She began by asking Rose when she was coming out to Putney? And Rose
answered that she was busy and couldn't say for sure.

"You won't be busy in August, will you? If you'll come then I'll show
you a room you haven't seen, the prettiest room in the house."

Rose drew in her breath. Her face had the soft flush in it that came
when she was deeply moved.

"I've got some of its dear little things all ready for it now," said
Jane. "You must see them."

"I should dearly love to."

"I never thought, Rose, that I should have it."

Rose meditated. "They come," said she, "mostly to them that doesn't
think."

"There's only one thing, Rose. I'm afraid. Oh, I'm so dreadfully
afraid."

"I shouldn't be afraid," said Rose, "if it was me."

"It's because I've been so happy."

"You'll be 'appier still when it's come. It'd make all the difference to
me if I 'ad a child. But that's what I haven't and never shall have."

"You don't know. You don't know."

"Yes. I do know." Rose's mouth trembled. She glanced unaware at the
pillow that lay so smooth beside her own. "I 'aven't let on to him how
much I want it. I wouldn't" (Rose steadied her mouth to get the words
out). "Not if it was ever so."

"You darling," said Jane, and kissed her, and at that Rose burst into
tears.

"I oughtn't to be keeping you here," she said. And they left the
bedroom.

"Aren't you coming in?" said Jane.

Rose had turned away from her at Tanqueray's door.

"I can't," she whispered. "Not with me eyes all swelled up like this."

She went down-stairs to her little kitchen, where in the half-darkness
she crouched down beside Minny who, with humped shoulders and head that
nodded to the fender, dozed before the fire.




XXXVII


Laura Gunning was writing a letter to Tanqueray to congratulate him on
his book and to explain why she had not come to his birthday party. It
was simply impossible to get off now. Papa, she said, couldn't be left
for five minutes, not even with the morning paper.

It was frightfully hard work getting all this into any intelligible form
of words; getting it down at all was difficult. For the last hour she
had been sitting there, starting and trembling at each rustle of the
paper. Mr. Gunning could not settle down to reading now. He turned his
paper over and over again in the vain search for distraction; he divided
it into parts and became entangled in them; now he would cast them from
him and trample them under his feet; and now they would be flapping
about his head; he would be covered and utterly concealed in newspaper.

It was a perpetual wind of newspaper, now high, now low; small, creeping
sounds that rose to a crescendo; rushing, ripping, shrieking sounds of
agitated newspaper, lacerating Laura's nerves, and murderous to the
rhythm of her prose.

Tears fell from Laura's eyes as she wrote; they dropped, disfiguring her
letter. Her head ached. It was always aching now. And when she tried to
write she felt as if she were weaving string out of the grey matter of
her brain, with the thread breaking all the time.

At four o'clock she rose wearily and began to get tea ready. Nina was
coming to tea that afternoon. It was something to look forward to,
something that would stave off the pressure and the pain.

Her tether had stretched; it had given her inches; but this was the end
of it. She did not see, herself, now, any more than Nina or Jane or
Tanqueray saw, how she was to go on. She did not know how, for
instance, she was to face the terrible question of finance. For the last
six months she had not written any paragraphs. Even if Papa had not made
it impossible for her to write them, her head and all the ideas in it
were giving out. She had lost her job. She was living precariously on
translation, which could be done, she maintained, when you hadn't any
head at all. She would get twenty pounds for it, and there would be
forty, perhaps, for the book which she had been sitting up to write. She
did not know where the money for next year was coming from; and there
were the doctor and the chemist now to pay for poor Papa.

The doctor and the chemist had not cured him of his dreams. The dreams
were incessant, and they were more horrid than they had ever been. She
hadn't slept for fear of the opening of the door, and the sound of the
slow feet shuffling to her bedside, and the face that took on more and
more the likeness of the horrors that he dreamed.

The dreams, she had gathered, were a very bad sign. She had been told
that she must be on the look-out; she must not leave him. She knew what
that meant. Her fear might take shape any day or any night.

Last night she had moved her bed into his room.

The doctor had looked grave when she told him what she had done. There
should be, he said, an attendant for the night. To be on the look-out
night and day were too much for any woman. She should husband her
strength, for she would want it. She was in for a very long strain. For
the old man's bodily health was marvellous. He might last like that for
another ten years, and, with care, for longer.

Nina had been drawn apart into the inner room to receive this account of
Mr. Gunning. She was shocked by the change she found in her little
friend. The Kiddy was very thin. Her pretty, slender neck was wasted,
and her childlike wrists were flattened to the bone. A sallow tint was
staining her whiteness. Her hair no longer waved in its low curves; it
fell flat and limp from the parting. Her eyes, strained, fixed in their
fear, showed a rim of white. Her mouth was set tight in defiance of her
fear. Nina noticed that there was a faint, sagging mark on either side
of it.

"Kiddy," she said, "how _will_ you----?"

"I don't know. My brain's all woolly and it won't think."

Laura closed her eyes; a way she had when she faced terror.

"Nina, it was horrible yesterday. I caught myself wishing----Oh no, I
don't; I didn't; I couldn't; it was something else, not me. It couldn't
have been me, could it?"

"No, Kiddy, of course it couldn't."

"I don't know. I feel sometimes as if I could be awful. Yesterday, I did
a cruel thing to him. I took his newspaper away from him."

She stared, agonized, as if her words were being wrenched from her with
each turn of a rack.

