It was Tanqueray who took Laura home that night. Prothero parted from her at the station and walked southwards with Nina Lempriere.
"Why didn't you go with her?" she said.
"I couldn't have let you walk home by yourself."
"As if I wasn't always by myself."
Her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with its involuntary surrender.
He edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the passers by. But the pace he set was terrific.
"You've no idea, Owen, how odd you look careering through the streets."
"Not odder than you, do I?Youought to be swinging up a mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. That's how I used to see you."
"Do you remember?"
"I remember the first time I ever saw you, fifteen years ago. I'd gone up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. I was beating my way up through the undergrowth when I came on you. You were above me, hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper ledge down on to the track. Your hair—you had lots of hair, all tawny—some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over your eyes. They gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there were green lights in them. You dropped at my feet and dashed down the mountain. I had found my wild cat."
"I remember. You frightened me. Your eyes were so queer."
"Not queerer than yours, Nina. Yours had all the enchantment and all the terror of the mountains in them."
"And yours—yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now."
"That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams."
"Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press on you and hurt you?"
They were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses, houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night.
"Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there—you and I could go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would simply disappear."
They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion.
"Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she.
"I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back."
"Isn't it—horrible?"
"No," he said. "It isn't."
They plunged down a steep side-street off the Strand, and turned on to their terrace. He let her in with his latchkey and followed her up-stairs. He stopped at her landing.
"May I come in?" he said. "Or is it too late?"
"It isn't late at all," said she. And he followed her into the room.
He did not see the seat she offered him, but stood leaning his shoulders against the chimney-piece. She knew that he had something to say to her that must be said instantly or not at all. And yet he kept silence. Whatever it was that he had to say it was not an easy thing.
"You'd like some coffee?" she said curtly, by way of breaking his dumb and dangerous mood.
He roused himself almost irritably.
"Thanks, no. Don't bother about it."
She left him and went into the inner room to make it. She was afraid of him; afraid of what she might have to hear. She had the sense of things approaching, of separation, of the snapping of the tense thread of time that bound them for her moment. It was as if she could spin it out by interposing between the moment and its end a series of insignificant acts.
Through the open doors she saw him as he turned and wandered to the bookcase and stood there, apparently absorbed. You would have said that he had come in to look for a book, and that when he had found what he wanted he would go. She saw him take her book, "Tales of the Marches," from its shelf and open it.
She became aware of this as she was about to lift the kettle from the gas-ring burning on the hearth. Her thin sleeve swept the ring. She was stooping, but her face was still raised; her eyes were fixed on Prothero, held by what they saw. The small blue jets of the ring flickered and ran together and soared as her sleeve caught them. Nina made no sound. Prothero turned and saw her standing there by the hearth, motionless, her right arm wrapped in flame.
He leaped to her, and held her tight with her arm against his breast, and beat out the fire with his hands. He dressed the burn and bandaged it with cool, professional dexterity, trembling a little, taking pain from her pain.
"Why didn't you call out?" he said.
"I didn't want you to know."
"You'd have been burnt sooner?"
He had slung her arm in a scarf; and, as he tied the knot on her shoulder, his face was brought close to hers. She turned her head and her eyes met his.
"I'd have let my whole body burn," she whispered, "sooner than hurt—your hands."
His hands dropped from her shoulder. He thrust them into his pockets out of her sight.
She followed him into the outer room, struggling against her sense of his recoil.
"If you had a body like mine," she said, "you'd be glad to get rid of it on any terms." She wondered if he saw through her pitiable attempt to call back the words that had flung themselves upon him.
"There's nothing wrong with your body," he answered coldly.
"No, Owen, nothing; except that I'm tired of it."
"The tiredness will pass. Is that burn hurting you?"
"Not yet. I don't mind it."
He stooped and picked up the book he had dropped in his rush to her. She saw now that he looked at it as a man looks at the thing he loves, and that his hands as they touched it shook with a nervous tremor.
She came and stood by him, without speaking, and he turned and faced her.
"Nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? If you hadn't written it, I should never have been here."
"That's why, then, isn't it?"
"I suppose so. Youhadto write it, and Ihadto come."
"Yes, Owen," she said gently.
"You brought me here," he said.
"I can't understand it."
"Can't understand what?"
"The fascination I had for you."
He closed the book and laid it down.
"You were my youth, Nina."
He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that forbade her to touch him.
"My youth was dumb. It couldn't make itself immortal. You did that for it."
"But the people of those tales are not a bit like you."
"No. Theyareme. They are what I was. Your people are not people, they are not characters, they are incarnate passions."
"So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony.
"You don't know me. You don't remember me. But I know and remember you. You asked me once how I knew. That's how. I've been where you were."
He paused.
"If my youth were here, Nina, it would be at your feet. As it is, it rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like an unhappy ghost."
It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him.
Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood.
She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say.
He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him.
She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow. Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat.
He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to between them.
She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart.
At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all passion of flesh and blood.
In the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated; eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable, not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing was accomplished.
Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it.
