in its first precarious year when she had planted George Tanqueray on an infatuated editor.
She had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. It wasn't for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. And it wasn't for nothing that Hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. He hadn't married her for that. And there they were, her earnings, diminished by some advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than sufficient to buy Louis out.
Her genius, after all, was a valuable asset.
She lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it.
Before she was well enough to go out she went and confronted Louis in his office.
Levine was human. He always had been; and he was moved by the sight of his pale sister-in-law, risen from her bed, dangerously, to do this thing. He was not hard on her. He suffered himself to be bought out for a sum less than she offered a sum that no more than recouped him for his losses. He didn't want, he said, to make money out of the thing, he only wanted not to lose. He was glad to be quit of it.
Brodrick was very tender to her when, lying in bed again, recovering from her rash adventure, she told him what she had done. But she divined under his tenderness an acute embarrassment; she could see that he wished she hadn't done it, and wished it not only for her sake but for his own. She could see that she had not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the glorious success of nineteen-three. The deed he thought so adorable when she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as impermissible in his wife. Then, by its sheer extravagance, it was flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it was not. As for his family, it was clear that they condemned the transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. Brodrick was not sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters of nineteen-eight.
The year was thick with them. There was Jane's collapse. Jane, by a natural perversity had chosen nineteen-eight, of all years, to write a book in. She had begun the work in the spring and had broken down with the first effort.
There was not only Jane; there was Jane's child, so lamentably unlike a Brodrick. The shedding of his first crop of hair was followed by a darker down, revealing Jane. Not that anybody could have objected to Jane's hair. But there was Jane's delicacy. An alarming tendency to waste, and an incessant, violent, inveterate screaming proclaimed him her son, the heir of an unstable nervous system.
Jane's time and what strength she had were divided between her sick child and Mabel Brodrick.
For in this dreadful year Mabel had become worse. Her malady had declared itself. There were rumours and hushed hints of a possible operation. Henry was against it; he doubted whether she would survive the shock. It was not to be thought of at present; not as long as things, he said, remained quiescent.
John Brodrick, as he waited, had grown greyer; he was gentler also and less important, less visibly the unsurprised master of the expected. The lines on his face had multiplied and softened in an expression as of wonder why this unspeakable thing should have happened to him of all men and to his wife of all women. Poor Mabel who had never done anything——
That was the way they put it now among themselves, Mabel's shortcoming. She had never done anything to deserve this misery. Lying on her couch in the square, solid house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon, Mabel covered her nullity with the imperial purple of her doom. In the family she was supreme by divine right of suffering.
Again, every day, Jane trod the path over the Heath to Wimbledon. And sometimes Henry found her at John's house and drove her back in his motor (he had a motor now). Once, boxed up with him in the closed car (it was March and the wind was cold over the Heath), she surprised him with a question.
"Henry, is it true that if Mabel had had children she'd have been all right?"
"Yes," he said curtly, wondering what on earth had made her ask him that.
"It's killing her then—not having them?"
"That," he said, "and the desire to have them."
"How cruel it is, how detestable—that she should havethis——"
"It's Nature's revenge, Jane, on herself."
"And she was so sweet, she would have loved them——"
The Doctor brooded. He had a thing to say to her.
"Jinny, if you'd put it away—altogether—that writing of yours—you'd be a different woman."
"Different?"
"You'd be happier. And, what's more, you'd be well, too. Perfectly well."
"This is not the advice I should give you," he went on, addressing her silence, "if you were an unmarried woman. I urge my unmarried patients to work—to use their brains all they can—and married ones, too, when they've no children. If poor Mabel had donesomethingit would have been far better. But in your case it's disastrous."
Jane remained silent. She herself had a premonition of disaster. Her restlessness was on her. Her nerves and blood were troubled again by the ungovernable, tyrannous impulse of her power. It was not the year she should have chosen, but because she had no choice she was working through everything, secretly, in defiance of Henry's orders. She wondered if he knew. He was looking at her keenly, as if he had at any rate a shrewd suspicion.
"I hardly think," he said, "it's fair to Hugh."
Henry was sure of his facts, and her silence made him surer. Shewasat it again, and the question was how to stop her?
The question was laid that night before the family committee. It met in the library at Moor Grange almost by Brodrick's invitation. Brodrick was worried. He had gone so far as to confess that he was worried about Jane. She wanted to write another book, he said, and he didn't know whether she was fit.
"Of course she isn't fit," said the Doctor. "It must be stopped. She must be made to give it up—altogether."
Brodrick inquired who was to make her? and was told thathewas. He must put his foot down. He should have put it down before.