"I hid it. And he cried, Nina, he cried."

Her sad eyes fastened on Nina's; they clung, straining at the hope they
saw in Nina's pity.

"I can't think how I did it. I couldn't stand it, you know--the
rustling."

"Kiddy," said Nina, "you're going to pieces."

Laura shook her head. "Oh no. If I could have peace; if I could only
have peace, for three days."

"You must have it. You must go away."

"How can I go and leave him?"

"Tank's wife would come."

"Three days." It seemed as if she were considering it, as if her mind,
drowning, snatched at that straw.

She let it go. "No. It's no use going away. It would make no
difference."

She turned her face from Nina. "In some ways," she said, "it's a good
thing I've got Papa to think of."

Nina was silent. She knew what Laura meant.




XXXVIII


They had preserved as by a compact a perpetual silence on the subject of
Owen Prothero. But always, after seeing Laura, Nina had forced herself
to write to him that he might know she had been true to her trust.

To-night she wrote: "I have done all I can for you, or, if you like, for
Laura. She's at the breaking point. If you think there's anything you
can do for her yourself you'd better do it and lose no time."

She wrote brutally; for mixed with her jealousy there was a savage anger
with Owen as the cause of Laura's suffering. She hated the Kiddy, but
she couldn't bear to see her suffer.

There were two days yet before the mail went; but she posted her letter
at once, while her nerve held out. The thing done, she sat up till
midnight brooding over it. It had taken all her nerve. For she did not
want Prothero to come back, and that letter would bring him. Bodily
separation from Owen had not killed her; it had become the very
condition of her life; for there was a soul of soundness in her. Her
blood, so vehement in its course, had the saving impetus of recoil.

She dreaded its dominion as the whipped slave dreads the lash.

Latterly she had detached herself even spiritually from Owen. She
remembered what she had been before, without him, and what, without him,
she had possessed. Her genius was a thing utterly removed from her, a
thing that belonged to Owen rather than to her, since he had said it was
his youth. She thought of it tenderly, as of a thing done for and
departed; for it was so that she had come to think of Owen's youth. She
was not like Jane, she felt no hatred of it and no jealousy. It had not
given her cause. It had not stood in her way. It had not struggled in
her against her passion. If it had, she knew that she would have swept
it aside and crushed it. It had lain always at the mercy of her
passions; she had given it to her passions to destroy, foreseeing the
destruction. But now she relented. She felt that she would save it if
she could.

It was in her hour of sanity and insight that she had said virginity was
the law, the indispensable condition. Virginity--she had always seen it,
not as a fragile, frustrate thing, but as a joyous, triumphing energy,
the cold, wild sister of mountain winds and leaping waters, subservient
only to her genius, guarding the flame in its secret, unsurrendered
heart.

Her genius was the genius of wild earth, an immortal of divinely pitiful
virgin heart and healing hand; clear-eyed, swift-footed, a huntress of
the woods and the mountains, a runner in the earth's green depths, in
the secret, enchanted ways. To follow it was to know joy and deliverance
and peace. It was the one thing that had not betrayed her.

There had been moments, lately, when she had had almost the assurance of
its ultimate return; when she had felt the stirring of the old impulse,
the immortal instinct; when she longed for the rushing of her rivers,
and the race of the wind on her mountains of the Marches. It would come
back, her power, if she were there, in the place where it was born; if
she could get away from streets and houses and people; if she got away
from Laura.

But Laura was the one thing she could not get away from. She had to be
faithful to her trust.

It would be seven weeks, at the least, before Owen could come back. Her
letter would take three weeks to reach him, and he would have to make
arrangements. She wondered whether the Kiddy could hold out so long.

All night she was tormented by this fear, of the Kiddy's not holding
out, of her just missing it; of every week being one more nail hammered,
as she had once said, into the Kiddy's little coffin; and it was with a
poignant premonition that she received a message from Addy Ranger in the
morning. Miss Ranger was down-stairs; she had something to say to Miss
Lempriere; she must see her. She couldn't come up; she hadn't a minute.

Addy stood outside on the doorstep. She was always in a violent hurry
when on her way to Fleet Street, the scene for the time being of her
job. But this morning her face showed signs of a profounder agitation.
She made a rush at Nina.

"Oh, Miss Lempriere, will you go to Laura?"

"Is she ill?"

"No. _He_ is. He's dying. He's in a fit. I think it's killing her."

The blinds were down when Nina reached the house in Camden Town.

The fit--it was apoplexy, Mrs. Baxter informed her--had not been long.
It had come on, mercifully, in his sleep. Mercifully (Mrs. Baxter leant
on it); but Miss Lempriere had better go up at once to Miss Gunning.

Nina went without a word.

The bed had been drawn into the middle of the small back room. The body
of the old man lay on it, covered with a sheet. His head was tilted a
little, showing the prone arch of the peaked nose; the jaw was bound
with a handkerchief. Already the features were as they had been in the
days before disease had touched them. Death had constrained them to
their primal sanity. Death dominated them like a living soul.

The death-bed and its burden filled the room. In the narrow space
between it and the wall little Laura went to and fro, to and fro,
looking for a pair of white socks that were not there and never had
been. She must find, she was saying, a pair of white socks, of clean
white socks. They had told her that they were necessary.




