She looked round the room, apparently recognizing with resentment the scene of Tanqueray's perpetual infidelity.
"But," said Jane, "he'd be away as much if he was in business."
"'Ef 'E was in business there'd be the evenin's to look forward to. And there'd be 'is Saturdays and Sundays. As it is, wot is there for her to look forward to?"
"At any rate she knows he's there."
"It's knowin' that 'E's there wot does it. It's not as if she 'ad a 'ouse to look after, or a little baby to take 'er mind orf of 'im."
"No, it isn't."
A sound of yapping came faintly up from the ground-floor.
"That's Joey," said Mrs. Eldred tearfully, "'er Pom as she was so fond of. I've brought 'im. And I've brought Minny too."
"Minny?" Jane had not heard of Minny.
"The cat, miss. They'll keep 'er company. It's but right as she should 'ave them."
Jane assented warmly that it was but right.
"It's not," Mrs. Eldred continued, "as if she came reg'lar, say once in a week, to see 'er uncle and me. She'll go to Camden Town and set with that poor old Mr. Gunning. Give Rose any one that's ill. But wot is thatbutsettin'? And now, you see, with settin' she's ill. It's all very well when you're brought up to it, but she isn't. Rose'd be well if she 'ad a 'ouse and did the work in it. And 'E won't let 'er 'ave it. 'E won't 'ear of 'er workin', 'E says."
"Well, naturally, he wouldn't like to see his wife working."
"Then, miss, 'E should 'ave married a lady 'as wouldn't want to work. That's wot 'E should have done. We were always against it from the first, 'er uncle and me was. But they was set, bein' young-like."
Mrs. Eldred's voice ceased suddenly as Tanqueray entered. Jane abstained from all observation of their greeting. She was aware of an unnatural suavity in Tanqueray's manner. He carried it so far as to escort Mrs. Eldred all the way down to the ground-floor sitting-room where Rose was.
He returned with considerable impetus to Jane.
"Well, Jinny, so you've seen my aunt-in-law?"
"I have," said Jinny contumaciously, "and I like her."
"What do you think? She's brought a dog on a chain and a beast of a cat in a basket."
Jinny abstained from sympathy, and Tanqueray grew grave.
"I wish I knew what was the matter with Rose," he said. "She doesn't seem to get much better. The doctor swears it's only liver; but he's a silly ass."
"Tanks, there's nothing the matter really, except—the poor little bird wants to build its nest. It wants sticks and straws and feathers and things——"
"Do you mean I've got to go and find a beastly house?"
"Let her go and find it."
"I would in a minute—only I'm so hard up."
"Of course you'll be hard up if you go on living in rooms like this."
"That's what she says. But when she talks about a house she means that she'll do all the work in it."
"Why not?" said Jane.
"Why not? I married her because I wasn't going to have her worked to death in that damned lodging-house of her uncle's."
"You married her because you loved her," said Jane quietly.
"Well—of course. And I'm not going to let my wife cook my dinner and make my bed and empty my slops. How can I?"
"She'll die if you don't, George."
"Die?"
"She'll get horribly ill. She's ill now because she can't run about and sweep and dust and cook dinners. She's dying for love of all the beautiful things you won't let her have—pots and pans and carpet-sweepers and besoms. You don't want her to die of an unhappy passion for a besom?"
"I don't want to see her with a besom."
Jane pleaded. "She'd look so pretty with it, George. Just think how pretty she'd look in a little house, playing with a carpet-sweeper."
"On her knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor——"
"You'd have a woman in to scrub."
"Carrying the coals?"
"You'dcarry the coals, George."
"By Jove, I never thought of that. I suppose I could." He pondered.
"You see," he said, "she wants to live at Hampstead."
"You can't cut her off from her own people."
"I'm not cutting her off. She goes to see them."
"She'll go to see them if you live at Hampstead. If you live here they'll come and see you. For she'll be ill and they'll have to."
Tanqueray looked at her, not without admiration.
"Jinny, you're ten times cleverer than I."
"In some things, Tanks, I am. And so is that wife of yours."
"She's—very sensible. I suppose it's sensible to be in love with a carpet-sweeper."
She shook her head at him.
"Much more sensible than being in love withyou."
His eyes evaded her. She rose.
"Oh, Tanks, you goose. Can't you see that it's you she's in love with—and that's why shemusthave a carpet-sweeper?"
With that she left him.
He followed her to the doorstep where he turned abruptly from her departure.
Rose in the sitting-room was kneeling by the hearth where she had just set a saucer of milk. With one hand she was loosening very gently from her shoulder the claws of Minny, the cat, who clung to her breast, scrambling, with the passion and desperation of his kind. Her other hand restrained with a soft caressing movement Joey's approaches to the saucer. Joey, though trembling with excitement, sat fascinated, obedient to her gesture. Joey was puny and hairless as ever, but in Rose's face as she looked at him there was a flush of maternal tenderness and gravity. A slightly sallow tinge under its sudden bloom told how Rose had suffered from the sedentary life.
All this Tanqueray saw as he entered. It held him on the threshold, unmoved by the rushing assault and lacerating bark of the little dog, who resented his intrusion.
Rose got up and came to him, lifting a frightened, pleading face.