But Brodrick, being a Brodrick, took an unexpected line.
"I don't know," he said slowly, "that we've any right to dictate to her. It's a big question, and I think she ought to be allowed to decide it for herself."
"She isn't fit," said Henry, "to decide anything for herself."
Brodrick sent a level look at him.
"You talk," said he, "as if she wasn't responsible."
"I should be very sorry to say who is and who isn't. Responsibility is a question of degree. I say Jane is not at the present moment in a state to decide."
"It sounds," said Brodrick, laughing in his bitterness, "very much as if you thought she wasn't sane. Of course I know she'd put a cheque for a hundred pounds into a drawer and forget all about it. But it would be more proof of insanity in Jinny if she remembered it was there."
"It would indeed," said Sophy.
"We're not discussing Jinny's talent for finance," said Henry.
"I suppose," said Brodrick, "what wearediscussing is her genius?"
"I'm not saying anything at all about her genius. We've every reason to recognize her genius and be proud of it. It's not a question of her mind. It's a question of a definite bodily condition, and as you can't separate mind from body" (he shrugged his shoulders), "well—there you are. I won't say don't let her work; it's better for her to use her brain than to let it rust. But let her use it in moderation. Moder—ation. Not those tremendous books that take it out of her."
"Are you sure they do take it out of her? Tanqueray says she'll be ill if she doesn't write 'em."
"Tanqueray? What does he know about it?"
"More than we do, I suspect. He says the normal, healthy thing for her is to write, to write tremendous books, and she'll suffer if we thwart her. He says we don't understand her."
"Does he suggest thatyoudon't understand her?" asked Sophy.
Brodrick smiled. "I think he was referring more particularly to Henry."
Henry tried to smile. "He's not a very good instance of his own theory. Look at his wife."
"That only proves that Tanqueray's books aren't good for his wife. Not that they aren't good for Tanqueray. Besides, Prothero says the same thing."
"Prothero!"
"He ought to know. He's a doctor."
Henry dismissed Prothero with a gesture.
"Look here, Hugh. It simply comes to this. Either there must be no more books or there must be no more children. You can't have both."
"There shall be no more children."
"As you like it. I don't advise it. Those books take it out of her more."
He lowered his voice.
"I consider her last book responsible for that child's delicacy."
Brodrick flinched visibly at that.
"I don't care," the Doctor went on, "what Prothero and Tanqueray say. They can't know. They don't see her. No more do you. You're out all day. I shouldn't know myself if Gertrude Collett hadn't told me."
"Oh—Gertrude Collett."
"Nobody more likely to know. She's on the spot, watching her from hour to hour."
"What did she tell you?"
"Why—that she works up-stairs, in her room—for hours—when she's supposed to be lying down. She's doing it now probably."
"Gertrude knows that for a fact?"
"A fact. And she knows it was done last year too, before the baby was born."
"AndIknow," said Brodrick fiercely, "it was not."
"Have her in," said Sophy, "and ask her."
Brodrick had her in and asked her. Gertrude gave her evidence with a gentle air of surprise that there could be any doubt as to what Mrs. Brodrick had been up to—this year, at any rate. She flushed when Brodrick confronted her with his certainty as to last year. She could not, in the face of Brodrick's certainty, speak positively as to last year.
She withdrew herself hastily, as from an unpleasant position, and was followed by Sophy Levine.
"There's nothing for it," said Henry, "but to tell her."
"About the child?"
"About the child."
There was a terrible pause.
"Will you tell her," said Brodrick, "or shall I?"
"I'll tell her. I'll tell her now. But you must back me up."
Brodrick fetched Jane. He had found her as Gertrude had said. She was heavy-eyed, and dazed with the embraces of her dream. But when she saw the look that passed between Hugh and Henry her face was one white fear. The two were about to arraign her. She took the chair that Henry held for her.
Then he told her. And Brodrick backed him up with silence and a face averted.
It was not until Henry had left them together that he spoke to her.
"Don't take it so hardly, Jinny," he said. "It's not as if you knew."
"I might have known," she answered.
She was thinking, "George told me that I should have to pay—that there'd be no end to my paying."
The Brodricks—Hugh—Henry—all of them—stood justified. There was, indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their attitude. She could not say that they had let her off easily. She knew (and they had taken care that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing.
That was it. They regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. It was a power in the highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. They refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin against the family, the race.
And she had been warned often enough. They had always told her that she would have to pay for it.
But now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the expected, they said no more. They assumed no airs of successful prophecy. They were sorry for her. They gathered about her when the day of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that she should have to pay. She knew that as long as she paid they would stand by her.