"This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go."
She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself; behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.
She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual appeal. Her passion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration, sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any one of them would kill her.
She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality of passion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all.
Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. And this terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she preferred a brutality like Tanqueray's which would have made short work of her.
As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the throat of the beast.
She was now at the end of Owen's last day. He had come and gone. She had endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised her courage.
"It'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. But when it hurts most it's healing."
That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back, above hers.
Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street. The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion.
The beast was falling now upon Laura's image and destroying it. It hated Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast, though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray's devilry. It had pursued Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen's feet and under the pity of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura's little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed, unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh.
The sound of Owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging, rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow, lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her, like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering.
It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble.
She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen's door, and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room.
His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut her in.
"What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarrassment or surprise. It was as if he had foreseen that she would do this.
"You're ill," he said. "Go down-stairs; I'll come to you."
"I'm not ill and I'm not mad. Please shut that door."
He shut it.
"Won't you sit down?"
She smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself. Prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour.
Her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of the room. On his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of surgical instruments lay in a litter of manuscripts. A drawer, pulled from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at her feet. With a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few new things bought yesterday for his journey. An overcoat lay on the bed beside her. He had not had anything like that before. She put out her hand and felt the stuff.
"It ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly.
He rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her sobbing ceased suddenly. She looked up at him and was still, under his touch.
"You don't want to go," she said. "Why are you going?"
"Because I have to. It's the only thing, you see, there is to do."
"If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have to. If you die out there it will be my doing."
"Won't it be the proprietors of the 'Morning Telegraph' who'll be responsible—if I die?"
"I set them on to you."
"Did you? I rather hoped they'd pitched on me because I was the best man for the job."
"The best man—to die?"
"War correspondents don't die. At least they don't set out with that intention."
"Youwilldie," she said slowly; "because everything I care for does."
"Why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?"
"I care—because they die."
Her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality's desire. Having uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done.
"Why shouldn't I tell you that I care for you? What does it matter? That ends it."
She rose.
"I know," she said, "I've broken all the rules. A woman shouldn't come and tell a man she cares for him."
"Why not?" he said simply.
"I tell you, I don't know why not. I only know that I'm so much more like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. Why shouldn't I tell you? You know it—as God knows it."
"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there."
"Owen—shall I ever be where you are now?"
"I had to die first. I told you my youth was dead. That, Nina, was what you cared for."
It was not. Yet she yearned for it—his youth that was made to love her, his youth that returning, a dim ghost, followed her and loved her still.
"No," she said, "it isn't only that."
She paused in her going and knelt down by his half-packed portmanteau. With her free left hand she lifted up, folded and laid smooth the new suit he had flung in and crushed. Her back was now towards him and the door he was about to open.
"Owen," she said, "since I'm breaking all the rules, why can't I go out, too, and look after you?"
He shook his head. "It's not the place for women," he said.
"Women? Haven't I told you that I'm like a man? I'm like you, Owen, if it comes to that."
He smiled. "If you were like me, you'd stay at home."
"What should I stay for?"
"To look after Laura Gunning. That's what you'd want to do, if you were—I. And," he said quietly, "it's what you're going to do."
She rose to her feet and faced him, defying the will that he laid on her.
"How do you know? And why should I?"
"Because there's nothing else that you can do for me."
She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to her to say.
That was a solid, practical idea of Brodrick's. All that he had heard of Owen Prothero connected him securely with foreign countries. By the fact that he had served in South Africa, to say nothing of his years in the Indian Medical Service, he was pointed out as the right man to send to the Russian army in Manchuria; add to this the gift of writing and your War Correspondent was complete. It was further obvious that Prothero could not possibly exist in England on his poems.
At the same time Brodrick was aware that he had reasons for desiring to get the long, ugly poet out of England as soon as possible. His length and his ugliness had not deterred Jane Holland from taking a considerable interest in him. Brodrick's reasons made him feel extremely uncomfortable in offering such a dangerous post as War Correspondent to young Prothero. Therefore when it came to Prothero's accepting it, he did his best to withdraw the offer. It wasn't exactly an offer. He had merely mentioned it as a possible opening, a suggestion in the last resort. He pointed out to Prothero the dangers and the risks, among them damage to his trade as a poet. Poets were too precious. There were, he said, heaps of other men.
But Prothero had leaped at it; he had implored Brodrick not to put another man in; and the more he leaped and implored the more Brodrick tried to keep him off it.
But you couldn't keep him off. He was mad, apparently, with the sheer lust of danger. Hewouldgo. "If you do," Brodrick had said finally, "you go at your own risk."
And he had gone, leaving the editor profoundly uncomfortable. Brodrick, in these days, found himself reiterating, "Hewouldgo, hewouldgo." And all the time he felt that he had sent the poor long poet to his death, because of Jane Holland.
He saw a great deal of Jane Holland in the weeks that followed Prothero's departure.