"Oh, George," she said, "don't make me send them away. Let me keep them."
"I suppose you must keep them if you want them."
"I never said I wanted them. Auntwouldbring them. She thought they'd be something to occupy my mind, like."
Tanqueray smiled, in spite of his gentleness, at the absurd idea of Rose having a mind.
Rose made a little sound in her throat like a laugh. She had not laughed, she had hardly smiled, for many months now.
"The doctor—'e's fair pleased. 'E says I'll 'ave to go out walkin' now, for Joey's sake."
"Poor Joey."
He stooped and stroked the little animal, who stood on ridiculous hind-legs, straining to lick his hand.
"His hair doesn't come on, Rose——"
"It hasn't been brushed proper. You should brush a Pom's 'air backwards——"
"Of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. He can bark all right, anyhow. There's nothing wrong with his lungs."
"He won't bark at you no more, now he knows you."
She leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized Minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. Minny was not beautiful.
"It's Minny," she said. "You used to like Minny."
It struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child at her breast. She saw his look and smiled up at him.
"I may keep him, too?"
At that he kissed her.
By the end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him like this and destroyed his peace.
It wasn't the idea of the house. The house was bad enough; the house indeed was abominable. It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and pressure of life.
It was all very well for Prothero to talk. His genius was safe, it was indestructible. It had the immunity of the transcendent. It worked, not in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. Whatever Prothero did it remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. Prothero could afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. He, Tanqueray, could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. To immerse himself was suicidal; it was the dyer plunging into his own vat.
Because his genius was a thing of flesh and blood, flesh and blood was the danger always at its threshold, the enemy in its house. For the same reason it was sufficient to itself. It fulfilled the functions, it enjoyed the excitements and the satisfactions of sense. It reproduced reality so infallibly, so solidly, so completely, that it took reality's place; it made him unconscious of his wife's existence and of the things that went on beneath him in the ground-floor sitting-room.
Yet he was not and had never been indifferent to life itself. He approached it, not with precaution or prejudice or any cold discretion, but with the supreme restraint of passion on guard against its own violence. If he had given himself to it, what a grip it would have had on him, what a terrible, destructive grip; if, say, he had found his mate; if he had married a woman, who, exulting in life, would have drawn him into it.
Rose had not drawn him in. She had done nothing assailing and destructive. She was, in some respects, the most admirable wife a man bent on solitude could have selected. The little thing had never got in his way. She was no longer disturbing to the intellect, nor agitating to the heart; and she satisfied, sufficiently, the infrequent craving of his senses. Up till now he would hardly have known that he was married; it had been so easy to ignore her.
But to-day she had been forced on his attention. The truth about Rose had been presented to him very plainly and boldly by Prothero, by the doctor, by Mrs. Eldred and by Jane. It was the same naked truth that in his novels he himself presented with the utmost plainness and boldness to the British public. His genius knew no other law but truth to Nature, trust in Nature, unbroken fidelity to Nature. And now it was Nature that arraigned his genius for its frustration of her purposes in Rose. His genius had made Rose the victim of its own incessant, inextinguishable lust and impulse to create.
Eleven o'clock struck and he had not written a line. Through his window he heard the front door open and Rose's little feet on the pavement, and Rose's voice calling into the darkness her old call, "Puss—Puss—Puss. Minny—Min—Min—Minny. Puss—Puss—Puss."
He sighed. He had realized for the first time that he was married.
Nina kept her promise, although Prothero protested that he saw no reason why he should be taken to see Laura Gunning. He was told that he need not be afraid of Laura. She was too small, Nina said, to do him any harm. Refusing to go and see Laura was like refusing to go and see a sick child. Ultimately, with extreme unwillingness, he consented.
Laura was the poorest of them all, and she lived on a top-floor in Albert Street, Camden Town, under desperate restrictions of time and space. For she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of Laura's family was that it was always there. She spoke of it briefly as Papa.
It was four years now since Mr. Gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy; for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them.
And yet Laura was cruel to her small genius. It was delicate, and she drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. She would turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. It had not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. But it was threatened. They were beginning, Nina said, to wonder how long Laura would hold out.
It was not Poverty that had wrecked her. She could bear that. Poverty had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test, justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. She rejoiced in her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing. For there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, Papa would not have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in Camden Town.
It was May and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity. There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window. There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of the fireplace next the window. On the other, the dark side, was Laura's writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. Another book-shelf faced the fireplace. That was all.
Here, for three years, Laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and hardly ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair.
Some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or spiritual squalor. Ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret. Prothero, coming into Laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof, drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to cling.
Laura was at home. She was writing, snatching at the few golden moments of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the old man dozed by the fireside. From time to time she glanced at him, and then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching, an immovable, perpetual fear.
Prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy, childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat, slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment before Laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder.
He took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the fragile thing.
He knew what Nina had meant when she said that he need not be afraid of her, that she couldn't do him any harm.
He saw a mere slender slip of a body, a virginal body, straight-clad; the body and the face of a white child. Her almost rudimentary features cast no shade; her lips had kept the soft, low curve of their childhood, their colourless curl flattened against her still, white face. He saw all that, and he saw the sleeping tenderness in her eyes; deep-down it slept, under dark blue veils. Her eyes made him forgive her forehead, the only thing about her which was not absurdly small.