More than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a sheltering and protecting wall.
She was almost unaware how close they were to her. It seemed to her that she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. Her sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living body of the child. Her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. She traced her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and bloodless veins.
There was an exaltation in her anguish. Her tenderness, shot with pain, was indistinguishable from a joy of sense. She went surrendered and subdued to suffering; she embraced passionately her pain. It appeased her desire for expiation.
They needn't have rubbed it into her so hard that it was her sin. If she could have doubted it there was the other child to prove it. John Henry Brodrick stood solid and sane, a Brodrick of the Brodricks, rosy and round with nourishment, not a nerve, Henry said, in his composition, and the stomach of a young ostrich. It was in little Hugh's little stomach and his nerves that the mischief lay. The screaming, Henry told her, was a nervous system. It was awful that a baby should have nerves.
Henry hardly thought that she would rear him. He didn't rub that in, he was much too tender. He replied to her agonized questioning that, yes, it might be possible, with infinite precaution and incessant care. With incessant care and infinite precaution she tended him. She had him night and day. She washed and dressed him; she prepared his food and fed him with her own hands. It was with a pang, piercing her fatigue, that she gave him to the nurse to watch for the two hours in the afternoon when she slept. For she had bad nights with him because of the screaming.
Brodrick had had bad nights, too. It had got on his nerves, and his digestion suffered. Jane made him sleep in a room at the other end of the house where he couldn't hear the screaming. He went unwillingly, and with a sense of cowardice and shame. He couldn't think how Jinny could stand it withhernerves.
She stood it somehow, in her passion for the child. It was her heart, not her nerves, that his screams lacerated. Beyond her heavy-eyed fatigue she showed no signs of strain. Henry acknowledged in her that great quality of the nervous temperament, the power of rising high-strung to an emergency. He intimated that he rejoiced to see her on the right track, substituting for the unhealthy excesses of the brain the normal, wholesome life of motherhood. He was not sure now that he pitied her. He was sorrier, ten times sorrier, for his brother Hugh.
Gertrude Collett agreed with the Doctor. She insisted that it was Brodrick and not Jane who suffered. Gertrude was in a position to know. She hinted that nobody but she really did know. She saw more of him than any of his family. She saw more of him than Jane. Brodrick's suffering was Gertrude's opportunity, the open, consecrated door where she entered soft-footed, angelic, with a barely perceptible motion of her ministrant wings. Circumstances restored the old intimate relation. Brodrick was worried about his digestion; he was afraid he was breaking up altogether, and Gertrude's solicitude confirmed him in his fear. Under its influence and Gertrude's the editor spent less and less of his time in Fleet Street. He found, as he had found before, that a great part of his work could be done more comfortably at home. He found, too, that he required more than ever the co-operation of a secretary. The increased efficiency of Addy Ranger made her permanent and invaluable in Fleet Street. Jane's preoccupation had removed her altogether from the affairs of the "Monthly Review." Inevitably Gertrude slid into her former place.
She had more of Brodrick now than she had ever had; she had more of the best of him. She was associated with his ambition and his dream. Now that Jane's hand was not there to support it, Brodrick's dream had begun to sink a little, it was lowering itself almost to Gertrude's reach. She could touch it on tiptoe, straining. She commiserated Jane on her exclusion from the editor's adventures and excitements, his untiring pursuit of the young talents (his scent for them was not quite so infallible as it had been), his curious or glorious finds. Jane smiled at her under her tired eyes. She was glad that he was not alone in his dream, that he had some one, if it was only Gertrude.
For, by an irony that no Brodrick could possibly have foreseen, Jane's child separated her from her husband more than her genius had ever done. Her motherhood had the fierce ardour and concentration of the disastrous power. It was as if her genius had changed its channel and direction, and had its impulse bent on giving life to the half-living body. Nothing else mattered. She could not have travelled farther from Brodrick in her widest, wildest wanderings. The very hours conspired against them. Jane had to sleep in the afternoon, to make up for bad nights. Brodrick was apt to sleep in the evenings, after dinner, when Jane revived a little and was free.
The year passed and she triumphed. The little half-living body had quickened. The child, Henry said, would live; he might even be fairly strong. His food nourished him. He was gaining weight and substance. Jane was to be congratulated on her work which was nothing short of a miracle.Herwork;hermiracle; Henry admitted it was that. He had had to stand by and do nothing. He couldn't work miracles. But if Jane had relaxed her care for a moment there was no miracle that could have saved the child.
To Jane itwasa miracle. It was as if her folding arms had been his antenatal hiding-place; as if she had brought him forth with anguish a second time.