XXXIX


It was on the thirtieth of July that Laura's father died. Three weeks
later Laura was living in the room in Adelphi Terrace which had been
Owen Prothero's. Nina had taken her away from the house in Camden Town,
where she had sat alone with her grief and remorse and the intolerable
memory of her fear. They said that her mind would give way if she were
left there.

And now, secretly and in a night, her trouble had passed from her. Lying
there in Owen's room, on his bed, held as in shelter by the walls that
had held him, there had come to her a strange and intimate sense of his
presence. More strangely and more intimately still, it assured her of
her father's presence and continuance, of it being as Owen had said. The
wind from the river passed over her, lying there. It fell like an aura
of immortality.

After that night the return of her bodily health was rapid, a matter of
three days; and they said of her that this marvellous recovery was due
to the old man's death, to her release from the tension.

Late one afternoon she was sitting by herself at Owen's window that
looked out to the sky. Outside the rain streamed in a grey mist to the
streets and the river. At the sound of it her heart lifted with a sudden
wildness and tremor. She started when Nina opened the door and came to
her, haggard and unsmiling.

Nina was telling her twice over to go down-stairs. There was somebody
there who had come to see her. When she asked who it was, Nina answered
curtly that she, Laura, knew.

Laura went down to Nina's room, the room that looked over the river.

Prothero stood by the window with his back to the light.

She gave a low sobbing cry of joy and fear, and stayed where she had
entered; and he strode forward and took her in his arms. He held her for
a long moment, bending to her, his lips pressed to hers, till she drew
back her face suddenly and looked at him.

"Do you know? Has Nina told you?"

"I knew three weeks ago."

"Did she wire?"

"Nobody wired."

"Why have you come, then?"

"_You_ sent for me."

"Oh no, no. It wasn't I. I couldn't. How could you think I would?"

"Why couldn't you?"

"It would have been," she said, "a dreadful thing to do."

"That dreadful thing is what you did. I heard you all night--the night
of the thirtieth; you were crying to me. And in the morning I saw you."

"You saw me?"

"I saw you in a little room that I've never seen you in. You were going
up and down in it, with your hands held out, like this, in front of you.
You were looking for something. And I knew that I had to come."

"And you came," she said, "just for that?"

"I came--just for that."

An hour later he was alone for a moment with Nina. She had come in with
her hat and jacket on.

"Do you mind," she said, "if I go out? I've _got_ to go."

There was nothing to be said. He knew the nature of her necessity, and
she knew that he knew. She stood confronting him and his knowledge with
a face that never flinched. His eyes protested, with that eternal
tenderness of his that had been her undoing. She steadied her voice
under it.

"I want you to know, Owen, that I sent for you."

"It was like your goodness."

She shrugged her thin shoulders. "There was nothing else," she said,
"that I could do."

That night, while Prothero and Laura sat together holding each other's
hands, Nina walked up and down outside on the Embankment, in the rain.
She had said that she was more like a man than a woman; and with her
stride that gave her garments recklessly to the rain, with her impetuous
poise, and hooded, hungry eyes, she had the look of some lean and
vehement adolescent, driven there by his youth.

The next day, very early, she went down into Wales, a virgin to her
mountains.

She had done all she could.




XL


Laura was staying at the Brodricks. She was to stay, Jane insisted on
it, until she was married. She would have to stay for ever then, Laura
said. Her marriage seemed so far-off, so unlikely, so impossible.

For Prothero had offended the powers that governed his material destiny,
the editors and proprietors of the "Morning Telegraph." A man who,
without a moment's notice, could fling up his appointment, an
appointment, mind you, that he had obtained, not by any merit of his
own, but through the grace and favour of an editor's wife, an
appointment that he held precariously, almost on sufferance, by mercy
extended to him day by day and hour by hour, what could he hope for from
sane, responsible men like Brodrick and Levine? Did he imagine that
appointments hung on lamp-posts ready to his hand? Or that they only
waited for his appearance, to fall instantly upon his head? And that, if
they did fall on his head, he could take them on and off like his hat?
And did he think that he could play the fool with a paper like the
"Morning Telegraph"?

These questions Brodrick asked of Levine and Levine of Brodrick, before
the unspeakably shocked, the unconditionally assenting faces of John and
Henry.

All the Brodricks disapproved of Prothero and were annoyed with him for
flinging up his appointment. Jane pleaded that he had flung it up
because he was fond of Laura and wanted to marry her; and she was told
that that was all the more reason why he should have stuck to it. They
were annoyed with him for keeping Laura hanging on when he knew he
couldn't marry her; and they were annoyed with him for wanting to marry
her at all. They admitted that it was very sad for Laura; they liked
Laura; they approved of Laura; she had done her duty by all the family
she had, and had nearly died of it. And when Jane suggested that all
Prothero wanted was to do the same, they replied that Prothero had no
business to think of having a family--they supposed that was what it
would end in--a man who couldn't keep himself, much less a delicate wife
and half-a-dozen children. There would be half-a-dozen; there always
were in cases like Prothero's. And at that Jane smiled and said they
would be darlings if they were at all like Laura.

They were annoyed with Jane for her championship of Prothero. They were
immeasurably annoyed with her when she, and Tanqueray, and Arnott
Nicholson, and Nina published his poems--a second volume--by
subscription. They subscribed generously, and grew more resentful on the
strength of it. Jane pleaded, but Brodrick was inexorable. The more she
pleaded the more inexorable he was. This time he put his foot down, and
put it (as Jane bitterly remarked) on poor Owen Prothero's neck. It was
a neck, a stiff and obstinate neck, that positively invited the foot of
a stiff and obstinate man.