And of all this he was afraid, afraid for the wonder and mystery it evoked in him. He saw that Nina watched him and that she was aware of his fear.
She was dangerously, uncontrollably aware of it, and aware of her own folly in bringing him to Laura against his judgment and his will. She might have known that for him there would be a charm, a perfection in her very immaturity, that she would have for him all the appealing, pathetic beauty of her type. For him, Nina, watching with a fierce concentration, saw that she was virginity reduced to its last and most exquisite simplicity.
They had said nothing to each other. Laura, in the wonderful hour of his coming, could find nothing to say to him. He noticed that she and Nina talked in low, rapid voices, as if they feared that at any moment the old man might awake.
Then Laura arose and began to get tea ready, moving very softly in her fear.
"You'd better let me cut the bread and butter," said Prothero.
Laura let him.
Nina heard them talking over the bread and butter while Laura made the tea. She saw that his eyes did not follow her about the room, but that they rested on her when she was not looking.
"You were hard at work when we came," he was saying.
Laura denied it.
"If I may say so, you look as if you'd been at it far too long."
"No. I'm never at it long enough. The bother is getting back to where you were half-an-hour ago. It seems to take up most of the time."
"Then I oughtn't—ought I—to take up any of it?"
"Oh, please," said Laura, "take it.Ican't do anything with it."
She had the air of offering it to him like bread and butter on a plate.
"Time," she said, "is about all we've got here. At any rate there will be time for tea." She examined the cupboard. "It looks as if time were about all we were going to have for tea." She explored the ultimate depth of the cupboard. "I wonder if I could find some jam. Do you like jam?"
"I adore it."
That was all they said.
"Need you," said Nina to Prothero, "spread the butter quite so thick?" Even in her agony she wondered how much, at the rate he was spreading it, would be left for the Kiddy's supper.
"He shall spread it," said the Kiddy superbly, "as thick as ever he likes."
They called Nina to the table. She ate and drank; but Laura's tea scalded her; Laura's bread and butter choked her; she sickened at it; and when she tried to talk her voice went dry in her throat.
And in his chair by the fireside, the old man dropped from torpor to torpor, apart and unaware of them. When he waked they would have to go.
"Do you think," said Laura, "I'd better wake Papa?"
That was a question which this decided little person had never been able to decide for herself. It was too momentous.
"No," said Nina, "I think you'd better not."
It was then that Mr. Gunning waked himself, violently; starting and staring, his pale eyes round with terror; for his sunstroke had made him dream dreams.
Laura gave an inarticulate murmur of compassion. She knelt by him, and held his hands in hers and stroked them.
"What is it, Papa dear, have you had a little dream? Poor darling," she said, "he has such horrid ones."
Mr. Gunning looked about him, still alarmed, still surrounded as in his dream, by appalling presences. He was a little man, with a weak, handsome face, worn and dragged by emotion.
"What's all this? What's all this?" he reiterated, until out of the throng of presences he distinguished dimly a woman's form. He smiled at it. He was almost wide awake now.
"Is it Rose?" he said.
"No, Papa. It's Nina."
Mr. Gunning became dejected. If it had been Rose she would have sat beside him and talked to him a little while.
He was perfectly wide awake now; he had seen Prothero; and the sight of Prothero revived in him his one idea. His idea was that every man who saw Laura would want to pick the little thing up and carry her away from him. He was haunted by the fear of losing Laura. He had lost everything he had and had forgotten it; but a faint memory of disaster persisted in his idea.
"What are you going to do with my little girl?" he said. "You're not going to take her away? I won't have that. I won't have that."
"Isn't he funny?" said Laura, unabashed. And from where she knelt, there on the verge of her terror, she looked up at the young man and laughed. She laughed lest Prothero should feel uncomfortable.
Nina had risen for departure, and with a slow, reluctant movement of his long body, Prothero rose too. Nina could have sworn that almost he bowed his head over Laura's hand.
"May I come and see you again some day?" he said. And she said she would be very glad.
That was all.
Outside in the little dull street he turned to Nina.
"It wasn't fair, Nina; you didn't tell me I was going to have my heart wrung."
"How could I know," she said fiercely, "what would wring your heart?"
He looked away lest he should seem to see what was in her.
But she knew he saw.
Three weeks passed. Prothero had been four times to see Miss Gunning. He had been once because she said he might come again; once because of a book he had promised to lend her; once because he happened to be passing; and once for no reason whatsoever. It was then borne in on him that what he required was a pretext. Calling late one evening he caught Miss Gunning in the incredible double act of flinging off a paragraph for the papers while she talked to Mr. Gunning.
His pretext, heaven-sent, unmistakable, stared him in the face. He could not write paragraphs for the papers (they wouldn't take his paragraphs), but he could talk to Mr. Gunning. It was not so difficult as he would have at first supposed. He had already learnt the trick of it. You took a chair. You made a statement. Any statement would do. You had only to say to Mr. Gunning, "Isn't that so?" and he would bow and assure you, with a solemn courtesy, that it was, and sit up waiting patiently for you to do it again; and you went on talking to Miss Gunning until he showed signs of restlessness. When you had done this several times running he would sink back in his chair appeased. But Prothero had discovered that if you concentrated your attention on Mr. Gunning, if you exposed him to a steady stream of statements, he invariably went to sleep; and while he slept Laura wrote.