They had reached the first month of autumn, and Jane was sitting out on the lawn in Brodrick's garden. The slender, new-born body of Prothero's Poems lay in her lap. Eddy Heron stretched himself at her feet. Winny hung over her shoulder. Every now and then the child swept back her long hair that brushed Jane's face, in the excitement of her efforts to see what, as she phrased it, Mr. Prothero had done. Opposite them Mrs. Heron and Gertrude Collett sat quietly sewing.
Eddy, who loved to tease his mother, was talking about Jane as if she wasn't there.
"I say, Mummy, don't you like her awfully?"
"Of course I like her," said Mrs. Heron, smiling at her son.
"Why do you like me?" said Jane, whose vision of Owen Prothero was again obscured by Winny's hair.
"Why do we like anybody?" said Mrs. Heron, with her inassailable reserve.
"You can't get out of it that way, Mum. You don't just go liking anybody. You like jolly few. We're an awful family for not liking people. Aren't we, Gee-Gee?"
"I didn't know it," said Miss Collett.
"Oh, but Gee-Gee's thinking of Uncle Hugh," said Winny.
Miss Collett's face stiffened. Shewasthinking of him.
"Uncle Hugh? Why, he's worse than any of us. With women—ladies—anyhow."
"Eddy, dear!" said Eddy's mother.
"Well, have you ever seen a lady Uncle Hugh could really stand—except Miss Holland?"
Gertrude bent so low over her work that her face was hidden.
"I say! look at that kid. Can't you take your hair out of Miss Holland's face? She doesn't want your horrid hair."
"Yes, I do," said Jane. She was grateful for the veil of Winny's hair.
They had not arrived suddenly, the five of them, at this intimacy. It had developed during the last fortnight, which Jane, fulfilling a promise, had spent with Dr. Brodrick and Mrs. Heron.
Jane had been ill, and Brodrick had brought her to his brother's house to recover. Dr. Henry had been profoundly interested in her case. So had his sister, Mrs. Heron, and Mr. John Brodrick and Mrs. John, and Sophy Levine and Gertrude Collett, and Winny and Eddy Heron.
Since the day when they had first received her, the Brodricks had established a regular cult of Jane Holland. It had become the prescribed event for Jane to spend every possible Sunday at Putney Heath with the editor of the "Monthly Review." Her friendship with his family had advanced from Sunday to Sunday by slow, well-ordered steps. Jane had no illusions as to its foundation. She knew that Brodrick's family had begun by regarding her as part of Brodrick's property, the most eligible, the most valuable part. It was interested in contemporary talent merely as a thing in which Brodrick had a stake. It had hardly been aware of Jane Holland previous to her appearance in the "Monthly Review." After that it had been obliged to recognize her as a power propitious to the editor's ambition and his dream. For though his family regarded the editor of the "Monthly Review" as a dreamer, a fantastic dreamer, it was glad to think that a Brodrick should have ambition, still more to think that it could afford a dream. They had always insisted upon that, there being no end to the things a Brodrick could afford. They had identified Jane Holland with his dream and his ambition, and were glad again to think that he could afford her. As for her dreadful, her conspicuous celebrity, the uncomfortably staring fact that she was Jane Holland, Jane was aware that it struck them chiefly as reflecting splendour upon Brodrick. But she was aware that her unique merit, her supreme claim, was that she had done a great thing for Brodrick. On that account, if she had been the most obscure, the most unremarkable Jane Holland, they would have felt it incumbent on them to cherish her. They had incurred a grave personal obligation, and could only meet it by that grave personal thing, friendship.
How grave it was, Jane, who had gone into it so lightly, was only just aware. This family had an immense capacity for disapproval; it was awful, as Eddy had observed, for not liking people. It was bound, in its formidable integrity, to disapprove of her. She had felt that she had disarmed its criticism only by becoming ill and making it sorry for her.
She had not been a week in Dr. Brodrick's house before she discovered that these kind people had been sorry for her all the time. They were sorry for her because she had to work hard, because she had no home and no family visible about her. They refused to regard Nina and Laura as a family, or the flat in Kensington Square as in any reasonable sense a home. Jane could see that they were trying to make up to her for the things that she had missed.
And in being sorry for Jane Holland they had lost sight of her celebrity. They had not referred to it since the day, three months ago, when she had first come to them, a brilliant, distracting alien. They were still a little perturbed by the brilliance and distraction, and it was as an alien that she moved among them still.
It was as an alien (she could see it plainly) that they were really sorry for her. They seemed to agree with her in regarding her genius as a thing tacked on to her, a thing disastrous, undesirable. They were anxious to show her that its presence did not destroy for any of them her personal charm. They betrayed their opinion that her charm existed in spite rather than because of it.
Thus, by this shedding of her celebrity, Jane in the houses of the Brodricks had found peace. She was secure from all the destroyers, from the clever little people, from everything that carried with it the dreadful literary taint. Brodrick's family was divinely innocent of the literary taint. The worst that could be said of Brodrick was that he would have liked to have it; but, under his editorial surface, he was clean.