Jane hid these things from Laura, who thought, poor innocent, that it
was only her luck. Marriage or no marriage, she was incredibly happy.
She even persuaded herself it was as well that she couldn't be married
if that was to make her happier. She distrusted happiness carried to
such a preposterous pitch.

She was sitting with Jane one evening, by the October firelight, in the
room where her friend lay quietly.

"Do you remember, Jinny, how we were all in love with George, you and I
and Nina and poor old Caro? Caro said it was our apprenticeship to the
master."

Jane remembered.

"He was training us; I really think he was," said Laura, still
reminiscent. "Can't you hear him saying, 'Come on, come on, what the
dickens does it matter if I do see you? It's got to be somebody and it
had much better be me. I shan't snigger. But I'm going to make you
squirm as much as you _can_ squirm. You've got to know what it feels
like.' I think he was positively proud of us when we did come on. I
can't imagine him taking any other view. And after all, you know, he
didn't snigger."

She pondered. "He's an abominable husband, but he's a glorious friend."

Jane assented. He was glorious and abominable.

Laura's face grew tender in meditation. She was no longer thinking of
George Tanqueray.

"There's one awful fear I have with Owen. I shan't be ready in time when
he's all nicely disembodied and on his way to heaven. I see him stopped
at some uninteresting station, and sitting there waiting--patiently
waiting--for me to disembody myself and come on. It'll take me ages."

"It always was difficult to get you off," Jane murmured.

"I know. And I shall feel as if I were keeping him back when he was
trying to catch a train."

"I imagine he's pretty sure of his train."

"The truth is Owen doesn't really wait. He's always in his train and out
of it, so to speak."

"And your disembodying yourself, darling, is only a question of time."

"And time," said Laura, "doesn't exist for Owen."

But time was beginning to exist for Owen. He felt the pressure of the
heavy days that divided him from Laura. He revolted against this tyranny
of time.

And Brodrick, the lord of time, remained inexorable for two months.

Long before they were ended, little Laura, with a determination as
inexorable as Brodrick's, had left Brodrick's house. To the great
disgust and scandal of the Brodricks she had gone back to her rooms in
Camden Town, where Prothero was living in the next house with only a
wall between them.

Then (it was in the middle of October, when Henry was telling them that
Jane must on no account be agitated) Brodrick and Jane nearly quarrelled
about Prothero. She said that he was cruel, and that if Owen went into a
consumption and Laura died of hunger it would be all his fault. And when
he tried to reason gently with her she went off into a violent fit of
hysterics. The next day Brodrick had a son born to him, a whole month
before Henry had expected anything of the kind.

At first Brodrick was more than ever enraged with Prothero for tampering
with other people's families like that. Jane had to go very near to
death before his will was broken. It broke, though, at the touch of her
weak arms round his neck, at the sight of her tortured body, and at her
voice, sounding from the doors of death and birth, imploring him to do
something for Owen Prothero.

Jane had hardly had time to recover before Prothero got work again on
Brodrick's paper. Laura said they owed that to Jinny's baby.

They were married in November before Jinny's baby could be christened.
It was a rather sad and strange little wedding, in the parish church of
Camden Town, with Brodrick to give away the bride, and Caro Bickersteth
for bridesmaid, and Tanqueray for best man. Nina was not there. She had
sent Laura a cheque for two hundred pounds two months ago--the half of
her savings--and told her to go and marry Owen with it at once, and she
had torn it up in a fury when Laura sent it back. She could do all that;
but she could not go and see Laura and Owen getting married.

The two had found a lodging in an old house in Hampstead, not far from
the Consumption Hospital. Laura had objected to the hospital, but Owen
refused to recognize it as a thing of fear. He had fallen in love with
the house. It topped a rise, at the end of the precipitous lane that
curls out of the great modern High Street. It stood back in its garden,
its narrow, flat-eyed windows staring over the wall down the lane.

Laura wasn't sure that she quite liked it.

"What are you looking at?" she said, as he paused before this house.

"I'm looking at that," said Prothero.

He pointed to an old, disused iron gate, and to the design, curl within
curl of slender, aspiring curves, that grew and branched and overflowed,
in tendrils of almost tremulous grace, and in triple leaves, each less
like a leaf than a three-tongued flame. Insubstantial as lace-work
against the green background of the garden, it hung rather than stood
between its brick pillars, its edges fretted and fringed with rust,
consumed in a delicate decay. A stout iron railing guarded this miracle
of art and time. Thus cut off from the uses of life, it gave to the
place an air of almost unbearable mystery and isolation; it stirred the
sense of mortality, of things that having passed through that doorway
would not return.

"That house looks and feels as if it had ghosts in it," she said.

"So it has. Not the ghosts of people who have died. The ghosts of people
who have never been born. The people," he said, "who come through the
iron gate."

And as she looked at it again and at the untrodden grass behind it, she
felt that this masterpiece of iron tortured into beauty was an
appropriate symbol of their life. Of Owen's, rather than of hers. Closed
as it was to all corporeal creatures, there yet went through it
presences, intelligences, the august procession of the dreams.

It was flanked by a postern door, a little humble door in the wall of
the garden. That was the door, Laura said, through which her little
humble dreams would go out into the world to make their living.

"Poor Owen," she said, "it's the door _you'll_ have to go through."

He smiled.