And while Laura wrote, Owen could keep on looking at her as much as he liked.
From where he sat his half-closed eyes could take in rather more than a side view of Laura. He could see her head as it bent and turned over her work, showing, now the two low waves of its dark hair, now the flat coils at the back that took the beautiful curve of Laura's head. From time to time she would look up at him and smile, and he would smile back again under his eyelids with a faint quiver of his moustache.
And Laura said to herself, "He is rather ugly, but I like him."
It was not odd that she should like him; but what struck her as amazing was the peace that in his presence settled on Papa. Once he had got over the first shock of his appearance, it soothed Mr. Gunning to see Prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. It established him in the illusion of continued opulence, for Mr. Gunning was not aware of the things that had happened to him four years ago. But there had been lapses and vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. In the days of opulence people had come to see him; now they only came to see Laura. They were always the same people, Miss Holland and Miss Lempriere and Mr. Tanqueray. They did no positive violence to the illusion; in their way they ministered to it. They took their place among the company of brilliant and indifferent strangers whom he had once entertained with cold ceremony and a high and distant courtesy. They stayed for a short time by his chair, they drifted from it into remote corners of the room, they existed only for each other and for Laura. Thus one half of his dream remained incomprehensible to Mr. Gunning. He did not really know these people.
But he knew Mr. Prothero, who took a chair beside him and stayed an hour and smoked a pipe with him. He had known him intimately and for a long time. His figure filled the dark and empty places in the illusion, and made it warm, tangible and complete. And because the vanished smokers, the comrades of the days of opulence, had paid hardly any attention to Laura, therefore Mr. Gunning's mind ceased to connect Prothero with his formidable idea.
Laura, who had once laughed at it, was growing curiously sensitive to the idea. She waited for it in dreadful pauses of the conversation; she sat shivering with the expectation of its coming. Sooner or later it would come, and when it did come Papa would ask Mr. Prothero his intentions, and Mr. Prothero, having of course no intentions, would go away and never have anything to do with them again.
Prothero had not yet asked himself his intentions or even wondered what he was there for, since, as it seemed, it was not to talk to Laura. There had been opportunities, moments, pauses in the endless procession of paragraphs, when he had tried to draw Laura out; but Laura was not to be drawn. She had a perfect genius for retreating, vanishing from him backwards, keeping her innocent face towards him all the time, but backing, backing into her beloved obscurity. He felt that there were things behind her that forbade him to pursue.
Of the enchantment that had drawn her in the beginning, she had not said a word. When it came to that they were both silent, as by a secret understanding and consent. They were both aware of his genius as a thing that was and was not his, a thing perpetually present with them but incommunicable, the very heart of their silence.
One evening, calling about nine o'clock, he found her alone. She told him that Papa was very tired and had gone to bed. "It is very good of you," she said, "to come and sit with him."
Prothero smiled quietly. "May I sit withyounow?"
"Please do."
They sat by the fireside, for even in mid-June the night was chilly. A few scattered ashes showed at the lowest bar of the grate. Laura had raked out the fire that had been lit to warm her father.
Papa, she explained, was not always as Mr. Prothero saw him now. His illness came from a sunstroke.
He said, yes; he had seen cases like that in India.
"Then, do you think——"
She paused, lest she should seem to be asking for a professional opinion.
"Do I think? What do I think?"
"That he'll get better?"
He was silent a long time.
"No," he said. "But he need never be any worse. You mustn't be afraid."
"Iamafraid. I'm afraid all the time."
"What of?"
"Of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face it."
"You've nerve enough for anything."
"You don't know me. I'm an utter coward. I can't face things. Especially the thing I'm afraid of."
"What is it? Tell me." He leaned nearer to her, and she almost whispered.
"I'm afraid of his having a fit—epilepsy. Hemighthave it."
"He might. But he won't. You mustn't think of it."
"I'm always thinking of it. And the most—the most awful thing is that—I'm afraid ofseeingit."
She bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to an unpardonable shame.
"Poor child. Of course you are," said Prothero. "We're all afraid of something. I'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood."
"You?"
"I."
"Oh—but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it."
"Wouldn't I?"
"No. Or you couldn't go and be a doctor. Why," she asked suddenly, "did you?"
"BecauseI was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way. My father was a country doctor—a surgeon. One day he sent me into his surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me—I was a boy about fifteen at the time—to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?"
"You fainted?—You were ill on the spot?"
"No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away."
A slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for the vibration of some spiritual recoil.
"What do you say to that?"
"I don't say anything."
"My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."
"They might have known," she said.
"They might have known what?"
"That you were different."
"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that Iwasa man—that I wasn't different after all."
"Well—you proved it."
"If I did my father never knew it."
"And your mother?" she said softly.
"I believe she knew."
"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"
"I never let her know, really, how different I was."
"You kept it to yourself?"
"It was the only way to keep it."
"Your genius?"
"If you choose to call it that."