It was in Hugh Brodrick's house, that the immunity, the peace was most profound. Hugh was not gregarious. Tanqueray could not have more abhorred the social round. He had come near it, he had told her, in his anxiety to knowher, but his object attained, he had instantly dropped out of it.
She knew where she was with him. In their long, subdued confidences he had given her the sense that she had become the dominant interest, the most important fact in his social life. And that, again, not because of her genius, but, he almost definitely intimated, because of some mystic moral quality in her. He did not intimate that he found her charming. Jane had still serious doubts as to her charm, and Brodrick's monstrous sincerity would have left her to perish of her doubt. She would not have had him different. It was because ofhismoral quality, his sincerity, that she had liked him from the first.
Most certainly she liked him. If she had not liked him she would not have come out so often to Roehampton and Wimbledon and Putney. She could not help but like him when he so liked her, and liked her, not for the things that she had done for literature, not for the things she had done for him, but for her own sake. That was what she had wanted, to be liked for her own sake, to be allowed to be a woman.
Unlike Tanqueray, Brodrick not only allowed her, he positively encouraged her to be a woman. Evidently, in Brodrick's opinion she was just like any other woman. He could see no difference between her and, well, Gertrude Collett. Gertrude, Jane was sure, stood to Brodrick for all that was most essentially and admirably feminine. Why he required so much of Jane's presence when he could have Gertrude Collett's was more than Jane could understand. She was still inclined to her conjecture that he was using her to draw Miss Collett, playing her off against Miss Collett, stinging Miss Collett to the desired frenzy by hanging that admirable woman upon tenter-hooks. That was why Jane felt so safe with him; because, she argued, he couldn't do it if he had not felt safe with her. He was not in love with her. He was not even, like Tanqueray, in love with her genius.
If she had had the slightest doubt about his attitude, his behaviour on the day of her arrival had made it stand out sharp and clear. She had dined at Moor Grange, and Caro Bickersteth had been there. Caro had insisted on dragging Jane's genius from its temporary oblivion, and Brodrick had turned silent and sulky, positively sulky then.
And in that mood he had remained for the two weeks that she had stayed at Roehampton. He had betrayed none of the concern so evidently felt for her by Eddy and Winny and Gertrude Collett and Mrs. Heron and the doctor. They had all contended with each other in taking care of her, in waiting on her hand and foot. But Brodrick, after bringing her there; after, as she said, dumping her down, suddenly and heavily, on his family, Brodrick had refused to compete; he had hung back; he had withdrawn himself from the scene, maintaining his singular sulkiness and silence.
She forgave him, for of course he was disturbed about Gertrude Collett. If he wanted to marry Gertrude, why on earth couldn't he marry her and have done with it? Jane thought.
In order to think better she had closed her eyes. When she opened them again she found Brodrick seated in an opposite chair, quietly regarding her. She was alone with him. The others had all gone.
"I wasn't asleep," said Jane.
"I didn't suppose you were," said Brodrick; "if you were reading Prothero."
Brodrick's conscience was beginning to hurt him rather badly. There were moments when he connected Jane's illness with Prothero's departure. He, therefore, by sending Prothero away, was responsible for her illness.
"If you want to read," he said, "I'll go."
"I don't want to read. I want to talk."
"About Prothero?"
"No, not about Mr. Prothero. About that serial——"
"What serial?"
"My serial. Your serial," said she.
Brodrick said he wasn't going to talk shop on Sunday. He wanted to forget that there were such things as serials.
"I wishIcould forget," said she.
She checked the impulse that was urging her to say, "You really ought to marry Gertrude."
"I wish you could," he retorted, with some bitterness.
"How can I?" she replied placably, "when it was the foundation of our delightful friendship?"
Brodrick said it had nothing whatever to do with their friendship.
"Well," said Jane, "if it wasn't that it was Hambleby."
At that Brodrick frowned so formidably that Jane could have cried out, "For goodness' sake go and marry her and leave off venting your bad temper upon me."
"It had to be something," said she. "Why shouldn't it be Hambleby? By the way, George Tanqueray was perfectly right. I was in love with him. I mean, of course, with Hambleby."
"You seem," said Brodrick, "to be in love with him still, as far as I can make out."
"That's why," said Jane, "I can't help feeling that there's something wrong with him. George says you never really know the people you're in love with."
There was a gleam of interest now in Brodrick's face. He was evidently, Jane thought, applying Tanqueray's aphorism to Gertrude.
"It doesn't make any difference," he said.
"I should have thought," said she, "it would have madesome."
"It doesn't. If anything, you know them rather better."
"Oh," said she, "it makesthatdifference, does it?"
Again she thought of Gertrude. "I wonder," she said pensively, "if you really know."
"At any rate I know as much as Tanqueray."
"Do I bore you with Tanqueray?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"You don't deny his genius?"
"I don't deny anybody's genius," said Brodrick furiously.
Jane looked at him.
"I don't think it's nice of you," said she, "to talk that way to me when I've been so ill."
"You've no right to be ill," said Brodrick, with undiminished rancour.