She would not have admitted that she loved him more than his brother. Jacky was as good as gold; but he was good with Gertrude and happy with Gertrude. The baby was neither good nor happy with anybody but Jane. Between her and the little twice-born son there was an unbreakable tie. He attached himself to his mother with a painful, pitiful passion. Out of her sight he languished. He had grown into her arms. Every time he was taken from them it was a rending of flesh from tender flesh.
His attachment grew with his strength, and she was more captured and more chained than ever. He "had" her, as Tanqueray would have said, at every turn. Frances and Sophy, the wise maternal women, shook their heads in their wisdom; and Jane smiled in hers. She was wiser than any of them. She had become pure womanhood, she said, like Gertrude. She defied Gertrude's womanhood to produce a superior purity.
Brodrick had accepted the fact without astonishment. The instinct of paternity was strong in him. Once married to Jane her genius had become of secondary importance. The important thing was that she was his wife; and even that was not so important as it had been. Only last year he had told her, jesting, that he never knew whether she was his wife or not. He hardly knew now (they saw so little of each other); but he did know that she was the mother of his children.
In the extremity of her anguish Jane had not observed this change in Brodrick's attitude. But now she had leisure to observe. What struck her first was the way Gertrude Collett had come out. It was in proportion as she herself had become sunk in her maternal functions that Gertrude had emerged. She was amazed at the extent to which a soft-feathered angel, innocent, heaven knew, of the literary taint, could constitute herself a great editor's intellectual companion. But Gertrude's intellect retained the quality of Gertrude. In all its manifestations it was soothing and serene. And there was not too much of it—never any more than a tired and slightly deteriorated editor could stand.
Jane had observed (pitifully) the deterioration and the tiredness. A falling off in the high fineness of the "Monthly Review" showed that Brodrick was losing his perfect, his infallible scent. The tiredness she judged to be the cause of the deterioration. Presently, when she was free to take some of his work off his shoulders, he would revive. Meanwhile she was glad that he could find refreshment in his increased communion with Gertrude. She knew that he would sleep well after it. And so long as he could sleep——
She said to herself that she had done Gertrude an injustice. She was wrong in supposing that if Hugh had been married to their angel he would have tired of her, or that he would ever have had too much of her. You couldn't have too much of Gertrude, for there was, after all, so very little to have. Or else she measured herself discreetly, never giving him any more than he could stand.
But Gertrude's discretion could not disguise from Jane the fact of her ascendency. She owed it to her very self-restraint, her amazing moderation. And, after all, what was it but the power, developed with opportunity, of doing for Brodrick whatever it was that Jane at the moment could not do? When Jane shut her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if Gertrude were not there, she found herself inquiring with dismay why, whatever would he do without her? What would she do herself? It was Gertrude who kept them all together. She ran the house noiselessly on greased wheels, she smoothed all Brodrick's rose-leaves as fast as Jane crumpled them. Without Gertrude there would be no peace.
Before long Jane had an opportunity of observing the fine height to which Gertrudecouldascend. It was at a luncheon party that they gave, by way of celebrating Jane's return to the social life. The Herons were there, the young people, who had been asked without their mother, to celebrate Winny's long skirts; they and the Protheros and Caro Bickersteth. Jane was not sure that she wanted them to come. She was afraid of any disturbance in the tranquil depths of her renunciation.
Laura said afterwards that she hardly knew how they had sat through that luncheon. It was not that Jinny wasn't there and Brodrick was. The awful thing was that both were so lamentably altered. Brodrick was no longer the enthusiastic editor, gathering around him the brilliant circle of the talents; he was the absorbed, depressed and ponderous man of business. It was as if some spirit that had breathed on him, sustaining him, lightening his incipient heaviness, had been removed. Jinny sat opposite him, a pale Mater Dolorosa. Her face, even when she talked to you, had an intent, remote expression, as if through it all she were listening for her child's cry. She was silent for the most part, passive in Prothero's hands. She sat unnoticed and effaced; only from time to time the young girl, Winny Heron, sent her a look from soft eyes that adored her.
On the background of Jane's silence and effacement nothing stood out except Gertrude Collett.
Prothero, who had his hostess on his right hand, had inquired as to the ultimate fate of the "Monthly Review." Jane referred him to Miss Collett on his left. Miss Collett knew more about the Review than she did.
Gertrude flushed through all her faded fairness at Prothero's appeal.
"Don't you know," said she, "that it's in Mr. Brodrick's hands entirely now?"
Prothero did know. That was why he asked. He turned to Jane again. He was afraid, he said, that the Review, in Brodrick's hands, would be too good to live.