"The thing," she said, "that made you different."
"You see," he said, "they didn't understand thatthatwas where I was most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."
"You couldn't lose it."
"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in Bombay; and it went again."
She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of something more than it.
"You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and there's the terror—themost awful terror there is—of never getting back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of it without seeing it—seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else matters. Nothing else is."
She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.
"And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the other part remains where it got to."
"I see."
Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit surer than she was now.
No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself that he put to the test.
And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them, he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his soul and its exultant, processional vision of God.
"The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'mstillafraid of the sight of blood."
"So I supposeIshall go on being afraid."
"Probably. But you won't turn tail any more than I should.Younever ran away."
"There are worse things than running away. All the things that go on inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries. Things that come of never being alone. I have to sit up at night to be alone."
"My child, you mustn't. It's simply criminal."
"If I didn't," she said, "I should never get it in."
He understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift.
"I know it's criminal, with Papa depending on me, and yet I do it. Sometimes I'm up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own things; things, I mean, that won't sell, just to gratify my vanity in having done them."
"To satisfy your instinct for perfection. God made you an artist."
She sighed. "He's made me so many things besides. That's where the misery comes in."
"And a precious poor artist you'd be if he hadn't, and if the misery didn't come in."
She shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "Misery's all very well for the big, tragic people like Nina, who can make something out of it. Why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?"
"And ifyou're being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection that you're not aware of——?"
She shook her head again.
"I'm certainly not aware of it. Still, I can understand that. I mean I can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and trying things too big for it and their not coming off. But—look at Papa."
She held her hands out helplessly. The gesture smote his heart.
"If Papa had been one of its experiments—but he wasn't. It had got him all right at first. You've no idea how nice Papa was. You've only to look at him now to see how nice he is. But he was clever. Not very clever," (she wasn't going to claim too much for him), "but just clever enough. He used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. And he can't say them any more."
She paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went.
"And to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you'd made as fine as it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away—it doesn't look like an Instinct for Perfection, does it?"
"The finest bits aren't thrown away. It's what you still have with you, what you see, that's being thrown away—broken up by some impatient, impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its instinct for perfection. Do you see?"
"I see that you're trying to make me happier about Papa. It's awfully nice of you."
"I'm trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body. To you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. To me it is simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual energies. We're nowhere near understanding the real function of disease. It probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies. It's a sign of their approaching freedom. Especially those diseases which are most like death—the horrible diseases that tear down the body from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and leaving the viscera exuberant with life. And if you knew the mystery of the building up—why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful than you can conceive. But, if you really knew, that would be nothing to the secret—the mystery—the romance of dissolution."
His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the darkness that wrapped her.
"If you could seethroughit you'd understand, you'd see that this body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium, transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside what we give."
Laura looked grave. "I can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that I understand."
"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts, infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable forces, and that we—we—unmake the work of millions of æons in a moment, that we charge it withourwill,ourinstincts,ourmemories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ of us—so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when they scatter, is the seed ofouruniverse, flung heaven knows where."
For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura's eyes. "Do you know," she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and I can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to know how you know about it."
A change passed over his face. It became suddenly still and incommunicable.
"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad."
"What won't I tell you?"
"What's become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"
"I've been trying to tell you. I've been trying to make you see."
"I can only see that they've gone."
"And I can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely than ever. Too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them."
"Ah——"
"And I should say the same of a still-born baby that I had never seen alive, or of a lunatic whom I had not once seen sane."
"How do you know?" she reiterated.
"I can't tell you."
"You can't tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when I look at it."
"I can't tell you anything," he said gently. "I can only talk to you like an intoxicated medical student, and it's time for me to go."
She did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent.
It was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech.
"I'm glad I've seen you," she said at last.
He ignored the valediction of her tone.
"And when am I to see you again?" he said.
This time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause.
He asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted his preposterous pretext? Up till now she had appeared to be taking him and his pretext simply, as they came. Her silence, her pause had had no expectation in it. It evidently had not occurred to her that the deep could open up. That was how she had struck him, more and more, as never looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look forward. She regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that might turn upon her at any time and hurt her.
He rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. He turned.
"Well," he said, "have you seen enough of me?"
They were outside the threshold now, and she stood there, one arm holding her lamp, the other stretched across the doorway, as if she would keep him from ever entering again.
"Or," said he, "may I come again? Soon?"
"Do," she said, "and bring Nina with you."
She set her lamp on the floor at the stairhead, and backed, backed from him into the darkness of the room.
It was the twenty-seventh of June, Laura's birthday. Tanqueray had proposed that they should celebrate it by a day on Wendover Hill. For the Kiddy's increasing pallor cried piteously for the open air.
Nina was to bring Owen Prothero; and Jane, in Prothero's interests, was to bring Brodrick; and Tanqueray, Laura insisted, was to bring his wife.
Rose had counted the days, the very hours before Laura's birthday. She had plenty to do for once on the morning of the twenty-seventh, making rock cakes and cutting sandwiches and packing them beautifully in a basket. Over-night she had washed and ironed the white blouse she was to wear. The white blouse lay on her bed, wonderful as a thing seen in a happy dream. Rose could hardly permit herself to believe that the dream would come true, and that Tanqueray would really take her.