"I have," said Jane. "A perfect right. I can be as ill as ever I please."
She looked at him again and caught him smiling surreptitiously under his heavy gloom.
"I mean," he said, "you needn't be. You wouldn't be if you didn't work so hard."
She crumpled her eyelids like one who fails to see.
"If I didn't what?"
"Work so hard."
He really wanted to know whether it was that or Prothero. First it had been Tanqueray, and she had got over Tanqueray. Now he could only suppose that it was Prothero. He would have to wait until she had got over Prothero.
"I like that," said she, "when it's your serial I'm working on."
"Do you mean to tell me," said Brodrick, "that it's that?"
"I was trying to tell you, but you wouldn't let me talk about it. Not that I wanted to talk about it when the bare idea of it terrifies me. It's awful to have it hanging over me like this."
"Forget it. Forget it," he said.
"I can't. I'm afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of not being able to finish it—of letting you down."
He turned and looked at her intently.
"That's why you've been killing yourself, is it?"
She did not answer.
"I didn't know. I didn't think," he said. "You should have told me."
"It's my fault. I ought to have known. I ought never to have tried."
"Why did you?" His sulkiness, his ferocity, was gone now; he was gentleness itself.
"Because I wanted to please you."
There was an inarticulate murmur from Brodrick, a happy sound.
"Well," he said, "you shan't go on."
"But what can we do?"
"We'll do something. There are plenty of things that can be done."
"But—there's the magazine."
"I don't care," said the editor, "if the abominable thing goes smash."
"What? You can contemplate it's going smash?"
"I can't contemplate your being worried like this."
"It's people that worry me," she said—"if I only could have peace!"
She sketched for him as she had sketched for Tanqueray the horrors brought on her by her celebrity.
"That's London," he said, as Tanqueray had said. "You should live out of it."
"Nothing comes to me in the country."
He pondered a long time upon that saying.
"You wouldn't call this country, would you?" he said at last.
"Oh dear me, no."
"Well—what would you think of Putney or Wimbledon as a compromise?"
"There can't be any compromise."
"Why not? It's what we all have to come to."
"Not I. I can only write if I'm boxed up in my funny little square, with the ash-trees weeping away in the middle."
"I don't wonder," said Brodrick, "that they weep."
"You think it's so terrible?"
"Quite terrible."
She laughed. "Do you remember how you came to see me there?"
"Yes. And how you took me for the man come to tune the piano."
He smiled, remembering it. A bell rang, summoning them, and he took no notice. He smiled again; and suddenly a great shyness and a terror overcame her.
"Don't you really think," said he, "that this sort of thing is nicer?"
"Oh, incomparably nicer. But isn't it getting rather cold?"
His face darkened. "Do you want to go in?"
"Yes."
They rose and went together into the house.
In the hall, through the open door of the drawing-room, she could see the table laid for tea, and Gertrude sitting at it by herself, waiting for them. His sister and the children had gone. Somehow she knew that he had made them go. They would come back, he explained, with the carriage that was to take her to the station, and they would say good-bye to her before she went.
He evaded the drawing-room door and led the way into his library; and she knew that he meant to have the last hour with her alone.
She paused on the threshold. She knew that if she followed him she would never get away.
"Aren't we going," said she, "to have tea with Miss Collett?"
"Would you rather?"
"Much rather," said she.
"Very well, just as you like," he said stiffly.
He was annoyed again. All through tea-time he sulked, while Jane sustained a difficult conversation with Miss Collett.
Miss Collett had lost much of her beautiful serenity. She was still a charming hostess, but there was a palpable effort about her charm. She looked as if she were beginning to suffer from the strain of Brodrick in his present mood.
What Brodrick's mood was, or was beginning to be, Jane could no longer profess to be unaware. While she talked thin talk to Gertrude about the superiority of Putney Heath to Wimbledon Park, and of Brodrick's house to the houses of the other Brodricks, she was thinking, "This woman was happy in his house before I came. He would have been happy with her if I hadn't come. It would be kinder of me if I were to keep out of it, and let her have her chance."
And when she had said good-bye to Mrs. Heron and the children, and found herself in the doctor's brougham, shut up all alone with Brodrick, she said to herself that it was for the last time. When she let him take her back to Kensington Square, when she let him sit with her there for ten minutes in the half-darkness, she said to herself that it was for the last time. And when he rose suddenly, almost violently, for departure, she knew it was for the last time.
"It was good of you," she said, "to bring me home."
"Do you callthisa home?" said Brodrick.
"Why not? It's all I want."
"Is it?" he said savagely, and left her.
He was intensely disagreeable; but that also, she told herself, was for the last time.
As long as Brodrick was there she could listen to the voice inside her, murmuring incessantly of last times, and ordering her to keep out of it and let the poor woman have her chance.