"And the other," he said, "is the door I shall come back through when
I'm gone."

That was what she couldn't bear to think of, the necessity she laid on
him of going, as it were, for ever through the postern door. He was
after all such a supernatural, such a disembodied thing. He had at times
the eyes of a young divinity innocent of creation, untouched by the
shames and terrors of the apparent world. And she knew it was the desire
they had for each other that had brought him back from his divine
borders and that held him in her world. There were moments when she
felt that he maintained his appearance there by an effort so intense
that it must be torture.

And he would have to work for her, doing dreadful things down in Fleet
Street. Every day she would see him go down the green walk, and out
through the postern gate, into the alien and terrible places of the
incarnate. She felt that she had brought mortality upon an immortal
thing. She had bound this winged and radiant spirit with the weight of
her sad star.

But there came to her a wonderful day when he brought her home, through
the little humble door in the wall of the garden; when, shut in their
room, he took her to himself. He laid his hands on her shoulders, and
she closed her eyes. He bowed his head over her and his breath was on
her mouth and she gave her face to him. His hands trembled holding her,
and she felt upon her their power and their passion.

And she knew that it was not her body alone that he sought for and held,
but the soul that was her womanhood. It stood before him, a new-born
Eve, naked and unafraid on the green plots of Eden. It looked at him,
and its eyes were tender with desire and pity. It was tremulous as a
body inhabited by leaping light and flame.

She knew that in them both the flame burned singly.




XLI


She was aware how wonderful the thing was that had happened to her, how
it stood solitary in the world.

It was not so, she knew, with any of the others. It was not so with Nina
or with Tanqueray. It was not so even with Jane. Jane had taken into her
life an element of tumult and division. The Lord her God (as Tanqueray
had once told her) was a consuming fire. Married she served a double and
divided flame. For Laura and Prothero the plots of Eden lay green for
ever inside the iron gate, and all heaven was held within the four walls
of a room.

They had established themselves, strictly speaking, in three rooms, two
for work and one for sleep. From the standpoint of tangible
requirements, three rooms on a silent upper floor was their idea of a
perfect lodging. It was Nina's, it had been Tanqueray's and Jane's. A
house, Laura declared, was all very well for a poet like poor Nicky
(what would poor Nicky be without his house?); but Jinny's house was a
curse to her, and Tanks did not regard his as an unmixed blessing,
though she would have died rather than say so to Tank's wife.

Tank's wife had her own theory of Laura's attitude. Laura was making (as
she herself had once made) the best of a bad job. Rose had the worst
opinion of Mr. Prothero's job; the job that sent him into Fleet Street
in all weathers and at all hours of the day and night, and was yet
compatible with his hanging about at home, doing nothing, four days out
of the seven. Rose was very fond of Laura and of Prothero. She had
always felt that they were interesting persons, persons who might any
day be ill and require to be taken care of, who required a good deal of
being taken care of, as it was. Rose superintended their removal. Rose,
very earnestly and gravely, took Laura's housekeeping in hand. To Rose,
Laura's housekeeping was a childish thing. She enlightened its innocence
and controlled its ardours and its indiscretions. Spring chicken on a
Tuesday and a Wednesday, and all Thursday nothing but such stuff as rice
and macaroni was, said Rose, a flyin' outrageous to extremes. She taught
them the secret of a breast of veal, stewed in rice (if rice they must
have), and many another admirable and economical contrivance.

Rose, fertile in contrivances, came and went a great deal to the house
with the iron gate. She, who had once felt that there was nothing in
common between her and her husband's friends, was being gradually drawn
to them. Jane's baby had been the link with Jane; Mr. Gunning had been
the link with Laura; she shared with Laura and Prothero the rare genius
of devotion to a person. Rose was shocked and bewildered by many of the
little ways of the creators, but she understood _their_ way. They loved
each other more than they loved anything they created. They loved each
other as she loved Tanqueray, but with a perfect comprehension.

Their happiness was ominously perfect. And as time went on Rose shook
her wise head over them. They had been married six months, and Rose was
beginning to think what a difference it would make if Laura was to have
a little baby, and she could come in sometimes and take care of it. But
Laura hadn't a little baby, and wasn't going, she said, to have a little
baby. She didn't want one. Laura was elated because she had had a book.
She had thought she was never going to have another, and it was the best
book she had ever had. Perfection, within her limits, had come to her,
now that she had left off thinking about it.

She couldn't have believed that so many perfect things could come to her
at once. For Laura, in spite of her happiness, remained a sceptic at
heart. She went cautiously, dreading the irony of the jealous gods.

Tanqueray had bullied his publishers into giving a decent price for
Laura's book. And, to the utter overthrow of Laura's scepticism, the
book went well. It had a levity and charm that provoked and captured and
never held you for a minute too long. A demand rose for more of the
same kind from the same author, and for her earlier books, the ones that
she had got out of bed to write, and that didn't and wouldn't sell.

For her husband's poems there had been no demand at all. He was not
unknown, far from it. He fell conspicuously, illustriously, between the
reviewers who reviled him, and the public who would have none of him. If
they had only let him alone. But they didn't. There was no poet more
pursued and persecuted than Owen Prothero. He trailed bleeding feet,
like a scapegoat on all the high mountains. He brought reproach and
ridicule on the friends who defended him, on Jane Holland, and on Nina
Lempriere and Tanqueray, which was what he minded most of all.