It all depended on whether Laura could get off. Getting Laura off was the difficulty they encountered every time she had a birthday.
So uncertain was the event that Nina and Prothero called at the house in Albert Street before going on to the station. They found Tanqueray, and Rose in her white blouse, waiting outside on the pavement. They heard that Jane Holland was in there with Laura, bringing pressure to bear on the obstinate Kiddy who was bent on the renunciation of her day.
Jane's voice on the landing called to them to come up-stairs. Without them it was impossible, she said, to get Laura off.
The whole house was helping, in a passionate publicity; for every one in it loved Laura. Mr. Baxter, the landlord, was on the staircase, bringing Laura's boots. The maid of all work was leaning out of the window on the landing, brushing Laura's skirt. A tall girl was standing by the table in the sitting-room. She had a lean, hectic face, and prominent blue eyes under masses of light hair. She was Addy Ranger, the type-writer on the ground-floor, who had come up from her typewriting to see what she could do. She was sewing buttons on Laura's blouse while Jane brought pressure upon Laura. "Of course you're going," Jane was saying. "It's not as if you had a birthday every day."
For Laura still sat at her writing-table, labouring over a paragraph, white lipped and heavy eyed. Shuffling all over the room and round about her was Mr. Gunning. He was pouring out the trouble that had oppressed him for the last four years.
"She won't stop scribbling. It's scribble—scribble—scribble all day long. If I didn't lie awake to stop her she'd be at it all night. I've caught her—in her nightgown. She'll get out of her bed to do it."
"Papa, dear, you know Miss Lempriere and Mr. Prothero?"
His mind adjusted itself instantly to its vision of them. He bowed to each. He was the soul of courtesy and hospitality, and they were his guests; they had come to luncheon.
"Lolly, my dear, have you ordered luncheon?—You must tell Mrs. Baxter to give us a salmon mayonnaise, and a salad and lamb cutlets in aspic. And, Lolly! Tell her to put a bottle of champagne in ice."
For in his blessed state, among the fragments of old splendours that still clung to him, Mr. Gunning had preserved indestructibly his sense of power to offer his friends a bottle of champagne on a suitable occasion, and every occasion now ranked with him as suitable.
"Yes, darling," said Laura, and dashed down a line of her paragraph.
He shuffled feebly toward the door. "I have to see to everything myself," he said. "That child there has no more idea how to order a luncheon than the cat. There should be," he reverted, "lamb cutlets in aspic. I must see to it myself."
He wandered out of the room and in again, driven, by his dream.
"Oh," cried Laura, "somebody else must have my birthday.Ican't have it. I must sit tight and finish my paragraph."
"You'll spoil it if you do," said Prothero.
"Besides spoiling everybody's day," said Jane judiciously.
That brought Laura round. She reflected that, if she sat tight from ten that evening till two in the morning, she could save their day.
But first she had to finish her paragraph and then to hide it and lock it up. Then she put the pens and ink on a high shelf out of Mr. Gunning's reach. He had been known to make away with the materials of Lolly's detestable occupation when he got the chance. He attributed to it that mysterious, irritating semblance of poverty in which they moved.
He smiled at her, a happy, innocent smile.
"That'sright,that'sright. Put it away, my dear, put it away."
"Yes, Papa," said Laura. She took the blouse from Addy Ranger, and she and Jane Holland disappeared with it into a small inner room. From the voices that came to him Prothero gathered that Jane Holland was "buttoning her up the back."
"Don't say," cried Laura, "that it won't meet!"
"Meet? It'll go twice round you. You don't eat enough."
Silence.
"It's no good," he heard Jane Holland say, "not eating. I've tried both."
"I," said Laura in a voice that penetrated, "over-eat. Habitually."
"I must go," said Mr. Gunning, "and find my hat and stick." His idea now was that Laura was going to take him for a walk.
Addy Ranger began to talk to Prothero. He liked Addy. She had an amusing face with a long nose and wide lips, restless and cynical. She confided to him the trouble of her life, the eternal difficulty of finding anywhere a permanent job. Addy's dream was permanence.
Then they talked of Laura.
"Do you know whatherdream is?" said Addy. "To be able to afford wine, and chicken, and game and things—for him."
"When you think of her work!" said Nina. "It's charming; it's finished, to a point. How on earth does she do it?"
"She sits up half the night to do it," said Prothero; "when he isn't there."
"And it's killing her," said Addy, who had her back to the door.
Mr. Gunning had come in again and he heard her. He gazed at them with a vague sweetness, not understanding what he heard.
Then Laura ran in among them, in a tremendous hurry. She wasn't ready yet. It was a maddening, protracted agony, getting Laura off. She had forgotten to lock the cupboard where the whisky was (a shilling's worth in a medicine bottle); and poor Papa might find it. Since he had had his sunstroke you couldn't trust him with anything, not even with a jam-pot. Then Addy, at Laura's request, rushed out of the room to find Laura's hat and her handkerchief and her gloves—not the ones with the holes in them. And then Laura looked at her hands.
"Oh," she cried, "lookat my poor hands. I can't go like that. Ihatean inky woman."