But when he was gone another voice, that was there too, told her that she could not keep out of it. She was being drawn in again, into the toils of life. When it had seemed to her that she drew, she was being drawn. She was drawn by all the things that she had cut herself off from, by holding hands, and searching eyes, and unforgotten tendernesses. In the half-darkness of her room the faces she had been living with were all about her. She felt again the brushing of Winny's hair over her cheek. She heard Winny's mother saying that she liked her. She saw Brodrick sitting opposite her, and the look with which he had watched her when he thought she was asleep.
And when the inward admonitory voice reiterated, "Don't be drawn," the other answered, "Whether I'm out of it or in it the poor woman hasn't got a chance."
It had not occurred to Gertrude that she had a chance. To have calculated chances would have seemed to her the last profanity, so consecrated was her attitude to Brodrick and to all that was Brodrick's. Her chance was, and it always had been, the chance of serving him. She had it. What more, she said to herself, could a woman want?
The peace she had folded round Brodrick wrapped her too. In the quiet hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock, nothing had happened to disturb her beautiful serenity. It was by the cultivation of a beautiful serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to Brodrick and her position in his house. In the beginning that position had been so fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance. Three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to stay. She was a far removed, impoverished cousin of Mrs. John Brodrick's. Hence her claim. They had stretched the point of cousinship to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every Brodrick. He had not wanted her. He preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. But he was sorry for the impoverished lady and he had let her come. Then his sister Sophy had urged him to keep her on until he married. Sophy meant until he married the lady she intended him to marry. He had not married that lady nor any other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. But he had kept Gertrude on.
He had said at the time that he didn't think she would do, but he would try her. He regarded Gertrude with the suspicion a Brodrick invariably entertained for any idea that was not conspicuously his own. But Gertrude had managed, with considerable adroitness, to convince him that she was, after all, his own idea. And when Sophy Levine triumphed, as a Brodrick invariably did triumph, in the proved perfection of her scheme, he said, Yes, Miss Collett was all right, now that he had trained her. If he approved of Miss Collett it was because she was no longer recognizable as the Miss Collett they had so preposterously thrust on him. He could not have stood her if she had been.
Brodrick was right. Gertrude was not the same woman. She did not even look the same. She had come to Moor Grange lean, scared, utterly pathetic, with a mouth that drooped. So starved of all delight and of all possession was Gertrude that she flushed with pleasure when she heard that she was to have for her very own the little north room where the telephone was now. There was such pathos in her meek withdrawal into that little north room, that Brodrick hadn't the heart to keep her in it. The drawing-room, he had intimated, also might be hers, when (it was understood rather than stated) he wasn't there himself.
By that time he no longer objected to Gertrude's being all over the place. Brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the sort of man who could not be happy without a woman to look after him. Silently, almost furtively, Gertrude made herself indispensable to him. She knew what he wanted before he knew it himself, and was on the spot to supply it. Thus, watching the awful increase of Brodrick's correspondence, as the editor grew great, she was prepared for the coming of a secretary and had forestalled it.
She had kept herself prepared for the coming of a wife, a mistress of Brodrick's house, and by making Brodrick supremely comfortable she had managed to forestall that too. His secretary had become the companion that his housekeeper could not hope to be. Hitherto he had kept Gertrude Collett out of his library as far as possible. Now her intrusion had the consecration of business, and it was even permissible for Gertrude to spend long hours with him in the sanctuary. Brodrick invariably breakfasted alone. This habit and his deadly and perpetual dining out, had been a barrier to all intimacy. But now a large part of his work on the "Monthly Review" could be done at home in the evenings, so that the editor had less time for dining out. And latterly he had taken to coming home early in the afternoons, when he rather liked to have Gertrude in the drawing-room pouring out tea for him. She filled the place of something that he missed, that he was as yet hardly aware of missing. It seemed to him that he had got used to Gertrude.
He could not think what life would be like without Gertrude, any more than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more intimate relation. For none of them had ever suggested that he should marry Gertrude. No Brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his housekeeper. Gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself.
And yet she dreamed. But her dream was of continuance in the silent, veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. Service to Brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the perfect tie. It was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. She desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible, inassailable passion of service. Whenever, in her dream, she touched the perilous edges of devotion, Gertrude had pulled herself back. She had told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save Brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense; to save and save and save. That was really what it came to when she saved him from having to keep a secretary.
For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick. Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity, Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging, intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.
It was with the coming of Jane Holland that disturbance had begun; a trouble so mysterious and profound that, if her conscience probed it, the seat of it remained hidden from the probe. She thought, in her innocence, that she was going to have an illness; but it had not struck her that her symptoms were aggravated by Miss Holland's presence and became intense to excruciation in those hours when she knew that Brodrick and Miss Holland were off together somewhere, and alone. She sickened at the thought, and was unaware that she was sick. This unconsciousness of hers was fostered by all the conventions of her world, a world that veils itself decorously in the presence of the unveiled; and she was further helped by her own anxiety to preserve the perfect attitude, to do the perfect thing.
She was not even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland. Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she was, and what she was doing when she was not there.