He was beginning to wonder whether, at this rate, there would be any
continued demand for his paragraphs, or for any of the work he did for
the "Morning Telegraph." His editors were by no means satisfied. If only
he could write columns and paragraphs as Laura wrote them. But he
couldn't really write them properly at all. And the dreadful irony of it
was that when he ought to be writing paragraphs, poems would come; and
that when he was writing poems he would have to leave off, as often as
not, to finish a paragraph.

Laura said to herself that she was going to make an end of all that.

Her gift was so small that it couldn't in any way crown him; there was
no room on his head for anything besides his own stupendous crown. But,
if she couldn't put it on his head, her poor gift, she could lay it, she
could spread it out at his feet, to make his way softer. He had praised
it; he had said that in its minute way it was wonderful and beautiful;
and to her the beauty and the wonder of it were that, though it was so
small, it could actually make his gift greater. It could actually
provide the difficult material conditions, sleep and proper food, an
enormous leisure and a perfect peace.

She was a little sore as she thought how she had struggled for years to
get things for poor Papa, and how he had had to do without them. And she
consoled herself by thinking, after all, how pleased he would have been
if he had known; and how fond he had been of Owen, and how nice Owen had
always been to him.

One evening she brought all the publishers' letters and the cheques, and
laid them before Owen as he sat in gloom.

"It looks as if we were going to make lots of money."

"We!"

"Yes, we; you and I. Isn't it funny?"

"I don't think it's funny at all," said Owen. "It might be--a little
funny, if I made it and not you."

"Darling--that would be funnier than anything."

Her laughter darted at him, sudden and sweet and shrill, and it cut him
to the heart. His gravity was now portentous.

"The beauty of it is," she persisted, defying all his gravity, "that,
if I can go on, you won't have to make it. And I shall go on, I feel
it; I feel myself going. I've got a dream, Owen, such a beautiful
dream. Some day, instead of sitting there breaking your heart over
those horrid paragraphs, instead of rushing down to Fleet Street in
the rain and the sleet and the fog, you shall ramp up and down here,
darling, making poems, and it won't matter if you wear the carpet
out, if you wear ten carpets. You shall make poems all day long, and
you--shall--never--write--another--paragraph again. You do them very
badly."

"You needn't remind me of that," said Owen in his gloom.

"But, surely, you don't want to do them _well_?"

"You know what I want."

"You talk as if you hadn't got it."

She crouched down beside him and laid her face against his knee.

"I don't think it's nice of you," she said, "not to be pleased when I'm
pleased."

His eyes lightened. His hand slid down to her and caressed her hair.

"I _am_ pleased," he said. "That's what I wanted, to see you going
strong, doing nothing but the work you love. All the same----"

"Well?"

"Can't you understand that I don't want to see my wife working for me?"

She laughed again. "You're just like that silly old Tanks. He couldn't
bear to see his wife working when she wanted to; so he wouldn't let her
work, and the poor little soul got ill with not having what she wanted.
You didn't want me to get ill, did you?"

"I wanted to take care of you--well or ill. I wanted to work for you all
my life long."

"And you wanted me to be happy?"

"More than anything I wanted you to be happy."

"But you didn't, and you don't want me to be happy--in my own way?"

He rose and lifted her from the floor where she crouched, and held her
so tight to him that he hurt her.

"My little one," he murmured, "can't you understand it? Can't you see
it? You're so small--so small."




XLII


For six months Jane concentrated all her passion on her little son. The
Brodricks, who had never been surprised at anything, owned that this was
certainly not what they had expected. Jane seemed created to confound
their judgments and overthrow their expectations. Neither Frances Heron
nor Sophy Levine was ever possessed by the ecstasy and martyrdom of
motherhood. They confessed as much. Frances looked at Sophy and said,
"Whoever would have thought that Jinny----?" And Sophy looked at Frances
and replied, "My dear, I didn't even think she could have had one. She's
a marvel and a mystery."

The baby was a link binding Jane to her husband's family. She was a
marvel and a mystery to them more than ever, but she was no longer an
alien. The tie of the flesh was strong. She was Hugh's wife, who had
gone near to death for him, and had returned in triumph. She was
glorified in their eyes by all the powers of life.

The baby himself had an irresistible attraction for them. From John's
house in Augustus Road, from Henry's house in Roehampton Lane, from the
house of the Levines in St. John's Wood, there was now an incessant
converging upon Brodrick's house. The women took an unwearying and
unwandering interest in Hugh's amazing son. (It was a girl they had
expected.) First thing in the morning, or at noon, or in the early
evening at his bed-time, John's wife, Mabel, came with her red-eyed,
sad-hearted worship. Winny Heron hung about him and Jane for ever. Jane
discovered in Sophy and in Frances an undercurrent of positive affection
that set from her child to her.

John Brodrick regarded her with solemn but tender approval, and Henry
(who might have owed her a grudge for upsetting his verdict), Henry
loved her even more than he approved. She had performed her part beyond
all hope; she linked the generations; she was wedded and made one with
the solidarity of the Brodricks.

Jane with a baby was a mystery and a marvel to herself. She spent days
in worshipping the small divinity of his person, and in the
contemplation of his heartrending human attributes. She doubted if there
were any delirium of the senses to compare with the touch of her hands
upon his body, or of his fingers on her breast. She fretted herself to
fever at his untimely weaning. She ached with longing for the work of
his hands upon her, for the wonder of his eyes, opening at her for a
moment, bright and small, over the white rim of her breast.