And she dashed out to wash the ink off.
And then the gloves found by Addy had all holes in them. And at that Laura stamped her foot and said, "Damn!"
The odds against Laura's getting off were frightful.
But she was putting on her hat. She was really ready just as Tanqueray's voice was heard calling on the stairs, "You must hurry up if you want to catch that train." And now they had to deal seriously with Mr. Gunning, who stood expectant, holding his hat and stick.
"Good-bye, Papa dear," said she.
"Am I not to come, too?" said Mr. Gunning.
"Not to-day, dear."
She was kissing him while Jane and Nina waited in the open doorway. Their eyes signed to her to be brave and follow them. But Laura lingered.
Prothero looked at Laura, and Mr. Gunning looked at Prothero. His terrible idea had come back to him at the sight of the young man, risen, and standing beside Laura for departure.
"Are you going to take my little girl away from me?" he said.
"Poor little Papa, of course he isn't. I'm going with Jane, and Nina. You know Nina?"
"And who," he cried, "is going to take me for my walk?"
He had her there. She wavered.
"Addy's coming in to give you your tea. You like Addy." (He bowed to Miss Ranger with a supreme courtesy.) "And I'll be back in time to see you in your little bed."
She ran off. Addy Ranger took Mr. Gunning very tenderly by the arm and led him to the stairs to see her go.
Outside on the pavement Tanqueray gave way to irritation.
"If," said he, "it would only please Heaven to take that old gentleman to itself."
"It won't," said Nina.
"How she would hate us if she heard us," said Jane.
"There ought to be somebody to take care of 'im," said Rose, moved to compassion. "'E might go off in a fit any day. She can't be easy when 'e's left."
"Hemustbe left," said Tanqueray with ferocity.
"Here she is," said Jane.
There she was; and there, too, was her family. For, at the sight of Laura running down-stairs with Prothero after her, Mr. Gunning broke loose from Addy's arm and followed her, perilously followed her. Addy was only just in time to draw him back from the hall door as Prothero closed it.
And then little Laura, outside, heard a cry as of a thing trapped, and betrayed, and utterly abandoned.
"I can't go," she cried. "He thinks I'm leaving him—that I'm never coming back. He always thinks it."
"You know," said Nina, "he never thinks anything for more than five minutes."
"I know—but——"
Nina caught her by the shoulder. "You stupid Kiddy, you must forget him when he isn't there."
"But heisthere," said Laura. "I can't leave him."
Between her eyes and Prothero's there passed a look of eternal patience and despair. Rose saw it. She saw how it was with them, and she saw what she could do. She turned back to the door.
"You go," she said. "I'll stay with him."
From the set of her little chin you saw that protest and argument were useless.
"I can take care of him," she said. "I know how."
And as she said it there came into her face a soft flame of joy. For Tanqueray was looking at her, and smiling as he used to smile in the days when he adored her. He was thinking in this moment how adorable she was.
"You may as well let her," he said. "She isn't happy if she can't take care of somebody."
And, as they wondered at her, the door opened and closed again on Rose and her white blouse.
They found Brodrick waiting for them at the station. Imperturbable, on the platform, he seemed to be holding in leash the Wendover train whose engines were throbbing for flight.
Prothero suffered, painfully, the inevitable introduction. Tanqueray had told him that if he still wanted work on the papers Brodrick was his man. Brodrick had an idea. On the long hill-road going up from Wendover station Prothero, at Tanqueray's suggestion, tried to make himself as civil as possible to Miss Holland.
Tentatively and with infinite precautions Jane laid before him Brodrick's idea. The War Correspondent of the "Morning Telegraph" was coming home invalided from Manchuria. She understood that his place would be offered to Mr. Prothero. Would he care to take it?
He did not answer.
She merely laid the idea before him to look at. He must weigh, she said, the dangers and the risks. From the expression of his face she gathered that these were the last things he would weigh.
And yet he hesitated. She looked at him. His eyes were following the movements of Laura Gunning where, well in front of them, the marvellous Kiddy, in the first wildness of her release from paragraphs, darted and plunged and leaped into the hedges.
Jane allowed some moments to lapse before she spoke again. The war, she said, would not last for ever; and if he took this berth, it would lead almost certainly to a regular job on the "Telegraph" at home.
He saw all that, he said, and he was profoundly grateful. His eyes, as they turned to her, showed for a moment a film of tears. Then they wandered from her.
He asked if he might think it over and let her know.
"When," she said, "can you let me know?"
"I think," he said, "probably, before the end of the day."
The day was drawing to its end when the group drifted and divided. Brodrick, still imperturbable, took possession of Jane, and Prothero, with his long swinging stride, set off in pursuit of the darting Laura.
Tanqueray, thus left behind with Nina, watched him as he went.
"He's off, Nina. Bolted." His eyes smiled at her, suave, deprecating, delighted eyes and recklessly observant.
"So has Jane," said Nina, with her dangerous irony.
Apart from them and from their irony, Prothero was at last alone with Laura on the top of Wendover Hill. She had ceased to dart and to plunge.
He found for her a hidden place on the green slope, under a tree, and there he stretched himself at her side.
"Do you know," he said, "this is the first time I've seen you out of doors."