It ended in wonder; for Brodrick was the only person who could have informed her, and he had grown curiously reticent on the subject of Jane Holland. He would say that she was coming, or that she was not coming, on such or such a day. That was all. Her coming on some day or the other was a thing that Gertrude had now to take for granted. She tried to discuss it eagerly with Brodrick; she dwelt on it with almost affectionate solicitude; you would have said that Brodrick could not have desired it more than she did.
In the last two weeks Gertrude found something ominous in Brodrick's silence and sulkiness. And on this Sunday, the day of Jane's departure, she was no longer able to ignore their significance. Very soon he would come to her and tell her that he did not want her; that she must go; that she must make room for Miss Holland.
That night, after Brodrick had returned from taking Jane Holland home, his secretary came to him in the library. She found him standing by the writing-table, looking intently at something which he held in his hand, something which, as Gertrude appeared to him, he thrust hastily into a drawer.
"May I speak to you a moment?" she said.
"Certainly."
He turned, patient and polite, prepared to deal, as he had dealt before, with some illusory embarrassment of Gertrude's.
"You are not pleased with me," she said, forcing the naked statement through hard lips straight drawn.
"What makes you think so?"
"Your manner has been different."
"Then what you mean is that you are not pleased with my manner. My manner is unfortunate."
He was almost oppressively patient and polite.
"Would it not be better," she said, "for me to go?"
"Certainly not. Unless you want to."
"I don't say that I want to. I say it might be better."
Still, with laborious, weary patience, he protested. He was entirely, absolutely satisfied. He had never dreamed of her going. The idea was preposterous, and it was her own idea, not his.
She looked at him steadily, with eyes prepared to draw truth from him by torture.
"And there is no reason?" she said. "You can think of no reason why it would be better for me to go?"
He hesitated a perceptible instant before he answered her.
"There is no reason," he said; and having said it, he left the room.
He had paused to gather patience in exasperation. Gertrude interpreted the pause as the impressive stop before the final, irrevocable decision; a decision favourable to her continuance.
She was not appeased by it. Her anxiety rather had taken shape, resolving itself into a dreadful suspicion as to the relations between Brodrick and Miss Holland.
He was not thinking of marrying Miss Holland. But there was something between them, something which by no means necessitated her own departure, which indeed rendered superfluous any change in the arrangements she had made so perfect. It was not likely that Brodrick, at his age, should desire to change them. He might be in love with Jane Holland. He was wedded to order and tranquillity and peace. And she never would be. There was wild, queer blood in her. Her writings proved her lawless, defiant, contemptuous of propriety. She had, no doubt, claimed the right of genius to make its own rules.
Gertrude's brain, which had been passive to the situation, now worked with uncontrolled activity. She found herself arguing it out. If it were so, whatever was, or had been, or would be between them, it was transitory. It would run its course and period, and she would remain, and he would return to her. She had only to wait and serve; to serve and wait. It seemed to her then that her passion rose above theirs, white with renunciation, a winged prayer, a bloodless, bodiless longing, subtler than desire, sounding a poignant spiritual cry.
And all the time she knew that her suspicion was not justified. Jane Holland was honest; and as for him, she was not even sure that he cared for her.
Every instinct in her was now subdued to the craving to be sure, to know how far the two were going or had gone. Whatever was between them, it was something that Brodrick desired to conceal, to thrust out of her sight, as he had thrust the thing he had held in his hand.
Up-stairs overhead, she heard the door of his room opening and shutting. She saw the light from his windows lengthening on the gravel path outside. He was not coming back.
She opened the drawer where she divined that it lurked hidden, the thing that was the sign and symbol of their secret. She found lying there, face downwards, a portrait of Jane Holland, a photograph of the painting by Gisborne. She took it in her hand and looked at the queer, half-plain, half-beautiful, wholly fascinating face; and it was as if she looked for the first time on the face of her own passion, dully, stupidly, not knowing it for the thing it was. She had a sudden vision of their passion, Jane's and Brodrick's, as it would be; she saw the transitory, incarnate thing, flushed in the splendour of its moment, triumphant, exultant and alive.
She laid the portrait in its drawer again, face downwards, and turned from it. And for a moment she stood there, clutching her breasts with her hands, so that she hurt them, giving pain for intolerable pain.
Now that the thing she was afraid of had become a fact, she told herself that she might have known, that she had known it all the time. As she faced it she realized how terribly afraid she had been. She had had foreknowledge of it from the moment when Jane Holland came first into Brodrick's house.
She maintained her policy of silence. It helped her, as if she felt that, by ignoring this thing, by refusing to talk about it, by not admitting that anything so preposterous could be, it did somehow cease to be.
She would have been glad if Brodrick's family could have remained unaware of the situation. But Brodrick's family, by the sheer instinct of self-preservation, was awake to everything that concerned it.