In his presence there perished in her all consciousness of time. Time
was nothing to him. He laid his diminutive hands upon the hours and
destroyed them for his play.

You would have said that time was no more to Jane than it was to the
baby. For six months she watched with indifference the slaughter and
ruin of the perfect hours. For six months she remained untormented by
the desire to write. Brodrick looked upon her as a woman made perfect,
wholly satisfied and appeased.

At the end of six months she was attacked by a mysterious restlessness
and fatigue. Brodrick, at Henry's suggestion, took her to the seaside.
They were away six weeks.

She came back declaring herself strong.

But there was something about her that Henry did not like. She was if
anything more restless; unnaturally (he said) abstracted when you spoke
to her; hardly aware of you at times. John had noticed that, too, and
had not liked it. They had all noticed it. They were afraid it must be
worrying Hugh. She seemed, Sophy said, to be letting things go all
round. Frances thought she was not nearly so much taken up with the
baby. When she mentioned it to Henry he replied gravely that it was
physical. It would pass.

And yet it did not pass.

The crisis came in May of nineteen-six, when the baby was seven months
old. It all turned on the baby.

Every morning about nine o'clock, now that summer was come, you found
him in the garden, in his perambulator, barefooted and bareheaded,
taking the air before the sun had power. Every morning his nurse brought
him to his mother to be made much of; at nine when he went out, and at
eleven when he came in, full of sleep. In and out he went through the
French window of Jane's study, which opened straight on to the garden.
He was wheeled processionally up and down, up and down the gravel walk
outside it, or had his divine seat under the lime-tree on the lawn.
Always he was within sight of Jane's windows.

One Sunday morning (it was early, and he had not been out for five
minutes, poor lamb) Jane called to the nurse to take him away out of her
sight.

"Take him away," she said. "Take him down to the bottom of the garden,
where I can't see him."

Brodrick heard her. He was standing on the gravel path, contemplating
his son. It was his great merit that at these moments, and in the
presence of other people, he betrayed no fatuous emotion. And now his
face, fixed on the adorable infant, was destitute of all expression. At
Jane's cry it flushed heavily.

The flush was the only sign he gave that he had heard her. Without a
word he turned and followed, thoughtfully, the windings of the exiled
perambulator. From her place at the writing-table where she sat
tormented, Jane watched them go.

Ten minutes later Brodrick appeared at the window. He was about to
enter.

"Oh, no, no!" she cried. "_Not_ you!"

He entered.

"Jinny," he said gently, "what's the matter with you?"

His voice made her weak and tender.

"I want to write a book," she said. "Such a pretty book."

"It's that, is it?"

He sighed and stood contemplating her in ponderous thought.

Jane took up some pens and played with them.

"I can't write if you look at me like that," she said.

"I won't look at you; but I'm going to talk to you."

He sat down. She saw with terror his hostility to the thing she was
about to do.

"Talking's no good," she said. "It's got to be done."

"I don't see the necessity."

"It's not one of those things that can be seen."

"No. But look here----" He was very gentle and forbearing. "Need you do
it quite so soon?"

"So soon? If I don't do it now, when _shall_ I do it?"

He did not answer her. He sat looking at her hands in their nervous,
restless play.

Her grave eyes, under their flattening brows, gazed thoughtfully at him.
The corners of her mouth lifted a little with their wing-like, quivering
motion. Two moods were in her; one had its home in her brooding, tragic
eyes, one in her mysterious, mocking lips.

"It's no use, dear," she said. "You'll never turn me into that sort of
woman."

"What sort of woman?"

"The sort of woman you like."

He waited in silence for what she would say next.

"It's not my fault, it's yours and Henry's. You shouldn't have made me
go away and get strong. The thing always comes back to me when I get
strong. It's _me_, you see."

"No, Jinny, the whole point is that you're not strong. You're not fit
for anything creative."

At that she laughed.

"You're not, really. Why, how old is that child?"

"Six months. No--seven."

"Well, Henry said it would take you a whole year to get over it."

"_I_ thought I should never get over it. We were both wrong."

"My child, it's palpable. You're nervy to the last degree. I never saw
you so horribly restless."

"Not more so than when I first knew Baby was coming."

"Well, quite as much."

She gave him a little look that he did not understand.

"Quite as much," she said. "And you were patient with me then."

He maintained a composure that invited her to observe how extremely
patient he was now.

"And do you remember--afterwards--before he came--how quiet I was and
how contented? I wasn't a bit nervy, or restless, or--or troublesome."

He smiled, remembering.

"Can't you see that anything creative--everything creative must be like
that?"

He became grave again, having failed to follow her.

"Presently, if this thing goes all right, I shall be quite, quite sane.
That's the way it takes you just at first. Then, when you feel it coming
to life and shaping itself, you settle down into a peace."

Now he understood.

"Yes," he said, "and you pay for it after."

"My dear, we pay for everything--after."

She leaned back in her chair. The movement withdrew her a little from
Brodrick's unremitting gaze.

"There are women--angels naturally--who become devils if they can't have
children. I'm an angel--you know I'm an angel--but I shall be a devil if
I can't have this. Can't you see that it's just as natural and
normal--for me?"

"It's pretty evident," he said, "that you can't have both. You weren't
built to stand the double strain----"

"And you mean--you mean----"

"I mean that it would be better for you if you could keep off it for a
while. At any rate while the child's young."