"So it is," said she in a strange, even voice.
She drew off her gloves and held out the palms of her hands as if she were bathing them in the pure air. Her face was turned from him and lifted; her nostrils widened; her lips parted; her small breasts heaved; she drank the air like water. To his eyes she was the white image of mortal thirst.
"Is it absolutely necessary for you to live in Camden Town?" he said.
She sat up very straight and stared steadily in front of her, as if she faced, unafraid, the invincible necessity.
"It is. Absolutely." She explained that Baxter, her landlord, had been an old servant of Papa's, and thattheimportant thing was to be with people who would be nice to him and not mind, she said, his little ways.
He sighed.
"Do you know what I should do with you if I could have my way? I should turn you into a green garden and keep you there from nine in the morning till nine at night. I should make you walk a mile with me twice a day—not too fast. All the rest of the time you should lie on a couch on a lawn, with a great rose-bush at your head and a bed of violets at your feet. I should bring you something nice to eat every two hours."
"And how much work do you suppose I should get through?"
"Work? You wouldn't doanywork for a year at least—if I had my way."
"It's a beautiful dream," said she. She closed her eyes, but whether to shut the dream out or to keep it in he could not say.
"I don't want," she said presently, "to lie on a couch in a garden with roses at my head and violets at my feet, as if I were dead. You don't know how tre—mend—ously alive I am."
"I know," he said, "how tremendously alive you'd be if I had my way—if you were happy."
She was still sitting up, nursing her knees, and staring straight in front of her at nothing.
"You don't know what it's like," she said; "the unbearable pathos of Papa."
"It's your pathos that's unbearable."
"Oh don't! Don't be nice to me. I shall hate you if you're nice to me." She paused, staring. "I was unkind to him yesterday. I see how pathetic he is, and yet I'm unkind. I snap like a little devil. You don't know what a devil, what a detestable little devil I can be."
She turned to him, sparing herself no pain in her confession.
"I was cruel to him. It's horrible, like being cruel to a child." The horror of it was in her stare.
"It's your nerves," he said; "it's because you're always frightened." He seemed to meditate before he spoke again. "How are you going on?"
"You see how."
"I do indeed. It's unbearable to think of your having to endure these things. And I have to stand by and see you at the end of your tether, hurt and frightened, and to know that I can do nothing for you. If I could have my way you would never be hurt or frightened any more."
As he spoke something gave way in her. It felt like a sudden weakening and collapse of her will, drawing her heart with it.
"But," he went on, "as I can't have my way, the next best thing is—to stand by you."
She struggled as against physical faintness, struggled successfully.
"Since I can't take you out of it," he said, "I shall come and live in Camden Town too."
"You couldn't live in Camden Town."
"I can live anywhere I choose. I shouldn'tseeCamden Town."
"You couldn't," she insisted. "And if you could I wouldn't let you."
"Why not?"
"Because—it wouldn't do."
He smiled.
"It would be all right. I should get a room near you and look after your father."
"It wouldn't do," she said again. "I couldn't let you."
"I can do anything I choose. Your little hands can't stop me."
She looked at him gravely. "Why do you choose it?"
"Because I can choose nothing else."
"Ah, why are you so good to me?"
"Because"—he mocked her absurd intonation.
"Don't tell me. It's because youaregood. You can't help it."
"No; I can't help it."
"But—" she objected, "I'm so horrid. I don't believe in God and I say damn when I'm angry."
"I heard you."
"You said yourself I wanted violets to sweeten me and hammers to soften me—you think I'm so bitter and so hard."
"You know what I think of you. And you know," he said, "that I love you."
"You mustn't," she whispered. "It's no good."
He seemed not to have heard her. "And some day," he said, "I shall marry you. I'd marry you to-morrow if I'd enough money to buy a hat with."
"It's no use loving me. You can't marry me."
"I know I can't. But it makes no difference."
"No difference?"
"Not to me."
"If you could," she said, "I wouldn't let you. It would only be one misery more."
"How do you know what it would be?"
"I won't even let you love me. That's misery too."
"You don't know what it is."
"I do know, and I don't want any more of it. I've been hurt with it."
With a low cry of pity and pain he took her in his arms and held her to him.
She writhed and struggled in his clasp. "Don't," she cried, "don't touch me. Let me alone. I can't bear it."
He turned her face to his to find the truth in her eyes. "And yet," he said, "you love me."
"No, no. It's no use," she reiterated; "it's no use. I won't have it. I won't let you love me."
"You can't stop me."
"I can stop you torturing me!"
She was freed from his arms now. She sat up. Her small face was sullen and defiant in its expression of indomitable will.
"Of course," he said, "you can stop me touching you. But it makes no difference. I shall go on caring for you. It's no use struggling and crying against that."
"I shall go on struggling."
"Go on as long as you like. It doesn't matter. I can wait."
She rose. "Come," she said. "It's time to be going back."
He obeyed her. When they reached the rise on the station road they turned and waited for the others to come up with them. They looked back. Their hill was on their left, to their right was the great plain, grey with mist. They stood silent, oppressed by their sense of a sad and sudden beauty. Then with the others they swung down the road to the station.
Before the end of the day Brodrick heard that his offer was accepted.