Every Brodrick, once he had passed the privileged years of his minority, knew that grave things were expected of him. It was expected of him, first of all, that he should marry; and that, not with the levity of infatuation, but soberly and seriously, for the good and for the preservation of the race of Brodricks in its perfection. As it happened, in the present generation of Brodricks, not one of them had done what was expected of them, except Sophy. John had fallen in love with a fragile, distinguished lady, and had incontinently married her; and she had borne him no children. Henry, who should have known better, had fallen in love with a lady so excessively fragile that she had died before he could marry her at all. And because of his love for her he had remained unmarried. Frances had set her heart on a rascal who had left her for the governess. And now Hugh, with his Jane Holland, bid fair to be similarly perverse.
For every Brodrick took, not delight, so much as a serious and sober satisfaction, in the thought that he disappointed expectation. Each one believed himself the creature of a solitary and majestic law. His actions defied prediction. He felt it as an impertinence that anybody, even a Brodrick, should presume to conjecture how a Brodrick would, in any given circumstances, behave. He held it a special prerogative of Brodricks, this capacity for accomplishing the unforeseen. Nobody was surprised when the unforeseen happened; for this family made it a point of honour never to be surprised. The performances of other people, however astounding, however eccentric, appeared to a Brodrick as the facilely calculable working of a law from which a Brodrick was exempt. Whatever another person did, it was always what some Brodrick had expected him to do. Even when Frances's husband ran away with the governess and broke the heart Frances had set on him, it was only what John and Henry and Sophy and Hugh had known would happen if she married him. If it hadn't happened to a Brodrick, they would hardly have blamed Heron for his iniquity; it was so inherent in him and predestined.
So, when it seemed likely that Hugh would marry Jane Holland, the Brodricks were careful to conceal from each other that they were unprepared for this event. They discussed it casually, and with less emotion than they had given to the wild project of the magazine.
It was on a Sunday evening at the John Brodricks', shortly after Jane had left Putney.
"It strikes me," said John who began it, "that one way or another Hugh is seeing a great deal of Miss Holland."
"My dear John, why shouldn't he?" said Frances Heron.
"I'm not saying that he shouldn't. I'm saying that one way or another, he does."
"He has to see her on business," said Frances.
"Doeshe see her on business?" inquired John.
"He says he does," said Frances.
"Of course," said the Doctor, "he'dsayhe did."
"Why," said Sophy, "does he say anything at all? That's the suspicious circumstance, to my mind."
"He's evidently aware," said the Doctor, "that something wants explaining."
"So it does," said Sophy; "when Hugh takes to seeing any woman more than once in five months."
"But she's the last woman he'd think of," said Frances.
"It's the last woman a man thinks of that he generally ends by marrying," said John.
"If he'd only think of her," said the Doctor, "he'd be safe enough."
"I know. It's his not thinking," said John; "it's his dashing into it with his eyes shut."
"Do you think," said Frances, "we'd better open his eyes?"
"If you do that," said Levine, "he'll marry her to-morrow."
"Yes," said the Doctor; "much better encourage him, give him his head."
"And fling her at it?" suggested Sophy.
"Well, certainly, if we don't want it to happen, we'd better assume that it will happen."
"Supposing," said Frances presently, "it did happen—what then?"
"My dear Frances, it would be most undesirable," said John.
"By all means," said Levine, "let us take the worst for granted. Then possibly he'll think better of it."
The family, therefore, adopted its characteristic policy of assuming Hugh's intentions to be obvious, of refusing to be surprised or even greatly interested.
Only the Doctor, watching quietly, waited for his moment. It came the next evening when he dropped in to dine with Hugh. He turned the conversation upon Jane Holland, upon her illness, upon its cause and her recovery.
"I shouldn't be surprised," said he, "if some time or other she was to have a bad nervous break-down."
Hugh laughed. "My dear Henry, you wouldn't be surprised if everybody had a bad nervous break-down. It's what you're always expecting them to have."
Henry said hedidexpect it in women of Miss Holland's physique, who habitually over-drive their brains beyond the power of their body. He became excessively professional as he delivered himself on this head.
It was his subject. He was permitted to enlarge upon it from time to time, and Hugh was not in the least surprised at his entering on it now. It was what he had expected of Henry, and he said so.
Henry looked steadily at his brother.
"I have had her," said he, "under very close observation."
"So have I," said Hugh. "You forget that she is an exceptional woman."
"On the contrary, I think her so very exceptional as to be quite abnormal. Geniuses generally are."
"I don't know. For a woman to live absolutely alone, as she does, and thrive on it, and turn out the work she does—It's a pretty fair test of sanity."
"That she should have chosen to do so is itself abnormal."
"It's not a joyous or a desirable life for her, if that's what you mean," said Hugh.
But that was not what the Doctor meant, and he judged it discreet to drop the discussion at that point.
And, as for several weeks he saw and heard no more of Miss Holland, he judged that Hugh had begun to think, and that he had thought better of it.
For the Doctor knew what he was talking about. When a Brodrick meant to marry, he did not lose his head about a woman, he married sanely, soberly and decorously, for the sake of children. It was so that their father had married. It was so that John—well, John had been a little unfortunate. It was so that he, the Doctor——
He stopped short in his reflections, remembering how it was that he had remained unmarried. Like every other Brodrick he had reserved for himself the privilege of the unexpected line.