"Isit too good to live, Gertrude?" said she.
Gertrude looked at Brodrick as if she thought thathewas.
"I don't think Mr. Brodrick will let it die," she said. "If he takes a thing up you can trust him to carry it through. He can fight for his own. He's a born fighter."
Down at her end of the table beside Brodrick, Laura listened.
"It has been a bit of a struggle, I imagine, up till now," said Prothero to Jane.
"Up till now" (it was Gertrude who answered) "his hands have been tied. But now it's absolutely his own thing. He has realized his dream."
If she had seen Prothero's eyes she would have been reminded that Brodrick's dream had been realized for him by his wife. She saw nothing but Brodrick. For Gertrude the "Monthly Review"wasBrodrick.
She drew him for Prothero's benefit as the champion of the lost cause of literature. She framed the portrait as it were in a golden laurel wreath.
Eddy Heron cried, "Hear, hear!" and "Go it, Gertrude!" and Winny wanted to know if her uncle's ears weren't tingling. She was told that an editor's ears were past tingling. But he flushed slightly when Gertrude crowned herself and him. They were all listening to her now.
"I assure you," she was saying, "weare not afraid."
She was one with Brodrick, his interests and his dream.
She was congratulated (by Jane) on her championship of the champion, and Brodrick was heard murmuring something to the effect that nobody need be frightened; they were safe enough.
It struck Laura that Brodrick looked singularly unsatisfied for a man who has realized his dream.
"All the same," said Prothero, "it was rash of you to take those poems I sent you."
"Dear Owen," said Jane, "do you think they'll sink him?"
"As far as that goes," Brodrick said, "we're going to have a novel of George Tanqueray's. That'll show you what we can afford."
"Or what George can afford," said Jane. It was the first spark she had emitted. But it consumed the heavy subject.
"By the way," said Caro Bickersteth, "whereisGeorge Tanqueray?"
Laura said that he was somewhere in the country. He was always in the country now.
"Without his wife," said Caro, and nobody contradicted her. She went on.
"You great geniuses ought not to marry, any more than lunatics. The law ought to provide for it. Genius, in either party, if you can establish the fact, should annul the contract, like—like any other crucial disability."
"Or," Jane amended, "why not make the marriage of geniuses a criminal act, like suicide? You can always acquit them afterwards on the ground of temporary insanity."
"How would you deal," said Brodrick suddenly, "with mixed marriages?"
"Mixed——?" Caro feigned bewilderment.
"When a norm—an ordinary—person marries a genius? It's a racial difference."
("Distinctly," Caro murmured.)
"And wouldn't it be hard to say which side the lunacy was on?"
Laura would have suspected him of a bitter personal intention had it not been so clear that Jinny's genius was no longer in question, that her flame was quenched.
It was Caro who asked (in the drawing-room, afterwards) if they might see the children.
Gertrude went up-stairs to fetch them. Eddy Heron watched her softly retreating figure, and smiled and spoke.
"I say, Gee-Gee's going strong, isn't she?"
Everybody affected not to hear him, and the youth went on smiling to his unappreciated self.
Gertrude appeared again presently, bringing the children. On the very threshold little Hugh struggled in her arms and tried to hurl himself on his mother. His object attained, he turned his back on everybody and hung his head over Jane's shoulder.
But little John Henry was admirably behaved. He wandered from guest to guest, shaking hands, in his solemn urbanity, with each. He looked already absurdly unastonished and important. He was not so much his father's son as the son of all the Brodricks. As for little Hugh, it was easy enough, Prothero said, to see whose sonhewas. And Winny Heron cried out in an ecstasy that he was going to be a genius, she was sure of it.
"Heaven forbid," said Brodrick. Everybody heard him.
"Oh, Uncle Hughy, if he was like Jin-Jin!" Allurement and tender reproach mingled in Winny's tone.
She turned to Jane with eyes that adored and loved and defended her. "I wish you'd have dozens of babies—darlings—like yourself."
"And I wish," said Eddy, "she'd have dozens of books like her last one."
Eddy was standing, very straight and tall, on his uncle's hearth. His chin, which was nothing if not determined, was thrust upwards and outwards over his irreproachable high collar. Everybody looked at Eddy as he spoke.
"What I want to know is why she doesn't have them? What have you all been doing to her? What haveyoubeen doing to her, Uncle Hughy?"
He looked round on all of them with the challenge of his young eyes.
"It's all very well, you know, but I agree with Miss Bickersteth. If you're a genius you've no business to marry—I mean nobody's any business to marry you."