"But he'll be young, though, for ages. And if--if there are any more of
him, there'll be no end to the keeping off."

"You needn't think about that," he said.

"It would be all very well," she said, "if it were simpler; if either
you or I could deal with the thing, if we could just wring its neck and
destroy it. I would if it would make you any happier, but I can't. It's
stronger than I. I _can't_ keep off it."

He pondered. He was trying, painfully, to understand the nature of this
woman whom he thought he knew, whom, after all, it seemed, he did not
know.

"You used to understand," she said. "Why can't you now?"

Why couldn't he? He had reckoned with her genius when he married her. He
had honestly believed that he cared for it as he cared for her, that
Jinny was not to be thought of apart from her genius. He had found
Henry's opinion of it revolting, absurd, intolerable. And imperceptibly
his attitude had changed. In spite of himself he was coming round to
Henry's view, regarding genius as a malady, a thing abnormal,
disastrous, not of nature; or if normal and natural--for Jinny--a thing
altogether subordinate to Jinny's functions as a wife and mother. There
was no sane man who would not take that view, who would not feel that
nature was supreme. And Jinny had proved that left to nature, to her
womanhood, she was sound and perfect. Jinny's genius had had, as he put
it, pretty well its fling. It was nature's turn.

Under all his arguments there lurked, unrecognized and unsuspected, the
natural man's fear of the thing not of nature, of its dominion, coming
between him and her, slackening, perhaps sundering the tie of flesh.
Through the tie of flesh, insensibly, he had come to look on Jinny as
his possession.

"What would you do," he said, "if the little chap were to get ill?"

She turned as if he had struck her.

"Ill? Why couldn't you _tell_ me he was ill?"

"But he isn't. I was only----"

"Does Henry say he's ill?"

"Henry? Oh Lord, no."

"You're lying. I'll go to him and see----"

She made a rush for the window. He sprang after her and caught her. She
struggled in his arms.

"Jinny, you little fool. There's nothing--nothing----He's bursting with
health."

"What did you mean, then?"

"I meant--supposing he were ill----"

"You meant to frighten me?"

She sat down and he saw her fighting for her breath. He knelt beside her
and took her in his arms, murmuring inarticulate things in his terror.
At his touch she turned to him and kissed him.

"Hugh, dear," she said, "don't frighten me again. It's not necessary."

All that week, and for many weeks, she busied herself with the child and
with the house. It was as if she were trying, passionately, to make up
for some brief disloyalty, some lapse of tenderness.

Then, all of a sudden she flagged; she was overcome by an intolerable
fatigue and depression. Brodrick was worried, but he kept his anxiety to
himself. He was afraid now of doing or saying the wrong thing.

One Saturday evening Jinny came to him in his study. She carried the
dreadfully familiar pile of bills and tradesmen's books.

"Is it those horrible accounts?" he said.

She was so sick, so white and harassed, so piteously humble, that he
knew. She had got them all wrong again.

"I did _try_ to keep them," she said.

"Don't try. Leave the damned things alone."

"I _have_ left them," she wailed. "And look at them."

He looked. A child, he thought, could have kept them straight. They were
absurdly simple. But out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile,
elementary innocence, Jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion,
of intricate complexity.

That was bad enough. But it was nothing to the disorder of what Jinny
called her own little affairs. There seemed at first to be no relation
between Jinny's proved takings and the sums that Jinny was aware of as
having passed into her hands. And then Brodrick found the cheques at the
back of a drawer, where they had lain for many months; forgotten,
Brodrick said, as if they had never been.

"I'm dreadful," said Jinny.

"You are. What on earth did you do before you married me?"

"George Tanqueray helped me."

He frowned.

"Well, you can leave it to me now," he said.

"It takes it out of me more than all the books I ever wrote."

That touched him, and he smiled in spite of himself.

"If," said she, "we only had a housekeeper."

"A housekeeper?"

"It's a housekeeper you want."

She put her face to his, brushing his cheek with a shy and fugitive
caress.

"You really ought," she said, "to have married Gertrude."

"You've told me that several times already."

"_She_ wouldn't have plagued you night and day."

He owned it.

"Isn't it rather a pity that she ever left?"

"Why, what else could the poor woman do?"

"Stay, of course."

He had never thought of that solution; he would, if he had been asked,
have judged it unthinkable.

"Supposing," said Jinny, "you asked her, very nicely, to come
back--don't you think that would save us?"

No; he never would have thought of it himself; but since she had put it
that way, as saving them, saving Jinny, that was to say; well, he owned,
wouldn't it?

"I say, but wouldn't you mind?" he said at last.

"Why should I?" said she.

In the afternoon of the next day, which was a Sunday, Brodrick appeared
at the house in Augustus Road. He asked to see Miss Collett, who was
staying there with her cousin.

She came to him, as she used to come to him in his study, with her
uplifted, sacrificial face, holding herself stiffly and tensely, half in
surrender, half resisting the impulse that drew her.

He laid the situation before her, curtly.

"If you were to come back," he said, "it would solve all our problems."

She reddened, suspecting, as was her way, significance in everything
that Brodrick said. Did he, she wondered, recognize that she too had her
problem; and was he providing for her too the simple and beautiful
solution? It was possible, then, she argued inwardly, that in some way
that was not any other man's way, in some immaterial and perfect way, he
cared. There was after all a tie. He desired, as she had desired, to
preserve it in its purity and its perfection.